9 ms·

The scientists know this. Paleoclimatology is one big part of climatology. But the outcome is the opposite - you should be more scared, since it shows that clim

The scientists know this. Paleoclimatology is one big part of climatology. But the outcome is the opposite - you should be more scared, since it shows that climate can change massively. That affects things like agriculture or sea level. What would you assume the sea level was, when those plants were alive? For example, with very quick search: "In general, world oceans were about 100 to 200 metres (330 to 660 feet) higher in the Early Cretaceous and roughly 200 to 250 metres (660 to 820 feet) higher in the Late Cretaceous than at present." https://www.britannica.com/science/Cretaceous-Period https://www.britannica.com/science/Cretaceous-Period

gnatman 5y ago
I just went looking for a map to see how different coastlines would look with a 200m sea level rise. It's, unsurprisingly, significant!! https://www.floodmap.net/ https://www.floodmap.net/
- arno_v 5y ago
  Surprisingly if you put it to 20 meters the effect globally seem insignificant. Although 80% of my own country would be flooded, so that's not great.
  - SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
    On a global scale, sure, but as you pointed out for some spots it wouldn't be good. Both Miami and New York (to a lesser extent) would be having a bad time.
  - jazzyjackson 5y ago
    I guess you mean the shape of the countries doesn't change much? iirc the majority of Earth's population lives on coastlines, most major cities will be inundated
    - lijogdfljk 5y ago
      They'll have a _long_ time to migrate though, no?
      - jazzyjackson 5y ago
        The rise in sea level is something of a misnomer, because the real damage comes in storm surges. Even a 1cm rise increases the amount of water that can pushed inland by *checks notes* a whole helluva lot. So while manhattan isn't going to be put underwater even after a whole foot of sea level rise (predicted by 2100), the storms it has to survive will be much worse. People won't move just from a little water in the roads (just look at Miami), I think even in the year 2099 you'll have a hard time getting new yorkers to move to ohio, but once a storm comes through and destroys their housing they will have to find somewhere else to live.
        France_is_bacon 5y ago
      - bigthymer 5y ago
        Housing is super expensive for people now. All of that coastal infrastructure will need to be rebuilt.
        thaumasiotes 5y ago
        But housing isn't expensive because it's hard to build. It's expensive because building it isn't allowed. If it all had to be rebuilt, that would be much cheaper than trying to build it under existing conditions.
    - hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
      Yeah, I was looking at this and thinking "At 20m, basically the entire Eastern and Southern Seaboard of the US is gone."
  - Sebb767 5y ago
    The big problem, as a sister comment pointed out, is that, for various reasons, a lot of people live close to the coast line. And a lot of people having to move was historically never really a good for peace, plus we loose a lot of agriculturally valuable land in the process.
    - _0w8t 5y ago
      Transportation by water is like 50 times cheaper than by land and it has been like that for at least the last 2000 years. So most people live either along the coast or along rivers.
  - scruple 5y ago
    At 20 meters, the Bay Area, the Central Valley, Los Angeles, and parts of Orange county are significantly impacted.
    - rich_sasha 5y ago
      Well if California goes, we might as well all pack up, civilisation is over.
      - scruple 5y ago
        Okay. So what do you think will happen when a significant chunk of the United States economic power is under water?
        oceanplexian 5y ago
        I suspect it will look like Amsterdam, or Venice, or any number of cities that figured out how to cope with existing at or below sea level.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
        gus_massa 5y ago
        From https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/148494/anticipating-future-sea-levels https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/148494/anticipating... > In its 2019 report, the IPCC projected (chart above) 0.6 to 1.1 meters (1 to 3 feet) of global sea level rise by 2100 (or about 15 millimeters per year) if greenhouse gas emissions remain at high rates (RCP8.5). By 2300, seas could stand as much as 5 meters higher under the worst-case scenario. I guess thy will migrate the datacenters before 2300.
        refurb 5y ago
        Mostly knowledge workers. Remote work already reducing potential impact.
        5y ago
  - r00fus 5y ago
    And as Lex Luthor pointed out in Superman1, there may be profit to be had. So honestly, two sides to that coin, amirite?
- stevenwoo 5y ago
  something like only 10 meters is necessary to depopulate large part of Florida (due to loss land and freshwater aquifers) and turn part of central California into a salt marsh and start reducing the USA's most productive farmland.
  - jazzyjackson 5y ago
    was always curious about how below sea level works there, how much sea rise does it take before death valley becomes the new dead sea?
    - Jtsummers 5y ago
      That is a flaw with this site, it seems to "fill in" Death Valley even with no change in sea level. The best way to read the map is to look at what new blue areas are connected to oceans, rivers, and seas. If they aren't, then it's unlikely they will be flooded as illustrated in the map at that new sea level. Death Valley, to go with that, is still detached from any oceans or rivers until almost a 600 m sea level rise.
