I have trouble interpreting stories like these as anything other than scare tactics. I'm not a "denier". I'm acknowledging that there's been an increase, generally in the range of 1-2 degrees F.
But given an increase of that magnitude, I find it very hard to blame for the kinds of problems being described here. 1F to 2F is well within the normal range of variation, and so if the roadways are suffering from it, it must be that the roads weren't properly designed for the expected variations to begin with.
The average world temperature is 1.4 C above the baseline this year. Yes, the poles have been hit the hardest, but we are still outpacing all predictions.
Meanwhile, in 2015, the world's governments have agreed to cap warming to 2.0 C by 2100... But won't take any action today. Why do I have the feeling that we will completely miss that target?
It's this kind of stuff that I'm arguing about. First, there's a wide range of predictions, and up until a decade ago, the measurements were middle of the road across them - far from "ALL predicitons".
Then came the "pause". For over a decade, the warming seemed to pause. Notice I emphasize "seemed". The observed atmospheric temperature barely moved at all, it was way below ALL predictions. [1]
I'm not denying, I'm not claiming that the "pause" disproves the theory. We know that there were other phenomena occurring, like oceans acting as a buffer. But the fact remains that observed temperatures deviated significantly below predictions for a protracted period of time.
When people come along and make claims like we are still outpacing all predictions, they make it easy for deniers to single out these exaggerations and pretend like their inaccuracy disproves the whole idea. By giving the deniers an easy strawman to argue against, you're creating an obstacle to real progress on the problem.
[1] "Scientists who study climate change and skeptics of human-caused global warming can agree on at least this: Global temperatures haven't risen nearly as much this century as model projections say they should have." -- https://www.wunderground.com/news/no-hiatus-pause-global-war...
Of course, if you read on, you'll find proposed explanations for the phenomenon. But as far as atmospheric measurements go, it's absolutely false that things have been worse than predicted, and downright absurd to claim that things have been worse than "all" (i.e., even the most pessimistic) predictions.
When I say all predictions, I should have quantified it as 'all predictions used by policymakers'.
There are certainly apocalyptic models that have called for more warming then what we've seen. We aren't using them to set policy - we are using models that have been underestimating the impact of warming.
I don't know if you've been to Alaska, but a large part of the lowland is swamp that happens to be frozen most of the time. The current roads are basically a pile of gravel on top of that. If the swamp is frozen for less of the time, the gravel moves more.
So yes, the road was not engineered with these conditions in mind, but building a road on a swamp is not easy to do, even if engineered correctly.
Barely mentioned in the article, the Trans-Alaska Pipeline was built with cooling pipes to keep the ground it is built on cold. [1][2]
I wonder, if a road lasted for seventy years, and then became unusable because of changes within ten, one could say that it's not within the "normal" variation anymore?
Probably someone has an article that is a lot more exact and involves a lot more statistics...
They are for areas north of the highway, but it shows temps in 1950 higher than they are today. The text also mentions that the ground has cooled slightly in the recent 20 years.
You are in fact a mild denier. Merely writing "I'm not a denier" doesn't change the implications of what you are writing. While world wide changes might so far amount to 1-2 degrees F, it is well known that the warming is concentrated in the northern and southern latitudes, so the changes in Alaska are much more than the global average.
the roads weren't properly designed for the expected variations to begin with.
Considering that the road has been there for seventy-years, I'd argue that it was designed just fine. I mean, yeesh, who am I going to pick for my SME on road construction, the anonymous dude/dudess on a forum devoted to work that will never involve a shovel or leave a callous on your finger, or the U. S. Army Corps of friggin' Engineers who have built roads in places you or I wouldn't survive more than a day or two?
But all appeals to authority aside, let's assume for the moment that the road was built to account for a variation in temps. Problem is, that variation window moved by a few degrees. You get that, right? That the average temp was (just making up #s) 28F +/- 2F and now it's 30F +/- 2F? With my made up numbers, the road never reached the freezing (EDIT: melting, actually) point even with variation. Now it does.
A change of X degrees in the global average temperature does not mean a uniform, across all times and locations, increase of X degrees in local temperatures.
The problems affect a fairly narrow band of latitudes; specifically, those where the average long-term temperature was just below freezing i.e. the southern margin of the permafrost. 1-2F is indeed within natural variation, but historically a warm year or two was followed by a harsh winter to refreeze the surface so that the deep layer stayed frozen.
Now, the average temperature is just above freezing or close enough to it that the heating effect of the asphalt pushes the local average temperature above freezing. This means that deep layers are now thawing for the first time in thousands of years; they will stabilize eventually, but in the meantime they're going to be near impossible to build roads on. And the thaw line continues to march north, year by year.
But go over to Bloomberg news, and they're wondering why the Japanese won't make the tough cultural sacrifices needed to increase immigration, to stave off stagnant GDP caused by declining population and the accompanying demographics. (I get the workers to non-workers issues in play. Even with that, I believe it is telling, which solutions are put forth. Increase immigration. Not, decrease consumption.)
