This is not something for the future, this is happening right now.
Sitting on the chairlift in Canada just pre-covid it was a daily occurrence to talk to an American who had come up to Canada for a week because their local ski resort had no snow.
They all said their resort used to get a ton, now it's lucky to get a foot for the whole season. This is a reality now.
EDIT: Also worth mentioning the capital city of Alaska had zero recorded snowfall for an entire winter for the first time in recorded history. Yes, it's very real.
I grew up in Brandon, Manitoba, Canada. Right in the middle of the bare Canadian prairie and near Winnipeg, commonly called "Winterpeg". In my teenage years and during university (late 2000s, early 2010s) I could look forward to returning over Christmas and going for a skate at the outdoor skating oval or going cross-country skiing at some trails in the Brandon hills. Not so for the couple years prior to covid. I haven't returned during the pandemic but it also wouldn't have been possible to do winter outdoor sports if I had. Christmas is considered "early season" now I guess.
>This is not something for the future, this is happening right now.
What you're describing is due to the La Nina effect:
>La Niña could also worsen California's ongoing drought and make its wildfire season even more of a threat. As Bloomberg explains, the state usually gets most of its annual water from rain and snow between November and April — the same period when La Niña is predicted to shift storm tracks north and away from the region that needs it.
Agree, my relatives have stories of Christmas in the 70s in the Midwest. And then sometimes there's ice storms. Extreme weather is not itself a good argument for climate change, you need to show you've bucked 100+ year trends (which has been done).
My personal experience growing up in the northeast is that storms are warmer and wetter than they used to be (maybe that means more snow on net), but with winters on the whole being warmer snow doesn’t accumulate like it used to.
The line where snow sticks around for the whole season has been steadily moving north.
What does the total snow mass for the entire Northern Hemisphere have to do with parent's observation (especially since it explicitly excludes mountains, the subject of the parent's point)?
It's completely possible that the Northern Hemisphere also has more rainfall then ever before, would that mean that lake Mead isn't drying up right now?
I find it a bit hard that you're really posted that information in good faith given it would require an almost willful misunderstanding of what the parent is saying and how hemisphere wide observations completely miss essential regional variation in weather patterns.
>Anecdotal data points are meaningless in systems as complex and dynamic as weather.
Exactly. "global warming isn't real because it's still snowing" gets ridiculed (as it rightly should), but I find it appalling that "global warming is real because it snowed really late where I lived" gets a free pass.
Climate change is real, not global warming. Weather is now much more extreme due to human actions. "Global warming" does not get a free pass. Please do not spread misinformation.
Please re-read my comment. I'm not denying climate change, only expressing my disapproval of how flawed arguments in favor of climate change gets a free pass.
I don’t understand why the OP is being downvoted. Climate change is real and causing temperature and weather anomalies all over the world, including record warm temps and droughts in the western continental United States.
In recent years HN has becoming increasingly aggressive in it's climate denial. Not in the classic sense of denying that there is climate change at all, but generally holding these assumptions as a sacred:
- climate change is not happening in a meaningful way now.
- the future impacts of climate change are wildly overstated.
- all potential issues that may come up with climate change can be mitigated through technology.
Any comments that violate any of these assumptions will be aggressively downvoted or often times even flagged. I have alt accounts that have had the latter happen frequently and I know because the flagged comments are always unflagged on review (conveniently hours after the article is no longer on the front page, and the discussion is effectively over).
This tendency may have always been a part of this community, but it has become a bigger issue in recent years because it has been increasingly apparent that severe climate impacts are being felt "faster than expected" right now, there is absolutely existential risk at play (on both a civilization and species level), and that nothing short of immediate reduction of the use of hydrocarbons can prevent extreme impacts (i.e. no techno solution).
Personally I think this is largely because these ideas pose major challenges to the ideological foundations of most of the HN community. In general people are brought here out of a common interest in the future, and the belief that technology (specifically VC funded technology) can solve any problem out there.
Our current understanding of climate change and its impacts shake this ideological foundation and makes a lot of people uncomfortably in a very profound way. Their only way to react is to try to make it go away. Down voting and flagging comments happens precisely because these realities of climate change hit a bit to close to the bone.
>but generally holding these assumptions as a sacred: [...]
>Any comments that violate any of these assumptions will be aggressively downvoted or often times even flagged.
examples?
>there is absolutely existential risk at play (on both a civilization and species level)
What's the evidence for "existential risk"? The IPCC's own estimates places economic losses stemming from climate change at "between 0.2 and 2.0% of income". If global is really going to wipe us from existence, then surely the economic losses will be much greater than 2%?
It's really hard to know whether your even being entirely serious, but just in case:
That piece of the IPCC report that article is cherry picking is a.) a bit out of date now and b.) assuming a warming of 2C which we've already given up on, at least according to the more recent report which framed our current condition as a "code red"[0], though I find it very hard to believe that you missed that press release this some.
And to be clear, existential risk doesn't mean I'm claiming "we're going extinct!" it means that that lies in the realm of realistic possibility. The IPCC reports are well acknowledged to be fairly conservative and fail to incorporate a lot of unknowns (Thwaite's glacier is an obvious example of this).
One example of evidence for extinction risk is work of paleontologist Peter Ward. Ward's "Under a Green Sky" is his popular science version of some of his work (and worth a read). Ward discovered that quite a few major extinction events in the past have been connected with sudden rise in atmospheric CO2 and rapid climate change. He makes well reasoned arguments about how quickly conditions can change and how that could easily lead to massive extinction events (we're already in the 6th largest extinction event right now, which again, I'm sure you know).
