These are standard talking points that people parrot and both of them are misleading. There did exist a global cooling idea and it was in some pop sci magazines, but it was never a serious prediction by the climate change community. Even in back in the 1970s we had a pretty good idea how much warming would result from adding co2 into the atmosphere:
To your second point, predicting the total heat of the Earth is also easier than predicting what the weather will be at one spot on the globe in any given moment. The former has only a few inputs (the sun) and outputs (back to space!) But how that heat swirls around in the atmosphere and moves to and from the oceans is pretty complicated.
Science is the pursuit of knowledge, and science therefore changes and new facts and tools and theories and methods are developed.
We are now much better at modeling than we were 50 years ago. Just like how the scientists of the 1970s were miles ahead of the scientists of the 1920s.
"Science got something wrong" is not a valid reason to discount it, because science necessarily gets things wrong. But it gets more right over time.
There's widespread consensus in scientific communities now, and there has been for decades - humans are warming the earth. How much? We're not sure, but it's absolutely demonstrable that we are.
> An enduring popular myth suggests that in the 1970s the climate science community was predicting “global cooling” and an “imminent” ice age, an observation frequently used by those who would undermine what climate scientists say today about the prospect of global warming. A review of the literature suggests that, on the contrary, greenhouse warming even then dominated scientists' thinking as being one of the most important forces shaping Earth's climate on human time scales.
But seriously, what relevance does a minority scientific hypothesis (even in the 70's, the majority of climate science focused on global warming from greenhouse gasses, not cooling from aerosols) from 50 years ago have when better data and 50 more years of experience show a clear warming trend, that is entirely anthropogenic, and which is today causing deadly heat waves, wildfires, flooding, storm surge, and more?
Your weather forecast for next week is already impacted by the global warming that has already happened.
I'm convinced that global warming is a threat. But I'd rather watch the world burn than listen to people who fly around in private jets or own mega mansions tell a regular person like me what steps I need to take to cut my carbon emissions. It may be irrational, but I just don't care.
Worse is hearing rich first world people imply that we can’t let the billions of poor in Asia or Africa have what we have. “Yeah we know we colonized you and all, but can you stay poor to save the world?”
Of course this won’t happen. Their answer will be “fuck you.”
There is only one conceivable way to stop this: we must have sources of energy that don’t emit carbon that are objectively cheaper and more practical than those that do. Then we must make them abundant and frictionless to adopt. They have to be the easy path, not burning fossil fuels.
If we can’t do that we need to prepare for the effects of 800ppm or more CO2 concentrations. India and Africa are about to do what China did and if it’s powered by coal that’s where we are going.
Those are the two options. Anything else is a fantasy.
I promise that my carbon footprint is less than the virtue signalers in the media talking about climate action. I walk to work. I don’t air condition my home. I paid to have my home made energy efficient. But because I’m honest about my attitudes, I’m “a horrible person.”
They and everyone else will die no matter what we do. The whole personal responsibility thing is complete horseshit. Even if everyone made a real effort to "do the right thing", cutting down on meat and getting rid of cars if possible etc, we'd still be completely fucked.
And just to be clear, this is a fictional scenario, it will not happen. The only thing that might make a real difference is if everyone on the planet gets together and collectively make huge changes to modern society. Obviously this also won't happen but I'd stand behind it if it did.
Go right ahead and outlaw beef, I love it but I can live without it if I have to. Go ahead and tax the biggest emitters, we'll have to pay more for things but I can live with that. Go ahead and do anything that can help improve our situation on a national or international scale and I'll support it.
But as long as we can buy beef in the store with no limits, buy cars with unnecessarily large combustion engines, fly around the world at our whim - people will. And it's not just these few popularized things we need to change. Everything needs to change. Where we produce things, how we produce them, the materials we produce them from. It's an enormous problem that I honestly don't expect us to be able to solve.
Oh, that sounds like a coded critique of Al Gore, amiright?
