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Climate Change Is Hell on Alaska's Formerly Frozen Highways

53 points by blondie9x 10y ago

CWuestefeld 10y ago
I have trouble interpreting stories like these as anything other than scare tactics. I'm not a "denier". I'm acknowledging that there's been an increase, generally in the range of 1-2 degrees F. But given an increase of that magnitude, I find it very hard to blame for the kinds of problems being described here. 1F to 2F is well within the normal range of variation, and so if the roadways are suffering from it, it must be that the roads weren't properly designed for the expected variations to begin with.
- JustUhThought 10y ago
  1-2 degrees globally. Celsius. And the predictions are consistently outpaced by reality.
  - JustUhThought 10y ago
    So, you were talking about temp change to date. Not predicted. My comment speaks to your commenet incorrectly. Sorry about that. I can't revise or delete my comment on this device, or I would. My bad.
  - gruez 10y ago
    To add to this, it's not as if temperatures everywhere went up by 1-2 degrees. polar areas are more affected than average by global warming
    - vkou 10y ago
      The average world temperature is 1.4 C above the baseline this year. Yes, the poles have been hit the hardest, but we are still outpacing all predictions. Meanwhile, in 2015, the world's governments have agreed to cap warming to 2.0 C by 2100... But won't take any action today. Why do I have the feeling that we will completely miss that target?
      - CWuestefeld 10y ago
        but we are still outpacing all predictions. It's this kind of stuff that I'm arguing about. First, there's a wide range of predictions, and up until a decade ago, the measurements were middle of the road across them - far from "ALL predicitons". Then came the "pause". For over a decade, the warming seemed to pause. Notice I emphasize "seemed". The observed atmospheric temperature barely moved at all, it was way below ALL predictions. [1] I'm not denying, I'm not claiming that the "pause" disproves the theory. We know that there were other phenomena occurring, like oceans acting as a buffer. But the fact remains that observed temperatures deviated significantly below predictions for a protracted period of time. When people come along and make claims like we are still outpacing all predictions, they make it easy for deniers to single out these exaggerations and pretend like their inaccuracy disproves the whole idea. By giving the deniers an easy strawman to argue against, you're creating an obstacle to real progress on the problem. [1] "Scientists who study climate change and skeptics of human-caused global warming can agree on at least this: Global temperatures haven't risen nearly as much this century as model projections say they should have." -- https://www.wunderground.com/news/no-hiatus-pause-global-warming-climate-change-heres-why-20140109 https://www.wunderground.com/news/no-hiatus-pause-global-war... Of course, if you read on, you'll find proposed explanations for the phenomenon. But as far as atmospheric measurements go, it's absolutely false that things have been worse than predicted, and downright absurd to claim that things have been worse than "all" (i.e., even the most pessimistic) predictions.
        vkou 10y ago
        When I say all predictions, I should have quantified it as 'all predictions used by policymakers'. There are certainly apocalyptic models that have called for more warming then what we've seen. We aren't using them to set policy - we are using models that have been underestimating the impact of warming.
  - qeternity 10y ago
    What are you talking about? Reality has far underpaced most climate models. I'm not a denier either, but let's get the facts straight.
- csours 10y ago
  I don't know if you've been to Alaska, but a large part of the lowland is swamp that happens to be frozen most of the time. The current roads are basically a pile of gravel on top of that. If the swamp is frozen for less of the time, the gravel moves more. So yes, the road was not engineered with these conditions in mind, but building a road on a swamp is not easy to do, even if engineered correctly. Barely mentioned in the article, the Trans-Alaska Pipeline was built with cooling pipes to keep the ground it is built on cold. [1][2] 1. http://dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a073597.pdf http://dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a073597.pdf [pdf] 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Construction_of_the_Trans-Alaska_Pipeline_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Construction_of_the_Trans-Alas...
  - monknomo 10y ago
    Not even a pile a gravel. A pile of frozen swamp ploughed higher and higher until it quit sinking, then sprinkled with gravel and topped with asphalt The Tok Cutoff is particularly bad these days
    - csours 10y ago
      Fair enough. That swamp muck is even less stable when wet.
- lamarkia 10y ago
  An increase of 1C globally means that the planet gets hotter by a gazzilion of Watts. Imagine how much energy is needed to increase the temperature of a glass of water by just 1C. Then, a swimming pool. Finally, a planet.
