Rapid warming may tip AMOC at 2°C, slower warming may avert collapse

If this doesn't get us we still have massive insect extinction, ocean acidification, permafrost thawing, prolonged droughts, etc.

There is just no way out at the point, the planet is tanking the damage for now but once it'll crack, and it's starting to, many systems will fail simultaneously, no amount of theatrical green washing will undo the damage

Why? Deindustrializing especially Europe moved factories into coal powered regions. It was put forward as green policy, but how can this result be a surprise to anyone?

Just posted the idea for a win-win reuse of desalination waste water in the arctic depths in a sibling comment! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49283840#49286264

There is no way geoengineering could go wrong right and make things worse. We really understand complex systems right? No way we would be like toddlers messing with powers we barely understand.

> geoengineering to stop global warming

Global warming is geoengineering. And any geoengineering out of it will need to eclipse the current geoengineering in size, energy and effort.

Burning fossil fuels is geo-engineering.

The things we need to get serious about are the easy to do thing (compared the sci-fi coded versions of geoengineering) we already know how to do, but are dragging our feet on: electrification, renewables, better insolation, more public transit, reducing red meat consumption.

Oh, it can be too late. Positive feedback loops and so forth.

Another way of saying "thoughts and prayers" :)

Drastic mitigations need to start now, talking will do nothing. But with people voting in leaders like Trump, nothing will happen. And remember, when gas prices was high during Biden's Admin. ? He did all he could to get them lower, including opening up new oil fields. So both "sides" are to blame.

We should have let the fossil fuel prices rise and force people to change their way of life. Instead our descendants will be force to change in ways that will be far worse then we would have if we started years ago.

I just think of easter island deforestation, endangered species poaching, container ships and bunker fuel, and setting the oil wells on fire in kuwait.

I've read though that if we raise the standard of living of a population, they pollute less, so there might be a self-interest-based solution if we can do it globally.

> went to Glacier National Park a while ago and stood before a sign that said "The glaciers you see will be gone by year 20xx" or something like that. The year was 20xx and I was looking right at the glaciers and they were decidedly not gone.

Why is it OK for Elon Musk to blow up spaceship after spaceship and everyone says well that’s the way you get it right, but a couple of Climate scientists put up a sign that is maybe a decade or two too early and all hell rains down on them?

What does Elon get credibility yet? Climate scientists don’t? It’s because we choose who we give credibility to. And as a species, we are stupidly optimistic or willing fully blind.

> The year was 20xx and I was looking right at the glaciers and they were decidedly not gone.

They just shrunk by 40% in ~50 years, no biggy

On a few other climate related topics scientists are actually surprised at how fast it's getting out of hands.

> In a democracy, credibility is an important resource.

We got Trump... Twice... so clearly not. What matters is selling a dream, and nobody want to hear about the dream of reducing growth, buying less, consuming less, etc.

focussing on the messaging is a particularly weak way to steer the conversation away from the real issue. just as in your story, that glacier may take an additional decade or two to disappear completely, but it will surely be gone.

we can't seriously believe that if we just adjusted the story a little bit this way or that, that the message would actually click and people would begin to try to minimize the tragic cost to future generations.

this is happening now. blaming the messenger for not being appropriately fawning, or curt, or amusing is kind of irrelevant at this point. maybe we can learn to do a better job next time there is an issue that's going to radically effect everyones lives for the foreseeable future.

Thwaites mass loss rate is 500% what it was in 1990. 500%, that is 2026 study. It is accelerating very rapidly as well.

I don’t give a damn, to be perfectly honest, what some sign posted god knows when with who knows what information, says. This is a man made global catastrophe. Information and research is very clear and very robust.

Ice loss in just 202x, from JUST thwaites, contributes to several centimeters of ocean rise. It’s going to be much much higher in 203x and 204x. It’s just one (unusually big) glacier of many.

We can all sit here and Reee Reee about the things that were overly reductive, overstated, wrong, even a lie. What I wrote above this is none of those and it’s actually psychotic how little we talk about the cryosphere collapse, given how badly it’s going to fuck us, not 1000 years from now, not 100 years from now, but 10 years from now. I played a video game twice that age on my computer yesterday.

The year predicted for the glacier's collapse was an extrapolation based on data and models available at the time. While the timing was off, the thing is going away visibly for everyone!

In hindsight they shouldn't have set the date, but contrast the fast decline with the long existence. Maybe even let people guess or bet the exact year to involve them and make them think.

I find it weird that the credibility is only called from the side of the science. No one who already wasn't alarmed is concerned that fossil fuel companies knew all about global warming, and only started to campaign against any action that would hurt their profits.

You can also visit a glacier in Canada that has signs showing where it was 30 years ago and it's about a quarter mile hike to where it is now. One poorly placed sign doesn't invalidate anything.