Seriously, our roads are sinking. Record temperatures. Record droughts. Record greenhouse gasses. But how many times were "jobs" talked about at the DNC and RNC? "Global warming"?
It seems like we're discovering a bunch of technologies that involve removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere now (and even using it as a resource). That isn't the only problem gas, but I'm optimistic that we will solve the "greenhouse effect" problem through this sort of climate engineering before the real disaster of rising sea levels gets too far. In a century people will probably be freaked out by a host of issues we've barely even thought of today (things like the Kessler syndrome that are not so top-of-the-mind).
The real disaster isn't rising sealevels (except in Bangladesh). Homes can be rebuilt. Its just a question of money. The real disaster is agricultural collapse in the tropics and subtropics.
Either way, it would be far cheaper to switch our energy production to renewables, then to geo-engineer on a planet scale. We aren't doing that in any meaningful way.
Instead we pat ourselves on the back for reducing US coal energy generation to 37%. Never mind that this entire reduction comes from burning natural gas...
Keeping CO2 output steady instead of rising with ever-growing population size & energy appetite is, I think, an important first victory. The work is by no means done, but Rome wasn't built in a day.
> The real disaster isn't rising sealevels (except in Bangladesh). Homes can be rebuilt. Its just a question of money. The real disaster is agricultural collapse in the tropics and subtropics.
Homes aren't the only thing destroyed by rising sealevels. Arable land that is under saltwater is a lot less arable.
Most arable land isn't coastal though - and most coastlines are urban. If you flood, say, all of China's, America's, and Europe's coastlines, nobody will have to go hungry. As another poster mentioned, the land doesn't have to be underwater to become unusable, but rising sea levels have a limited reach.
A very large share of arable land is at a low elevation above sea level along waterways; land distance from the coast doesn't control the effect of sea-level rise.
> If you flood, say, all of China's, America's, and Europe's coastlines, nobody will have to go hungry.
Well, except that its impossible geographically to do that without also flooding inland arable areas. Flooding America's coastline also means flooding (among other prime agricultural areas) much of California's Central Valley.
> The real disaster isn't rising sealevels (except in Bangladesh). Homes can be rebuilt. Its just a question of money. The real disaster is agricultural collapse in the tropics and subtropics.
A good chunk of arable land and aquifers will be affected by rising sea levels as well.
Really, our only hope is somehow all that land that is too cold to farm now...becomes more practical to farm. :/
James Lovelock, the inventor of Electron Capture Detector, which he used to discover CFC's, and the person behind the Gaia theory, predicts that only Canada, Northern Europe and Siberia will be habitable in the later part of this century.
Very true - there will be a limit to what size of a population can be sustained by farming within those northern areas. Whatever that number is, it's probably not 9 billion people
I agree climate change has to be taken seriously and we need to study ways to mitigate the effects of our GHG output. No doubt.
On the Japan question. No, I think and hope they continue to be uniquely stubborn. Why? Because we are all going to be there (we would have been there if we'd be as strict as Latin American countries are about their own immigration). Japan can lead the way for us and for others on how to deal with this issue (population decline).
Japan is in fact dealing with their issue head on by not importing workers. By not importing workers they are not defraying the issue. They are doing the opposite of dealing with consequences later.
Besides, population decline could very well be a large part of the answer to the problem of automation and labor redundancy. Who cares if you have less workers if you /need/ less workers?
> Besides, population decline could very well be a large part of the answer to the problem of automation and labor redundancy. Who cares if you have less workers if you /need/ less workers?
Its only a short-term answer (sure, natural population contraction and population aging means your workforce to total supported population ratio is shrinking, which can delay the need to address the retooling society to deal with lower labor-hours:population requirements, but it only delays the need, and eventually creates other problems.)
In what way is importing workers "defraying the issue"? Also, why would the population of the US decline? White people aren't having babies like they used to, but other groups don't show the same trend. It's the reason why the US is on track to become a majority-minority country long before the original estimated 2050. California's already there.
People are still clamorimg to get into the US, and fighting tooth and nail to stay here.
You are the first person I've read that considers not importing workers a solution, rather than a symptom of cultural insularity that threatens to bring down their economy through the burden of an aging population.
If you look at the stats of immigrants in the U.S. other groups aren't having as many babies like they used to. Look up birth rate by minorities on Pew Social Trends.
Japan, by some measures, is over populated. But regardless. World population is stabilizing, at least in mature economies. The US would be in a pop decline, if not for immigrants. If we only count US born newborns, the US pop is in decline.
Japan facing this issue we will all face is good for them and for us as their solutions will pave the way for other countries which will follow (much of western Europe and east Asia).
Because the trend world wide is for pop to level off and decline. The economies are based on growth. It'd be good for an advanced nation to work a solution to that problem (good economy in a pop decline).
> Why? Because we are all going to be there (we would have been there if we'd be as strict as Latin American countries are about their own immigration). Japan can lead the way for us and for others on how to deal with this issue (population decline).
Why isn't immigration a valid solution to population decline? This seems like a classic paean to the old white country to me.
