7 ms·

Scientists warn of perilous climate shift in decades, not centuries

132 points by kdazzle 11y ago

drallison 11y ago
duplicate
- cryptoz 11y ago
  Not a duplicate. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Scientists%20warn%20of%20perilous%20climate%20shift%20in%20decades,%20not%20centuries&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix&page=0 https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Scientists%20warn%20of%20peril...
  - dalke 11y ago
    The title of this submission is "Scientists warn of perilous climate shift in decades, not centuries". The previous two links used "Scientists Warn of Perilous Climate Shift Within Decades, Not Centuries". Note the difference between "in" and "within". The actual NYT article uses "within", so this submission title is incorrect. (Edit: originally I thought it was due to the different URLs used, then I thought it was the difference in case. On the third try I noticed that one differing word.)
  - melling 11y ago
    click the (nytimes.com) link and scan the last 10 articles. You don't need to do a search.
- dalke 11y ago
  The HN moderators now support some duplicates. Sometimes things fall too quickly off the first page, or are at the wrong time of day and not really noticed, where it might be noticed a couple of hours later. When there is a duplicate, at least in a case like this where the "past" link shows no previous postings, I tend to also include a link to the previous posts. For example: "Third time this has been posted: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=global-warming-sea-level-carbon&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=global-warming-sea-level-carbo... " works because the slug text is the same. Turns out the title of this submission uses "in" instead of "within", which is why it's not trivial to find previous submissions. FWIW, of the previous two postings, only one had a comment; drallison posted a link to resources that cryptoz also points out in this the comments to this post.
- dang 11y ago
  We don't count a story as a duplicate until it has had significant attention in the last year or so: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
cryptoz 11y ago
Here is the paper that has just been peer-reviewed and published in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics: Ice melt, sea level rise and superstorms: evidence from paleoclimate data, climate modeling, and modern observations that 2 °C global warming could be dangerous. http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/16/3761/2016/ http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/16/3761/2016/ And the 15-minute video by the author to accompany the paper: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JP-cRqCQRc8&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JP-cRqCQRc8&feature=youtu.be
- nonbel 11y ago
  >"The net forcing driving climate change in our simulations (Fig. S16 in the Supplement) is almost 2Wm^-2 at present and increases to 5–6Wm^-2 at the end of this century" Thanks, from the paper it looks like they just hardcoded the warming into their model, ie it is not due to simulation of a physical process. Is that correct?
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
whitegrape 11y ago
Hasn't this been the party line for..decades? (Since sometime in the 90s at least?)
- splawn 11y ago
  is there a science party?
  - metasean 11y ago
    In the US, I think the closest is the Green Party - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Party_of_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Party_of_the_United_Stat...
    - splawn 11y ago
      Perhaps... the left has its anti-science bugaboos as well though.
    - cjslep 11y ago
      As long as it isn't nuclear science. Edit: I do mean nuclear science, not just nuclear power.
      - davidw 11y ago
        Or GMO's, or vaccines (for a subset of those folks).
      - TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
        Is the hatred of nuclear really so irrational? It's an expensive way of generating electricity which has frequent safety issues and gives the state the means to build nuclear weapons.
        mturmon 11y ago
        ...with a track record of concealing problems by supposedly neutral and trustworthy experts.
jamesblonde 11y ago
I was at a climate science workshop in Stockholm a few weeks ago and a well known researcher from Bremen University, who has a well known simulation for expected increases in global temperatures, showed that recent changes in their assumptions due to new measurements increased their expected temperature increase from 4.5 degrees by 2100 to 7 degrees. And nobody was that shocked. Shocking!
- touristtam 11y ago
  what's his name?
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- lololomg 11y ago
  7 degrees? Holy shit
percept 11y ago
"He gained fame in 1988 when he warned Congress that global warming had already begun. He was ahead of the scientific consensus at the time, but it became clear in retrospect that Earth had been in the midst of a period of rapid global warming at the time he testified."
jbattle 11y ago
Are there any credible options for geoengineering our way out of this? If prevention fails that is
- neffy 11y ago
