5 ms·

Arctic now locked into devastating temperature rise, UN report says

84 points by colinprince 8y ago

wazoox 8y ago
Lands warm up more than oceans. We're already past 1.5°C of temperature rise and we probably won't do anything to prevent 2°C. Most probably, we'll hit +3-+4°C in 2100. However even +2°C is a global average; oceans are cooler, and 75% of the surface. It can easily be +1°C on the oceans, and +5°C on land, averaging to +2°C. The situation of complex systems such as climate, the world economy and global ecosystems doesn't simply gently degrade over time. There are quick, catastrophic changes that occur rapidly when reaching certain thresholds. So all could be mostly fine for 1 year, or 5, or 10, then collapse suddenly any time because we've gone through one particular threshold we don't know (ocean acidity, surface temperature, oxygen concentration, forests dying from the heat and becoming carbon sources, etc). Prepare for a tough, violent future. Be scared to death.
- waplot 8y ago
  >Prepare for a tough, violent future. Be scared to death. This is exactly the type of fearmongering Science avoids.
  - rosser 8y ago
    When the next local Gamma Ray Burst comes along, the planet will be sterilized. Am I also fearmongering?
  - gdubs 8y ago
    Science helps us arrive closer and closer to the truth, through hypothesis, experimentation, review, and revision. So yes, by definition science isn't in the business of fear mongering. But that really has no bearing on whether or not people choose to be terrified by the facts uncovered by science.
  - scythe 8y ago
    The IPCC has indeed carefully avoided claims which may appear to be "fearmongering". However, a consequence of this is that they typically discuss the least severe warming scenarios in predictions of the effects of climate change. But the fact is that at current emissions, temperature anomalies of 3 C or more are likely within the next century. Barring large-scale geoengineering on a scale never before attempted, such an amount of warming would be utterly devastating to human civilization. Relevant historical comparisons include the Black Plague and the Spanish flu and not much else. Nine-figure death tolls are not off the menu.
    - earthtolazlo 8y ago
      A nine-figure death toll seems optimistic, unfortunately.
  - wazoox 8y ago
    I didn't pretend to present a scientific assessment of the situation. However I've been following closely the situation on energy (we are running out of it), other resources (phosphates, essential to industrial agriculture, metals, essential to any industry, particularly the hyped "green energies"), ecology, climate, for the past 15 years and the situation is dire.
  - Intermernet 8y ago
    You've been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Our models show, according to a majority of experts, that your quality of life will possibly be affected, with a consensus opinion that you may have a 10 to 20 year reduction in expected social interaction. Sometimes telling it how it is equates to good bedside manner.
- debacle 8y ago
  > Prepare for a tough, violent future. Be scared to death. Anyone with even moderate financial stability will be completely alright. I'm not sure which scenario would be so terrifying as to be scared to death.
  - 14 8y ago
    Do you really think so? Take a man's water away for a few days and you will have riots. You think you will be safe behind your wooden doors when you have people outside ready to kill for it? I am a little concerned to be honest even if I can afford the initial hit of it all.
    - debacle 8y ago
      Put another way, anyone who lives in a country with a per capita income >1000 USD will not be impacted in any severe way by global warming.
  - misnome 8y ago
    Yes, this is the sociopathic point of view. There are billions of people who don’t have “moderate financial stability”, sucks to be them I guess?
    - debacle 8y ago
      It's pragmatic. The most cost effective reaction to global warming is transplanting peoples. The maximal impact of global warming, from a cost perspective, will be a rounding error over the next 50 years.
      - wazoox 8y ago
        Gaël Giraud, chief economist of the national French agency for development, says that the only economic simulation that reliably tracked actual data for nearly 50 years is World3. He often says that usually, building a model predicting 18 months in the future is a sure way to get the Nobel, but this one is in a class of its own. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World3 Here are some scientists' papers and opinions: https://sustainable.unimelb.edu.au/publications/research-papers/is-global-collapse-imminent https://sustainable.unimelb.edu.au/publications/research-pap... https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/09/discovering-limits-to-growth/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/09/discovering-limits-to-gro... https://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/2011/09/cassandra-and-limits-to-growth.html https://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/2011/09/cassandra-and-l...