Immigration in Latin America is actually not very restrictive. Organized crime (from anywhere in the world) can come and go as it pleases in the region. Whatever you may have read on right-wing media, illegal immigration is rampant in Latin America.
The irony of some Americans complaining about Latinos now is rich. You didn't care much about them when the US govt was promoting dictators and doing everything it could to undermine the democratic will in the region (predominantly left wing in response to the incredible levels of legacy inequality) and why would you? It made many of your companies super rich which in turn provided you with nice, cushy jobs managing your "banana republic" natural resources. The local population though was saddled with no voice and (usually) murderous psychopaths as their "leaders". As a result they migrated in droves to the US, the richest nation on earth that also happened to be the closest. And now you complain. It would be funny if it wasn't racist too.
Try getting a job in Costa Rica or Panama as an illegal. You'll have to get an illegal job.
But anyway, the response is more about Japan. The long term answer is not the importation of workers, but finding a solution to having a viable economy with a declining population and aging population. It's in our interest that they find real solutions to a problem we will all face, rather than stave off the issue a bit with labor imports.
United Fruit != Many companies. They were in a few counties. They had bad influence, but it was one limited industry making a family rich... The main problem wasn't US companies but rather a very backward uneducated population. Those that put effort into education, Chile, Costa Rica, Panama. Uruguey are doing well. Americans on the other hand did not muck around in Mexico as they did Chile or Guatemala, and see where they are with their nationalism. Who is more racist, the Mexican government and how they dont provide resources for their majority mestizos or Americans, I bet Mexicans get a better deal from the US than they do their own gov't, else they'd enjoy what "Mexico es para Mexicanos" has to offer them rather than emigrate to a foreign land apparently full of racists.
> The main problem wasn't US companies but rather a very backward uneducated population.
The US isn't full of racists but you clearly are racist. Can't say I'm surprised since I could smell it in your first comment.
It may surprise you but Latin America had its share of intellectual leaders, many of which had to flee their own countries because of the brutal dictatorships propped up by the US govt. The ones who didn't were simply "disappeared". It's very convenient that you only think of United Fruit as the only beneficiary of subservient local dictatorships, it betrays a lack of knowledge about how neocolonialism (or even neoliberalism) works. Either that or you just did a quick "banana republic" google search and completely ignore that the term can be used independently of the United Fruit case. Which, again, betrays an ignorance about the whole subject.
I understand Latin America has produced a number of intellectuals --granted, however the majority of their mestizo population during the time of united fruit etc, were not attending school past the 6th grade, if that. That's a lot of intellectual capital left on the table and contributed to weak economies. The stronger economies had some semblance of compulsory education beyond elementary school. Even today, in Mexico itself, you have indigenous people for whom Spanish is a second language and due to that suffer discrimination in their own country --and this repeats in many south American countries.
You forget most of their intellectuals come from their elite families, it's not like the average person there has much of a chance in the elite circles.
Pointing out the poor educational infrastructure as well as a culture which does not make it a priority is not being racist.
No I'm not. You're the one ignoring the mistreatment of local populations by the minority creoles. Yes, there was what can be categorized in some sense imperialism, in some countries, but that was conflated with larger geopolitical issues of the cold war.
The real numbers are probably somewhat worse. There's a Swedish government report that has the best numbers, but I couldn't find it within a reasonable time. Swedish employment rates for natives and first-world immigrants are good, though.
I usually find your sentiment to be buried somewhere deeper on most HN threads that touch on these issues.
I'm honestly baffled at the endless optimism and belief of others in our ability to innovate and disrupt out of this crisis, whether it be technological advances or some market solution.
Some people even go so far as to suggest that we'll be moving beyond this planet in the next 100 years and all resource problems will be solved. It's hard to reply to them without sounding snarky, but I can't help but wonder in what circumstances those people were raised with that line of thinking. They just sound completely ignorant of both history and basic physics when they make those statements.
At least there won't be an ice age, which, according to the timeline, should happen soonish (on geological timescales). An ice age would be very problematic too, and we've averted that easily.
That's true enough. The key point, though, is that the cold would have come at a typical rate. Typical being extremely slow, by human standards. We would have had many generations to prepare for it.
There is growing agreement that what we are facing is going to happen very quickly, even by human standards.
There is research that hints that a very quick onset might be possible. It's even be suggested that it can happen in months. [1] (I tried to find the corresponding paper but could only dig up a conference talk abstract.)
The studies I found all used lake sediments in Irish lakes, so it's somewhat local and not conclusive yet imho. Still, it seems to be a surprisingly fast change in the data. (I was surprised; I didn't know.)
Do you have a source for your point? It looks like a more extensive literature review is needed to answer this question since the answer is not on the surface. Or my google-fu is just weak today.
On the other hand I also found research stating that the next glacial period might be a few 10,000 years off, so there's that.
The political and corporate establishments don't give a fuck about us or climate change. We need to stop looking to these selfish demagogues within the Republican and Democratic parties as if they have anything in common with us. These people and their families will be safe and sound even if the planet and environment goes completely to shit. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if many of them would wipe out the majority of life on Earth if their political donors pushed for it.
