Perhaps on mobile the experience is missing, but on my desktop the article is able to convey its message through pictures, sentences and short paragraphs.
Also on a desktop, I had to "restart" reading everytime I scrolled through a whole page. Lost interest, which is quite a shame because the content seems actually interesting and some of the pictures are very pretty, but the reading experience is just abysmal.
I did a web scraping project of all major news publications in the US and the NYT was by far the most difficult to parse because their article structures are extremely arbitrary and inconsistent.
off topic: The researchers featured in this article are out in the wild, collecting samples, making observations etc. That seems to be the complete opposite of the desk jobs that people in software have.
Come to think of it, even though there is lot of money in software, but I don't think you ever get to know the world around you or enjoy life better than say a geologist or similar jobs.
When you are working in software, you are not “sitting at a desk”, you’re sitting at the helm of the future. All of the advancements and evolution of mankind and life on this earth have led us to the creation of civilization’s most important tool: the computer. And as computers weave more into the fabric of our world and everyday life, those who master them wield power like Gods. There’s no place I’d rather be.
I've spent a lot of time in software and I am looking to exit so I can spend more time away from the desk, but I have to say - this is a great attitude to have!
Could be true, or not. You could head out to wilderness every weekend, on vacations (probably further away), move closer to it etc. And researcher can head down to nearest pub or TV with netflix after work. You can travel where you actually want, not where the job takes you (although this specific one covers pretty cool locations).
Nah, when I vacation I can go there if I like it. These people have to go certain places.
My friend is a marine biologist and she dives off tropical islands in beautiful blue ocean water. The other day she talked about how everyone said it must be amazing to live this life so close to nature and she said it's really fucking hard not to flip out. The job is hard and painful and to be honest, my job as a software engineer is way better because I get to have fun wherever I want two days a week.
Yes, but I wonder how they afford it? It seems like to work in those roles you have to have family wealth or something. I don't really get it. I tried being an academic and pretty quickly determined I would always be broke if I continued on that career path.
Also, I wonder how objective these scientists are given how they compete for funding and what an echo chamber these communities are. They play a big game of being good researchers, but I kind of think a lot of foregone conclusions are never again revisited until reality slaps them in the face from some other direction.
I don't want to know the world and I don't enjoy going outside. My life is perfect in front of the computer and I'm kind of offended that you presume everyone wants that kind of life.
I struggle with this occasionally. My partner is a hydrographer and her job is to create electronic navigation charts for the Western Canadian and Arctic coastline. This involves surveying the waters, studying tides, and generating the charts from all of the data. Sometimes she gets to go for weeks or a month at a time on the surveying boats, or they fly out to check on remote tide stations.
The rest of her time is much like ours, just sitting at a desk tapping away at a keyboard or mouse. But 1.5-2 months of her year are booked by her employer to be off surveying. They see whales, go fishing and dive for food in their spare time, visit remote waters in the arctic or BC coast, stay in interesting communities along the coast, and all kinds of neat stuff.
Of course it isn't perfect and the ~10 months spent charting is so tedious that it gives me mild discomfort from a distance. I think the value of having quality navigation charts for the ocean is a little known but incredibly important asset to any place in the world though. Vessels travelling safely is the backbone of trade, tourism, fishing, and many kinds of recreation. I suspect there's some satisfaction in that at least.
I've spent 24 years writing software professionally and I often think about my exit. I don't think I'll ever stop writing software, I truly love it. But the career itself is incredibly stressful. The money is compensation for that stress, but I'd much rather be outside and working with my hands. I'm going to create other channels of income and then move on.
It's not that I think people can't be happy at a desk. I've been very happy. Just looking for a change and some sunshine.
I do archaeology in-between software jobs. The pay is terrible, but there's an attraction to working outside on something meaningful that's hard to ignore. At the same time, washing clothes in rivers and being sick in the field sucks.
Did you know that Canada was once a tropical climate? I'm just saying it's possible that the earth's climate has been changing for billions of years and will continue to change after they take away our freedom by placing a tax on energy.
Oil is way, way cheaper than its real value. If you had to produce oil from scratch, it would cost far more. If we use it willy-nilly, we're impinging on the freedom of future people. There has to be a balance, here.
Your wording makes me cringe. People don't have "freedom" to use or have access to things in the sense you are suggesting. Its not a fundamental right to have and use Oil. In its extreme you are basically asking people to suffer today so that maybe some future people might not suffer. It is completely unattainable because the future is always in the future -- and largely unknown. So people will have to continue to suffer and make sacrifices because of the near unlimited "future people".