- Gravityloss 10y ago
  I wonder, if a road lasted for seventy years, and then became unusable because of changes within ten, one could say that it's not within the "normal" variation anymore? Probably someone has an article that is a lot more exact and involves a lot more statistics...
  - maxerickson 10y ago
    We don't have a clear picture of normal. This page has some graphs of ground temps the last 100 years: http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/arctic-zone/detect/land-permafrost.shtml http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/arctic-zone/detect/land-permafrost.... They are for areas north of the highway, but it shows temps in 1950 higher than they are today. The text also mentions that the ground has cooled slightly in the recent 20 years.
- lkrubner 10y ago
  You are in fact a mild denier. Merely writing "I'm not a denier" doesn't change the implications of what you are writing. While world wide changes might so far amount to 1-2 degrees F, it is well known that the warming is concentrated in the northern and southern latitudes, so the changes in Alaska are much more than the global average.
- dagss 10y ago
  So what are you saying happened -- somebody went in with machinery and created the cracks in the road, then go and pretend it is warming? Others have pointed out that avg(Alaska, Summer) != avg(World, All Year)
- ChrisClark 10y ago
  1 to 2 degrees increase in the global average is disastrous in the long term.
- Diederich 10y ago
  The temperature increase isn't evenly spread across the globe, it's concentrated toward the poles.
- mikestew 10y ago
  the roads weren't properly designed for the expected variations to begin with. Considering that the road has been there for seventy-years, I'd argue that it was designed just fine. I mean, yeesh, who am I going to pick for my SME on road construction, the anonymous dude/dudess on a forum devoted to work that will never involve a shovel or leave a callous on your finger, or the U. S. Army Corps of friggin' Engineers who have built roads in places you or I wouldn't survive more than a day or two? But all appeals to authority aside, let's assume for the moment that the road was built to account for a variation in temps. Problem is, that variation window moved by a few degrees. You get that, right? That the average temp was (just making up #s) 28F +/- 2F and now it's 30F +/- 2F? With my made up numbers, the road never reached the freezing (EDIT: melting, actually) point even with variation. Now it does.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  A change of X degrees in the global average temperature does not mean a uniform, across all times and locations, increase of X degrees in local temperatures.
- scatters 10y ago
  The problems affect a fairly narrow band of latitudes; specifically, those where the average long-term temperature was just below freezing i.e. the southern margin of the permafrost. 1-2F is indeed within natural variation, but historically a warm year or two was followed by a harsh winter to refreeze the surface so that the deep layer stayed frozen. Now, the average temperature is just above freezing or close enough to it that the heating effect of the asphalt pushes the local average temperature above freezing. This means that deep layers are now thawing for the first time in thousands of years; they will stabilize eventually, but in the meantime they're going to be near impossible to build roads on. And the thaw line continues to march north, year by year.
JustUhThought 10y ago
We are in for a shtt-storm. But go over to Bloomberg news, and they're wondering why the Japanese won't make the tough cultural sacrifices needed to increase immigration, to stave off stagnant GDP caused by declining population and the accompanying demographics. (I get the workers to non-workers issues in play. Even with that, I believe it is telling, which solutions are put forth. Increase immigration. Not, decrease consumption.) Seriously, our roads are sinking. Record temperatures. Record droughts. Record greenhouse gasses. But how many times were "jobs" talked about at the DNC and RNC? "Global warming"? We, are so, f-cked.
- superswordfish 10y ago
  It seems like we're discovering a bunch of technologies that involve removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere now (and even using it as a resource). That isn't the only problem gas, but I'm optimistic that we will solve the "greenhouse effect" problem through this sort of climate engineering before the real disaster of rising sea levels gets too far. In a century people will probably be freaked out by a host of issues we've barely even thought of today (things like the Kessler syndrome that are not so top-of-the-mind).
  - vkou 10y ago
    The real disaster isn't rising sealevels (except in Bangladesh). Homes can be rebuilt. Its just a question of money. The real disaster is agricultural collapse in the tropics and subtropics. Either way, it would be far cheaper to switch our energy production to renewables, then to geo-engineer on a planet scale. We aren't doing that in any meaningful way. Instead we pat ourselves on the back for reducing US coal energy generation to 37%. Never mind that this entire reduction comes from burning natural gas...
