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An expert’s view on unusually warm Arctic temperatures
- ommunist 10y ago"Snows always melt" https://youtu.be/FfeytbHBPFM https://youtu.be/FfeytbHBPFM
- patcon 10y agoReading that article feels... unsatisfying. I realize they have a technical audience in mind, but all the data crammed into english sentences feels reminiscent of the days when complex math problems were described in words. I feel like the dense information in that post could be described much more concisely in visual form, and I'm disheartened that it is instead hidden in paragraphs.
- kwhitefoot 10y agoHidden? It all seems fairly simply written to me. How would a visual presentation have made it easier to read? See http://www.webpagefx.com/tools/read-able/check.php?tab=Test+By+Url&uri=https%3A%2F%2Fblog.metoffice.gov.uk%2F2016%2F11%2F25%2Fan-experts-view-on-unusually-warm-arctic-temperatures%2F http://www.webpagefx.com/tools/read-able/check.php?tab=Test+... Test Results: Your page (https://blog.metoffice.gov.uk/2016/11/25/an-experts-view-on-unusually-warm-arctic-temperatures/ https://blog.metoffice.gov.uk/2016/11/25/an-experts-view-on-...) has an average grade level of about 7. It should be easily understood by 12 to 13 year olds.
- inopinatus 10y agoI wouldn't say they have a technical audience in mind. Far from it, this is evidently a press release (notice how it says "by Press Office" at the top). Put simply, they didn't write it for you. The Met Office externally deals primarily with journalists and civil servants, two audiences for which words are a main currency. I can assure you that internally they are not short of propellerheads geeking out on some quite spectacular visualizations. The links you might be after instead: http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/news/2016/arctic-sea-ice-melt-season http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/news/2016/arctic-sea-ic... http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadisst/ http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadisst/
- jameshart 10y agoI think the most bizarre part about it is the structure of this as a report of 'things Ed Blockley said' (or 'added', or 'continued' - I was surprised not to learn that he 'exclaimed' or 'averred' anything), mixed in with a different set of additional facts and figures and context provided by the 'narrator'. It seems we might have been better served to have just had Ed Blockley's contribution unedited and in its entirety, without the contextualizing and narration provided by the reporter. It is possible to copy/paste out all the reported paragraphs attributed to Dr Blockley from the text and get a well written overview of current Arctic climatology.
- tc313 10y agoIt's bizarre, but it's also typical for press releases from large organizations.
- almostApatriot1 10y agoguy sounds like a snob to me.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- rjtobin 10y agoMost of the articles I've read about this refer to a "tipping point": that we're crossing some line where the behavior of the system will change dramatically. But what are the actual consequences of this? Can anyone on HN explain the real-world effects that this might have, apart from slightly higher sea levels? I tried searching, but the fluff to substance ratio is so high out there.
- lsadam0 10y agoI believe the tipping point usually refers to the release of Methane trapped in permafrost? Meaning the permafrost melts, releasing methane, and thus triggering a runaway greenhouse effect. Something like Venus.
- greglindahl 10y agoThe other Arctic tipping point is because the ocean absorbs a lot more energy than ice... so once the Arctic loses more ice cover, it will go ice-free and remain that way. Nobody knows when/if the methane problem will happen. The ice/ocean thing can be modeled.
- jamesblonde 10y agoThese are the methane clathrates trapped mostly in the siberian sea (Arctic ocean), where increasing sea temperatures are causing methane to bubble up to the surface in large patches (sometimes 1 sq km in size). Runaway global warming by melting methane clathrates is known as the Clathrate Gun Hypothesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis In previous mass extinctions, such as the End of the Permian, 251 million years ago, 96% of species were lost - due to a similar event: " A cataclysmic eruption near Siberia blasted CO2 into the atmosphere. Methanogenic bacteria responded by belching out methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Global temperatures surged while oceans acidified and stagnated, belching poisonous hydrogen sulfide. " https://cosmosmagazine.com/palaeontology/big-five-extinctions https://cosmosmagazine.com/palaeontology/big-five-extinction...
- Tuna-Fish 10y ago
- coldcode 10y agoMy assumption is that we will see a continued change in the arctic sea ice pattern over the next decade. The effect on weather will be interesting to see, if the arctic isn't all that cold the annual pattern of wind and heat in the northern hemisphere will be very different; how I don't really have any idea. In a complex heat engine if you change the distribution and amount of heat it's not easy to predict what the end result will be. Of course if we stop studying it everything will go back to normal /s.
- rcarmo 10y agoA little thought experiment I Googled up, seeing as I live near a river estuary and have been pondering the effects of sea levels rising for a few years now: http://geology.com/sea-level-rise/ http://geology.com/sea-level-rise/ (IIRC the realistic figures are more along the lines of centimetres rather than metres over the next few hundred years, but it's sobering to consider)
- zzleeper 10y agoDon't the figures depend on the latitude? (Northern Hemispher will see a larger increase or sth lke that)
- greydius 10y agoSo the Chinese have infiltrated the British government in order to spread their climate change hoax? That's dedication.
- orf 10y agoI hope this is sarcastic, you should put `\s` after it else people will get the wrong idea and think you're an idiot.
- guelo 10y agoPet peeve, don't spend 5 paragraphs discussing a graph when actually showing it is much more informative! http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-ice-graph/ http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-i...
