I am not a "denier", I can recognize that anthropomorphic activities are changing the climate over time and we're not prepared to deal with that. But this sort of article annoys me because "on record" represents a nanosecond of geologic time. There are mountains, and plant fossils[1] under the ice at Antartica, so at some point in the geologic record there was little to no ice at all! And no humans likely either, which can happen again, but the relentless effort to drive anxiety of extinction through the human race just feels so non-helpful to me.
The scientists know this. Paleoclimatology is one big part of climatology. But the outcome is the opposite - you should be more scared, since it shows that climate can change massively. That affects things like agriculture or sea level. What would you assume the sea level was, when those plants were alive?
For example, with very quick search:
"In general, world oceans were about 100 to 200 metres (330 to 660 feet) higher in the Early Cretaceous and roughly 200 to 250 metres (660 to 820 feet) higher in the Late Cretaceous than at present."
I guess you mean the shape of the countries doesn't change much? iirc the majority of Earth's population lives on coastlines, most major cities will be inundated
The rise in sea level is something of a misnomer, because the real damage comes in storm surges. Even a 1cm rise increases the amount of water that can pushed inland by *checks notes* a whole helluva lot. So while manhattan isn't going to be put underwater even after a whole foot of sea level rise (predicted by 2100), the storms it has to survive will be much worse.
People won't move just from a little water in the roads (just look at Miami), I think even in the year 2099 you'll have a hard time getting new yorkers to move to ohio, but once a storm comes through and destroys their housing they will have to find somewhere else to live.
But housing isn't expensive because it's hard to build. It's expensive because building it isn't allowed. If it all had to be rebuilt, that would be much cheaper than trying to build it under existing conditions.
Insurance isn't an endless bucket of money, and it's also going to adapt. Eventually you just won't be able to get insurance for properties in areas like that. Just look at the floods in New Orleans or the current flooding along the east coast of Australia, I doubt there's enough money to make all those affected whole again.
I think insurance may be the main driver for when people actually decide to move. People are pretty resilient, but if you can't get a home loan because you can't get insurance, people won't keep living there.
The big problem, as a sister comment pointed out, is that, for various reasons, a lot of people live close to the coast line. And a lot of people having to move was historically never really a good for peace, plus we loose a lot of agriculturally valuable land in the process.
Transportation by water is like 50 times cheaper than by land and it has been like that for at least the last 2000 years. So most people live either along the coast or along rivers.
> In its 2019 report, the IPCC projected (chart above) 0.6 to 1.1 meters (1 to 3 feet) of global sea level rise by 2100 (or about 15 millimeters per year) if greenhouse gas emissions remain at high rates (RCP8.5). By 2300, seas could stand as much as 5 meters higher under the worst-case scenario.
I guess thy will migrate the datacenters before 2300.
Well, billions of poor people without iPhones will be displaced or flooded. But actually on reflection, that's irrelevant compared to, dunno, having to build sea walls in Los Angeles and ruining the beach.
When I imagine the value of beach houses in Orange County dropping due to sea level rise, it fills me with such sadness.
On a global scale, sure, but as you pointed out for some spots it wouldn't be good. Both Miami and New York (to a lesser extent) would be having a bad time.
False, the long term NOAA models are far more complex than simple extrapolation (though that is of course a part of any forecast) and they certainly aren’t linear. Feel free to read up on them yourself:
> Global mean sea level, or the average height of the ocean surface, has risen 6 - 8 inches (15 - 20 centimeters) since 1920. In the continental U.S., relative sea level has risen about 10 - 12 inches (25 - 30 centimeters) over the same period. Observational data from tide gauges and satellites also show that sea level rise, both globally and along the continental U.S., is accelerating, with more than a third of that rise having occurred in the past two and a half decades (see NOAA and NASA portals for altimeter-based global rates and NOAA for local tide gauge rates).
So, 30% of the normal one foot per century (somewhat less worldwide) happened in the last 25% of the time. That’s not a big acceleration, that’s measurement error.
And yet this report says the rate of rise will nearly triple over the next thirty years. This is simply not plausible.
Generally, the report reduced the predictions. Also, they eliminated the 2.5 meter (!) scenario.
This map is weird. I put 20m sea rise and it shows Caspian Sea expanding, roughly doubling its size. But the thing is: Caspian Sea isn't a sea at all, it's a lake (named "sea" only because of its size), not connected to oceans in any way - why would its level rise at all?
