Antarctic sea-ice at 'mind-blowing' low alarms experts
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
This is not something we fix as individuals, with feel-good home solutions, recycling, or planting trees. Large industry is destroying our world, on purpose, because of greed.
This only gets fixed through policy and regulation. Vote.
They are also still debating "décroissance", that is "de-growth".
I find crazy that no one even mentionned the word "efficiency" as in "we might not need all the resources we consume to produce everything we do today. Let's set a realistic efficiency goals and try to achieve them"
If we just reduced the resources needed to produce todays consumption, why wouldn't the savings just go to producing more of the same stuff? Ie. growth?
I think also using tiny homes and more insulated and cheaper earth bag homes could help but also would help with the housing crisis. There's a lot we could share, and if we did maybe we could also build smaller homes and lots as we wouldn't need as much storage.
I was referring to people who deny that climate change is even real. I would love to get to the stage of debating how to fix things, instead of being stuck in the stage of complete denial.
We have had climate change since day one of earth. We can see it in the charts, data, etc. the issue is how much impact do the humans contribute?
If people were serious about carbon footprint, nuclear power plants would be built. But we are not serious, instead we have grifting policies that lead to wasted solutions: Solyndra, wind farms, solar farms, etc.
Then on top of all of this, the people in charge find ways to encourage coal, look at how Germany and the rest of the first worlds tried to bankrupt Pakistan by driving up the price of natural gas. Pakistan, China, and every country who saw that are going with coal.
The people who say climate denialism should not be tolerated are not serious about what they propose, because their solutions are not based in reality.
You are going to need to also propose a solution beyond "stay poor" for the country.
https://cleantechnica.com/2023/06/29/solar-82-of-power-capac...
37% of new car sales in China are either full electric or plugin hybrid. 25% are full electric BEVs. The west is far behind.
You'll have to be more clever on solving this problem. I would suggest against parroting false feel good phrases that will result in absolutely nothing changing, and start thinking outside the box you and many others seem to have found themselves in, if you actually want to see our planet survive.
We are talking about the death of this entire planet being perpetrated by a specific group of people. What sort of solutions did our ancestors come up with for significantly smaller stakes, to simply safeguard things like freedom? When speaking of saving an entire world with the potential to spread life throughout a galaxy, there are few conceivable solutions which cannot be easily morally justified if they result in safeguarding that future.
We are a species with an infinite cosmic destiny. I might suggest we all start acting like it.
Republicans are in favor of dismantling and eliminating the EPA and clean energy initiatives, for instance. Democrats aren’t great either, but Republican policies are measurably at least an order of magnitude worse.
Every single election cycle we have this discussion. "Well, at least the Dems are better than the Republicans. They're the best we can get." It's not enough. Hasn't been enough for a long time.
We increased crop yields multifold already:
https://ourworldindata.org/crop-yields
So maybe we can do the same to carbon yield?
Are trees the plants which capture most CO2 per hectare?
See for example
+ https://www.salk.edu/harnessing-plants-initiative/
+ https://www.slcu.cam.ac.uk/news/wood-modification-boosts-bio...
+ https://news.mongabay.com/2023/07/genetically-engineered-tre...
+ https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/16/science/genetically-modif...
> Are trees the plants which capture most CO2 per hectare?
I'm struggling to find exact numbers per hectare, and it's only one of several important metrics (e.g. speed of capture, longevity, ecosystem effects).
From my readings I believe a combined strategy of species-diverse reforestation and algae breeding (perhaps GM, though I don't know enough) would be optimal.
Edit: as noted by others below, wetlands preservation and extension would also be great.
We need to plan _forests_ not trees. Trees are not tools to fix our CO2 problem, we need to restore ecosystems and think how we can regrow forests and not monocultures of a "super CO2 capture tree".
When we will start to understand that one problem != one solution, especially when it comes to things as intricate and complex than ecosystems we will start to understand the root of our issues properly.
Just a note that monoculture plantations don't function the same way as vast, diverse, multi-level primeval forests, with regards to a water cycle and biodiversity.
With catastrophic effects.
https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/research-news/2...
All planetary boundaries mapped out for the first time, six of nine crossed
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320356605_Agricultu...
Agriculture production as a major driver of the Earth system exceeding planetary boundaries
Most of it is because of animal agriculture - it uses 80% of agriculture land and about half of our crops.
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use
https://ourworldindata.org/drivers-of-deforestation
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26231772/
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/31/avoiding...
> Could we breed trees which capture more CO2?
We don't have to breed new trees. The ones we have are enough.
We have enough space to capture 2+x more CO2 than we've released into the atmosphere since industrial revolution.
We could switch to plant-based diets and free an area the size of both Americas.
https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2013/10/World-Map-by-Land...
On that land a regular primeval forest, Miyawayki/Amazon/Syntropic style would grow 10x faster than regular monocultures and that would also enable the biodiversity to rebound. We'd get ourselves out of overshoot in no time (given few decades, of course).