    - sliverstorm 10y ago
      Never mind that this entire reduction comes from burning natural gas... It's still a huge improvement, cutting CO2 output by half and eliminating other byproducts.
omegaworks 10y ago
>Annual repair costs for one section that runs through the Yukon are C$30,000 ($22,900) per kilometer Delicious, delicious externalized cost. It's time for a carbon tax.
parsnips 10y ago
Classic propaganda. Fissures on the Alaskan highway are caused by temperature variance. This has been happening since the highway was built in the 40's. Example: >Winter frost is extremely hard on the roads. Do not be surprised to see deep fissures across the highway. http://www.dangerousroads.org/north-america/canada/747-alaska-highway-canada.html http://www.dangerousroads.org/north-america/canada/747-alask... So when the author says: >Scientists say they’re the crystal-clear manifestation that permafrost -- slabs of ice and sediment just beneath the Earth’s surface in colder climes -- is thawing as global temperatures keep rising. I become extremely skeptical. This is the danger of lazy journalism and ultimately lazy readers confirmation bias.
scarygliders 10y ago
Is HN now going to be taken over by climate change stories? I honestly thought I'd gotten away from all that when I stopped reading Slashdot. Now it seems to be infesting here too. I await the inevitable downvotes.
- csours 10y ago
  FYI the downvotes are for not contributing to the discussion.
dharma1 10y ago
The "fun" starts when the feedback loops really start going https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_methane_emissions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_methane_emissions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane_clathrate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane_clathrate Depending on how fast we'll see arable land being lost, food supply for 9 billion people in 2040 could be quite problematic
- nibs 10y ago
  We need to create a market for halophyte plants that can be grown using salt water in dessert/saline conditions. It requires extensive marketing investment and skill in order to create a market at each level of biomass (biofuel, animal feed, people food, niche health products, pharma).
  - dharma1 10y ago
    Interesting. I had to Google it - it looks like 2% of plants tolerate salt water to different degrees. It looks like an interesting field for breeding or potentially GM to cultivate seawater tolerant food crops
rybosome 10y ago
Is there any reason to be optimistic about our ability to deal with climate change? I have to admit that this topic depresses me deeply, as the United States' tepid response does not match the magnitude of the problem. It is shockingly easy to imagine scenarios resulting in the collapse of civilization (agricultural collapse places significant pressure on a few areas which leads to a domino effect of instability triggering nuclear war).
- lisper 10y ago
  > Is there any reason to be optimistic about our ability to deal with climate change? Yes: because failing to be optimistic about it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Also, you never know what will make people come around. In any process of winning hearts and minds there is always a time before which things seem hopeless. Look at the Sanders and Trump campaigns: when they started, no one believed they could succeed. Bernie came very close, and Trump actually won. (Not that I want to hold up Trump as a model of how to proceed, but just as a data point to show that the unexpected can happen.) Maybe if we get enough "thousand year floods" like just happened in Maryland -- say a dozen of those events in a year or in a month -- people will suddenly wake up and realize the gravity of the situation and find their sense of duty and planetary patriotism. You also never know what's coming down the technology pipe. This, for example, looks promising: http://phys.org/news/2016-07-breakthrough-solar-cell-captures-carbon.html http://phys.org/news/2016-07-breakthrough-solar-cell-capture... We can still fix this. Don't lose hope.
  - agentultra 10y ago
    > We can still fix this. Don't lose hope. I think it's beyond our capabilities to "fix" in any meaningful amount of time. However we can still survive. If we remain optimistic and plan to adapt to the coming changes.
  - Diederich 10y ago
    This is the correct answer. We don't know if or how we can deal with the problems coming up. But giving up will surely make things worse. Further, we have to choose to not give in to excessive alarmism. I am typing as someone who struggles with this every day, since I've been watching climate change closely for quite a few years now. Things are objectively accelerating, so it's easy to give in to panic. But that might be even worse than giving up. We have to approach this with focus, an iron will and with an even temperament. Every scary climate related news item should be practically drowned in data, as hard and objective as we can get it. Because, these days, nothing puts people 'to sleep' the way unfounded alarmism does. Because people are numb to all of the alarm handles being pulled, all over the place.