- lisper 10y agoI am as concerned about climate change as anyone. I think it's the most serious problem we face today. But it is very important to keep some perspective here, if for no other reason, so that we who believe this is a serious problem don't lose credibility in the political battles to come. 1. Earth is not going to become Venus. The surface of Venus is hot enough to melt lead, hot enough to completely sterilize the planet. That is not going to happen here even under an absolute worst-case scenario. 2. Homo sapiens is almost certainly not going to go extinct even in a worst-case scenario. We are a very robust species capable of adapting to an extraordinarily wide variety of situations. We are very, very tough to kill en masse. We ourselves have tried to wipe out segments of our own population in the past and barely made a dent. The biggest killer in our history, bubonic plague, barely killed a third of us. 3. What is at risk, and what IMHO is worrisome, is the modern technological civilization we have built for ourselves. Our infrastructure and political systems are highly dependent on a stable climate. If we lose that, would could easily go back to the middle ages. (We probably won't go back to neolithic times because knowledge is also pretty robust, and we will almost certainly be able to keep basic technologies alive. But a Mad-Max type scenario is a real possibility.) 4. Colonizing the moon or other planets won't save us. All extra-terrestrial environments accessible to use with current technology are much harsher than earth will be even in a worst-case scenario. If we and our civilization can't survive here, we can't survive anywhere.
- susan_hall 10y agoI am surprised you were downvoted. The 4 points you make seem straightforward, and are accurate. The timeline for economic damage (from global warming) is fairly long. Even in the worst-case scenario, the Earth as we know it is still recognizable for the next 50 years, and all of the seasons and climate patterns remain roughly the same. The major changes will tend to show 50 to a 100 years from now. Also, I'd like to point out that the increasing acidity of the oceans is a much worse problem, in the long-term, than the warming of the atmosphere. Carbon washes out of the atmosphere, and ends up as acid in the oceans. At current trends, in less than 100 years the oceans will be more acidic than at any point since the Cambrian Revolution. It is not clear that life in the oceans can survive with those levels of acidity (other than organisms that live in volcanic vents and love acid).
- wallace_f 10y agoIn the very, very long run wouldn't it be preferable to retain as much energy within the earth system as possible, instead of letting it float off into space and difficult to ever recapture? I've never heard that argument. It certainly sounds very cold hearted, at the very least.
- CydeWeys 10y agoNo it wouldn't. The Sun has many billions of years left to go before its red giant phase, and in its red giant phase the problem will be way too much heat, not too little. And anyway, heat is lost in timeframes much shorter than billions of years. The Earth is warm now because of radioactive decay on the interior and sunlight shining on the exterior.
- wallace_f 10y agoIt was actually just a question to illicit imaginative thought, it wasn't seriously intended to garner a yes or no answer. In the Kardashev scale a Type I civilization is able to harness the total energy of its host planet. A Type II civilization can harness the energy of it's neighbouring star. Some scientists believe that we may be able to reach Type 1 status in a couple hundred years. >The Sun has many billions of years left to go before its red giant phase, and in its red giant phase the problem will be way too much heat, not too little. Not necessarily. If we continue to advance technologically the only limiting factor besides scientific progress may likely well be how much energy we can harness and the age of the universe.
- Smaug123 10y agoThat's not the problem right now. The problem right now is that either we have too much energy and we can't get it off the Earth fast enough, or we have too little/exactly enough energy but its distribution is so suboptimal that the best we can do is throw the excess into space because the buffers are full.
- CydeWeys 10y agoYour response is just so out of place in this discussion though. One single second of the Sun's total energy output is enough to fuel the United States' entire annual energy usage for nine million years. Lack of energy is not a problem, and even if it were, worrying about stockpiling energy on Earth right now in such low amounts to survive the heat death of the universe is like the equivalent of giving a few molecules of water to someone in the desert who's dying of dehydration. It's so many orders of magnitude below significance that it's laughable. We are facing the very real existential crisis of potentially destroying our civilization through climate change before we can even get off this planet. The heat death of the universe untold billions of years in the future doesn't matter one whit if we don't survive to witness it, and anything we do nowadays won't matter at all towards that end anyway.
- mirimir 10y agoGCC deniers like to point to growth in Antarctic sea ice. But it's clear that Antarctic shelf ice is collapsing, which will increase glacial outflow. So why is Antarctic sea ice growing? Explanations seem to focus on changes in weather patterns, such as precipitation and wind.[0] Or perhaps, it's just that they're measuring ice area, and not ice volume. But there seems to be no explanation that's coherent enough to be persuasive. Or is there? [0] https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/antarctic-sea-ice-reaches-new-record-maximum https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/antarctic-sea-ice-reach...
- deepGem 10y agoCurrently, all efforts are geared towards reversing climate change. OTOH I feel that we should also be prepared for the ensuing eventuality of climate change, as it is clear that the current civilisation as we know will collapse under dramatic climate change. What can be possibly done to prepare for such an onslaught ? I don't mean something ridiculous like the movie 2012, but engineered ways to deal with the catastrophe that could possibly hit us or our kids generation in the nest 50-100 years. Either we have to engineer processes that can withstand climate change OR We have to engineer the human gene to withstand the oncoming onslaught, so even if current processes are gone, we'll be able to engineer new ones to deal with the existing climate. AND we prepare underground or space facilities to wait out the aftermath of a nuclear war
- _ph_ 10y agoWe currently have all the means to prevent a catastrophic climate change. But we are not using them. It seems to be controversial to replace coal with wind and solar. How would you expect even more radical engineering project to succeed? Besides, in between would be a collapse of our civilization - something we really should try to prevent.
- deepGem 10y agoI am 100% aligned with preventing climate change, but after Trump got elected, my hopes of prevention are diminishing. Hence the rhetoric.