36 ms·

The Laptev Sea hasn't frozen

478 points by xenocratus 6y ago

olivermarks 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laptev_Sea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laptev_Sea Does anyone know when 'records began'? I was trying to find out how long the local climate there has been measured.
- Afforess 6y ago
  NSIDC records began in 1979 for the arctic sea ice. Earlier records have to be intuited from proxy sources, such as anecdotal accounts or early photos.
- arethuza 6y ago
  This article refers to a 1981-2010 Median: http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/2020/07/laptev-sea-lapping-up-the-heat-in-june/ http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/2020/07/laptev-sea-lapping... Edit: Another graph goes back to 1979.
- dathinab 6y ago
  The first record in the graph used by the hn-linked article is from 1978. If I'm not wrong this should be the point from which frequent reliable measurements had been taken. (It also roughly matches with my memory about that topic).
- post_below 6y ago
  I was curious too, came across this graphic showing records since they began in 1979 (original source NOAA) https://mobile.twitter.com/ZLabe/status/1318913839568662529/photo/1 https://mobile.twitter.com/ZLabe/status/1318913839568662529/...
- blululu 6y ago
  Satellite records go back to 1979 [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/22/alarm-as-arctic-sea-ice-not-yet-freezing-at-latest-date-on-record https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/22/alarm-as-arcti...], but there appear to be ground based observations from earlier years that corroborate the abnormality of the current year.
- xenocratus 6y ago
  Interesting, the wiki page notes: > The sea has a severe climate with temperatures below 0 °C (32 °F) over more than nine months per year, low water salinity Given the low salinity and below 0 °C for so long, you would expect it to be frozen most of the time.
jonbaer 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_shipping_routes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_shipping_routes
- S33V 6y ago
  Are you insinuating that these ships are a driving force in inhibiting the formation of ice, that the lack of ice will be beneficial to these routes, or some other thought that I'm not seeing?
  - masklinn 6y ago
    The lack of ice opens up these routes year-round.
  - jonbaer 6y ago
    https://www.highnorthnews.com/en/rosatom-invest-7bn-arctic-shipping-compete-suez-canal https://www.highnorthnews.com/en/rosatom-invest-7bn-arctic-s... ... "By 2023 the company forecasts revenues of $700 million, reaching $5.6 billion in 2026."
Afforess 6y ago
Another factor which has not been mentioned much is that an unfrozen Laptev sea will affect the placement of the jet streams. Open sea will result in a lower albedo and greater evaporation on the surface, year-round. This in turn will change the composition of the atmosphere over the region, causing the jet streams to be shifted and may affect flight routes and seasonal weather patterns for northern regions. https://www.pnas.org/content/117/6/2824 https://www.pnas.org/content/117/6/2824
baron_harkonnen 6y ago
It wasn't that long ago that most climate scientists were saying that we wouldn't see a Blue Ocean Event (BOE) until 2040-2050, but I suspect we'll see, like many climate estimates, that number ends up being a bit too conservative. When the BOE does happen we'll start to see some pretty dramatic changes to our world fairly rapidly (and as a reminder, we are already seeing dramatic changes to our world). We're all in some form of climate denial right now. Even if you are able to acknowledge that climate change is happening, you likely aren't being realistic about how unavoidable its impacts are, or the full magnitude of those impacts. I still see people talking about life in 150 years as if it will be a simple continuation of the "progress" we've seen in the last 150, completely oblivious to the way that progress was achieved and the inevitably and unavoidable consequences of it.
- chowned 6y ago
  Denial is the only way to cope with how impossible it feels to make any meaningful progress. I mean, the alternative is to sit white-knuckled until I die in a food riot. I am well aware of the changes that are coming, and it's one of many reasons why I'm not having kids: I don't believe progress will continue like it has (which was always unsustainable, even without deleterious effects on the climate), and I think the future earth will be much harder for humans in the short term. Sure, humanity will probably adapt, but millions of people might die in the process.
  - erikerikson 6y ago
    > Denial is the only way to cope I disagree. We can accept that we have a feeling of impossibility and still continue engaging in behaviors we predict to have a more positive outcome than any others. After all, have you ever been wrong? I have. Occasionally the bulk of our actions create emergent shifts. It seems we will have to make adjustments and there may well be horrid consequences but the severity of those remains under our adjustment. I'm surprised to read this on Hacker News, one of the homes of "impossible" successes.
  - core-questions 6y ago
    > Denial is the only way to cope > I'm not having kids You are a defeatist, aren't you? This entire thing has literally scared you into not fulfilling the genetic imperative, ending your own genetic line because you think that perhaps you may have an easier, simpler life and death this way. No need to expose yourself to the suffering of others you love, no need to invest yourself in tomorrow - just watch it all go, knowing that when you inevitably shuffle off the coil nobody is going to mind a bit. Sad. Sorry to hear it. It's always a shame when an intelligent person chooses to ignore the sacrifice every one of their ancestors made to bring them to this point, just so that they don't have to risk the potential of having any hardship themselves. I do sincerely hope that you accomplish something great in your life that makes it otherwise worthwhile for them; to know that generations of people eked by just for you to play video games all day would be a truly disappointing conclusion.
csours 6y ago
At this point it feels like Global Warming will be really bad, but also really uneven. Some people will have a really bad time, losing their homes, way of life etc, but a lot of other people won't notice much most of the time.
- xenocratus 6y ago
  And some areas will actually become more habitable - closer to the poles.
  - scarmig 6y ago
    It turns out that beachfront property in Siberia was a great deal!
    - londons_explore 6y ago
      Lots of siberia is permafrost... When that melts it usually becomes boggy marshland. Not great for your holiday resort.
  - daxfohl 6y ago