Also, it is nice to see that my family home is safe until about 350 meters rise (although it would be located on a small island in that case)
It's possible it's the algorithm has a bug for stuff like this, but I did notice that with, for example, 40m sea rise it shows a connection from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea.
Interesting that even at a ridiculous, unprecedented 500m sea level rise, there are still substantial areas of dry land. It would be a radically different world, and a smaller one for us land based animals, but it doesn’t seem outlandish that civilization could persist.
The highest point in the Netherlands is 322 meters (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaalserberg), so even the mighty Dutch might have a problem with a 500m rise in sea level.
Not only that, but also the massive loss of land that is currently dense urban area, and the massive loss of land in general. There will have to be huge reconfigurations of where people live and what people's livelihoods are. I am not optimistic that such changes can be managed among several billion humans without war, famine, etc.
Dry land is just one aspect of climatic stability. Tolerable and predictable weather patterns is another. Fertile regions, a critical consequence of that. The question isn't whether some will survive, the question is: Who, why them, and at what cost? Furthermore, it's best to avoid population bottleneck scenarios in general, isn't it?
So, sure; we can relax at least our fears for a Kevin Costner "waterworld."
Maybe "stability" isn't the best factor for human progress? I'm not saying "therefore, let's maximize chaos!" -- just pointing out that /stability/ in today's world is more likely to lead to "business as usual."
I know Hollywood movies like to focus on dystopian scenarios wherein the Onepercenters always end up the sole benefactors of significant changes (especially due to worsening climate/pollution)...but is that really so? I envision that they in particular would want stability -- especially political -- far more than the average person. The reason why especially such persons historically preferred western nations, for example, was precisely due to greater stability, and not because of tax laws, for example.
Perhaps it was "stability" that contributed to scientific stagnation in some cultures?
Lastly, another term for "stability" is steady state. Remember what cell bio teaches regarding steady state vs equilibrium.
If you're suggesting that what human civilization needs, in order to elevate us to a more global maximum (by your favorite rubric, whatsoever), is climate catastrophe, I think you could serve yourself well by looking into generational trauma and PTSD.
It's the culling of vulnerable populations that will limit our biodiversity and development towards ultimate catastrophe resilience. We've seen enough homogenization of architecture and institutions already to seriously endanger our tenure on the planet.
It's strange to me that you view "western nations" as possessing "greater stability" than the Persian, Indian, Chinese, and Ottoman empires and, likewise, strange that you think "the Onepercenters" "historically preferred" strong, stable social structures and not, specifically, a differential between their holdings and a marginal region to exploit.
Some people like to romanticize the opportunities available for underdogs in times of crisis but, for example, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is an easy counter-example. Vulnerability isn't strength. A "rising tide" doesn't lift all boats.
Ours is a hugely abstract and almost criminally vague level of discourse, however. I can't think of any meaningful consensus at which you and I might arrive. I just hope you can grow to recognize that survival of the fittest has no foresight, and no memory. Too cheaply do we cull the only locally unfit. Leaving climate change to do its worst in the hopes that it might topple "business as usual" sounds like a great way to preserve the most ruthless actors.
And large changes would take at least decades or centuries. It seems outlandish that civilization wouldn't persist just because coastal settlements move their center of mass over time.
Not to mention 500 meters will likely take a thousand years or more. Where will society be a thousand years from now? Changing the climate might be as easy as using the terrain editor in Sim City.
something like only 10 meters is necessary to depopulate large part of Florida (due to loss land and freshwater aquifers) and turn part of central California into a salt marsh and start reducing the USA's most productive farmland.
Good to keep in mind that best estimates right now have sea level rising by less than 0.7 meters through 2100. 10 meters may happen some day but it will be a very slow process.
Ecological estimates have been shown to wildly conservative.
Who ten years ago had in their ecologic prediction bingo card that we'd have rampant wildfires globally and 118 degree ground temps in the Arctic Circle by 2020?
That is a flaw with this site, it seems to "fill in" Death Valley even with no change in sea level. The best way to read the map is to look at what new blue areas are connected to oceans, rivers, and seas. If they aren't, then it's unlikely they will be flooded as illustrated in the map at that new sea level. Death Valley, to go with that, is still detached from any oceans or rivers until almost a 600 m sea level rise.
