How to keep Earth from being cooked by the ever-hotter Sun | Hacker News Reader

How to keep Earth from being cooked by the ever-hotter Sun

arstechnica.com

20 pointsvinnyglennon33 comments

This sentence from the article seems to be completely made up and not based in any actual science:

"Without water to lubricate tectonic activity, our plates will grind to a halt."

In fact, water has nothing to do with tectonic activity, and the "lubricant" seems to be a special kind of molten magma:

https://today.ucsd.edu/story/scripps_scientists_discover_lub...

This is not my area, but how does your statement reconcile with [1] and [2]?

[1] "The fate of water within Earth and super-Earths and implications for plate tectonics," doi://10.1098/rsta.2015.0394, from which: "Water is thought to be critical for the development of plate tectonics, because it lowers viscosities in the asthenosphere, enabling subduction."

[2] "The role of liquid water in maintaining plate tectonics and the regulation of surface temperature," 2001AGUFM.U21A..09S, from which: "The difference between the strength of a wet lithosphere and that of a dry lithosphere seems to be big enough to control the very existence of plate tectonics."

In southern california we had a name for when it rained ~1" and then got really hot afterward - "Earthquake weather".

I've asked various times and even asked LLMs if there might be some truth in the idea, but everyone assures me, same as you, that no, water doesn't affect plate movement at all.

try googling/whatever the term to correct any misinformation i gave, here.

eta: I see negative points for defining a term i heard repeatedly over two full decades of cognition. Similar to trying to google the definition, the resounding result is "no."

There is research that does show precipitation events might influence earthquake activity:

https://news.mit.edu/2024/study-heavy-snowfall-rain-may-cont...

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/200...

i'll read those in a bit, but my theory was:

IF it rains a lot somewhere like a desert, the ground will absorb a lot of water, filling voids, washing areas out, including underground. If it then gets really hot and dry (you know, like a desert), suddenly that mud shrinks, the voids become larger, there's less friction. For sure, an earthquake didn't happen every time (or really any time in my memory) there was "earthquake" weather, but i'm guessing prior to the mid 80s it happened a few times and that's where the term started being spread.

What i don't like is instant ridicule for wondering if there might be something to it. It's not like the phrase "the devil beating his wife with a frying pan" as a synonym for a specific type of weather, even!

No, the real question is how to keep the earth from being cooked by greenhouse gases, not in 500 million years, but actually in a few decades. This article borders on climate change denial.

Multiple problems can exist at the same time.

Let's try to fix the things that hurt us on a human scale, with the technological and social stability that nets us we're in a much better place to tackle problems way further down the line.

No human society has lasted even a fraction of those 500 million years so anything we do now to beat that is going to be moot anyway

Because of one problem, we are not allowed to talk about other interesting ideas?

Why not just allow only topics on Hackernews where the specified problem is mentioned as the foremost issue.

Also this article actually did highlight the imminent problem.

> (our wanton carbon emissions notwithstanding).

Still climate change denial?

Ah no of course we can talk about it, it's interesting research.

I just wouldn't invest a penny into "fixing" it, that's all.

I don't think the article is climate change denial but if it's true that the Sun is getting hotter then man-made global warming will not be significant comparing to that.

Is it a few decades from 1980 or a few decades from 2024?

Alarmist statements hurt more than they help fight human caused climate change.

Given that CO2 emissions have only ever increased, it seems like everything hurts more than helps the fight against climate change. For what it’s worth, I’m reasonably convinced that the answer is 1980 and that, like a lethal dose of radiation, the damage is done and now we merely wait for the effects to take hold fully.

I'm starting to get that there's no good way to talk about climate change, especially to people which have a vested interest not to hear about it.

Maybe people are just tired from the same old alarmism which is then used to introduce more and more limitations and never touches the biggest offenders. Sure, introduce the next tax, lovely. Hope Nestle doesn't get touched.

The measures against climate change have been so weak until now that I don't think we can even talk about limitations yet. At least there's some equality here I guess, nobody doesn't do anything.

The measures against climate change has been weak precisely because of alarmism.

