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Interesting. It's unfortunate that this will be used as ammunition for climate skeptics. It seems that ice cliffs are very different than ice sheets - the thin

by dawg- 7y ago

Interesting. It's unfortunate that this will be used as ammunition for climate skeptics. It seems that ice cliffs are very different than ice sheets - the things currently melting. Ice cliffs were previously supposed to account for up to 6 feet of sea level rise, instead of the much more toned-down projections we have seen in the last few years. The subtle distinction between ice cliffs and ice sheets will be lost in the media re-telling of this. Sometimes I wonder if science can ever truly be put to work for mass society? It seems not.

rimliu 7y ago
What you say is basically it is too bad that it cannot be used for scaremongering.
- ceejayoz 7y ago
  Nah. It's like having a study come out that shows smoking doesn't cause toenail cancer like the previous ones did. You know the tobacco industry will portray it as "new study shows smoking doesn't cause cancer!" or "scientists cast doubt on smoking-cancer link".
- dawg- 7y ago
  Actually, that's not what I said.
  - dawg- 7y ago
    I also want to mention that I don't agree with whoever flagged the above comment. Silencing and/or hiding people with different opinions is never the way to go.
    - jothezero 7y ago
      My last post was satirical about the stake, but it is exactly why I mentioned it. I feel like we are in the dark era of Christianity burning witches and dissidents. The More Things Change, The More They Remain The Same.
    - wool_gather 7y ago
      > Silencing and/or hiding people with different opinions is never the way to go. I completely agree with this. But looking at the (now dead) comment (not having flagged it myself)...it's not really an example of a differing opinion. It's a cheap rhetorical shot that adds absolutely nothing to the discussion. If the commentor had actually expanded on their disagreement, the remark could certainly stand as part of that. There are examples of substantive comments in this thread that disagree with yours. On its own, that one has no merit except to lower the level of discourse here.
- jothezero 7y ago
  That exactly what he means by this. Because he and only him, holds the truth, and dare you not go against what he states, as you will end on the stake.
  - dawg- 7y ago
    I'm sorry that this is what you got from my comment, because it wasn't my intention. I was trying to say that the nuance in the article will be completely lost in the media. Even commenters in this thread who "believe in" climate change and claim to subscribe to the scientific orthodoxy are missing the distinction between ice sheets and ice cliffs, which was one of the main points of the article. And HN is one of the rare places on the internet where people actually read things, so imagine what the conversation will look like when someone posts it on facebook. Ultimately I was trying to raise the question of whether it's even possible to communicate science to the general public. And this thread so far is answering that question with a big fat "NO".
    - NateEag 7y ago
      It's inherently impossible to communicate advanced scientific research results in a quick, meaningful way to a layperson. By definition a layperson doesn't understand any scientific field in depth. Since they don't, they do not have the tools to truly understand anything in the field's research - you need to understand the field's current state to understand what's going on in the latest research. Ever tried to explain something highly technical to non-technical management? That's another instance of this problem. They're both special cases of the general problem that only experts can really understand and appreciate great work in their field, and that a very fortunate person might get to be an expert in four or maybe five fields before they die.
vfc1 7y ago
Yes, I can already see all the articles saying that the meltdown of the ice sheets is "not that bad after all", even though the melting is on record levels in the last few years. This is why even in the age of the Internet, it's going to take decades until the measures that actually need to be taken to combat climate change to be put in place. By then we will be well above the 1.5 degrees rise in temperature, and population north of 10 billion.
- chrisco255 7y ago
  We don't control the climate. The climate is a non-linear dynamic system. There are dozens of natural cycles that control the climate (AMO, PDO, ENSO, solar cycles, to name a few). And all predictions of catastrophic, runaway warming have failed to materialize in the 21st century despite over 30 years of doomsday predictions. We've seen maybe a 0.13C per decade increase in temps. Well within cyclical norms. Our understanding of the climate has to be driven by facts on the ground and not computer models and hype. We still do not have good models for understanding or predicting global low cloud cover. Clouds are hugely important to our climate system. There is no way to accurately predict the temperature in the future, especially 100 years into the future, without modeling fundamental and extremely complex systems. Our current models do not match reality or even closely approximate it.
  - moultano 7y ago
    Honestly where do you get this stuff? It's like time-cube level of nuttery.
    - topologistics 7y ago
      What is nutty? Is there anything in the comment you replied to that is untrue? Maybe you just don't like the big words.
      - moultano 7y ago
        I started trying to write out a reply going point by point, but it's just exhausting. When someone is that far from reality it's just too much work to try to pull them back, and they're not going to do any of the work themselves. Arctic sea ice has a third of the volume it had when I was young, smaller than at any point we've ever measured, can reconstruct from ships logs, or estimate from ice cores. You'd think that kind of absurd level of change would give some of these people pause, but it doesn't.
hannob 7y ago
