Seems a bit strange you declare that the ice isn't freezing in October when October isn't over yet. I don't know how to square the headline with the articles claim that the ice growth actually started in September. Unless that's referring to a different region?
> Also looking at the raw temperatures, we can see the eastern Arctic ocean is actually in positive surface temperatures, which means a low to zero chance of freezing over at this point. In normal conditions, almost the entire Arctic ocean should be at or below the freezing point – 0°C (black color) by the end of October.
maybe freezing is a process that if it hasn't gotten to a certain point when you are near the end of October that it will not reach that point?
I mean if I'm watching a pot of spaghetti and it is at a certain point halfway through the 5th minute I can say with confidence whether or not it will be done in the 5th minute.
The comments seem more based on the title "not freezing in October" rather than the content which says it is currently actively freezing more slowly than in recent years.
Makes you wonder how worried and frustrated would have been those people who approached the path of violence to attract attention of the world towards such things. Not that I am condoning those actions.
I wrote to my MP (in the UK) about this shit, saying extinction rebellion had a valid cause and were arguably doing the right thing in their 'civil disobedience' (includes illegal disruption) because bugger all else will work, and would she perhaps like to speak up on their behalf? To say the law being broken is a valid action here? She didn't answer the question. Just platitudes in return. She's lame.
Standard human 'exponential discounting' behaviour. Inaction will cause us all a great deal of discomfort in the vaguely anticipated future, but unpopular action will cause her personally a great deal of discomfort right now.
True, but I said in the letters that a politician's job is to take the long term view and make those hard decisions. I want to be really clear about those last 2 points; it's part of what they're there for. Future discount is not an excuse.
I was worrying myself sick at least 20 years ago, trying and failing to get anyone to listen. No-one cared. Now it's too late.
The time to worry is when the problem can be dealt with, not when it's blatantly out of control and entering a vicious spiral. Tip: stop worrying, there's no point now.
> The time to worry is when the problem can be dealt with
I'm convinced that it can still be dealt with but also that it'll require more drastic approaches now, such as stratospheric aerosol injection and other geoengineering techniques.
We had cold spell in central europe for couple of weeks (not sure about the rest of the northern hemisphere), that could explain the extra snow. Now we're back at +-normal temperatures for this time of the year. All of which tells very little about arctic ice - in fact despite this cold spell water is warmer than usual. Not good
The temperature increase can happen during the night. Increased CO2 might benefit plant life making the planet greener.
Is it too late? It probably is.
Nth order effects will have the most impact. Methane leaking from Siberian ice is equivalent to 125 years of 2019 CO2 emissions. When that happens it’s over.
Species extinction and habitat destruction are currently driven by industrial and agricultural expansion and pollution.
We talk about oil spills or methane leaks but the agricultural waste flowing down the Mississippi destroys more life than oil spills every year.
2012 was the lowest minimum ever, and 2020's minimum only slightly above it. For many days 2020 was lower than 2012 on the corresponding days, and now we are into an uncharted territory of the latest refreeze ever.
The Antarctic is a physical land mass. The Antarctic sea ice always melts away during the spring/summer. The Antarctic is surrounded by ocean, making precipitation an often occurrence, which funnily enough means that it snows more on the land when ocean temperatures rise slightly, and this snow helps build the seasonal ice around the Antarctic.
In contrast, the Arctic isn't a land mass, it's only ice, and it's mostly surrounded by land, making precipitation a less often occurrence and making the effects of rising ocean temperatures more devastating.
Basically, there's no going back once the Arctic melts, and by the time we see the Antarctic ice receding we'll be in serious trouble.
> Sea ice volume is above 2012 in the Arctic
2012 was an outlier, but sure.
> And Greenland has had massive, earlier than usual gains in ice this year
See the explanation for landmasses above.
> Cheyenne, WY saw record breaking cold this past week
> Northern Hemisphere snow mass is nearly 400 Gigatons above average for this time of year
Climate change will have variable effects on local weather around the world. An upward trend in global average temperature doesn't mean everywhere is going to get hotter all the time.