You know, the guy that was warning us all and was mocked by people like you as being crazy. Now that there's irrefutable evidence he was right it's down to ad hominem attacks, because that's all you've got.
I'm sure this is very important and so on and so forth. But we really need to find some way of communicating this stuff more "bite sized". Every few days over the summer scienticians predict that all life in the universe will be violently exterminated if we don't tax meat - and it's probably true, but it's just too loud, and too boring.
Alternatively: people care more about this stuff than ever before. So who’s to say that your preferred communication style is actually what will move the needle?
Unfortunately, there is no “bite sized” way that is acceptable to communicate to the public to eat less meat because it’s terrible for the environment, or, even more bluntly, any way to tell people it’s just consume less without a large part of the population getting defensive and antagonistic.
I imagine if a core aspect of your lifestyle, work, culture, and traditions were being attacked for "destroying the planet", you may feel defensive and antagonistic as well.
My grandfather was a cattle rancher. His father was a cattle rancher, etc. When my extended family gets together we eat roast beef because that is our tradition. We eat beef hamburgers and hot dogs at 4th of July cookouts because that is our culture.
Most of the folks telling people like us to stop would never dream of telling another culture how to exist but since we are poor and white we don't really exist since we've been swept under the rug of white privilege.
Tradition is a pretty terrible defense when the tradition in question has measurable, known harms.
Luckily, most rational people would probably agree that there is a middle ground between "change nothing" and "eliminate the tradition". For example, cutting beef consumption to once a week or once a month would considerably lower your environmental impact without eliminating a valued tradition.
> Most of the folks telling people like us to stop would never dream of telling another culture how to exist but since we are poor and white we don't really exist
Aww yeah that sweet nectar of victimhood. There are westerners telling Africans to stop female genital mutilation, should that also be allowed to continue, because, "culture"?
Unfortunately people are already being displaced and/or dying from climate related causes. That does not fit into any soft messaging and requires drastic intervention.
So the glaciers are melting because extra energy (heat) is being added to the system (well, not being radiated into space). Once the glaciers are gone, that extra heat will be absorbed by... what exactly?
Glaciers are obviously important to people and wildlife in the region, but I don't think it's important as global heat reservoir. Glaciers are only 1.74% of total water on earth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_distribution_on_Earth
Of course the ocean itself is warming up, so I guess we're screwed either way. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Glaciers and ice in general reflect a lot of light/heat back into space. As they disappear you end up with a positive feedback loop so that extra heat is mostly absorbed instead of reflected.
It's yet another safety that is going to disappear.
The concern is albedo (absorption of incoming solar radiation), not heat reservoir.
Lighter surfaces (snow, ice, clouds) typically reflect more light and heat. Darker surfaces (water, ground, asphalt) absorb light and emit thermal radiation, which is then trapped within the atmosphere by greenhouse gasses.
The atmosphere is differentially transparent to visible-light frequencies (high transparency) and infra-red radiation (low-transparency). That's the essence of what causes greenhouse warming, and we're adding more of the gasses (CO2, methane, and others) which are more effective at trapping heat.
Changes to surface characteristics (such as glacial melting) and atmospheric conditions (cloud formation, with dependencies on whether these are high-altitude or low), as a result of greenhouse-gas induced warming, provide feedback cycles which amplify or dampen effects. Many of the known feedbacks accelerate warming.
That's in addition to other feedbacks such as warming arctic-region permafrost, releasing both trapped CO2 and methane and triggering decomposition which generates more of these, or the "clathrate gun hypothesis", in which frozen and dissolved methane hydrates, themselves exceedingly powerful greenhouse gasses, are released at a rapid and accelerating rate. Among potential scenarios is a runaway greenhouse gas effect where global climates warm far beyond human or biological tolerance, either regionally or globally.
That is still a lot of water, and the phase change is a terrific heat reservoir. It takes a comparable amount of energy to melt water from -1 to 1 degrees, as it does to bring the water from 1 degrees up to 99 degrees.
