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- Hacker News
- Given how we are at the tail end of a small ice age, shouldn't it be expected that temperatures recover to what they were previously? I never quite understood how climate is simultaneously too complicated to understand and predict the weather accurately while also a solved problem that we just need to take action on. And somehow the action we need to take is more taxation?
Since I keep hearing about this for at least 30 years now and still nobody took action the whole thing might be a bit more complicated than what the news media would have you know.
by OroPla - Nobody took action because the global south (logically) decided that economic growth and rising living standards is worth the global cost.by alephnerd
- > temperatures recover
Not. so. fast.
by cachius - > Given how we are at the tail end of a small ice age, shouldn't it be expected that temperatures recover to what they were previously?
The speed at which the temperature is increasing is what is concerning, it’s much faster than a usual warming cycle. The XKCD comic of the timeline of human history and climate really drives home how steep the increase in temperature has been vs in the past: https://m.xkcd.com/1732/
- The only thing that matters is that we're pumping insane amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and basically terra forming ourselves and most of nature out of the equation.
Nature is infinitely more complex than most people believe, we don't even know how basic things like soil ecosystems truly works, the thing that supports 100% of life on earth, we have virtually no clue about it, so what do we know about the rest...
Nobody is taking action because the whole system is made for growth and continuous improvement, you can't tell people "we have to work more to simply keep the status quo", let alone "we may even lose a lot of nice things and convenience in the process"
by toasty228 - 1. The global temperature has never in human history done what it's doing now. 2. Weather isn't the same as climate. They operate on way different scales and timelines. Uncertainty in the one does not necessarily map to uncertainty in the other. 3. Climate change is most definitely not a solved problem. We know some big things we can do, and none of them are easy.by phlakaton
- People have continually been taking significant action! CFCs were banned in 1987. High GWP refrigerants, like R-12 and R-22 have been banned, and even newer ones like R-401 are now significantly regulated: The days of bleeding an air conditioning system to atmosphere are _long_ gone. Cars in developed countries are annually inspected for emissions systems performance, so NOx and other GHG-producers have been cut to nearly 0% from vehicles since the 1990s in those regions. Transoceanic shipping has recently implemented its sulfur-free requirement, and we're visibly seeing fewer sulfuric clouds over the ocean. Stricter gas milage requirements in cars have seen a drop in CO2 emissions in the US from 2007 to 2025 by 102 million metric tons of CO2, despite having 23,000,000 more people.
The Paris accords have been running for years. No country has met its targets but nearly every country has seen a reduction.
The reductions aren't as big as we'd like. The temperature is still rising faster than we'd like. But the idea that we haven't taken any action is completely false.
by freeone3000 - It's pretty easy to model to a first approximation. Gases like Carbon Dioxide reflect certain wavelengths of infrared. When they are present in the atmosphere, they are present at a certain percentage concentration, and as that increases they reflect more infrared.
This matters because there are three ways for a body to eliminate thermal energy: radiation, convection, and conduction. Earth is not in contact with anything else, so it cannot conduct. It does not share an atmosphere with anything else, so it cannot convect. So that leaves radiation, which is largely in the form of infrared. Then it stands to reason that if you change how much IR is reflected back to the surface by the atmosphere, say by changing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, then you will increase the amount of heat the Earth contains as long as there is a source of heat nearby or within. Earth has both in the form of a molten core and the Sun.
This is why they call them "greenhouse gases." Because they cause the Earth to retain more heat than it radiates in the infrared spectrum, like the glass on a greenhouse.
- I heard in 1988 that we all must be dead by now from the ozone hole.by wartywhoa23
- Glad you brought that up. Because we fixed it. Now because of ignorance, we are not fixing this. As a person without kids, its not my problem. Strange that anti-science conservatives wants us to have more children while willfully destroying their future.by wesleywt
- CFC elimination worked, but switching refrigerants is a lot easier than not burning hydrocarbons.
- Weird how something was done about that though
- This exact sentiment has been expressed and addressed ad nauseum.by DangitBobby
- And we fixed the ozone hole by taking decisive action internationally banning the worst ozone-destroying gasesby wongarsu
- Luckily the Montreal protocol was implemented and CFCs were banned. Something like that should be considered for more green house gasses. Maybe Paris?by bakies
- WE FIXED THAT. We literally listened to professionals, introduced legislation and fixed it. The worst possible example you could use.by podgietaru
- Good point, we should probably do the same thing with our carbon emissions that we did with the chemicals that deplete ozone. The Montreal Protocol of 1987 successfully phased out over 99% of them.by DennisP
- This is a tepid sort of optimism.
- Can't we just pour the waste water from desalination plants into the arctic abyss to keep AMOC going?by cachius
- Once warming gets to a point we may not need desalination plants. The boil off from the ocean will perpetuate rainfall. Clean water for everyone. Never mind the 100+ mph winds that go along with that.