This was predicted back in the 90s - the poles are so far below freezing that warmer temperatures increase polar snowfall (since they increase evaporation but remain cold enough for snow to form).
I don't think we predicted the Arctic ice disappearing this fast, though.
But doesn't arctic ice all be floating in sea water mean it has no effect on sea levels? Why "there is no going back"? Since it has been ice free in the past and then ice came back, why shouldn't it happen again?
Salt water is denser than fresh water. The displacement of the Arctic ice is less than the displacement of the water contained in that ice when it melts. So the sea levels will rise. Though, that's not the only problem...
Think of the Arctic as exactly what it is, a giant ice cube, keeping your drink (or, you know, the world) cool. The smaller the ice cube gets, the smaller its effect on keeping your drink cool. When it's gone, your drink quickly goes to room temperature. It's highly unlikely that we can survive like we currently do without the Arctic. Sure, the ice might come back in 10 000 years or so, not particularly useful to us in the short term though, is it?
And the problem isn't that the Earth goes through natural cycles of cooling and warming, it's that our actions are accelerating the warming of the Earth, meaning we've got even less time to figure out how we as a species would survive the natural heating of the Earth.
Thermal expansion of the oceans will contribute significantly to sea level rise. That is, until that is dwarfed by Greenland melting, followed by Antarctica.
There are some very serious consequences of an ice free arctic. Here is a video from Just Have a Think called "Blue Ocean Event : Game Over?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qo3cznpfIpA
This isn't exactly what you're looking for, but climate change is probably a solvable problem with the right technology.
My personal favorite idea is a giant set of solar shades [1]. I guess for that you should be watching for starship news at something like [2].
Other examples of relevant technology would include things include like fusion, superconductors (which are really a subset of fusion ;)), co2 extraction (which only makes sense if you have excess energy), and so on.
"The world’s best solar power schemes now offer the “cheapest…electricity in history” with the technology cheaper than coal and gas in most major countries."
This is how you can be confident that anyone who says nuclear is the only solution to climate change hasn't looked at the state of the energy industry in 30 years. The price of solar power is a dirt cheap and still dropping exponentially.
Not sure if this should count as "good news", but there's this:
> While the ongoing coronavirus pandemic continues to threaten millions of lives around the world, the first half of 2020 saw an unprecedented decline in carbon dioxide emissions -- larger than during the financial crisis of 2008, the oil crisis of the 1979, or even World War II.
No, permafrost was removed, not thawed. And it was construction related, not climate.
Construction removed the permafrost, and heat from electrical systems and occupation have prevented it from reforming.
But this also implies that no liquid water was expected, which is false. Even places with permafrost experience surface thaw and runoff.
The fact that the vault design included a drainage system proves that above-freezing temperatures were expected.
The problem was rain/runoff/melt water freezing too fast once it got passed the entrance, and creating ice dams and similar blockages. Combined with an entrance that is warmer (sometimes above freezing) than the deeper facility (always below freezing), and you start to see the problem, since liquid water flows down.
When those problems occurred, the drainage system couldn't function properly, which caused addl flooding.
Ice dam removal required humans, machinery, and work, which added heat, which made the entrance warmer... And all of a sudden you have a double feedback loop.
It was a bad engineering design, but not because they assumed the wrong temperature(s).
And nothing to do with climate change. Climate change is misleadingly implied by the absence of permafrost.
Ironically, slightly warmer temperatures might have solved the design flaws, if it prevented ice from forming and allowed water to drain before freezing.
The Azolla event is a scenario hypothesized to have occurred in the middle Eocene epoch, around 49 million years ago, when blooms of the freshwater fern Azolla are thought to have happened in the Arctic Ocean. As they sank to the stagnant sea floor, they were incorporated into the sediment; the resulting draw-down of carbon dioxide has been speculated to have helped transform the planet from a "greenhouse Earth" state, hot enough for turtles and palm trees to prosper at the poles, to the current icehouse Earth known as the Late Cenozoic Ice Age.