Then opening scene of The Ministry for the Future reflects this view. We won't get serious until there is a major catastrophe where millions die. And it needs to be millions of the "right people". Sadly, 10 million people dying in the DRC won't move the needle in the US. 1 million people dying in Texas might.

OTOH in 2020-2021 we had over 800,000 additional deaths due to COVID (conservative lower bound), and people are still made that they had to get vaccinated and schools were closed. Look at the Fauci scapegoating going on right now.

So, maybe 1M people in the US could die in a head wave or climate catastrophe and we still wouldn't do anything about it. However, the difference with COVID is that number happened over 2 years so "feels" less critical than if 800K people had died in the course of a week.

I was on a cruise ship to Alaska and we went to see Dawes Glacier, and people who had been on that same cruise 10-15 years earlier commented on how much smaller it was. I don't have the most recent numbers but it retreated by 3.8 km between 1985 and 2020.

That sign could have been better worded, but it doesn't change what's happening.

Once warming gets to a point we may not need desalination plants. The boil off from the ocean will perpetuate rainfall. Clean water for everyone. Never mind the 100+ mph winds that go along with that.

WE FIXED THAT. We literally listened to professionals, introduced legislation and fixed it. The worst possible example you could use.

And we fixed the ozone hole by taking decisive action internationally banning the worst ozone-destroying gases

Weird how something was done about that though

Luckily the Montreal protocol was implemented and CFCs were banned. Something like that should be considered for more green house gasses. Maybe Paris?

This exact sentiment has been expressed and addressed ad nauseum.

Good point, we should probably do the same thing with our carbon emissions that we did with the chemicals that deplete ozone. The Montreal Protocol of 1987 successfully phased out over 99% of them.

Glad you brought that up. Because we fixed it. Now because of ignorance, we are not fixing this. As a person without kids, its not my problem. Strange that anti-science conservatives wants us to have more children while willfully destroying their future.

CFC elimination worked, but switching refrigerants is a lot easier than not burning hydrocarbons.

Nobody took action because the global south (logically) decided that economic growth and rising living standards is worth the global cost.

1. The global temperature has never in human history done what it's doing now. 2. Weather isn't the same as climate. They operate on way different scales and timelines. Uncertainty in the one does not necessarily map to uncertainty in the other. 3. Climate change is most definitely not a solved problem. We know some big things we can do, and none of them are easy.

It's pretty easy to model to a first approximation. Gases like Carbon Dioxide reflect certain wavelengths of infrared. When they are present in the atmosphere, they are present at a certain percentage concentration, and as that increases they reflect more infrared.

This matters because there are three ways for a body to eliminate thermal energy: radiation, convection, and conduction. Earth is not in contact with anything else, so it cannot conduct. It does not share an atmosphere with anything else, so it cannot convect. So that leaves radiation, which is largely in the form of infrared. Then it stands to reason that if you change how much IR is reflected back to the surface by the atmosphere, say by changing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, then you will increase the amount of heat the Earth contains as long as there is a source of heat nearby or within. Earth has both in the form of a molten core and the Sun.

This is why they call them "greenhouse gases." Because they cause the Earth to retain more heat than it radiates in the infrared spectrum, like the glass on a greenhouse.

> Given how we are at the tail end of a small ice age, shouldn't it be expected that temperatures recover to what they were previously?

The speed at which the temperature is increasing is what is concerning, it’s much faster than a usual warming cycle. The XKCD comic of the timeline of human history and climate really drives home how steep the increase in temperature has been vs in the past: https://m.xkcd.com/1732/

The only thing that matters is that we're pumping insane amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and basically terra forming ourselves and most of nature out of the equation.

Nature is infinitely more complex than most people believe, we don't even know how basic things like soil ecosystems truly works, the thing that supports 100% of life on earth, we have virtually no clue about it, so what do we know about the rest...

Nobody is taking action because the whole system is made for growth and continuous improvement, you can't tell people "we have to work more to simply keep the status quo", let alone "we may even lose a lot of nice things and convenience in the process"

> temperatures recover

Not. so. fast.

People have continually been taking significant action! CFCs were banned in 1987. High GWP refrigerants, like R-12 and R-22 have been banned, and even newer ones like R-401 are now significantly regulated: The days of bleeding an air conditioning system to atmosphere are _long_ gone. Cars in developed countries are annually inspected for emissions systems performance, so NOx and other GHG-producers have been cut to nearly 0% from vehicles since the 1990s in those regions. Transoceanic shipping has recently implemented its sulfur-free requirement, and we're visibly seeing fewer sulfuric clouds over the ocean. Stricter gas milage requirements in cars have seen a drop in CO2 emissions in the US from 2007 to 2025 by 102 million metric tons of CO2, despite having 23,000,000 more people.

The Paris accords have been running for years. No country has met its targets but nearly every country has seen a reduction.

The reductions aren't as big as we'd like. The temperature is still rising faster than we'd like. But the idea that we haven't taken any action is completely false.