Arctic melting four times faster than rest of the planet, study says | Hacker News Reader

Arctic melting four times faster than rest of the planet, study says

ft.com

66 pointsWithinReason73 comments

An obvious thing to stop doing is participating in the cryptocurrency economy that is using an obscene amount of energy, see https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/

Bitcoin funded by taxpayer money!

Texas paid this company to mine bitcoin during an ongoing energy crisis. Meanwhile, Texans are paying 50% more in electricity costs compared to last year. [1]

[1]https://www.pcgamer.com/texas-paid-this-company-to-mine-bitc...

Strange, for the past 40 years I thought the obvious thing was to stop using coal to generate electricity.

40% of the world’s electricity is generated from coal, and the amount is increasing.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jul/08/germany-reacti...

I think future generations will look back and think we were morons for choosing coal over nuclear. The radiation from particulates released by burning coal actually kills more people each year than the radiation from nuclear accidents has ever killed. Plus we also made a nice little climate change disaster on our little space ship Earth that's hurling through the Milky Way.

No need for future generations. Lots of people in this current generation think it's an absolutely poor idea to choose coal over nuclear.

How moronic would it be, when the actual solution, renewable energy sources, are not even discussed?

Choosing nuclear energy bears the same moronic behavior. It's unsustainable and, compared to coal, we have much less options handling it's waste on a much larger time scale. "Not beeing able to handle the waste" is the same problem category and nobody cares. This is not just short-sightedness, it's also a propagandistic master piece.

Decades of a lacking energy transition plan and now, when the situation gets more dire, the debate goes between non-solution A and non-solution B. But at least we have status quo going for _us_.

Renewables weren't an option in those days. They've only recently started to become viable, and are not really viable at scale until the energy storage solution can also be solved at a combined cost equivalent to coal or nuclear. I do think it will get there, but it's not fair to look back at the last 70 years and say why didn't we do more renewables.

That doesn't mean it's not obvious to stop wasting even more energy on cryptocurrency scams. While it's not going to undo the waste that existed before, it might help to prevent it from getting even worse.

The percentage of coal electricity is slightly falling globally.

In non-percentage terms it's still rising as electricity demand rises, particularly in China.

This (non percentage) rise is forecast to peak around 2028 in China (and therefore the rest of the world) currently.

The real tragedy is that global warming was forecast decades ago. Even as far back as the 1912.

https://i.imgur.com/qT7iBSt.jpg

I guess we could call it rather comedy than tragedy that there are still powerful people on this world who deny this in 2022.

In general I hope there'll be more attention to the reasons why they deny this: not because they don't believe it, but because it is in their interest to deny since "business as usual" is where they thrive.

"The effect may be considerable in a few centuries"

So optimistic! We F'ed up way before that!

They underestimated the ability of new media to manufacture consent.

1896:

https://www.sciencehistory.org/distillations/magazine/future...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svante_Arrhenius

Oh no!

https://cei.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/8.png

Let's raise taxes in the west, that'll stop China and India from rolling coal!

Your superficial, what-about, reactionary response is a perfect display of how to ignore problems and go extinct over it.

Here is a direct link to the study: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-022-00498-3

It's a serious situation for sure.....but I guess I'd expect the part of the world that IS ice to be melting faster than the parts of the world that aren't.

Yeah, the original title "The Arctic has warmed nearly four times faster than the globe since 1979" (https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-022-00498-3, which another commenter mentioned) makes much more sense. You could actually compare the rates at which Arctic glaciers and glaciers in other parts of the world are receding, but I doubt it's four times faster?!

Ice is a major buffer the keeps global mean tempreture in check.

Once gone, things get very serious.

The amount of energy that melts a tonne of ice at 0 C to a tonne of water at the same tempreture will raise that same tonne of water from 0 C to over 79 C.

ie. Energy going to melting ice isn't going toward raising sea and air tempretures .. once there is no ice to melt that same energy will direct itself toward cooking things up.

A lot.

The geological temperature recording disagrees with you. Greenhouse climates (with no polar caps) were more stable than ice-house climate configurations with polar caps, with the latter leading to milankovitch cycles.

The "geological temperature recording" have zero effect on the latent and specific heat of water which form the basis of my comment.

