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Antarctic sea ice – rapid decreases, reduced to lowest area in 40 years
- adrianN 7y agoDoomsday messages are coming in in rapid succession. First the permafrost is melting 70 years earlier than expected, then Greenland losing massive amounts of ice, then glaciers that provide fresh water for hundreds of millions in India and China disappearing at an alarming rate, now this. And still politicians do nothing. What we need is an effort to build renewables, insulate homes, and build charging infrastructure that rivals the Apollo program, what we get are "freedom molecules" and "clean coal".
- defterGoose 7y agoDon't forget that all the insects (the single largest link in the animalian food chain) are dying. Politicians long ago forgot that their job is to instigate improvement in society, and now relegate themselves to either decrying or defending the status quo. I'm beginning to fear that the Apollo program might actually be the greatest societal effort the US will ever undertake.
- fallingfrog 7y agoI’m not sure politicians have ever seen their jobs as instigating improvements to society. I think they see their job as to protect the interests of the biggest contributors to their campaigns. There was a time when that was organized labor, which is as close as you’re going to get to the “will of the people”, but now it’s mostly big business.
- NeedMoreTea 7y agoThere did seem to be a tendency to try in the immediate post-war era. Even the right, hands off, side of politics were increasing state services and benefits. In no small part as a consequence of coming back from the war, so soon after the previous one, generating a widespread mood of "now we must do better". It mostly survived through the sixties, and finally died with the 73 oil crisis. That caused the chaos of the rest of the seventies that resulted in the course we're still on today.
- aldoushuxley001 7y agoKeep in mind the decimation of insect populations likely has very little to do with global warming and more to do with pollutions like agricultural insecticides, deforestation, etc.
- baxtr 7y agoMy guess is that this is related to the "exponential growth" of humanity
- cies 7y agoWhich is related to capitalism needing it to even "work".
- hkyeti 7y agoNot just politicians. And still citizens do nothing. Meat consumption is rising (one of the best things we can do personally is stop eating meat and dairy). Travel is increasing. Consumption...
- anon_z88 7y agoWhy is not eating meat/dairy "one of the best things we can do personally"?
- gdubs 7y agoBecause land-use change is a leading cause of climate change, and most land-use change is happening to grow and harvest animals. Add on top of that the monoculture crops are also largely grown to feed animals, and those monocultures also drive climate change. Eating a plant based diet is great, but even switching to locally raised, pasture grown animals can be a positive. But ultimately pastures need to be re-wilded into natural forests. Beef needs to become an expensive luxury and not a dietary staple.
- hkyeti 7y agoAgree about beef becoming an expensive luxury, but Oxford and CSIRO etc scientists have shown that pasture grown animals are worse for climate change. Sequestration doesn't cover their emissions... http://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2017-10-03-grass-fed-beef-good-or-bad-climate http://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2017-10-03-grass-fed-beef-good-or-b...
- adrianN 7y agoProducing meat consumes a lot of resources. Especially if its beef. https://i.imgur.com/JAMsYHk.gif https://i.imgur.com/JAMsYHk.gif
- lightgreen 7y agoWhy constraint yourself voluntarily instead of simply paying co2 tax? If meat production hurts climate, let’s just make it expensive (not the meat itself, but the process which produces co2) and let free market work towards stopping climate change. Maybe you don’t eat meat but instead buying something else which hurts climate 20 times more? Nobody knows.
- Kaiyou 7y agoAll these doomsday messages! And they have zero impact on the quality of my life. I wonder why nobody cares. \s
- breakyerself 7y agoKaiyou falls off a 10-story building. As he passes the sixth story, someone yells from the window, “How’s it going?” He yells back, “So far, so good!”
- Kaiyou 7y agoThis conversation is now 30 years old. Still, so far, so good.
- mikepurvis 7y agoWell, that is the thing about hitting the ground— you can be milliseconds away and everything still looks fine. In a few decades, historians will be able to look back and identify the key events and turning points in all this. I suspect that the stuff we're seeing now will be eventually seen as part of the transition from "getting bad slowly" to "getting bad very quickly". But obviously it's hard to know without the full benefit of hindsight.
- Kaiyou 7y agoI suspect it won't be earlier than in a few centuries.
- adrianN 7y agoAll signs point to you being wrong.
- homonculus1 7y agoWhat data does your suspicion derive from?