  There are a couple of ideas for engineering that would make the albedo (reflectivity) of the North Pole area controllable. One involves a space shield, the other is floating panels (one side black, one side white). The larger issue is a) predicting the result and b) the 'it could be good for Ontario' problem that all types of climate change bring benefits as well as costs. f.ex. a return to glacial conditions would suck for the Northern Hemisphere, but be good news for India, Africa etc.
- specialist 11y ago
  Hope so. Prevention failed. I believe, but obviously cannot prove, that we've already passed the tipping point. Thawing tundra, ocean acidification, and burning forests are all now in positive feedback loops. Meaning we could stop all human activity tomorrow and atmospheric CO2 would continue to increase. But the great unknown that scares me is the thawing methane clathrate. Hard to imagine mitigating this one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis
guard-of-terra 11y ago
Let's launch a solar shade! Plus - we get to decide what parts of earth to shade. I propose arid areas and also those who withholds from paying a voluntary shade tax.
Gravityloss 11y ago
Very good ice sheet dynamics presentations from AGU 2015 are available on youtube or on AGU page. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3p9uRxX95f4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3p9uRxX95f4 You can think of an ice sheet like a cathedral. Once you melt away the side buttress, a large portion of the whole thing falls into the sea. Many large glaciers have surprisingly small "gatekeepers". It's a dynamic process [x]. We have never seen a massive ice sheet collapse so don't know for certain if it takes two decades or two centuries. The potential to raise the sea level is large, many meters. This now adds the ocean dynamics there, but I wonder if I got this right: The melt water has no salt, is thus less dense and hence stays on top and just keeps on warming and warming and will then melt the ice a lot quicker. x: by dynamic I mean that one can't just get a linear relationship between temperature and melt rate. Think more of a collapsing building.
meow_mix 11y ago
Does anyone who understands the methods they use for prediction care to chime in? I'm curious to know how people model such a complex system with any hope of accuracy. Do they simply rely on some sort of time series data? Or is it something more interesting?
justsaysmthng 11y ago
"Why worry about things you cannot control? " My wife, my parents and most of my friends tell me when I try to bring up the climate topic. "Either do something about it or let's talk about something else, it's depressing"... And I often wonder - what is the root cause of this climate thing? We need to fix the root cause and then things will fall into place... Right ? See, I don't think it's the fossil fuels. I don't think it's the pollution and the destruction of forests and the mining and the toxic rivers and the plastic in the oceans. All these mechanistic manifestations of human activity are consequences of our dominant philosophy of life. What's important to us, what matters more, about choices we make every day. Forests or nice furniture ? Clean air or 6.3 liter V12 (yeah!) ? Clean rivers in China or iPhone 6s ? Beef or Lentils ? Me or my competitors ? Ultimately it's the answers that we have to some very simple questions - about who we are and why we are here... These are spiritual questions. So my conclusion was that: The state of the Planet is mirroring humanity's spiritual health. So if this is the root cause, is there a way to cure it ? Well :) Can you envision a way to make 7 billion people of various races and religions agree on one and true "spiritual" code ? I find it very hard. But maybe not spiritual - maybe we can use Science and invent new things... Well, isn't it "science" that got us here in the first place ? Isn't it like "throwing good money after bad" ? I don't know. As a scientist I sure hope we can figure something out. There are a couple of ideas we could use... But there are other issues.. How can we renounce our way of life, our growth, our social order, the economy, the stock market.... Because that's what it would take to fix things.. "Going green" is too little too late. We need to stop consuming, we need to stop growing, we need to stop competing. And that's political and economic blasphemy right there. Edit: Changed my mind. Although I think our chances of fixing this mess are slim, I still think there's hope. There are things we can do about it. We are technologists. We have a lot more power than we care to admit. Imagine Facebook "spamming" all users about climate change, about recycling, about respecting nature. Imagine Google showing up "red spots" of pollution on the maps. Instead of ads, why not climate propaganda from time to time ? What if every iPhone's or Android's alarm went off at the same time warning users that the Planet is in danger ? Go plant a tree now! Simple, cheap, yet could have dramatic effects.. Eventually it would cause political changes and hopefully we'll at least extend the problem further into the future. If only the Planet could pay us back somehow...
- 11y ago
kirk21 11y ago
Looking into Kiva green loans to add value with some spare cash.

