How is something critical if it has been transgressed and we are still alive? Or on the very first moment every single one is past we all suddenly die?
This comment screams lack of education about complicated systems. For example take overpopulation in things like grazing mammals. The funny thing about being overpopulated is that it is not instantly deadly. Once the mammals eat enough of their food source that their food source cannot reproduce reliably the game is over. But they tend to have reserves of fat and muscle that last for some period of time. The weakest die first. Then the population reduces. But the population doesn't go back to what was previously considered at the over population limit. No, populations massively collapse because there is nothing to eat at all. 9 out of 10 members of the population can die. And if it's something like an island, extinction is on the menu.
The passengers weren't all affected equally either. A lot of first-class passengers made it onto lifeboats, whereas third class passengers mostly didn't.
(The analogy breaks down a little in that we don't have lifeboats and the collapse of our ecosystems probably won't be as absolute and catestrophic as a ship sinking. The Earth's ability to sustain large numbers of humans may decline significantly though, and a lot of things we take for granted now may be gone.)
Honestly, as someone who has been very concerned about climate for a while now, I'm surprised how much visible disruption of the climate system we've directly been able to observe. Earlier in my life I thought that, though dire, this was certainly a problem that would impact future generations but not so much ours. It turns out I might have been quite wrong on that front.
Good news, you won't face the time after.
A little faster than expected maybe. Not all that much though.
> Boundary positions do not demarcate or predict singular threshold shifts in Earth system state. They are placed at a level where the available evidence suggests that further perturbation of the individual process could potentially lead to systemic planetary change by altering and fundamentally reshaping the dynamics and spatiotemporal patterns of geosphere-biosphere interactions and their feedbacks
Probably would need to read more to get a clear understanding of exactly what they mean and how they're defined, but it sounds like we're to an unstable place. Perhaps somewhat analogous to skating on thin ice: you may not have haven't broken through yet, but you're in a spot where a break could happen at any moment and from any movement.
I’m not sure if it would be with forest management, or the complexity and reasons that cut Texas has its own grid, separated from everyone else. I’m not sure I would say either directly applicable to this topic.
Maybe some of the northern flyover states would be best? Higher land around the great lakes for example? If I were looking to buy up some land today I'd even consider Canada, but only after the fires have died down. The only nice thing about wildfires burning 40 million acres of forest to the ground is that it'll be a while before there's enough fuel for it to happen again.
At this rate, it's looking pretty rough.
> Had Earth system remained forced by 1988 conditions (350 ppm and 85%/50%/85% of tropical/temperate/boreal forest cover remaining), the simulations show that temperature over the global land surface would not have increased by more than an additional 0.6°C in the subsequent 800 years
> If climate and land system change can be halted at 450 ppm and forest cover retained at 60%/30%/60% of boreal/temperate/tropical natural cover, then the simulation indicates a mean temperature rise over land of 1.4°C by 2100 (in addition to 0.7°C between preindustrial time and 1988) and 1.9°C after 800 years as vegetation evolves in a warmer climate
The latter is an optimistic projection assuming we will do more to stop climate change, the paper goes further into the odds of a >3C increase.
To put that in context, a 1.5°C increase in average temperature is considered a doomsday scenario where wildfires and storms ravage the earth, killing over half of the global population.
To ELI5 like you seem to prefer, the iceberg breaching the hull of the Titanic seems like a critical transgression, but the ship stayed afloat another hour or so...
I don't think the paper claims we've passed criticality. Instead, it talks of boundaries and risk, the latter reflecting that we don't know where the critical points are.
> on the very first moment every single one is past we all suddenly die?
Biosphere collapse could happen suddenly and without warning. That would throw the global south into political turmoil while prompting a global and destabilizing refugee crisis.
1000 998 994 986 970 938 874 746 490 ooops
1000 1499 2497 4493 ...
it pays to be be patient!
> https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-24268-5
This HN user categorically and obsessively has their own opinion on climate change, and how it is influenced by humans.
Their "evidence research" is taking the first Google search result that they believe to support their position in the discussion at hand - even if it doesn't make sense (hurricanes in North America versus Mediterranean).
If they don't invest in such sloppy research, their arguments hit rock-bottom Tiktok factoid niveau. one can better just assume nonsense/randomizing/lying and ignore this user for anything climate-related.