- RikNieu 8y ago
  This post reminds me of Deep Adaption theory by Professor Jem Bendell. https://jembendell.wordpress.com/2018/07/26/the-study-on-collapse-they-thought-you-should-not-read-yet/ https://jembendell.wordpress.com/2018/07/26/the-study-on-col...
14 8y ago
On one hand I wonder what is the breakthrough that is going to happen that will save us all? Some new energy or carbon removing technology. I fear this will not happen soon enough and that brings me to the other hand at what point will climate change break a nation and what is going to be their response when their back is against the wall and other nations are already strained by climate change. If no one takes them in, what measure will they take to ensure their children live on? At what point will we start seeing other nations carbon emissions as hostile? It seems pretty selfish the way we run the earth now. Perhaps we need to truly pay for our individual emissions. Like sure you want to be a millionaire and run a private jet sure but you will be responsible for not just the cost of it's gas but it's entire emissions as well. You want to sell something that causes emissions, sure but you better add that cost into your products you sell as you will pay for the emissions. And by pay for emissions I mean the true cost. If current world tech costs 100$/kg to remove then you pay 100$ for every kg you release. And by law that money is used for that actual purpose. It seems pretty obvious some industries are reaping the rewards of high emissions with little pay back. That needs to stop. It completely reminds me of the plastic problem where people are selling these products with copious amounts of plastic packaging that ends up in landfills and city's are left trying to deal with the cost of it all.
- netsharc 8y ago
  Arab Spring happened in part because food prices went up to not-affordable levels (partly because of 2011 forest fires in Russia destroying their grain harvests), and the Syrian civil war was also triggered because drought caused failed farmers to move into the cities looking for other income, causing social tensions. The chaos has triggered the refugee crisis, turning many European nations into right-wing populism. So, break a nation? Climate change broke a few already. The EU governments are already making it hard for refugees to cross the Medditerranean (financing the Libyan Coast Guard to stop "smugglers", as well as camps in Turkey), although all the Neo-Nazis still scream about it, I can imagine that when more right wing governments get voted to "represent" the populace, they'll take even more drastic measures (even more than the Italian government refusing docking rights to ships which rescue refugees).
  - 8y ago
temp-dude-87844 8y ago
The poles are a reservoir of factors that could further contribute to a warming climate and rising sea levels, and with their disruption, the processes will escalate. The emergence of similar reports might finally cause the conversation around climate change to move out of talking about vague if dire impacts and about policies that resemble austerity pledges, and about mitigation and adaptation. Those seem to have been a taboo so far, but that can't continue.
gdubs 8y ago
I'm constantly reminded of the cartoon where a heckler is standing up during a Climate Change presentation, yelling, "What if it's a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?" I'm a big believer in the scientific method. I think wherever possible we should gather evidence to confirm or deny our hypothesis. But sometimes we have to make decisions without time for all the facts, all the calculations to come in. You could stand there in the street as a car careens toward you, slide rule in hand, being absolutely sure the car will collide with you before finally stepping out of the way. But, of course that's ridiculous. So, the fear is that making the necessary changes to society would be far too disruptive, too expensive, resulting in ultimately more death and devastation than what Climate Change may or may not bring. That's quite a gamble. We seem totally fine spending trillions of dollars on other experiments [cough] tax cuts [cough]. We go to war, sacrificing lives and national treasure on uncertain outcomes, on shaky premises, and on and on. Why, with this one issue, are we so reluctant to make the leap with a significant scientific consensus around the issue?
- blackflame7000 8y ago
  The thing is that is much more complex than just “stepping out of the way”. There’s a cost associated with it and you can’t just get some to buy into it, you need everyone to buy into it for it to work.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 8y ago