Furthermore Milankovitch cycles induce mild climate changes but climate changes don't "lead to milankovitch cycles" . . .

While it's true that the latent heat of ice to water is very high, it is not likely an important factor in global warming. Polar ice doesn't cool the world as an ice cube in a drink might.

The much more important effect of losing polar ice is the albedo effect, that is how much solar radiation is reflected back into space by ice and snow vs how much is absorbed by exposed ground.

Just in case: losing ice in the polar oceans also doesn't increase sea levels (since floating ice has less volume than the water it floats on), but losing ice that lies over land, such as in Greenland, directly contributes to rising sea levels.

Losing the albedo of floating ice has the same effect on warming as does losing snow or ice on land.

Has anyone done a study of climate denier media running headlines like this to enrage their audience?

It might just be an emergent phenomena where things that enrage everybody get most clicks, but I'd be interested to see if numbers supported that theory.

Since this is the Financial Times I'd also wonder whether you could demonstrate that their readers have lost money because the coverage of climate change is so divorced from reality, as it's not only one of the biggest catastrophes facing humankind but providing solutions to it is also one of the biggest business opportunities.

edit: I'm actually struggling to find anything troubling they've published in the last couple of years, so they may have already made the switch to accepting reality.

Similarly Sky News seems to have done a 180 degree switch in roughly the same time frame.

Did the FT promote climate change denial in the past?

Sky News is no longer owned by Rupert Murdoch.

Yeah, fairly certain they did.

All media was pretty bad for a while, but I've just been looking up some stats and the happily the media generally has shifted, with only nationalist far-right media sticking with the old narrative.

Glancing through their last few years of EV coverage for example, only reveals a couple of oddities, mostly written by the same US lobbyist.

It is startling to glance though and see story after story about business investing in batteries and factories and EV rollout and net zero targets and then suddenly see headlines suggesting:

Biden should support hybrids more (meaning support EVs less)

Switch to EVs will worsen inequality

EU emissions rules will prevent the middle class from driving

or a couple of stories about EVs causing job losses or less union employment.

It's a very noticeable shift in tone between the two sides but thankfully it's only a fraction of the coverage.

I'd say the watershed for FT happened sometime around COP19, though they're still touting fossil fuels as cheap in 2020

> Climate negotiators are striving for a mutual impoverishment pact. It is hardly surprising that progress has stalled.

While adding of course that they're not denying climate change. Just saying fossil fuels are the cheapest source of energy 5 years after the UK government had accepted and announced that wind power was the cheapest.

They used to featur Bjorn Lomborg a lot, even positively reviewing his latest book in 2020, despite very well credentialled readers writing letters ripping him apart for his nonsense.

>Yeah, fairly certain they did.

There's no need to be "fairly certain" when you can search their entire archive online.

For what it's worth, the FT is one of the more reliable sources on matters that affect global economics.

And there's no need to search their online archives when you remember being angry at some of the obvious lies you read in it in the first place.

I did scan their online archives, but only to track their general tone over years.

And while it's improved (along with most of the media) they're still condoning clear bullshit by Bjorn Lomborg and Michael Shellenberg, two individuals who also have an entire online archive of them being wrong.

https://www.ft.com/content/93d6353c-9ab1-4bd9-86bb-7d77aab44...

They apparently aren't even very good at simple financial maths:

> Lomborg estimates that it will cost New Zealand between 16 and 32 per cent of annual GDP to hit its declared net-zero target in 2050 — or $12,800 for each citizen.

> Lomborg suggests that a temperature rise of 4C is possible — more than twice the 1.5C targeted in the 2015 UN Paris climate arrangement — while shedding only 2.9 per cent of global GDP relative to where it otherwise would have been.

They got taken in by this comparison for example and had to issue a correction.

https://www.desmog.com/bjorn-lomborg/

https://www.lomborg-errors.dk/coolitB.htm

So are sea levels rising faster then?

One can find pictures by climate change skeptics showing old and recent photos of various piers that show no change. These are dismissed as poor evidence of the lack of change, but photos showing piers under water are elusive.