The main issue with climate change is there are many positive (and of course some negative, but we don't quite now the balance) feed backs that we don't understand. It is quite possible that enough of these trigger and all of our "worst case" projects turn out to be quite optimistic.
>That piece of the IPCC report that article is cherry picking is a.) a bit out of date now
Did the latest IPCC report contain a more updated projection?
>b.) assuming a warming of 2C which we've already given up on, at least according to the more recent report which framed our current condition as a "code red"[0]
What is code red supposed to mean? I looked on wikipedia for a more detailed summary and got an "intermediate" projection of 2.7 °C of warming by 2100. I'm having trouble finding out what the "intermediate" projection was in the 2014 report, so it's unclear how much the forecasts changed. Depending on how "~2" is interpreted, it could be anywhere between a 0.7 degree rise and 0.2. How that would affect the estimate would be unknown, but 2% was the upper bound of the original estimate.
>though I find it very hard to believe that you missed that press release this some.
I'm having trouble understanding what your point is here. Are you accusing me of arguing in bad faith because the report says "code red", therefore it obviously means we're facing existential threat? I don't see how that follows. I could plausibly imagine a report coming out (for sake of argument, in feb 2020, before the death rates were known) saying that our situation with covid is "code red", but that doesn't mean I'll think we're literally at risk of going extinct from it.
>And to be clear, existential risk doesn't mean I'm claiming "we're going extinct!" it means that that lies in the realm of realistic possibility.
what counts is "realistic possibility" here? I guess if you take the most pessimistic interpretation as 2% (ie. 1 in 50 chance of earth going up in flames, 49 in 50 chance of nothing happening at all), then I suppose it's an high enough risk to count as a "realistic possibility", but I doubt the situation is that dire. It's far more likely to produce a normal distribution centered at 1.1% economic lost, the probability of 100% loss (ie. humans ceasing to exist) being at the tail end.
>The IPCC reports are well acknowledged to be fairly conservative and fail to incorporate a lot of unknowns (Thwaite's glacier is an obvious example of this).
Now would be a great time to answer my original question. "What's the evidence for "existential risk?". Are there studies that incorporates the unknowns in an objective way?
>He makes well reasoned arguments about how quickly conditions can change and how that could easily lead to massive extinction events (we're already in the 6th largest extinction event right now, which again, I'm sure you know).
Based on the description it sound less like an objective analysis on existential threats, and more of a "well if these things happen, then theoretically it will be Really Bad™".
> EDIT: Also worth mentioning the capital city of Alaska had zero recorded snowfall for an entire winter for the first time in recorded history. Yes, it's very real.
It's also worth mentioning that the recorded history is rarely more than 100 years, and in almost no case more than a thousand.
In mountain locations, rain tends to run off the ground and into rivers as it rains. This depends on the region, but happens often in Spring/Fall.
Snowmelt, when the weather warms gradually, will slowly melt. It will seep into cracks and replenish underground water sources. It will also slowly replenish rivers often into (and sometimes throughout) the Summer.
So, a gradual snowmelt helps with the water cycle.[1] If warm weather comes fast, then the benefits over rain are diminished. Then less desirable effects like flooding can happen.
Milder winters mean huge swathes of the world where certain disease-ridden and economically disastrous pests like ticks and termites are currently walled out from due to the extreme cold in the winter are suddenly going to be much worse places to live.
It still hasn't snowed once in Chicago this year, smashing the record for latest snowfall. We're on the verge of breaking the record for most days without snowfall as well. I also don't think we've had a December with this many days over 50° F.
The previous record was broken just recently in 2012, having stood since 1965: things aren't just getting worse, they're getting worse faster and faster.
I'm from ohio, but been living in Utah since 2013.
Let me tell you, snow back east was just something you talked about, or moaned about, etc...
Out here, it's a totally different thing. Economically it's extremely valuable, I mean the license plate reads: Utah: The Greatest Snow on Earth.
Ski-resorts are a big industry out here.
Tourism aside, the snow pack out here is crucially vital to farming(arguably a bad use, esp. considering 70% of Utahs' water goes to alfalfa (a high water sucking crop) farms of which the Governor owns one of the biggest), residential water systems, etc. I'd imagine w/ no snow the Colorado river could even mostly dry up. (Maybe I'm off on that, I'm not a geologist).
Fire season starts earlier, lasts longer, covers more places, and I've seen 3 small fires start during storms in the past 2 years, never before that have I ever seen a forest fire up close.
My point is Chicago, will survive easily without snow, the west... I'm not sure can exist at all without snow. Honestly, I'm not sure we'll last past 2035 unless there's a miracle. I'm certain there will be massive migrations by 2050 from the coasts inward, from the west to the east, from the hottest climates to cooler ones (esp if the temp exceeds survivable thresholds)... and then the resources in the middle of the country will start to struggle, maybe droughts there cause even more instability ...eventually there will be water wars.
I'd bet my life savings on that. I can't say when, but eventually it'll happen. Again - unless we have some scientific miracle that completely reverses things... I'd like to see a huge space sun-shield device concocted ...our first mega structure in space... it would be kinda cool to see how they build something that big..
Snow, freezing temperatures, and the insulation snow provides against freezing temps, as well as knock-on effects on albedo, are all significant.
Kudzu, scourge of the South, is limited in its northward spread by the frost line. Those images you've seen of it overtopping trees, houses, and utility poles are real (and surreal).