  > I'm constantly reminded of the cartoon where a heckler is standing up during a Climate Change presentation, yelling, "What if it's a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?" The truth is that if climate change really is the catastrophe that people are talking about, we will have to take drastic action that will make the world worse. Maybe we have to convert large portions of our land into solar and wind farms spoiling previously pristine wilderness with installations and power lines? Maybe we will have to embrace nuclear power and decide that having a Chernobyl every decade or so is a tolerable risk? Maybe we will have to decide that seeding with sulfur in the upper atmosphere is required to help with temperatures and that acid rain will just have to be an acceptable trade-off. If people really believed that climate change was the catastrophe that they say it is, they would be willing to practically give away everything in exchange for getting legislation through that would help climate change. If democrats went to republicans and said "Look, climate change is a life or death thing. If you support an effective global carbon tax, we will support everything else in your platform." You could probably get legislation passed by next month. Of course, nobody really views climate change as being that much of a crisis!
genidoi 8y ago
Climate scientists, in an effort to avoid panic, are downplaying the calamity and timescale of this crisis. It's common knowledge in the climate science academic community that the 2018 IPCC report was overly conservative in its modelling of CC progression by lacking any mention of self reinforcing feedback loops. The two most impactful of these loops are the Arctic sea ice reflectivity loss (less ice -> less incoming light reflected back into space -> more heat captured by earth -> less ice) and the Siberian arctic shelf methane loop, arguably the most devestating one because we already know it caused Earth's worst extinction[0], and it is beginning to happen again[1]. It will be refreshing to see if the scientific community's consensus on how silent to be about the severity of the climate crisis will change as the facts of how rapidly the feedback loops are progressing essentially implicate near-term (10-20 years) civilisational collapse. More info from the World Research Institute on climate feedback loops: https://www.wri.org/blog/2018/08/why-positive-climate-feedbacks-are-so-bad https://www.wri.org/blog/2018/08/why-positive-climate-feedba... [0]: https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/earth-permian-mass-extinction-apocalypse-warning-climate-change-frozen-methane-a7648006.html https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/earth-permian-mass... [1]: https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2018/04/28/scientists-struggle-to-explain-a-worrying-rise-in-atmospheric-methane https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2018/04/28/...
waplot 8y ago
So i tried to find the actual UN report. The article linked to this http://www.grida.no/publications/431 http://www.grida.no/publications/431 but it doesn't appear to exist anymore (??) Luckily there is a Google cached version http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:w_-_g9leLdgJ:www.grida.no/publications/431+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ca http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:w_-_g9l... which links to the report https://gridarendal-website-live.s3.amazonaws.com/production/documents/:s_document/465/original/GlobalLinkages.pdf?1552478695 https://gridarendal-website-live.s3.amazonaws.com/production... In the cbc article, they say "According to one study cited in the report, up to 70 per cent of Arctic infrastructure could be threatened because of thawing permafrost by 2050. ". This refers to page 17 of the report, which cites this study https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-07557-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-07557-4 In the abstract, they clearly state "We show that nearly four million people and 70% of current infrastructure in the permafrost domain are in areas with high potential for thaw of near-surface permafrost." While the CBC sub-headline says "70% of infrastructure will be threatened because of thawing permafrost by 2050" Seems quite misleading. CBC will have people think that 70% of all infrastructure is threatened (subjective interpretation) whereas the study clearly indicates it's 70% of the infrastructure in the permafrost domain, which affects a whopping 4 million people. I'm sure there will be plans to help those affected in time. I'm not saying it's not a problem, I'm just saying, as usual, the media hypes and sensationalizes it, most likely for some ulterior agenda.
cwkoss 8y ago
Would unfreezing some of these soils make the soil hospitable to carbon-consuming plants? Seems like the effect of permafrost melt may be partially mitigated by increased plant growth in those areas: through both gas and soil nutrient sequestration.
- jryb 8y ago
  Yes, but because those latitudes receive less light, plant growth is hindered somewhat.