      - jazzyjackson 5y ago
        Right on, thanks for the answer.
  - jjcon 5y ago
    Good to keep in mind that best estimates right now have sea level rising by less than 0.7 meters through 2100. 10 meters may happen some day but it will be a very slow process. https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/us-coastline-to-see-up-to-foot-of-sea-level-rise-by-2050 https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/us-coastline-to-see-up-to-...
    - r00fus 5y ago
      Ecological estimates have been shown to wildly conservative. Who ten years ago had in their ecologic prediction bingo card that we'd have rampant wildfires globally and 118 degree ground temps in the Arctic Circle by 2020?
- jjcon 5y ago
  Certainly significant but that also happens on a massive time scale - the best estimates have us up 0.7 meters in 2100. https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/us-coastline-to-see-up-to-foot-of-sea-level-rise-by-2050 https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/us-coastline-to-see-up-to-...
  - Gravityloss 5y ago
    Unfortunately, that's just linear extrapolation from current rates. Ice sheet collapse can be extremely nonlinear, accelerating rapidly. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-05003-z.pdf?origin=ppub https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-05003-z.pdf?origi... Or watch any of Eric Rignot's presentations in youtube. The term is Marine Ice Sheet Instability. This video in my opinion gives a fun demonstration of it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLdaAKIkpKA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLdaAKIkpKA Miscommunicating sea level rise risk is a big problem.
    - jjcon 5y ago
      False, the long term NOAA models are far more complex than simple extrapolation (though that is of course a part of any forecast) and they certainly aren’t linear. Feel free to read up on them yourself: https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/hazards/sealevelrise/sealevelrise-tech-report-sections.html https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/hazards/sealevelrise/sealevelr...
      - Gravityloss 5y ago
        Thanks, I was wrong. The report is good reading.
        wrycoder 5y ago
        But you must have seen something I didn’t. See my comment nearby.
      - wrycoder 5y ago
        > Global mean sea level, or the average height of the ocean surface, has risen 6 - 8 inches (15 - 20 centimeters) since 1920. In the continental U.S., relative sea level has risen about 10 - 12 inches (25 - 30 centimeters) over the same period. Observational data from tide gauges and satellites also show that sea level rise, both globally and along the continental U.S., is accelerating, with more than a third of that rise having occurred in the past two and a half decades (see NOAA and NASA portals for altimeter-based global rates and NOAA for local tide gauge rates). So, 30% of the normal one foot per century (somewhat less worldwide) happened in the last 25% of the time. That’s not a big acceleration, that’s measurement error. And yet this report says the rate of rise will nearly triple over the next thirty years. This is simply not plausible. Generally, the report reduced the predictions. Also, they eliminated the 2.5 meter (!) scenario.
- 988747 5y ago
  This map is weird. I put 20m sea rise and it shows Caspian Sea expanding, roughly doubling its size. But the thing is: Caspian Sea isn't a sea at all, it's a lake (named "sea" only because of its size), not connected to oceans in any way - why would its level rise at all? Also, it is nice to see that my family home is safe until about 350 meters rise (although it would be located on a small island in that case)
  - hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
    It's possible it's the algorithm has a bug for stuff like this, but I did notice that with, for example, 40m sea rise it shows a connection from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea.
- jl6 5y ago
  Interesting that even at a ridiculous, unprecedented 500m sea level rise, there are still substantial areas of dry land. It would be a radically different world, and a smaller one for us land based animals, but it doesn’t seem outlandish that civilization could persist.
  - nerdponx 5y ago
    It's difficult to imagine the extent and depth of suffering that humans will endure during the transition.
    - krona 5y ago
      The Netherlands didn't endure much suffering. In fact, quite the opposite.
      - pchristensen 5y ago
        The highest point in the Netherlands is 322 meters (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaalserberg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaalserberg), so even the mighty Dutch might have a problem with a 500m rise in sea level.
      - ehnto 5y ago
        I think they're referring to the increasing intensity of severe weather.
        nerdponx 5y ago
        Not only that, but also the massive loss of land that is currently dense urban area, and the massive loss of land in general. There will have to be huge reconfigurations of where people live and what people's livelihoods are. I am not optimistic that such changes can be managed among several billion humans without war, famine, etc.
    - refurb 5y ago
      Seems par for the course of human history no?
- totetsu 5y ago
  Solves the question of who gets Ukraine..
- puglr 5y ago
  What a great tool for generating fictional maps.
- France_is_bacon 5y ago
ChuckMcM 5y ago
