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Comment by TT-392 | Hacker News Reader

So.... it is gonna get colder than usual? Article is a bit vague if you don't feel like reading the whole thing start to end.

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It will get both unseasonably warm at times and have several days of biting cold at others.

The original name for what we now call “Global warming“ or “climate change” was “climate unsettling”: balancing mechanisms that allowed seasons to have predictable temperature and precipitation (like El Niño) are being disrupted. The relatively small rise of average temperature (one degree) is enough to move airmass. Those block otherwise stable currents. Things aren’t where they are supposed to be.

Isn’t it more that they aren’t where we expect them (plus higher energy systems tend to be more chaotic). There isn’t really any supposed to be when it comes to nature, just expected/precedented.

While there is certainly no place an airmass is supposed to be, this framing makes it sound like the problem would go away if we just updated our expectations.

Do you think the problem would go away if we updated our expectations?

There is a fair argument to be made that most of the "problem" concerning the environment is a problem specifically /for humanity/. The planet, and likely most of our peers on the planet, don't care.

So yes, an El Nino is "supposed" to be <here> /for us/, but an El Nino is only "expected" or "just so happened to always be" <here> for the planet at large.

It's a question of what perspective is used.

What makes you think that animals and plants are less affected by unusual weather than humans? Most species have a lot less technology to help them cope with the change.

For example, plants which leave dormancy (or proceed to a new phase such as flowering) during the unusually warm periods, only to be severely damaged when the cold returns. Species may be maladapted to the new weather patterns.

We also see the less direct ecological effects such as new pests thriving in area -- new weather patterns create an ecosystem to which the species is no longer adapted. E.g. fungi killing trees. Or for humans, "tropical diseases" becoming common in more northern areas.

What makes you think animals and plants care?

Life has existed long before humans ever came onto the scene, and life has experienced environmental highs and lows that would make humanity shriek in absolute horror.

Life will go on and the Earth will continue to spin and orbit, whether humanity does or not.

> Life will go on and the Earth will continue to spin and orbit, whether humanity does or not.

Greetings Professor Falken!

Evolution has made most lifeforms care about their wellbeing. In my ethics causing unnecessary suffering and loss of diversity is not okay just because ultimately the universe will reach a state of maximum entropy and everything will have been without meaning.

Life is a local entropy drop at the cost of a global entropy boost, in the entropy-ethics life is fundamentaly unethical.

So what's your point? That we shouldn't care about climate change because "life goes on"? That's a pretty low bar.

Personally I would like to preserve a future both where humans can survive and some of Earth's great ecological diversity is maintained. Those systems can't "care" because they're not sentient, but I am.

My point is that the concept of "El Ninos should happen <here>" is specifically a human perspective. As far as the planet and our peers are concerned, it doesn't really matter where such phenomena occur. Nature gonna nature and life gonna life.

Besides that, personally I have no attachment to humanity in particular. Objectively, the planet would be much better off without us around. That's not to say I would go out of my way to not exist; I'm already here, might as well enjoy my time here. But I'm not going to go out of my way to "preserve humanity" or whatever either. Life has persevered without us before we came around, and life will persevere whether we exist or not.

> Objectively, the planet would be much better off without us around

That's specifically a human perspective.

Is it? In terms of how much we get along with the enrivonment compared to our peers, we do pretty horrible. The planet wouldn't care since it doesn't care about life one way or another, though; I grant you that.

Right. That was my point in response to your point that value judgements are reliant on human consciousness.

population-wise life will go on. For any individual it's a lot less certain. Plants or animals

I think the real distinction I’m unsure about is if the problem is the earth finding a new equilibrium point potentially on the order of hundreds to thousands of years or if the problem is we’re overall making the earth worse at supporting human life. I’d guess a mix of both, but certainly the adjustment as areas that once had a consistent climate x move to a different climate y is pretty bad by itself

My understanding is that a new equilibrium can only be found, in general, when the net new input(s) to a system have stopped changing.

The amount of atmospheric CO2 continues to grow linearly[1] at best. The earth's climate may find a new equilibrium when CO2 stabilizes, or it may not. The resulting equilibrium may be conducive to human life, or it may not. But until that number flattens, we can only expect more change. And, of course, that is only one of the many stressors on the climate.

[1] https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2915/the-atmosphere-getting-a-...

You're implicit assumption is that the system's response to ever increasing CO2 is indefinitely linear and proportional?

If you believe that I've got some beans you can buy.

This equilibrium you're chasing is much more transient than you'd like to think. Especially in the face of more and more accurate/precise observations.

I think you misread my comment, I made no such assumption.

The commenter I replied to said "I’m unsure about if ... the earth [is] finding a new equilibrium point potentially on the order of hundreds to thousands of years..."

I pointed to NASA measurements showing that atmospheric CO2 is increasing linearly and has been for some time. Whether its increase accelerates or decelerates or remains flat depends largely on many unpredictable factors (primarily humans).