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-00603-4
https://ourworldindata.org/carbon-opportunity-costs-food
The overshoot threatens our civilization with crop failures. The only realistic way out of it is immediate phase-out of fossil fuels and plant-based diets.
> We increased crop yields multifold already
With catastrophic effects.
> Most of it is because of animal agriculture.
They do.
A significant influence on those increases was thanks to fertilizers, insecticides, and herbicides. This goes hand in hand with water pollution and biodiversity loss, exemplified by dead zones in oceans and an 80% decline in insect populations in the last few decades.
Improvements in irrigation systems have led to the depletion of our aquifers, which were filled over many millennia, and their renewal may take centuries.
Mechanization and soil management lead to soil erosion; maybe only a few decades of soil remain until we lose all of it.
Less than 50% of our crops are for human consumption; the rest is used as animal feed and biofuels.
(I'm not vegan or otherwise promoting absolutes, it's just easier to explain/understand in the extreme I think.)
"The only realistic way out of it is immediate phase-out of fossil fuels and plant-based diets."
The suggestion for a global plant based diet is not unfeasible. Only thing you need is to convince the elites to change to vegetarianism. One of the large scale "hari seldon" style rules of thumb are that the non-elites will generally imitate the perceived lifestyles of the elites to the best of their abilities. This is not a physics or engineering problem, but a marketing problem and hence not impossible to solve.
I disagree we can immediately phase-out fossil fuels. They are foundational to the whole global industry including agriculture. I agree we should, but this is an engineering problem that has not yet been solved.
Directly associating “protein” with animal products and implicitly assuming protein is something we should be at all worried about when there hasn’t been a report of “protein deficiency” ever are a big part of the problem.
I can’t assume this is your case but I’ve still to meet a person who brings this up and has no access to, for example, beans or lentils. A quick google search will offer many more alternatives, although it’ll also consistently bring up the fact protein is something that should hardly ever be on your mind.
You do have to actively and periodically watch your vitamins though, which we all tend to have less than what we need, and lower-than-healthy vitamins for long periods can do irreparable damage in the long term.
You do have to watch your B12 when switching to a vegetarian diet, not because animals naturally produce it but because they are generally supplemented with it; but low B12 is also pretty common in meat eaters. By the time you feel the symptoms it’s already dangerously low.
I’m not looking to attack you — I just don’t want random people reading unfounded reasons not to go vegetarian and unconsciously believing them.
> Only thing you need is to convince the elites to change to vegetarianism.
Maybe, but what others decide to do or not does not prevent individuals from doing their part. Just by changing your habits and living your life you’ll influence people. You’ll get to patiently answer honest questions, show off amazing recipes that will wipe away preconceived culinary notions, etc. Your friends, after years of seeing you well, will stop thinking “omg they must lack protein” or “they must be rich to be able to afford veggies”
Bottom-up works too, and I’d even think it’s usually the way to go with all society-scale changes. Waiting for someone else to do something generally leads nowhere good. Also, a ton of famous people are already openly vegan or vegetarian.
There definitely is
I think that abolisment of subsidies to most destructive and polluting sectors (fossil fuels, animal agriculture, fishing, ...) would get us a long way.
> They are foundational to the whole global industry including agriculture
Agree.
So we use what we have to expedite the switch to renewables and reform agriculture for sustainable production less dependent on chemicals and poisons.
The peak oil is not that far away.
An "immediate phase-out of fossil fuels" would kill a billion people or more right off the bat. Do you not understand that, or do you simply not care?
https://www.agry.purdue.edu/ext/corn/news/timeless/images/US...
See how corn yield has increased from around 20 bushels/acre to nearly 180?
That extra 160 bushels of corn per acre is due almost exclusively to fossil fuels and other modern agricultural practices.
That extra 160 bushels is also what feeds a substantial portion of the planet.
The same is true of other crops such as wheat. In the last hundred years or so, the Kansas wheat crop has gone from 12-13 bushels per acre to well over 30 (40 in a good year).
That didn't happen with a peasant poking animal manure into the ground with a digging stick. It happened with tractors, combine harvesters, and petrochemical-derived fertilizers.
I meant it not as right now, but as soon as possible.
> See how corn yield has increased from around 20 bushels/acre to nearly 180?
> The same is true of other crops such as wheat
Just 7-10% of that corn is for human consumption, the rest is animal feed and biofuls.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/06/corn-industries-susta...
Corn based ethanol is worse for the climate than gasoline.
https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/us-corn-based-e...
Most of the world’s grain is not eaten by humans - nearly half of all grain is either burned as fuel or eaten by animals
https://web.archive.org/web/20230204130304/https://www.econo...
> It happened with tractors, combine harvesters, and petrochemical-derived fertilizers.
Yes, that's the destructive part.
We should instead switch to local methods of regenerative farming, like syntropic/natural/permaculture farming, which might be more labour and knowledge intensive, but when done right have similar yields, while repairing soils and working with biodiversity, not against it.