Okay, I'd like to respond to this, "... you should be more scared," Can you reason to that position? Here is how I see it, and perhaps that will make my position more clear. I'm going to die (so are you). Every year, the probability that I'm going to die in the next year goes up bit by bit. I don't expect to read articles that continually harp on "look how close to death you are, are you sure you don't want to eat at Cracker Barrel even ONCE before you die?" And yet, I'm not anxious about dying. I accept that I cannot live forever and I do everything that I can do to live a long and happy life but there are things that other people do that can kill me. If Russia tosses a nuke into Silicon Valley, I'm dead, if a drunk driver crosses into my lane and crushes my car, I'm dead, if a clot in my bloodstream decides to take out a critical part of my brain, I'm dead. Nothing I can do to prevent that. Should I be more scared of dying? How about just scared enough to do everything I can do minimize my risks? I am always open to good science that informs me and helps me make good choices about risk with respect to my mortality. I exercise, I don't smoke, I wear my seatbelt, I look both ways when I cross the street, the list goes on. Unless you haven't been paying attention, the most recent IPCC report basically says, "We're fucked, its gonna happen now no matter what." And that sucks because in an imaginary universe where there was some sort of world government that could tell everybody on the planet what to do and enforce it if they didn't then maybe it wouldn't happen. But we don't live on that planet any more than I live on a planet that can infinitely extend my life, no matter how much I wish it. So I point out, the planet doesn't care. Big extinction event? No big deal, been there done that, look forward to seeing what the new apex predator looks like kinda not caring. What is even sadder, is that no credible climate scientist will say "If you do this, you'll avert disaster and it will all be well." Because we AFFECT the climate but we don't know how to CONTROL the climate. That part would require us to take actions, look at the result, and then adjust to figure out what each of the levers does and what sort of pull we might have on it. I got into a long email discussion with one of IPCC contributors who worked on the clouds aspect of the model. Because the atmosphere is warming, it holds more moisture, and that moisture becomes clouds when you hit the dew point. Clouds can form at all levels of the atmosphere but where they form changes their impact on local weather. The cloud model shows that if we get more clouds in the stratosphere it will increase surface temperatures, if they form in the troposphere the decrease surface temperatures. It was the latter that guided the "nuclear winter" hypothesis. But we haven't gotten there yet so we don't know where they are going to start showing up (and it can be different in different parts of the world). All the science tells is that there is more energy available for things like hurricane and cyclones which are powered by the difference between surface and atmospheric temperatures, and there is more water available for things like clouds and precipitation. You can play with the current IPCC model, change where the clouds form, and get an ice age. Pretty amazing right? But it represents the limit of our understanding in how things proceed. But that hasn't stopped any number of groups to weaponize anxiety to encourage action on their particular idea of what's "best." Some are well meaning but others, like the nuclear industry, are really trying to convince folks that you have to start massive reactor projects right now, no matter the cost, to avert calamity. Is that accurate? No. The science says the calamity is locked and loaded. Is it effective at getting more money for nuclear? Absolutely. "Being scared" and "being anxious" isn't productive (and it reduces your life expectancy to boot!) Being proactive about the things individuals can do is good as long as all good ideas get equal treatment, rather than pushing a single agenda (whether it is nuclear, bicycles, electric cars, or high speed rail). That is the context of my annoyance at what I see as fear mongering headlines and articles trying to steer resources to one and only one cause.
somenameforme 5y ago
Such quotes ('oceans were 200-250 meters higher') are going to mislead people. It's currently estimated that if all ice melted, sea levels would rise somewhere around 70 meters [1]. National Geographic had an interesting interactive some time back that showed what the world would look like if this happened. [2] And it's likely these estimates have not yet accounted for an important recent discovery which could bring that 70 meters down substantially. In 2016 it was discovered that sea levels were rising more slowly than expected [3]. The reason, discovered through satellite imagery, is that the lands were absorbing much more water than expected - effectively acting like giant sponges. [1] - https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-would-sea-level-change-if-all-glaciers-melted https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-would-sea-level-change-if-all-... [2] - https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/rising-seas-ice-melt-new-shoreline-maps https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/rising-s... [3] - https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2398/study-rising-seas-slowed-by-increasing-water-on-land/ https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2398/study-rising-seas-slowed-...
lowwave 5y ago
Probably why all the countries are using funds legally and illegally to space exploration and space assets.