84 points by colinprince 8y ago

Lands warm up more than oceans. We're already past 1.5°C of temperature rise and we probably won't do anything to prevent 2°C. Most probably, we'll hit +3-+4°C in 2100. However even +2°C is a global average; oceans are cooler, and 75% of the surface. It can easily be +1°C on the oceans, and +5°C on land, averaging to +2°C. The situation of complex systems such as climate, the world economy and global ecosystems doesn't simply gently degrade over time. There are quick, catastrophic changes that occur rapidly when reaching certain thresholds. So all could be mostly fine for 1 year, or 5, or 10, then collapse suddenly any time because we've gone through one particular threshold we don't know (ocean acidity, surface temperature, oxygen concentration, forests dying from the heat and becoming carbon sources, etc). Prepare for a tough, violent future. Be scared to death.

waplot 8y ago
>Prepare for a tough, violent future. Be scared to death. This is exactly the type of fearmongering Science avoids.
- rosser 8y ago
  When the next local Gamma Ray Burst comes along, the planet will be sterilized. Am I also fearmongering?
- gdubs 8y ago
  Science helps us arrive closer and closer to the truth, through hypothesis, experimentation, review, and revision. So yes, by definition science isn't in the business of fear mongering. But that really has no bearing on whether or not people choose to be terrified by the facts uncovered by science.
- scythe 8y ago
  The IPCC has indeed carefully avoided claims which may appear to be "fearmongering". However, a consequence of this is that they typically discuss the least severe warming scenarios in predictions of the effects of climate change. But the fact is that at current emissions, temperature anomalies of 3 C or more are likely within the next century. Barring large-scale geoengineering on a scale never before attempted, such an amount of warming would be utterly devastating to human civilization. Relevant historical comparisons include the Black Plague and the Spanish flu and not much else. Nine-figure death tolls are not off the menu.
  - earthtolazlo 8y ago
    A nine-figure death toll seems optimistic, unfortunately.
- wazoox 8y ago
  I didn't pretend to present a scientific assessment of the situation. However I've been following closely the situation on energy (we are running out of it), other resources (phosphates, essential to industrial agriculture, metals, essential to any industry, particularly the hyped "green energies"), ecology, climate, for the past 15 years and the situation is dire.
- Intermernet 8y ago
  You've been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Our models show, according to a majority of experts, that your quality of life will possibly be affected, with a consensus opinion that you may have a 10 to 20 year reduction in expected social interaction. Sometimes telling it how it is equates to good bedside manner.
debacle 8y ago
> Prepare for a tough, violent future. Be scared to death. Anyone with even moderate financial stability will be completely alright. I'm not sure which scenario would be so terrifying as to be scared to death.
- 14 8y ago
  Do you really think so? Take a man's water away for a few days and you will have riots. You think you will be safe behind your wooden doors when you have people outside ready to kill for it? I am a little concerned to be honest even if I can afford the initial hit of it all.
  - debacle 8y ago
    Put another way, anyone who lives in a country with a per capita income >1000 USD will not be impacted in any severe way by global warming.
- misnome 8y ago
  Yes, this is the sociopathic point of view. There are billions of people who don’t have “moderate financial stability”, sucks to be them I guess?
  - debacle 8y ago
    It's pragmatic. The most cost effective reaction to global warming is transplanting peoples. The maximal impact of global warming, from a cost perspective, will be a rounding error over the next 50 years.
    - wazoox 8y ago
      Gaël Giraud, chief economist of the national French agency for development, says that the only economic simulation that reliably tracked actual data for nearly 50 years is World3. He often says that usually, building a model predicting 18 months in the future is a sure way to get the Nobel, but this one is in a class of its own. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World3 Here are some scientists' papers and opinions: https://sustainable.unimelb.edu.au/publications/research-papers/is-global-collapse-imminent https://sustainable.unimelb.edu.au/publications/research-pap... https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/09/discovering-limits-to-growth/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/09/discovering-limits-to-gro... https://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/2011/09/cassandra-and-limits-to-growth.html https://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/2011/09/cassandra-and-l...
RikNieu 8y ago
This post reminds me of Deep Adaption theory by Professor Jem Bendell. https://jembendell.wordpress.com/2018/07/26/the-study-on-collapse-they-thought-you-should-not-read-yet/ https://jembendell.wordpress.com/2018/07/26/the-study-on-col...