The glaciers are not the only parts of the system affected by the warming. And with a complex system you get a lot of positive feedback loops that with more warming they push add more warming on their own (either more emissions like the one caused by permafrost thawing or more heat absorption because less ice reflecting light).
Glacier melting is just another milestone in a road that will be pretty hard to stop walking till the end.
As glaciers (69% of fresh water) melt, oceans absorb more heat. This leads to rising sea levels and altered currents (e.g. AMOC). The warming air influences weather patterns and increases atmospheric moisture. As the permafrost thaws, it releases additional greenhouse gases. Elevated water vapor amplifies the greenhouse effect, and changing cloud formations further influence global temperatures. These shifts in ecosystems affect both Earth's reflectivity (albedo) and global biodiversity.
Some of these impacts can serve as feedback mechanisms, potentially further accelerating the rate of change.
Unless I'm mistaken, it has a lot to do with the albedo that in this case when the surface material's properties turns from reflection (glacier) to absorption (rock material).
So, fresh snow might have an albedo of up to at around 0.8 or more, where as darker surfaces like asphalt are at around 0.04 to 0.12, so, the less albedo, the more it'll absorb instead of reflect (esp. back out into space).
The thing is that darker type rock materials also work as sort of heat capacitors in the sunlight, so basically, instead of reflecting that heat energy back into space, it'll stay around and warm up things.
Not sure if this constitutes as an example of a climate feedback loop (or an accelerant to one), but at least the albedo loss is one of the main concerns among climate scientist when they talk about i.e. (northern) polar ice cap melt -- instead of reflecting the heat back into space via snow and ice sheets, the heat energy gets absorbed by the sea, and that causes all sort of additional wacky stuff.
Arctic News often talks about it and even have this illustration on what happens if i.e. ocean ice is gone: https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-AHyeWIcSSVw/U70d6UBytbI/AAAAAAAAN... (although 0.9 albedo in that one is like at the higher end of expectancy for a fresh snow pack/ice sheet covered with white snow, the albedo drops rapidly with subsequent surface melt etc.)
I think ironically this causes the Jetstream and polar vortex to breakdown, the polar vortex is what keeps arctic air from dipping further south, if the vortex fails we could be ushered into an ice age where the feedback loop is reversed. more ice, more reflection, more ice. at least that's what I learned on a YouTube video recently (some meteorologist channel).
it's amazing how many runaway feedback loops can take us to extreme heat or cold near the extinction line either way. I think we could weather an ice age, but I think billions wouldn't make it. We'd create underground homes with lights to grow food or something in a space station or on the moon.
We're pretty resourceful, I think it'd take more than that to take us out. An asteroid is much more certain extinction, unless we do have an actual colony in space or on the moon.
> We're pretty resourceful, I think it'd take more than that to take us out.
I'm less concerned with the survival of the species as a whole, as I am with the survival of my family and culture. Note that my culture goes back three millennia, so I'm not really interested in preserving the exact modern way of life.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
So.. build the oil pipelines because think of the poor people? We already have an affordability crisis and an extreme wealth gap. I don’t buy what you are selling, but even if true the best option is still to get onto renewable energy. The rest is just noise from oil and gas.
I've pretty much come to realize this as well, which is why I think at this point people should stop having children and we can just wind things down in an orderly fashion.
I see the rationale behind your point but I tend to differ. I have faith in humanity.
If anything, we are not creating enough people. There are both implicit and explicit growth obligations underlying the functioning of society, a population collapse would almost certainly result in extreme destabilisation.
It's climate 'change' not global warming. The effects on the AMOC Jetstream and ice content in the Arctic are causing the polar vortex to collapse this is like a wall that keeps frigid polar air in the Arctic, if that collapses it could actually reverse global warming but not in the way we'd like, we're taking full ice age, where ice covers the earth down to the equator.
