I just came back from 7 months on one of the U.S. research stations, doing network engineering and glacier search and rescue. It was pretty interesting to see how fast the glacier face the station was near was retreating each year.
edit: did an AMA while there that hit the reddit front page
I'm not sure why people are downvoting the above comment.
Many people think the same way and we have a long way to convince people that their attitudes and behavior need to be modified --both here _and_ in the developing world. It's likely more acute in the developing world since their governments have fewer resources to dedicate to the issue so the populous is on their own to modify behavior and attitudes.
Ignoring this issue (that this kind of attitude exists) just compounds the problem. We need to work knowing people think this way and keep that in mind when developing policy.
I'm not sure it is possible to convince someone who has all the facts and still doesn't give a fuck. Only new facts will do the trick, facts which, even if not adding to the body of knowledge, have a high fuck giving factor. Like, a tornado destroys their house or such.
I think, like with many things, you have to work with the early adopters, then the bulk and finally the stragglers and at that point you can deal with the hard-core holdouts (or work around them). The key is acknowledging this phenomenon and taking it into account so that policies cane be more successful.
I think the issue is making an emotional connection to the facts. I don't believe any person has the emotional bandwidth to care about every problem in the world.
It is possible, but first you have to open a real dialog. That isn't going to happen without first learning to speak their language, because this is "More than just Resistance to Science"[1].
> Only new facts will do the trick
Arguments based on facts are useful when trying to persuade people fluent in the language of science and logic. Unfortunately I suspect only a minority of the population has sufficient understanding of data-focused language. Most people instead see language as phatic expression[2][3] first.
A good example of this from the other side of the language divide that still retains mutual intelligibility are Trump's repeated - and often self-contradictory - promises that he would "build the wall". People that primarily use language to convey facts often claims his rhetoric sounds ignorant, useless, or xenophobic. Trump's intended audience, on the other hand, hears the language of emotion that promises protection. Trump isn't trying to convey facts, so self-contradiction and other ignorant claims are not important.
To reach people on the other side of this divide, it is probably necessary to first learn their language of social hierarchy, emotion, etc. Skipping that step and continuing to throw facts at them is about as useful as sending them a textbook written in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.
[3] While I'm discussing this as a language problem, some people may prefer George Lakoff's explanation[4] about "framing", which is a different interpretation of essentially the same ideas.
Please do give me a fact as to why I should pay for green initiatives when someone else, like those in Europe, are more willing to pay. I reap their benefits, for free.
As a pundit I read says, "when those in charge start acting like it's a crisis, I'll believe in the crisis."
When you see government officials and Hollywood high-rollers flying in private chartered airplanes to exotic locations for climate change conferences telling the rest of us how we should live, it's hard to think of it as a real crisis.
I suspect nothing will convince you, because you've decided that you don't care who suffers for your actions - people in poorer countries, or future generations. This is a rationalisation on your part, not a failure of the scientists.
So, now that we are over the "there's no climate change" phase, the "humans aren't responsible" phase and the "it's not that bad, we'll adapt or there might be good things coming out of it" phase it is the "scientists are responsible because they couldn't convince me" phase.
That's one name for it. 'I still won't vote for taxes or meaningful legislation on the issue because they're just going to get it wrong anyway.' is the phase's actual name.
We can trace the widespread notions in the Republican party that the government cannot ever do anything correctly, and should be feared when it tries, to this quote:
The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help. - Ronald Reagan
No no, don't believe in auditing, and ethics, and holding officials accountable with voting, and when necessary prosecutions. Just be scared of the government, and withhold funding so it's small enough to drown in a bathtub. But today's Republicans miss his message (he'd be considered a liberal today, I think)
Now, so there will be no misunderstanding, it's not my intention to do away with government. It is rather to make it work--work with us, not over us; to stand by our side, not ride on our back. From Reagan's inaugural address.
The Republican Party capitalizes on that perception but doesn't create it. America's governments are remarkably inept at doing even basic things. I just got back from Tokyo, where my 45 minute train ride from the airport arrived downtown within a minute of schedule. Meanwhile, the D.C. metro segment of my commute runs at best 20% over scheduled time. That's despite being one of the most expensive systems in the world. So many things are like that. We spend more on education than almost anyone else for worse results.
The question to me is why is this the case? What makes American government particularly disfunctional and how can that be fixed? I don't really have any answers.
Totally escapes me too. I suspect deep-seated cultural differences. America is a more contentious, less cooperative society so we add layers of complexity to mediate between all these groups of people who can't agree on even basic things. In most European countries, for example, it's very difficult to block development projects through things like environmental review lawsuits. But there is also this basic level of trust that whoever is running the project won't build a chemical refinery next to an elementary school. Nobody has that trust in the U.S.
The real question is not why the US seems to lag behind it's peers in how effective our government is. It is, how is the US able to be so much better than it's peers?
You can't compare little state sized homogenous countries in Europe to the enormous, diverse landscape of the US. Compare the US to any other country of similar population and you will see a performance standout in almost all categories.
Cherry picking European countries and comparing them to the US is like asking why Vermont, Massachusets, Connecticut, or New York are so much better off than Europe.
I'm talking about countries like the France and Germany, etc. The U.S. continues to outperform those countries but I'm not sure you can chalk it up to the effectiveness of our government. I'd chalk it up to the U.S. having a head start from WWII and the major European powers being late to adopt market economies. Since then, they've caught up. For example, the U.S. had 50% higher labor productivity per hour of work than France and Germany in the 1970s. Today, it's identical: http://piketty.blog.lemonde.fr/2017/01/09/of-productivity-in....
But again, both countries have less than a third of the US population. And no, I don't think our government gives us any special advantage. But my point is that you can't begin to compare the US to these fractionally sized countries that have the advantage of chasing off all the poor into other cheaper countries in Europe due to high cost of living.
Why are Bel-Air and Manhatten so rich? They are just doing so much better than the rest of the US. They barely have any poor! Must be their local governments and better market economies!
The middle class, and rural America have a unique mix of deep ignorance of reality, and a legitimate complaint. Legit: they have been screwed economically, the rich have by every single measure gotten astronomically more wealthy, and the middle class has at best stagnated but also has shrunk.
