19 ms·

We Have Four Years to Save Ourselves from Climate Change, Harvard Scientist Says

86 points by jefflombardjr 7y ago

loblollyboy 7y ago
He'll prob be promoted for his hype game
foolzcrow 7y ago
Obey. Obey. Obey. Obey
stackola 7y ago
I remember Al Gore saying we got 10 years in 2006. In fact this type of rhetoric has been going on for centuries. [1] [1] https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/10/08/the-ever-receding-climate-goalpost-ipcc-and-al-gore-12-years-to-save-the-planet-again/ https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/10/08/the-ever-receding-cli...
- alexandercrohde 7y ago
  That's the downside of boys crying wolf... when the actual wolf comes we don't listen.
  - yogthos 7y ago
    Except nobody was crying wolf. If we took the problem seriously back then, we wouldn't be fucked now. The reality is that we're living through a mass extinction driven by climate change. Over 60% of animals have gone extinct since the 70s. The fact that people are looking at the world today and asking where's the problem is beyond belief.
    - weberc2 7y ago
      It's not beyond belief; it's that it's happening so slowly that it's not perceived by the common person. And the "crying wolf" that people upthread were referring to was the "this will be irreversible in N years" specifically, not the broader threat of climate change generally.
    - RyanDagg 7y ago
      "Over 60% of animals have gone extinct since the 70s" Citations?
      - stackola 7y ago
        Might be referring to this [1], but it concludes population sizes have gone down 60%, which doesn't sound good either, but is still a different story. [1] https://www.wwf.org.uk/updates/living-planet-report-2018 https://www.wwf.org.uk/updates/living-planet-report-2018
- foolzcrow 7y ago
  They are an apocalyptic death cult. The end is nigh submit to the elite or forever perish. How is submitting to the 1% going to save earth? They used to say by the end of the century. Year after year their predictions fail and the cult marches on.
  - AstralStorm 7y ago
    Show us where these predictions fail or that's beneficial to elites who actually want status quo.
- jefflombardjr 7y ago
  1. Al Gore didn't say this, James Anderson did. James Anderson is a "Harvard University professor of atmospheric chemistry best known for establishing that chlorofluorocarbons were damaging the Ozone Layer." 2. You're right about the rhetoric - it has been around for centuries but so have major ecological disasters. The Dust Bowl alone forced tens of thousands of poverty-stricken families to abandon their farms, unable to pay mortgages or grow crops, and losses reached $25 million per day by 1936 (equivalent to $450,000,000 in 2018).[0] I can hardly fathom the true cost of something that impacts the entire planet. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl
  - WillPostForFood 7y ago
    Al Gore has made the claim multiple times: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ice-caps-melt-gore-2014/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ice-caps-melt-gore-2014/ e.g. in 2007: Their latest modelling studies indicate northern polar waters could be ice-free in summers within just 5-6 years. Professor Wieslaw Maslowski told an American Geophysical Union meeting that previous projections had underestimated the processes now driving ice loss.
    - stubish 7y ago
      Could, not would. Like smoking can kill you, not smoking will kill you. It is a common and fundamental English language pattern, clearly indicating doubt and should never be misinterpreted as certainty.
      - WillPostForFood 7y ago
        Fair enough, but could is enough to play on people's fears. Immigrant X could be a terrorist. Food additive Y could cause cancer. You can't then claim you didn't say "would". Note that things like tobacco cancer warnings use use can/could not will/would, and the intent of the message is still clear. "SURGEON GENERAL WARNING: Cigar Smoking Can Cause Lung Cancer And Heart Disease." "WARNING: This product can cause mouth cancer."
- jchanimal 7y ago
  We kinda had 10 years back in the 80s. Just saying.
- oceanghost 7y ago
  No, no. You're the crazy one for thinking the world might not be ending. Remember?
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
aldoushuxley001 7y ago
No we don't. Hyperbole around climate change just makes people more likely to disregard the actual dangers.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  It's not clear to me if you've forgotten to provide evidence for the “No, we don’t”, or if you are making the argument that the assertion that the characterization of the danger as so imminent makes people less likely to believe and therefore the characterization is false.
  - imtringued 7y ago
    See you in 2023.
- jefflombardjr 7y ago
  Polar ice caps melting is hyperbole? Care to elaborate?
  - _red 7y ago
    Because the vast majority of the earths history has been without ice on the poles. Obviously this will force changes on humans no doubt. However, trying to shoehorn this natural fact into a political / carbon-credit trading scheme is deeply cynical that is apparent to most >100 IQ people.
    - dagss 7y ago
      Noone cares about earths history. Earth will be fine. Nature will adapt. What we care about is that all of industrialized human civilization has been with polar ice caps...
    - artimaeis 7y ago
      The majority of Earth's history made it a completely uninhabitable place for humans. Seems like it would be in our combined best interest to prevent it from becoming that way again.
norswap 7y ago