Our earth system is fragile, if it weren't we'd see signs of life everywhere, we don't because it's rare and we're likely our own great filter putting resources and immediate comfort over prolonged survival.
The oil Baron's legacy will be that they didn't leave a civilization to remember their legacy.
On one hand I agree we as a species have passed a threshold where we are playing with fire in many regards.
On the other hand, I tend disagree with the claims of fragility. My (somewhat shallow) readings of the data both past and present suggest these systems are much more anti-fragile and multi-dimensional then we give them credit for.
There is no doubt we are manipulating them at a scale which will almost certainly come with consequences. That said, the consequences appears to me as more of a mixed bag than existential in nature.
There are some studies that suggest our contribution may have staved of the next glacial period by as much as 50,000 years. Tbf, I don't give much cadence to such predictions from both sides, these systems are way too complex for us to make claims beyond the fact they ware messing with them..
Side note on Oil Barons:
The evil Mr Burns trope is a tree hugging hippie fantasy. Most of these companies are public corporations majority held by institutions (index funds) which are mostly made up of pension funds, 401Ks, sovereign funds, college endowments etc.
There are outliers but they at the exception to the rule. Oil and commodities in general are a very hard line of business. You have a short period of supply/demand mismatch where you get to pretty much print money but supply catches up real quick and then its a decade of survival until the cycle repeats. A lot of companies die during this time, usually the small/independent ones..
And even when he had Oil Barons like Rockefeller, should they be really considered as evil? Arguably they played a critical role in not only the rise of the American Empire but even modern civilisation as we know it.
If haven't noticed it yet, I really think we are underestimating the role fossil fuels played in creating the world we see around us by an order of magnitude. Beyond that, I believe people are equally underestimating how bad things used be in the past. We as species were under the tyranny of nature in a manner not so dissimilar to a chimpanzee or a wolf.
Do you mean back to pre-industrial levels or 1.5 degrees below pre industrial levels?
I don't know about other regions, but the Rocky Mountain glaciers weren't in steady state at pre industrial temperatures, they were slowly retreating. They are remnants of the ice age.
The glaciers in the Cascades of the PNW were advancing in the early 1900s (a new one in the crater where most of Mt St Helens used to be is still advancing!) so at pre-industrial temps those would absolutely come back.
67 comments
[ 5.8 ms ] story [ 174 ms ] threadhttps://theconversation.com/40-years-ago-scientists-predicte...
To your second point, predicting the total heat of the Earth is also easier than predicting what the weather will be at one spot on the globe in any given moment. The former has only a few inputs (the sun) and outputs (back to space!) But how that heat swirls around in the atmosphere and moves to and from the oceans is pretty complicated.
We are now much better at modeling than we were 50 years ago. Just like how the scientists of the 1970s were miles ahead of the scientists of the 1920s.
"Science got something wrong" is not a valid reason to discount it, because science necessarily gets things wrong. But it gets more right over time.
There's widespread consensus in scientific communities now, and there has been for decades - humans are warming the earth. How much? We're not sure, but it's absolutely demonstrable that we are.
> An enduring popular myth suggests that in the 1970s the climate science community was predicting “global cooling” and an “imminent” ice age, an observation frequently used by those who would undermine what climate scientists say today about the prospect of global warming. A review of the literature suggests that, on the contrary, greenhouse warming even then dominated scientists' thinking as being one of the most important forces shaping Earth's climate on human time scales.
But seriously, what relevance does a minority scientific hypothesis (even in the 70's, the majority of climate science focused on global warming from greenhouse gasses, not cooling from aerosols) from 50 years ago have when better data and 50 more years of experience show a clear warming trend, that is entirely anthropogenic, and which is today causing deadly heat waves, wildfires, flooding, storm surge, and more?
Your weather forecast for next week is already impacted by the global warming that has already happened.
We'll stop burning fossil fuels when it's good for us personally. Whether by cheap clean new tech or taxes/regulations.