Such quotes ('oceans were 200-250 meters higher') are going to mislead people. It's currently estimated that if all ice melted, sea levels would rise somewhere around 70 meters [1]. National Geographic had an interesting interactive some time back that showed what the world would look like if this happened. [2]
And it's likely these estimates have not yet accounted for an important recent discovery which could bring that 70 meters down substantially. In 2016 it was discovered that sea levels were rising more slowly than expected [3]. The reason, discovered through satellite imagery, is that the lands were absorbing much more water than expected - effectively acting like giant sponges.
Okay, I'd like to respond to this, "... you should be more scared,"
Can you reason to that position? Here is how I see it, and perhaps that will make my position more clear.
I'm going to die (so are you). Every year, the probability that I'm going to die in the next year goes up bit by bit. I don't expect to read articles that continually harp on "look how close to death you are, are you sure you don't want to eat at Cracker Barrel even ONCE before you die?"
And yet, I'm not anxious about dying. I accept that I cannot live forever and I do everything that I can do to live a long and happy life but there are things that other people do that can kill me. If Russia tosses a nuke into Silicon Valley, I'm dead, if a drunk driver crosses into my lane and crushes my car, I'm dead, if a clot in my bloodstream decides to take out a critical part of my brain, I'm dead. Nothing I can do to prevent that.
Should I be more scared of dying? How about just scared enough to do everything I can do minimize my risks? I am always open to good science that informs me and helps me make good choices about risk with respect to my mortality. I exercise, I don't smoke, I wear my seatbelt, I look both ways when I cross the street, the list goes on.
Unless you haven't been paying attention, the most recent IPCC report basically says, "We're fucked, its gonna happen now no matter what." And that sucks because in an imaginary universe where there was some sort of world government that could tell everybody on the planet what to do and enforce it if they didn't then maybe it wouldn't happen. But we don't live on that planet any more than I live on a planet that can infinitely extend my life, no matter how much I wish it.
So I point out, the planet doesn't care. Big extinction event? No big deal, been there done that, look forward to seeing what the new apex predator looks like kinda not caring.
What is even sadder, is that no credible climate scientist will say "If you do this, you'll avert disaster and it will all be well." Because we AFFECT the climate but we don't know how to CONTROL the climate. That part would require us to take actions, look at the result, and then adjust to figure out what each of the levers does and what sort of pull we might have on it.
I got into a long email discussion with one of IPCC contributors who worked on the clouds aspect of the model. Because the atmosphere is warming, it holds more moisture, and that moisture becomes clouds when you hit the dew point. Clouds can form at all levels of the atmosphere but where they form changes their impact on local weather. The cloud model shows that if we get more clouds in the stratosphere it will increase surface temperatures, if they form in the troposphere the decrease surface temperatures. It was the latter that guided the "nuclear winter" hypothesis. But we haven't gotten there yet so we don't know where they are going to start showing up (and it can be different in different parts of the world). All the science tells is that there is more energy available for things like hurricane and cyclones which are powered by the difference between surface and atmospheric temperatures, and there is more water available for things like clouds and precipitation.
You can play with the current IPCC model, change where the clouds form, and get an ice age. Pretty amazing right? But it represents the limit of our understanding in how things proceed.
But that hasn't stopped any number of groups to weaponize anxiety to encourage action on their particular idea of what's "best." Some are well meaning but others, like the nuclear industry, are really trying to convince folks that you have to start massive reactor projects right now, no matter the cost, to avert calamity. Is that accurate? No. The science says the calamity is locked and loaded. Is it effective at getting more money for nuclear? Absolutely.
"Being scared" and "being anxious" isn't productive (and it reduces your life expectancy to boot!) Being proactive about the things individuals can do is good as long as all good ideas get equal treatment, rather than pushing a single agenda (whether it is nuclear, bicycles, electric cars, or high speed rail).
That is the context of my annoyance at what I see as fear mongering headlines and articles trying to steer resources to one and only one cause.
This is the headline you are annoyed at, its subheading in the article, and the article's concluding paragraph:
"Antarctic sea ice hits lowest minimum on record"
"Natural variability is probably the cause, although global warming could have a role."
“This could be the start of sustained loss of Antarctic ice similar to what we have seen in the Arctic over the past 50 years, or it could be short-term variability that reverts back to the mean year,” says Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth in California. In the long term, climate change will result in declining Antarctic sea ice, he adds.