Sea levels have risen about 100mm since 1993, and the rate of increase is indeed increasing

It's still quite slow, and we're probably still a hundred years off under water piers. It's currently rising at a rate of 3.7mm/year

Seeing this comment got me wondering how sea level is actually measured. Found this article from NASA[1] that was really interesting!

[1] https://climatekids.nasa.gov/sea-level/

A Youtube video talking about these skeptic claims and comparing with the actual science (spoiler, yes they are):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTRlSGKddJE

Do people on HN feel optimistic or pessimistic about the future (both near and far). It seems we are just starting to see the disastrous effects of the current levels of CO2, with no obvious attempts in the world to curb emissions (note the recent US bill just decelerates the amount being released, bit doesn't do anything to reverse the current amount).

My colleagues eat in twilight (eating area didn't have windows) to lower the energy consumption and limit CO2 release. Yandex is burning 12000 liters of diesel to power their data center for an hour.

I have not driven a car in 30 years, always walk, bike or use public transport. No longer fly. I cook and eat local food, as much vegetarian as possible. I don't own a smart phone or use any Big Tech services. Limit my work to what is ethical and sustainable as much as possible. Married later and chose to have one child and a smaller home.

For the mostpart this lifestyle makes me

1) Poorer

2) Ostracised

There is no reward structure that favours doing the right thing. For me, these positive lifestyle choices have to be their own reward. Unfortunately that makes me see my society, which rewards conspicuous greed and selfishness as beneath contempt, and that's not a nice feeling.

I live my life similarly to yours. Then I read stories about how celebrities are using private jets to make 15 minute runs to the next town over. Or how the Saudi family continues to, you know, exist.

This is why I am pessimistic about humanity’s future. We need to make systemic changes, but those who benefit from the system will never voluntarily agree to give up that power, even if it means doom for themselves and the rest of us.

This is prime "I'm 13 and this is deep" content. Great job!

Yep. I obsessively pick up trash in my neighborhood, replaced my lawn with local flora, advocate for better cycling infrastructure, compost, sort my recycling (don't throw away batteries), donate monthly to a tree-planting charity, keep the thermostat low, don't eat meat...

...and many people I know think I'm ridiculous. Honestly I feel like I'm doing the minimum. All these things do is inconvenience me. I'm not expecting an award (outside of my kids not experiencing global famine) but no one gives a shit.

I fully expect not enough to be done until people are starving to death. And at that point I still don't expect anything to happen... the wealthy will live with some minor inconviniences and the poor will die.

In many cultures and especially if you live in a big city, the idea of being able to get around without a car is considered positive. Vegetarianism is massive in India (as are railways) and significant percentages in Europe too.

The rest is the problem with how we generate our energy.

I highly doubt even 10 LED bulbs for an hour, on coal, make a dent in a human's CO2 "budget". It sounds like a stupid privation to feel like something is being done because you're making a sacrifice. That it's a useless sacrifice doesn't matter.

There are so many more and better optimisation that can be made, on the individual, communal and societal level.

I just installed a 50KWp FV setup in family owned hotel. It produces a 300kWh daily (summer in Europe). Still seems like nothing compared to what is consumed.

Personally I am extremely pessimistic as humans and countries are selfish no one will be willing to do the sacrifices needed. A small portion of worlds population produces majority of the carbon emissions. So even if they start decreasing carbon emissions the population growth and economic growth of the rest will result in carbon emissions growing rather than slowing or stopping. Where as the world need to decrease emissions.

Selfishness in a world where renewables cost less than fossil fuels helps rsther than hinders.

The people wanting to catch up to Western standards of living are strongly motivated to do it with renewables for multiple selfish reasons.

Far future (100's-1000's of years), optimistic. Floods, a.k.a. fat-tail disasters like civilization collapse, have happened numerous times in the past, they'll happen numerous more times going forward, we'll continue to be around. We won't go to the stone age, but we'll lose a lot of modern comforts.

Near future, pessimistic. A bad flu completely disrupted our global little village - imagine what actual unprecedented natural disasters and abrupt resource shortages will do. When hundreds of millions of people have the rug pulled out from under them with no local sustainable fallbacks, it's going to get very ugly.

Mixed. The CO2 emission trend in US is trending down, the trend started ~2007 [1]. That's heartening. But I expect the next few decades to be rough.