Does "no more permanent ice" means there is a period of the year where there is no ice at all at the poles? That seems hardly believable. I was also under the impression that melting ice would push the level of the oceans by multiple meters. If 75-80% of ice has already melted, wouldn't we have seen significant elevation already? Just some facts that I found surprising, coming from someone who doesn't know much on the topic. I'm well on board with global warming, but the facts presented here don't mesh with what I understood about it.
- assblaster 7y ago
  The problem with predictions like this is that this prediction will look silly in 4 years when the Earth has not ended, similar to how wild predictions in the past have not borne fruit. I understand their desire to sensationalize, but people like AOC make the same predictions, and she is not seen as smart by a large portion of the public. I think if we just stick with the experimental science research, the general public will find more confidence in the sciences.
  - dagss 7y ago
    Citations on wild predictions in past not being correct?
    - charlieflowers 7y ago
      I'm not GP, but there are plenty of examples of doomsday prophets predicting the tribulation, or the rapture, or some other form of the end of the world.
      - KirinDave 7y ago
        Okay, but what reasonable level of evidence and plausibility hasn't been passed for global warming? At this point, what else would it take a reasonable person to see the danger of the situation we're in?
olivermarks 7y ago
Anderson, the "Godfather of climate change science' advocates aerosol geo engineering experimentation https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/pgaq57/harvard-calls-for-geoengineering-experiments https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/pgaq57/harvard-calls-for-...
- weberc2 7y ago
  Related: https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/questions/9805/would-adding-sulfur-dioxide-to-the-atmosphere-have-a-global-cooling-effect/9809 https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/questions/9805/would-...
Fjolsvith 7y ago
> "People at this point haven't come to grips with the irreversibility of this sea-level rise problem," Anderson said, displaying a map that shows the site of Harvard's new $10 billion Allston campus inundated after 3 meters of sea-level rise. The Harvard scientist wants to save his new research center from climate change. Also, submission should say "Five", instead of "Four".
- makerofspoons 7y ago
  The article is from January 2018, so if Dr. Anderson is correct we now have four years.
  - thecolorblue 7y ago
    The title should have indicated the article was from 2018 and properly quoted the articles title.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- Fjolsvith 7y ago
  Also, I would wonder how smart Harvard scientists are, really. After all, they built a $10 billion campus that has an effective lifespan of 5 years?
bleh123 7y ago
It's amazing to me how most of these predictions refrain from calling out the single largest polluters in the world, China, from changing their behavior or doing anything substantial. In particular, this paragraph at the end: > In Chicago Thursday, he prosecuted a moral argument that implicates university administrators who refuse to divest from fossil fuels, journalists who fail to fact-check false statements made by political candidates, and executives of fossil fuel companies who continue to pursue activities that are exacerbating climate change—especially those who mislead the public about those effects. Really? Can you, as a man of science stand behind such vitriol as an outburst for what is arguably at best a theory with a lot of room for error? Specifically: > "The chance that there will be any permanent ice left in the Arctic after 2022 is essentially zero," Anderson said Based on WHAT? This man is making a claim for the complete wipe out of roughly seven million cubic miles of ice in the next three years? Even if one were to be charitable and entertain a massive error margin on this claim, based on data about the polar cycles it seems extremely unlikely. This is nothing but an attempt to use "Science" to create panic. I strongly agree that we need to do more on the environment, but there's got to be a better answer than killing off a major chunk of the commercial markets and industry that have contributed to the single most prosperous period in human history. Can scientists please not make recommendations on policy? I'd love to hear scientific solutions . . just the other day, there was a discussion here on HN about using energy from a nuclear reactor to recycle atmospheric carbons. Practical or not, i'd love to see us innovate our way out of this hole while continuing to be reasonably responsible with our environmental decisions.
- gdubs 7y ago
  The US has double the emissions per capita as China. [1] China is also steadily moving towards one of the most ambitious carbon tax / cap and trade systems in the world. [2] Don’t have the exact source in front of me but I read in a paper recently that China’s new carbon market will cover a significant percentage of global carbon emissions when it’s in full swing. 1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions_per_capita https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_... 2: https://www.icf.com/blog/policy-and-regulation/china-carbon-price https://www.icf.com/blog/policy-and-regulation/china-carbon-...
timw4mail 7y ago
...the Maldives are under water, and half of Florida doesn't exist any more. Oh, wait, that's not the case. Assuming that assertion is true, though, 4 or 5 years is not enough time for anything to realistically be done. I assert that in 20 years we'll still not see the supposed effects though.
- gerbilly 7y ago
  Melting polar ice caps (not antarctic, polar) does not affect sea levels because it's floating ice.
- mcv 7y ago