If everything is going to shit anyways, why throw resources into a black hole fixing it today? Check how many headlines have been saying inevitable, point of no return, etc etc for several decades.

Another aspect of this is overfitting on metrics like CO2 emissions, that's how you get hot garbage like carbon offsets that allow the worst offenders to keep operating like they have always been.

You live in a parallel world, the vast majority of the mainstream news out there are outright climate change deniers funded by billionaires and the few ones who don't cannot even relay the whole truth for being accused of "alarmism".

The reason nobody does anything about climate change is because it threatens their wealth, not because it's a catastrophe.

In my 'parallel world', it does seem like the mainstream media publishes articles every week or so (for the last decade or so) about how we are at the point of no return for climate change. And all of it is preserved in this wonderful searchable web of articles that ensures one does not have to speculate about what was published.

Maybe search on the web, who knows, it could turn out that you too live in the same world!

I'm sorry but no they really don't.

As an example, there's been some pretty deadly heatwave feuled by climate changed recently for example both in Sub-Saharan africa and south east asia and I'm sure nobody is really aware of it.

Turns out the "alarmist" as you call them were right all along and the current events are following pretty much the worst case scenarios.

You first say that alarmists don't exist, but then also they were right all along?

I'm just quoting your comment about the so-called alarmist mainstream news which is just nonsense, that's what doesn't exist.

What if in 50 years it turns out alarmists were right, and there's nothing could be done? Anti-alarmists will say "oopsie, we were wrong, you were right, now we see". But it won't help.

Imagine there's a huge asteroid comes at Earth, but it will strike only in 100 years. Alarmists start screaming that we need to act NOW, but anti-alarmists would be like "oh come on, you're screaming it for the last 44 years, please stop".

People are pretty bad at solving long problems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_wager

You can extend this 'what if I am right' argument to literally anything, making it vacuous.

Pascal's wager doesn't require much effort on behalf of the user, though. The idea is the benefits far outweigh the downsides. So should we just try to have a cleaner earth with the benefit of subverting this dangerous thing if it does exist?

The clincher here is that most of the greenhouse gasses come from giant corporations. As non-billionaire individuals, we don't have to personally give anything up. All we have to do is get those corporations to stop polluting simply because it's more profitable in the short term.

>All we have to do is get those corporations to stop polluting simply because it's more profitable in the short term.

Agreed. Also happy to personally give up conveniences if it helps.

The distinction is between 'this bad thing should be fixed', and 'this double plus super duper bad thing is going to kill everyone'.

Why even bother if the second one correct?

So basically every country on earth has recorded the hottest temps and highest average temps ever recorded on the last few years, often breaking the record from the year before.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_weather_records#/med...

If you don’t accept that as evidence, you will never accept anything.

An evidence for what?

Climate change is real and we need to move away from destroying the environment. Maybe even resort to artificial mitigations at some point.

There's not much evidence on either direction about how irreversible it is or how doomed we are. And claiming there is is dishonest, and hurts the efforts to make real changes for the sake of scoring ideological points.

There's definite evidence about the irreversibility like the release of trapped CO2 in ice that accumulated over tens of thousands of years. Riding of sea levels will also take much more time to reverse than it took to happen. Technically it's all reversible as the world will see another ice age at some point but on a human scale it's not going to be.

Apologies for being rude, but these kind of answers are exactly the type of answers that sre not helping solving things at all and are counterreactive. This article is not denying anything. Its telling something entirely different. Also it tries to give a slightly different look on things than usual.

If anything such sentiment is actively harmful to the topic, since claiming it's bordering on climate denial, borders on censorship to me.

Even though I believe climate change is real, I could see how it would irk me against the whole movement when it's the only thing you are allowed to talk about.

The post in its first paragraph literally brings up how we are actively harming the planet with carbon emissions, so it's not even that they didn't mention it or went against it.

How the hell is it climate change denial for someone to speak at all of a completely different problem from that of human-caused climate change? It is possible to be interested in and worried about different things simultaneously.

Absurdly intolerant claims like yours border on similarity to a hysterical, religious fervor against the idea of praying to any other god.

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