132 points by kdazzle 11y ago

drallison 11y ago

duplicate

cryptoz 11y ago
Not a duplicate. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Scientists%20warn%20of%20perilous%20climate%20shift%20in%20decades,%20not%20centuries&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix&page=0 https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Scientists%20warn%20of%20peril...
- dalke 11y ago
  The title of this submission is "Scientists warn of perilous climate shift in decades, not centuries". The previous two links used "Scientists Warn of Perilous Climate Shift Within Decades, Not Centuries". Note the difference between "in" and "within". The actual NYT article uses "within", so this submission title is incorrect. (Edit: originally I thought it was due to the different URLs used, then I thought it was the difference in case. On the third try I noticed that one differing word.)
- melling 11y ago
  click the (nytimes.com) link and scan the last 10 articles. You don't need to do a search.
dalke 11y ago
The HN moderators now support some duplicates. Sometimes things fall too quickly off the first page, or are at the wrong time of day and not really noticed, where it might be noticed a couple of hours later. When there is a duplicate, at least in a case like this where the "past" link shows no previous postings, I tend to also include a link to the previous posts. For example: "Third time this has been posted: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=global-warming-sea-level-carbon&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=global-warming-sea-level-carbo... " works because the slug text is the same. Turns out the title of this submission uses "in" instead of "within", which is why it's not trivial to find previous submissions. FWIW, of the previous two postings, only one had a comment; drallison posted a link to resources that cryptoz also points out in this the comments to this post.
dang 11y ago
We don't count a story as a duplicate until it has had significant attention in the last year or so: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

cryptoz 11y ago

Here is the paper that has just been peer-reviewed and published in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics: Ice melt, sea level rise and superstorms: evidence from paleoclimate data, climate modeling, and modern observations that 2 °C global warming could be dangerous. http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/16/3761/2016/ http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/16/3761/2016/ And the 15-minute video by the author to accompany the paper: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JP-cRqCQRc8&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JP-cRqCQRc8&feature=youtu.be

nonbel 11y ago
>"The net forcing driving climate change in our simulations (Fig. S16 in the Supplement) is almost 2Wm^-2 at present and increases to 5–6Wm^-2 at the end of this century" Thanks, from the paper it looks like they just hardcoded the warming into their model, ie it is not due to simulation of a physical process. Is that correct?
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]

whitegrape 11y ago

Hasn't this been the party line for..decades? (Since sometime in the 90s at least?)

splawn 11y ago
is there a science party?
- metasean 11y ago
  In the US, I think the closest is the Green Party - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Party_of_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Party_of_the_United_Stat...
  - splawn 11y ago
    Perhaps... the left has its anti-science bugaboos as well though.
  - cjslep 11y ago
    As long as it isn't nuclear science. Edit: I do mean nuclear science, not just nuclear power.
    - davidw 11y ago
      Or GMO's, or vaccines (for a subset of those folks).
    - TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
      Is the hatred of nuclear really so irrational? It's an expensive way of generating electricity which has frequent safety issues and gives the state the means to build nuclear weapons.
      - mturmon 11y ago
        ...with a track record of concealing problems by supposedly neutral and trustworthy experts.

jamesblonde 11y ago

I was at a climate science workshop in Stockholm a few weeks ago and a well known researcher from Bremen University, who has a well known simulation for expected increases in global temperatures, showed that recent changes in their assumptions due to new measurements increased their expected temperature increase from 4.5 degrees by 2100 to 7 degrees. And nobody was that shocked. Shocking!

touristtam 11y ago
what's his name?
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
lololomg 11y ago
7 degrees? Holy shit

percept 11y ago

"He gained fame in 1988 when he warned Congress that global warming had already begun. He was ahead of the scientific consensus at the time, but it became clear in retrospect that Earth had been in the midst of a period of rapid global warming at the time he testified."

