Our Changing Planet, as Seen from Space | Hacker News Reader

Our Changing Planet, as Seen from Space

e360.yale.edu

64 pointsYaleE3606 comments

California is, for the first time in 25 years, drought free: https://www.drought.gov/states/california#current-conditions

In commentary on the article, a photo gallery of nine images, I didn’t get much out of it. Maybe because it didn’t show much actual change (aside from one side by side 5 years apart, and another one days or weeks apart?).

Pretty pictures, not compelling. But, seeing the shipmap post from yesterday (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46527161) and the inframap today (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46536866) were more so.

It is a common myth about these California "droughts." Like anywhere, water fluctuates, but CA is not abnormal in this regard.

And really CA has plenty of water, but the people fight for the farmers for it, and the farmers win. Agriculture is about 80-90% of total use. All of residential, commercial, industrial, baseball fields, golf courses, residential lawns - all make up 10-20% of water use.

So why the constant "drought"-alerts and admonitions to take shorter showers and flush less often? Because every gallon used in your home takes money out of a farmer's pocket. 1 flush ~= two almonds. A shower is ~5-10 almonds. 5 showers is an avocado. If you don't use it, they will - and if you use it, they can't.

> "Humans are altering the planet on an unthinkable scale"

Mesmerizing photos, but hard to draw causal conclusions. Drought in Iraq is pictured directly above flooding in Australia. Maybe this is just the natural cycle of the planet. We don't have data to compare for more than just the last couple generations.

Paleogeologists beg to differ.

https://academic.oup.com/oocc/article/3/1/kgad008/7335889?lo...

Yes we do. Please read the IPCC reports if you're curious about where the data comes from, there is a huge amount of climate data beyond the direct weather measurements you're referring to.

The "natural cycle" argument is one of the most common points around climate change denial. It's also one of the most commonly debunked. See the following:

UN - https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/debunking-eight-...

MIT - https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/todays-climate-change-simila...

Columbia University - https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2017/04/04/how-we-know-cli...

It's also unclear to me how scientists might not have enough data to validate climate change in the last several hundred years, but they do have enough data to validate the natural cycle hypothesis spanning thousands of years.

I'm not going to engage more deeply here because this post has the smell of trolling to it, but if you're engaging in good faith, there are hundreds of reputable reports refuting the natural cycle hypothesis:

https://www.google.com/search?q=natural+cycle+arguments+on+c...

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