That seems to be ... integral to the function of the site itself:
<https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...>
Reputation and patterns of behavior matter.
Edit, yup, it was poor maintenance on the dam as indicated in 2021: https://sebhau.edu.ly/journal/jopas/article/view/2137
Because the user/writer is completely unimportant in an endless flowing sea of anonymous text. Whatever one of us writes in a comment, somebody else could as easily have written, that's why only the argument itself is interesting. It is misguided effort to care about any "reputation" of an anonymous user on an anonymous discussion platform, unless you're moderating said platform.
Apologies for the meta-discussion.
I reject both of those assertions.
Authorship matters. Comments are not anonymous, but optionally pseudonymous, where reputation (karma) is explicitly tracked.
The significant point of karma tracking isn't the accuracy of that karma, but the tracking of it. Other measures, such as flags and moderator admonishments, are also presumably tracked, at least by mods.
All imply that reputation is an integral element of Hacker News participation.
Studying court cases, I've seen too many instances of people who initially weren't believed or just dismissed, because they weren't considered the right "who", but in the end were proven to be completely right. Studying the history of science, there are many such famous cases.
As for the science of meteorology, it shouldn't be treated as an ideological war, where people go after each other's characters – even pseudonymously. It's the study of elements that don't care what humans think of them.
Apart fromt this, you seem to confuse moderating with discussing. Wether somebody or somebody's comments are subject to moderator actions have nothing to do with the truthfulness of what they wrote.
The reputation and credibility of speakers may, however, count against a consideration of what it is that they have to say. If someone is known to have been an unreliable guide in the past, or violated other precepts of dialectical discussion, they deserve little consideration, or at best might be offered reserved judgement until a more reliable narrator appears or independent verification can be provided.
You are confusing a positive claim of authority against a negative claim of credibility.
The notion of empirical evidence does not mean that every last fact or claim must be verified. It relies profoundly on the credibility of the messenger, witness, and/or experimenter. Expertise in field lies both in specific knowledge of a domain as well as credibility in relating that knowledge. Experience without credibility is charlatanism. Lacking both credibility and experience is the foolish fraud.
In the specific domain of weather, it's those with an axe to grind against credible impartial experts from an overwhelming number of independent disciplines and organisations who'd launched character assassinations, as is exceedingly well documented. Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway's Merchants of Doubts is only one of many accounts of this. Oreskes is interesting herself as a historian of science, who's specifically studied another instance in which heterodoxy became not only orthodoxy but the central organising principle of an entire scientific study: the development of plate tectonics theory as the foundation of geology. That revolution occurred over the course of about 50 years, in which, again, evidence from many independent individuals, disciplines, and institutions provided overwhelming justification for a new model of understanding. Those include the discovery of radioactivity, the use of radiometric dating, the fossil record, gathering and dating of extraterrestrial rock samples from asteroids and the Moon, ocean core data, magnetic field history revealed in those cores, bathymetry, volcanology, seismology, and others.
Science does occasionally make hasty judgements; the ideal of empirical validation runs up against fallible humans and human institutions. Ultimately, however, it corrects itself, which is the one thing ideologically-motivated reasoning cannot do. Alfred Wegener's initial hypothesis proved to be in the right direction, but of itself lacked sufficient evidence for the theory to be accepted on its own. Over the course of a half century, and despite quite strong resistance within and outside the scientific community, that evidence was gathered, however, and a theory based on the broad outlines proposed by Wegener was all but certain by the mid-1950s and was eventually accepted in 1965.
The ideology in climate science comes largely from commercial interests who would be gravely harmed should the full implications and conclusions of what is now the overwhelmingly supported scientific consensus be adopted and realised. Upton Sinclair is validated yet again.
<https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/30/salary/>
And repeatedly having to re-refute previously refuted bullshit is overwhelmingly tedious.
Use the drop down and look at accumulated cyclone energy. There's no trend in 42 years and last year was the third lowest total tropical cyclone energy for earth in the last 42 years. This year seems on track to be very low for cyclone energy too.
Costs in terms of percent of GDP are falling: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17477891.2018.15...
And most importantly, death rates for weather are drastically reduced over the last hundred years: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-deaths-from-nat...