pinaceae 10y ago
Meanwhile in Russia, Anthrax spores are active again because of the thawing of (former) permafrost - http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36951542 http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36951542
Diederich 10y ago
I decided to drive to the arctic ocean from California in 2014, and so traversed the north half of this highway by RV. It was a magical, difficult, inspiring and sorrowful experience. I had never seen a black spruce before (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picea_mariana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picea_mariana), but they were enormous, pristine forests of them. But a lot of them were NOT pristine. For dozens of miles at a time, most all of the trees would be at an odd sideways angle. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drunken_trees https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drunken_trees) The permafrost they relied on for stability was melting. More than two years later, I suspect that the countless trees I saw leaning steeply to one side are mostly dead. On the Dalton highway, once past the Brooks range (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks_Range https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks_Range), there were enormously quantities of heavy rain. I didn't realize, at the time, how unusual that was. It turns out that the Alaskan tundra is typically extremely dry, and while I was up there, more than a years worth of (not very cold) rain fell, turning the road into a morass. My goal was to put my feet into the arctic ocean, and the only way to do that is to first get to Dead Horse, Alaska (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadhorse,_Alaska https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadhorse,_Alaska). The 'town limits' are several miles from the ocean, and it's rigorously patrolled private land in between, controlled by various oil companies. They typically offer tours, but I arrived a bit too early, so I was thinking about hiking a few miles up the Sag River (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagavanirktok_River https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagavanirktok_River). Fortunately, I happened to talk to an oil worker guy at the gas station, and he said I would not likely survive such a hike. Polar bears, he said, had been getting extremely aggressive over the past few years. They were starving. At that moment, I felt a unique feeling, that few people experience these days. In my four decades living, I've been in a couple of life or death circumstances. But it wasn't quite like that. The idea that I had nearly found myself in a situation where I might have been hunted by an enormous, hungry animal. A creature who rightly considered me food, and little else. It was a curious feeling! Fortunately, the tours started the next day, and I took a bus through the vast oil infrastructure, to a specific spot where tourists got to interact with the arctic ocean. It was cold, gray and sleeting. The ocean almost seemed like a very large lake, with pretty small waves. The ice had melted early that year, again, and so was not visible from shore.
blaze33 10y ago
So, I've been curious: here's a chart of the mean annual temperature departure for Alaska (1949-2015)[1](source: [2]), the past two years have been particularly hotter there with anomalies > 4.5°F. The NOAA has more detailed datasets but it's a bit more work to extract meaningful information. Also I'm sick of hearing that people believe (or don't) in climate change when it's just factual data. [1] http://climate.gi.alaska.edu/sites/default/files/ClimateTrends/StateWide_Change_1949-2015_F.png http://climate.gi.alaska.edu/sites/default/files/ClimateTren... [2] http://climate.gi.alaska.edu/ClimTrends/Change/TempChange.html http://climate.gi.alaska.edu/ClimTrends/Change/TempChange.ht...
agentultra 10y ago
It's already hell in many Northern Canadian communities that rely on ice-roads [0]. From what I understand we're on track for an unavoidable > 2C increase in global average temperatures this century. It's also quite likely that we'll be passing the extinction threshold if we don't take extreme measures to avoid it. It's quite likely another Syria-like crisis could happen anywhere affected by climate change. I'm disconcerted that these issues are not the most pressing issues of our time. There are many valid socio-political issues to consider but extinction seems to be the most important one to me. Maybe it's because the predictions are far enough into the future that we cannot fathom a solution right now... sort of like how smokers don't make the decision to quit today because it's not going to kill them right now. [0] https://news.vice.com/article/canadas-ice-roads-are-melting-and-that-is-terrible-news-for-aboriginal-communities https://news.vice.com/article/canadas-ice-roads-are-melting-...
uptown 10y ago
So if fresh water will become scarce, and renewable sources of energy are essential, where can individuals invest to provide financial backing to companies addressing these issues?