14 8y ago

On one hand I wonder what is the breakthrough that is going to happen that will save us all? Some new energy or carbon removing technology. I fear this will not happen soon enough and that brings me to the other hand at what point will climate change break a nation and what is going to be their response when their back is against the wall and other nations are already strained by climate change. If no one takes them in, what measure will they take to ensure their children live on? At what point will we start seeing other nations carbon emissions as hostile? It seems pretty selfish the way we run the earth now. Perhaps we need to truly pay for our individual emissions. Like sure you want to be a millionaire and run a private jet sure but you will be responsible for not just the cost of it's gas but it's entire emissions as well. You want to sell something that causes emissions, sure but you better add that cost into your products you sell as you will pay for the emissions. And by pay for emissions I mean the true cost. If current world tech costs 100$/kg to remove then you pay 100$ for every kg you release. And by law that money is used for that actual purpose. It seems pretty obvious some industries are reaping the rewards of high emissions with little pay back. That needs to stop. It completely reminds me of the plastic problem where people are selling these products with copious amounts of plastic packaging that ends up in landfills and city's are left trying to deal with the cost of it all.

netsharc 8y ago
Arab Spring happened in part because food prices went up to not-affordable levels (partly because of 2011 forest fires in Russia destroying their grain harvests), and the Syrian civil war was also triggered because drought caused failed farmers to move into the cities looking for other income, causing social tensions. The chaos has triggered the refugee crisis, turning many European nations into right-wing populism. So, break a nation? Climate change broke a few already. The EU governments are already making it hard for refugees to cross the Medditerranean (financing the Libyan Coast Guard to stop "smugglers", as well as camps in Turkey), although all the Neo-Nazis still scream about it, I can imagine that when more right wing governments get voted to "represent" the populace, they'll take even more drastic measures (even more than the Italian government refusing docking rights to ships which rescue refugees).
- 8y ago

temp-dude-87844 8y ago

The poles are a reservoir of factors that could further contribute to a warming climate and rising sea levels, and with their disruption, the processes will escalate. The emergence of similar reports might finally cause the conversation around climate change to move out of talking about vague if dire impacts and about policies that resemble austerity pledges, and about mitigation and adaptation. Those seem to have been a taboo so far, but that can't continue.

gdubs 8y ago

I'm constantly reminded of the cartoon where a heckler is standing up during a Climate Change presentation, yelling, "What if it's a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?" I'm a big believer in the scientific method. I think wherever possible we should gather evidence to confirm or deny our hypothesis. But sometimes we have to make decisions without time for all the facts, all the calculations to come in. You could stand there in the street as a car careens toward you, slide rule in hand, being absolutely sure the car will collide with you before finally stepping out of the way. But, of course that's ridiculous. So, the fear is that making the necessary changes to society would be far too disruptive, too expensive, resulting in ultimately more death and devastation than what Climate Change may or may not bring. That's quite a gamble. We seem totally fine spending trillions of dollars on other experiments [cough] tax cuts [cough]. We go to war, sacrificing lives and national treasure on uncertain outcomes, on shaky premises, and on and on. Why, with this one issue, are we so reluctant to make the leap with a significant scientific consensus around the issue?