Of course this won’t happen. Their answer will be “fuck you.”
There is only one conceivable way to stop this: we must have sources of energy that don’t emit carbon that are objectively cheaper and more practical than those that do. Then we must make them abundant and frictionless to adopt. They have to be the easy path, not burning fossil fuels.
If we can’t do that we need to prepare for the effects of 800ppm or more CO2 concentrations. India and Africa are about to do what China did and if it’s powered by coal that’s where we are going.
Those are the two options. Anything else is a fantasy.
And just to be clear, this is a fictional scenario, it will not happen. The only thing that might make a real difference is if everyone on the planet gets together and collectively make huge changes to modern society. Obviously this also won't happen but I'd stand behind it if it did.
Go right ahead and outlaw beef, I love it but I can live without it if I have to. Go ahead and tax the biggest emitters, we'll have to pay more for things but I can live with that. Go ahead and do anything that can help improve our situation on a national or international scale and I'll support it.
But as long as we can buy beef in the store with no limits, buy cars with unnecessarily large combustion engines, fly around the world at our whim - people will. And it's not just these few popularized things we need to change. Everything needs to change. Where we produce things, how we produce them, the materials we produce them from. It's an enormous problem that I honestly don't expect us to be able to solve.
You know, the guy that was warning us all and was mocked by people like you as being crazy. Now that there's irrefutable evidence he was right it's down to ad hominem attacks, because that's all you've got.
My grandfather was a cattle rancher. His father was a cattle rancher, etc. When my extended family gets together we eat roast beef because that is our tradition. We eat beef hamburgers and hot dogs at 4th of July cookouts because that is our culture.
Most of the folks telling people like us to stop would never dream of telling another culture how to exist but since we are poor and white we don't really exist since we've been swept under the rug of white privilege.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/31/avoiding...
Animal agriculture has 8+ times more emissions than air travel.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/352100490_Emissions...
https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector
And that's just emissions ... we're not talking about biodiversity loss, eutrophication, deforestation, soil erosion, water usage, ...
Luckily, most rational people would probably agree that there is a middle ground between "change nothing" and "eliminate the tradition". For example, cutting beef consumption to once a week or once a month would considerably lower your environmental impact without eliminating a valued tradition.
Aww yeah that sweet nectar of victimhood. There are westerners telling Africans to stop female genital mutilation, should that also be allowed to continue, because, "culture"?
I'm a bit frighted by what I think the answer is.
Of course the ocean itself is warming up, so I guess we're screwed either way. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It's yet another safety that is going to disappear.
Lighter surfaces (snow, ice, clouds) typically reflect more light and heat. Darker surfaces (water, ground, asphalt) absorb light and emit thermal radiation, which is then trapped within the atmosphere by greenhouse gasses.
The atmosphere is differentially transparent to visible-light frequencies (high transparency) and infra-red radiation (low-transparency). That's the essence of what causes greenhouse warming, and we're adding more of the gasses (CO2, methane, and others) which are more effective at trapping heat.
Changes to surface characteristics (such as glacial melting) and atmospheric conditions (cloud formation, with dependencies on whether these are high-altitude or low), as a result of greenhouse-gas induced warming, provide feedback cycles which amplify or dampen effects. Many of the known feedbacks accelerate warming.
That's in addition to other feedbacks such as warming arctic-region permafrost, releasing both trapped CO2 and methane and triggering decomposition which generates more of these, or the "clathrate gun hypothesis", in which frozen and dissolved methane hydrates, themselves exceedingly powerful greenhouse gasses, are released at a rapid and accelerating rate. Among potential scenarios is a runaway greenhouse gas effect where global climates warm far beyond human or biological tolerance, either regionally or globally.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis>
Glacier melting is just another milestone in a road that will be pretty hard to stop walking till the end.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipping_points_in_the_climate_...