    Those siberian methane craters make me second guess whether any of that land would be habitable either.
  - scythe 6y ago
    Unfortunately, the geometry of a sphere is such that half of the total area of Earth is between +/- 30 degrees latitude. The areas that will be improved are much smaller than the areas that will get worse.
  - masklinn 6y ago
    > And some areas will actually become more habitable - closer to the poles. These areas have no soil worth speaking of so agriculture is not an option, the ecosystem will not be stable so no foraging or hunting, and the grounds will be extremely unstable as they'll be thawing continuously, and the surface will just be soggy bog. As all extreme locales the long winter night also tends to trigger depression in many.
zaroth 6y ago
It is not beyond human technology, and not even particularly expensive in relative terms, to dampen the amount of solar energy reaching the Earth in a non-permanent, freely reversible, and infinitesimally granular degree. This will be done, if ever it is needed, by depositing hundreds of millions of tons of reflective material (basically refined moon dust) into Lagrange Points which will block a proportionate amount of energy from reaching the Earth. The solar energy output from the sun (measured as 'total solar irradiance' or TSI) is not constant. It ebbs and wanes in a fascinating quasi-periodic fashion on daily, 11-year, 210-year, 350-year, etc. cadences. It also shows an overall increasing trend over millennia timeframes (3 - 4 billion years ago the sun output only ~70% of its current energy). Since about the 1940s up until quite recently we have been experiencing a period considered a "modern grand maximum" in solar activity. [1, 2] All this is simply to show that the sun is not an absolute constant, as Aristotle believed, but a dynamic and fluctuating system which directly impacts -- actually that understates it, variance of solar output has been the primary driver of our wildly varying global climate for the Earth's entire history. Which makes it all the more notable that anthropogenic climate change has now begun to bend the curve in similar fashion to our mighty star. Crucially, the technological moderation of TSI is not a risky endeavor even remotely like detonating nuclear bombs to dust up the atmosphere. This would not be a last-ditch gambit. The impact of adding reflective material between the Earth and sun is miniscule on the scale of how much material could be placed into position at a given time, e.g. using rail-guns on the surface of the moon. It is a multi-decade effort that requires constant upkeep to maintain, or otherwise naturally dissipates over time. It is easy to measure precisely the impact achieved and therefore precisely control how much of a hand we put on the celestial scale. And once established and in place, e.g. 50 years from now, will cost likely on the order of $500 billion per year in upkeep. That is to say, an absolute bargain in terms of the economic impact of doing nothing. It is neither physically impossible, nor constrained by the practical extraction of natural resources that would need to be brought to bear, nor dangerous, nor requires exotic undiscovered materials or magical technology that could not be fabricated given proper funding over the next couple decades. I have no doubt or concern that our technological capability for generating clean energy will continue to grow exponentially, hopefully culminating in abundant and asymptotically free, clean energy within the century. And I have no doubt that while reaching that crowning achievement that humanity is entirely capable of either extracting excess CO2 directly from the atmosphere, or moderating TSI in order to achieve an optimal climate equilibrium. This is by no means easy, or even guaranteed. But I firmly believe that we are not doomed, and that we remain entirely in control of our fate. In my opinion, the solution will not be found in the direction of policies that tax, ration, or restrict abundant energy, for that is an unethical chokehold that will be felt most directly by the poorest peoples among us. We must strive for technological solutions that make energy cleaner, cheaper, reliable, safe, and abundant for energy is truly the path out of poverty. We have fewer humans living in poverty than at any time in human history [3], and we must continue on that path. I think as our energy and space technology continue to rapidly advance, the hardest part will be deciding not how to set the thermostat, but exactly where to set the thermostat, because there will be winners and losers regardless. [1] - https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41116-017-0006-9 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41116-017-0006-9 [2] - https://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/~infocom/The%20Website/evolution.html https://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/~infocom/The%20Website... [3] - https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty
qwerty456127 6y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if the cold would "wait" for the very end of the winter season and then unleash a frozen hell to last until the end of spring.
dr_dshiv 6y ago
It is really irresponsible that we don't fund geoengineering research. 1. Marine cloud brightening can be accomplished with, essentially, salt water jets on the back of container ships. 2. Selective iron fertilization has, additionally, positive ecological effects that need to be understood. 3. The lofting of sulfer dioxide into the upper atmosphere is not that expensive. On the order of 10 billion per year. We need to start experimenting to learn the dangers and adapt. We don't want to be in a place where we have to do this in an emergency. We need to more fully understand the science of it in less dramatic ways.
- rektide 6y ago
  Lofting things seems like a super great place to deploy some electric powered flight systems. It's a bit nebulous where power comes from- nuclear? solar? thermal convector engines? how? a boat? solar pilons? But the vision seems cool. The battery doesn't have to be big. As long as it can charge fast, and is long lived, it can keep delivering power & energy, coming back down, charging, & doing it again. Persistence.
  - dr_dshiv 6y ago
    Neat idea! They can be charged on a giant hydrogen balloon platform, which can pump the SO2 to about 20km. I started making pictures of a related concept. https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1r6CPFJ1AX1ZULacguTf6IyCS1dyiqFz_HsjH-evYiHg/edit?usp=drivesdk https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1r6CPFJ1AX1ZULacguTf6...
    - carapace 6y ago