Economic considerations
[...] The burial of large amounts of organic material provides the source rock for oil, so given the right thermal history, the preserved Azolla blooms might have been converted to oil or gas. (https://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/30/science/earth/under-all-t...)
As a side note, I'm hopeful that the genetic modification of the Azolla to be salt water resistant could make similar mass carbon sequestration possible in somewhere like the Dead Sea. I haven't heard of any organization working on it yet though.
the fact that it took a ~800k years to reduce atmospheric CO2 from 3500 to 650 might have something to do with it...
IF we somehow found a way of getting this much water in a single place (flood half of sahara?) it would 1) take ~30k years to lower ppm back to 300 if we stopped emissions and 2) it would probably kill the amazon rainforests which would lose its saharan dust fertilizer. if you don't do it in sahara, you have to get this much fertilizer from somewhere else.
I know I'm going to get downvoted, but may I quote Wikipedia:
"An ice age is a long period of reduction in the temperature of the Earth's surface and atmosphere, resulting in the presence or expansion of continental and polar ice sheets and alpine glaciers. Earth's climate alternates between ice ages and greenhouse periods, during which there are no glaciers on the planet. Earth is currently in the Quaternary glaciation, known in popular terminology as the Ice Age.[1] Individual pulses of cold climate within an ice age are termed "glacial periods" (or, alternatively, "glacials", "glaciations", "glacial stages", "stadials", "stades", or colloquially, "ice ages"), and intermittent warm periods within an ice age are called "interglacials" or "interstadials", with both climatic pulses part of the Quaternary or other periods in Earth's history.[2]"
No matter the cause, no ice in the polar regions is actually the norm. Sure, bad consequences for humanity are real, but in the (very) long run, we would have to face them anyway (if humanity still exists).
The concern isn't so much the fact the ice is melting as the rate that it is melting. If this happened at the normal geological timescales we would have plenty of time to adapt.
A lot of things that used to be imperceptible are now perceptible thanks to precise measurements and systematic, complete and reliable written records. For example, an average change in temperatures of 1 degree over one century used to be imperceptible, now it's not.
Even if imperceptible slow (to our human senses), there would eventually a point of "ice free in October". A simple report about that event doesn't tell me anything about the rate.
One datapoint out of the norm would be explainable via noise, which is why the article is not about a single datapoint but the trend of all the recent datapoints being far below the norm. You're dismissing the article as a "simple report of an ice free october" when that's not what the article is.
It would not normally just be imperceptible slow to our human senses, it would normally be imperceptibly below the noise floor over our entire lifetimes.
First of all I criticize the alarmist headline. As for the article, I know see data goes only back 41 years. Is that even a meaningful geological timeframe?
Also there often seems to be the assumption that every year should be like average. In fact, average implies that some years should be below and some above.
Not saying there is nothing going on, but I don't automatically believe we are all going to die just from that article. (We as in mankind, every individual will of course die, unless there is a major scientific breakthrough).
I find it absolutely incredible the mental gymnastics you're performing to conclude that your "common sense" take is a more accurate representation of reality than what these scientists are telling us.
> but I don't automatically believe we are all going to die just from that article.
Nowhere in the article does it say that. Nothing about this article is alarmist.
The simple truth is you've already made up your mind about climate change in general, and now you're just looking for tiny crumbs of evidence that researchers are slipping up somewhere, and criticizing anything that doesn't fit your notion of how this should play out.
I guess you could describe all science as "mental gymnastics". And all we humans have is common sense.
"The simple truth is you've already made up your mind about climate change in general, and now you're just looking for tiny crumbs of evidence that researchers are slipping up somewhere, and criticizing anything that doesn't fit your notion of how this should play out. "
That exact line could be handed back to yourself, except that you are sucking up all evidence that confirms your point of view.
So you are taking the contents of the article at face value, but somehow I am the silly person doing mental gymnastics?
Common sense is essentially how people think. Scientists are also people. If claims don't add up or data is missing to support a claim, common sense can be used to spot it.