Be the change you want to see in the world. If you're worried about climate change and you're not vegan, you need to realize you're contributing to one of the largest causes of biodiversity loss and greenhouse gas emissions on the planet. Consider adopting pets or children instead of breeding them into this world. If you're an activist, fight for local political change to bring sound environmental policy to your community and work to expand to surrounding regions. If you're an engineer or scientist, don't forget that you have the key to making this world a better place (and no global warming denier can take that from you). Finally, I believe Tesla sets a good precedent for manifesting these sorts of ambitious ideas within a system of free market capitalism.
You say we are so fucked, but I'm not so quick to agree. I'm not going to say I'm a total optimist, but I think the potential exists, within our lifetime, for weird and exciting technologies that could allow us to solve these problems in ways we could have never imagined. As long as CERN doesn't destroy all life as we know it, I think we're good.
right, so next week you will be talking about how the world is overcrowded and now you are saying japan is fucked because it doesn't have enough people.
dogmatic orthodoxy of apocalyptic ecotastrophism is an pseudo-intellectual psycho-emotional epidemic.
Classic propaganda. Fissures on the Alaskan highway are caused by temperature variance. This has been happening since the highway was built in the 40's.
Example:
>Winter frost is extremely hard on the roads. Do not be surprised to see deep fissures across the highway.
>Scientists say they’re the crystal-clear manifestation that permafrost -- slabs of ice and sediment just beneath the Earth’s surface in colder climes -- is thawing as global temperatures keep rising.
I become extremely skeptical. This is the danger of lazy journalism and ultimately lazy readers confirmation bias.
We need to create a market for halophyte plants that can be grown using salt water in dessert/saline conditions. It requires extensive marketing investment and skill in order to create a market at each level of biomass (biofuel, animal feed, people food, niche health products, pharma).
Interesting. I had to Google it - it looks like 2% of plants tolerate salt water to different degrees. It looks like an interesting field for breeding or potentially GM to cultivate seawater tolerant food crops
Is there any reason to be optimistic about our ability to deal with climate change? I have to admit that this topic depresses me deeply, as the United States' tepid response does not match the magnitude of the problem. It is shockingly easy to imagine scenarios resulting in the collapse of civilization (agricultural collapse places significant pressure on a few areas which leads to a domino effect of instability triggering nuclear war).
> Is there any reason to be optimistic about our ability to deal with climate change?
Yes: because failing to be optimistic about it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Also, you never know what will make people come around. In any process of winning hearts and minds there is always a time before which things seem hopeless. Look at the Sanders and Trump campaigns: when they started, no one believed they could succeed. Bernie came very close, and Trump actually won. (Not that I want to hold up Trump as a model of how to proceed, but just as a data point to show that the unexpected can happen.) Maybe if we get enough "thousand year floods" like just happened in Maryland -- say a dozen of those events in a year or in a month -- people will suddenly wake up and realize the gravity of the situation and find their sense of duty and planetary patriotism.
I think it's beyond our capabilities to "fix" in any meaningful amount of time. However we can still survive. If we remain optimistic and plan to adapt to the coming changes.
We don't know if or how we can deal with the problems coming up. But giving up will surely make things worse.
Further, we have to choose to not give in to excessive alarmism. I am typing as someone who struggles with this every day, since I've been watching climate change closely for quite a few years now. Things are objectively accelerating, so it's easy to give in to panic.
But that might be even worse than giving up.
We have to approach this with focus, an iron will and with an even temperament.
Every scary climate related news item should be practically drowned in data, as hard and objective as we can get it.
Because, these days, nothing puts people 'to sleep' the way unfounded alarmism does. Because people are numb to all of the alarm handles being pulled, all over the place.
Currently the DoD does not think that stable states will be disrupted to the point of conflict, but unstable states for sure.
It's unclear who exactly they consider fragile states in their report, but I'd certainly put North Korea, India and Pakistan in there as states that have a potential for climate change based conflict. If China feels any real stress they will stop providing rice to North Korea and we could see nukes flying from there.
I personally don't see large scale nuclear war (above 5 nukes flying) happening unless it's Russia or the US that are feeling the pressure. Russia seems to be in the camp of countries that will gain aritable land and the US has a huge amount of resources and plenty of ways to cut back on consumption before it feels the pressure.
If you are suggesting a donimno effect of refugees then the answer is very different: I don't think a large influx of refugees would cause a state to go to war, more likely they would turn them away at the border and we'd see a horrible increase in a humanitarian problems, racism and xenophobia, but then again we seem to have already seen that with the end results of the Arab Spring.
Yes. Before global warming, the big global environmental crisis was CFC's destroying the ozone layer. In the 1980s nations got together and agreed on the 1987 Montreal Protocol to phase out the use of harmful CFC's.
Global warming is a similar problem. More difficult, sure, but essential characteristics are similar. We can do it, because we have solved similar problems in the past.
But a lot of them were NOT pristine. For dozens of miles at a time, most all of the trees would be at an odd sideways angle. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drunken_trees) The permafrost they relied on for stability was melting.