I can't remember the source, but I think it was a fairly well known economist. He has the position that prices for things always go up, so in effect using Oil now will always be cheaper than using oil in the future.
> People don't have "freedom" to use or have access to things in the sense you are suggesting.
Resources can unconstrain a person in the same way freedom can. They can enable one to do things not possible without them.
> In its extreme you are basically asking people to suffer today so that maybe some future people might not suffer.
It's called using the resources you have access to in a sensible way. Yes, you may have to sacrifice some short-term gain in order to unlock greater long-term gain.
> It is completely unattainable because the future is always in the future -- and largely unknown.
Do you save money? Do you ration your groceries or consume them all the first day you buy them then starve the rest of the week?
> He has the position that prices for things always go up, so in effect using Oil now will always be cheaper than using oil in the future.
The price of writing this post itself and delivering it over a network would have cost orders of magnitudes more just a couple decades ago.
Oil is not globally owned, it is owned by individuals who mine it, and the land owners who allowed it to be taken from the ground.
The way this is being worded and the only foundation for such arguments is if it is assumed oil is a right for everybody to have access, or is group owned by humanity.
I use my groceries as needed, but if I wanted to buy a cart full of apples and flush them down the toilet it is none of your business -- as after I have bought them you have no right. Unless you own the apples and are the one selling them, you have not business in telling me how to use them either.
So the only take away I have is you think all humans own oil and have a right to it, and that if some humans are using it in a way that would make less for further humans, then you some how think you have a say in telling me how much I can use.
The suggestion that you or anybody else has a say on how much of a product one can buy or how quickly they use the product is ludicrous.
No one owned the process by which the oil was produced.
We don't need to bring in leaky concepts of rights here. It is a plain fact that the Earth has a resource which was formed before humanity even existed, is limited, and the price of which is not reflective of the process required to create it. It is also a plain fact that using said resource unwisely hampers fellow and future citizens.
Buying a cart full of apples and flushing them is also unwise, but at least the price of an apple is somewhat reflective of the cost of producing one.
A carbon tax helps bring the price of oil up to at least be closer to its real value, and help prevent unwise ways of utilizing it.
> using said resource unwisely
> prevent unwise ways of utilizing
Who are you to decide what is wise or unwisely use of oil? How do you know the carbon tax does not unjustly affect the ability for those with lesser means to use it today and as a result kill off entire peoples who would have existed otherwise -- talking about hampering future citizens.
The entire notion of limiting use of it because it is going to run out is silly because it will still run out. It does not matter if it runs out 100 years from now, or 200 years from now or 1000 years from now. It is still going to run out.
You want to trade the freedoms of today for the idea of "freedom" tomorrow. You have no data or proof to suggest that how it is being used today vs how it will be used by future peoples will be better or worse. All you are doing now is raising the price artificially and hampering current citizens -- which I argue are more important than any future ones you can image.
> A carbon tax helps bring the price of oil up to at least be closer to its real value.
Value is subjective. 1000 years ago oil was worthless, and when found was often considered unwanted. The price of oil will change as its value changes over time. We could have had different events that caused us to never discover the use of oil and thus it would be valueless to us today.
Your comment makes me cringe. Why not use all the world's resources immediately in the most flagrant way possible "if the future's always uncertain."
Being good stewards of shared resources is not "asking people to suffer today." You are right that it is not a fundamental right to have oil - so why do you get it all?
Please proof that claim. 100x faster never. And faster warming compared to which period. We are still in at the tail end of an ice age so warming is expected.
xkcd is always fun and supported by facts, but that chart only goes as far back as 20000 years ago.
No chart-based argument is ever fair if it does not show all available data and includes zero. Which is to say that it needs to cover about 4.5 billion years and show temperature in degrees Kelvin. Not that it isn't rhetorically effective; it's just not fair.
To restore the effectiveness, you'd probably have to put everything on a log scale, also chart the first derivative of the mean global temperature function, chart the partial pressure of CO2, and label all the mass extinction events.
The facts speak for themselves; no one should need to be tricked in order to believe them. And cherry-picking is a rhetorical trick. The rate of change in mean global temperature is at a level that is a hundred times more rapid than the warming and cooling rates seen in previous geological eras. And while we are still under the Eocene maximum for absolute mean temperature, biological evolution needs time to keep up with temperature change. Species that produce new generations on the scale of decades can possibly handle a 5 degree change, when it occurs over 100000 years, but not so much when it only takes 100 years. If you swing the needle on the temperature gauge fast enough, only the species that can produce new generations in a matter of hours will survive it.