  There's a massive difference between time to act, and time until we see the effects. By the time we do see the effects of global worming, it will be far too late to do anything about it. (And we're already seeing some effects.)
makerofspoons 7y ago
The loss of sea ice is stoking US heat waves: https://phys.org/news/2019-06-loss-arctic-sea-ice-stokes.html https://phys.org/news/2019-06-loss-arctic-sea-ice-stokes.htm... Intense heat is also predicted for Europe this summer: https://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/accuweather-2019-europe-summer-forecast/70008315 https://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/accuweather-2019... James Anderson, the scientist from the article, also has linked ozone depletion with climate change: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-ozone-problem-is-back-and-worse-than-ever-136717745/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-ozone-prob...
- snarf21 7y ago
  I think his four years is too fast but I also don't think we can totally destroy the planet (aside from nuclear destruction). We know too much and have too much technology. Some (small?) fragment of civilization will survive while the earth recovers. For example, methane has a half life of seven years so it will take some time. The more immediate threat seems to be around food and water. The Ogallala Aquifer is drying up quickly and we will have a new Dust Bowl.[https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2016/08/vanishing-midwest-ogallala-aquifer-drought/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2016/08/vanishin...] Considering how much food for the US and the world comes from here there is going to be massive starvation. It just seems like this planet can only infinitely support around 4B people. We have too many now but population is slowly starting to tilt back. We also need to understand that constant growth is toxic. Both for our planet in population and as a driver for business and profits. I think this planet will be quite different as automation continues to accelerate and as we start using all of our resources in a sustainable and non-destructive way. I am very curious to see how this plays out over my lifetime.
  - toyg 7y ago
    With all due respect, I strongly doubt anybody would be seriously impacted by that aquifer outside of North America. This said, anything that turns Americans angrier is a security risk for the rest of the world.
    - 7y ago
assblaster 7y ago
The key part from the article: "The level of carbon now in the atmosphere hasn’t been seen in 12 million years". What was the Earth like 13 million years ago? Or 130 million years? A snapshot in time does little to provide actual context.
- Fellshard 7y ago
  I have little trust in forensically invented snapshots over concrete measurements, as well.
Dumblydorr 7y ago
There's little chance of transitioning our energy system in time, so let's start considering how to cool our planet. Can we block or reflect sunlight? That seems the brightest future, cooling the planet artificially while decarbonizing and capturing the carbon already released.
- rawrmaan 7y ago
  I don't know if anyone is researching this, but couldn't we manufacture stupidly large floating reflective tarps and start deploying them anywhere sea ice is melting? Seems like this would be a high benefit for relatively low cost.
  - rb808 7y ago
    I'd think they'd work better at the equator to reflect the most heat.
    - aaomidi 7y ago
      And fucking weather patterns even more.
    - fouc 7y ago
      Tropical countries would love to reduce the heat, it would massively help their economies.
    - Dumblydorr 7y ago
      I believe we should start at the poles, as that would slow feedback loops there and save what little climate system we have. The poles are crucial holders of water in ice form, cooling those should be high priority.
  - jefflombardjr 7y ago
    Yeah! The Swiss are doing this on a much smaller scale: https://www.livescience.com/61951-swiss-glacier-blanket.html https://www.livescience.com/61951-swiss-glacier-blanket.html I would think floating tarps would seriously mess with the marine life though.
billpg 7y ago
So we can relax for three years before we have to do anything?
- aaomidi 7y ago
  Ten years* We don't do shit until it's already fucked millions of people.
  - toyg 7y ago
    Well, if you assume the Earth is unsustainably overpopulated already, surely that should be a fundamentally inevitable development anyway...?
    - aaomidi 7y ago
      I don't assume this. I think the west would have to give up some stuff they see as a "need" currently and we can sustain this population.
umadon 7y ago
No amount of individual behavioral changes are going to cut it. The entire economy needs to be transformed. Does anyone seriously believe the people who control the economy will just let this happen?
agentultra 7y ago
"I don't understand how these people sit down to dinner with their kids," Anderson said, "because they're not stupid people." I have a hard enough time teaching my kids about the seasons and polar bears when many of these things won't exist by the time they're teenagers.
sasasassy 7y ago
Another wild prediction. This person's wild claim is that if go on with the current path the ocean's will rise 7 meters and there will be worse storms. You can visit http://www.floodmap.net/ http://www.floodmap.net/ and see how 7 meters is nothing, even discounting that we can adapt and protect against flooding. Worse storms are bad, but if the alternative is "World War II-style transformation of industry", what alternative is that? How can the world say to 5 billion people "sorry, you have to stop your industrialisation now, there may be storms in the US".
- abledon 7y ago
  that sites UI is so bad, seems like low hanging fruit for some React frontend wizard to redo and make the defacto site to go to for climate / flooding visualizations