- King-Aaron 7y agoI don't quite follow the results being discussed here, but from my reading am I right in understanding that up until now there's been a gradual increasing trend in sea ice coverage in the antarctic, which is now (as of the latest results) drastically decreasing?
- rypskar 7y agohttps://earthsky.org/earth/while-arctic-sea-ice-declines-in-2014-antarctic-sea-ice-increases https://earthsky.org/earth/while-arctic-sea-ice-declines-in-... TLDR: He went on to say that many climate models actually predict a short-term increase in Antarctic sea ice, under conditions of global warming. He spoke of factors such as increasing fresh water and higher wind speeds that promote ice growth and expansion, and, as is clear from this year’s Antarctic sea ice maximum, these factors appear to be dominating right now.
- ralusek 7y agoI think that it's important for free market advocates, myself included, to understand something. Negative third party externalities, having direct impacts on individuals that did not consent to the responsible transaction(s), are fully within the responsibility of the government to regulate and/or tax. You are not violating your principles by backing state intervention for environmental issues.
- IAmEveryone 7y agoIndeed. It’s unfortunate that what was originally a belief in the superiority of capitalism to organize a society to everyone’s benefit has morphed into blind support for existing, large businesses. The best illustration in recent history are probably the attempts to insulate coal power from competition by renewables. Really makes you wonder if people don’t sometimes look in the mirror and wonder “wait, how did I end up here?”
- kfk 7y agoAdvocates of real free markets want a carbon tax. Externalities are a real problem and there is a lot of economics research on how to deal with it. The issue is that “right wing” has passed to signify “liberal”. There is nothing less liberal, or capitalistic, than most of the current right wing parties in western countries.
- chewz 7y agoCarbon tax is terrible idea. We have a science proving that it won't work. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Lucas_Jr https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Lucas_Jr. Pseudo-market solutions do not work. They are quickly gamed by market players. It would be just a waste of precious time.
- VorticesRcool 7y agoThat link does not say anything about science or a carbon tax. What did that economist have to say about it?
- martincollignon 7y agoWant to make a difference on climate change as a technologist? Feel free to join these communities actively looking for support and with ongoing projects (that are alive): - https://climateaction.tech/ https://climateaction.tech/ - https://techimpactmakers.com/ https://techimpactmakers.com/ - https://www.tmrow.com/ https://www.tmrow.com/
- ForHackernews 7y agoYou should also take political action. With due respect to people who are trying to take positive individual action, it will not be enough. We've been waiting 30 years and people are still driving SUVs. Only large scale government policy can move the needle for an entire society. Maybe you have political views that you find that distasteful, but unfortunately we're running out of time, and you'll have to choose between your politics and your future. https://www.sunrisemovement.org/ https://www.sunrisemovement.org/ http://rebellion.earth/ http://rebellion.earth/
- martincollignon 7y agoEverything will be needed - incl. political action. Not everyone wants to be political, and people should be offered other choices.
- dao- 7y agoGP said "You should also take political action", so this doesn't rule out individual action. GP's key point is that individual action would not be enough and you're not actually addressing that argument by just saying that not everyone wants to be political and that other choices would be nice.
- notabee 7y agoIf people don't want to be political now, they're really not going to like the choices (or lack thereof) left after politics have failed and the crisis, famines, and other impacts start to become apparent to the general population. Choices are what we are rapidly running out of.
- perfunctory 7y agoA related article on the thinning of Antarctic ice sheets [0]. So we've got the decrease in ice extent as well as thickness, which is equal to total volume decrease? [0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/may/16/thinning-of-antarctic-ice-sheets-spreading-inland-rapidly-study https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/may/16/thinning...
- EGreg 7y agoGetting whiplash reading this. What’s the upshot? Following over 3 decades of gradual but uneven increases in sea ice coverage, the yearly average Antarctic sea ice extents reached a record high of 12.8 × 106 km2 in 2014, followed by a decline so precipitous that they reached their lowest value in the 40-y 1979–2018 satellite multichannel passive-microwave record, 10.7 × 106 km2, in 2017. In contrast, it took the Arctic sea ice cover a full 3 decades to register a loss that great in yearly average ice extents. Still, when considering the 40-y record as a whole, the Antarctic sea ice continues to have a positive overall trend in yearly average ice extents, although at 11,300 ± 5,300 km2⋅y−1, this trend is only 50% of the trend for 1979–2014, before the precipitous decline.