Deep ignorance and denial how flawed their culture is. They believe their taxes go disproportionately to cities, and the poor, and that illegal immigrants get free health care who they also subsidize. They believe gays, gay marriage, women, and non-Christians are not equal to straight white men. And they HATE that they are forced by courts and laws to treat them as equal.
They've become skeptical of democracy because it's not working in their favor. When courts were siding with them on religion in schools and part of the public discourse, meaning they get to metaphorically slap minority gays and women around, it was great for them. But as they're on the losing end of these civil rights cases, they're not liking it.
Neither the economics, nor democracy are working for them. So they're attacking the entire system, and Republican politicians are really taking advantage of that in a variation of the Nixon southern strategy:
Rural folk don't seem to understand that 100 miles of distributed water and sewage, shared by not that many people, will cost a lot to maintain. Yet they get pissed that city folk are paying less for water and sewer, totally not understanding the concept of economies of scale. They have no idea that rural telephones have been subsidized by city folk for upwards of 100 years to make hundreds of miles of copper more affordable, basically neutralizing the fact they live in the boonies.
I get all that and I agree with a lot of it. But that doesn't really explain, for example, why building a subway in NYC costs 7x per km what it costs in London or Paris.
America has taken local power to an extreme. There is just no pre-emption or exception to that local power which includes numerous fiefdoms within the county, the city, the utilities, a massive complex of competing federal, state, and city regulations. And then unions. To this day, if you do a trade show in Javits and take a computer power cord and plug it into a power strip, let alone BRING YOUR OWN power strip, you will get chewed out. A worker who sees it will chew you out, tell his buddy who will chew you out, tell his boss, and he his boss, and in sequence you will have a minimum of an hour of swearing, vitriol over how you're intentionally trying to fuck them over, cost them money, take their jobs, on and on. It is one of the worst union cities I've ever experienced.
Instead of protecting a right to work concept, they protect specific tasks. So even if that task becomes obsolete, you still have to pay that union guy with that specialty to stand around doing nothing.
If it weren't for all the people you'd disenfranchise from such a process, what you'd want is a business, neighborhood, city, state delegation to create a federal law that totally preempts all state and local laws, for each major project, to cut through the red tape. shrug
Oh and middle men. There's a middle man for everything. Especially in Manhattan, it's almost not hyperbole to say the doorman has an accountant, a lawyer, and a therapist. And anybody making more money than a doorman, has two or more of each of those.
Great city. And a shit hole.
EDIT: Also, I think the 2nd Ave project is a big fat classist waste of money. The Lexington Ave/Park Ave line is not that far away, Manhattan has already a very dense subway service compared to Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn.
Kind of an aside, but the need for the 2nd Ave Subway isn't so much about having to walk a couple of blocks but that the 456 line has too many riders which leads to overcrowding and delays.
The DC Metro is subject to malicious interference from a certain political party that LIKES it to be unpunctual and troubled. Gives them something to bash
The Republican party actively recruits incompetency and actively sabotages the system. It's a blatantly racist, classist, anti-democracy party at this point. The voter disenfranchisement they engage in is widespread. The nutty conspiracy theories about voter fraud, all involving brown people, is widespread. It's become the party that's questioning democracy now that democracy means people like them aren't winning elections, so they have to engage in the craziest methods of gerrymandering, voter registration purging, barriers to voter registration, and actively dissemination of factually incorrect information.
That perception is _much_ older than Reagan. Back in 1866 we have:
> No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session.
(Gideon Tucker), and it was hardly a brand-new notion then. The fact is that government, even democratic government, puts its needs and desires first. To the extent that this matches up with the needs and desires of the people it's governing, things are good. To the extent that it doesn't, you get problems. Democracy helps a bit with making things align, but not terribly much. And the more non-local a government is, the less alignment of its needs and desires with the diverse needs and desires of the governed, all else being equal.
This last is why some people advocate for more local government power and less central government power...
>No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session.
That's obscure and it's also being taken out of context [1]. What I said, was "widespread notion in the Republican party" I do mean contemporary, this is not an exhaustive search or maybe I'd go back to the Magna Carte.
>The fact is that government, even democratic government, puts its needs and desires first.
Really, it's a fact? You have a citation for this fact? I haven't heard of such a thing in democracies, that's rather fundamentally the opposite of what they're about. Perhaps you're confused about the distinction between government and bureaucracy?
Anyway the small government advocacy pretty much amounts to whining for being on the losing end of the stick by people with failed ideas or failed representation. And the idea that democracy doesn't help terribly much I think is deeply ignorant of when and why it fails: being selectively non-democratic. Top on that list I'd but ethnic discrimination (racism) and misogyny. Anywhere those are protected, democracy is under threat.
The Articles of Confederation prescribed such a weak central government, that it was pointless and a failure, and thus scraped in favor of the current one.
The current constitution, prescribes a more powerful central government, but also incorporated and institutionalized racism to appease a certain local (regional) advocacy. Upons that compromise coming under threat, the "state's rights" types came back out of the woodwork, and then ~650,000 people died. See Yugoslavia for another example of democracy + racism = not really a democracy now, is it?
This local advocacy continued on in the U.S. with things like local school boards emphasizing and deemphasizing pesky things called facts, in order to avoid troubling local sensitivities, and ensuring a nation can have different ideas about how history and science have transpired.
Kansas, a real life experiment in less central government and more local government. Total failure. Only governor Christ Christie is less popular than Brownback.
[1]
Gideon was criticizing the lawyer for not realizing the law had changed. It is a quote of a quote. What Gideon wrote was:
The error arose from want of diligent watchfulness in respect to legislative changes. He did not remember that it might be necessary to look at the statutes of the year before. Perhaps he had forgotten the saying, that “no man’s life, liberty or property are safe while the Legislature is in session.”
"The current constitution... incorporated and institutionalized racism to appease a certain local (regional) advocacy."