- jeanperrot 7y ago
  At 7 meters, much of Florida is gone. Regardless, global warming will impact poorer (and tropical) countries disproportionately. I live in the Pacific Northwest, and I know it is a pretty good place to be as it warms up. Bangladesh, less so. You can't expect Bangladesh to lead the decarbonation of industrial production - but the US can, and there are good arguments that it will yield an increase in wealth and standards of living.
  - jrochkind1 7y ago
    This is a crucial point. The huge changes to the ecology will make some places difficult to inhabit and destabilize food production, which will destabilize economies, which will lead to large social disruption and conflict. It is the poor who will be least able to protect themselves from this destabilization. Not just because poorer/tropical countries will be disproportionately effected, but it's because it's the rich (globally or locally) who have the resources to protect themselves. With technology, with mobility, with "security". Some who are now rich (globally or locally) will also find themselves less so. When I see the standard the U.S. is setting for how refugees are treated, I'm terrified, even on just a self-interested level. Many more of us will be refugees in the future.
hurled 7y ago
Why say anything at all, when it's obvious that no one is going to do anything in four years?
viach 7y ago
Interesting, is it possible to use hight levels of carbon dioxide detected during exoplanets spectroscopy in order to decide where to point big radio telescopes, so that there could be radio signals of intelligent life from other dying worlds?
greggeter 7y ago
GenIV Nuclear now.
mcv 7y ago
The title is very misleading. There is no hard deadline to save ourselves from climate change, or if there is, we already passed it. We're currently at the point were every year we continue doing nothing, means it takes multiple years (decades? centuries?) to recover from the accumulated effects. Permanent ice is already melting, climate is already changing. Even if we completely stop emitting CO2 right now (which we can't), there would still be too much CO2 in the atmosphere for some time, leading to further heating and longer melting. Even if we were to remove all excess CO2 from the atmosphere right now (which we obviously can't), Earth would still be too warm and icecaps would continue to melt while global temperatures would slowly revert to normal. We're doing none of those things; we're still arguing over whether we should do anything at all. Our inaction over the past couple of decades on this issue is going to have repercussions for the next centuries. The issue right now is: how bad do we want things to get? We can't stop it anymore, but we may be able to mitigate it. I really really hope we can prevent the Eastern Antarctic icecap from melting, because that would truly be a disaster. When that melts, most major population centers will have to be evacuated.
- challenger22 7y ago
  >Even if we completely stop emitting CO2 right now (which we can't), there would still be too much CO2 in the atmosphere for some time, leading to further heating and longer melting Do you have any data on this? If you look at how quickly things cool off at night, Earth's biosphere reaches steady-state thermal equilibrium over the course of a few days. Your claim is essentially that we've already set off an albedo forcing function that we can't stop, and which is also stronger than existing negative feedback loops. Seems unlikely to me.
  - mcv 7y ago
    Well, the CO2 in our atmosphere is too high, and it's been built up over the course of more than a century. It won't immediately drop back to normal levels even if we did somehow manage to stop producing any CO2 at all. At night the temperature drops not due to a lack of CO2, but due to a lack of sunlight. If we were to be able to partially block the sun, or reflect significantly more sunlight back into space, we would indeed be able to lose heat more more quickly, but that would require engineering on a scale we've never done before. So sure, paint the entire Earth white, but how? Or build a giant solar screen in space, but again: how? Besides, blocking sunlight will also have many negative repercussions.
gdubs 7y ago
The “we’ve been hearing scare stories for decades” argument is akin to “I’ve been driving drunk without my seatbelt for a decade and people keep saying I’ll die, but I haven’t yet.” For many, many people, the dire warnings have come true. Entire towns were erased by fire in Northern California last year. Severe storms are racking up billions and billions of dollars in damage every year — and entire islands have been decimated. The amount of corn planted in the Midwest for the time of year is off the charts, due to freakish weather. The world is a big place. We can’t wait until everyone all at once is feeling the types of disasters that make you sit up and take notice. But these events are happening constantly, all around the world. Yea, it doesn’t look like “The Day After Tomorrow”, but what kind of yardstick is that, anyway? We need to strike a balance between a healthy dose of fear, optimism for the sake of our children, and resolve.
- Izkata 7y ago
  > The amount of corn planted in the Midwest for the time of year is off the charts, due to freakish weather. Either you found different reports than me, or you're using "off the charts" wrong. It means "too high/too much to measure"; the crop situation is actually lower than normal due to flooding.
  - gdubs 7y ago
    Clunky phrasing — I meant off the normal curve. In this case, obviously meaning much lower than what’s typical for this time of year.
RappingBoomer 7y ago
climate change? I thought it was global warming...

