Climate change: Thousands of penguins die in Antarctic ice breakup
bbc.com
bbc.com
There's good evidence that 2023 is trending to be the hottest year on record because of reduction of sulfur in cargo ship fuels. Sulfur is a pollutant that reduces air quality but on the flip side, it can increase cloud formation (which prevents heat being trapped in the atmosphere).
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/esnt/2022/nasa-study-finds-evid...
Some folks see this as an argument in favor of continuing to use high-sulfur fuels, and perhaps, intentionally disperse sulfur in the atmosphere. That's a bad idea for a number of reasons, one of which is acidification of rain.
The biggest and most alarming takeaway imo, is that high-sulfur fuels have been obscuring the severity of climate change.
That really seems like the obvious next step in my opinion.
Dismissing SRM technology, Prof Joeri Rogelj of Imperial College, London, called it “irresponsible, dangerous and a threat to the manageability” of our survival, saying: “It is not a solution but an extremely dangerous band-aid that covers up the global warming problem without healing it, creating a false and unwarranted sense of climate safety while the core of the problem continues to fester.”
https://phys.org/news/2023-08-viewpoint-guardrails-geoengine...
Viewpoint: Without more research and guardrails, geoengineering is a costly gamble, with potentially harmful results
While theoretically capable of cooling the planet, solar radiation management could have drastic side effects by shifting patterns of global atmospheric circulation that can lead to more extreme weather events. It also does nothing to reduce harms of excess greenhouse gases, including ocean acidification. A 2022 study published in the scientific journal Nature predicted that stratospheric aerosol injection could alter global precipitation patterns and reduce agricultural productivity.
Beyond safety, another important question involves accountability. There's a good chance that geoengineering meant to help one region would harm others. That's because ocean and weather systems are globally interconnected.
As Riley Duren, a systems engineer from NASA, said in an interview with the space agency: "Geoengineering is not a cure. At best, it's a Band-Aid or tourniquet; at worst, it could be a self-inflicted wound."
Not sure if making enough salt spray boats is easier or harder than just reintroducing sulpher fuels.
Might not be the perfect analogy, but I think of it as akin to software that exclusively relies on automated garbage collection for memory management.
However I suspect rather than fix the root cause of the problem (CO2 emissions), our so called leaders will think bioengineering is a wonderful idea.
In Dubai they’re already doing it quite successfully with cloud seeding, I always wondered what that did to the inland climate.
Can you explain this? The link you provided does not state this conclusion.
I have a dark fascination with the inevitable industry-friendly responses you find on a post like this. I always wonder if the people know that the industry says very different things behind closed doors than they do in congress.
https://www.ap.org/ap-in-the-news/2022/climate-grant-illustr...
The Associated Press said Tuesday that it is assigning more than two dozen journalists across the world to cover climate issues, in the news organization’s largest single expansion paid for through philanthropic grants.
The announcement illustrates how philanthropy has swiftly become an important new funding source for journalism — at the AP and elsewhere — at a time when the industry’s financial outlook has been otherwise bleak.
For many years, Journalists and philanthropists were more wary of each other. News organizations were concerned about maintaining independence and, until the past two decades, financially secure enough not to need help. Philanthropists didn’t see the need, or how journalists could help them achieve their goals.
Nonprofit news organizations like ProPublica and Texas Tribune led the way in changing minds
Both sides had things to learn.
For Carovillano, it was getting used to the idea that funders weren’t just being generous; they had their own goals to achieve. “This is a mutually beneficial arrangement,” he said.
Note that all 20 of the new hires are tasked to "focus on climate change’s impact" - i.e. impact is assumed, and then they go looking for stories to support this narrative. Something they explicitly aren't funded to investigate: whether the science is robust.
As always, the loudest shrieking about corruption comes from the most corrupt people.
The notion that the problem is the "academic/philanthropic complex" comes directly out of the same industry imagineering and is a common misdirect providing talking points that lead away from industrial disruption.
In other words, it sounds to me like you (or to be fair and more accurate: people who use similar arguments) are critical of mainstream misdirection but possibly unaware that they've also been just as duped.
In basic terms this point works, otherwise it wouldn't be a good ruse. The academy is easily corrupted and non-profits are mostly total shit. These are not trivial points to make in the picture. But they aren't paramount at all. They are not the cause and changing them will not solve our problem.
https://cp.copernicus.org/articles/18/1729/2022/
> ...changes in atmospheric circulation, wind stress and thermodynamic processes linked to the Southern Annular Mode (SAM) and El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO)
>...Thus, projections of future Antarctic sea-ice extent and the associated climate implications are highly uncertain.