You do know that the anti-slavery advocates were the source of the 3/5ths compromise, right? Anti-slavery groups didn't want slaves to count at all for determining representation, while pro-slavery groups wanted slaves fully counted. If the 3/5ths compromise institutionalized racism in the Constitution, it was to 'appease' the anti-slavery advocates. Since you appear to misunderstand this, perhaps you should ask yourself what other facts you misunderstand.
> I haven't heard of such a thing in democracies, that's rather fundamentally the opposite of what they're about.
For direct democracies with significant electoral control over what goes on, sure. For the thing that most "democratic" countries have, I disagree.
> Perhaps you're confused about the distinction between government and bureaucracy?
"Government" as understood in modern Western "democracies" is a combination of the bureaucracy and a certain number of elected officials.
You really haven't heard of elected officials putting their elected desires ahead of their nominal constituents'?
For the rest, as far as I can tell the main business of governing is in fact done by the bureaucracy in most Western countries, and bureaucratic departments tend to prioritize achievement of the goals they were set (often by themselves), without regard to how others would prioritize those goals. This is neither unheard of, unexpected, nor unusual. Everyone I've met who has thought about the problem at all, regardless of political persuasion, understands that this is a fundamental hazard of bureaucracy that needs to be addressed somehow. There are strong disagreements on how best to address it, of course.
> the idea that democracy doesn't help terribly much I think is deeply ignorant of when and why it fails
I think we agree on when and why it fails. The question is when it stops being democratic and along what dimensions.
For example, I consider the various statewide legislation passed recently in some states that forbids democratically-voted-for municipal wifi to be a failure of democracy in precisely the way you describe, and one that would be avoided by more-local devolution of power.
Now the problems you mention with discrimination are very real, and I have no problem with strongly centralized civil rights protections that are therefore uniformly applied to all citizens regardless of jurisdiction. There are certainly various other issues like this, where either there are significant externalities or a historical failure of local governance that ought to be the purview of more central government bodies.
This need for case-by-case analysis does mean that there are no easy solutions here, and I'm not claiming that there are. But I _am_ claiming that due to repeated failures in the current system, whether they were avoidable or not, there is fairly widespread perception that the central government is not to be trusted. And I don't think this perception really "dates back to Reagan" so much as that Reagan _expressed_ this rising perception. That is, Reagan was a consequence of the perception, not a cause of it.
Oh, and as far as misalignment of government and citizens' desires in democracies...
You may want to read "Seeing Like a State" by James Scott, or https://samzdat.com/2017/05/22/man-as-a-rationalist-animal/ for an illustrative review if you don't want to read the whole book. Some of the examples in the book are from totalitarian regimes, but Brazil is a democracy and still ended up with some of the same failure modes, and the blog post gives a hypothetical but oft-repeated in practice example of a less-local (city-wide or larger) government trampling all over people from a particular part of the city, all with the best of intentions, because it thinks (possibly correctly!) that it can't accomplish those intentions without making its job easier by destroying the local communities.
Democratic government does help avoid excesses like mass deaths due to obtuse state action, of course, and this is a pretty darned good endorsement given the history of the 20th century. But it certainly doesn't eliminate obtuse state action.
No doubt cynicism is as old as politics. But there is a difference when a wag says "don't trust the government" and when the newly elected President of the US says it.
There are legitimate debates to be had about the size and function of the government. But I've never understood the populist appeal of the declaration: The government only causes problems -- elect me and let me prove it to you!
But I suspect that a number of elected presidents of the US in the 1800s, and a number of the people involved in setting up the US government in the 1700s, would have said to not trust the US federal government in its current form. In fact, they would have been appalled by it.
Now times have changed since the 1800s, and we can indeed have debates about whether the government we have now is doing the things it should be doing, to the extent that it should be doing them. I wish such debates were more common, instead of everyone presupposing the answers. :(
More like "political solutions to scientific problems are unlikely given the high incidence of graft and rent seeking".
Look at the construction of the Tappan Zee bridge near New York City, cost of construction and how long it took. Then look at estimates for its replacement.
Not really. The baby boomer generation are going to die off and take their miserly attitudes with them. There is no other option other than to move to a post-carbon economy and for it to be renewables all the way. You will die out and new people will come along with different energy demands. They might be happy to get about Dutch style, on a bicycle. To most Americans that mode of transport is unthinkable for things like shopping or bringing up a family, but the Dutch do it.
I believe there are plenty of people paving the way for our post-carbon world, building a new and clean world from the filth left behind by the baby boomer generation.
Currently millenials do not put 2 and 2 together when it comes to climate change and their personal habits of consumerism, we did better in the 1970's after the crisises of the time at turning lights off when not needed. But this time round we have people using sensors and things like LED lights to keep the energy consumption sensible.
The only way for countries like the UK to meet their emissions targets and air quality targets is to get rid of the targets (Brexit) or to get serious about electric cars. Right now one energy company is converting lamp posts to charging points, so soon on-street charging will become very easy. A small step but an important one as it makes the impossible possible and at affordable cost. So you might just get an EV because that is how it works and you just charge up every time you park next to a lamp post.
There are only four petrol stations inside the congestion charge zone in London, there used to be far more. Imagine a time when there are none and you have to go to a motorway to find petrol or diesel for your classic retro vehicle.
Even General Motors are taking EVs seriously.
As for the disposable bag, try visiting the UK. They went extinct when stops started charging for them. The other day I found a hoard of three in a drawer. In former times people would have small cupboards full of the things. It took a long time coming, but the end of the disposable free bag was survived by retailers and consumers alike.
I think that EV cars will be like flat screen televisions and ICE cars will be like CRT monitors in not too many years to come. We didn't initially get a better picture with flat screen displays but those richer colours did not save the CRT, even if there were no 'dead pixels'.
In a matter of time the batteries will be integrated into the frame or the wheels or even the furnishings and these EV cars will be a far simpler product than those ICE things. The supply chain will die out for ICE and this new post carbon world will start to happen. Watch and see.
> They might be happy to get about Dutch style, on a bicycle. To most Americans that mode of transport is unthinkable for things like shopping or bringing up a family, but the Dutch do it.