53 points by blondie9x 10y ago

I have trouble interpreting stories like these as anything other than scare tactics. I'm not a "denier". I'm acknowledging that there's been an increase, generally in the range of 1-2 degrees F. But given an increase of that magnitude, I find it very hard to blame for the kinds of problems being described here. 1F to 2F is well within the normal range of variation, and so if the roadways are suffering from it, it must be that the roads weren't properly designed for the expected variations to begin with.

JustUhThought 10y ago
1-2 degrees globally. Celsius. And the predictions are consistently outpaced by reality.
- JustUhThought 10y ago
  So, you were talking about temp change to date. Not predicted. My comment speaks to your commenet incorrectly. Sorry about that. I can't revise or delete my comment on this device, or I would. My bad.
- gruez 10y ago
  To add to this, it's not as if temperatures everywhere went up by 1-2 degrees. polar areas are more affected than average by global warming
  - vkou 10y ago
    The average world temperature is 1.4 C above the baseline this year. Yes, the poles have been hit the hardest, but we are still outpacing all predictions. Meanwhile, in 2015, the world's governments have agreed to cap warming to 2.0 C by 2100... But won't take any action today. Why do I have the feeling that we will completely miss that target?
    - CWuestefeld 10y ago
      but we are still outpacing all predictions. It's this kind of stuff that I'm arguing about. First, there's a wide range of predictions, and up until a decade ago, the measurements were middle of the road across them - far from "ALL predicitons". Then came the "pause". For over a decade, the warming seemed to pause. Notice I emphasize "seemed". The observed atmospheric temperature barely moved at all, it was way below ALL predictions. [1] I'm not denying, I'm not claiming that the "pause" disproves the theory. We know that there were other phenomena occurring, like oceans acting as a buffer. But the fact remains that observed temperatures deviated significantly below predictions for a protracted period of time. When people come along and make claims like we are still outpacing all predictions, they make it easy for deniers to single out these exaggerations and pretend like their inaccuracy disproves the whole idea. By giving the deniers an easy strawman to argue against, you're creating an obstacle to real progress on the problem. [1] "Scientists who study climate change and skeptics of human-caused global warming can agree on at least this: Global temperatures haven't risen nearly as much this century as model projections say they should have." -- https://www.wunderground.com/news/no-hiatus-pause-global-warming-climate-change-heres-why-20140109 https://www.wunderground.com/news/no-hiatus-pause-global-war... Of course, if you read on, you'll find proposed explanations for the phenomenon. But as far as atmospheric measurements go, it's absolutely false that things have been worse than predicted, and downright absurd to claim that things have been worse than "all" (i.e., even the most pessimistic) predictions.
      - vkou 10y ago
        When I say all predictions, I should have quantified it as 'all predictions used by policymakers'. There are certainly apocalyptic models that have called for more warming then what we've seen. We aren't using them to set policy - we are using models that have been underestimating the impact of warming.
- qeternity 10y ago
  What are you talking about? Reality has far underpaced most climate models. I'm not a denier either, but let's get the facts straight.
csours 10y ago
I don't know if you've been to Alaska, but a large part of the lowland is swamp that happens to be frozen most of the time. The current roads are basically a pile of gravel on top of that. If the swamp is frozen for less of the time, the gravel moves more. So yes, the road was not engineered with these conditions in mind, but building a road on a swamp is not easy to do, even if engineered correctly. Barely mentioned in the article, the Trans-Alaska Pipeline was built with cooling pipes to keep the ground it is built on cold. [1][2] 1. http://dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a073597.pdf http://dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a073597.pdf [pdf] 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Construction_of_the_Trans-Alaska_Pipeline_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Construction_of_the_Trans-Alas...
- monknomo 10y ago
  Not even a pile a gravel. A pile of frozen swamp ploughed higher and higher until it quit sinking, then sprinkled with gravel and topped with asphalt The Tok Cutoff is particularly bad these days
  - csours 10y ago
    Fair enough. That swamp muck is even less stable when wet.
lamarkia 10y ago
An increase of 1C globally means that the planet gets hotter by a gazzilion of Watts. Imagine how much energy is needed to increase the temperature of a glass of water by just 1C. Then, a swimming pool. Finally, a planet.
Gravityloss 10y ago
I wonder, if a road lasted for seventy years, and then became unusable because of changes within ten, one could say that it's not within the "normal" variation anymore? Probably someone has an article that is a lot more exact and involves a lot more statistics...
- maxerickson 10y ago
  We don't have a clear picture of normal. This page has some graphs of ground temps the last 100 years: http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/arctic-zone/detect/land-permafrost.shtml http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/arctic-zone/detect/land-permafrost.... They are for areas north of the highway, but it shows temps in 1950 higher than they are today. The text also mentions that the ground has cooled slightly in the recent 20 years.
lkrubner 10y ago
You are in fact a mild denier. Merely writing "I'm not a denier" doesn't change the implications of what you are writing. While world wide changes might so far amount to 1-2 degrees F, it is well known that the warming is concentrated in the northern and southern latitudes, so the changes in Alaska are much more than the global average.
dagss 10y ago
So what are you saying happened -- somebody went in with machinery and created the cracks in the road, then go and pretend it is warming? Others have pointed out that avg(Alaska, Summer) != avg(World, All Year)
ChrisClark 10y ago
1 to 2 degrees increase in the global average is disastrous in the long term.
Diederich 10y ago
The temperature increase isn't evenly spread across the globe, it's concentrated toward the poles.
mikestew 10y ago
the roads weren't properly designed for the expected variations to begin with. Considering that the road has been there for seventy-years, I'd argue that it was designed just fine. I mean, yeesh, who am I going to pick for my SME on road construction, the anonymous dude/dudess on a forum devoted to work that will never involve a shovel or leave a callous on your finger, or the U. S. Army Corps of friggin' Engineers who have built roads in places you or I wouldn't survive more than a day or two? But all appeals to authority aside, let's assume for the moment that the road was built to account for a variation in temps. Problem is, that variation window moved by a few degrees. You get that, right? That the average temp was (just making up #s) 28F +/- 2F and now it's 30F +/- 2F? With my made up numbers, the road never reached the freezing (EDIT: melting, actually) point even with variation. Now it does.
dragonwriter 10y ago
A change of X degrees in the global average temperature does not mean a uniform, across all times and locations, increase of X degrees in local temperatures.
scatters 10y ago
The problems affect a fairly narrow band of latitudes; specifically, those where the average long-term temperature was just below freezing i.e. the southern margin of the permafrost. 1-2F is indeed within natural variation, but historically a warm year or two was followed by a harsh winter to refreeze the surface so that the deep layer stayed frozen. Now, the average temperature is just above freezing or close enough to it that the heating effect of the asphalt pushes the local average temperature above freezing. This means that deep layers are now thawing for the first time in thousands of years; they will stabilize eventually, but in the meantime they're going to be near impossible to build roads on. And the thaw line continues to march north, year by year.

