53 ms·

The concurrence of three climatic events

• xrd 3y ago
  I read the whole article. I looked at all the graphs and charts. I still don't understand the near term significance, even with the detailed explanations. Assuming I'm exactly average, that means 50% of the population won't understand it either. Of that 50%, how many will actually care? Nothing will happen until it is too late. His final words weren't encouraging and I can't say I feel any better either.
  • graeme 3y ago
    > Assuming I'm exactly average, that means 50% of the population won't understand it either. Of that 50%, how many will actually care? Nothing will happen until it is too late. That’s the crux of the dilemma. It’s too hard. Nothing in our daily experience gives us an intuition for it. For instance, the media often says “solving climate change requires lowering emissions”. Which gives the impression that if we lower emissions we solve it. But lowering admissions merely slows the speed at which the problem worsens. To solve the problem we would need to go to zero and then actually suck extra co2 from the atmosphere. And total global emissions, the only number which matters, are at a record high.
  • Ancalagon 3y ago
    Third paragraph from the bottom. Seems pretty clear in layman's terms to me. > As we enter Northern hemisphere summer, large regions of the planet will experience record heatwaves, fires, storms and flooding. These events will set records in intensity, duration and frequency. The planet’s overall temperature will spike to new highs for the modern era, with 1.5°C in sight for 2024. Antarctic polar sea-ice will continue its retreat from “normal”, exposing more open ocean to incoming solar radiation and heating. Crops will fail. Infrastructure will break beyond repair. Climate migration will spike. And all of this is already happening.
    • soperj 3y ago
      We've got 40 years of data on Antarctic sea ice, and over the last 4 decades it's been growing, not retreating. [1] [1]https://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index https://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index
      • mistrial9 3y ago
        https://github.com/ICESAT-2HackWeek/sea-ice-tutorials https://github.com/ICESAT-2HackWeek/sea-ice-tutorials
      • thedougd 3y ago
        Perhaps you could be more specific with your citation. Nothing jumped out at me. Is this what you're referring to? https://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/s_plot_hires.png https://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/s_plot_hires.png
        • soperj 3y ago
          Yes, that's it. Slope is positive.
      • hedgehog 3y ago
        That's an accurate but misleading characterization of the data. Anyone can go eyeball the chart you linked and then read this for context to form a more complete opinion: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/understanding-climate-antarctic-sea-ice-extent https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...
        • soperj 3y ago
          How is it misleading when they're talking about "exposing more open ocean to incoming solar radiation and heating" specifically? How is it misleading at all when I've literally just quoted data from a really good site?
          • 3y ago
  • TOMDM 3y ago
    I think this is precisely what is missing in so much of the climate communication from scientists in the space, the "so what" moment. Drawing a line in the sand is useful for policy (We should target staying under 1.5C above historical records), but the other piece needs to be the why of it all. So sure, from the figures given in this post we're seeing record antarctic sea ice anomolies, record sea surface temperature anomolies and record temperature mean anomolies. But what does this mean for the average person? What portion of our farmland is no longer serviceable? What places can people no longer live, what portion of our fresh water sources no longer work? How many people will have to move, find other sources of food/water? What other severe downstream effects are coming that I'm not even aware of? Severe weather? Flooding? Ecosystem collapse? I understand that this blog is likely more dedicated towards the science behind climate rather than communication of the consequences to the layman, but it seems that most science communication is more interested in communicating the science behind predictions (and often failing) than communicating what the outcomes are likely to be.
    • 0zemp3c 3y ago
      [flagged]
    • boilerupnc 3y ago
      This might be of interest. The opinion contributors on the wraltechwire site [0] do a reasonable job at trying to express outcomes in the context of climate change science concepts. [0] https://wraltechwire.com/tag/climate-change/ https://wraltechwire.com/tag/climate-change/
  • noiv 3y ago
    > near term significance The North Atlantic heat flux of the air-ocean interface changed and some one more knowledgeable might tell how many terajoule stay in the atmosphere a little bit longer probably altering the weather pattern as we like to know them.
    • wiredfool 3y ago
      Ireland is going to have a warm and lovely summer, which is not it's usual climate pattern, leading to water shortages and peat bog /wild fires.