And that's only one of the visible signs. Many invasive insect species, including both those that attack crops and those that spread disease, are limited in northerly spread by freezing temperatures. Rising temps means more northerly invasion.
Ground freezes further limit insect, animal, and plant invaders. It's not clear to me whether or not the northern Plains states will see more or less freezing, my guess is that temperature swings will likely be wide and uneven, and with less snow cover, fluctuate to a greater extent through the winter months. This could kill desired plants (as roots that were previously protected from freezing do in fact freeze), promote invasive species, simply wear and weather structures and roadbeds to a greater extend (more freeze-thaw cycles). Less snow means more dark earth and higher solar absorption, which would tend to accelerate warming trends. Positive feedbacks tend to be dangerous.
And climate instabilty may mean more "polar vortex" events, with weeks of 60F (18C) weather followed by -20F (-28C). Rains followed by freezes create ice, snows followed by rapid warming, increased melt and flooding. (All of course dependent on precipitation patterns.)
How all this washes out is hard to predict. I strongly advise against simply hand-waving the issue away as "people will have one less thing to complain about".
At the other end of the seasonal cycle, dryer summers and higher winds may also mean wildfires, something that's far rarer in the Plains states, but not unheard of. These did accompany the high-wind storm a week or so back, in which sustained winds of 80--100 mph were registered from Colorado to Minnesota, effectively not unlike a hurricane-on-land.
I agree wholeheartedly. People complain about snow but these are areas that evolved (over eons and over human timescales) to adapt to the local weather patterns, cold and snow included. They don't just "handle it," they rely on it whether they realize it or not.
It's not just kudzu. Ticks, termites, malaria-carrying mosquitoes, and so much more.
Every religion has a global flood myth, climate change is just the one of the scientifically religious and its zealots get just as upset if you don’t believe it as if you think Noah’s ark didn’t happen. Similarly there is no way to disprove it.
You can see the ridiculousness of the situation when it comes to how they prove it, consensus.
Science has never involved consensus, it works on hypothesis and evidence. Similarly no one can agree on which model predicts the future so they run 80,000 models with different parameters and then 20 years later pick whichever one happened to randomly generate the outcome and ignore the 79,999 models which were wrong.
I’m not a denier, I’m open to a single hypothesis, and a length of time in which we can analyze the results.
In summary climate change is a global flood myth and the solution is Pascal’s wager.
And predictably no one points to any evidence they just downvote because they have nothing to say.
There are very clear correlations. The scientists aren't pulling the association out of thin air, it's observed. We have satellites that watch the atmospheric currents and temperature fluctuations, how those drag different temperatures of air to different areas, and back engineer why things are moving the way they are.
The primary example is the weakening of the Arctic air currents causing the cold air to escape. The Arctic then warms faster, and causes short-lived, dramatic drops in temperature in the north Midwest.
We do similar back-engineering with the dry spells on the west coast.
The largest computers in the world are routinely used to simulate the weather and predict changes climate change will cause, and we are getting more and more accurate every year.
Thank you, I appreciate the discussion rather than downvoting.
Do you think that a weakening current with more water in the atmosphere (atmospheric rivers) will lead to more or less snowfall? Not being sarcastic, it’s just that if both things are true it would indicate that the prediction in this article is wrong.
Unrelated, what are your thoughts on the carboniferous period with 800ppm CO2 and 0 degrees difference in average temp. (This is according to Wikipedia, I can appreciate if the answer is Wikipedia is not reliable on this matter)
> Do you think that a weakening current with more water in the atmosphere (atmospheric rivers) will lead to more or less snowfall? Not being sarcastic, it’s just that if both things are true it would indicate that the prediction in this article is wrong.
Depends on where you are. The center of Africa is all desert. If they start getting a lot of rain, and the PNW gets less, the overall amount of rain falling can increase while the west coast of the US falls apart. Weather isn't uniform, and the climate in various locations is going to change. Some places will likely change for the better while others change for the worse. The issue there is that the places that are great now, but will be worse have a lot more people living in them than the places that are bad now and will get better.
> Unrelated, what are your thoughts on the carboniferous period with 800ppm CO2 and 0 degrees difference in average temp.
I don't know much about it. A good way to frame climate stuff in general: Normally things sit at some equilibrium and experiences a slow change to some new equilibrium due to some natural process. Like the most recent ice age ending. The reason man made climate change specifically is dangerous is we can change one aspect of the current equilibrium faster than all the factors can move to match it. That's why you'll hear people say "We could go carbon neutral today and the Earth will continue warming for decades." It's because we are changing one variable of the equation faster than the others can adjust, which has only happened historically during massive die-offs and extinction events. If we want from 200ppm to 600ppm over 200k years, the consequences would likely be pretty much unnoticed for most animal species. Doing it in 100, not so much.
How long have those satellites been watching? It can't be all that long?
It seems to me scientists still find unexpected things.
I think when people first tried to model the three body problem, the planets would just fall apart. But in reality they don't, so they knew they had to try harder. I wonder if many doomsday models are like the three body models that fell apart. And newspapers go "scientists show that earth could float off into space soon".
If the modeling is this good and this accurate, it would be helpful if consensus predictions were published in a prominent outlet that is easy for the public to consume and compare against empirical data as it comes in. I think this is particularly true if you can make reliable predictions about specific regions.
This would help build credibility. Right now, it seems like many are quick to attribute any kind of unfortunate weather to climate change, even if it leads to ultimately contradictory claims.