jbattle 11y ago

Are there any credible options for geoengineering our way out of this? If prevention fails that is

neffy 11y ago
There are a couple of ideas for engineering that would make the albedo (reflectivity) of the North Pole area controllable. One involves a space shield, the other is floating panels (one side black, one side white). The larger issue is a) predicting the result and b) the 'it could be good for Ontario' problem that all types of climate change bring benefits as well as costs. f.ex. a return to glacial conditions would suck for the Northern Hemisphere, but be good news for India, Africa etc.
specialist 11y ago
Hope so. Prevention failed. I believe, but obviously cannot prove, that we've already passed the tipping point. Thawing tundra, ocean acidification, and burning forests are all now in positive feedback loops. Meaning we could stop all human activity tomorrow and atmospheric CO2 would continue to increase. But the great unknown that scares me is the thawing methane clathrate. Hard to imagine mitigating this one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis

guard-of-terra 11y ago

Let's launch a solar shade! Plus - we get to decide what parts of earth to shade. I propose arid areas and also those who withholds from paying a voluntary shade tax.

Gravityloss 11y ago

Very good ice sheet dynamics presentations from AGU 2015 are available on youtube or on AGU page. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3p9uRxX95f4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3p9uRxX95f4 You can think of an ice sheet like a cathedral. Once you melt away the side buttress, a large portion of the whole thing falls into the sea. Many large glaciers have surprisingly small "gatekeepers". It's a dynamic process [x]. We have never seen a massive ice sheet collapse so don't know for certain if it takes two decades or two centuries. The potential to raise the sea level is large, many meters. This now adds the ocean dynamics there, but I wonder if I got this right: The melt water has no salt, is thus less dense and hence stays on top and just keeps on warming and warming and will then melt the ice a lot quicker. x: by dynamic I mean that one can't just get a linear relationship between temperature and melt rate. Think more of a collapsing building.

meow_mix 11y ago

Does anyone who understands the methods they use for prediction care to chime in? I'm curious to know how people model such a complex system with any hope of accuracy. Do they simply rely on some sort of time series data? Or is it something more interesting?

justsaysmthng 11y ago

"Why worry about things you cannot control? " My wife, my parents and most of my friends tell me when I try to bring up the climate topic. "Either do something about it or let's talk about something else, it's depressing"... And I often wonder - what is the root cause of this climate thing? We need to fix the root cause and then things will fall into place... Right ? See, I don't think it's the fossil fuels. I don't think it's the pollution and the destruction of forests and the mining and the toxic rivers and the plastic in the oceans. All these mechanistic manifestations of human activity are consequences of our dominant philosophy of life. What's important to us, what matters more, about choices we make every day. Forests or nice furniture ? Clean air or 6.3 liter V12 (yeah!) ? Clean rivers in China or iPhone 6s ? Beef or Lentils ? Me or my competitors ? Ultimately it's the answers that we have to some very simple questions - about who we are and why we are here... These are spiritual questions. So my conclusion was that: The state of the Planet is mirroring humanity's spiritual health. So if this is the root cause, is there a way to cure it ? Well :) Can you envision a way to make 7 billion people of various races and religions agree on one and true "spiritual" code ? I find it very hard. But maybe not spiritual - maybe we can use Science and invent new things... Well, isn't it "science" that got us here in the first place ? Isn't it like "throwing good money after bad" ? I don't know. As a scientist I sure hope we can figure something out. There are a couple of ideas we could use... But there are other issues.. How can we renounce our way of life, our growth, our social order, the economy, the stock market.... Because that's what it would take to fix things.. "Going green" is too little too late. We need to stop consuming, we need to stop growing, we need to stop competing. And that's political and economic blasphemy right there. Edit: Changed my mind. Although I think our chances of fixing this mess are slim, I still think there's hope. There are things we can do about it. We are technologists. We have a lot more power than we care to admit. Imagine Facebook "spamming" all users about climate change, about recycling, about respecting nature. Imagine Google showing up "red spots" of pollution on the maps. Instead of ads, why not climate propaganda from time to time ? What if every iPhone's or Android's alarm went off at the same time warning users that the Planet is in danger ? Go plant a tree now! Simple, cheap, yet could have dramatic effects.. Eventually it would cause political changes and hopefully we'll at least extend the problem further into the future. If only the Planet could pay us back somehow...

11y ago

kirk21 11y ago

Looking into Kiva green loans to add value with some spare cash.