      Just make geodesic cellular kites[1]. Above a certain surface area/mass ratio it becomes difficult not to fly. Power with Magnus effect pontoons[2]. One of the things I'd like to do eventually is make flying buildings that never land. [1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=alexander+bell+kites&t=ffcm&atb=v60-1&iar=images&iax=images&ia=images https://duckduckgo.com/?q=alexander+bell+kites&t=ffcm&atb=v6... [2] https://newatlas.com/magenn-mars-floating-wind-generator/11109/ https://newatlas.com/magenn-mars-floating-wind-generator/111...
dr_dshiv 6y ago
I can imagine growing massive hydrogen balloons in the sea. Using their solar energy and the day-night cycle, they pump small amounts of salt water to approximately 100m high, where the salt seeds cloud formation. Forming low clouds over dark blue oceans is very efficient.
- chr1 6y ago
  If we do that kind of thing on a massive scale, we could use that not simply to reduce the global temperature, but to control the local weather, reducing area covered by deserts.
  - dr_dshiv 6y ago
    Yeah, I think local weather control, say over melting permafrost, is a high priority.
raziel2701 6y ago
Polar bears are fucked, this makes me sad.
- edjrage 6y ago
  "Would you care more if I was a [polar bear]?" https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-uVr0ODIKv_s/VMGAo_qUiQI/AAAAAAAAAFg/_et08HUZQ4g/s1600/wwf-tunapanda.jpg https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-uVr0ODIKv_s/VMGAo_qUiQI/AAAAAAAAA...
CalRobert 6y ago
It does call in to question the wisdom of saving for retirement. Given the arctic is releasing methane and cities have, what, three days of food on average? How long can civilisation persist?
- raziel2701 6y ago
  I see hints of this rationale all the time on wallstreetbets. It comes with a heavy dose of nihilism and maybe a bit of hedonism. Why invest and wait 30-40 yrs for retirement if there's not going to be a world to retire into? Hence, they go all in on risky option plays.
  - kortilla 6y ago
    The explanation is simpler than that, they like to gamble.
    - CalRobert 6y ago
      Saving in a 401k, IRA, etc relies on government stability and willingness not to raid funds (see Poland) for many decades, which seems less likely with the possibility of crop failures.
- nullsense 6y ago
  >How long can civilisation persist? Can we use the number of seasons of The Walking Dead as a proxy to estimate that?
  - smcl 6y ago
    That's a nice idea - but unfortunately I think civilisation broke down pretty quickly
- tropdrop 6y ago
  Let's not forget the very real phenomenon in 1999 of many assuming the world ends in 2000 (some shadow of that again in 2012 with the Mayan calendar). It did not happen. In fact, whatever happens, life finds a way...
worik 6y ago
I know. Let's fly to Mars!
- umvi 6y ago
  Mars' climate is 1000x worse than the most apocalyptic post-climate-change earth climate you can imagine.
  - worik 6y ago
    Ok... Let's fly to the moon!! Look at this puppy - it can walk on its front legs!
  - m4x 6y ago
    Trying to establish a colony on Mars could be an effective way to develop systems that can support life on a less hospitable Earth. You would need self-sufficient food production systems, habitation systems that are resilient to extremely inhospitable climate, etc. Even if the tech never ends up being used or successful off-planet, it may end up being quite useful here on Earth.
rektide 6y ago
Two other arctic bits of news from yesterday, [1] Two new studies substantially advance understanding of currents that help regulate climate, https://phys.org/news/2020-10-substantially-advance-currents-climate.html https://phys.org/news/2020-10-substantially-advance-currents... More focused on the Atlantic conveyors & new discoveries there. But very Arctic related, about the thermohaline cycle that has allowed warm water to sink & cool & how that has worked. [2] 'Sleeping giant' Arctic methane deposits starting to release, scientists find, https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/oct/27/sleeping-giant-arctic-methane-deposits-starting-to-release-scientists-find https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/oct/27/sleeping-gia... Laptev sea specific... for now! Laptev Sea hasn't frozen... oh and the methane & other hydrates are dissolving, & also present at much higher concentrations at the surface than usual.
vikiomega9 6y ago
How much of an impact would a Biden administration have on helping with climate change? Beside policy changes would they support moonshot research?
AcerbicZero 6y ago
Russia is finally getting those warm water ports they've always wanted? I guess we should start getting ready for climate change events, and pre-planning our reactions to those specific events.
Diederich 6y ago
https://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-ice-graph/ https://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-... is one of the pages I watch pretty carefully. Sea ice extent is direct and important, it's far from the whole story. This is by no means meant to minimize what's happening in the Laptev sea. There's a lot going on up there, and the level of badness, while overall large and larger than ever, is variable.
dshpala 6y ago
I think it's clear that humankind won't be able to stop/reverse this process. So, are there any realistic state-wide plans to prepare for the worst? Like, move cities away from shores, prepare for certain regions to become very hot (unsuitable for farming), etc.?
- skim_milk 6y ago
  It might not be totally necessary depending on how people take their own initiative to move (although I think everyone would love to see some coordination). It's not too hard to find pockets of areas that will have "better" weather for humans. I live in the middle of nowhere where it is expected at least in the next 80 years even with the doomsday 8 Celsius temperature change scenario that the water aquifer will rise (more freshwater for humans and agriculture) and the weather will be more mild. Evidently some people are paying attention - lots of people moving here from the coastal US for a variety of reasons, I'd imagine climate being a small factor to move. No reason to be excited to move to the middle of nowhere but people are already watching and listening for where to move evidently without any large-scale planning at the moment.
- entropicdrifter 6y ago
  Hahahahahaha, No. We'll get drought, famine and resource wars, take it or leave it
- sergeykish 6y ago
  It is called Climate change adaptation, I've seen videos of floodplains geoengineering in Denmark. There are state-wide programs https://climate-adapt.eea.europa.eu/countries-regions/countries https://climate-adapt.eea.europa.eu/countries-regions/countr...
newintellectual 6y ago
Ice Worshippers by any other name, a new religion.
brandmeyer 6y ago
The East Siberian see is in a similar situation. The central arctic basin is also having its slowest re-freeze on record. https://sites.google.com/site/arcticseaicegraphs/regional https://sites.google.com/site/arcticseaicegraphs/regional