  • avgcorrection 3y ago
    I know that this is HN but this isn’t an IQ-guarded secret. People not “getting it” is based on denial and/or a misguided Culture War politics (those people say it is so, and therefore it is not so), not lack of smarts.
  • oezi 3y ago
    The near term significance is that 2023 gives everyone a taste of what was supposed the new mean in 2050.
• rootusrootus 3y ago
  https://archive.is/hwhax https://archive.is/hwhax
• booleandilemma 3y ago
  This guy's blog is subtitled "Eliot Jacobson's Collapse of Everything Blog". Is this his schtick? Does he just say the world is ending all the time, or is what he's saying true?
  • p_j_w 3y ago
    >Does he just say the world is ending all the time, or is what he's saying true? These two things aren't necessarily mutually exclusive.
  • giarc 3y ago
    Perhaps. I never know what to believe. I've heard smart, knowledgeable people like Bill Gates state that he thinks we won't experience a scorched Earth ending, but that we will solve this crisis. I'd like to believe him, but then I see an article like this and I don't know who to believe, the graphs are pretty damning if only to say "that line is way above the other lines, and that is bad."
    • djleni 3y ago
      For what it’s worth, the average interpretation I’ve seen from climate scientists is: - No, we won’t hit scorched earth Venus-like runaway warming. - If we don’t reduce emissions drastically, greenhouse gas warming plus various feedbacks will cause extreme weather, render some parts of the world unlivable due to wet bulb temperature, and overwhelm unprepared infrastructure, costing huge amounts of money and creating millions of migrants. So, not the end times, but definitely dark times. If you sprinkle a bit of pessimism about current politics it’s not a stretch to assume we probably won’t handle those impacts gracefully, or achieve the drastic emissions cuts required to avoid them.
      • iso1631 3y ago
        Millions of migrants seems a massivly optimistic view. I suspect it will be well over a billion in 10 years.
        • 3y ago
• EMCymatics 3y ago
  whoever is using the ocean as a giant heat sink needs to stop (joke)
  • tonymillion 3y ago
    Turns out AI will be the death of us all, but not in the way we think… All those GPUs need cooling somehow.
    • EMCymatics 3y ago
      The reason why we cant fight climate change is because the AI wont let us (joke)
• htk 3y ago
  Reading the article I see some very short timeframes being used (e.g. 1991-2020, 1979-2000) as statistically relevant. Might be enough when preaching to the choir, but irrelevant to the skeptics.
  • jgilias 3y ago
    Those are standard climatological periods. You need that for data to be comparable and make sense. I would expect the skeptics to put in at least minor surface level effort in trying to understand the thing that they’re skeptical about, but yeah, maybe that’s too much to ask.
  • lm28469 3y ago
    Skeptics will stay skeptics whatever we say. Last time the timeframe was too long, this time the timeframe is too short. "we had ice age in the past", "we had warming in the past", 1990 is too close, -2m years is too far, the sun is closer (it's not), "numbers can say anything", "oooooh spooky graphs ;)" &c.
    • klyrs 3y ago
      If we move the goalpost to before we started collecting data, then all studies are invalid and the problem goes away!
  • coldtea 3y ago
    Not so much sceptics as "prejudiced".
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• mbil 3y ago
  Interesting that removing sulphur emissions may have resulted in more solar radiation being absorbed by the oceans. Wonder if cargo ships could purposely emit some benign material that would reflect away sunlight. Although I suspect there could be unintended consequences.
  • roflyear 3y ago
    I'd be careful buying into the "whys" here, as I'm not sure they are qualified to come to these conclusions. It seems speculation. However, the data seems to be real...
  • rjmunro 3y ago
    Just spraying seawater upwards to make clouds might do the trick: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/A-conceptual-Flettner-spray-vessel-with-Thom-fences-The-wind-would-be-blowing-from-the_fig4_23223631 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/A-conceptual-Flettner-sp...
    • londons_explore 3y ago
      Even if scientists agreed that spraying seawater upwards from every ship would mitigate say 10 years of climate change, can you imagine world governments coming to an agreement to do it, and how to fund it?