Point is - we don't know.
I spent a couple minutes on the article in question and it does not agree with the OP.
The bluffer in this classic game, however, has already moved on to misappropriating their next large volume. It's easy to toss smoke bombs.
What are you going to do? Learn Chinese, read the text, then come back in 4 years and tell me I'm wrong?
That's what this game is.
You can go and find the quote the OP is using, read the context, and, if you take the time, see it doesn't mean what they claim.
It's asymmetrical and either not done in good faith or not worth engaging in.
> I spent a couple minutes on the article in question and it does not agree with the OP.
which is not very convincing.
You might very well be right but it doesn't seem logically consistent to dismiss arguments in this way. We have time to debate anyway.
Thanks for your time. Have a good afternoon
One could simply refuse to engage, but that cedes the field to the people using in the easiest talking points. That "field" consists of people whose opinions matter, because they vote, but continue to consider the situation "unproven" despite scientific evidence overwhelmingly on one side. It becomes entirely a matter of persuasion, almost completely divorced from the actual data, since anybody capable of being persuaded by the data already has been.
Until you can repackage climate change as some slaphappy singsongy jesus thing or some hayekian libertarian delusion, a large percentage of the population will never get on board.
That's because the evidence they're looking for is biblical verses or rational choice theory argument - there's nothing materialist about their epistemology which is why that approach simply does not work.
The submarine surveys agree with the Buoy measurements agree with the satellite measurements which agree with the microwave remote sensing measurements.
There was 1 (one) (singular) study from 8 years ago that had a different interpretation of the numbers by Jay Zwally. People who don't understand science love attaching themselves to it like pulling out Andrew Wakefield's vaccine autism paper.
They are quick to discredit 99.99% of the science and then parade around with the 0.01% cause celebre calling it irrefutable evidence.
Here's the 157 citations to that paper, as you can see, it doesn't look like any of them support the findings https://scholar.google.com/scholar?oi=bibs&hl=en&cites=17945...
For instance: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0179-y or https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/201...
But some people will cling on to these tiny crumbs like a toddler with a comfort blanket. I get it.
As for your claims of consensus, please just stop. Almost nothing about the climate has a consensus outside of the physical absorption bands of various gases. Constantly claiming you don't need to respond to people's points because there's a "consensus" when there obviously isn't is an illegitimate tactic. Engage with the point or don't, but don't try and pretend you're in the right to ignore it.
It's almost invariably political ideology propagated by conservative intellectual dark web conspiracy peddlers like Sam Harris, Weinsteins or Rush Limbaugh type characters using rhetorical tricks to create FUD and blow smoke in order to support a political agenda.
They're propagandists and liars. I'm tired of that game and I've got no time for their tricks. I've seen them all before and it's just feeding the trolls. They're being insincere frauds.
The chemistry works. The physics works. There's no dispute on the chemical properties of carbon dioxide. No dispute on the current measurements or the physics of it. Nobody is saying the ph levels of the ocean are not being measured accurately or that certain biological chemistry doesn't only work at specific levels.
There's no rogue satellite returning different data. Even the American Petroleum Institute doesn't dispute any actual data.
Very fundamental chemistry and physics would have to foundationally change for climate change to be fake. I've yet to find anyone with a scintilla of evidence to show how this alternative model actually works. That's because it doesn't.
It's all rhetorical hand waving nonsense by internet celebrities and talk show yappers who can't balance a chemical equation yet alone propose an alternate GCM. Their criticisms are just uninformed bullshit.
The problems with the science here are legion, starting with the fact that the climate is far too complicated to predict given only knowledge of the chemical properties of CO2!
Consider the thousands of factors you need to also fully understand. Climate models don't properly handle the effects of clouds, they don't understand how energy is absorbed by the ocean, and they aren't even calibrated against reliable temperature measurements which is one reason estimates of the core ECS variable (the key to the whole thing) have been getting wider over time, not narrower. As in, literally, the constant you want to see scientists agree on has been losing consensus, not gaining it.
Your problem is that you think reality is very simple, and that's why you struggle to understand why anyone could possibly disagree with your views. Go spend a few months trying to explain why the models are diverging both from observation and each other - a scientific fact - and then you may start to find it possible to understand "talk show yappers" or whoever else you imagine is your enemy.
You're pretending like extremely small nuances and details are ground shifting giant fundamental questions.
That's another right wing FUD game
Re: ocean warming. These aren't small details. For over a decade climatologists reported that there had been a long term pause in global warming. Thousands of papers were written about it, wondering where the heat went. They started to argue that it had disappeared into the ocean, in an event not anticipated by the models. Literally that all global warming had been absorbed this way since ~2000. That's a huge detail to miss!