gnatman 5y ago

I just went looking for a map to see how different coastlines would look with a 200m sea level rise. It's, unsurprisingly, significant!! https://www.floodmap.net/ https://www.floodmap.net/

arno_v 5y ago
Surprisingly if you put it to 20 meters the effect globally seem insignificant. Although 80% of my own country would be flooded, so that's not great.
- SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
  On a global scale, sure, but as you pointed out for some spots it wouldn't be good. Both Miami and New York (to a lesser extent) would be having a bad time.
- jazzyjackson 5y ago
  I guess you mean the shape of the countries doesn't change much? iirc the majority of Earth's population lives on coastlines, most major cities will be inundated
  - lijogdfljk 5y ago
    They'll have a _long_ time to migrate though, no?
    - jazzyjackson 5y ago
      The rise in sea level is something of a misnomer, because the real damage comes in storm surges. Even a 1cm rise increases the amount of water that can pushed inland by *checks notes* a whole helluva lot. So while manhattan isn't going to be put underwater even after a whole foot of sea level rise (predicted by 2100), the storms it has to survive will be much worse. People won't move just from a little water in the roads (just look at Miami), I think even in the year 2099 you'll have a hard time getting new yorkers to move to ohio, but once a storm comes through and destroys their housing they will have to find somewhere else to live.
      - France_is_bacon 5y ago
    - bigthymer 5y ago
      Housing is super expensive for people now. All of that coastal infrastructure will need to be rebuilt.
      - thaumasiotes 5y ago
        But housing isn't expensive because it's hard to build. It's expensive because building it isn't allowed. If it all had to be rebuilt, that would be much cheaper than trying to build it under existing conditions.
  - hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
    Yeah, I was looking at this and thinking "At 20m, basically the entire Eastern and Southern Seaboard of the US is gone."
- Sebb767 5y ago
  The big problem, as a sister comment pointed out, is that, for various reasons, a lot of people live close to the coast line. And a lot of people having to move was historically never really a good for peace, plus we loose a lot of agriculturally valuable land in the process.
  - _0w8t 5y ago
    Transportation by water is like 50 times cheaper than by land and it has been like that for at least the last 2000 years. So most people live either along the coast or along rivers.
- scruple 5y ago
  At 20 meters, the Bay Area, the Central Valley, Los Angeles, and parts of Orange county are significantly impacted.
  - rich_sasha 5y ago
    Well if California goes, we might as well all pack up, civilisation is over.
    - scruple 5y ago
      Okay. So what do you think will happen when a significant chunk of the United States economic power is under water?
      - oceanplexian 5y ago
        I suspect it will look like Amsterdam, or Venice, or any number of cities that figured out how to cope with existing at or below sea level.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - gus_massa 5y ago
        From https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/148494/anticipating-future-sea-levels https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/148494/anticipating... > In its 2019 report, the IPCC projected (chart above) 0.6 to 1.1 meters (1 to 3 feet) of global sea level rise by 2100 (or about 15 millimeters per year) if greenhouse gas emissions remain at high rates (RCP8.5). By 2300, seas could stand as much as 5 meters higher under the worst-case scenario. I guess thy will migrate the datacenters before 2300.
      - refurb 5y ago
        Mostly knowledge workers. Remote work already reducing potential impact.
      - 5y ago
- r00fus 5y ago
  And as Lex Luthor pointed out in Superman1, there may be profit to be had. So honestly, two sides to that coin, amirite?
stevenwoo 5y ago
something like only 10 meters is necessary to depopulate large part of Florida (due to loss land and freshwater aquifers) and turn part of central California into a salt marsh and start reducing the USA's most productive farmland.
- jazzyjackson 5y ago
  was always curious about how below sea level works there, how much sea rise does it take before death valley becomes the new dead sea?
  - Jtsummers 5y ago
    That is a flaw with this site, it seems to "fill in" Death Valley even with no change in sea level. The best way to read the map is to look at what new blue areas are connected to oceans, rivers, and seas. If they aren't, then it's unlikely they will be flooded as illustrated in the map at that new sea level. Death Valley, to go with that, is still detached from any oceans or rivers until almost a 600 m sea level rise.
    - jazzyjackson 5y ago
      Right on, thanks for the answer.
- jjcon 5y ago
  Good to keep in mind that best estimates right now have sea level rising by less than 0.7 meters through 2100. 10 meters may happen some day but it will be a very slow process. https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/us-coastline-to-see-up-to-foot-of-sea-level-rise-by-2050 https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/us-coastline-to-see-up-to-...