IMO it's always interesting to know what's happened in ancient history, but for the purposes of keeping earth habitable for humans, I'm mainly interested in the period of time in which humans have lived on earth. The rate of change has not been totally unprecedented, but it has been within the time range we've been around.
Superfluous data can distract from salient points; for example it's simply not relevant to the discussion of life on earth what the weather was like when the earth was still a ball of lava. And sure, the temperature changed quite rapidly when the moon was blown off the side of the earth. But how is that important?
I don't find the possibility of distraction to be more important than the possibility of deception.
If you conceal data because it is distracting, the person from whom you are hiding it cannot know why you did that. They only know that they cannot see what you refused to show.
If it is not relevant, it is better to show it, and explain why it is not relevant as best as you are able. And that explanation can take the form of an arrow that marks the earliest time life was suspected to have first developed.
But in showing it, an observer might be able to discern temperature trends due to changes in the sun, meteor and comet bombardments, loss of core radionuclides, radiation into space, or other cosmological factors not attributable to humanity, or other forms of life. It might show a reason why the Earth today should be cooler now than it was at the Eocene maximum.
It's just more honest. You can still show a second graphic that cuts out the pieces you feel to be unimportant, and which highlights the pieces that best make your point.
Greenland glacier called Jakobshavn, the largest in the north Atlantic, is growing in size after decreasing for several years. It's almost like there's a cycle...
"Turn off the alarms everyone, this part of the building isn't on fire."
It takes more than a few data-points to declare a trend reversed, especially one this big. In the paper I believe you're referring to they even conclude:
> Despite the slowdown and thickening we report here, glacier flow still exceeds the velocities of the early 1990s, when the mass balance of the glacier was nearly in equilibrium, and continues to contribute to Greenland’s net ice mass loss. [1]
If you read the NASA source, it is talking only about Antarctica. NASA doesn't say anything about this being "90% of the world's glaciers". That is inserted by the author who is commenting on the NASA study, and is unsupported.
It is entirely possible that the Antarctic ice is growing while the Arctic is shrinking. That doesn't mean that there is no consequence to the loss of Arctic ice, or that it won't cause extinctions and a shift in climate in the Arctic.
It's still interesting that Antarctic ice is growing (according to this study at least). I've certainly never heard that before. In fact I've heard lots about Antarctic ice melting.
From the NASA press release:
> “The good news is that Antarctica is not currently contributing to sea level rise, but is taking 0.23 millimeters per year away,” Zwally said. “But this is also bad news. If the 0.27 millimeters per year of sea level rise attributed to Antarctica in the IPCC report is not really coming from Antarctica, there must be some other contribution to sea level rise that is not accounted for.”
Apparently the study contradicts the IPCC report in a pretty significant way. The press release does mention that the trend is not good, but the idea that Antarctica is gaining ice is news to me.
“The good news is that Antarctica is not currently contributing to sea level rise, but is taking 0.23 millimeters per year away,” Zwally said. “But this is also bad news. If the 0.27 millimeters per year of sea level rise attributed to Antarctica in the IPCC report is not really coming from Antarctica, there must be some other contribution to sea level rise that is not accounted for.”
You could’ve linked to the NASA study[1] instead of a dubious sounding website with an arictle written by “iceagenow.com”.
>according to Zwally. “If the losses of the Antarctic Peninsula and parts of West Antarctica continue to increase at the same rate they’ve been increasing for the last two decades, the losses will catch up with the long-term gain in East Antarctica in 20 or 30 years -- I don’t think there will be enough snowfall increase to offset these losses.”
Just because something is happening in one location isn't evidence of something else happening in another. It's also not evidence against global warming, to quote your article even:
>“That is what is SUPPOSED to happen when there is global warming,” says @Smaulgld. “Glaciers get bigger unless they melt -that’s global warming too.”
>"More than 99 percent of all species, amounting to over five billion species, that ever lived on Earth are estimated to have died out. Estimates on the number of Earth's current species range from 10 million to 14 million, of which about 1.2 million have been documented and over 86 percent have not yet been described. In 2016, scientists reported that 1 trillion species are estimated to be on Earth currently with only one-thousandth of one percent described."
71 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 136 ms ] threadPersonally I found it very hard to want to continue reading with all the interruptions.
[0] http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/index.html
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/12/new-y...
