Today's North Atlantic Sea Surface Temperature (4.8 Sigma) | Hacker News Reader

Today's North Atlantic Sea Surface Temperature (4.8 Sigma)

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66 pointsmyshpa24 comments

What's really astonishing about this is that to increase sea surface temperature by 1.5 degrees C, you need to heat the whole ocean mixed layer, which in summer is around 50 meters deep. E = c_p * rho * h * dT ~ (4e3 J / kg K) * (10e3 kg / m^3) * (50 m) * (1.5 K) = 3e8 J / m^2. So over the whole North Atlantic, this is about a (4e14 m^2) * (3e8 J / m^2) = 1.2e23 Joules of energy that have been added to the North Atlantic. That's about the same amount of energy that the whole Earth absorbs from the sun in a month.

Is the frog boiling yet? Can we start doing something about all this now please?

Do what, exactly?

It's December 7, 1941. The Japanese have just attacked Pearl Harbor. Suddenly, most people realize the status quo has changed. The economy needs to make a major transition. Things need to be built at an unprecedented rate. Sacrifices will need to be made at every level because survival is on the line. Victory is possible but it will be a long and difficult fight.

Do we throw up our collective hands and say "it's too hard, the job is too big, not enough people are willing, we surrender"?

Or do we shut up and get to work?

The transition away from a carbon-emitting economy can be done if we have the will, and we will come out of it stronger than ever. We just need to stop saying we can't, and start building.

I'm pretty sure working harder, when done haphazardly, will worsen things

This is silly. How can you possibly make such a sweeping statement? How can you possibly believe 7 billion people would feverishly begin working towards something with no sense of plan or intentionally?

Yes, plenty of alternative energy technologies will emit too much carbon during the transition to make them viable. Right now, whenever we build something, we have GHG byproducts all over the place, so we have to really do the math first. A lot of needles will have to be threaded in the coming years if our civilization as we know it is going to survive.

But that doesn't mean we should just give up. And half measures are no longer an option.

I'll bite. For start

- stop fossil fuels in transport & energy, minimize plastic production

- stop subsidizing meat & dairy, reform agriculture (pollution, eutrophication, soils)

- reforest / rewild pastures, stop overfishing (carbon capture, biodiversity)

- degrowth & basic income, remove financial drivers of exponential growth (prevent repetition)

ASAP everything, 2050 is too late.

so we go back to the caves then.

We have 2 choices now. Either we do it, or we let nature handle the problem.

One option is much better than the other.

Just for the common people. They’re going to fly private jets to every meeting to talk about how best to do it, and meet on their 400 foot yachts afterwards to sign the agreements.

The tyrants always sell themselves as the answer to the apocalypse. Everyone you know is going to die. Society is always heading towards multiple kinds of total destruction. Anyone who uses that to try to take control of us is a tyrant. We shouldn’t sacrifice society at the feet of fear, especially to the very people in charge of the factories and industries causing the problems.

I don’t deny global warming. But I don’t believe the people claiming to have the answers and I’m not willing to follow Hitler logic to take people back to the Stone Age as the “solution” to the problem because I read books (and you shouldn’t either).

But I guarantee you others will put this forward as the “inevitable logic” or “nature will do it for us if we don’t sacrifice everything” as if technology has done nothing and we can’t possibly come back into balance with nature without utterly obliterating human civilization. It’s actually kind of batshit.

Nuclear anyone? No?

Increase the tempo of Starship launches. Head to Psyche 16, build more Starships.

Move China to Psyche 16.

Drop Tesla's and iPhones from space onto Earth, which is now a garden.

Maybe we should stop subsidizing the fossil fuel industry, and start a schedule of steady tax increases on it so that remembers become gradually but overwhelming cheaper to use.

4 sigma is once every 43 years (twice in a lifetime)

4.5 sigma is once every 403 years (once in the modern era)

5 sigma is once every 4776 years (once in recorded history)

How do you derive these?

Edit: probability for daily event, see here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/68%E2%80%9395%E2%80%9399.7_r...

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-07-24/antarctic-sea-ice-lev...

"The consensus statement at the moment would be that this is largely anthropogenic forces that have caused the ocean to warm, for the atmosphere to be highly disturbed and to affect the sea ice," Dr Heil said. ...

Either way, she fears a further change in the balance could trigger a tipping point from where it's difficult to reverse the trajectory. ...

"I think a lot of people have the time line too long out, saying this won't affect them. I'm pretty convinced that this is something my generation will experience."

Totally insane. The water by me is 82'. The highest it has ever been before this year was 78ish.

Do we have sea temperature data from before 1982? Like, thousands of years'?

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/blogs/national-museum-of-natu....

"The true heavyweights for reconstructing ancient seawater temperatures are the microorganisms. Foraminifera, single-celled organisms roughly the size of the period ending this sentence, occur nearly everywhere in the oceans and have an exquisite fossil record."

We have reasonably accurate sea surface temperature data from 1945 to present, about 78 years. We have less accurate measurements back to the 1880s. Finally, we have proxy records going back thousands of years, based on isotope fractionation ratios and other paleoclimate data.

I located https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indica...

Especially Figure 2 on that page, a map showing the change in Sea Surface Temperature, was interesting.

Do you have more information on what changed around 1945? (I mean, I could probably guess. I was wondering if you're looking at different sources than I am.)

On how many points ? The ocean is big, you know.

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