[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/carb...

but most of it is that natural gas is a lot cheaper than coal and doesn't emit as much co2. the decision was more of a by product of chasing the cheapest energy source.

Which is good news, because in most of the world, renewables are the cheapest source and getting cheaper. And if cheapness can get Americans off coal, it should work for everyone else.

For countries like Russia and to lesser extend Canada the models show that they will benefit from the global warming. Basically they will get more agricultural land and ice-free Arctic will open more transportation routes. Plus they will need to use less energy for heating in winter.

On the other hand as the article shows the models can be wrong and even very wrong. For example, it can be that the ricing temperature in fact triggers the new ice age and that can arrive in matter of decades. Of cause, this is very speculative, but since we cannot reliably predict consequences of raising CO2 levels, that can not be excluded.

For Russia it's not that simple. The melting permafrost in Siberia will destroy a lot of infrastructure built into it, and the wildfires there from the last couple of summers have been devastating.

The problem with permafrost is not that it melts, but rather that it melts during summer and freezes during winter. To build on it one has to drive piles into the ground and build on top of those.

Then there are two cases. First is when the piles can reach bedrock. Then the fact that the layer of melted permafrost will be deeper in summer does not matter. As I understand this is strongly preferred in Russia even if means to move the building site.

The second is when there is no suitable bedrock or it is too deep to reach it with piles without making things too expensive. Then the piles are driven just into the permanent permafrost. But this is problematic even without the warming of climate. The piles conduct heat and melt permanent permafrost around them sinking the building unevenly. Previously this was just accepted. So piles were driven as deep as practically possible and let the building gradually sink under assumption that in 20-30 years the things will have to be rebuild or abandoned.

But nowadays the piles are refrigerated. This way they can be more shallow and more permanent.

So rising temperature is not necessary threatens the infrastructure. It will gradually make buildings on piles that do not reach the bedrock more expensive to operate as the cooling of piles will need more energy.

I'm optimistic. I'm sure a global warming of 5 to 10 degrees is unavoidable by now. Much of the comfort people currently have might disappear... but given the fact that people live and survive in Australia, I'm confident some degrees are survivable. It won't be a fun ride, tho.

No, 5 to 10 is not unavoidable, sorry. The current most likely scenario assuming status quo is between 2 and 4, if i recall my IPCC properly.

And it's really _not_ the same as 10 !

We haven't stopped digging out carbon and inserting it into the carbon cycle. So there is no end to the warming in sight.

Politically unavoidable, IMHO. That cheap fossil fuel energy is just too hard to pass up. It's like trying to convince several billion starving people to not eat the marshmallows right in front of them.

Anything between 5 and 10 degrees average rise will kill all life on earth.

85% of the prehistoric time earth was like that, its called greenhouse earth or acyrogenic climate. Dinosaurs lived when it was around 10 degrees hotter, and they did not die from that.

Right now we are living in a icehouse earth where polar caps are a thing, which is not the case in a greenhouse climate.

However you are forgetting about continental drift. 100M - 200M years ago there was much more land concentrated at the poles (where the climate would have been more amenable to life) - https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/09/what-...

And nowadays we got Eurasia and North America lined around the North Pole.

I was optimistic 20 years ago. Pessimistic now.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/15/World_fo...

Less pessimistic than 5-10 years ago, but that’s not saying much. Carbon-free energy sources like solar and wind will soon be cheaper than fossil fuels if they aren’t already, so greed will push us rapidly in the right direction. Unfortunately the climate is a big ship, and we have been steering it toward warming for a long time. Things will get much worse before they stabilize, particularly for the poor and for most species other than humans. Drought, famine, migration, war, and xenophobia might even get bad enough to temporarily make our population decline.

Optimistic in the sense that we already have all the tech we need to fix this and in the process make the world better and richer.

Optimistic in the sense that, after a long uphill struggle through the investment phase when clean energy and the tech to use it was actually more expensive, and then more expensive if you ignore pollution, we're now in the it's just plain cheaper phase which puts the greedy and selfish on the other side of the issue.