[2] https://www.fastcompany.com/3020689/the-new-york-times-fight...
[3] http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2013/08/...
The pictures are as much a part of the story as the words and this format lets the pictures be a part of the flow of reading.
I think it's fantastic on mobile and desktop.
My friend is a marine biologist and she dives off tropical islands in beautiful blue ocean water. The other day she talked about how everyone said it must be amazing to live this life so close to nature and she said it's really fucking hard not to flip out. The job is hard and painful and to be honest, my job as a software engineer is way better because I get to have fun wherever I want two days a week.
Also, I wonder how objective these scientists are given how they compete for funding and what an echo chamber these communities are. They play a big game of being good researchers, but I kind of think a lot of foregone conclusions are never again revisited until reality slaps them in the face from some other direction.
Humans are fallible...
The rest of her time is much like ours, just sitting at a desk tapping away at a keyboard or mouse. But 1.5-2 months of her year are booked by her employer to be off surveying. They see whales, go fishing and dive for food in their spare time, visit remote waters in the arctic or BC coast, stay in interesting communities along the coast, and all kinds of neat stuff.
Of course it isn't perfect and the ~10 months spent charting is so tedious that it gives me mild discomfort from a distance. I think the value of having quality navigation charts for the ocean is a little known but incredibly important asset to any place in the world though. Vessels travelling safely is the backbone of trade, tourism, fishing, and many kinds of recreation. I suspect there's some satisfaction in that at least.
It's not that I think people can't be happy at a desk. I've been very happy. Just looking for a change and some sunshine.
I can't remember the source, but I think it was a fairly well known economist. He has the position that prices for things always go up, so in effect using Oil now will always be cheaper than using oil in the future.
Resources can unconstrain a person in the same way freedom can. They can enable one to do things not possible without them.
> In its extreme you are basically asking people to suffer today so that maybe some future people might not suffer.
It's called using the resources you have access to in a sensible way. Yes, you may have to sacrifice some short-term gain in order to unlock greater long-term gain.
> It is completely unattainable because the future is always in the future -- and largely unknown.
Do you save money? Do you ration your groceries or consume them all the first day you buy them then starve the rest of the week?
> He has the position that prices for things always go up, so in effect using Oil now will always be cheaper than using oil in the future.
The price of writing this post itself and delivering it over a network would have cost orders of magnitudes more just a couple decades ago.
The way this is being worded and the only foundation for such arguments is if it is assumed oil is a right for everybody to have access, or is group owned by humanity.
I use my groceries as needed, but if I wanted to buy a cart full of apples and flush them down the toilet it is none of your business -- as after I have bought them you have no right. Unless you own the apples and are the one selling them, you have not business in telling me how to use them either.
So the only take away I have is you think all humans own oil and have a right to it, and that if some humans are using it in a way that would make less for further humans, then you some how think you have a say in telling me how much I can use.
The suggestion that you or anybody else has a say on how much of a product one can buy or how quickly they use the product is ludicrous.
We don't need to bring in leaky concepts of rights here. It is a plain fact that the Earth has a resource which was formed before humanity even existed, is limited, and the price of which is not reflective of the process required to create it. It is also a plain fact that using said resource unwisely hampers fellow and future citizens.
Buying a cart full of apples and flushing them is also unwise, but at least the price of an apple is somewhat reflective of the cost of producing one.
A carbon tax helps bring the price of oil up to at least be closer to its real value, and help prevent unwise ways of utilizing it.
Who are you to decide what is wise or unwisely use of oil? How do you know the carbon tax does not unjustly affect the ability for those with lesser means to use it today and as a result kill off entire peoples who would have existed otherwise -- talking about hampering future citizens.
The entire notion of limiting use of it because it is going to run out is silly because it will still run out. It does not matter if it runs out 100 years from now, or 200 years from now or 1000 years from now. It is still going to run out.
You want to trade the freedoms of today for the idea of "freedom" tomorrow. You have no data or proof to suggest that how it is being used today vs how it will be used by future peoples will be better or worse. All you are doing now is raising the price artificially and hampering current citizens -- which I argue are more important than any future ones you can image.
> A carbon tax helps bring the price of oil up to at least be closer to its real value.
Value is subjective. 1000 years ago oil was worthless, and when found was often considered unwanted. The price of oil will change as its value changes over time. We could have had different events that caused us to never discover the use of oil and thus it would be valueless to us today.
Being good stewards of shared resources is not "asking people to suffer today." You are right that it is not a fundamental right to have oil - so why do you get it all?