For example, a few months ago Scott Alexander posed the question of whether climate change could reduce the number of cold-related deaths. In the comments for that article (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28960588), many countered by saying that climate change is actually predicted to make winters colder on average, and/or increase the number of extreme cold weather events. It was no help that you can find news articles from prominent outlets that appear to make contradictory claims on this point (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28963655).
It took a fair amount of digging into IPCC reports to determine that this appears to be incorrect; the consensus prediction is warming winters (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28963266). But in the thread we couldn't come to agreement on whether the consensus view predicts more or fewer extreme cold events.
Thank you, I’m quite interested, I read as much as I can about it as obviously if it is real it’s quite serious.
The first graph in the first link exemplifies the problems I have with CC evidence, the data presented goes back a long time but not far enough to when we know CO2 was higher.
While it does not outright lie it tailors the data to create the impression that it hasn’t been higher. It’s like when graphs don’t have the axis at zero to exaggerate the differences.
For such a serious topic I would expect less disengenous presentation of the data.
Overall, not your links, but the totality of what I’ve read over the years, I get the feeling of being asked to make a decision based on reading advocacy pieces rather than a summary of the available information regardless of what conclusion it points to.
edit: upon re checking the first link I see the graph is also not centered on zero, again to exaggerate the differences between pre-industrial Revolution and now.
Why do you need more that 1 million years? Why is that “disingenuous” to stop before 10 million years?
I agree with your concern about the graph’s Y axis not being zeroed, it should be. Still, the jump in the last century is quite large, right? So why does it matter if CO2 levels were higher before humans existed? Isn’t it concerning you to that CO2 levels have jumped extremely suddenly and with very large magnitude to 30% higher (and growing) than the earth has seen in the last million years? Is your contention that CO2 doesn’t necessarily imply climate change?
This page covers a larger time period: https://earth.org/data_visualization/a-brief-history-of-co2/ It shows a correlation between temperature and CO2 for 10+ million years ago, that would seem to justify concern with today’s skyrocketing CO2 levels, no?
BTW, I think your comment above demonstrates a misunderstanding of what “scientific consensus” means. It doesn’t meant that scientists have gotten together to agree on what the collective will believe. It means that many independent studies and investigations have reached compatible conclusions, that multiple different kinds of hypotheses and evidence are all pointing at the same result.
I will add & admit that using “consensus” is an argument by authority. Personally I think the consensus is worth noting, but that point may be having the opposite effect on you by making you feel pressured to accept it. You’re right that the links I posted are advocacy and lay-person summaries, not scientific sources. The answer to this is to follow the citations and read the actual sources.
I like this article, it’s the stuff I really dig into. I like your idea of reading the sources, perhaps I will go to that for this one as Wikipedia has lots of sources at the bottom.
As for why it’s important to go back is because I’m interested in how the previous levels were achieved either the high levels so we can mitigate those natural sources or more relevant to today is how the low levels were achieved. I think the data should go back as far as we know, ideally all the way to the creation of the earth. Or at least the great oxidation event.
My understanding is that the all time global low was achieved by trees ending up in swamps in a high oxygen environment (35%) that essentially caused trees to suck all the CO2 out of the atmosphere.
Like here’s the thing, when we had 800ppm CO2 we had coral reefs in the North Pole (the plates have shifted and those fossils are currently in Alberta).
I think society should be given informed consent, we can eliminate CO2 and have the current climate, or we can go to 800ppm and have coral reefs on North Pole.
Also I think if the public knew it would empower our leaders to go toe to toe with China and India. Like if they don’t want to cut, then we go to 800ppm, call us when it gets too hot / the monsoons too severe and we can talk.
You’re definitely correct regarding consensus, I find it to be an appeal to authority and politicians use it to convey that the science favors a particular policy over another.
Society should be given informed consent, I agree. But doesn’t that mean everyone should know and understand that most of the actual science being done is all independently and from many different angles coming to the same conclusion that our industrial activities seem to be increasing the CO2 levels and potentially warming the earth much faster than any time in history, and much faster than any of the natural cycles, save for a couple of extreme volcanic eruptions and large meteors? Doesn’t informed consent in fact mean letting the public know that our policy decisions today might affect whether our grandkids can expect to ever see snow? Your argument here seems totally reasonable, I’m just curious how it meshes with your top comment.
Is it really hard to believe, surprising, or even debatable, that running several billion combustion engines all day every day globally that all emit CO2 would increase atmospheric CO2? Is it really in question whether adding a lot of CO2 to the air for a hundred years might raise the temperature?
Be aware that bringing up CO2 levels from 30 million years ago as some kind of demonstration that today’s CO2 levels might be “normal” is also cherry-picking and exaggerating, similar to NASA’s not using zero as the graph’s baseline, it’s also attempting to frame the debate in a way that downplays what’s happening today. The problem isn’t necessarily the CO2 level at all, it’s the magnitude and velocity of the anomaly today relative to recent history. It doesn’t take data from all time to see that the last century’s bump in CO2 levels might be something to worry about.
The problem in the US is we have a political party that denies climate change exists largely on the grounds that doing anything about it will be disruptive to the economy (without worrying whether doing nothing could be even more disruptive, nor what our long term goals are). The primary climate change skeptic argument in this country isn’t based on investigating the science, it’s currently based on denying science. When you said “climate change is a global flood myth” without providing any evidence of why our current published science is wrong, I interpreted that to be a political stance and not one based on science. You do seem genuinely interested in the science though, so it may be important to stop reading material from politicians and focus on investigating primary sources, and understanding what exactly the scientific consensus really is.