> It's unfortunate that this will be used as ammunition for climate skeptics. That will always happen, though it only shows that these people don't understand science: That "we don't know every detail about climate change and there's scientific controversy and new discoveries about many details" does not equal "we have a controversy about the basic facts of climate change". Interesting enough the collapse of the west antarctic ice shield was a major point of criticism where people said the IPCC got things wrong, because they were underplaying risks. It seems the debate isn't over. We'll see how it plays out.
umvi 7y ago
I remember in middle school (~2004) in Cambridge we had a school assembly about global warming, and they showed an animation of a cup of water filled with ice, the ice melting, and then the cup overflowing. In retrospect it was a simplified analogy for kids to understand, but on the other hand, massive ammunition for climate skeptics such as my parents who instantly debunked the analogy as soon as I told them about the assembly and put a cup of ice water on the kitchen table to show how silly the claim was.
- MR4D 7y ago
  That analogy may hold for arctic ice, but not antarctic ice, which is mostly a set of glacier's above the ground - some of it even has its base more than a mile above sea level. So think of a full cup and dropping ice cubes into it. Totally different result. https://antarctic-logistics.com/about-antarctica/antarctic-environment/ https://antarctic-logistics.com/about-antarctica/antarctic-e...
  - stevenwoo 7y ago
    Good point, don’t forget same is true of Greenland’s glaciers.
  - umvi 7y ago
    Sure, but even now the analogy is not great because the melting part has nothing to do with it. In other words, if you drop an ice cube into a cup of water, it will either immediately overflow or it will never overflow. The melting part has nothing to do with whether it will overflow. If the snow on the roof melts -> the cup overflows I think a better analogy is a cup sitting at the drain pipe of a rain gutter and the roof is covered with snow.
    - MR4D 7y ago
      I think you missed a word in my comment.... "a full cup".
      - umvi 7y ago
edoo 7y ago
I flatly don't believe in CAGW. Science shows us CO2 has a base2 logarithmic effect with 50% of the heating coming in at around 40ppm. Do the math. At this point even if we go up to 5k ppm there is less than 2C total warming even possible. The rest of the temperature rise scare comes from IPCC models that amplify the tiny amount of CO2 warming. The same models that have so far failed to track reality. Satellite data shows the rate of warming over the last 50 years has not changed even as CO2 skyrocketed. The correlation isn't even there. NASA admits that the most recent years would not have actually been the hottest years ever if they didn't fill in missing data with their propriety algorithm. The sky is not falling. I expect it to take another 10 years or so before the data is so in your face that we start talking about how we made such a large mistake. Even if CO2 was a problem the only way to fix it at this point is to keep the 2 billion people down that are striving for a much larger footprint. Good luck with that.
- ceejayoz 7y ago
  > Even if CO2 was a problem the only way to fix it at this point is to keep the 2 billion people down that are striving for a much larger footprint. Or, help them skip over the heavily polluting stages of that growth. We subsidize electric cars and solar installations in the US; helping developing nations do the same might go a ways.
  - edoo 7y ago
    Pollution is the real problem and it really feels like it has been given a back seat to the climate. Those Chinese factories are churning away for the same American corporations that lobby for the CO2 laws.
commandlinefan 7y ago
> ammunition for climate skeptics That climate change alarmist’s predictions have been shown to be wrong - again - will be used as “ammunition” by the people who can’t help but notice that climate alarmists predictions are wrong each and every single time they pronounce them strikes you as a problem… why, exactly?
brlewis 7y ago
> It's unfortunate that this will be used as ammunition for climate skeptics. On the contrary, skeptics' argument that climate science is being suppressed and manipulated just took a heavy blow.
- jfengel 7y ago
  Conspiracy thinking doesn't require, or reward, consistency. It doesn't matter how trivial it is to refute a talking point. They'll just Gish Gallop on to the next one -- including ones that have been refuted for them before.
WhompingWindows 7y ago
> Sometimes I wonder if science can ever truly be put to work for mass society? It seems not. Come now, that's short-sighted. Have you forgotten the hundreds of scientific discoveries making your daily life better than it was for your great-great-grandparents?
- dawg- 7y ago
  of course, but I'm not sure those discoveries have been "put to work" with the intention and mass organization in the same way climate science has been. I think with climate science we are trying to organize scientific knowledge and use it to solve a problem on a planetary scale that has not really been done before. There have been huge international interdisciplinary efforts like CERN and the ISS for example. But nothing so messily intertwined with people's personal lives, values, principles as climate science.
tito 7y ago
I found the terms confusing so looked them up. Does this look right to you? Glacier: Large ice masses created by snowfall that has transformed into ice and compressed over the course of many years. Ice sheets, ice streams, and ice shelves are a few types of glaciers. [2] Ice Sheets: Freaking huge glaciers Ice Cliffs: the vertical edges of an ice sheet. Like a rock cliff but made of ice. Ice Shelf: the "hanging chad" of the ice world. Chunk of an ice sheet that extends out over the ocean (nice diagram in source below) [1] Sea ice: Frozen seawater, floating on the ocean. Not made from snowfall. Iceberg: Ice floating on the ocean, chunk of an ice sheet/ice shelf [1] Helpful: http://www.antarcticglaciers.org/glacier-processes/glacier-types/ice-shelves-sea-ice-icebergs/ http://www.antarcticglaciers.org/glacier-processes/glacier-t... [2] https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2018/02/05/glaciers-ice-sheets-polar-ice/ https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2018/02/05/glaciers-ice-sheets...