More than two years later, I suspect that the countless trees I saw leaning steeply to one side are mostly dead.
On the Dalton highway, once past the Brooks range (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks_Range), there were enormously quantities of heavy rain. I didn't realize, at the time, how unusual that was. It turns out that the Alaskan tundra is typically extremely dry, and while I was up there, more than a years worth of (not very cold) rain fell, turning the road into a morass.
My goal was to put my feet into the arctic ocean, and the only way to do that is to first get to Dead Horse, Alaska (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadhorse,_Alaska). The 'town limits' are several miles from the ocean, and it's rigorously patrolled private land in between, controlled by various oil companies.
They typically offer tours, but I arrived a bit too early, so I was thinking about hiking a few miles up the Sag River (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagavanirktok_River). Fortunately, I happened to talk to an oil worker guy at the gas station, and he said I would not likely survive such a hike. Polar bears, he said, had been getting extremely aggressive over the past few years. They were starving.
At that moment, I felt a unique feeling, that few people experience these days. In my four decades living, I've been in a couple of life or death circumstances. But it wasn't quite like that.
The idea that I had nearly found myself in a situation where I might have been hunted by an enormous, hungry animal. A creature who rightly considered me food, and little else. It was a curious feeling!
Fortunately, the tours started the next day, and I took a bus through the vast oil infrastructure, to a specific spot where tourists got to interact with the arctic ocean.
It was cold, gray and sleeting. The ocean almost seemed like a very large lake, with pretty small waves. The ice had melted early that year, again, and so was not visible from shore.
So, I've been curious: here's a chart of the mean annual temperature departure for Alaska (1949-2015)[1](source: [2]), the past two years have been particularly hotter there with anomalies > 4.5°F.
The NOAA has more detailed datasets but it's a bit more work to extract meaningful information.
Also I'm sick of hearing that people believe (or don't) in climate change when it's just factual data.
It's already hell in many Northern Canadian communities that rely on ice-roads [0].
From what I understand we're on track for an unavoidable > 2C increase in global average temperatures this century. It's also quite likely that we'll be passing the extinction threshold if we don't take extreme measures to avoid it.
It's quite likely another Syria-like crisis could happen anywhere affected by climate change. I'm disconcerted that these issues are not the most pressing issues of our time. There are many valid socio-political issues to consider but extinction seems to be the most important one to me.
Maybe it's because the predictions are far enough into the future that we cannot fathom a solution right now... sort of like how smokers don't make the decision to quit today because it's not going to kill them right now.
So if fresh water will become scarce, and renewable sources of energy are essential, where can individuals invest to provide financial backing to companies addressing these issues?
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 31.8 ms ] threadBut given an increase of that magnitude, I find it very hard to blame for the kinds of problems being described here. 1F to 2F is well within the normal range of variation, and so if the roadways are suffering from it, it must be that the roads weren't properly designed for the expected variations to begin with.
And the predictions are consistently outpaced by reality.
I can't revise or delete my comment on this device, or I would. My bad.
Meanwhile, in 2015, the world's governments have agreed to cap warming to 2.0 C by 2100... But won't take any action today. Why do I have the feeling that we will completely miss that target?
It's this kind of stuff that I'm arguing about. First, there's a wide range of predictions, and up until a decade ago, the measurements were middle of the road across them - far from "ALL predicitons".
Then came the "pause". For over a decade, the warming seemed to pause. Notice I emphasize "seemed". The observed atmospheric temperature barely moved at all, it was way below ALL predictions. [1]
I'm not denying, I'm not claiming that the "pause" disproves the theory. We know that there were other phenomena occurring, like oceans acting as a buffer. But the fact remains that observed temperatures deviated significantly below predictions for a protracted period of time.
When people come along and make claims like we are still outpacing all predictions, they make it easy for deniers to single out these exaggerations and pretend like their inaccuracy disproves the whole idea. By giving the deniers an easy strawman to argue against, you're creating an obstacle to real progress on the problem.
[1] "Scientists who study climate change and skeptics of human-caused global warming can agree on at least this: Global temperatures haven't risen nearly as much this century as model projections say they should have." -- https://www.wunderground.com/news/no-hiatus-pause-global-war...
Of course, if you read on, you'll find proposed explanations for the phenomenon. But as far as atmospheric measurements go, it's absolutely false that things have been worse than predicted, and downright absurd to claim that things have been worse than "all" (i.e., even the most pessimistic) predictions.
There are certainly apocalyptic models that have called for more warming then what we've seen. We aren't using them to set policy - we are using models that have been underestimating the impact of warming.
So yes, the road was not engineered with these conditions in mind, but building a road on a swamp is not easy to do, even if engineered correctly.
Barely mentioned in the article, the Trans-Alaska Pipeline was built with cooling pipes to keep the ground it is built on cold. [1][2]
1. http://dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a073597.pdf [pdf]
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Construction_of_the_Trans-Alas...
The Tok Cutoff is particularly bad these days
Imagine how much energy is needed to increase the temperature of a glass of water by just 1C. Then, a swimming pool. Finally, a planet.
Probably someone has an article that is a lot more exact and involves a lot more statistics...