      • notfish 3y ago
        Also, H2O is a stronger greenhouse gas than CO2, so this is prolly not really a great idea
        • tonymillion 3y ago
          To counter that, H2O has a really easy path to exit the atmosphere (straight down), and it’s not like we’re producing that much more… Unlike CO2 which has been nicely stored away from the atmosphere for millions of years…
        • 3y ago
• vichu 3y ago
  I fear that this is the year "wet-bulb temperature" becomes a term regular households across the world become deeply familiar with. It may be as ubiquitous as the term "social distancing" became. I've always naively thought that climate disaster was still 10-20 years out, but it seems like it's going to begin in earnest now and instead be completely catastrophic after these next 10 years. What can I as an individual do? Move to Saskatchewan or Alaska? I already know from a friend in Alaska that the melting permafrost is causing many native villages to sink and collapse, and it's only gotten worse in the past few years. Check out this article on Newtok, AK by National Geographic from 2019: http://archive.today/1enHh http://archive.today/1enHh
  • AnonCoward42 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • kfrzcode 3y ago
      The end is (nigh++)!
  • kfrzcode 3y ago
    Keep calm, carry on, adapt. Slow-moving crises are not crises, they're problems, not emergencies. ---- Here, have some literature, down-voters! ---- [1] Nine long and nearly continuous sea level records were chosen from around the world to explore rates of change in sea level for 1904–2003. These records were found to capture the variability found in a larger number of stations over the last half century studied previously. Extending the sea level record back over the entire century suggests that the high variability in the rates of sea level change observed over the past 20 years were not particularly unusual. The rate of sea level change was found to be larger in the early part of last century (2.03 ± 0.35 mm/yr 1904–1953), in comparison with the latter part (1.45 ± 0.34 mm/yr 1954–2003). The highest decadal rate of rise occurred in the decade centred on 1980 (5.31 mm/yr) with the lowest rate of rise occurring in the decade centred on 1964 (−1.49 mm/yr). Over the entire century the mean rate of change was 1.74 ± 0.16 mm/yr. [0] ---- We compare estimates of coastal and global averaged sea level for 1950 to 2000. During the 1990s and around 1970, we find coastal sea level is rising faster than the global average but that it rises slower than the global average during the late 1970s and late 1980s. The differences are largely a result of sampling the time-varying geographical distribution of sea level rise along a coastline which is more convoluted in some regions than others. More rapid coastal rise corresponds to La Niña–like conditions in the tropical Pacific Ocean and a slower rate corresponds to El Niño–like conditions. Over the 51 year period, there is no significant difference in the rates of coastal and global averaged sea level rise, as found in climate model simulations of the 20th century. The best estimate of both global average and coastal sea level rise remains 1.8 ± 0.3 mm yr−1, as found in earlier studies. [1] ---- Kemp et al. (1) note that recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports emphasize sub-2 °C scenarios. Simultaneously, IPCC reports also overemphasize catastrophic scenarios, as does broader discourse. For example, the cataclysmic Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 (RCP8.5) and Shared Socioeconomic Pathway 5-8.5 (SSP5-8.5) scenarios—now widely considered implausible (2)—account for roughly half of the scenario mentions in recent IPCC Assessment Reports’ impacts (Working Group II) sections (Fig. 1A), similar to underlying scientific literature (3). The SSP3-7.0 emissions pathway, which Kemp et al. (1) use in their analyses, assumes a world in 2100 heavily reliant on coal and with no climate policy—an implausible future (3, 4). It projects vastly higher emissions than the International Energy Agency (IEA) stated policies scenario, which has continually been revised downward in recent years (4) (Fig. 1B). [2] ---- [0]: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2006GL028492 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/200... [1]: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2004GL021391 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/200... [2]: https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2214347119 https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2214347119 Cherry-picked because hey, why not?
• cpr 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • vsareto 3y ago
    >Average Antarctic sea ice concentration in February 2023, the month when sea ice reaches its summer minimum extent. Compared to median conditions from 1981–2010 (yellow line), the most recent minimum was the lowest on record throughout the month. ???
  • otikik 3y ago
    It does not. It clearly says it has gone down.
  • simmerup 3y ago
    That article is from March...
    • distortionfield 3y ago
      But much more importantly the OPs statement is directly contrary to what their own link states.