jagger27 6y ago
Pretty disheartening to see so much climate change denial in this thread.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
aristophenes 6y ago
This way of showing climate change is not robust. I could balance this single example with the fact that temperatures below 0 F were common in the northern United States earlier this week, which is extremely uncommon in October. It would seem that cold polar air moved down over the USA while warmer air was sucked up over Russia, delaying freezing. When every storm, fire, drought is provided as evidence of global warming it makes reasonable people suspicious. Don’t provide anecdotes. The world is a big place and anomalies are always happening. Show good, comprehensive data and be skeptical of the rest or you haven’t earned trust. It’s dangerous because you can see in the comments that there are intelligent people that want to do very unnatural things to the air or water to fight global warming, and it feels to me like children playing with fire. They don’t understand the consequences of what they are doing, but are scared into doing reckless things because they believe it’s do it die. Maybe it is, but I’d like to see better science than this before we go that route. Remember the historical environmental catastrophe for our planet is ice, and the natural pattern is to swing in and out of ice ages. If we accidentally kick one of those off, say goodbye to 90% of life on earth.
- sethgoodluck 6y ago
  global warming really should be called "Global Weirding" the fact that a major ice formation is not freezing (coupled with anomalous temp fluxes in other areas) IS the model and is the point of concern. in that context, the "child playing with fire" is not taking any kind of notable actions. reasonable people trust scientists across the globe who spend their entire careers studying this who all say the same thing in the same way. we are doing this it is bad it is going to get worse we need to change defying that is idiocy
  - aristophenes 6y ago
    > reasonable people trust scientists across the globe who spend their entire careers studying this who all say the same thing in the same way. This appeal to authority is another example of what I am talking about. It's meaningless because if there was a scientist questioning global warming they wouldn't be able to hold a related job or get funding. Additionally, people tend to conform, especially in fields where your career depends on your reputation. For example, the scientific consensus prior to World War 1 was that citrus didn't cure scurvy, even though it had been doing so for hundreds of years prior and had been scientifically proven before.[1] So people started dying from scurvy again. Even the very well prepared, intelligent polar explorers were unable to deal with it properly even though they researched and planned for it, because they relied on the consensus of the scientific community instead of good science. [1] https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/24149/how-scurvy-was-cured-then-cure-was-lost https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/24149/how-scurvy-was-cur...
glofish 6y ago
In related submission that I see today: The Sun is more active now than over the last 8000 year https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24937001 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24937001
- dlp211 6y ago
  Hmm, who to believe, a hacker news headline about sun activity which has shown no correlation let alone causation or the IPCC panel? Tough choice. This is like picking who to do a life saving surgery between an actual surgeon and a clown. You aren't being skeptical, you're just poisoning the discussion.
VoodooJuJu 6y ago
The subject of climate change always sparks some interesting and complex technological solutions. But what if the best solution isn't more technology, but less? What if, instead of more civilization, the solution is less civilization? What if the solution to surviving climate change isn't "consume other product" or "consume other fuel source", it's "don't consume"? Imagine if we are the last generation to experience the benefits of electricity and abundantly-stocked grocery stores. Imagine returning to a Bronze Age or Medieval European way of life. Is that disturbing? What if it's the answer?
- carapace 6y ago
  Well, Geoff Lawton famously said, "You can solve all the world's problems in a garden." But do you really want to do without dentists?
- tshaddox 6y ago
  I think that's worth contemplating, but I think the conclusion of that contemplation will be that less technology is not the solution. I think it's pretty obvious that reducing technological progress cannot possibly lead to solutions to big, extreme, but presumably inevitable problems, like impacts from celestial objects, supernovae, etc. It's true that some technologies could cause or hasten extinction, stasis seems to guarantee it.
MichaelMoser123 6y ago
Poor polar bears are hungry; they need the ice for navigation and hunting. Interesting if and how they will adapt. Here [1] they say that ice bears weathered the Medieval Warm Period of 800-1300 because it wasn't warmer than the late 20th century and stayed cold in some parts. [1] https://polarbearsinternational.org/research/research-qa/how-did-polar-bears-survive-earlier-warming-trends/ https://polarbearsinternational.org/research/research-qa/how...
headmelted 6y ago
Leaving this here as it’s both relevant and terrifying: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/oct/27/sleeping-giant-arctic-methane-deposits-starting-to-release-scientists-find https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/oct/27/sleeping-gia... “ Scientists have found evidence that frozen methane deposits in the Arctic Ocean – known as the sleeping giants of the carbon cycle – have started to be released over a large area of the continental slope off the East Siberian coast, the Guardian can reveal. High levels of the potent greenhouse gas have been detected down to a depth of 350 metres in the Laptev Sea near Russia, prompting concern among researchers that a new climate feedback loop may have been triggered that could accelerate the pace of global heating.” Catastrophic climate change is now on a timeline of months rather than decades.
- kasey_junk 6y ago
  The quote in this comment is accurate (and alarming enough on its own) but nothing in the linked article indicates that “Catastrophic climate change is now on a timeline of months...”
a_square_peg 6y ago
As a related note, here's a visualization showing decreasing surface albedo since 1979 - https://i.redd.it/6tli0mfkdls51.gif https://i.redd.it/6tli0mfkdls51.gif
armindou5 6y ago
More bleak news...
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
known 6y ago
"Stupidity is knowing the truth, seeing the truth but still believing the lies" --Feynman (b. 1918)

