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Coastal Arctic Sea Ice Is Thinning Faster Than Previously Thought
- DennisP 5y agoMeanwhile Peter Wadhams has been saying for years that the IPCC was dramatically underestimating the thinning of ice, on the grounds that he'd been spending decades roaming under the ice in submarines, and what the IPCC estimated for years in the future he'd already seen with his own eyes. His book A Farewell to Ice is a pretty compelling read.
- hannob 5y agoWadhams is controversial, to say the least, and he's been wrong in the past. See e.g. here: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/faulty-science-doomism-and-flawed-conclusions-deep-adaptation/ https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/faulty-science-d... This is an issue I've been struggling with myself to navigate sometimes. There's sometimes a thin line between scientists who rightfully say that some of the "mainstream" climate predictions (aka the IPCC) have underestimated risks vs. those that spread baseless doomism.
- kaesar14 5y agoIt does seem like the mainstream estimates were pretty wrong in how aggressive warming would be.
- hannob 5y agoSo what? Wadham was also pretty wrong. "X was wrong, so I'll support the words of Y who was wrong in a different direction" is not a very smart position to have.
- kaesar14 5y agoI don’t really know anything about Wadham. I’m only commenting on the balance between mainstream estimates of climate milestones and what ended up happening - some more pessimism thrown into the models might be necessary.
- DennisP 5y agoHis prediction was overly pessimistic, but based on OP's article it appears his account of the current state of the ice was spot on. This doesn't seem surprising since his specialty was observing the ice, not modeling the future.
- rewgs 5y agoThe meme of “scientists spreading doom and gloom” just doesn’t appear to be rooted in reality, though. A much more obvious explanation is that what they’re revealing and proposing is unbelievably dark and holistically bad that people can’t wrap their heads around the complexity of it all, and if they can’t, they choose to ignore it. Our reactions to our own mortality explain a lot here.
- tanylak 5y agoGreat book
- vegetablepotpie 5y agoThank you for the book recommendation. I try to read and listen to as much content as I can about climate change. > IPCC was dramatically underestimating the thinning of ice Much of the IPCC reports summarizes work of scientist, who downplay their own results out of fear that their results will be interpreted as alarmist or biased towards an agenda. This was shown in the documentary Merchants of Doubt. The specific mechanisms employed to carry this out is outlined in this drilled podcast episode https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/drilled/id1439735906?i=1000465248169 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/drilled/id1439735906?i... it talks about the media, but it uses human psychology and applies to all people.
- tanylak 5y agoFunny how this is turning out. People who live off that ice have been saying this for years, but we need some "fancy" model to tell us that.
- perfunctory 5y agoUnfortunately this is a very common refrain in climate science. Everything is always worse than previously thought.
- bellyfullofbac 5y agoYes, the scientists err on the side of optimism because otherwise they'd be attacked by the denialists as alarmists. So whenever they have a range of values (like predicted temperature rise over the next 10 years) they pick the rosier value.
- gremlinsinc 5y agothey're attacked either way....might as well go down in a blaze of glory with the WHOLE truth out there!
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- aporetics 5y agoI would like to know why the data they had been working from was decades old. Was it a funding issue?
- Proven 5y agoAnd yet this is nothing to worry about