86 points by jefflombardjr 7y ago

loblollyboy 7y ago

He'll prob be promoted for his hype game

foolzcrow 7y ago

Obey. Obey. Obey. Obey

stackola 7y ago

I remember Al Gore saying we got 10 years in 2006. In fact this type of rhetoric has been going on for centuries. [1] [1] https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/10/08/the-ever-receding-climate-goalpost-ipcc-and-al-gore-12-years-to-save-the-planet-again/ https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/10/08/the-ever-receding-cli...

alexandercrohde 7y ago
That's the downside of boys crying wolf... when the actual wolf comes we don't listen.
- yogthos 7y ago
  Except nobody was crying wolf. If we took the problem seriously back then, we wouldn't be fucked now. The reality is that we're living through a mass extinction driven by climate change. Over 60% of animals have gone extinct since the 70s. The fact that people are looking at the world today and asking where's the problem is beyond belief.
  - weberc2 7y ago
    It's not beyond belief; it's that it's happening so slowly that it's not perceived by the common person. And the "crying wolf" that people upthread were referring to was the "this will be irreversible in N years" specifically, not the broader threat of climate change generally.
  - RyanDagg 7y ago
    "Over 60% of animals have gone extinct since the 70s" Citations?
    - stackola 7y ago
      Might be referring to this [1], but it concludes population sizes have gone down 60%, which doesn't sound good either, but is still a different story. [1] https://www.wwf.org.uk/updates/living-planet-report-2018 https://www.wwf.org.uk/updates/living-planet-report-2018
foolzcrow 7y ago
They are an apocalyptic death cult. The end is nigh submit to the elite or forever perish. How is submitting to the 1% going to save earth? They used to say by the end of the century. Year after year their predictions fail and the cult marches on.
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  Show us where these predictions fail or that's beneficial to elites who actually want status quo.
jefflombardjr 7y ago
1. Al Gore didn't say this, James Anderson did. James Anderson is a "Harvard University professor of atmospheric chemistry best known for establishing that chlorofluorocarbons were damaging the Ozone Layer." 2. You're right about the rhetoric - it has been around for centuries but so have major ecological disasters. The Dust Bowl alone forced tens of thousands of poverty-stricken families to abandon their farms, unable to pay mortgages or grow crops, and losses reached $25 million per day by 1936 (equivalent to $450,000,000 in 2018).[0] I can hardly fathom the true cost of something that impacts the entire planet. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl
- WillPostForFood 7y ago
  Al Gore has made the claim multiple times: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ice-caps-melt-gore-2014/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ice-caps-melt-gore-2014/ e.g. in 2007: Their latest modelling studies indicate northern polar waters could be ice-free in summers within just 5-6 years. Professor Wieslaw Maslowski told an American Geophysical Union meeting that previous projections had underestimated the processes now driving ice loss.
  - stubish 7y ago
    Could, not would. Like smoking can kill you, not smoking will kill you. It is a common and fundamental English language pattern, clearly indicating doubt and should never be misinterpreted as certainty.
    - WillPostForFood 7y ago
      Fair enough, but could is enough to play on people's fears. Immigrant X could be a terrorist. Food additive Y could cause cancer. You can't then claim you didn't say "would". Note that things like tobacco cancer warnings use use can/could not will/would, and the intent of the message is still clear. "SURGEON GENERAL WARNING: Cigar Smoking Can Cause Lung Cancer And Heart Disease." "WARNING: This product can cause mouth cancer."
jchanimal 7y ago
We kinda had 10 years back in the 80s. Just saying.
oceanghost 7y ago
No, no. You're the crazy one for thinking the world might not be ending. Remember?

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

aldoushuxley001 7y ago

No we don't. Hyperbole around climate change just makes people more likely to disregard the actual dangers.

dragonwriter 7y ago
It's not clear to me if you've forgotten to provide evidence for the “No, we don’t”, or if you are making the argument that the assertion that the characterization of the danger as so imminent makes people less likely to believe and therefore the characterization is false.
- imtringued 7y ago
  See you in 2023.
jefflombardjr 7y ago
Polar ice caps melting is hyperbole? Care to elaborate?
- _red 7y ago
  Because the vast majority of the earths history has been without ice on the poles. Obviously this will force changes on humans no doubt. However, trying to shoehorn this natural fact into a political / carbon-credit trading scheme is deeply cynical that is apparent to most >100 IQ people.
  - dagss 7y ago
    Noone cares about earths history. Earth will be fine. Nature will adapt. What we care about is that all of industrialized human civilization has been with polar ice caps...
  - artimaeis 7y ago
    The majority of Earth's history made it a completely uninhabitable place for humans. Seems like it would be in our combined best interest to prevent it from becoming that way again.