478 points by xenocratus 6y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laptev_Sea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laptev_Sea Does anyone know when 'records began'? I was trying to find out how long the local climate there has been measured.

Afforess 6y ago
NSIDC records began in 1979 for the arctic sea ice. Earlier records have to be intuited from proxy sources, such as anecdotal accounts or early photos.
arethuza 6y ago
This article refers to a 1981-2010 Median: http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/2020/07/laptev-sea-lapping-up-the-heat-in-june/ http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/2020/07/laptev-sea-lapping... Edit: Another graph goes back to 1979.
dathinab 6y ago
The first record in the graph used by the hn-linked article is from 1978. If I'm not wrong this should be the point from which frequent reliable measurements had been taken. (It also roughly matches with my memory about that topic).
post_below 6y ago
I was curious too, came across this graphic showing records since they began in 1979 (original source NOAA) https://mobile.twitter.com/ZLabe/status/1318913839568662529/photo/1 https://mobile.twitter.com/ZLabe/status/1318913839568662529/...
blululu 6y ago
Satellite records go back to 1979 [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/22/alarm-as-arctic-sea-ice-not-yet-freezing-at-latest-date-on-record https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/22/alarm-as-arcti...], but there appear to be ground based observations from earlier years that corroborate the abnormality of the current year.
xenocratus 6y ago
Interesting, the wiki page notes: > The sea has a severe climate with temperatures below 0 °C (32 °F) over more than nine months per year, low water salinity Given the low salinity and below 0 °C for so long, you would expect it to be frozen most of the time.

jonbaer 6y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_shipping_routes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_shipping_routes

S33V 6y ago
Are you insinuating that these ships are a driving force in inhibiting the formation of ice, that the lack of ice will be beneficial to these routes, or some other thought that I'm not seeing?
- masklinn 6y ago
  The lack of ice opens up these routes year-round.
- jonbaer 6y ago
  https://www.highnorthnews.com/en/rosatom-invest-7bn-arctic-shipping-compete-suez-canal https://www.highnorthnews.com/en/rosatom-invest-7bn-arctic-s... ... "By 2023 the company forecasts revenues of $700 million, reaching $5.6 billion in 2026."

Afforess 6y ago

Another factor which has not been mentioned much is that an unfrozen Laptev sea will affect the placement of the jet streams. Open sea will result in a lower albedo and greater evaporation on the surface, year-round. This in turn will change the composition of the atmosphere over the region, causing the jet streams to be shifted and may affect flight routes and seasonal weather patterns for northern regions. https://www.pnas.org/content/117/6/2824 https://www.pnas.org/content/117/6/2824

baron_harkonnen 6y ago

It wasn't that long ago that most climate scientists were saying that we wouldn't see a Blue Ocean Event (BOE) until 2040-2050, but I suspect we'll see, like many climate estimates, that number ends up being a bit too conservative. When the BOE does happen we'll start to see some pretty dramatic changes to our world fairly rapidly (and as a reminder, we are already seeing dramatic changes to our world). We're all in some form of climate denial right now. Even if you are able to acknowledge that climate change is happening, you likely aren't being realistic about how unavoidable its impacts are, or the full magnitude of those impacts. I still see people talking about life in 150 years as if it will be a simple continuation of the "progress" we've seen in the last 150, completely oblivious to the way that progress was achieved and the inevitably and unavoidable consequences of it.

chowned 6y ago
Denial is the only way to cope with how impossible it feels to make any meaningful progress. I mean, the alternative is to sit white-knuckled until I die in a food riot. I am well aware of the changes that are coming, and it's one of many reasons why I'm not having kids: I don't believe progress will continue like it has (which was always unsustainable, even without deleterious effects on the climate), and I think the future earth will be much harder for humans in the short term. Sure, humanity will probably adapt, but millions of people might die in the process.
- erikerikson 6y ago
  > Denial is the only way to cope I disagree. We can accept that we have a feeling of impossibility and still continue engaging in behaviors we predict to have a more positive outcome than any others. After all, have you ever been wrong? I have. Occasionally the bulk of our actions create emergent shifts. It seems we will have to make adjustments and there may well be horrid consequences but the severity of those remains under our adjustment. I'm surprised to read this on Hacker News, one of the homes of "impossible" successes.
- core-questions 6y ago
  > Denial is the only way to cope > I'm not having kids You are a defeatist, aren't you? This entire thing has literally scared you into not fulfilling the genetic imperative, ending your own genetic line because you think that perhaps you may have an easier, simpler life and death this way. No need to expose yourself to the suffering of others you love, no need to invest yourself in tomorrow - just watch it all go, knowing that when you inevitably shuffle off the coil nobody is going to mind a bit. Sad. Sorry to hear it. It's always a shame when an intelligent person chooses to ignore the sacrifice every one of their ancestors made to bring them to this point, just so that they don't have to risk the potential of having any hardship themselves. I do sincerely hope that you accomplish something great in your life that makes it otherwise worthwhile for them; to know that generations of people eked by just for you to play video games all day would be a truly disappointing conclusion.

csours 6y ago

At this point it feels like Global Warming will be really bad, but also really uneven. Some people will have a really bad time, losing their homes, way of life etc, but a lot of other people won't notice much most of the time.