blackflame7000 8y ago
The thing is that is much more complex than just “stepping out of the way”. There’s a cost associated with it and you can’t just get some to buy into it, you need everyone to buy into it for it to work.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 8y ago
> I'm constantly reminded of the cartoon where a heckler is standing up during a Climate Change presentation, yelling, "What if it's a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?" The truth is that if climate change really is the catastrophe that people are talking about, we will have to take drastic action that will make the world worse. Maybe we have to convert large portions of our land into solar and wind farms spoiling previously pristine wilderness with installations and power lines? Maybe we will have to embrace nuclear power and decide that having a Chernobyl every decade or so is a tolerable risk? Maybe we will have to decide that seeding with sulfur in the upper atmosphere is required to help with temperatures and that acid rain will just have to be an acceptable trade-off. If people really believed that climate change was the catastrophe that they say it is, they would be willing to practically give away everything in exchange for getting legislation through that would help climate change. If democrats went to republicans and said "Look, climate change is a life or death thing. If you support an effective global carbon tax, we will support everything else in your platform." You could probably get legislation passed by next month. Of course, nobody really views climate change as being that much of a crisis!

genidoi 8y ago

Climate scientists, in an effort to avoid panic, are downplaying the calamity and timescale of this crisis. It's common knowledge in the climate science academic community that the 2018 IPCC report was overly conservative in its modelling of CC progression by lacking any mention of self reinforcing feedback loops. The two most impactful of these loops are the Arctic sea ice reflectivity loss (less ice -> less incoming light reflected back into space -> more heat captured by earth -> less ice) and the Siberian arctic shelf methane loop, arguably the most devestating one because we already know it caused Earth's worst extinction[0], and it is beginning to happen again[1]. It will be refreshing to see if the scientific community's consensus on how silent to be about the severity of the climate crisis will change as the facts of how rapidly the feedback loops are progressing essentially implicate near-term (10-20 years) civilisational collapse. More info from the World Research Institute on climate feedback loops: https://www.wri.org/blog/2018/08/why-positive-climate-feedbacks-are-so-bad https://www.wri.org/blog/2018/08/why-positive-climate-feedba... [0]: https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/earth-permian-mass-extinction-apocalypse-warning-climate-change-frozen-methane-a7648006.html https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/earth-permian-mass... [1]: https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2018/04/28/scientists-struggle-to-explain-a-worrying-rise-in-atmospheric-methane https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2018/04/28/...

waplot 8y ago

So i tried to find the actual UN report. The article linked to this http://www.grida.no/publications/431 http://www.grida.no/publications/431 but it doesn't appear to exist anymore (??) Luckily there is a Google cached version http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:w_-_g9leLdgJ:www.grida.no/publications/431+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ca http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:w_-_g9l... which links to the report https://gridarendal-website-live.s3.amazonaws.com/production/documents/:s_document/465/original/GlobalLinkages.pdf?1552478695 https://gridarendal-website-live.s3.amazonaws.com/production... In the cbc article, they say "According to one study cited in the report, up to 70 per cent of Arctic infrastructure could be threatened because of thawing permafrost by 2050. ". This refers to page 17 of the report, which cites this study https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-07557-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-07557-4 In the abstract, they clearly state "We show that nearly four million people and 70% of current infrastructure in the permafrost domain are in areas with high potential for thaw of near-surface permafrost." While the CBC sub-headline says "70% of infrastructure will be threatened because of thawing permafrost by 2050" Seems quite misleading. CBC will have people think that 70% of all infrastructure is threatened (subjective interpretation) whereas the study clearly indicates it's 70% of the infrastructure in the permafrost domain, which affects a whopping 4 million people. I'm sure there will be plans to help those affected in time. I'm not saying it's not a problem, I'm just saying, as usual, the media hypes and sensationalizes it, most likely for some ulterior agenda.

cwkoss 8y ago

Would unfreezing some of these soils make the soil hospitable to carbon-consuming plants? Seems like the effect of permafrost melt may be partially mitigated by increased plant growth in those areas: through both gas and soil nutrient sequestration.

jryb 8y ago
Yes, but because those latitudes receive less light, plant growth is hindered somewhat.