This page has some graphs of ground temps the last 100 years:
http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/arctic-zone/detect/land-permafrost....
They are for areas north of the highway, but it shows temps in 1950 higher than they are today. The text also mentions that the ground has cooled slightly in the recent 20 years.
Others have pointed out that avg(Alaska, Summer) != avg(World, All Year)
Considering that the road has been there for seventy-years, I'd argue that it was designed just fine. I mean, yeesh, who am I going to pick for my SME on road construction, the anonymous dude/dudess on a forum devoted to work that will never involve a shovel or leave a callous on your finger, or the U. S. Army Corps of friggin' Engineers who have built roads in places you or I wouldn't survive more than a day or two?
But all appeals to authority aside, let's assume for the moment that the road was built to account for a variation in temps. Problem is, that variation window moved by a few degrees. You get that, right? That the average temp was (just making up #s) 28F +/- 2F and now it's 30F +/- 2F? With my made up numbers, the road never reached the freezing (EDIT: melting, actually) point even with variation. Now it does.
Now, the average temperature is just above freezing or close enough to it that the heating effect of the asphalt pushes the local average temperature above freezing. This means that deep layers are now thawing for the first time in thousands of years; they will stabilize eventually, but in the meantime they're going to be near impossible to build roads on. And the thaw line continues to march north, year by year.
But go over to Bloomberg news, and they're wondering why the Japanese won't make the tough cultural sacrifices needed to increase immigration, to stave off stagnant GDP caused by declining population and the accompanying demographics. (I get the workers to non-workers issues in play. Even with that, I believe it is telling, which solutions are put forth. Increase immigration. Not, decrease consumption.)
Seriously, our roads are sinking. Record temperatures. Record droughts. Record greenhouse gasses. But how many times were "jobs" talked about at the DNC and RNC? "Global warming"?
We, are so, f-cked.
Either way, it would be far cheaper to switch our energy production to renewables, then to geo-engineer on a planet scale. We aren't doing that in any meaningful way.
Instead we pat ourselves on the back for reducing US coal energy generation to 37%. Never mind that this entire reduction comes from burning natural gas...
It's still a huge improvement, cutting CO2 output by half and eliminating other byproducts.
Yes, there has been GDP growth since then, which is great... But the atmosphere doesn't care about GDP. What it needs are reductions.
Homes aren't the only thing destroyed by rising sealevels. Arable land that is under saltwater is a lot less arable.
A very large share of arable land is at a low elevation above sea level along waterways; land distance from the coast doesn't control the effect of sea-level rise.
> If you flood, say, all of China's, America's, and Europe's coastlines, nobody will have to go hungry.
Well, except that its impossible geographically to do that without also flooding inland arable areas. Flooding America's coastline also means flooding (among other prime agricultural areas) much of California's Central Valley.
A good chunk of arable land and aquifers will be affected by rising sea levels as well.
Really, our only hope is somehow all that land that is too cold to farm now...becomes more practical to farm. :/
www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/james-lovelock-the-prophet-20071101
On the Japan question. No, I think and hope they continue to be uniquely stubborn. Why? Because we are all going to be there (we would have been there if we'd be as strict as Latin American countries are about their own immigration). Japan can lead the way for us and for others on how to deal with this issue (population decline).
Japan is in fact dealing with their issue head on by not importing workers. By not importing workers they are not defraying the issue. They are doing the opposite of dealing with consequences later.
Its only a short-term answer (sure, natural population contraction and population aging means your workforce to total supported population ratio is shrinking, which can delay the need to address the retooling society to deal with lower labor-hours:population requirements, but it only delays the need, and eventually creates other problems.)
People are still clamorimg to get into the US, and fighting tooth and nail to stay here.
You are the first person I've read that considers not importing workers a solution, rather than a symptom of cultural insularity that threatens to bring down their economy through the burden of an aging population.
Japan facing this issue we will all face is good for them and for us as their solutions will pave the way for other countries which will follow (much of western Europe and east Asia).
That's a popular idea, but it's false: http://www.politifact.com/virginia/statements/2016/apr/18/do...
But that's exactly my question. Why is importing workers "defraying the issue" when that same tactic works for the US?
Why isn't immigration a valid solution to population decline? This seems like a classic paean to the old white country to me.
Immigration in Latin America is actually not very restrictive. Organized crime (from anywhere in the world) can come and go as it pleases in the region. Whatever you may have read on right-wing media, illegal immigration is rampant in Latin America.
The irony of some Americans complaining about Latinos now is rich. You didn't care much about them when the US govt was promoting dictators and doing everything it could to undermine the democratic will in the region (predominantly left wing in response to the incredible levels of legacy inequality) and why would you? It made many of your companies super rich which in turn provided you with nice, cushy jobs managing your "banana republic" natural resources. The local population though was saddled with no voice and (usually) murderous psychopaths as their "leaders". As a result they migrated in droves to the US, the richest nation on earth that also happened to be the closest. And now you complain. It would be funny if it wasn't racist too.