Unfortunately you lost nearly all your credibility by using the Dutch as a positive example. The Dutch economy is overwhelmingly based on the extraction, production, and export of natural gas, chemicals, and fuel [1]. This doesn't seem environmentally friendly to me.
No matter what law you pass or what incentive you give, recent college grads (I'm a liberal from Berkeley, myself) will find a way to maximize my utility at the expense of the environment. Corporations do this and so do millions of people around the world. Even the Dutch are not immune.
If you want to truly save the environment, go work in battery science and solar production. Because right now, even in HN's beloved Scandinavian countries, oil and gas remains their number one industries. The Norwegians especially know this and are milking it for all it's worth. How will you convince them if you can't convince me - someone not distracted by the billions of dollars involved with oil and gas drilling?
I don't like blaming one generation or another. What happens is that people age and as they age they shift their political stance. Another important differentiator is whether they have children or not.
As for the Dutch, yes, we have a lot of bicycles and people tend to get a bit more exercise here but there is still plenty wrong with Dutch society and if you took a 10 km altitude photograph of the country you'd probably still conclude the dominant life form is a steel box on wheels.
It's the world's biggest public goods problem. Let's say for the sake of argument that fixing global warming were worth $10K to you. You still don't contribute because it wouldn't help; the marginal improvement to the environment from your little personal contribution wouldn't make any significant difference to your life. It'd certainly be far less than $10K of benefit.
So it's entirely rational to skip the actions you describe. But that's true for everyone. We'd all be happier if everybody contributed, but for each of us, we're better off not contributing, whether other people contribute or not. So nobody does much and we all end up worse off.
Problems like this crop up all the time and we have a way of dealing with them. Instead of deciding whether we'll personally contribute, we vote on whether we'll all contribute.
So if you really believe your first four statements, maybe you could consider voting for politicians who support a price on carbon.
Trump is President. Amazon buying Whole Foods. Antartica is melting. London Burning. Corals dying. Bees dying. North Korea. Putin. Etc.
WTF is going on... Elect Elon Musk as President in 2020 and let's all go to Mars (Not!)
So many assholes in charge. And the people of this planet are in diametric opposition to each other.
Feel free to down vote this on the basis that it is absolutely and utterly useless to state all that is wrong and offer no solutions. I just happen to think that we need more of stating what is wrong. I don't think it has sunk in yet.
Yes they are. People keep conflating the ability of commercial bee keepers to keep up with colony collapse with the ability of wild bee populations to survive. They are not the same thing.
I don't know about the Netherlands specifically but iirc neonicotinoid pesticides are banned throughout the EU. Maybe wild bees are doing better there. But overall things are not getting better.
I have noticed a pattern. Anglo-saxon countries are killing us. Unfortunately they are also the primary users of this platform, so good luck seeing this message!
Just because things have turned out okay in the past doesn't guarantee that they will in the future. There really isn't much of a light at the end of the tunnel when it comes to climate change.
As long as my golf courses in Florida are OK, there is no global warming. A bunch of floating ice can't raise sea levels, since the ice is already there, it's just moving around. It's big ice, yes, but it won't do anything and certainly won't reach the US, hence it will not affect it. Those damn state leaders aligning with the commie Europeans on the issue don't know a thing, they're going rogue. I tell you what, they will regret this, the federal government and the American people won't stand for this.
This is a joke, right? Warm water occupies more volume than cold water. Also, ice that is on LAND and running off into the OCEAN will raise sea level. Also water from melting ice caps that evaporates goes back into the ocean and refreezing on polar caps is slowing down, so more water in the ocean. It does not have to melt straight into the ocean. Sea level is rising due to ice melting. It is a fact.
Wow... just wow. I'm overwhelmingly under-learned on this topic, but from the sounds of scientists, shit is literally hitting the fan. What books and research in the last couple years are good for non-scientists about the effects of rising oceans on socio-economics and politics?
It will be hard to find anything that isn't exceedingly one-sided if socio-economics and politics are involved. One thing to remember when you read that stuff is that the poorest are the ones that suffer the most from the regulations we put in place. For example, I support taxation on any product or service with externalities where it's nearly impossible to price the damage done into the product naturally. Pollution is a perfect example of this. I buy oil from you, but third parties are harmed. Therefore somehow I need to pay a tax and compensate everyone I'm harming. Anyways... who do you think this tax will harm the most? The billionaire oil barons? Of course not. They will still be billionaires. It's the poorest who need cheap fuel so they don't freeze to death in the winter.
If we manage to actually enforce anti-carbon regulation across the globe, who will be harmed the most? It's India, China, and Brazil among others who are still industrializing. It's the people who we're just trying to get up to the point of actually being pretty confident they will get 1-2 meals every day... not even making them wealthy. Often these things are framed to appear to be going after the "evil rich" person who burns coal. Sure, we know burning coal kills lots of people. I would never deny those stats. No one ever talks about how many lives are saved by burning coal. As technology progresses perhaps countries will not need to burn coal to go through industrialization and pull their people off the brink of starvation, but we're nowhere near that today. So we need to consider these types of things as we talk about the socioeconomic and political ramifications of climate change. The solution can't be worse than the problem for poor people.
Distributing the revenue from said taxes back as a public dividend should solve that problem nicely. Since we're all impacted by those externalities a public dividend is only fair. And since the distributed money compensate for increased costs the tax can be pretty high, and thus effective in directing money towards alternate solutions.
I'm against capitalism, so that would be a fair assessment of me. But if you really want a label, try geo-libertarian, I'm definitely not a socialist.
In any case, even hard core capitalists would recognize the value in controlling extenalities to help the market economy do its things.
If it helps I'm not a proponent of taxes per se. The tax I'm advocating could just as easily be described as rent. It is my hope that a fair, and effective, rent extraction from our shared capital (land, pollution rights, spectrum bands and so forth) could actually help abolish unfair and damaging taxes like income taxes.
Zwally's study is in-line with the GRACE data, and loss of land ice mass. "According to the new analysis of satellite data, the Antarctic ice sheet showed a net gain of 112 billion tons of ice a year from 1992 to 2001. That net gain slowed to 82 billion tons of ice per year between 2003 and 2008."
