Ice coverage sits in another positive feedback loop, as more (dark/heat absorbing) water is exposed compared with white ice, things become hotter, locally and globally. And the Arctic is one of the regions where the average of temperatures increased more.
Last winter was already very meh and extremely subpar re snowpack. Not even going into the increasing speed of glaciers melting, its up to 10m per year.
Winters as we know are disappearing, summers are getting brutal heatwaves never seen even few years ago, not within 1 person lifetime but within one darn decade. To any climate change denier... I'd love to smash that idiocy out of your head if that would help, but unfortunately we all know it won't.
Well, one must balance the downsides with the positives. Cheap energy from fossil fuels allowed humanity to flourish like never before, raising standards of living globally. And in the 50-year span from 1970 to 2019, deaths from climate-related reasons decreased to one-third[0], even as the global population more than doubled. That's one-third the absolute number, not per capita! All this mostly due to the increasing ability of the developing world to deal with extreme weather events, again thanks to cheap energy.
I posit it's entirely reasonable to disagree on what we should do about climate change.
[0]: https://library.wmo.int/records/item/57564-wmo-atlas-of-mort...
> I posit it's entirely reasonable to disagree on what we should do about climate change.
I think maybe you could have argued that in the past, but not so much anymore. We know now that it is possible to fully decarbonize the vast majority of our energy sources without a significant decrease in living standards - we just need to ensure the infrastructure exists that incentivizes the transition as quickly as possible, and ensure that organizations/people with large vested interests in fossil fuel extraction aren't allowed to control the direction we, collectively, take.
Instead of saying "It's not happening." the GP is saying "It's happening but it's no big deal. good stuff came from it."
Which to be frank, is a complete waste of time not worth responding to. What they've said has been a meme for 30 years at this point.
https://condenaststore.com/featured/the-planet-got-destroyed...
The other problem is the future: it’s mostly the same places which saw those gains which are also critically at risk from flooding, drought/famine, dangerous heat levels, etc. so there’s very much a “the future is longer than the past” aspect to this conversation where, say, 3-6 good decades shouldn’t be accepted as an excuse for the much larger number of worse decades which have already started.
Please explain those cool positives you see to them. You won't have to, they will mostly not lay around and wait for collapse and death, instead they will stand up, turn towards also your home and march to a good and safe location (TM). I would do exactly the same in their place. Bear in mind that those folks will be absolutely desperate with nothing to lose.
This will be a catastrophe for all developed nations, and I don't see any way to avoid it now.
The solution is, again, more energy abundance so that most of the world can have AC. To paraphrase another HNer, I wish for the average Bangladeshi or Nigerian to have the living standards of the average Texan or Swiss; not the other way around, which would be what I foresee as the result of "degrowth" in the name of saving the climate.
There's virtually no point in the hand-wringing that the developed world engages in with electric cars and rooftop solar, when the developing world, where the majority of people are, are emitting more per capita CO2 emissions year after year. China alone netted over 40GW of coal power plants last year.
> Same could easily go for whole Sahel
The Sahel isn't home to all that many people, because it's not very friendly to civilization to begin with. Countries with territories in the Sahel have quite a lot of people, but that's entirely different.
> I don't see any way to avoid it now
More energy, preferably emission-free, but with emissions if we must. More nuclear power plants. More research into fusion.
Thanks for taking Ontario's Canadian winter this year