But anyway, the response is more about Japan. The long term answer is not the importation of workers, but finding a solution to having a viable economy with a declining population and aging population. It's in our interest that they find real solutions to a problem we will all face, rather than stave off the issue a bit with labor imports.
United Fruit != Many companies. They were in a few counties. They had bad influence, but it was one limited industry making a family rich... The main problem wasn't US companies but rather a very backward uneducated population. Those that put effort into education, Chile, Costa Rica, Panama. Uruguey are doing well. Americans on the other hand did not muck around in Mexico as they did Chile or Guatemala, and see where they are with their nationalism. Who is more racist, the Mexican government and how they dont provide resources for their majority mestizos or Americans, I bet Mexicans get a better deal from the US than they do their own gov't, else they'd enjoy what "Mexico es para Mexicanos" has to offer them rather than emigrate to a foreign land apparently full of racists.
The US isn't full of racists but you clearly are racist. Can't say I'm surprised since I could smell it in your first comment.
It may surprise you but Latin America had its share of intellectual leaders, many of which had to flee their own countries because of the brutal dictatorships propped up by the US govt. The ones who didn't were simply "disappeared". It's very convenient that you only think of United Fruit as the only beneficiary of subservient local dictatorships, it betrays a lack of knowledge about how neocolonialism (or even neoliberalism) works. Either that or you just did a quick "banana republic" google search and completely ignore that the term can be used independently of the United Fruit case. Which, again, betrays an ignorance about the whole subject.
You forget most of their intellectuals come from their elite families, it's not like the average person there has much of a chance in the elite circles.
Pointing out the poor educational infrastructure as well as a culture which does not make it a priority is not being racist.
Third world aid has a similar problem. The more wealthy people become, the more they eat meat and pollute.
Cases like Sweden where more than 90% of third world immigrants stay unemployed are likely the worst of all.
Do you have a source to back this claim?
After one year, more than 99% are unemployed http://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/162-000-kom-till-sverige-5...
More than half of the unemployed in Sweden are immigrants http://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/nu-ar-fler-an-halften-av-d...
I'm honestly baffled at the endless optimism and belief of others in our ability to innovate and disrupt out of this crisis, whether it be technological advances or some market solution.
Some people even go so far as to suggest that we'll be moving beyond this planet in the next 100 years and all resource problems will be solved. It's hard to reply to them without sounding snarky, but I can't help but wonder in what circumstances those people were raised with that line of thinking. They just sound completely ignorant of both history and basic physics when they make those statements.
At least there won't be an ice age, which, according to the timeline, should happen soonish (on geological timescales). An ice age would be very problematic too, and we've averted that easily.
There is growing agreement that what we are facing is going to happen very quickly, even by human standards.
The studies I found all used lake sediments in Irish lakes, so it's somewhat local and not conclusive yet imho. Still, it seems to be a surprisingly fast change in the data. (I was surprised; I didn't know.)
Do you have a source for your point? It looks like a more extensive literature review is needed to answer this question since the answer is not on the surface. Or my google-fu is just weak today.
On the other hand I also found research stating that the next glacial period might be a few 10,000 years off, so there's that.
[1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427344-800-mini-ice...
Be the change you want to see in the world. If you're worried about climate change and you're not vegan, you need to realize you're contributing to one of the largest causes of biodiversity loss and greenhouse gas emissions on the planet. Consider adopting pets or children instead of breeding them into this world. If you're an activist, fight for local political change to bring sound environmental policy to your community and work to expand to surrounding regions. If you're an engineer or scientist, don't forget that you have the key to making this world a better place (and no global warming denier can take that from you). Finally, I believe Tesla sets a good precedent for manifesting these sorts of ambitious ideas within a system of free market capitalism.
You say we are so fucked, but I'm not so quick to agree. I'm not going to say I'm a total optimist, but I think the potential exists, within our lifetime, for weird and exciting technologies that could allow us to solve these problems in ways we could have never imagined. As long as CERN doesn't destroy all life as we know it, I think we're good.
dogmatic orthodoxy of apocalyptic ecotastrophism is an pseudo-intellectual psycho-emotional epidemic.
Delicious, delicious externalized cost. It's time for a carbon tax.
Example:
>Winter frost is extremely hard on the roads. Do not be surprised to see deep fissures across the highway.
http://www.dangerousroads.org/north-america/canada/747-alask...
So when the author says:
>Scientists say they’re the crystal-clear manifestation that permafrost -- slabs of ice and sediment just beneath the Earth’s surface in colder climes -- is thawing as global temperatures keep rising.
I become extremely skeptical. This is the danger of lazy journalism and ultimately lazy readers confirmation bias.
I honestly thought I'd gotten away from all that when I stopped reading Slashdot. Now it seems to be infesting here too.