GRACE shows acceleration since 2008. Zwally's study uses data from 1992-2001, 2003-2008. And is in-line with the net-gain slowing down in his data-set.
This misleading comment cherry picks one particular study to suggest a conclusion that is probably not true. The commenter started out talking about sea ice, and when (rightly) that was noted to be irrelevant, switched to a different press release.
The linked study (Zwally et al.) uses satellite radar altimetry (ICESat) to measure height of Antarctic ice, and thereby quantify mass losses. Other studies use satellite-derived gravity (GRACE) to get more directly at mass changes. They conflict.
One possible reason (among several) for the discrepancy is that the overall height of Antarctica is also changing as it rebounds from ice loss in the distant past, i.e., some of the height increase seen by Zwally et al. is due not to ice increases, but to inter-ice-age rebound of the continent beneath the ice.
The way I understood it, the article is about glaciers and ice shelves, not about antarctic sea ice extent which is largely driven by wind patterns. The more northward winds, the more sea ice.
Incidentally, antarctic sea ice extent did go from record highs 3 years ago to record lows this year.
Second paragraph from the 2015 study linked above makes clear it is talking about land, not sea ice:
"The research challenges the conclusions of other studies, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 2013 report, which says that Antarctica is overall losing land ice."
And there's way more to it than that. Waste water will have to be pumped out of storm water systems rather than flowing. Salt enters ground water and causes changes. Things like underground car parks become problematic. Rivers don't flow the same and may need gates to keep high tides and storm surges out. The flow changes cause silting and river travel can be affected. Storm surges should be handled by your wall, but they are terrifying for low lying areas.
All they said was that they don't have evidence for a link, which may be because there is no link, there is a link but they haven't found the evidence yet, or a link was never within the scope of their study.
You're basically claiming they found evidence disproving a link with the "don't link the event to climate change."
>'You're basically claiming they found evidence disproving a link with the "don't link the event to climate change."'
No I am not. But by default I would assume all such events (really every event on earth) are somehow linked to climate change... it is exceptional to me that they claim to have no evidence for this.
Edit: Isn't it interesting that everyone except them (who are the apparent experts here) seems to have no problem linking it with climate change, including me?
This comes up a lot in climate discussions. There's a record hurricane or heat wave, but these things happen randomly so there's no way to say definitively that one particular event would not have happened without climate change.
But we do know that overall, climate change causes stronger hurricanes and hotter heat waves.
In the same way, we know smoking causes lung cancer, but if you're a smoker who gets lung cancer, nobody can say for sure that the smoking caused it, because some nonsmokers get lung cancer too. They just don't get it as often.
"But we do know that overall, climate change causes stronger hurricanes" How do we know this? I can find all sorts of papers predicting stronger hurricanes, but just like the predictions of more numerous hurricanes, there seems to be little observational evidence of the effect.
Here's the measured Accumulated Cyclone Energy, worldwide, 1970-2016. The total energy seems to peak in the mid 1990s. Is this consistent with claims of stronger hurricanes and more destructive hurricane seasons?
So you are saying it is linked to climate change anyway (but this is impossible to get evidence for) or what? There is a very curious social phenomenon going on regarding this event.
Yes, so you think you know better than the experts. This is what I said originally, there is a strange phenomenon in this case that many people think they know more than the people studying this rift, including me.
Launch many satellites into space which have huge reflective screens to bounce away some 1% of the light that would otherwise reach Earth.
I heard this idea suggested at least a decade ago in Popular Science. I imagine there are many such proposals to defeat global warming (beyond cutting CO2 emissions), but somehow this one stuck with me. Musk could also do it with his rockets.
The real problem here is businesses who are causing this are externalizing their costs to everyone else. So I have to buy an expensive EV, I have to willingly pay more for energy, I must willingly inconvenience myself to bring a reusable bag to the grocery store. Until we make those who are causing this pay the real costs, we will never see any meaningful change. The worst part is also that those countries that choose not to have any restrictions will inevitably move ahead, economically, of those that do and slowly weaken those that do have restrictions. The only real solution to this problem is complete collapse or ubiquitous market forces that make the environmental choice also the best fiscal choice.
How is it even possible to talk about recent acceleration in melting without mentioning the abnormally large el Nino we just had? Because it would imply the acceleration was temporary.
Some perspective from someone who is definitely concerned about climate change: antarctica as a whole is losing 100 cubic kilometers of ice per year [1] of its 30,000,000 cubic kilometers[2]. So at current burn rates it will be another 300,000 years before antarctica has melted. Short of radical acceleration, we aren't losing antarctica any time soon.
Some perspective from someone who is definitely concerned about climate change: antarctica as a whole is losing 100 cubic kilometer of ice per year [1], of its 30,000,000 cubic kilometers[2]. So at current burn rates it will be another 300,000 years before antarctica has melted. Short of radical acceleration, we aren't losing antartica any time soon.
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 170 ms ] threadedit: did an AMA while there that hit the reddit front page
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5656e1/iama_i_dont_ha...
Is it bad? Yes.
Are humans accelerating it? Yes.
Is it bad for my kids and future generations? Yes.
Does that mean I'm going to switch to an EV, start taking public transportation in Mountain View, or stop using disposable bags at While Foods? No.
Scientists have a long way to convince the billions of people on Earth like me before anyone is going to meaningfully reduce climate change.
Many people think the same way and we have a long way to convince people that their attitudes and behavior need to be modified --both here _and_ in the developing world. It's likely more acute in the developing world since their governments have fewer resources to dedicate to the issue so the populous is on their own to modify behavior and attitudes.
Ignoring this issue (that this kind of attitude exists) just compounds the problem. We need to work knowing people think this way and keep that in mind when developing policy.
It's not about information.
> Like, a tornado destroys their house or such.
That's more like it. In other words, until something is personal people have a very hard time relating to it, no matter how irrefutably true it is.
> I'm not sure it is possible to convince someone
It is possible, but first you have to open a real dialog. That isn't going to happen without first learning to speak their language, because this is "More than just Resistance to Science"[1].