JustUhThought 10y ago

We are in for a shtt-storm. But go over to Bloomberg news, and they're wondering why the Japanese won't make the tough cultural sacrifices needed to increase immigration, to stave off stagnant GDP caused by declining population and the accompanying demographics. (I get the workers to non-workers issues in play. Even with that, I believe it is telling, which solutions are put forth. Increase immigration. Not, decrease consumption.) Seriously, our roads are sinking. Record temperatures. Record droughts. Record greenhouse gasses. But how many times were "jobs" talked about at the DNC and RNC? "Global warming"? We, are so, f-cked.

superswordfish 10y ago
It seems like we're discovering a bunch of technologies that involve removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere now (and even using it as a resource). That isn't the only problem gas, but I'm optimistic that we will solve the "greenhouse effect" problem through this sort of climate engineering before the real disaster of rising sea levels gets too far. In a century people will probably be freaked out by a host of issues we've barely even thought of today (things like the Kessler syndrome that are not so top-of-the-mind).
- vkou 10y ago
  The real disaster isn't rising sealevels (except in Bangladesh). Homes can be rebuilt. Its just a question of money. The real disaster is agricultural collapse in the tropics and subtropics. Either way, it would be far cheaper to switch our energy production to renewables, then to geo-engineer on a planet scale. We aren't doing that in any meaningful way. Instead we pat ourselves on the back for reducing US coal energy generation to 37%. Never mind that this entire reduction comes from burning natural gas...
  - sliverstorm 10y ago
    Never mind that this entire reduction comes from burning natural gas... It's still a huge improvement, cutting CO2 output by half and eliminating other byproducts.