by dawg- 7y ago

rimliu 7y ago

What you say is basically it is too bad that it cannot be used for scaremongering.

ceejayoz 7y ago
Nah. It's like having a study come out that shows smoking doesn't cause toenail cancer like the previous ones did. You know the tobacco industry will portray it as "new study shows smoking doesn't cause cancer!" or "scientists cast doubt on smoking-cancer link".
dawg- 7y ago
Actually, that's not what I said.
- dawg- 7y ago
  I also want to mention that I don't agree with whoever flagged the above comment. Silencing and/or hiding people with different opinions is never the way to go.
  - jothezero 7y ago
    My last post was satirical about the stake, but it is exactly why I mentioned it. I feel like we are in the dark era of Christianity burning witches and dissidents. The More Things Change, The More They Remain The Same.
  - wool_gather 7y ago
    > Silencing and/or hiding people with different opinions is never the way to go. I completely agree with this. But looking at the (now dead) comment (not having flagged it myself)...it's not really an example of a differing opinion. It's a cheap rhetorical shot that adds absolutely nothing to the discussion. If the commentor had actually expanded on their disagreement, the remark could certainly stand as part of that. There are examples of substantive comments in this thread that disagree with yours. On its own, that one has no merit except to lower the level of discourse here.
jothezero 7y ago
That exactly what he means by this. Because he and only him, holds the truth, and dare you not go against what he states, as you will end on the stake.
- dawg- 7y ago
  I'm sorry that this is what you got from my comment, because it wasn't my intention. I was trying to say that the nuance in the article will be completely lost in the media. Even commenters in this thread who "believe in" climate change and claim to subscribe to the scientific orthodoxy are missing the distinction between ice sheets and ice cliffs, which was one of the main points of the article. And HN is one of the rare places on the internet where people actually read things, so imagine what the conversation will look like when someone posts it on facebook. Ultimately I was trying to raise the question of whether it's even possible to communicate science to the general public. And this thread so far is answering that question with a big fat "NO".
  - NateEag 7y ago
    It's inherently impossible to communicate advanced scientific research results in a quick, meaningful way to a layperson. By definition a layperson doesn't understand any scientific field in depth. Since they don't, they do not have the tools to truly understand anything in the field's research - you need to understand the field's current state to understand what's going on in the latest research. Ever tried to explain something highly technical to non-technical management? That's another instance of this problem. They're both special cases of the general problem that only experts can really understand and appreciate great work in their field, and that a very fortunate person might get to be an expert in four or maybe five fields before they die.