xenocratus 6y ago
And some areas will actually become more habitable - closer to the poles.
- scarmig 6y ago
  It turns out that beachfront property in Siberia was a great deal!
  - londons_explore 6y ago
    Lots of siberia is permafrost... When that melts it usually becomes boggy marshland. Not great for your holiday resort.
- daxfohl 6y ago
  Those siberian methane craters make me second guess whether any of that land would be habitable either.
- scythe 6y ago
  Unfortunately, the geometry of a sphere is such that half of the total area of Earth is between +/- 30 degrees latitude. The areas that will be improved are much smaller than the areas that will get worse.
- masklinn 6y ago
  > And some areas will actually become more habitable - closer to the poles. These areas have no soil worth speaking of so agriculture is not an option, the ecosystem will not be stable so no foraging or hunting, and the grounds will be extremely unstable as they'll be thawing continuously, and the surface will just be soggy bog. As all extreme locales the long winter night also tends to trigger depression in many.

zaroth 6y ago

It is not beyond human technology, and not even particularly expensive in relative terms, to dampen the amount of solar energy reaching the Earth in a non-permanent, freely reversible, and infinitesimally granular degree. This will be done, if ever it is needed, by depositing hundreds of millions of tons of reflective material (basically refined moon dust) into Lagrange Points which will block a proportionate amount of energy from reaching the Earth. The solar energy output from the sun (measured as 'total solar irradiance' or TSI) is not constant. It ebbs and wanes in a fascinating quasi-periodic fashion on daily, 11-year, 210-year, 350-year, etc. cadences. It also shows an overall increasing trend over millennia timeframes (3 - 4 billion years ago the sun output only ~70% of its current energy). Since about the 1940s up until quite recently we have been experiencing a period considered a "modern grand maximum" in solar activity. [1, 2] All this is simply to show that the sun is not an absolute constant, as Aristotle believed, but a dynamic and fluctuating system which directly impacts -- actually that understates it, variance of solar output has been the primary driver of our wildly varying global climate for the Earth's entire history. Which makes it all the more notable that anthropogenic climate change has now begun to bend the curve in similar fashion to our mighty star. Crucially, the technological moderation of TSI is not a risky endeavor even remotely like detonating nuclear bombs to dust up the atmosphere. This would not be a last-ditch gambit. The impact of adding reflective material between the Earth and sun is miniscule on the scale of how much material could be placed into position at a given time, e.g. using rail-guns on the surface of the moon. It is a multi-decade effort that requires constant upkeep to maintain, or otherwise naturally dissipates over time. It is easy to measure precisely the impact achieved and therefore precisely control how much of a hand we put on the celestial scale. And once established and in place, e.g. 50 years from now, will cost likely on the order of $500 billion per year in upkeep. That is to say, an absolute bargain in terms of the economic impact of doing nothing. It is neither physically impossible, nor constrained by the practical extraction of natural resources that would need to be brought to bear, nor dangerous, nor requires exotic undiscovered materials or magical technology that could not be fabricated given proper funding over the next couple decades. I have no doubt or concern that our technological capability for generating clean energy will continue to grow exponentially, hopefully culminating in abundant and asymptotically free, clean energy within the century. And I have no doubt that while reaching that crowning achievement that humanity is entirely capable of either extracting excess CO2 directly from the atmosphere, or moderating TSI in order to achieve an optimal climate equilibrium. This is by no means easy, or even guaranteed. But I firmly believe that we are not doomed, and that we remain entirely in control of our fate. In my opinion, the solution will not be found in the direction of policies that tax, ration, or restrict abundant energy, for that is an unethical chokehold that will be felt most directly by the poorest peoples among us. We must strive for technological solutions that make energy cleaner, cheaper, reliable, safe, and abundant for energy is truly the path out of poverty. We have fewer humans living in poverty than at any time in human history [3], and we must continue on that path. I think as our energy and space technology continue to rapidly advance, the hardest part will be deciding not how to set the thermostat, but exactly where to set the thermostat, because there will be winners and losers regardless. [1] - https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41116-017-0006-9 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41116-017-0006-9 [2] - https://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/~infocom/The%20Website/evolution.html https://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/~infocom/The%20Website... [3] - https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty

qwerty456127 6y ago

I wouldn't be surprised if the cold would "wait" for the very end of the winter season and then unleash a frozen hell to last until the end of spring.

dr_dshiv 6y ago

It is really irresponsible that we don't fund geoengineering research. 1. Marine cloud brightening can be accomplished with, essentially, salt water jets on the back of container ships. 2. Selective iron fertilization has, additionally, positive ecological effects that need to be understood. 3. The lofting of sulfer dioxide into the upper atmosphere is not that expensive. On the order of 10 billion per year. We need to start experimenting to learn the dangers and adapt. We don't want to be in a place where we have to do this in an emergency. We need to more fully understand the science of it in less dramatic ways.

rektide 6y ago
Lofting things seems like a super great place to deploy some electric powered flight systems. It's a bit nebulous where power comes from- nuclear? solar? thermal convector engines? how? a boat? solar pilons? But the vision seems cool. The battery doesn't have to be big. As long as it can charge fast, and is long lived, it can keep delivering power & energy, coming back down, charging, & doing it again. Persistence.
- dr_dshiv 6y ago
  Neat idea! They can be charged on a giant hydrogen balloon platform, which can pump the SO2 to about 20km. I started making pictures of a related concept. https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1r6CPFJ1AX1ZULacguTf6IyCS1dyiqFz_HsjH-evYiHg/edit?usp=drivesdk https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1r6CPFJ1AX1ZULacguTf6...
  - carapace 6y ago
    Just make geodesic cellular kites[1]. Above a certain surface area/mass ratio it becomes difficult not to fly. Power with Magnus effect pontoons[2]. One of the things I'd like to do eventually is make flying buildings that never land. [1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=alexander+bell+kites&t=ffcm&atb=v60-1&iar=images&iax=images&ia=images https://duckduckgo.com/?q=alexander+bell+kites&t=ffcm&atb=v6... [2] https://newatlas.com/magenn-mars-floating-wind-generator/11109/ https://newatlas.com/magenn-mars-floating-wind-generator/111...