I do not see fearmongering here. I see a Nature article reporting a noteworthy measurement, without applying any subjective tone or value judgement that would induce anxiety. No mention of human extinction, no mention of steering resources, no politics. In fact it emphasizes the ice's natural variability, as if the authors want to avoid fanning the flames.
Why do you see it that way? I'm actually really puzzled, since you seem to value sensible and rational consideration of things. I would've expected you to comment, "Thank goodness for a level-headed article that provides a balanced interpretation!"
> the most recent IPCC report basically says, "We're fucked, its gonna happen now no matter what."
More precisely, that climate change is going to happen no matter what. Yes, that's true.
But the report does not say we cannot adapt to climate change. It only says we can't stop it from happening. We should be thinking about how to adapt--which is just the large scale equivalent of you wearing a seat belt, looking both ways before crossing the street, etc., to adapt to the fact that there are whackos out there who don't drive carefully.
While you're not wrong regarding adaption, to quote a fictional chaostician:
"If there's one thing the history of evolution has taught us, it's that life will not be contained. Life breaks free, it expands to new territories, and crashes through barriers painfully, maybe even dangerously, but, uh, well, there it is."
That change is going to probably hurt a lot more than looking left or right.
> That change is going to probably hurt a lot more than looking left or right.
It would hurt less if we'd spent the last couple of decades thinking and talking about adaptation, and taking steps in that direction, instead of wringing our hands. Or, for that matter, if more coastal cities and nations had acted like the Netherlands, who have been managing sea level rise for more than four centuries now (an excellent example of what adaptation can accomplish), instead of like, for example, the city of Miami, which has had drainage issues for decades and has done nothing about them.
> Unless you haven't been paying attention, the most recent IPCC report basically says, "We're fucked, its gonna happen now no matter what."
Yes, the IPCC is finally coming around to using the words irreversible and abrupt in their assessments.
> You can play with the current IPCC model, change where the clouds form, and get an ice age.
I don't recall seeing any mention of a potential pathway to an ice age in any IPCC report or any recent paper from a peer reviewed journal. Are you saying that there is at least one IPCC contributor who will admit that the models are so uncertain that we don't know whether to expect an ice age instead of catastrophic warming?
> weaponize anxiety to encourage action
A reasonable way to encourage action when nothing has been working. People are going even further than attempting to appeal to emotion, they're actually blocking streets and engaging in civil disobedience. That's because people still believe there's hope for themselves and / or their children and they care to attempt to push for the best outcome possible.
> "Being scared" and "being anxious" isn't productive
It absolutely can be. Sometimes you need a good amount of fear or anxiety to kick you in the ass and cause you to act. That's how most of my writing in high school got done as I didn't do anything until the panic set in. It's not ideal, but again...nothing else has been working.
> what I see as fear mongering headlines and articles trying to steer resources to one and only one cause
How many causes are as important as the preservation of habitat for homo sapiens? I don't think very many people share your "No big deal, ... look forward to seeing what the new apex predator looks like" point of view.
I am responding to the assertion that "sometimes you need a good amount of fear or anxiety to kick you in the ass..." This supposition is not merely factually false, but is actually dangerously harmful, especially to one's mental (but also physical) health.
First, what's important to realize is, when you say it can be positive, you are thinking of incidental stressors. But that's not the case here. The sort of fear/anxiety that occurs is constant and long term, rather than incidental (e.g. worrying about something abstract, rather than fleeing from a predator). Indeed, incidental stress can be / often is productive. However, it differs fundamentally from anxiety, which is considered a mental disorder that results among others when fear / mental stress become long term / constant (such as when worrying about an abstract notion that has no direct effect on one's situational survival).
Anxiety adversely affects the amygdala and hippocampus, in particular. It causes a growth in the former, which results in intensified bodily responses to anxiety; so in that sense, it acts as a positive feedback loop that worsens the effects of anxiety as time goes on. At the same time, long term effects result in the hippocampus shrinking, which reduces a person's ability to form long term memories, or contextualize emotional responses. Needless to say, that in itself severely curtails the ability to reason on a higher level.