      • cpr 3y ago
        Conclusion of article: >Overall, the long-term trend in Antarctic sea ice is nearly flat. (in contrast, the glaciers and ice sheets over land in Antarctica are losing mass.) The satellite record spans more than four decades, and although the ice has shown increasing and decreasing trends over portions of that record, few of those trends have been statistically significant. Year-to-year variability has dominated, especially over the last decade. Since the year 2013, Antarctic sea ice has exhibited its highest and lowest extents in the entire record—the highest-ever winter maximum occurred in September 2014, and the lowest-ever summer minimum was in February 2022. But the overall trend, as of early 2022, is close to zero.
• matthewdgreen 3y ago
  "The end of global industrial civilization is where we are headed right now, not at some future dystopian moment. I wish I had a hopeful word to end with. But I don’t." That's a pretty terrifying ending. Many of these trends (reducing sea ice causing increased ocean warming, burning of forests and permafrost) may be irreversible once things pass a certain point. At very least we may need to engage in some sort of large-scale solar radiation management project to stop them, and worryingly we may need to start that project very soon before it's too late.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • c1sc0 3y ago
    IF the correlation between sulphuric oxide contents in shipping fuel and these measures changes are true then we have the solution in the article right there. The best day to start solar radiation management was yesterday, the second-best is now.
    • matthewdgreen 3y ago
      I don't actually disagree with this. My concern is that right now the public is very far from accepting the idea that we should engage in these projects, and they only exist at the research stage. Worse: convincing the world to accept near-term SRM (or even "use dirtier fuel again" SRM) may be a tough sell, since some portion of the world isn't convinced that climate change is very serious, let alone an existential threat that needs immediate action. Even if SRM works and is safe, getting from our current situation to one where we deploy SRM could take years, and I'm getting worried that we might not have those years.
  • coldtea 3y ago
    Don't worry. Magically awesome, yet uninvented, or in perpetual "in the next ten years" state technology, with Star Trek scope, will save us with a technical solution. If not, we're all just going to Mars in 10-15 years, with colonies and terraformings. Even if we haven't managed to even get back to the moon for 50 years. That's what everybody insisted for the past 20-30 years, so must be true. All we need to do is keep expanding consumption/production!
• Aaronstotle 3y ago
  The record fire season in 2020 is why I decided to hedge my bets on living a long life and smoke 1 cigarette per day.
• abeppu 3y ago
  > The IPCC suggests that current sulfur aerosol levels are contributing in the neighborhood of 0.5° C to total global cooling, offsetting warming that would otherwise rapidly occur. > By cleaning up shipping fuels, massive regions of the world’s oceans that were protected from heating by shipping sulfate aerosols are now experiencing rapid warming. This includes the main shipping routes between Asia and the Western US as well as the major routes from the Easter US to Europe and the Middle East. And that’s where the warming is happening. This rapid heating is known as “termination shock,” and it appears to be what’s happening right now. It's frustrating that we've argued a lot about the hazards of intentional geoengineering responses without reaching a consensus that we should do it, and meanwhile the shipping industry was cavalierly doing it along-side their other emissions. Yes, we need to rapidly cut emissions. Yes, we need to in parallel invest in carbon capture. But if every fraction of a degree matters, shouldn't we also be at least continuing if not scaling up these these albedo-increasing changes? (edited for grammar)
  • pyrale 3y ago
    Climate change is just one of the things that will get us if we don't find a way to live in our environment. We can't just fuck every other issue to solve that one problem, and hope everything will be fine.
    • creato 3y ago
      You could include the cost of energy in your statement, and then it says nothing.
      • Retric 3y ago
        Solving climate change doesn’t require dramatic long term changes to the cost of energy. Economically it’s mostly a question of sunk costs as our infrastructure is built around fossil fuels. However, infrastructure has a finite lifespan meaning gradually changing things is vastly less expensive, though you do need to actually start changing things. Thus ideas like increasing carbon taxation so economies optimize for efficient transitions.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• DrThunder 3y ago
  He forgot the 4th event - Social Contagion Resulting in Climate Sensationalism. Can we please have a realistic discussion on climate change? I'm so sick of these "scientists" acting like we're in "Day After Tomorrow" and every normal weather event is suddenly a precursor to the Armageddon that'll take us all out in the next decade or less. You scientifically cannot look at individual weather events and determine they're climate change, that's pseudoscience. People like this author only manage to turn rational individuals into deniers due to their over the top claims that never come true.