dr_dshiv 6y ago

I can imagine growing massive hydrogen balloons in the sea. Using their solar energy and the day-night cycle, they pump small amounts of salt water to approximately 100m high, where the salt seeds cloud formation. Forming low clouds over dark blue oceans is very efficient.

chr1 6y ago
If we do that kind of thing on a massive scale, we could use that not simply to reduce the global temperature, but to control the local weather, reducing area covered by deserts.
- dr_dshiv 6y ago
  Yeah, I think local weather control, say over melting permafrost, is a high priority.

raziel2701 6y ago

Polar bears are fucked, this makes me sad.

edjrage 6y ago
"Would you care more if I was a [polar bear]?" https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-uVr0ODIKv_s/VMGAo_qUiQI/AAAAAAAAAFg/_et08HUZQ4g/s1600/wwf-tunapanda.jpg https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-uVr0ODIKv_s/VMGAo_qUiQI/AAAAAAAAA...

CalRobert 6y ago

It does call in to question the wisdom of saving for retirement. Given the arctic is releasing methane and cities have, what, three days of food on average? How long can civilisation persist?

raziel2701 6y ago
I see hints of this rationale all the time on wallstreetbets. It comes with a heavy dose of nihilism and maybe a bit of hedonism. Why invest and wait 30-40 yrs for retirement if there's not going to be a world to retire into? Hence, they go all in on risky option plays.
- kortilla 6y ago
  The explanation is simpler than that, they like to gamble.
  - CalRobert 6y ago
    Saving in a 401k, IRA, etc relies on government stability and willingness not to raid funds (see Poland) for many decades, which seems less likely with the possibility of crop failures.
nullsense 6y ago
>How long can civilisation persist? Can we use the number of seasons of The Walking Dead as a proxy to estimate that?
- smcl 6y ago
  That's a nice idea - but unfortunately I think civilisation broke down pretty quickly
tropdrop 6y ago
Let's not forget the very real phenomenon in 1999 of many assuming the world ends in 2000 (some shadow of that again in 2012 with the Mayan calendar). It did not happen. In fact, whatever happens, life finds a way...

worik 6y ago

I know. Let's fly to Mars!

umvi 6y ago
Mars' climate is 1000x worse than the most apocalyptic post-climate-change earth climate you can imagine.
- worik 6y ago
  Ok... Let's fly to the moon!! Look at this puppy - it can walk on its front legs!
- m4x 6y ago
  Trying to establish a colony on Mars could be an effective way to develop systems that can support life on a less hospitable Earth. You would need self-sufficient food production systems, habitation systems that are resilient to extremely inhospitable climate, etc. Even if the tech never ends up being used or successful off-planet, it may end up being quite useful here on Earth.

rektide 6y ago

Two other arctic bits of news from yesterday, [1] Two new studies substantially advance understanding of currents that help regulate climate, https://phys.org/news/2020-10-substantially-advance-currents-climate.html https://phys.org/news/2020-10-substantially-advance-currents... More focused on the Atlantic conveyors & new discoveries there. But very Arctic related, about the thermohaline cycle that has allowed warm water to sink & cool & how that has worked. [2] 'Sleeping giant' Arctic methane deposits starting to release, scientists find, https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/oct/27/sleeping-giant-arctic-methane-deposits-starting-to-release-scientists-find https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/oct/27/sleeping-gia... Laptev sea specific... for now! Laptev Sea hasn't frozen... oh and the methane & other hydrates are dissolving, & also present at much higher concentrations at the surface than usual.

vikiomega9 6y ago

How much of an impact would a Biden administration have on helping with climate change? Beside policy changes would they support moonshot research?

AcerbicZero 6y ago

Russia is finally getting those warm water ports they've always wanted? I guess we should start getting ready for climate change events, and pre-planning our reactions to those specific events.

Diederich 6y ago

https://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-ice-graph/ https://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-... is one of the pages I watch pretty carefully. Sea ice extent is direct and important, it's far from the whole story. This is by no means meant to minimize what's happening in the Laptev sea. There's a lot going on up there, and the level of badness, while overall large and larger than ever, is variable.

dshpala 6y ago

I think it's clear that humankind won't be able to stop/reverse this process. So, are there any realistic state-wide plans to prepare for the worst? Like, move cities away from shores, prepare for certain regions to become very hot (unsuitable for farming), etc.?

skim_milk 6y ago
It might not be totally necessary depending on how people take their own initiative to move (although I think everyone would love to see some coordination). It's not too hard to find pockets of areas that will have "better" weather for humans. I live in the middle of nowhere where it is expected at least in the next 80 years even with the doomsday 8 Celsius temperature change scenario that the water aquifer will rise (more freshwater for humans and agriculture) and the weather will be more mild. Evidently some people are paying attention - lots of people moving here from the coastal US for a variety of reasons, I'd imagine climate being a small factor to move. No reason to be excited to move to the middle of nowhere but people are already watching and listening for where to move evidently without any large-scale planning at the moment.
entropicdrifter 6y ago
Hahahahahaha, No. We'll get drought, famine and resource wars, take it or leave it
sergeykish 6y ago
It is called Climate change adaptation, I've seen videos of floodplains geoengineering in Denmark. There are state-wide programs https://climate-adapt.eea.europa.eu/countries-regions/countries https://climate-adapt.eea.europa.eu/countries-regions/countr...

newintellectual 6y ago

Ice Worshippers by any other name, a new religion.