As glaciers (69% of fresh water) melt, oceans absorb more heat. This leads to rising sea levels and altered currents (e.g. AMOC). The warming air influences weather patterns and increases atmospheric moisture. As the permafrost thaws, it releases additional greenhouse gases. Elevated water vapor amplifies the greenhouse effect, and changing cloud formations further influence global temperatures. These shifts in ecosystems affect both Earth's reflectivity (albedo) and global biodiversity.
Some of these impacts can serve as feedback mechanisms, potentially further accelerating the rate of change.
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albedo
So, fresh snow might have an albedo of up to at around 0.8 or more, where as darker surfaces like asphalt are at around 0.04 to 0.12, so, the less albedo, the more it'll absorb instead of reflect (esp. back out into space).
The thing is that darker type rock materials also work as sort of heat capacitors in the sunlight, so basically, instead of reflecting that heat energy back into space, it'll stay around and warm up things.
Not sure if this constitutes as an example of a climate feedback loop (or an accelerant to one), but at least the albedo loss is one of the main concerns among climate scientist when they talk about i.e. (northern) polar ice cap melt -- instead of reflecting the heat back into space via snow and ice sheets, the heat energy gets absorbed by the sea, and that causes all sort of additional wacky stuff.
Arctic News often talks about it and even have this illustration on what happens if i.e. ocean ice is gone: https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-AHyeWIcSSVw/U70d6UBytbI/AAAAAAAAN... (although 0.9 albedo in that one is like at the higher end of expectancy for a fresh snow pack/ice sheet covered with white snow, the albedo drops rapidly with subsequent surface melt etc.)
it's amazing how many runaway feedback loops can take us to extreme heat or cold near the extinction line either way. I think we could weather an ice age, but I think billions wouldn't make it. We'd create underground homes with lights to grow food or something in a space station or on the moon.
We're pretty resourceful, I think it'd take more than that to take us out. An asteroid is much more certain extinction, unless we do have an actual colony in space or on the moon.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If anything, we are not creating enough people. There are both implicit and explicit growth obligations underlying the functioning of society, a population collapse would almost certainly result in extreme destabilisation.
Our earth system is fragile, if it weren't we'd see signs of life everywhere, we don't because it's rare and we're likely our own great filter putting resources and immediate comfort over prolonged survival.
The oil Baron's legacy will be that they didn't leave a civilization to remember their legacy.
On the other hand, I tend disagree with the claims of fragility. My (somewhat shallow) readings of the data both past and present suggest these systems are much more anti-fragile and multi-dimensional then we give them credit for.
There is no doubt we are manipulating them at a scale which will almost certainly come with consequences. That said, the consequences appears to me as more of a mixed bag than existential in nature.
There are some studies that suggest our contribution may have staved of the next glacial period by as much as 50,000 years. Tbf, I don't give much cadence to such predictions from both sides, these systems are way too complex for us to make claims beyond the fact they ware messing with them..
Side note on Oil Barons:
The evil Mr Burns trope is a tree hugging hippie fantasy. Most of these companies are public corporations majority held by institutions (index funds) which are mostly made up of pension funds, 401Ks, sovereign funds, college endowments etc.
There are outliers but they at the exception to the rule. Oil and commodities in general are a very hard line of business. You have a short period of supply/demand mismatch where you get to pretty much print money but supply catches up real quick and then its a decade of survival until the cycle repeats. A lot of companies die during this time, usually the small/independent ones..
And even when he had Oil Barons like Rockefeller, should they be really considered as evil? Arguably they played a critical role in not only the rise of the American Empire but even modern civilisation as we know it.
If haven't noticed it yet, I really think we are underestimating the role fossil fuels played in creating the world we see around us by an order of magnitude. Beyond that, I believe people are equally underestimating how bad things used be in the past. We as species were under the tyranny of nature in a manner not so dissimilar to a chimpanzee or a wolf.
I don't know about other regions, but the Rocky Mountain glaciers weren't in steady state at pre industrial temperatures, they were slowly retreating. They are remnants of the ice age.