What if the politics of climate change denial undermines our ability to have informed consent? What if climate skeptics are winning the debate despite the science, and convincing policy makers to not take action? What exactly are the risks of taking action to reduce emissions, in the cases where the effects have been overstated vs understated? What are the best case and worst case scenarios? Why not reduce emissions anyway just because breathing pollution is causing health problems? The earth is going to survive whatever happens, with or without humans. Life will go on even if we kill ourselves. All the questions and debate are only about what’s good for us humans, and mainly in the short term. We’re fighting over how much money to spend this week and not really talking about what life will be like in a hundred or thousand years.
BTW, your top comment also complained about calling any and all weather anomalies evidence of climate change. FWIW, there is a plausible scientific argument called “global weirding” that centers on the fact that higher temperatures is literally more energy in the system that causes more strange things to happen that haven’t been happening historically. Any single event, single storm, single season, regional weather in a single year, you’re right that none of these by themselves indicate climate change. However, taken as a whole, the increasing frequency of odd/extreme weather events over many recent years is an indicator of change. I like how it’s described here: xvilka↗
All these articles suggest "if we don't stop", "if carbon emissions will not be reduced", they aren't realistic. Knowing people, I doubt it will be done enough in the right time. The only right strategy is to start preparing for the worst, adapting infrastructure, cities, villages, and agriculture.
Coupled with the depletion of deep aquifers, this situation means most farming west of the Mississippi river will probably vanish in our lifetimes.[0] We all need to start thinking much more creatively about how we're going to eat in the future.
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 103 ms ] threadSitting on the chairlift in Canada just pre-covid it was a daily occurrence to talk to an American who had come up to Canada for a week because their local ski resort had no snow.
They all said their resort used to get a ton, now it's lucky to get a foot for the whole season. This is a reality now.
EDIT: Also worth mentioning the capital city of Alaska had zero recorded snowfall for an entire winter for the first time in recorded history. Yes, it's very real.
What you're describing is due to the La Nina effect:
>La Niña could also worsen California's ongoing drought and make its wildfire season even more of a threat. As Bloomberg explains, the state usually gets most of its annual water from rain and snow between November and April — the same period when La Niña is predicted to shift storm tracks north and away from the region that needs it.
https://www.npr.org/2021/10/15/1046313870/la-nina-winter-wea...
Northern Hemisphere snow mass is one standard deviation above 1982-2012 average.
Anecdotal data points are meaningless in systems as complex and dynamic as weather.
Further, the aggregate for all of North America hardly excludes the possibility of regional snow drought.
The line where snow sticks around for the whole season has been steadily moving north.
It's completely possible that the Northern Hemisphere also has more rainfall then ever before, would that mean that lake Mead isn't drying up right now?
I find it a bit hard that you're really posted that information in good faith given it would require an almost willful misunderstanding of what the parent is saying and how hemisphere wide observations completely miss essential regional variation in weather patterns.
Exactly. "global warming isn't real because it's still snowing" gets ridiculed (as it rightly should), but I find it appalling that "global warming is real because it snowed really late where I lived" gets a free pass.
- climate change is not happening in a meaningful way now.
- the future impacts of climate change are wildly overstated.
- all potential issues that may come up with climate change can be mitigated through technology.
Any comments that violate any of these assumptions will be aggressively downvoted or often times even flagged. I have alt accounts that have had the latter happen frequently and I know because the flagged comments are always unflagged on review (conveniently hours after the article is no longer on the front page, and the discussion is effectively over).
This tendency may have always been a part of this community, but it has become a bigger issue in recent years because it has been increasingly apparent that severe climate impacts are being felt "faster than expected" right now, there is absolutely existential risk at play (on both a civilization and species level), and that nothing short of immediate reduction of the use of hydrocarbons can prevent extreme impacts (i.e. no techno solution).
Personally I think this is largely because these ideas pose major challenges to the ideological foundations of most of the HN community. In general people are brought here out of a common interest in the future, and the belief that technology (specifically VC funded technology) can solve any problem out there.
Our current understanding of climate change and its impacts shake this ideological foundation and makes a lot of people uncomfortably in a very profound way. Their only way to react is to try to make it go away. Down voting and flagging comments happens precisely because these realities of climate change hit a bit to close to the bone.
>Any comments that violate any of these assumptions will be aggressively downvoted or often times even flagged.
examples?
>there is absolutely existential risk at play (on both a civilization and species level)
What's the evidence for "existential risk"? The IPCC's own estimates places economic losses stemming from climate change at "between 0.2 and 2.0% of income". If global is really going to wipe us from existence, then surely the economic losses will be much greater than 2%?
https://reason.com/2014/03/31/new-ipcc-report-unchecked-clim...
That piece of the IPCC report that article is cherry picking is a.) a bit out of date now and b.) assuming a warming of 2C which we've already given up on, at least according to the more recent report which framed our current condition as a "code red"[0], though I find it very hard to believe that you missed that press release this some.
And to be clear, existential risk doesn't mean I'm claiming "we're going extinct!" it means that that lies in the realm of realistic possibility. The IPCC reports are well acknowledged to be fairly conservative and fail to incorporate a lot of unknowns (Thwaite's glacier is an obvious example of this).