brandmeyer 6y ago

The East Siberian see is in a similar situation. The central arctic basin is also having its slowest re-freeze on record. https://sites.google.com/site/arcticseaicegraphs/regional https://sites.google.com/site/arcticseaicegraphs/regional

jagger27 6y ago

Pretty disheartening to see so much climate change denial in this thread.

deleted 6y ago
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aristophenes 6y ago

This way of showing climate change is not robust. I could balance this single example with the fact that temperatures below 0 F were common in the northern United States earlier this week, which is extremely uncommon in October. It would seem that cold polar air moved down over the USA while warmer air was sucked up over Russia, delaying freezing. When every storm, fire, drought is provided as evidence of global warming it makes reasonable people suspicious. Don’t provide anecdotes. The world is a big place and anomalies are always happening. Show good, comprehensive data and be skeptical of the rest or you haven’t earned trust. It’s dangerous because you can see in the comments that there are intelligent people that want to do very unnatural things to the air or water to fight global warming, and it feels to me like children playing with fire. They don’t understand the consequences of what they are doing, but are scared into doing reckless things because they believe it’s do it die. Maybe it is, but I’d like to see better science than this before we go that route. Remember the historical environmental catastrophe for our planet is ice, and the natural pattern is to swing in and out of ice ages. If we accidentally kick one of those off, say goodbye to 90% of life on earth.

sethgoodluck 6y ago
global warming really should be called "Global Weirding" the fact that a major ice formation is not freezing (coupled with anomalous temp fluxes in other areas) IS the model and is the point of concern. in that context, the "child playing with fire" is not taking any kind of notable actions. reasonable people trust scientists across the globe who spend their entire careers studying this who all say the same thing in the same way. we are doing this it is bad it is going to get worse we need to change defying that is idiocy
- aristophenes 6y ago
  > reasonable people trust scientists across the globe who spend their entire careers studying this who all say the same thing in the same way. This appeal to authority is another example of what I am talking about. It's meaningless because if there was a scientist questioning global warming they wouldn't be able to hold a related job or get funding. Additionally, people tend to conform, especially in fields where your career depends on your reputation. For example, the scientific consensus prior to World War 1 was that citrus didn't cure scurvy, even though it had been doing so for hundreds of years prior and had been scientifically proven before.[1] So people started dying from scurvy again. Even the very well prepared, intelligent polar explorers were unable to deal with it properly even though they researched and planned for it, because they relied on the consensus of the scientific community instead of good science. [1] https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/24149/how-scurvy-was-cured-then-cure-was-lost https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/24149/how-scurvy-was-cur...

glofish 6y ago

In related submission that I see today: The Sun is more active now than over the last 8000 year https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24937001 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24937001

dlp211 6y ago
Hmm, who to believe, a hacker news headline about sun activity which has shown no correlation let alone causation or the IPCC panel? Tough choice. This is like picking who to do a life saving surgery between an actual surgeon and a clown. You aren't being skeptical, you're just poisoning the discussion.

VoodooJuJu 6y ago

The subject of climate change always sparks some interesting and complex technological solutions. But what if the best solution isn't more technology, but less? What if, instead of more civilization, the solution is less civilization? What if the solution to surviving climate change isn't "consume other product" or "consume other fuel source", it's "don't consume"? Imagine if we are the last generation to experience the benefits of electricity and abundantly-stocked grocery stores. Imagine returning to a Bronze Age or Medieval European way of life. Is that disturbing? What if it's the answer?

carapace 6y ago
Well, Geoff Lawton famously said, "You can solve all the world's problems in a garden." But do you really want to do without dentists?
tshaddox 6y ago
I think that's worth contemplating, but I think the conclusion of that contemplation will be that less technology is not the solution. I think it's pretty obvious that reducing technological progress cannot possibly lead to solutions to big, extreme, but presumably inevitable problems, like impacts from celestial objects, supernovae, etc. It's true that some technologies could cause or hasten extinction, stasis seems to guarantee it.

MichaelMoser123 6y ago

Poor polar bears are hungry; they need the ice for navigation and hunting. Interesting if and how they will adapt. Here [1] they say that ice bears weathered the Medieval Warm Period of 800-1300 because it wasn't warmer than the late 20th century and stayed cold in some parts. [1] https://polarbearsinternational.org/research/research-qa/how-did-polar-bears-survive-earlier-warming-trends/ https://polarbearsinternational.org/research/research-qa/how...

headmelted 6y ago

Leaving this here as it’s both relevant and terrifying: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/oct/27/sleeping-giant-arctic-methane-deposits-starting-to-release-scientists-find https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/oct/27/sleeping-gia... “ Scientists have found evidence that frozen methane deposits in the Arctic Ocean – known as the sleeping giants of the carbon cycle – have started to be released over a large area of the continental slope off the East Siberian coast, the Guardian can reveal. High levels of the potent greenhouse gas have been detected down to a depth of 350 metres in the Laptev Sea near Russia, prompting concern among researchers that a new climate feedback loop may have been triggered that could accelerate the pace of global heating.” Catastrophic climate change is now on a timeline of months rather than decades.

kasey_junk 6y ago
The quote in this comment is accurate (and alarming enough on its own) but nothing in the linked article indicates that “Catastrophic climate change is now on a timeline of months...”

a_square_peg 6y ago

As a related note, here's a visualization showing decreasing surface albedo since 1979 - https://i.redd.it/6tli0mfkdls51.gif https://i.redd.it/6tli0mfkdls51.gif

armindou5 6y ago

More bleak news...

deleted 6y ago

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known 6y ago

"Stupidity is knowing the truth, seeing the truth but still believing the lies" --Feynman (b. 1918)