> Only new facts will do the trick
Arguments based on facts are useful when trying to persuade people fluent in the language of science and logic. Unfortunately I suspect only a minority of the population has sufficient understanding of data-focused language. Most people instead see language as phatic expression[2][3] first.
A good example of this from the other side of the language divide that still retains mutual intelligibility are Trump's repeated - and often self-contradictory - promises that he would "build the wall". People that primarily use language to convey facts often claims his rhetoric sounds ignorant, useless, or xenophobic. Trump's intended audience, on the other hand, hears the language of emotion that promises protection. Trump isn't trying to convey facts, so self-contradiction and other ignorant claims are not important.
To reach people on the other side of this divide, it is probably necessary to first learn their language of social hierarchy, emotion, etc. Skipping that step and continuing to throw facts at them is about as useful as sending them a textbook written in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.
[1] http://scienceblogs.com/clock/2007/05/31/more-than-just-resi...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phatic_expression
[3] While I'm discussing this as a language problem, some people may prefer George Lakoff's explanation[4] about "framing", which is a different interpretation of essentially the same ideas.
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5f9R9MtkpqM
When you see government officials and Hollywood high-rollers flying in private chartered airplanes to exotic locations for climate change conferences telling the rest of us how we should live, it's hard to think of it as a real crisis.
What a time to be alive.
The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help. - Ronald Reagan
No no, don't believe in auditing, and ethics, and holding officials accountable with voting, and when necessary prosecutions. Just be scared of the government, and withhold funding so it's small enough to drown in a bathtub. But today's Republicans miss his message (he'd be considered a liberal today, I think)
Now, so there will be no misunderstanding, it's not my intention to do away with government. It is rather to make it work--work with us, not over us; to stand by our side, not ride on our back. From Reagan's inaugural address.
You can't compare little state sized homogenous countries in Europe to the enormous, diverse landscape of the US. Compare the US to any other country of similar population and you will see a performance standout in almost all categories.
Cherry picking European countries and comparing them to the US is like asking why Vermont, Massachusets, Connecticut, or New York are so much better off than Europe.
Why are Bel-Air and Manhatten so rich? They are just doing so much better than the rest of the US. They barely have any poor! Must be their local governments and better market economies!
Deep ignorance and denial how flawed their culture is. They believe their taxes go disproportionately to cities, and the poor, and that illegal immigrants get free health care who they also subsidize. They believe gays, gay marriage, women, and non-Christians are not equal to straight white men. And they HATE that they are forced by courts and laws to treat them as equal.
They've become skeptical of democracy because it's not working in their favor. When courts were siding with them on religion in schools and part of the public discourse, meaning they get to metaphorically slap minority gays and women around, it was great for them. But as they're on the losing end of these civil rights cases, they're not liking it.
Neither the economics, nor democracy are working for them. So they're attacking the entire system, and Republican politicians are really taking advantage of that in a variation of the Nixon southern strategy:
https://www.thenation.com/article/exclusive-lee-atwaters-inf...
Rural folk don't seem to understand that 100 miles of distributed water and sewage, shared by not that many people, will cost a lot to maintain. Yet they get pissed that city folk are paying less for water and sewer, totally not understanding the concept of economies of scale. They have no idea that rural telephones have been subsidized by city folk for upwards of 100 years to make hundreds of miles of copper more affordable, basically neutralizing the fact they live in the boonies.
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/jun/19/americas-grea...
http://www.amny.com/transit/subway-construction-in-nyc-costs...
Instead of protecting a right to work concept, they protect specific tasks. So even if that task becomes obsolete, you still have to pay that union guy with that specialty to stand around doing nothing.
If it weren't for all the people you'd disenfranchise from such a process, what you'd want is a business, neighborhood, city, state delegation to create a federal law that totally preempts all state and local laws, for each major project, to cut through the red tape. shrug
Oh and middle men. There's a middle man for everything. Especially in Manhattan, it's almost not hyperbole to say the doorman has an accountant, a lawyer, and a therapist. And anybody making more money than a doorman, has two or more of each of those.
Great city. And a shit hole.
EDIT: Also, I think the 2nd Ave project is a big fat classist waste of money. The Lexington Ave/Park Ave line is not that far away, Manhattan has already a very dense subway service compared to Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn.
<i>But when the time came to pay up for risk reduction in the Obamacare exchanges, Congress reneged and paid only 12% of what was owed to the insurers.</i> http://www.marketwatch.com/story/im-a-former-health-insuranc...
They pull shenanigans like this all the time.
> No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session.
(Gideon Tucker), and it was hardly a brand-new notion then. The fact is that government, even democratic government, puts its needs and desires first. To the extent that this matches up with the needs and desires of the people it's governing, things are good. To the extent that it doesn't, you get problems. Democracy helps a bit with making things align, but not terribly much. And the more non-local a government is, the less alignment of its needs and desires with the diverse needs and desires of the governed, all else being equal.
This last is why some people advocate for more local government power and less central government power...
That's obscure and it's also being taken out of context [1]. What I said, was "widespread notion in the Republican party" I do mean contemporary, this is not an exhaustive search or maybe I'd go back to the Magna Carte.
>The fact is that government, even democratic government, puts its needs and desires first.
Really, it's a fact? You have a citation for this fact? I haven't heard of such a thing in democracies, that's rather fundamentally the opposite of what they're about. Perhaps you're confused about the distinction between government and bureaucracy?
Anyway the small government advocacy pretty much amounts to whining for being on the losing end of the stick by people with failed ideas or failed representation. And the idea that democracy doesn't help terribly much I think is deeply ignorant of when and why it fails: being selectively non-democratic. Top on that list I'd but ethnic discrimination (racism) and misogyny. Anywhere those are protected, democracy is under threat.
The Articles of Confederation prescribed such a weak central government, that it was pointless and a failure, and thus scraped in favor of the current one.
The current constitution, prescribes a more powerful central government, but also incorporated and institutionalized racism to appease a certain local (regional) advocacy. Upons that compromise coming under threat, the "state's rights" types came back out of the woodwork, and then ~650,000 people died. See Yugoslavia for another example of democracy + racism = not really a democracy now, is it?