This is an interesting dilemma, and I am aware that people are now seeking professional help for climate anxiety and that it can be a serious problem in some cases. However, I don't think this is a valid reason to discourage climate emergency headlines because the overall harm that is caused by our climate related activity is significantly higher than harm caused by anxiety. Without bringing serious, alarming attention to the issue, there's no way it will be addressed. I don't condone denial. But to the previous poster's point, if the situation has completely gotten away from us, then there's no point in suffering the anxiety because there's nothing to be done but await the end times. However, most people aren't on board with the hopeless abandon mindset at this time. Like so many other aspects of this problem, there's no easy solution, and it's complicated. I think the same could be said of our COVID response. Absolutely caused constant anxiety. And it was absolutely necessary. And it did encourage beneficial behaviour. The alternative is ignorance and more death.
> All the science tells is that there is more energy available for things like hurricane and cyclones which are powered by the difference between surface and atmospheric temperatures
Actually, they're powered ultimately by the difference between polar and tropical temperatures, correct? A cyclone is basically just a big thing that transports energy from the tropics to the poles to equalize an imbalance. And warming affects the poles more than the tropics, so the difference between polar and tropical temperatures, and hence the energy available for cyclones, should be decreasing, not increasing.
Once an individual cyclone gets going, that makes it stronger, yes. But what happens to cyclones? They don't just sit in the same place. They move, generally speaking, from the tropics towards the poles. That's what cyclones are doing from the perspective of the climate system as a whole, which is what the post I responded to was talking about: they're transporting energy from the tropics to the poles. (Of course they aren't the only things that do that: the overall circulation of the atmosphere does it all the time. Cyclones are just one piece of that overall picture.)
> Once an individual cyclone gets going, that makes it stronger, yes.
No, that's what makes and maintains a cyclone. Trade winds primarily just move it.
I have no idea if trade winds are expected to fade with climate change, that's an interesting question. There will always be differentials, though, so I don't think there's reason to assume hurricanes/cyclones will stay put.
Now have time for a longer reply. There are a few different phenomena.
First is that "fear" and "anxiety" are indeed used by the news media or politicians to get more attention. There I agree. It is cheap, unsustainable and harmful. But there's more to glaciers than news fearmongering.
The second concept is "the planet doesn't care". George Carlin has his famous skit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7W33HRc1A6c Of course life will continue on earth, after relatively large temperature swings or 10 kilometer asteroid hits etc. That doesn't mean we don't need to care about anything. His skit can be seen as a wake up call (which he might or might not have meant). Why would we do anything? Why would you recycle instead of dumping plastic bags in the river? Why would you put the safety on in your gun? The planet will be fine even if you blow your leg off. But you will be affected. It's the people that are f.... That's the punchline.
But I also disagree about his "don't meddle with nature, let the species die". If we change something, let's say, dump cyanide or mercury in a river, it's not "natural" for animals to die downstream. It's not "nature doing its thing". It's our responsibility. It's an untenable philosophical position to do something and then act as if the consequences don't have anything to do with the deed. But that's not the core point of the skit.
So about caring. If there was an asteroid headed towards earth, I'd care. Yes, it's happened before, and life has survived. But I still care. It would have great negative consequences for me and others. And there are others that care. There are programs to survey asteroids. To build technology to deflect them. Why do it? The asteroids are not our fault. They have struck before. They are "natural". Sure some news media might use them as scare tactics, to get attention. Those are all red herrings. It would matter, it would cause great suffering, that could be prevented. So let's prevent it. Let's not fall into apathy.
The third is this attitude of shallow dismissal of large amounts of scientific enquiry, that was at the start of it all, in your first comment. I got the implication that the fossils show how stupid the scientists are, that everything will be fine. No, a massive amount of work has been performed studying glaciers, or climate change. We have ice penetrating radar to map the ground underneath. We track glacier flows. We measure sea temperatures at depth. Of course also paleoclimate has been studied. Paleoclimate was actually one of the great motivators for the CO2 theory, to show that climate can change drastically - more than what would be expected from the small insolation changes. If you really want to have a rational approach to glaciers, then don't follow some news talking heads but look at the science. Marine Ice Sheet Instability is the key word here.
I would argue that very few people do - especially people who have real problems today, like putting food on the table and paying rent, they don't care at all about what is going to happen next month let alone coming generation.
Now throw the religious kind in the mix, and they are either relying on divine intervention, or think humanity deserves what is coming or whatever..
And, that is the primarily the reason why this is such a difficult topic on which to get everyone on the same page.