- alex_young 7y agoI think the visualizations help a lot here: https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/early/2019/06/25/1906556116/F9.large.jpg https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/early/2019/06/25/190655611... Seems like there is a lot of extreme variance, but it's hard to imagine that the ice is going to come back quickly from such a huge and steep decline.
- refurb 7y agoStill, when considering the 40-y record as a whole, the Antarctic sea ice continues to have a positive overall trend in yearly average ice extents Sounds like the trend is an increase in the overall area of ice?
- ash 7y agoFrom the Discussion section: > The ice covers of each of the 5 sectors of Fig. 1 and of the Southern Ocean as a whole have experienced considerable interannual variability over the past 40 y (Figs. 2–7). In fact, the Southern Ocean and 4 of the 5 sectors (all except the Ross Sea) have each experienced at least one period since 1999 when the yearly average ice extents decreased for 3 or more straight years only to rebound again afterward and eventually reach levels exceeding the extent preceding the 3 y of decreases (Figs. 2–7). This illustrates that the ice decreases since 2014 (Fig. 2) are no assurance that the 1979–2014 overall positive trend in Southern Ocean ice extents has reversed to a long-term negative trend. Only time and an extended observational record will reveal whether the small increase in yearly average ice extents from 2017 to 2018 (Fig. 2C) is a blip in a long-term downward trend or the start of a rebound. And: > I hope that the 40-y record discussed in this paper will encourage further studies into the atmospheric and oceanic conditions that could have led to the extremely rapid 2014–2017 decline of the Antarctic sea ice cover, the comparably rapid decline in the mid-1970s, and the uneven but overall gradual increases in Antarctic sea ice coverage in the intervening decades.
- myth_drannon 7y agoI just watched Like Stories of Old taking the topic of Chernobyl (HBO) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y21TGmzHHjk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y21TGmzHHjk He talks about the concept of Risk Society - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_society How society responds to ecological disasters, basically don't think the government going to tackle it, it will just ignore it.
- ptah 7y agohttp://flood.firetree.net/ http://flood.firetree.net/
- umvi 7y ago> reduced to lowest area in 40 years Does that mean over 40 years ago it had an even lower area or that they are at all time lows (as far as we can tell)? Could account for why my grandparents are skeptical, they're like "yeah, yeah, this has all happened before, environmental political fads come and go..."
- anon_z88 7y agoThis skepticism is important. What is the timeline of these changes in temperature? Can we compare it to the changes 100 years ago? 500 years ago? 1000 years ago? 10,000 years ago? Are we accounting for positioning and skewing of the sun (on it's natural cycle)? So much more goes into temperature regulation than simply "carbon emissions", if we were to realistically tackle an environmental disaster I would point to the plastic waste in the ocean and the fish farms.
- tremon 7y agoThe 40-year timespan marks the boundary of the current measurement regime (satellite multichannel passive-microwave measurements). This isn't the first time it happens, but earlier measurements may not be directly comparable. From the article: The one other several-year period during the time frame of modern instrumental records with an estimated loss of hemispheric sea ice coverage comparably as rapid as [the current one was] in the mid-1970s. Calculations based on a variety of datasets [..] show rates of decrease of ∼600,000 km2/y for the 4 y from the start of 1973 to the start of 1977 and for the 3-y subset from the start of 1974 to the start of 1977 The concluding remark is helpful to reproduce in full: I hope that the 40-y record discussed in this paper will encourage further studies into the atmospheric and oceanic conditions that could have led to the extremely rapid 2014–2017 decline of the Antarctic sea ice cover, the comparably rapid decline in the mid-1970s, and the uneven but overall gradual increases in Antarctic sea ice coverage in the intervening decades. More broadly, the environmental datasets may be nearing the point where they are long enough and rich enough to enable the linking of several of the modes and dipoles and oscillations now spoken of separately, just as the El Niño and Southern Oscillation phenomena were linked together years ago as ENSO; once that further linkage happens, the understanding of Earth’s very interconnected climate system, including the sea ice cover, could be markedly enhanced.
- ablation 7y agoI posted this in another comment covering the Guardian's coverage, but figured I'd post here too in case it got lost as this seems like a more lively discussion. Is there any indication what a 'tipping point' or irreversible positive feedback loop would look like once it had started? Would it resemble a graph such as in TFA? Or would perhaps not be an irreversible first swoop, so to speak, but instead oscillate deeper each time? Unknowable and unlikely, perhaps, given that it's not happened before. But a part of me wonders what it looks like when we get to the point where the charts and graphs don't go back up again.