One example of evidence for extinction risk is work of paleontologist Peter Ward. Ward's "Under a Green Sky" is his popular science version of some of his work (and worth a read). Ward discovered that quite a few major extinction events in the past have been connected with sudden rise in atmospheric CO2 and rapid climate change. He makes well reasoned arguments about how quickly conditions can change and how that could easily lead to massive extinction events (we're already in the 6th largest extinction event right now, which again, I'm sure you know).
The main issue with climate change is there are many positive (and of course some negative, but we don't quite now the balance) feed backs that we don't understand. It is quite possible that enough of these trigger and all of our "worst case" projects turn out to be quite optimistic.
0. https://news.un.org/en/story/2021/08/1097362
Did the latest IPCC report contain a more updated projection?
>b.) assuming a warming of 2C which we've already given up on, at least according to the more recent report which framed our current condition as a "code red"[0]
What is code red supposed to mean? I looked on wikipedia for a more detailed summary and got an "intermediate" projection of 2.7 °C of warming by 2100. I'm having trouble finding out what the "intermediate" projection was in the 2014 report, so it's unclear how much the forecasts changed. Depending on how "~2" is interpreted, it could be anywhere between a 0.7 degree rise and 0.2. How that would affect the estimate would be unknown, but 2% was the upper bound of the original estimate.
>though I find it very hard to believe that you missed that press release this some.
I'm having trouble understanding what your point is here. Are you accusing me of arguing in bad faith because the report says "code red", therefore it obviously means we're facing existential threat? I don't see how that follows. I could plausibly imagine a report coming out (for sake of argument, in feb 2020, before the death rates were known) saying that our situation with covid is "code red", but that doesn't mean I'll think we're literally at risk of going extinct from it.
>And to be clear, existential risk doesn't mean I'm claiming "we're going extinct!" it means that that lies in the realm of realistic possibility.
what counts is "realistic possibility" here? I guess if you take the most pessimistic interpretation as 2% (ie. 1 in 50 chance of earth going up in flames, 49 in 50 chance of nothing happening at all), then I suppose it's an high enough risk to count as a "realistic possibility", but I doubt the situation is that dire. It's far more likely to produce a normal distribution centered at 1.1% economic lost, the probability of 100% loss (ie. humans ceasing to exist) being at the tail end.
>The IPCC reports are well acknowledged to be fairly conservative and fail to incorporate a lot of unknowns (Thwaite's glacier is an obvious example of this).
Now would be a great time to answer my original question. "What's the evidence for "existential risk?". Are there studies that incorporates the unknowns in an objective way?
>He makes well reasoned arguments about how quickly conditions can change and how that could easily lead to massive extinction events (we're already in the 6th largest extinction event right now, which again, I'm sure you know).
Based on the description it sound less like an objective analysis on existential threats, and more of a "well if these things happen, then theoretically it will be Really Bad™".
It's also worth mentioning that the recorded history is rarely more than 100 years, and in almost no case more than a thousand.
Droughts are going to become worse in the west because of warm Winters.
Snowmelt, when the weather warms gradually, will slowly melt. It will seep into cracks and replenish underground water sources. It will also slowly replenish rivers often into (and sometimes throughout) the Summer.
So, a gradual snowmelt helps with the water cycle.[1] If warm weather comes fast, then the benefits over rain are diminished. Then less desirable effects like flooding can happen.
[1]https://www.usgs.gov/special-topics/water-science-school/sci...
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01186-6
The previous record was broken just recently in 2012, having stood since 1965: things aren't just getting worse, they're getting worse faster and faster.
https://abc7chicago.com/chicago-weather-no-snow-record-when-...
Let me tell you, snow back east was just something you talked about, or moaned about, etc...
Out here, it's a totally different thing. Economically it's extremely valuable, I mean the license plate reads: Utah: The Greatest Snow on Earth.
Ski-resorts are a big industry out here.
Tourism aside, the snow pack out here is crucially vital to farming(arguably a bad use, esp. considering 70% of Utahs' water goes to alfalfa (a high water sucking crop) farms of which the Governor owns one of the biggest), residential water systems, etc. I'd imagine w/ no snow the Colorado river could even mostly dry up. (Maybe I'm off on that, I'm not a geologist).
Fire season starts earlier, lasts longer, covers more places, and I've seen 3 small fires start during storms in the past 2 years, never before that have I ever seen a forest fire up close.
My point is Chicago, will survive easily without snow, the west... I'm not sure can exist at all without snow. Honestly, I'm not sure we'll last past 2035 unless there's a miracle. I'm certain there will be massive migrations by 2050 from the coasts inward, from the west to the east, from the hottest climates to cooler ones (esp if the temp exceeds survivable thresholds)... and then the resources in the middle of the country will start to struggle, maybe droughts there cause even more instability ...eventually there will be water wars.
I'd bet my life savings on that. I can't say when, but eventually it'll happen. Again - unless we have some scientific miracle that completely reverses things... I'd like to see a huge space sun-shield device concocted ...our first mega structure in space... it would be kinda cool to see how they build something that big..
Kudzu, scourge of the South, is limited in its northward spread by the frost line. Those images you've seen of it overtopping trees, houses, and utility poles are real (and surreal).
And that's only one of the visible signs. Many invasive insect species, including both those that attack crops and those that spread disease, are limited in northerly spread by freezing temperatures. Rising temps means more northerly invasion.