Ah yes, the “Tens of millions of years ago, the climate was also different!” silly excuse.
Modern humans have been around a minuscule fraction of that time. If we are affecting the climate in ways that normally take millions of years, “there’s some plants under the ice” is the non-helpful remark
My family member worked as a petroleum geologist for Exxon-Mobil for many years, and he is fond of talking about how the climate has changed dramatically throughout the earth's history as a sort of defense against any discussion of climate change. That those changes historically went very poorly for the organisms living in affected areas doesn't seem to faze him, as though we should be desirous of a new Permian extinction. I've come to the conclusion it's a defense mechanism for him psychologically, to avoid having to acknowledge that his life's work served to destroy the natural world and threaten the peaceful existence of his descendants.
I’m not defending Exxon but I feel like no one asks the question “What if we never discovered fossil fuels”.
Well, perhaps Earth would be in the middle of an ice age (And there is evidence to support it) which clearly isn’t good for all the species that would go extinct during such a period. If you look past the alarmism I don’t think we understand this complex system as well as we like to think we do. And that is completely ignoring the massive amount of good things that hydrocarbons do for our planet, help to feed the world, enable humanity to support huge cities and billions of humans, all the modern conveniences of life, and so on.
> Well, perhaps Earth would be in the middle of an ice age
It wouldn’t.
> And there is evidence to support it
There isn’t. Show us the link.
Earth’s cycles are measured in the many thousands of years. The industrial revolution has 200-300 years and hasn’t really made a dent since the last 100 or so.
The amount of denial in a supposedly well informed crowed such HN never ceases to surprise and depress me.
The article mentions that "on record" only covers the last ~40 years 5 separate times, including in the first sentence and visually in a graph. Is there any way it could be more clear? It also says in the subtitle and body that this change is probably not due to global warming. How are you reading it as an "effort to drive anxiety of extinction"?
It's honestly hard to imagine a more mildly-framed climate-related story that is still accurate. Do you have an example of some climate-related coverage that you find acceptable?
Geology is a funny thing. Those fossils lived 100 million years ago, when Antarctica wasn't even located at the South pole. So, that's a pretty, um, cold comfort.
Also, geological time scales are a bit of a curiosity. Humans are barely a blip. Folks sounding the alarm about climate change are speaking to humans. The Earth will keep turning, and even generalized life on Earth will probably be "fine" as long as we don't tip too far towards a Venus-level greenhouse. Humans might have a rougher go of it.
From https://www.planetary.org/articles/what-is-the-habitable-zon.... : "Mercury and Venus are not in the habitable zone because they are too close to the Sun to harbor liquid water. However, evidence suggests that the Sun used to be much dimmer. Venus may have once had oceans, but its proximity to the brightening Sun caused the liquid water to evaporate. The escape of liquid water from Venus’s surface may have directly led to the planet’s current inhospitable, dense atmosphere."
P.S. Hey, that link you provided already /is/ 3D. You can page through the different eras using the left/right arrow keys, but the maps are projected onto a 3D sphere that can be rotated using the mouse.
I think the main problem here is not necessarily the actual extent of the ice but rather rapid change and how we, people, are dependant on particular climate in particular parts of our planet.
We are all dependant on very fragile balance of various mechanisms that we do not fully understand.
For example, European climate depends very much on the mass of warm water transported by Gulfstream. Europe would be basically north Canada if not for all that warm water and precipitation that comes with it. But we also know that this stream itself depends on the water cooling up north and sinking to complete the cycle. If the water can't cool the cycle will be broken and Europe may suddenly change the climate dramatically at an astonishing rate.
I am not worried about plant and animal life -- these will migrate or adapt. Nature has always found a way in the past.
What I am worried is human toll, masses of people affected by rapid climate change that are unable to fend for themselves.
The only solution to fossil-fueled global warming is the elimination of the combustion of fossil fuels. This creates problems for many interests. The United States is currently the world's #1 producer of fossil fuels. A plan to eliminate fossil fuel production within 30 years, i.e. a 3% per year program (meaning, building out that 3% per year as solar/wind/storage) is plausible. However, this would upend the current global economic order. Hence, there is a deliberate effort to not replace fossil fuels with renewables, even though it is now technologically feasible to do so. That's all there is to it really.
