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Comment by nemo44x | Hacker News Reader

Antarctic sea ice extent had been rising from 1979 (when satellite data started) to 2015. It regressed for a few years and then expanded again in 2020 and 2021 and then regressed again. There's a lot of causes of this and there are studies looking at it going back many hundreds and thousands of years, but they aren't as accurate as satellite data. Additionally, different seas in the antarctic have had different behaviors. Some have regressed and some have expanded at different times.

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.

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> >...Thus, projections of future Antarctic sea-ice extent and the associated climate implications are highly uncertain.

> 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."

You're making a huge leap there. We do know that cancer is a sickness and we actually do know your chances of survival 6 months out, 1 year out, 5 years out, etc. We don't know the day you will die from it but we are certain you will die from it if left untreated. We have lots of empirical data that can be tested, replicated, and stated with a high probability of certainty. We have actual knowledge on this. This is what science is used for - to create actual knowledge. Not informed opinions.

You are the one making a logical leap. We do know that the Earth's climate is entering conditions never seen during human history. We know how CO2 warms up the Earth. We just don't have a detailed knowledge of exactly how and where it affects weather.

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.

Here's the graph of Antarctic minimum: https://www.climate.gov/sites/default/files/styles/full_widt...

Just based on a cursory examination, you seem to be cherry-picking from your citation and omitting words that appear in that study, like “slightly”, to make it sound as if there was some sort of significant growth of the Antarctic ice sheet since 1979 that is now reverting to some stable state, which is not the case.

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...

It doesn't follow that it's reasonable to express alarm.

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.

There was a huge burst recently and then a crash. It’s a regression to the mean.

That paper is quite difficult to interpret for a non-expert, and isn't focused on just sea ice extent. I'm not sure what they mean by "extent", is it a maximum or an average? Here's a link with some graphs that are easier to understand: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/....

The annual maximum follows the trend you describe, while the annual minimum has been more static and decreased substantially in the last few years.

Arctic sea ice has been quite stable for the past 100 years but has recently begun to shrink rapidly. I imagine scientists might be worried that the Antarctic might be about to start seeing a similar change in behaviour.

This article is about Antarctic ice.

Antarctic sea ice has also begun to shrink rapidly, dramatically so. Check out https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/seaice/ (you'll need to click "switch hemisphere")

Seems this was immediately heavily downvoted (I'm not OP). Curious to see what arguments against this stance are.

Citing large technical volumes and claiming they say something counter to a consensus, such as https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/ice-sheets/ is a classic bluff. For example, it's one of Alex Jones's favorite tactics.

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.

This isn't really a counter argument. It's more of a form of rhetoric argument, which is also what you're accusing GP of.

I don't think you get it. Let's say you don't speak, say, Chinese. I make a claim that's in stark disagreement to the general consensus, such as "The Chinese claim their country is an island in the Caribbean north of Jamaica" and then I find a large academic text, in Chinese, and claim that I translated a section of it that supports my argument.

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.

Yes, but you haven't proven this is what GP is doing. You have just asserted it is, without providing further evidence beyond

> 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.

Go check the OP replies. I'm under no obligation to further convince you of that which is obvious.

Thanks for your time. Have a good afternoon

Of course, it's an online forum, no need to engage further if you do not wish to. Have a good day.

We've been over the data so many times that there isn't really anything new to say about it. Insisting on revisiting old arguments is itself a rhetorical tactic that superficially resembles argumentation but is really just a time-waster.

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.

It's not that they don't find the empirical evidence persuasive but they can't resolve it with their personal emotional and political alignments.

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.

Claiming a consensus when there isn't one is a classic bluff.

The satellite measurements of Antarctic sea ice are not in dispute. Nobody is putting forth a device with a different measurement.

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.

You're strawmanning, please don't do that. The original claim was about long term ice trends/projections and what they do or don't mean, but now you're trying to claim there's a dispute over satellite measurement accuracy (there isn't).

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.

That's not the claim.

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.

What are you talking about? Do you really think all you need to accurately predict global climate trends hundreds of years into the future is the chemical properties of a single gas? If you do actually believe that then your knowledge of climatology is very poor indeed.

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.

This is beyond useless. That's all wrong. Plenty of GCMs deal with cloud cover.

You're pretending like extremely small nuances and details are ground shifting giant fundamental questions.

That's another right wing FUD game

They attempt to deal with it, but there are still massive problems with their simulations of it. Go read the papers, the model authors talk about the issues themselves. Nothing right wing about climatological papers, is there, far from it.

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.

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.

Edit: I moved this comment to reply directly to the OP at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37251831 since that seems like a better place for it.

This actually seems like a good counter argument.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com