Because it is available, and I paid for it...
Until it stopped changing slowly, and started changing 100x faster, in the past 50ish years.
https://xkcd.com/1732/
No chart-based argument is ever fair if it does not show all available data and includes zero. Which is to say that it needs to cover about 4.5 billion years and show temperature in degrees Kelvin. Not that it isn't rhetorically effective; it's just not fair.
To restore the effectiveness, you'd probably have to put everything on a log scale, also chart the first derivative of the mean global temperature function, chart the partial pressure of CO2, and label all the mass extinction events.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:All_palaeotemps.png might be a good starting point.
The facts speak for themselves; no one should need to be tricked in order to believe them. And cherry-picking is a rhetorical trick. The rate of change in mean global temperature is at a level that is a hundred times more rapid than the warming and cooling rates seen in previous geological eras. And while we are still under the Eocene maximum for absolute mean temperature, biological evolution needs time to keep up with temperature change. Species that produce new generations on the scale of decades can possibly handle a 5 degree change, when it occurs over 100000 years, but not so much when it only takes 100 years. If you swing the needle on the temperature gauge fast enough, only the species that can produce new generations in a matter of hours will survive it.
Superfluous data can distract from salient points; for example it's simply not relevant to the discussion of life on earth what the weather was like when the earth was still a ball of lava. And sure, the temperature changed quite rapidly when the moon was blown off the side of the earth. But how is that important?
If you conceal data because it is distracting, the person from whom you are hiding it cannot know why you did that. They only know that they cannot see what you refused to show.
If it is not relevant, it is better to show it, and explain why it is not relevant as best as you are able. And that explanation can take the form of an arrow that marks the earliest time life was suspected to have first developed.
But in showing it, an observer might be able to discern temperature trends due to changes in the sun, meteor and comet bombardments, loss of core radionuclides, radiation into space, or other cosmological factors not attributable to humanity, or other forms of life. It might show a reason why the Earth today should be cooler now than it was at the Eocene maximum.
It's just more honest. You can still show a second graphic that cuts out the pieces you feel to be unimportant, and which highlights the pieces that best make your point.
It takes more than a few data-points to declare a trend reversed, especially one this big. In the paper I believe you're referring to they even conclude:
> Despite the slowdown and thickening we report here, glacier flow still exceeds the velocities of the early 1990s, when the mass balance of the glacier was nearly in equilibrium, and continues to contribute to Greenland’s net ice mass loss. [1]
[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-019-0329-3
Why so damn hostile to an otherwise decent observation
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
90 Percent Of The World’s Glaciers Are GROWING - https://principia-scientific.org/climate-shock-90-percent-wo...
The source for the link isn't some crackpot either. It's NASA.
It is entirely possible that the Antarctic ice is growing while the Arctic is shrinking. That doesn't mean that there is no consequence to the loss of Arctic ice, or that it won't cause extinctions and a shift in climate in the Arctic.
From the NASA press release:
> “The good news is that Antarctica is not currently contributing to sea level rise, but is taking 0.23 millimeters per year away,” Zwally said. “But this is also bad news. If the 0.27 millimeters per year of sea level rise attributed to Antarctica in the IPCC report is not really coming from Antarctica, there must be some other contribution to sea level rise that is not accounted for.”
Apparently the study contradicts the IPCC report in a pretty significant way. The press release does mention that the trend is not good, but the idea that Antarctica is gaining ice is news to me.
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/nasa-study-mass-gains-o...
>according to Zwally. “If the losses of the Antarctic Peninsula and parts of West Antarctica continue to increase at the same rate they’ve been increasing for the last two decades, the losses will catch up with the long-term gain in East Antarctica in 20 or 30 years -- I don’t think there will be enough snowfall increase to offset these losses.”
[1]https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/nasa-study-mass-gains-o...
Just because something is happening in one location isn't evidence of something else happening in another. It's also not evidence against global warming, to quote your article even:
>“That is what is SUPPOSED to happen when there is global warming,” says @Smaulgld. “Glaciers get bigger unless they melt -that’s global warming too.”
>"More than 99 percent of all species, amounting to over five billion species, that ever lived on Earth are estimated to have died out. Estimates on the number of Earth's current species range from 10 million to 14 million, of which about 1.2 million have been documented and over 86 percent have not yet been described. In 2016, scientists reported that 1 trillion species are estimated to be on Earth currently with only one-thousandth of one percent described."
Life is a cycle. Glaciers are a cycle.