I await the inevitable downvotes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_methane_emissions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane_clathrate
Depending on how fast we'll see arable land being lost, food supply for 9 billion people in 2040 could be quite problematic
Yes: because failing to be optimistic about it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Also, you never know what will make people come around. In any process of winning hearts and minds there is always a time before which things seem hopeless. Look at the Sanders and Trump campaigns: when they started, no one believed they could succeed. Bernie came very close, and Trump actually won. (Not that I want to hold up Trump as a model of how to proceed, but just as a data point to show that the unexpected can happen.) Maybe if we get enough "thousand year floods" like just happened in Maryland -- say a dozen of those events in a year or in a month -- people will suddenly wake up and realize the gravity of the situation and find their sense of duty and planetary patriotism.
You also never know what's coming down the technology pipe. This, for example, looks promising: http://phys.org/news/2016-07-breakthrough-solar-cell-capture...
We can still fix this. Don't lose hope.
I think it's beyond our capabilities to "fix" in any meaningful amount of time. However we can still survive. If we remain optimistic and plan to adapt to the coming changes.
We don't know if or how we can deal with the problems coming up. But giving up will surely make things worse.
Further, we have to choose to not give in to excessive alarmism. I am typing as someone who struggles with this every day, since I've been watching climate change closely for quite a few years now. Things are objectively accelerating, so it's easy to give in to panic.
But that might be even worse than giving up.
We have to approach this with focus, an iron will and with an even temperament.
Every scary climate related news item should be practically drowned in data, as hard and objective as we can get it.
Because, these days, nothing puts people 'to sleep' the way unfounded alarmism does. Because people are numb to all of the alarm handles being pulled, all over the place.
It's unclear who exactly they consider fragile states in their report, but I'd certainly put North Korea, India and Pakistan in there as states that have a potential for climate change based conflict. If China feels any real stress they will stop providing rice to North Korea and we could see nukes flying from there.
I personally don't see large scale nuclear war (above 5 nukes flying) happening unless it's Russia or the US that are feeling the pressure. Russia seems to be in the camp of countries that will gain aritable land and the US has a huge amount of resources and plenty of ways to cut back on consumption before it feels the pressure.
If you are suggesting a donimno effect of refugees then the answer is very different: I don't think a large influx of refugees would cause a state to go to war, more likely they would turn them away at the border and we'd see a horrible increase in a humanitarian problems, racism and xenophobia, but then again we seem to have already seen that with the end results of the Arab Spring.
It was successful: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/06/antarctic-ozone-h...
Global warming is a similar problem. More difficult, sure, but essential characteristics are similar. We can do it, because we have solved similar problems in the past.
It was a magical, difficult, inspiring and sorrowful experience.
I had never seen a black spruce before (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picea_mariana), but they were enormous, pristine forests of them.
But a lot of them were NOT pristine. For dozens of miles at a time, most all of the trees would be at an odd sideways angle. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drunken_trees) The permafrost they relied on for stability was melting.
More than two years later, I suspect that the countless trees I saw leaning steeply to one side are mostly dead.
On the Dalton highway, once past the Brooks range (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks_Range), there were enormously quantities of heavy rain. I didn't realize, at the time, how unusual that was. It turns out that the Alaskan tundra is typically extremely dry, and while I was up there, more than a years worth of (not very cold) rain fell, turning the road into a morass.
My goal was to put my feet into the arctic ocean, and the only way to do that is to first get to Dead Horse, Alaska (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadhorse,_Alaska). The 'town limits' are several miles from the ocean, and it's rigorously patrolled private land in between, controlled by various oil companies.
They typically offer tours, but I arrived a bit too early, so I was thinking about hiking a few miles up the Sag River (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagavanirktok_River). Fortunately, I happened to talk to an oil worker guy at the gas station, and he said I would not likely survive such a hike. Polar bears, he said, had been getting extremely aggressive over the past few years. They were starving.
At that moment, I felt a unique feeling, that few people experience these days. In my four decades living, I've been in a couple of life or death circumstances. But it wasn't quite like that.
The idea that I had nearly found myself in a situation where I might have been hunted by an enormous, hungry animal. A creature who rightly considered me food, and little else. It was a curious feeling!
Fortunately, the tours started the next day, and I took a bus through the vast oil infrastructure, to a specific spot where tourists got to interact with the arctic ocean.
It was cold, gray and sleeting. The ocean almost seemed like a very large lake, with pretty small waves. The ice had melted early that year, again, and so was not visible from shore.
The NOAA has more detailed datasets but it's a bit more work to extract meaningful information.
Also I'm sick of hearing that people believe (or don't) in climate change when it's just factual data.
[1] http://climate.gi.alaska.edu/sites/default/files/ClimateTren...
[2] http://climate.gi.alaska.edu/ClimTrends/Change/TempChange.ht...
From what I understand we're on track for an unavoidable > 2C increase in global average temperatures this century. It's also quite likely that we'll be passing the extinction threshold if we don't take extreme measures to avoid it.
It's quite likely another Syria-like crisis could happen anywhere affected by climate change. I'm disconcerted that these issues are not the most pressing issues of our time. There are many valid socio-political issues to consider but extinction seems to be the most important one to me.
Maybe it's because the predictions are far enough into the future that we cannot fathom a solution right now... sort of like how smokers don't make the decision to quit today because it's not going to kill them right now.
[0] https://news.vice.com/article/canadas-ice-roads-are-melting-...