Ground freezes further limit insect, animal, and plant invaders. It's not clear to me whether or not the northern Plains states will see more or less freezing, my guess is that temperature swings will likely be wide and uneven, and with less snow cover, fluctuate to a greater extent through the winter months. This could kill desired plants (as roots that were previously protected from freezing do in fact freeze), promote invasive species, simply wear and weather structures and roadbeds to a greater extend (more freeze-thaw cycles). Less snow means more dark earth and higher solar absorption, which would tend to accelerate warming trends. Positive feedbacks tend to be dangerous.
And climate instabilty may mean more "polar vortex" events, with weeks of 60F (18C) weather followed by -20F (-28C). Rains followed by freezes create ice, snows followed by rapid warming, increased melt and flooding. (All of course dependent on precipitation patterns.)
How all this washes out is hard to predict. I strongly advise against simply hand-waving the issue away as "people will have one less thing to complain about".
At the other end of the seasonal cycle, dryer summers and higher winds may also mean wildfires, something that's far rarer in the Plains states, but not unheard of. These did accompany the high-wind storm a week or so back, in which sustained winds of 80--100 mph were registered from Colorado to Minnesota, effectively not unlike a hurricane-on-land.
It's not just kudzu. Ticks, termites, malaria-carrying mosquitoes, and so much more.
Dry winter? Climate change. Wet winter? Climate change. Cold summer? Climate change. Heat wave? Climate change. Hurricane? Climate change. Doldrums? Climate change.
Every religion has a global flood myth, climate change is just the one of the scientifically religious and its zealots get just as upset if you don’t believe it as if you think Noah’s ark didn’t happen. Similarly there is no way to disprove it.
You can see the ridiculousness of the situation when it comes to how they prove it, consensus.
Science has never involved consensus, it works on hypothesis and evidence. Similarly no one can agree on which model predicts the future so they run 80,000 models with different parameters and then 20 years later pick whichever one happened to randomly generate the outcome and ignore the 79,999 models which were wrong.
I’m not a denier, I’m open to a single hypothesis, and a length of time in which we can analyze the results.
In summary climate change is a global flood myth and the solution is Pascal’s wager.
And predictably no one points to any evidence they just downvote because they have nothing to say.
The primary example is the weakening of the Arctic air currents causing the cold air to escape. The Arctic then warms faster, and causes short-lived, dramatic drops in temperature in the north Midwest.
We do similar back-engineering with the dry spells on the west coast.
The largest computers in the world are routinely used to simulate the weather and predict changes climate change will cause, and we are getting more and more accurate every year.
Do you think that a weakening current with more water in the atmosphere (atmospheric rivers) will lead to more or less snowfall? Not being sarcastic, it’s just that if both things are true it would indicate that the prediction in this article is wrong.
Unrelated, what are your thoughts on the carboniferous period with 800ppm CO2 and 0 degrees difference in average temp. (This is according to Wikipedia, I can appreciate if the answer is Wikipedia is not reliable on this matter)
Depends on where you are. The center of Africa is all desert. If they start getting a lot of rain, and the PNW gets less, the overall amount of rain falling can increase while the west coast of the US falls apart. Weather isn't uniform, and the climate in various locations is going to change. Some places will likely change for the better while others change for the worse. The issue there is that the places that are great now, but will be worse have a lot more people living in them than the places that are bad now and will get better.
> Unrelated, what are your thoughts on the carboniferous period with 800ppm CO2 and 0 degrees difference in average temp.
I don't know much about it. A good way to frame climate stuff in general: Normally things sit at some equilibrium and experiences a slow change to some new equilibrium due to some natural process. Like the most recent ice age ending. The reason man made climate change specifically is dangerous is we can change one aspect of the current equilibrium faster than all the factors can move to match it. That's why you'll hear people say "We could go carbon neutral today and the Earth will continue warming for decades." It's because we are changing one variable of the equation faster than the others can adjust, which has only happened historically during massive die-offs and extinction events. If we want from 200ppm to 600ppm over 200k years, the consequences would likely be pretty much unnoticed for most animal species. Doing it in 100, not so much.
I think when people first tried to model the three body problem, the planets would just fall apart. But in reality they don't, so they knew they had to try harder. I wonder if many doomsday models are like the three body models that fell apart. And newspapers go "scientists show that earth could float off into space soon".
This would help build credibility. Right now, it seems like many are quick to attribute any kind of unfortunate weather to climate change, even if it leads to ultimately contradictory claims.
For example, a few months ago Scott Alexander posed the question of whether climate change could reduce the number of cold-related deaths. In the comments for that article (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28960588), many countered by saying that climate change is actually predicted to make winters colder on average, and/or increase the number of extreme cold weather events. It was no help that you can find news articles from prominent outlets that appear to make contradictory claims on this point (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28963655).
It took a fair amount of digging into IPCC reports to determine that this appears to be incorrect; the consensus prediction is warming winters (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28963266). But in the thread we couldn't come to agreement on whether the consensus view predicts more or fewer extreme cold events.
Here’s some light reading, with evidence, if you’re interested.
https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/
https://royalsociety.org/topics-policy/projects/climate-chan...
https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_consensus_on_climat...
https://www.nytimes.com/article/climate-change-global-warmin...
The first graph in the first link exemplifies the problems I have with CC evidence, the data presented goes back a long time but not far enough to when we know CO2 was higher.
While it does not outright lie it tailors the data to create the impression that it hasn’t been higher. It’s like when graphs don’t have the axis at zero to exaggerate the differences.
For such a serious topic I would expect less disengenous presentation of the data.
