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When looking at the bottom of the article, it seemed the river was quite full in 2019 and in 2021 seems suddenly most of the river is gone. Is it really fair t
by wsc981 5y ago
When looking at the bottom of the article, it seemed the river was quite full in 2019 and in 2021 seems suddenly most of the river is gone.
Is it really fair to blame global warming for this 2 year massive change? I find that hard to believe.
At the bottom of the article it's stated:
> “It is a twice in a century event,” said Sierra, who is an advisor to the Buenos Aires grains exchange, adding that a long-term weather cycle had converged with a double hit from the La Niña phenomenon which lowers precipitation.
So perhaps next year the river could be up at 2019 levels again?
- mysterydip 5y agoIf warming is causing ice to melt, shouldn't rivers be higher rather than lower?
- diego_moita 5y ago> When looking at the bottom of the article, Yeah, when you cut out what you don't want to read you'll draw just the conclusions you want to have. If you were to read the whole article you'd understand that it refers to several causes compounding and working together, deforestation and global warming are not the only ones. But most people just like to read the convenient parts.
- foerbert 5y agoI've got nothing to say about what the actual cause is, but I see many lines of thought go this direction and don't think they are credible. Not everything is a simple linear effect. There are all kinds of interactions that do not have a simple linear correlation between the amount of cause and the degree of effect. Climate and the effects on various things we care about are particularly complex and full of these sorts of interactions. There is no inherent reason to doubt global warming is a plausible cause for something just because it took place (relatively) suddenly. Is global warming the cause in this specific instance? I have no idea. But discounting the idea just because the river didn't slowly get lower over the past decade or two is not reasonable.
- Biologist123 5y agoPrecisely. It’s tipping points which are our greatest threat.
- toolz 5y agoWouldn't you have to define a tipping point before you could categorize the threat? This seems rather sensationalist to me. Hopefully I'm not just conflating your comment with all the other sensationalism in the constant global warming scares, but at first glance is does seem to fit in.
- ceejayoz 5y ago> Wouldn't you have to define a tipping point before you could categorize the threat? There are quite a few tipping points that are only fully definable in hindsight. Attempting to anticipate them still has value. For example, I might see latency creeping up on my webserver over several weeks. At some point, that's likely to become a problem, but the exact date/time when I get Pingdom alerts from a downed server may not be something I can determine.
- toolz 5y agosure, but you can't categorize the threat based on some looming unknowns. You either have an idea of when you'll hit some point and the consequences or you don't - you can't just say "the unknowns are the greatest threat" because they are unknowns and by definition you don't know anything about them Are there unknowns that are likely huge threats? Maybe, maybe not. Who's to say?
- ceejayoz 5y ago> you can't just say "the unknowns are the greatest threat" because they are unknowns and by definition you don't know anything about them You can say "when we mess with massively, inherently chaotic systems, things tend to go in unexpected directions very rapidly", though. > Who's to say? Climatologists, who've been saying so for decades?
- namenotrequired 5y ago> it seemed the river was quite full in 2019 and in 2021 seems suddenly most of the river is gone As I understood to the text and the map, most of the land that dried are the “marshes, lagoons and meandering streams” mentioned. You can still clearly make out the main stream of the river, which presumably carries the majority of the volume, at the bottom of both images. The rest of the article makes it clear the water levels have been declining for decades.
- delegate 5y agoClimate impact is a bit like this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=czLIj-4suOk https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=czLIj-4suOk
- totalZero 5y agoThe weather patterns in the past couple of years have been very extreme across the entire southern cone of South America. Without that background information it's hard to really parse the link between weather and water levels. I do believe that is the basis for the comment.