Around 2015 or so they resolved the problem in a different way: they modified the temperature databases to erase the pause from the record. All those papers, apparently studying and trying to explain something that had never even happened.
So the uncomfortable fact remained that by their own telling, either:
1. They didn't understand heat absorption of the oceans.
or
2. They didn't know how to measure global temperature despite their entire field being based around these measurements.
But actual history is just "right wing fud", right? It's impossible for pure minded academics to ever be corrupted by power, pride or a lust for status. They're just born better than right wing people.
> Point is - we don't know.
People keep interpreting "we don't know" in the same way a mutual fund information sheet says "past performance does not guarantee future performance," but in reality, "we don't know" is akin to saying "You have a stage three liver cancer and it will likely spread to some other organs, but we don't know yet which organ and when."
Some people keep saying "But the doctors can't even tell me what will happen next month! I'm probably fine."
The operating assumption must be that things that never happened (or very rarely happened) will start to happen more frequently.
You are arguing that as long as climatologists cannot reliably predict any particular disaster, we should assume the climate should be "business as usual." That's not science, that's just refusing to acknowledge the reality.
The annual maximum follows the trend you describe, while the annual minimum has been more static and decreased substantially in the last few years.
Looking at the data itself, Antarctic sea ice extent was pretty stable until the past two years, where it has fallen quite dramatically.[0] I think it is reasonable to express some alarm when you’ve gone from a trend of -0.12% per decade, to 16% below the 30-year average, in two years.
[0] https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/snow-and-ice-ext...
Decades of stability followed by sudden change is strong evidence against CO2 being the cause, because growth of that in the atmosphere is a very stable process. It suggests a different cause, which means it's natural, most likely related to undersea volcanism. In which case it's unlikely to be dangerous, unless you think this is some sort of freak event like an asteroid strike. But then you're not talking about climate change.
This is a disingenuous attitude; yes, special interests/lobbyists fund far more than (I think) they should, but there are _very_ clearly differences in opinion and legislation amongst political candidates and elected officials.
Last night, the Republicans held a primary debate in which none would acknowledge human-caused climate change. Last year, the Democratic party passed the inflation reduction act which puts a bunch of resources into addressing climate change: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_Reduction_Act
"Recycle our plastic" may be worthless, but voting and acting while also developing technical solutions really does matter.
at worst it's a distraction from necessary change, like plastic recycling.
or possibly they managed to shuffle ~2km or less in 43 days and were just fine.
That's not a tear jerker headline tho.
edit: asked `units` and doubled the distance:
You have: 3km/43days
You want: m/day
69.767442This has big "the polar bears are starving" because of climate change vibes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
"The current rate of extinction of species is estimated at 100 to 1,000 times higher than natural background extinction rates, and is increasing"
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/oct/13/almost-7...
Animal populations experience average decline of almost 70% since 1970, report reveals
Animals have always died as a part of nature, therefore we shouldn’t care about humans causing extinctions.
Is the same as saying:
Humans have always died as a part of nature, therefore we shouldn’t care about humans causing genocides.
Is this an intelligent way to think?
Seems to me that we should be trying to make people's lives easier in the meantime, rather than making them miserable and poor with bonkers legislation, regulation and taxes.
Fanatics still seem to be stuck in the "bargaining" phase, I feel ahead of the curve to be honest.
1. It's not happening
2. It's not our fault
3. It's not that bad
4. We can't solve it
5. It's too late
6. Let's (try to) do something about it.
I think solar radiation management is the only last-ditch idea that might pull things out.
In terms of outcomes, "climate change is real but nothing we could do would have any effect" is identical to "climate change is fake", which is why you're getting lumped in with the deniers.
Canada implemented carbon taxes to reduce emissions. Emissions still rose and everything just became more expensive.
Even if it's a net cost though... it's not like there isn't enough money to go around. If only there was a way to redistribute that wealth so that poor people didn't get even poorer.
I really truly don't think the only two options are "do nothing" or "do something but at such a great cost to people's quality of life that the cost outweighs the many millions or billions of lives saved".
Any so-called attempt to "redistribute wealth" has led to massive inflation and a borderline humanitarian crisis in our cities with people losing their homes and becoming addicted to deadly drugs on the streets.
Animal ag is the leading driver of biodiversity loss, deforestation, droughts, water usage, eutrophication etc.
We could switch to plant-based diets, reforest the pastures (the size of both Americas) and stop climate change (together with phase-out of fossil fuels) and store enough carbon in those forests to cause new little ice age and reverse the warming.