Those who want to make us live sustainably now or previously are hoping that we can be smarter than that. We're supposed to be a smart species. Can we limit ourselves artificially to preserve a better quality of life?
Easy to be pessimistic about this now(!)
Also, birth rates are in terminal decline pretty much everywhere except Africa so don’t worry, we’ll control our population on our own.
What about other animals?
You do realize that would be mostly the half whose nations had nothing to with this mess in the first place, right? The rich well of nations of northern hemisphere will not suffer dramatic population falls (just the slow, endemic kind from low birth rate).
Good idea. Why don't you start with yourself?
Or an invasive species without a natural predator.
You first.
Also closing the loop on plastics.
Then there is some yearly variation, say, this year above average by 3 degrees, 5 years later below average by 3 degrees.
If you call the yearly variation climate change, then five years later your opponents will say "you see, it was a hoax".
It is a bit like presidents taking credit for the stock market going up. Then when it inevitably goes down, it makes them look bad.
This is an inevitable physical consequence of human activity steadily increasing the insulating properties of the atmosphere in a demonstrable and measurable way.
Sure, right now we're going up faster than our new normal rate of increase due to ENSO flux, and in a few years we'll see our rate of increase drop below the current rate as ENSO swings back (fingers crossed) .. but overall on a ten year rolling average we're seeing steady increases in average global temp. as a direct result of human activity (hence AGW) and it'll stay that way until we reduce the insulation properties of the atmosphere.
There can be a day-to-day variation of 10+ degrees. If Monday is cold and Tuesday is warm, and I say "this is because of global warming", then if Wednesday is lukewarm then I discredited myself.
> There can be a day-to-day variation of 10+ degrees
You seem to be confusing weather with climate change.
Weather refers to short-term atmospheric conditions, such as daily temperature and precipitation variations, while climate change represents long-term shifts in average temperature, precipitation patterns, and other climatic factors over extended periods, often spanning decades (3+) to centuries.
If someone says "this year is unusually warm with unusually low ice cover", that is not about climatic factors spanning decades to centuries.
If someone says "the average ice cover between 2000-2020 is lower than the average cover between 1980-2000" that is about climate.
Ultimately its up to us to convince the policymakers and senior leadership in corporations to make the correct decision.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/31/avoiding...
> Ultimately its up to us to convince the policymakers and senior leadership in corporations to make the correct decision
Imagine a nation with the highest consumption of meat, where individual choices and habits have long shaped dietary preferences. In such a scenario, without widespread adoption of plant-based diets and a shift in societal norms driven by individuals, convincing policymakers and senior leadership in corporations to regulate and promote sustainable diets becomes an uphill battle.
It's through our own choices and advocacy that we can lay the foundation for systemic change and address the pressing issue of climate change effectively.
And the little plastic recycling they do has the effect of making them think "I'm helping!", when in reality it moves the needle very little...
One can equally interpret the diagram from the article as showing a fairly constant level - somewhat varying within a limited range - with 2023 being an outlier. All it tells about is the variance and without at least more year labels there is no way to read anything about the trend from it.
[I'm not saying the article is wrong or right, just that it does a very bad job supporting its thesis.]
> Until 2016 Antarctica's winter sea-ice had actually been growing in size.
>"There is a chance that it's a really freak expression of natural variability," [Dr Mallet] says
There isn't an obvious trend. I'm pleased that they aren't trying to hide this and that the article is clear that we don't know everything about Antarctica (I'd imagine it's very hard to get data for annual sea ice maxima before we started measuring them). This isn't supposed to single-handedly convince anyone that climate change is happening, but show a piece of evidence that extreme weather events are becoming more frequent.
You can play with the data a bit here:
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-i...
Be sure to click the Antarctic button. Arctic (the default) shows 2012 as the lowest record.
For Antarctica, last year was the previous minimum and was 2-sigma from the mean. Additional iso-sigma curves are not shown but I'd guess this year is at least one more sigma off the mean. I progressively activate past years and do not spot an obvious trend. So, last two years have deviated significantly with this year deviating yet more so.
On the other hand, given the number of measurements, we would expect about two measurements to be outside of 2-sigma. If we do not attribute anything to 2022 and 2023 being correlated, then this is just a fluctuation.
On the gripping hand, 2022 and 2023 may be the first two points of an explosive trend.
Arctic doesn't really matter much in this regard because the arctic ice doesn't influence the sea level, which I think is the main (but not only) point of the article.
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/files/2023/09/asina_S_iqr_...
Also 2014 seems to've been more ice due to record snowfall, which is easier to freeze than the regular freezing of the sea. Seems to be in line with climate models predicting more erratic weather. Good example of why they weren't worried about that, since it's expected, but worried about this, since it isn't.
So far, as much as I can see, the current climate models do not predict absolutely anything in advance, but are used to explain things afterwards to show that anything is caused by co2.