The graph also seems to show that the highest maximum on record wasn’t that long ago. If anything, the graph shows that the amplitude is getting larger.
I read an interview with a paleontologist and he pointed out two things. First, climate 9000 years ago was about 1- 1.5 degree warmer than today. Even 1000 years ago it was much milder in Arctic or Northern Atlantic/Pacific. Second, the next ice age should start within the next 1000-2000 years. And for humans an ice age is much worse than global warming even by 2 degrees. So it could be that we should continue to increase CO2 as a protection against the ice age…
The first sentence is explicit: “Antarctic sea ice shrank to below 2 million square kilometres this year, the lowest minimum extent since satellite records began 43 years ago”
That's fair. When I'm being precise I try to be clear that I both understand and believe the science of climate change due to human activity is valid, and I believe and understand the science that says the climate changes due to non-human activity as well. I know people who take the position that climate has always changed and that humans are not a part of that (or I think even more perversely that humans are part of nature so any climate change they create is 'natural') which avoids the agency that humans have to be rational in the face of their own actions.
If you can find posts of mine from 10 years ago you'll see that my position hasn't changed a whole lot.
What I have never believed however is that it was possible to communicate the impacts humans are having to a large enough portion of the population that set priorities to change the eventuality that Al Gore warned of in "An Inconvenient Truth."
I've talked about this sort of self denial in my own journey to getting my weight under control where it is easy to say, ""These calories aren't making me fat, it is all those other calories I've already eaten that made me fat. Not eating this tasty treat would just deny me a treat and not change my weight one bit." It is true, and it was what I wanted to believe, but within that truth was that my actions, my habits, and my choices led me to place where I was fat.
It was hard work to get me to a point in the way I think about things to consciously change my day to day activities and change the way I thought about my "relationship" with food, to get to a reasonable weight. Do that for 7 billion people with regard to their cars/energy consumption? It is inconceivable![1]
That said, it also annoys me that the science says seeding the oceans with iron [2] could potentially remove massive amount of CO2 from the air, and yet we don't even allow people to try. Either it is an existential threat (which I think it is) so everything is on the table, or it isn't.
Sorry to hear about the weight struggle. My personal experience is that it's a very habit dependent and hard to conquer thing.
And yes, we can’t possibly convince everyone. We shouldn't try. Long term thinking is really hard.
We need top down public policies informed by science. Heavy tax incentives and disincentives.
We should definitively try seeding the oceans, but planet scale engineering is some scary shit. The stakes are as high as can be and calculating all possible outcomes is next to impossible. It's also hard to start small and scale. So, very much needed and terribly dangerous.
> because "on record" represents a nanosecond of geologic time
We are concerned with human survival, not geological history, and human civilization has exsited within the current nanosecond. We don't want to be geological history.
That doesn't seem like the right comparison to make, though. The time when there was no ice was not a time conducive to humans (or civilisation, at the very least).
do you have any other ideas about how we can slow the human influence on climate change? people have been trying alternatives to fear for quite some time… and well, here we are
The general reason to worry has more to do with the rate of change than the change itself, illustrated the best by this xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1732/ Historically, life had a lot more time to adapt to changes in the atmosphere. Times we know of sudden changes, like the meteor that killed the dinosaurs, are mass extinctions.
On one hand, we're already a mass extinction event even without considering the temperature change, so maybe it's not that much of an additional reason to worry. On the other hand, stacking even more stress onto the habitats of creatures we rely on might be the straw the breaks the camel's back as well. And that's ignoring things like sea level rise for our coastal cities, and the effect temperature changes might have on agriculture. Much like the above, the rate we're affecting the climate will not give us much time to respond to issues.
Do you want every article about climate change to include at 10 page essay about the geological history as we know it, how we know the current warming is caused by human activities, and what happened during past rapid warming events and what their causes were?
The climate was far more extreme in the past than what AGW is expected to do. It doesn't matter. Climate change is expected to be a problem because of changes that are faster than humans and other species can adapt.
Having said that, nobody has any idea how much of a problem it'll be for humans or even if life will be better or worse than it already is. All we have is predictions of sea level, temperature, etc. that don't directly impact us.
That says nothing about how bad it will be. Almost all houses get destroyed on a similar time frame anyway simply because people don't want to keep using old houses. They're often only designed to last 50 years.
[1] https://oceanwide-expeditions.com/blog/the-ancient-fossil-fo...