norswap 7y ago

Does "no more permanent ice" means there is a period of the year where there is no ice at all at the poles? That seems hardly believable. I was also under the impression that melting ice would push the level of the oceans by multiple meters. If 75-80% of ice has already melted, wouldn't we have seen significant elevation already? Just some facts that I found surprising, coming from someone who doesn't know much on the topic. I'm well on board with global warming, but the facts presented here don't mesh with what I understood about it.

assblaster 7y ago
The problem with predictions like this is that this prediction will look silly in 4 years when the Earth has not ended, similar to how wild predictions in the past have not borne fruit. I understand their desire to sensationalize, but people like AOC make the same predictions, and she is not seen as smart by a large portion of the public. I think if we just stick with the experimental science research, the general public will find more confidence in the sciences.
- dagss 7y ago
  Citations on wild predictions in past not being correct?
  - charlieflowers 7y ago
    I'm not GP, but there are plenty of examples of doomsday prophets predicting the tribulation, or the rapture, or some other form of the end of the world.
    - KirinDave 7y ago
      Okay, but what reasonable level of evidence and plausibility hasn't been passed for global warming? At this point, what else would it take a reasonable person to see the danger of the situation we're in?

olivermarks 7y ago

Anderson, the "Godfather of climate change science' advocates aerosol geo engineering experimentation https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/pgaq57/harvard-calls-for-geoengineering-experiments https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/pgaq57/harvard-calls-for-...

weberc2 7y ago
Related: https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/questions/9805/would-adding-sulfur-dioxide-to-the-atmosphere-have-a-global-cooling-effect/9809 https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/questions/9805/would-...

Fjolsvith 7y ago

> "People at this point haven't come to grips with the irreversibility of this sea-level rise problem," Anderson said, displaying a map that shows the site of Harvard's new $10 billion Allston campus inundated after 3 meters of sea-level rise. The Harvard scientist wants to save his new research center from climate change. Also, submission should say "Five", instead of "Four".

makerofspoons 7y ago
The article is from January 2018, so if Dr. Anderson is correct we now have four years.
- thecolorblue 7y ago
  The title should have indicated the article was from 2018 and properly quoted the articles title.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Fjolsvith 7y ago
Also, I would wonder how smart Harvard scientists are, really. After all, they built a $10 billion campus that has an effective lifespan of 5 years?

bleh123 7y ago

It's amazing to me how most of these predictions refrain from calling out the single largest polluters in the world, China, from changing their behavior or doing anything substantial. In particular, this paragraph at the end: > In Chicago Thursday, he prosecuted a moral argument that implicates university administrators who refuse to divest from fossil fuels, journalists who fail to fact-check false statements made by political candidates, and executives of fossil fuel companies who continue to pursue activities that are exacerbating climate change—especially those who mislead the public about those effects. Really? Can you, as a man of science stand behind such vitriol as an outburst for what is arguably at best a theory with a lot of room for error? Specifically: > "The chance that there will be any permanent ice left in the Arctic after 2022 is essentially zero," Anderson said Based on WHAT? This man is making a claim for the complete wipe out of roughly seven million cubic miles of ice in the next three years? Even if one were to be charitable and entertain a massive error margin on this claim, based on data about the polar cycles it seems extremely unlikely. This is nothing but an attempt to use "Science" to create panic. I strongly agree that we need to do more on the environment, but there's got to be a better answer than killing off a major chunk of the commercial markets and industry that have contributed to the single most prosperous period in human history. Can scientists please not make recommendations on policy? I'd love to hear scientific solutions . . just the other day, there was a discussion here on HN about using energy from a nuclear reactor to recycle atmospheric carbons. Practical or not, i'd love to see us innovate our way out of this hole while continuing to be reasonably responsible with our environmental decisions.

gdubs 7y ago
The US has double the emissions per capita as China. [1] China is also steadily moving towards one of the most ambitious carbon tax / cap and trade systems in the world. [2] Don’t have the exact source in front of me but I read in a paper recently that China’s new carbon market will cover a significant percentage of global carbon emissions when it’s in full swing. 1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions_per_capita https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_... 2: https://www.icf.com/blog/policy-and-regulation/china-carbon-price https://www.icf.com/blog/policy-and-regulation/china-carbon-...

timw4mail 7y ago

...the Maldives are under water, and half of Florida doesn't exist any more. Oh, wait, that's not the case. Assuming that assertion is true, though, 4 or 5 years is not enough time for anything to realistically be done. I assert that in 20 years we'll still not see the supposed effects though.