omegaworks 10y ago

>Annual repair costs for one section that runs through the Yukon are C$30,000 ($22,900) per kilometer Delicious, delicious externalized cost. It's time for a carbon tax.

parsnips 10y ago

Classic propaganda. Fissures on the Alaskan highway are caused by temperature variance. This has been happening since the highway was built in the 40's. Example: >Winter frost is extremely hard on the roads. Do not be surprised to see deep fissures across the highway. http://www.dangerousroads.org/north-america/canada/747-alaska-highway-canada.html http://www.dangerousroads.org/north-america/canada/747-alask... So when the author says: >Scientists say they’re the crystal-clear manifestation that permafrost -- slabs of ice and sediment just beneath the Earth’s surface in colder climes -- is thawing as global temperatures keep rising. I become extremely skeptical. This is the danger of lazy journalism and ultimately lazy readers confirmation bias.

scarygliders 10y ago

Is HN now going to be taken over by climate change stories? I honestly thought I'd gotten away from all that when I stopped reading Slashdot. Now it seems to be infesting here too. I await the inevitable downvotes.

csours 10y ago
FYI the downvotes are for not contributing to the discussion.

dharma1 10y ago

The "fun" starts when the feedback loops really start going https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_methane_emissions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_methane_emissions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane_clathrate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane_clathrate Depending on how fast we'll see arable land being lost, food supply for 9 billion people in 2040 could be quite problematic

nibs 10y ago
We need to create a market for halophyte plants that can be grown using salt water in dessert/saline conditions. It requires extensive marketing investment and skill in order to create a market at each level of biomass (biofuel, animal feed, people food, niche health products, pharma).
- dharma1 10y ago
  Interesting. I had to Google it - it looks like 2% of plants tolerate salt water to different degrees. It looks like an interesting field for breeding or potentially GM to cultivate seawater tolerant food crops

rybosome 10y ago

Is there any reason to be optimistic about our ability to deal with climate change? I have to admit that this topic depresses me deeply, as the United States' tepid response does not match the magnitude of the problem. It is shockingly easy to imagine scenarios resulting in the collapse of civilization (agricultural collapse places significant pressure on a few areas which leads to a domino effect of instability triggering nuclear war).

lisper 10y ago
> Is there any reason to be optimistic about our ability to deal with climate change? Yes: because failing to be optimistic about it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Also, you never know what will make people come around. In any process of winning hearts and minds there is always a time before which things seem hopeless. Look at the Sanders and Trump campaigns: when they started, no one believed they could succeed. Bernie came very close, and Trump actually won. (Not that I want to hold up Trump as a model of how to proceed, but just as a data point to show that the unexpected can happen.) Maybe if we get enough "thousand year floods" like just happened in Maryland -- say a dozen of those events in a year or in a month -- people will suddenly wake up and realize the gravity of the situation and find their sense of duty and planetary patriotism. You also never know what's coming down the technology pipe. This, for example, looks promising: http://phys.org/news/2016-07-breakthrough-solar-cell-captures-carbon.html http://phys.org/news/2016-07-breakthrough-solar-cell-capture... We can still fix this. Don't lose hope.
- agentultra 10y ago
  > We can still fix this. Don't lose hope. I think it's beyond our capabilities to "fix" in any meaningful amount of time. However we can still survive. If we remain optimistic and plan to adapt to the coming changes.
- Diederich 10y ago
  This is the correct answer. We don't know if or how we can deal with the problems coming up. But giving up will surely make things worse. Further, we have to choose to not give in to excessive alarmism. I am typing as someone who struggles with this every day, since I've been watching climate change closely for quite a few years now. Things are objectively accelerating, so it's easy to give in to panic. But that might be even worse than giving up. We have to approach this with focus, an iron will and with an even temperament. Every scary climate related news item should be practically drowned in data, as hard and objective as we can get it. Because, these days, nothing puts people 'to sleep' the way unfounded alarmism does. Because people are numb to all of the alarm handles being pulled, all over the place.