This local advocacy continued on in the U.S. with things like local school boards emphasizing and deemphasizing pesky things called facts, in order to avoid troubling local sensitivities, and ensuring a nation can have different ideas about how history and science have transpired.
Kansas, a real life experiment in less central government and more local government. Total failure. Only governor Christ Christie is less popular than Brownback.
[1] Gideon was criticizing the lawyer for not realizing the law had changed. It is a quote of a quote. What Gideon wrote was: The error arose from want of diligent watchfulness in respect to legislative changes. He did not remember that it might be necessary to look at the statutes of the year before. Perhaps he had forgotten the saying, that “no man’s life, liberty or property are safe while the Legislature is in session.”
You do know that the anti-slavery advocates were the source of the 3/5ths compromise, right? Anti-slavery groups didn't want slaves to count at all for determining representation, while pro-slavery groups wanted slaves fully counted. If the 3/5ths compromise institutionalized racism in the Constitution, it was to 'appease' the anti-slavery advocates. Since you appear to misunderstand this, perhaps you should ask yourself what other facts you misunderstand.
For direct democracies with significant electoral control over what goes on, sure. For the thing that most "democratic" countries have, I disagree.
> Perhaps you're confused about the distinction between government and bureaucracy?
"Government" as understood in modern Western "democracies" is a combination of the bureaucracy and a certain number of elected officials.
You really haven't heard of elected officials putting their elected desires ahead of their nominal constituents'?
For the rest, as far as I can tell the main business of governing is in fact done by the bureaucracy in most Western countries, and bureaucratic departments tend to prioritize achievement of the goals they were set (often by themselves), without regard to how others would prioritize those goals. This is neither unheard of, unexpected, nor unusual. Everyone I've met who has thought about the problem at all, regardless of political persuasion, understands that this is a fundamental hazard of bureaucracy that needs to be addressed somehow. There are strong disagreements on how best to address it, of course.
> the idea that democracy doesn't help terribly much I think is deeply ignorant of when and why it fails
I think we agree on when and why it fails. The question is when it stops being democratic and along what dimensions.
For example, I consider the various statewide legislation passed recently in some states that forbids democratically-voted-for municipal wifi to be a failure of democracy in precisely the way you describe, and one that would be avoided by more-local devolution of power.
Now the problems you mention with discrimination are very real, and I have no problem with strongly centralized civil rights protections that are therefore uniformly applied to all citizens regardless of jurisdiction. There are certainly various other issues like this, where either there are significant externalities or a historical failure of local governance that ought to be the purview of more central government bodies.
This need for case-by-case analysis does mean that there are no easy solutions here, and I'm not claiming that there are. But I _am_ claiming that due to repeated failures in the current system, whether they were avoidable or not, there is fairly widespread perception that the central government is not to be trusted. And I don't think this perception really "dates back to Reagan" so much as that Reagan _expressed_ this rising perception. That is, Reagan was a consequence of the perception, not a cause of it.
You may want to read "Seeing Like a State" by James Scott, or https://samzdat.com/2017/05/22/man-as-a-rationalist-animal/ for an illustrative review if you don't want to read the whole book. Some of the examples in the book are from totalitarian regimes, but Brazil is a democracy and still ended up with some of the same failure modes, and the blog post gives a hypothetical but oft-repeated in practice example of a less-local (city-wide or larger) government trampling all over people from a particular part of the city, all with the best of intentions, because it thinks (possibly correctly!) that it can't accomplish those intentions without making its job easier by destroying the local communities.
Democratic government does help avoid excesses like mass deaths due to obtuse state action, of course, and this is a pretty darned good endorsement given the history of the 20th century. But it certainly doesn't eliminate obtuse state action.
There are legitimate debates to be had about the size and function of the government. But I've never understood the populist appeal of the declaration: The government only causes problems -- elect me and let me prove it to you!
But I suspect that a number of elected presidents of the US in the 1800s, and a number of the people involved in setting up the US government in the 1700s, would have said to not trust the US federal government in its current form. In fact, they would have been appalled by it.
Now times have changed since the 1800s, and we can indeed have debates about whether the government we have now is doing the things it should be doing, to the extent that it should be doing them. I wish such debates were more common, instead of everyone presupposing the answers. :(
Look at the construction of the Tappan Zee bridge near New York City, cost of construction and how long it took. Then look at estimates for its replacement.
I believe there are plenty of people paving the way for our post-carbon world, building a new and clean world from the filth left behind by the baby boomer generation.
Currently millenials do not put 2 and 2 together when it comes to climate change and their personal habits of consumerism, we did better in the 1970's after the crisises of the time at turning lights off when not needed. But this time round we have people using sensors and things like LED lights to keep the energy consumption sensible.
The only way for countries like the UK to meet their emissions targets and air quality targets is to get rid of the targets (Brexit) or to get serious about electric cars. Right now one energy company is converting lamp posts to charging points, so soon on-street charging will become very easy. A small step but an important one as it makes the impossible possible and at affordable cost. So you might just get an EV because that is how it works and you just charge up every time you park next to a lamp post.
There are only four petrol stations inside the congestion charge zone in London, there used to be far more. Imagine a time when there are none and you have to go to a motorway to find petrol or diesel for your classic retro vehicle.
Even General Motors are taking EVs seriously.
As for the disposable bag, try visiting the UK. They went extinct when stops started charging for them. The other day I found a hoard of three in a drawer. In former times people would have small cupboards full of the things. It took a long time coming, but the end of the disposable free bag was survived by retailers and consumers alike.
I think that EV cars will be like flat screen televisions and ICE cars will be like CRT monitors in not too many years to come. We didn't initially get a better picture with flat screen displays but those richer colours did not save the CRT, even if there were no 'dead pixels'.
In a matter of time the batteries will be integrated into the frame or the wheels or even the furnishings and these EV cars will be a far simpler product than those ICE things. The supply chain will die out for ICE and this new post carbon world will start to happen. Watch and see.
Wait, I thought we were blaming The Millennials (tm) for everything.