gerbilly 7y ago
Melting polar ice caps (not antarctic, polar) does not affect sea levels because it's floating ice.
mcv 7y ago
There's a massive difference between time to act, and time until we see the effects. By the time we do see the effects of global worming, it will be far too late to do anything about it. (And we're already seeing some effects.)

makerofspoons 7y ago

The loss of sea ice is stoking US heat waves: https://phys.org/news/2019-06-loss-arctic-sea-ice-stokes.html https://phys.org/news/2019-06-loss-arctic-sea-ice-stokes.htm... Intense heat is also predicted for Europe this summer: https://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/accuweather-2019-europe-summer-forecast/70008315 https://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/accuweather-2019... James Anderson, the scientist from the article, also has linked ozone depletion with climate change: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-ozone-problem-is-back-and-worse-than-ever-136717745/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-ozone-prob...

snarf21 7y ago
I think his four years is too fast but I also don't think we can totally destroy the planet (aside from nuclear destruction). We know too much and have too much technology. Some (small?) fragment of civilization will survive while the earth recovers. For example, methane has a half life of seven years so it will take some time. The more immediate threat seems to be around food and water. The Ogallala Aquifer is drying up quickly and we will have a new Dust Bowl.[https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2016/08/vanishing-midwest-ogallala-aquifer-drought/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2016/08/vanishin...] Considering how much food for the US and the world comes from here there is going to be massive starvation. It just seems like this planet can only infinitely support around 4B people. We have too many now but population is slowly starting to tilt back. We also need to understand that constant growth is toxic. Both for our planet in population and as a driver for business and profits. I think this planet will be quite different as automation continues to accelerate and as we start using all of our resources in a sustainable and non-destructive way. I am very curious to see how this plays out over my lifetime.
- toyg 7y ago
  With all due respect, I strongly doubt anybody would be seriously impacted by that aquifer outside of North America. This said, anything that turns Americans angrier is a security risk for the rest of the world.
  - 7y ago

assblaster 7y ago

The key part from the article: "The level of carbon now in the atmosphere hasn’t been seen in 12 million years". What was the Earth like 13 million years ago? Or 130 million years? A snapshot in time does little to provide actual context.

Fellshard 7y ago
I have little trust in forensically invented snapshots over concrete measurements, as well.

Dumblydorr 7y ago

There's little chance of transitioning our energy system in time, so let's start considering how to cool our planet. Can we block or reflect sunlight? That seems the brightest future, cooling the planet artificially while decarbonizing and capturing the carbon already released.

rawrmaan 7y ago
I don't know if anyone is researching this, but couldn't we manufacture stupidly large floating reflective tarps and start deploying them anywhere sea ice is melting? Seems like this would be a high benefit for relatively low cost.
- rb808 7y ago
  I'd think they'd work better at the equator to reflect the most heat.
  - aaomidi 7y ago
    And fucking weather patterns even more.
  - fouc 7y ago
    Tropical countries would love to reduce the heat, it would massively help their economies.
  - Dumblydorr 7y ago
    I believe we should start at the poles, as that would slow feedback loops there and save what little climate system we have. The poles are crucial holders of water in ice form, cooling those should be high priority.
- jefflombardjr 7y ago
  Yeah! The Swiss are doing this on a much smaller scale: https://www.livescience.com/61951-swiss-glacier-blanket.html https://www.livescience.com/61951-swiss-glacier-blanket.html I would think floating tarps would seriously mess with the marine life though.

billpg 7y ago

So we can relax for three years before we have to do anything?

aaomidi 7y ago
Ten years* We don't do shit until it's already fucked millions of people.
- toyg 7y ago
  Well, if you assume the Earth is unsustainably overpopulated already, surely that should be a fundamentally inevitable development anyway...?
  - aaomidi 7y ago
    I don't assume this. I think the west would have to give up some stuff they see as a "need" currently and we can sustain this population.

umadon 7y ago

No amount of individual behavioral changes are going to cut it. The entire economy needs to be transformed. Does anyone seriously believe the people who control the economy will just let this happen?

agentultra 7y ago

"I don't understand how these people sit down to dinner with their kids," Anderson said, "because they're not stupid people." I have a hard enough time teaching my kids about the seasons and polar bears when many of these things won't exist by the time they're teenagers.

sasasassy 7y ago

Another wild prediction. This person's wild claim is that if go on with the current path the ocean's will rise 7 meters and there will be worse storms. You can visit http://www.floodmap.net/ http://www.floodmap.net/ and see how 7 meters is nothing, even discounting that we can adapt and protect against flooding. Worse storms are bad, but if the alternative is "World War II-style transformation of industry", what alternative is that? How can the world say to 5 billion people "sorry, you have to stop your industrialisation now, there may be storms in the US".