You are thinking in Quantum Mechanics? Or scientists do, as opposed to normal people? Because scientists are somehow "superhuman"?
"how much evidence there is in the "there is no climate change" side?"
Why are you bringing up "there is no climate change"? Nobody made such a claim. But even if there is climate change, not every article has to be taken at face value, and not every theory on how it comes about has to be automatically considered true.
I haven't really seen Quantum Mechanics applied to climate science, though. Maybe it exists, but it doesn't seem to feature high in the public discourse. So I guess it is all bunk, because it is not Quantum Mechanics?
Earth has been cycling between glacial (90,000 years) and inter-glacial periods (10,000 years) every 100,000 years or so for the past million or so years. We were actually winding up an interglacial period and would likely be headed to another ice age...in a few thousand years. But our CO2 emissions completely changed that trajectory in two centuries. Our current emissions will change that trajectory even further in just a couple decades.
Now we are headed for something...very different. And it's happening fast.
Edit: Trying hard to not say something snippy about climate change deniers, with great difficulty. Let me simply suggest possible correlations between climate change denial, coronavirus denial and anti-vaccination.
82 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 154 ms ] threadOn this topic, see also:
[1] https://grist.org/article/let-it-go-the-arctic-will-never-be... (plus HN discussion[3])
[2] https://www.bas.ac.uk/media-post/past-evidence-supports-comp...
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16468943
[1] https://twitter.com/severeweatherEU
I mean if I'm watching a pot of spaghetti and it is at a certain point halfway through the 5th minute I can say with confidence whether or not it will be done in the 5th minute.
( •_•)>⌐■-■
(⌐■_■)
Edit: clarifications.
The time to worry is when the problem can be dealt with, not when it's blatantly out of control and entering a vicious spiral. Tip: stop worrying, there's no point now.
I'm convinced that it can still be dealt with but also that it'll require more drastic approaches now, such as stratospheric aerosol injection and other geoengineering techniques.
Ah, I remember the first time someone said this! It was in the 1970s, and I believed them.
I mean, it _can_ be dealt with. It always could be dealt with - we just _won't_ deal with it.
Sea ice volume is above 2012 in the Arctic: http://polarportal.dk/en/sea-ice-and-icebergs/sea-ice-thickn...
And Greenland has had massive, earlier than usual gains in ice this year (growth started in August, weeks earlier than usual): http://polarportal.dk/en/greenland/surface-conditions/
Cheyenne, WY saw record breaking cold this past week, reaching 2 degrees Fahrenheit in October, breaking the 1873 October record of 5 degrees Fahrenheit: https://www.wyomingnews.com/news/local_news/cheyenne-sees-as...
Northern Hemisphere snow mass is nearly 400 Gigatons above average for this time of year: https://globalcryospherewatch.org/state_of_cryo/snow/fmi_swe...
It's also La Niña this year, so the northern US will see a wetter, colder winter while the southwest will be warmer and drier.
Do you believe this carbon has an impact on climate?
Do you believe elevated temperatures worldwide is bad for the biosphere, causes species extinction, habitat destruction, etc.?
Do you believe that's bad?
Is it too late? It probably is.
Nth order effects will have the most impact. Methane leaking from Siberian ice is equivalent to 125 years of 2019 CO2 emissions. When that happens it’s over.
Species extinction and habitat destruction are currently driven by industrial and agricultural expansion and pollution.
We talk about oil spills or methane leaks but the agricultural waste flowing down the Mississippi destroys more life than oil spills every year.
2012 was the lowest minimum ever, and 2020's minimum only slightly above it. For many days 2020 was lower than 2012 on the corresponding days, and now we are into an uncharted territory of the latest refreeze ever.
Here's a graphic so you can see it in context:
https://twitter.com/ZLabe/status/1318913839568662529?s=19
https://nsidc.org/cryosphere/seaice/characteristics/differen...
The Antarctic is a physical land mass. The Antarctic sea ice always melts away during the spring/summer. The Antarctic is surrounded by ocean, making precipitation an often occurrence, which funnily enough means that it snows more on the land when ocean temperatures rise slightly, and this snow helps build the seasonal ice around the Antarctic.