- I went to Glacier National Park a while ago and stood before a sign that said "The glaciers you see will be gone by year 20xx" or something like that. The year was 20xx and I was looking right at the glaciers and they were decidedly not gone. I understand the motivation. The reality is that an action of strength A is required to create outcome X, but if one expresses this need, it's likely one achieves only an action of strength A- < A and consequently the outcome X- != X. This encourages us to say "we need an action of strength A+ or we will get the outcome X-". The hope is that the discount that people apply on the prediction results in an action of strength A' ~ A and an outcome X' ~= X.
But public exhortation is a repeated game and unless you're Heaven's Gate the success of your popularized predictions has a significant effect on the discount that the public applies to your predictions. Failed predictions have an effect on the discount rate asymmetric to the direction. It is likely that a successful public authority allows some number of people to experience catastrophe pour encourager les autres. Attempting a zero error rate by biasing to zero catastrophe is likely to cause repeated discounting until true catastrophe cannot be averted.
I'm reminded me of the short story The Wandering Earth. Spoilers to follow so don't read if you care. In the story, a group of scientists determine that the Sun is going to flare enough to kill everyone, so all of humanity mobilizes to install massive engines to move the Earth far enough to survive while creating technology that survives the dark. After years of traveling to past Pluto, no Sun catastrophe materializes, resulting in a massive Earthwide revolt that eventually takes control of the control center and the scientists and government officials are sentenced to death by walking into the cold waste. Just as the last of them dies, the Sun flares as predicted, just a little later.
In a democracy, credibility is an important resource. To avert actual existential catastrophe, it is better to err on the side of local under-predicted disaster. It is probably best to let Rancho Palos Verdes fall into the ocean without compensating the homeowners. It is probably best to let the Texan flood plains flood and people to lose their homes entirely. It is probably best to let the Californians lose their homes to the wildfires.
by arjie - Then opening scene of The Ministry for the Future reflects this view. We won't get serious until there is a major catastrophe where millions die. And it needs to be millions of the "right people". Sadly, 10 million people dying in the DRC won't move the needle in the US. 1 million people dying in Texas might.
OTOH in 2020-2021 we had over 800,000 additional deaths due to COVID (conservative lower bound), and people are still made that they had to get vaccinated and schools were closed. Look at the Fauci scapegoating going on right now.
So, maybe 1M people in the US could die in a head wave or climate catastrophe and we still wouldn't do anything about it. However, the difference with COVID is that number happened over 2 years so "feels" less critical than if 800K people had died in the course of a week.
- I find it weird that the credibility is only called from the side of the science. No one who already wasn't alarmed is concerned that fossil fuel companies knew all about global warming, and only started to campaign against any action that would hurt their profits.
- I was on a cruise ship to Alaska and we went to see Dawes Glacier, and people who had been on that same cruise 10-15 years earlier commented on how much smaller it was. I don't have the most recent numbers but it retreated by 3.8 km between 1985 and 2020.
That sign could have been better worded, but it doesn't change what's happening.
- > The year was 20xx and I was looking right at the glaciers and they were decidedly not gone.
They just shrunk by 40% in ~50 years, no biggy
On a few other climate related topics scientists are actually surprised at how fast it's getting out of hands.
> In a democracy, credibility is an important resource.
We got Trump... Twice... so clearly not. What matters is selling a dream, and nobody want to hear about the dream of reducing growth, buying less, consuming less, etc.
by toasty228 - focussing on the messaging is a particularly weak way to steer the conversation away from the real issue. just as in your story, that glacier may take an additional decade or two to disappear completely, but it will surely be gone.
we can't seriously believe that if we just adjusted the story a little bit this way or that, that the message would actually click and people would begin to try to minimize the tragic cost to future generations.
this is happening now. blaming the messenger for not being appropriately fawning, or curt, or amusing is kind of irrelevant at this point. maybe we can learn to do a better job next time there is an issue that's going to radically effect everyones lives for the foreseeable future.
by convolvatron - You can also visit a glacier in Canada that has signs showing where it was 30 years ago and it's about a quarter mile hike to where it is now. One poorly placed sign doesn't invalidate anything.by wookmaster
- The year predicted for the glacier's collapse was an extrapolation based on data and models available at the time. While the timing was off, the thing is going away visibly for everyone!
In hindsight they shouldn't have set the date, but contrast the fast decline with the long existence. Maybe even let people guess or bet the exact year to involve them and make them think.
by cachius - Thwaites mass loss rate is 500% what it was in 1990. 500%, that is 2026 study. It is accelerating very rapidly as well.
I don’t give a damn, to be perfectly honest, what some sign posted god knows when with who knows what information, says. This is a man made global catastrophe. Information and research is very clear and very robust.
Ice loss in just 202x, from JUST thwaites, contributes to several centimeters of ocean rise. It’s going to be much much higher in 203x and 204x. It’s just one (unusually big) glacier of many.
We can all sit here and Reee Reee about the things that were overly reductive, overstated, wrong, even a lie. What I wrote above this is none of those and it’s actually psychotic how little we talk about the cryosphere collapse, given how badly it’s going to fuck us, not 1000 years from now, not 100 years from now, but 10 years from now. I played a video game twice that age on my computer yesterday.
by Lord-Jobo - It'll never be too late to mitigate even worse effects. Remember that the defeatism is what people who want no change want.by podgietaru