abledon 7y ago
that sites UI is so bad, seems like low hanging fruit for some React frontend wizard to redo and make the defacto site to go to for climate / flooding visualizations
jeanperrot 7y ago
At 7 meters, much of Florida is gone. Regardless, global warming will impact poorer (and tropical) countries disproportionately. I live in the Pacific Northwest, and I know it is a pretty good place to be as it warms up. Bangladesh, less so. You can't expect Bangladesh to lead the decarbonation of industrial production - but the US can, and there are good arguments that it will yield an increase in wealth and standards of living.
- jrochkind1 7y ago
  This is a crucial point. The huge changes to the ecology will make some places difficult to inhabit and destabilize food production, which will destabilize economies, which will lead to large social disruption and conflict. It is the poor who will be least able to protect themselves from this destabilization. Not just because poorer/tropical countries will be disproportionately effected, but it's because it's the rich (globally or locally) who have the resources to protect themselves. With technology, with mobility, with "security". Some who are now rich (globally or locally) will also find themselves less so. When I see the standard the U.S. is setting for how refugees are treated, I'm terrified, even on just a self-interested level. Many more of us will be refugees in the future.

hurled 7y ago

Why say anything at all, when it's obvious that no one is going to do anything in four years?

viach 7y ago

Interesting, is it possible to use hight levels of carbon dioxide detected during exoplanets spectroscopy in order to decide where to point big radio telescopes, so that there could be radio signals of intelligent life from other dying worlds?

greggeter 7y ago

GenIV Nuclear now.

mcv 7y ago

The title is very misleading. There is no hard deadline to save ourselves from climate change, or if there is, we already passed it. We're currently at the point were every year we continue doing nothing, means it takes multiple years (decades? centuries?) to recover from the accumulated effects. Permanent ice is already melting, climate is already changing. Even if we completely stop emitting CO2 right now (which we can't), there would still be too much CO2 in the atmosphere for some time, leading to further heating and longer melting. Even if we were to remove all excess CO2 from the atmosphere right now (which we obviously can't), Earth would still be too warm and icecaps would continue to melt while global temperatures would slowly revert to normal. We're doing none of those things; we're still arguing over whether we should do anything at all. Our inaction over the past couple of decades on this issue is going to have repercussions for the next centuries. The issue right now is: how bad do we want things to get? We can't stop it anymore, but we may be able to mitigate it. I really really hope we can prevent the Eastern Antarctic icecap from melting, because that would truly be a disaster. When that melts, most major population centers will have to be evacuated.

challenger22 7y ago
>Even if we completely stop emitting CO2 right now (which we can't), there would still be too much CO2 in the atmosphere for some time, leading to further heating and longer melting Do you have any data on this? If you look at how quickly things cool off at night, Earth's biosphere reaches steady-state thermal equilibrium over the course of a few days. Your claim is essentially that we've already set off an albedo forcing function that we can't stop, and which is also stronger than existing negative feedback loops. Seems unlikely to me.
- mcv 7y ago
  Well, the CO2 in our atmosphere is too high, and it's been built up over the course of more than a century. It won't immediately drop back to normal levels even if we did somehow manage to stop producing any CO2 at all. At night the temperature drops not due to a lack of CO2, but due to a lack of sunlight. If we were to be able to partially block the sun, or reflect significantly more sunlight back into space, we would indeed be able to lose heat more more quickly, but that would require engineering on a scale we've never done before. So sure, paint the entire Earth white, but how? Or build a giant solar screen in space, but again: how? Besides, blocking sunlight will also have many negative repercussions.

gdubs 7y ago

The “we’ve been hearing scare stories for decades” argument is akin to “I’ve been driving drunk without my seatbelt for a decade and people keep saying I’ll die, but I haven’t yet.” For many, many people, the dire warnings have come true. Entire towns were erased by fire in Northern California last year. Severe storms are racking up billions and billions of dollars in damage every year — and entire islands have been decimated. The amount of corn planted in the Midwest for the time of year is off the charts, due to freakish weather. The world is a big place. We can’t wait until everyone all at once is feeling the types of disasters that make you sit up and take notice. But these events are happening constantly, all around the world. Yea, it doesn’t look like “The Day After Tomorrow”, but what kind of yardstick is that, anyway? We need to strike a balance between a healthy dose of fear, optimism for the sake of our children, and resolve.

Izkata 7y ago
> The amount of corn planted in the Midwest for the time of year is off the charts, due to freakish weather. Either you found different reports than me, or you're using "off the charts" wrong. It means "too high/too much to measure"; the crop situation is actually lower than normal due to flooding.
- gdubs 7y ago
  Clunky phrasing — I meant off the normal curve. In this case, obviously meaning much lower than what’s typical for this time of year.

RappingBoomer 7y ago

climate change? I thought it was global warming...