In contrast, the Arctic isn't a land mass, it's only ice, and it's mostly surrounded by land, making precipitation a less often occurrence and making the effects of rising ocean temperatures more devastating.
Basically, there's no going back once the Arctic melts, and by the time we see the Antarctic ice receding we'll be in serious trouble.
> Sea ice volume is above 2012 in the Arctic
2012 was an outlier, but sure.
> And Greenland has had massive, earlier than usual gains in ice this year
See the explanation for landmasses above.
> Cheyenne, WY saw record breaking cold this past week > Northern Hemisphere snow mass is nearly 400 Gigatons above average for this time of year
Climate change will have variable effects on local weather around the world. An upward trend in global average temperature doesn't mean everywhere is going to get hotter all the time.
I don't think we predicted the Arctic ice disappearing this fast, though.
Salt water is denser than fresh water. The displacement of the Arctic ice is less than the displacement of the water contained in that ice when it melts. So the sea levels will rise. Though, that's not the only problem...
Think of the Arctic as exactly what it is, a giant ice cube, keeping your drink (or, you know, the world) cool. The smaller the ice cube gets, the smaller its effect on keeping your drink cool. When it's gone, your drink quickly goes to room temperature. It's highly unlikely that we can survive like we currently do without the Arctic. Sure, the ice might come back in 10 000 years or so, not particularly useful to us in the short term though, is it?
And the problem isn't that the Earth goes through natural cycles of cooling and warming, it's that our actions are accelerating the warming of the Earth, meaning we've got even less time to figure out how we as a species would survive the natural heating of the Earth.
I'm not asking for lies to make me feel good, just more regarding technological progress, positive trends in the use of renewables etc.
It would be nice to read a news letter to give us some hope for the future.
Maybe there is no good news? I find it hard to believe that though.
https://climatereanalyzer.org/wx/DailySummary/#t2anom
For daily arctic sea ice updates (where you can clearly see that the regrowth is very slow for october):
https://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/
My personal favorite idea is a giant set of solar shades [1]. I guess for that you should be watching for starship news at something like [2].
Other examples of relevant technology would include things include like fusion, superconductors (which are really a subset of fusion ;)), co2 extraction (which only makes sense if you have excess energy), and so on.
[1] https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/we-need-spacex-bfr-not-j...
[2] https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/
"The world’s best solar power schemes now offer the “cheapest…electricity in history” with the technology cheaper than coal and gas in most major countries."
This is how you can be confident that anyone who says nuclear is the only solution to climate change hasn't looked at the state of the energy industry in 30 years. The price of solar power is a dirt cheap and still dropping exponentially.
> While the ongoing coronavirus pandemic continues to threaten millions of lives around the world, the first half of 2020 saw an unprecedented decline in carbon dioxide emissions -- larger than during the financial crisis of 2008, the oil crisis of the 1979, or even World War II.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/10/201014082806.h...
So yeah, relying on permafrost being 'perma' seems a little unwise these days.
Construction removed the permafrost, and heat from electrical systems and occupation have prevented it from reforming.
But this also implies that no liquid water was expected, which is false. Even places with permafrost experience surface thaw and runoff.
The fact that the vault design included a drainage system proves that above-freezing temperatures were expected.
The problem was rain/runoff/melt water freezing too fast once it got passed the entrance, and creating ice dams and similar blockages. Combined with an entrance that is warmer (sometimes above freezing) than the deeper facility (always below freezing), and you start to see the problem, since liquid water flows down.
When those problems occurred, the drainage system couldn't function properly, which caused addl flooding.
Ice dam removal required humans, machinery, and work, which added heat, which made the entrance warmer... And all of a sudden you have a double feedback loop.
It was a bad engineering design, but not because they assumed the wrong temperature(s).
And nothing to do with climate change. Climate change is misleadingly implied by the absence of permafrost.