  - r00fus 5y ago
    Ecological estimates have been shown to wildly conservative. Who ten years ago had in their ecologic prediction bingo card that we'd have rampant wildfires globally and 118 degree ground temps in the Arctic Circle by 2020?
jjcon 5y ago
Certainly significant but that also happens on a massive time scale - the best estimates have us up 0.7 meters in 2100. https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/us-coastline-to-see-up-to-foot-of-sea-level-rise-by-2050 https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/us-coastline-to-see-up-to-...
- Gravityloss 5y ago
  Unfortunately, that's just linear extrapolation from current rates. Ice sheet collapse can be extremely nonlinear, accelerating rapidly. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-05003-z.pdf?origin=ppub https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-05003-z.pdf?origi... Or watch any of Eric Rignot's presentations in youtube. The term is Marine Ice Sheet Instability. This video in my opinion gives a fun demonstration of it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLdaAKIkpKA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLdaAKIkpKA Miscommunicating sea level rise risk is a big problem.
  - jjcon 5y ago
    False, the long term NOAA models are far more complex than simple extrapolation (though that is of course a part of any forecast) and they certainly aren’t linear. Feel free to read up on them yourself: https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/hazards/sealevelrise/sealevelrise-tech-report-sections.html https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/hazards/sealevelrise/sealevelr...
    - Gravityloss 5y ago
      Thanks, I was wrong. The report is good reading.
      - wrycoder 5y ago
        But you must have seen something I didn’t. See my comment nearby.
    - wrycoder 5y ago
      > Global mean sea level, or the average height of the ocean surface, has risen 6 - 8 inches (15 - 20 centimeters) since 1920. In the continental U.S., relative sea level has risen about 10 - 12 inches (25 - 30 centimeters) over the same period. Observational data from tide gauges and satellites also show that sea level rise, both globally and along the continental U.S., is accelerating, with more than a third of that rise having occurred in the past two and a half decades (see NOAA and NASA portals for altimeter-based global rates and NOAA for local tide gauge rates). So, 30% of the normal one foot per century (somewhat less worldwide) happened in the last 25% of the time. That’s not a big acceleration, that’s measurement error. And yet this report says the rate of rise will nearly triple over the next thirty years. This is simply not plausible. Generally, the report reduced the predictions. Also, they eliminated the 2.5 meter (!) scenario.
988747 5y ago
This map is weird. I put 20m sea rise and it shows Caspian Sea expanding, roughly doubling its size. But the thing is: Caspian Sea isn't a sea at all, it's a lake (named "sea" only because of its size), not connected to oceans in any way - why would its level rise at all? Also, it is nice to see that my family home is safe until about 350 meters rise (although it would be located on a small island in that case)
- hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
  It's possible it's the algorithm has a bug for stuff like this, but I did notice that with, for example, 40m sea rise it shows a connection from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea.
jl6 5y ago
Interesting that even at a ridiculous, unprecedented 500m sea level rise, there are still substantial areas of dry land. It would be a radically different world, and a smaller one for us land based animals, but it doesn’t seem outlandish that civilization could persist.
- nerdponx 5y ago
  It's difficult to imagine the extent and depth of suffering that humans will endure during the transition.
  - krona 5y ago
    The Netherlands didn't endure much suffering. In fact, quite the opposite.
    - pchristensen 5y ago
      The highest point in the Netherlands is 322 meters (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaalserberg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaalserberg), so even the mighty Dutch might have a problem with a 500m rise in sea level.
    - ehnto 5y ago
      I think they're referring to the increasing intensity of severe weather.
      - nerdponx 5y ago
        Not only that, but also the massive loss of land that is currently dense urban area, and the massive loss of land in general. There will have to be huge reconfigurations of where people live and what people's livelihoods are. I am not optimistic that such changes can be managed among several billion humans without war, famine, etc.
  - refurb 5y ago
    Seems par for the course of human history no?
totetsu 5y ago
Solves the question of who gets Ukraine..
puglr 5y ago
What a great tool for generating fictional maps.
France_is_bacon 5y ago