Overall, not your links, but the totality of what I’ve read over the years, I get the feeling of being asked to make a decision based on reading advocacy pieces rather than a summary of the available information regardless of what conclusion it points to.
edit: upon re checking the first link I see the graph is also not centered on zero, again to exaggerate the differences between pre-industrial Revolution and now.
I agree with your concern about the graph’s Y axis not being zeroed, it should be. Still, the jump in the last century is quite large, right? So why does it matter if CO2 levels were higher before humans existed? Isn’t it concerning you to that CO2 levels have jumped extremely suddenly and with very large magnitude to 30% higher (and growing) than the earth has seen in the last million years? Is your contention that CO2 doesn’t necessarily imply climate change?
This page covers a larger time period: https://earth.org/data_visualization/a-brief-history-of-co2/ It shows a correlation between temperature and CO2 for 10+ million years ago, that would seem to justify concern with today’s skyrocketing CO2 levels, no?
BTW, I think your comment above demonstrates a misunderstanding of what “scientific consensus” means. It doesn’t meant that scientists have gotten together to agree on what the collective will believe. It means that many independent studies and investigations have reached compatible conclusions, that multiple different kinds of hypotheses and evidence are all pointing at the same result.
I will add & admit that using “consensus” is an argument by authority. Personally I think the consensus is worth noting, but that point may be having the opposite effect on you by making you feel pressured to accept it. You’re right that the links I posted are advocacy and lay-person summaries, not scientific sources. The answer to this is to follow the citations and read the actual sources.
I like this article, it’s the stuff I really dig into. I like your idea of reading the sources, perhaps I will go to that for this one as Wikipedia has lots of sources at the bottom.
As for why it’s important to go back is because I’m interested in how the previous levels were achieved either the high levels so we can mitigate those natural sources or more relevant to today is how the low levels were achieved. I think the data should go back as far as we know, ideally all the way to the creation of the earth. Or at least the great oxidation event.
My understanding is that the all time global low was achieved by trees ending up in swamps in a high oxygen environment (35%) that essentially caused trees to suck all the CO2 out of the atmosphere.
Like here’s the thing, when we had 800ppm CO2 we had coral reefs in the North Pole (the plates have shifted and those fossils are currently in Alberta).
I think society should be given informed consent, we can eliminate CO2 and have the current climate, or we can go to 800ppm and have coral reefs on North Pole.
Also I think if the public knew it would empower our leaders to go toe to toe with China and India. Like if they don’t want to cut, then we go to 800ppm, call us when it gets too hot / the monsoons too severe and we can talk.
You’re definitely correct regarding consensus, I find it to be an appeal to authority and politicians use it to convey that the science favors a particular policy over another.
Is it really hard to believe, surprising, or even debatable, that running several billion combustion engines all day every day globally that all emit CO2 would increase atmospheric CO2? Is it really in question whether adding a lot of CO2 to the air for a hundred years might raise the temperature?
Be aware that bringing up CO2 levels from 30 million years ago as some kind of demonstration that today’s CO2 levels might be “normal” is also cherry-picking and exaggerating, similar to NASA’s not using zero as the graph’s baseline, it’s also attempting to frame the debate in a way that downplays what’s happening today. The problem isn’t necessarily the CO2 level at all, it’s the magnitude and velocity of the anomaly today relative to recent history. It doesn’t take data from all time to see that the last century’s bump in CO2 levels might be something to worry about.
The problem in the US is we have a political party that denies climate change exists largely on the grounds that doing anything about it will be disruptive to the economy (without worrying whether doing nothing could be even more disruptive, nor what our long term goals are). The primary climate change skeptic argument in this country isn’t based on investigating the science, it’s currently based on denying science. When you said “climate change is a global flood myth” without providing any evidence of why our current published science is wrong, I interpreted that to be a political stance and not one based on science. You do seem genuinely interested in the science though, so it may be important to stop reading material from politicians and focus on investigating primary sources, and understanding what exactly the scientific consensus really is.
What if the politics of climate change denial undermines our ability to have informed consent? What if climate skeptics are winning the debate despite the science, and convincing policy makers to not take action? What exactly are the risks of taking action to reduce emissions, in the cases where the effects have been overstated vs understated? What are the best case and worst case scenarios? Why not reduce emissions anyway just because breathing pollution is causing health problems? The earth is going to survive whatever happens, with or without humans. Life will go on even if we kill ourselves. All the questions and debate are only about what’s good for us humans, and mainly in the short term. We’re fighting over how much money to spend this week and not really talking about what life will be like in a hundred or thousand years.
BTW, your top comment also complained about calling any and all weather anomalies evidence of climate change. FWIW, there is a plausible scientific argument called “global weirding” that centers on the fact that higher temperatures is literally more energy in the system that causes more strange things to happen that haven’t been happening historically. Any single event, single storm, single season, regional weather in a single year, you’re right that none of these by themselves indicate climate change. However, taken as a whole, the increasing frequency of odd/extreme weather events over many recent years is an indicator of change. I like how it’s described here: xvilka ↗ All these articles suggest "if we don't stop", "if carbon emissions will not be reduced", they aren't realistic. Knowing people, I doubt it will be done enough in the right time. The only right strategy is to start preparing for the worst, adapting infrastructure, cities, villages, and agriculture. [dead] MaxMoney ↗ dreamcompiler ↗ Coupled with the depletion of deep aquifers, this situation means most farming west of the Mississippi river will probably vanish in our lifetimes.[0] We all need to start thinking much more creatively about how we're going to eat in the future.
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/12/kansas-aqu...