Ironically, slightly warmer temperatures might have solved the design flaws, if it prevented ice from forming and allowed water to drain before freezing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azolla_event
The Azolla event is a scenario hypothesized to have occurred in the middle Eocene epoch, around 49 million years ago, when blooms of the freshwater fern Azolla are thought to have happened in the Arctic Ocean. As they sank to the stagnant sea floor, they were incorporated into the sediment; the resulting draw-down of carbon dioxide has been speculated to have helped transform the planet from a "greenhouse Earth" state, hot enough for turtles and palm trees to prosper at the poles, to the current icehouse Earth known as the Late Cenozoic Ice Age.
Economic considerations
[...] The burial of large amounts of organic material provides the source rock for oil, so given the right thermal history, the preserved Azolla blooms might have been converted to oil or gas. (https://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/30/science/earth/under-all-t...)
IF we somehow found a way of getting this much water in a single place (flood half of sahara?) it would 1) take ~30k years to lower ppm back to 300 if we stopped emissions and 2) it would probably kill the amazon rainforests which would lose its saharan dust fertilizer. if you don't do it in sahara, you have to get this much fertilizer from somewhere else.
nevertheless people are exploring azolla: https://www.climatefoundation.org/azolla.html
No matter the cause, no ice in the polar regions is actually the norm. Sure, bad consequences for humanity are real, but in the (very) long run, we would have to face them anyway (if humanity still exists).
They suggest melting ice in general is cause for concern, when really it is expected because of the ice age cycles.
Not saying the rate is not concerning, but then they should write about the rate, not about extreme measurements.
It would not normally just be imperceptible slow to our human senses, it would normally be imperceptibly below the noise floor over our entire lifetimes.
Also there often seems to be the assumption that every year should be like average. In fact, average implies that some years should be below and some above.
Not saying there is nothing going on, but I don't automatically believe we are all going to die just from that article. (We as in mankind, every individual will of course die, unless there is a major scientific breakthrough).
> but I don't automatically believe we are all going to die just from that article.
Nowhere in the article does it say that. Nothing about this article is alarmist.
The simple truth is you've already made up your mind about climate change in general, and now you're just looking for tiny crumbs of evidence that researchers are slipping up somewhere, and criticizing anything that doesn't fit your notion of how this should play out.
"The simple truth is you've already made up your mind about climate change in general, and now you're just looking for tiny crumbs of evidence that researchers are slipping up somewhere, and criticizing anything that doesn't fit your notion of how this should play out. "
That exact line could be handed back to yourself, except that you are sucking up all evidence that confirms your point of view.
And no, I don't need to buy into the idea of climate change at all to take the contents of the article at face value.
Common sense is essentially how people think. Scientists are also people. If claims don't add up or data is missing to support a claim, common sense can be used to spot it.
Quantum mechanics say hello
> except that you are sucking up all evidence that confirms your point of view.
how much evidence there is in the "there is no climate change" side?
"how much evidence there is in the "there is no climate change" side?"
Why are you bringing up "there is no climate change"? Nobody made such a claim. But even if there is climate change, not every article has to be taken at face value, and not every theory on how it comes about has to be automatically considered true.
No, I'm saying that common sense doesn't have any saying in science
Ah, you';re missing the point completely
Quantum mechanics has nothing to do with climate change, but the point is that your claim that common sense is important in science is false
https://slate.com/technology/2014/12/the-last-time-the-arcti...
Earth has been cycling between glacial (90,000 years) and inter-glacial periods (10,000 years) every 100,000 years or so for the past million or so years. We were actually winding up an interglacial period and would likely be headed to another ice age...in a few thousand years. But our CO2 emissions completely changed that trajectory in two centuries. Our current emissions will change that trajectory even further in just a couple decades.
Now we are headed for something...very different. And it's happening fast.
Edit: Trying hard to not say something snippy about climate change deniers, with great difficulty. Let me simply suggest possible correlations between climate change denial, coronavirus denial and anti-vaccination.
Egyptians? (Because they are in denial).
https://twitter.com/UnlikelyWorlds/status/132136993874190745...