Pessimistic because we wasted 3 decades letting the problem worsen for no reason, so our chances of solving any other big "problem" (in quotes because the only real problem was that we ignored it for so long) seem low generally.

Optimistic that the sudden switch from renewables being expensive to cheap might catch the far-right off guard and totally destroy them as a political force, though apparently some are already moving to eco-fascism instead, and they seem good at denying history so they'll just claim it never happened.

To be pedantic, the rest of the planet is not "melting" as it's not covered in ice.

Also, this seems to be climate alarmists favorite headline: - New England shows it is warming faster than the rest of the world in new study [1] - Africa Warming More, Faster Than Other World Regions [2] - Climate: Europe warming faster than rest of world (IPCC) [3] - NOAA: Minnesota warming faster than other states [4] - Mexico is warming faster than the rest of the planet, they say [5] - New research shows the South Pole is warming faster than the rest of the world [6] Etc..

[1] https://www.masslive.com/news/2021/12/new-england-shows-it-i... [2] https://www.voanews.com/a/africa-warming-more-faster-than-ot... [3] https://unric.org/en/climate-europe-warming-faster-than-rest... [4] https://www.kare11.com/article/weather/mn-warming-faster-tha... [5] https://www.sandiegored.com/en/news/200115/Mexico-is-warming... [6] https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL2006/S00218/new-research-s...

Are you using climate alarmists pejoratively? The headlines are basically saying that our scientific models have been systematically underestimating the feedback effects of warming, which suggests we have less time than ever to mitigate the continuing effects. At which point for you does it stop being 'alarmist' and start being 'realistic'? After it's too late?

Well I would hope so. If the whole planet is melting, then where are the lava fields?

I can't read the article, but this headline is the worst. Pretty sure melting 4x faster than Arizona is still zero melting.

It's a process with stages: melting (where ice is available) -> evaporating (if there is water) -> burning (of the dry forests when there is not enough water) -> desertification (of the barren land when water, forests and other vegetation are gone). But yeah, Arizona is mostly already in the final stage, and I guess you can't really compare the speed across all stages anyway.

The title of the study is "Arctic warming four times faster than rest of the earth". Warming is not the same as melting, but melting is more clickbaity. In accepted climate models, it was previously assumed that Arctic is warming twice as fast as rest of the earth, but this shows those models were insufficient.

Another thing is that, this was conducted around Arctic circle. The rate of warming varies around different regions. Svalbard is warming up 7 times as fast (1.25 C per decade) compared to rest of the earth

Arctic Ice Shelf now at largest coverage, NEXT!

https://www.severe-weather.eu/global-weather/arctic-sea-ice-...

Latest news maintained by Arctic scientists, and not by silly climate change fanatics:

http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/

Did you read the whole article? Ok, 2021 has been better than the last 18 years, but still below the long-term average (https://www.severe-weather.eu/wp-content/gallery/cryosphere/...), so "largest coverage" it is not - and also one good year doesn't mean that it will keep getting better.

It turns out that there are three dimensions. Arctic sea ice volume keeps dropping, faster and faster.

http://psc.apl.uw.edu/research/projects/arctic-sea-ice-volum...

> Arctic Ice Shelf now at largest coverage, NEXT!

Funny definition of "now". Your linked article was from 8 months ago, you know, when it was winter.

As for the real "now", if you care to look at a graph of the last few years and as well as inter-decile and median from 1981-2020, it's blatantly obvious that both volume and extent are well below average, and on a long, steady, downward trend.

http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/

https://zacklabe.com/arctic-sea-ice-extentconcentration/

If you don't see the decreasing trend in the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s mean curves, I can't help you.

Another thing missing from this measurement is this is the Arctic sea ice area. The Arctic sea ice volume is trending almost linearly towards 0.

http://psc.apl.uw.edu/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/schweiger...

(source for the image above http://psc.apl.uw.edu/research/projects/arctic-sea-ice-volum...)

Thanks for the link to the news by Arctic scientists.

In this article [1] they wrote that the shift to more rainfall than snow in the Arctic is now predicted to occur between 2050 to 2080 (whereas the old models predicted this to occur between 2070 to 2090).

Interesting but alarming.

[1] https://nsidc.org/news-analyses/news-stories/rainfall-arctic...

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