pinaceae 10y ago

Meanwhile in Russia, Anthrax spores are active again because of the thawing of (former) permafrost - http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36951542 http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36951542

Diederich 10y ago

I decided to drive to the arctic ocean from California in 2014, and so traversed the north half of this highway by RV. It was a magical, difficult, inspiring and sorrowful experience. I had never seen a black spruce before (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picea_mariana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picea_mariana), but they were enormous, pristine forests of them. But a lot of them were NOT pristine. For dozens of miles at a time, most all of the trees would be at an odd sideways angle. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drunken_trees https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drunken_trees) The permafrost they relied on for stability was melting. More than two years later, I suspect that the countless trees I saw leaning steeply to one side are mostly dead. On the Dalton highway, once past the Brooks range (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks_Range https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks_Range), there were enormously quantities of heavy rain. I didn't realize, at the time, how unusual that was. It turns out that the Alaskan tundra is typically extremely dry, and while I was up there, more than a years worth of (not very cold) rain fell, turning the road into a morass. My goal was to put my feet into the arctic ocean, and the only way to do that is to first get to Dead Horse, Alaska (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadhorse,_Alaska https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadhorse,_Alaska). The 'town limits' are several miles from the ocean, and it's rigorously patrolled private land in between, controlled by various oil companies. They typically offer tours, but I arrived a bit too early, so I was thinking about hiking a few miles up the Sag River (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagavanirktok_River https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagavanirktok_River). Fortunately, I happened to talk to an oil worker guy at the gas station, and he said I would not likely survive such a hike. Polar bears, he said, had been getting extremely aggressive over the past few years. They were starving. At that moment, I felt a unique feeling, that few people experience these days. In my four decades living, I've been in a couple of life or death circumstances. But it wasn't quite like that. The idea that I had nearly found myself in a situation where I might have been hunted by an enormous, hungry animal. A creature who rightly considered me food, and little else. It was a curious feeling! Fortunately, the tours started the next day, and I took a bus through the vast oil infrastructure, to a specific spot where tourists got to interact with the arctic ocean. It was cold, gray and sleeting. The ocean almost seemed like a very large lake, with pretty small waves. The ice had melted early that year, again, and so was not visible from shore.

blaze33 10y ago

So, I've been curious: here's a chart of the mean annual temperature departure for Alaska (1949-2015)[1](source: [2]), the past two years have been particularly hotter there with anomalies > 4.5°F. The NOAA has more detailed datasets but it's a bit more work to extract meaningful information. Also I'm sick of hearing that people believe (or don't) in climate change when it's just factual data. [1] http://climate.gi.alaska.edu/sites/default/files/ClimateTrends/StateWide_Change_1949-2015_F.png http://climate.gi.alaska.edu/sites/default/files/ClimateTren... [2] http://climate.gi.alaska.edu/ClimTrends/Change/TempChange.html http://climate.gi.alaska.edu/ClimTrends/Change/TempChange.ht...

agentultra 10y ago

It's already hell in many Northern Canadian communities that rely on ice-roads [0]. From what I understand we're on track for an unavoidable > 2C increase in global average temperatures this century. It's also quite likely that we'll be passing the extinction threshold if we don't take extreme measures to avoid it. It's quite likely another Syria-like crisis could happen anywhere affected by climate change. I'm disconcerted that these issues are not the most pressing issues of our time. There are many valid socio-political issues to consider but extinction seems to be the most important one to me. Maybe it's because the predictions are far enough into the future that we cannot fathom a solution right now... sort of like how smokers don't make the decision to quit today because it's not going to kill them right now. [0] https://news.vice.com/article/canadas-ice-roads-are-melting-and-that-is-terrible-news-for-aboriginal-communities https://news.vice.com/article/canadas-ice-roads-are-melting-...

uptown 10y ago

So if fresh water will become scarce, and renewable sources of energy are essential, where can individuals invest to provide financial backing to companies addressing these issues?