vfc1 7y ago

Yes, I can already see all the articles saying that the meltdown of the ice sheets is "not that bad after all", even though the melting is on record levels in the last few years. This is why even in the age of the Internet, it's going to take decades until the measures that actually need to be taken to combat climate change to be put in place. By then we will be well above the 1.5 degrees rise in temperature, and population north of 10 billion.

chrisco255 7y ago
We don't control the climate. The climate is a non-linear dynamic system. There are dozens of natural cycles that control the climate (AMO, PDO, ENSO, solar cycles, to name a few). And all predictions of catastrophic, runaway warming have failed to materialize in the 21st century despite over 30 years of doomsday predictions. We've seen maybe a 0.13C per decade increase in temps. Well within cyclical norms. Our understanding of the climate has to be driven by facts on the ground and not computer models and hype. We still do not have good models for understanding or predicting global low cloud cover. Clouds are hugely important to our climate system. There is no way to accurately predict the temperature in the future, especially 100 years into the future, without modeling fundamental and extremely complex systems. Our current models do not match reality or even closely approximate it.
- moultano 7y ago
  Honestly where do you get this stuff? It's like time-cube level of nuttery.
  - topologistics 7y ago
    What is nutty? Is there anything in the comment you replied to that is untrue? Maybe you just don't like the big words.
    - moultano 7y ago
      I started trying to write out a reply going point by point, but it's just exhausting. When someone is that far from reality it's just too much work to try to pull them back, and they're not going to do any of the work themselves. Arctic sea ice has a third of the volume it had when I was young, smaller than at any point we've ever measured, can reconstruct from ships logs, or estimate from ice cores. You'd think that kind of absurd level of change would give some of these people pause, but it doesn't.

hannob 7y ago

> It's unfortunate that this will be used as ammunition for climate skeptics. That will always happen, though it only shows that these people don't understand science: That "we don't know every detail about climate change and there's scientific controversy and new discoveries about many details" does not equal "we have a controversy about the basic facts of climate change". Interesting enough the collapse of the west antarctic ice shield was a major point of criticism where people said the IPCC got things wrong, because they were underplaying risks. It seems the debate isn't over. We'll see how it plays out.

umvi 7y ago

I remember in middle school (~2004) in Cambridge we had a school assembly about global warming, and they showed an animation of a cup of water filled with ice, the ice melting, and then the cup overflowing. In retrospect it was a simplified analogy for kids to understand, but on the other hand, massive ammunition for climate skeptics such as my parents who instantly debunked the analogy as soon as I told them about the assembly and put a cup of ice water on the kitchen table to show how silly the claim was.

MR4D 7y ago
That analogy may hold for arctic ice, but not antarctic ice, which is mostly a set of glacier's above the ground - some of it even has its base more than a mile above sea level. So think of a full cup and dropping ice cubes into it. Totally different result. https://antarctic-logistics.com/about-antarctica/antarctic-environment/ https://antarctic-logistics.com/about-antarctica/antarctic-e...
- stevenwoo 7y ago
  Good point, don’t forget same is true of Greenland’s glaciers.
- umvi 7y ago
  Sure, but even now the analogy is not great because the melting part has nothing to do with it. In other words, if you drop an ice cube into a cup of water, it will either immediately overflow or it will never overflow. The melting part has nothing to do with whether it will overflow. If the snow on the roof melts -> the cup overflows I think a better analogy is a cup sitting at the drain pipe of a rain gutter and the roof is covered with snow.
  - MR4D 7y ago
    I think you missed a word in my comment.... "a full cup".
    - umvi 7y ago