Unfortunately you lost nearly all your credibility by using the Dutch as a positive example. The Dutch economy is overwhelmingly based on the extraction, production, and export of natural gas, chemicals, and fuel [1]. This doesn't seem environmentally friendly to me.
No matter what law you pass or what incentive you give, recent college grads (I'm a liberal from Berkeley, myself) will find a way to maximize my utility at the expense of the environment. Corporations do this and so do millions of people around the world. Even the Dutch are not immune.
If you want to truly save the environment, go work in battery science and solar production. Because right now, even in HN's beloved Scandinavian countries, oil and gas remains their number one industries. The Norwegians especially know this and are milking it for all it's worth. How will you convince them if you can't convince me - someone not distracted by the billions of dollars involved with oil and gas drilling?
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Netherlands
As for the Dutch, yes, we have a lot of bicycles and people tend to get a bit more exercise here but there is still plenty wrong with Dutch society and if you took a 10 km altitude photograph of the country you'd probably still conclude the dominant life form is a steel box on wheels.
So it's entirely rational to skip the actions you describe. But that's true for everyone. We'd all be happier if everybody contributed, but for each of us, we're better off not contributing, whether other people contribute or not. So nobody does much and we all end up worse off.
Problems like this crop up all the time and we have a way of dealing with them. Instead of deciding whether we'll personally contribute, we vote on whether we'll all contribute.
So if you really believe your first four statements, maybe you could consider voting for politicians who support a price on carbon.
WTF is going on... Elect Elon Musk as President in 2020 and let's all go to Mars (Not!)
So many assholes in charge. And the people of this planet are in diametric opposition to each other.
Feel free to down vote this on the basis that it is absolutely and utterly useless to state all that is wrong and offer no solutions. I just happen to think that we need more of stating what is wrong. I don't think it has sunk in yet.
I don't know about the Netherlands specifically but iirc neonicotinoid pesticides are banned throughout the EU. Maybe wild bees are doing better there. But overall things are not getting better.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_greenhous...
I have noticed a pattern. Anglo-saxon countries are killing us. Unfortunately they are also the primary users of this platform, so good luck seeing this message!
I mean, yeah, let's always work towards fixing problems but is the end really near?
Edit: I'm unsure why the parent comment is now flagged.
If we manage to actually enforce anti-carbon regulation across the globe, who will be harmed the most? It's India, China, and Brazil among others who are still industrializing. It's the people who we're just trying to get up to the point of actually being pretty confident they will get 1-2 meals every day... not even making them wealthy. Often these things are framed to appear to be going after the "evil rich" person who burns coal. Sure, we know burning coal kills lots of people. I would never deny those stats. No one ever talks about how many lives are saved by burning coal. As technology progresses perhaps countries will not need to burn coal to go through industrialization and pull their people off the brink of starvation, but we're nowhere near that today. So we need to consider these types of things as we talk about the socioeconomic and political ramifications of climate change. The solution can't be worse than the problem for poor people.
In any case, even hard core capitalists would recognize the value in controlling extenalities to help the market economy do its things.
If it helps I'm not a proponent of taxes per se. The tax I'm advocating could just as easily be described as rent. It is my hope that a fair, and effective, rent extraction from our shared capital (land, pollution rights, spectrum bands and so forth) could actually help abolish unfair and damaging taxes like income taxes.
https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/antarctic-sea-ice-reach...
But now in 2017 we're talking about continent-wide collapse?
https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/land-ice/
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/nasa-study-mass-gains-o...
GRACE shows acceleration since 2008. Zwally's study uses data from 1992-2001, 2003-2008. And is in-line with the net-gain slowing down in his data-set.
The linked study (Zwally et al.) uses satellite radar altimetry (ICESat) to measure height of Antarctic ice, and thereby quantify mass losses. Other studies use satellite-derived gravity (GRACE) to get more directly at mass changes. They conflict.
One possible reason (among several) for the discrepancy is that the overall height of Antarctica is also changing as it rebounds from ice loss in the distant past, i.e., some of the height increase seen by Zwally et al. is due not to ice increases, but to inter-ice-age rebound of the continent beneath the ice.
More: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/20...
Incidentally, antarctic sea ice extent did go from record highs 3 years ago to record lows this year.
http://edition.cnn.com/2017/02/16/world/antarctica-sea-ice-r...
"The research challenges the conclusions of other studies, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 2013 report, which says that Antarctica is overall losing land ice."
>"The team say they have no evidence to link the growth of this rift, and the eventual calving, to climate change." https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/06/170602112819.h...
It seems that everyone in the media or commenting on the internet suddenly knows better than the experts on this topic.
You're basically claiming they found evidence disproving a link with the "don't link the event to climate change."
No I am not. But by default I would assume all such events (really every event on earth) are somehow linked to climate change... it is exceptional to me that they claim to have no evidence for this.
Edit: Isn't it interesting that everyone except them (who are the apparent experts here) seems to have no problem linking it with climate change, including me?
But we do know that overall, climate change causes stronger hurricanes and hotter heat waves.
In the same way, we know smoking causes lung cancer, but if you're a smoker who gets lung cancer, nobody can say for sure that the smoking caused it, because some nonsmokers get lung cancer too. They just don't get it as often.
Here's the measured Accumulated Cyclone Energy, worldwide, 1970-2016. The total energy seems to peak in the mid 1990s. Is this consistent with claims of stronger hurricanes and more destructive hurricane seasons?
https://www.wunderground.com/hurricane/accumulated_cyclone_e...
There are some famous photos of Patagonia 100 years ago and today...anyone remember them?
I managed to find these before/after photos of glaciers in Alaska.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2972130/Globa...
I heard this idea suggested at least a decade ago in Popular Science. I imagine there are many such proposals to defeat global warming (beyond cutting CO2 emissions), but somehow this one stuck with me. Musk could also do it with his rockets.
Wyoming, North Dakota have the most.
[1]https://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/20100108_Is_Antar...
[2]https://www.sciencedaily.com/terms/antarctic_ice_sheet.htm
[1]https://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/20100108_Is_Antar...
[2]https://www.sciencedaily.com/terms/antarctic_ice_sheet.htm