Consequently (I tried to answer) - no, the climate will not find an equilibrium ("a state of rest or balance due to the equal action of opposing forces") as long as one of the primary forces driving the system out of balance continues to change (i.e., we keep dumping more CO2 into the air) without some countervailing force changing at roughly the same rate. Today there is no countervailing force, so there will be no equilibrium.

I don't see how your comment ("this equilibrium you're chasing"?) relates at all.

CO2 may momentarily be one of a convoluted set of factors that contribute to the dominant harmonic component of the system with the output "global temperatures", but it is not in and of itself stable in it's relation to the output of the system. Clearly due to the afore mentioned "convoluted set of factors" having their own internal period/fluctuations/harmonics of convolution.

CO2 will rise, but it will eventually necessary uncouple from it's relationship to temperature at which point some other factor we are wholy unaware of will probably do something as equally disturbing to our environmental "equilibrium".

If you transform the system in respect to time, you'll find that from some perspective almost nothing ever happened, and from another the whole thing was wildly unstable and unpredictable.

It already doesn't matter what CO2 levels are doing now. Up and to the right and how hard is probably completely irrelevant. What matters is the flux of the system, and everything points to the fact that weve already left the station. There's no unwinding this thing, and it's not going where anyone thinks it's going.

The truly conservative thing to be doing would be to prepare ourselves for the most violent future, but instead what we're trying to do is grip onto the past with our already dying hand. Weakening our heart at the very moment we need to bolster it.

Everything is going to be fine, but you and I will be dead. I assure you of that.

Looks like someone else went out arguing, but I do actually agree with this. Maybe where I’m optimistic is that I think we are on track to stop adding more co2 within the next few hundred years or so (hopefully much sooner). Though I do think it’s worth knowing the natural environment also introduces co2 to the atmosphere at a roughly linear rate (via volcanos)

A major problem is the rate of change. The climate changes naturally all the time, but these processes usually take a couple of millennia. In that time frame the biosphere has time to adapt; species can migrate etc. We're in the process of compressing millennia of change into a hundred years.

If "the problem" is that we're expecting an unnatural level of consistency, yes, it would. (If you consider "the problem" to be that weather is chaotic, then of course the answer is no)

> There isn't really .. supposed to be.. .....

Most ecosystems prefer and need some stability... myself included

Sure, if the purpose of the ecosystem is human (or other lifeform) survivability.

But what if it's not?

I don't think there is any "purpose" to the ecosystem, it just exists as it does. But previously that ecosystem was suitable for what became human life, which is why we exist in it, and obviously it's very bad for us if we manage to shift the ecosystem into something that does not support human life.

The ecosystem does not "care", it's not a person, it does not have feelings. The only entities perceiving a drastic problem will be animals, including us.

Of course it doesn't have any purpose, but we're not 14 anymore so we get on with practical concerns

It's not, but that's rather fatalistic.

Somewhat similar perspective: large magnitude swings over long periods are just very low frequency, high amplitude oscillations. They are just as much expressions of more energy in the earth's systems as thermal expressions such as higher average temps in the ground/water/atmosphere.

Basically this line, from the caption of the 3rd line graph at the US climate.gov site[1] that shows large magnitude swings over long periods:

> Global atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) in parts per million (ppm) for the past 800,000 years. The peaks and valleys track ice ages (low CO2) and warmer interglacials (higher CO2).

Unfortunately, it continues:

> During these cycles, CO2 was never higher than 300 ppm. The increase over the last 60 years is 100 times faster than previous natural increases. In fact, on the geologic time scale, the increase from the end of the last ice age to the present looks virtually instantaneous.

(Note the last dot on the chart in the upper-right corner representing 2021's average value of 414.7 ppm. This corresponded to a time roughly 3 million years ago when ocean levels were 16 to 82 feet higher than today.)

[1] https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...

Well, I should clarify that in terms of geological time the "large magnitude swings" I was thinking of when I wrote that are still very high frequency. I was thinking in terms of large temperature fluctuations over periods of days, weeks, months, like the ones experienced during when the polar vortex destabilizes and floats around the northern hemisphere.

This is HN, where part of the culture is sharing articles which require technical knowledge to understand. And where many of the comments help make sense of them.

The article is not vague, it is actually very precise and focused. It uses a technical vocabulary which is appropriate for its intended audience.

The problem wasn't technical vocabulary, the problem was a lot of stuff to read, and the conclusion not having a good tl;dr. I have horrible dyslexia, and I was about to go to sleep when I saw the article. But it seemed important, so I was looking for a tl;dr

Big cold can really do over some crops (like red winter wheat) if its too cold too early without snow cover.

Because if they say it like that, they think It would undermine the climate change image in the minds of the masses. That is why we see such silly headlines like `Earth had its 6th-hottest July and year to date on record` from NOAA.

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