ChuckMcM 5y ago

Okay, I'd like to respond to this, "... you should be more scared," Can you reason to that position? Here is how I see it, and perhaps that will make my position more clear. I'm going to die (so are you). Every year, the probability that I'm going to die in the next year goes up bit by bit. I don't expect to read articles that continually harp on "look how close to death you are, are you sure you don't want to eat at Cracker Barrel even ONCE before you die?" And yet, I'm not anxious about dying. I accept that I cannot live forever and I do everything that I can do to live a long and happy life but there are things that other people do that can kill me. If Russia tosses a nuke into Silicon Valley, I'm dead, if a drunk driver crosses into my lane and crushes my car, I'm dead, if a clot in my bloodstream decides to take out a critical part of my brain, I'm dead. Nothing I can do to prevent that. Should I be more scared of dying? How about just scared enough to do everything I can do minimize my risks? I am always open to good science that informs me and helps me make good choices about risk with respect to my mortality. I exercise, I don't smoke, I wear my seatbelt, I look both ways when I cross the street, the list goes on. Unless you haven't been paying attention, the most recent IPCC report basically says, "We're fucked, its gonna happen now no matter what." And that sucks because in an imaginary universe where there was some sort of world government that could tell everybody on the planet what to do and enforce it if they didn't then maybe it wouldn't happen. But we don't live on that planet any more than I live on a planet that can infinitely extend my life, no matter how much I wish it. So I point out, the planet doesn't care. Big extinction event? No big deal, been there done that, look forward to seeing what the new apex predator looks like kinda not caring. What is even sadder, is that no credible climate scientist will say "If you do this, you'll avert disaster and it will all be well." Because we AFFECT the climate but we don't know how to CONTROL the climate. That part would require us to take actions, look at the result, and then adjust to figure out what each of the levers does and what sort of pull we might have on it. I got into a long email discussion with one of IPCC contributors who worked on the clouds aspect of the model. Because the atmosphere is warming, it holds more moisture, and that moisture becomes clouds when you hit the dew point. Clouds can form at all levels of the atmosphere but where they form changes their impact on local weather. The cloud model shows that if we get more clouds in the stratosphere it will increase surface temperatures, if they form in the troposphere the decrease surface temperatures. It was the latter that guided the "nuclear winter" hypothesis. But we haven't gotten there yet so we don't know where they are going to start showing up (and it can be different in different parts of the world). All the science tells is that there is more energy available for things like hurricane and cyclones which are powered by the difference between surface and atmospheric temperatures, and there is more water available for things like clouds and precipitation. You can play with the current IPCC model, change where the clouds form, and get an ice age. Pretty amazing right? But it represents the limit of our understanding in how things proceed. But that hasn't stopped any number of groups to weaponize anxiety to encourage action on their particular idea of what's "best." Some are well meaning but others, like the nuclear industry, are really trying to convince folks that you have to start massive reactor projects right now, no matter the cost, to avert calamity. Is that accurate? No. The science says the calamity is locked and loaded. Is it effective at getting more money for nuclear? Absolutely. "Being scared" and "being anxious" isn't productive (and it reduces your life expectancy to boot!) Being proactive about the things individuals can do is good as long as all good ideas get equal treatment, rather than pushing a single agenda (whether it is nuclear, bicycles, electric cars, or high speed rail). That is the context of my annoyance at what I see as fear mongering headlines and articles trying to steer resources to one and only one cause.

somenameforme 5y ago

Such quotes ('oceans were 200-250 meters higher') are going to mislead people. It's currently estimated that if all ice melted, sea levels would rise somewhere around 70 meters [1]. National Geographic had an interesting interactive some time back that showed what the world would look like if this happened. [2] And it's likely these estimates have not yet accounted for an important recent discovery which could bring that 70 meters down substantially. In 2016 it was discovered that sea levels were rising more slowly than expected [3]. The reason, discovered through satellite imagery, is that the lands were absorbing much more water than expected - effectively acting like giant sponges. [1] - https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-would-sea-level-change-if-all-glaciers-melted https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-would-sea-level-change-if-all-... [2] - https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/rising-seas-ice-melt-new-shoreline-maps https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/rising-s... [3] - https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2398/study-rising-seas-slowed-by-increasing-water-on-land/ https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2398/study-rising-seas-slowed-...

lowwave 5y ago

Probably why all the countries are using funds legally and illegally to space exploration and space assets.