edoo 7y ago

I flatly don't believe in CAGW. Science shows us CO2 has a base2 logarithmic effect with 50% of the heating coming in at around 40ppm. Do the math. At this point even if we go up to 5k ppm there is less than 2C total warming even possible. The rest of the temperature rise scare comes from IPCC models that amplify the tiny amount of CO2 warming. The same models that have so far failed to track reality. Satellite data shows the rate of warming over the last 50 years has not changed even as CO2 skyrocketed. The correlation isn't even there. NASA admits that the most recent years would not have actually been the hottest years ever if they didn't fill in missing data with their propriety algorithm. The sky is not falling. I expect it to take another 10 years or so before the data is so in your face that we start talking about how we made such a large mistake. Even if CO2 was a problem the only way to fix it at this point is to keep the 2 billion people down that are striving for a much larger footprint. Good luck with that.

ceejayoz 7y ago
> Even if CO2 was a problem the only way to fix it at this point is to keep the 2 billion people down that are striving for a much larger footprint. Or, help them skip over the heavily polluting stages of that growth. We subsidize electric cars and solar installations in the US; helping developing nations do the same might go a ways.
- edoo 7y ago
  Pollution is the real problem and it really feels like it has been given a back seat to the climate. Those Chinese factories are churning away for the same American corporations that lobby for the CO2 laws.

commandlinefan 7y ago

> ammunition for climate skeptics That climate change alarmist’s predictions have been shown to be wrong - again - will be used as “ammunition” by the people who can’t help but notice that climate alarmists predictions are wrong each and every single time they pronounce them strikes you as a problem… why, exactly?

brlewis 7y ago

> It's unfortunate that this will be used as ammunition for climate skeptics. On the contrary, skeptics' argument that climate science is being suppressed and manipulated just took a heavy blow.

jfengel 7y ago
Conspiracy thinking doesn't require, or reward, consistency. It doesn't matter how trivial it is to refute a talking point. They'll just Gish Gallop on to the next one -- including ones that have been refuted for them before.

WhompingWindows 7y ago

> Sometimes I wonder if science can ever truly be put to work for mass society? It seems not. Come now, that's short-sighted. Have you forgotten the hundreds of scientific discoveries making your daily life better than it was for your great-great-grandparents?

dawg- 7y ago
of course, but I'm not sure those discoveries have been "put to work" with the intention and mass organization in the same way climate science has been. I think with climate science we are trying to organize scientific knowledge and use it to solve a problem on a planetary scale that has not really been done before. There have been huge international interdisciplinary efforts like CERN and the ISS for example. But nothing so messily intertwined with people's personal lives, values, principles as climate science.

tito 7y ago

I found the terms confusing so looked them up. Does this look right to you? Glacier: Large ice masses created by snowfall that has transformed into ice and compressed over the course of many years. Ice sheets, ice streams, and ice shelves are a few types of glaciers. [2] Ice Sheets: Freaking huge glaciers Ice Cliffs: the vertical edges of an ice sheet. Like a rock cliff but made of ice. Ice Shelf: the "hanging chad" of the ice world. Chunk of an ice sheet that extends out over the ocean (nice diagram in source below) [1] Sea ice: Frozen seawater, floating on the ocean. Not made from snowfall. Iceberg: Ice floating on the ocean, chunk of an ice sheet/ice shelf [1] Helpful: http://www.antarcticglaciers.org/glacier-processes/glacier-types/ice-shelves-sea-ice-icebergs/ http://www.antarcticglaciers.org/glacier-processes/glacier-t... [2] https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2018/02/05/glaciers-ice-sheets-polar-ice/ https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2018/02/05/glaciers-ice-sheets...