  • pc86 3y ago
    > Can we please have a realistic discussion on climate change? No we can't, because of the people who actually care about it, half are "everyone is going to be dead before your toddler goes to college unless we dismantle capitalism across the globe" and half are "humans haven't caused any warming at all and dumping trillions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere has zero measurable effect I bet you voted for Biden." Both are idiots, but the problem is if you're not in one of those camps, and you want to have a rational discussion about climate change, you're in such a small minority you look like the crazy one. Even here where I'd like to think the users are generally intelligent, the thread is either jokes, apocalyptic predictions about billions of climate-migrants, or nonsense about communism. It would be interesting to compare this trend in US politics as a whole and how it can also be applied to this specific issue (and other divisive issues like gun rights or abortion rights) if it wasn't so goddamn depressing.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  • michaelmrose 3y ago
    If someone tells you that cigarettes are going to give you cancer the fact that you aren't dead yet isn't a good indication that they are wrong. Furthermore the climate is incredibly complex. Waiting until we are absolutely certain of the exact trajectory of our fuckery will surely result in us being too fucked to take much corrective action. Basically you are asking to much and you're wrong.
• coding123 3y ago
  tipping point - some line crossed
• whalesalad 3y ago
  NAC Collapse? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Atlantic_Current https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Atlantic_Current - https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/12/14/1041321/climate-change-ocean-atlantic-circulation/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/12/14/1041321/climate-... - https://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/science-tech/huge-atlantic-ocean-current-slowing-down-if-it-collapses-la-niña-could-become-norm https://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/science-tech/huge-atlantic...
• lsh123 3y ago
  Yet another alarmist article. These predictions are so easy to make and nobody cares if you are wrong. From the past (you can google more yourself): https://apnews.com/article/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0 https://apnews.com/article/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0 https://www.nytimes.com/1995/09/18/world/scientists-say-earth-s-warming-could-set-off-wide-disruptions.html https://www.nytimes.com/1995/09/18/world/scientists-say-eart... https://nypost.com/2021/11/12/50-years-of-predictions-that-the-climate-apocalypse-is-nigh/ https://nypost.com/2021/11/12/50-years-of-predictions-that-t...
  • abm53 3y ago
    The article is mostly about current conditions, not predictions.
    • lsh123 3y ago
      Last 2 sentences from the article: "... The end of global industrial civilization is where we are headed right now, not at some future dystopian moment. I wish I had a hopeful word to end with. But I don’t."
      • otikik 3y ago
        "mostly".
  • its-summertime 3y ago
    Predictions end up being wrong if things change https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Protocol and others for example (besides, "Will happen" is very different from "Could happen")
    • lsh123 3y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method "The purpose of an experiment is to determine whether observations agree with or conflict with the expectations deduced from a hypothesis"
• idlewords 3y ago
  As this post hints at in the discussion of sulfur emissions at sea, all it takes to significantly slow global warming is one country or sufficiently motivated non-state actor deciding to go all-in on geoengineering (like seeding the stratosphere with sulfur dioxides). Compare this to the collective action problem of everyone, including rapidly industrializing poorer countries, spending trillions to decarbonize their economy and it's pretty clear which outcome is more likely. The only question is which country (or countries) will be first to attempt it, and what will trigger them to act.
  • detritus 3y ago
    According to the 'novel' The Ministry of The Future, that could be a state Actor... . I put 'novel' in quotes because it's a really weird novel.
    • giraffe_lady 3y ago
      A lot of novels are weird. It's straightforwardly a novel you don't need to put it in quotes.
      • detritus 3y ago
        More that it's a weird form of treatise with the mereset semblance of a coherent novel intertwined within it to encourage people to read it.
    • blacksmith_tb 3y ago
      A novel novel, got it. I actually thought it was a pretty straightforward read, but to each their own. According to the novel Termination Shock it could just take an eccentric billionaire to launch a geoengineering effort like that (though with some blowback from state actors) - of course there aren't any of those around, so that's clearly fiction...
      • ericmay 3y ago
        Just as a digression I thought Ministry for the Future was a far better book than Termination Shock was.
• isp 3y ago
  In this article is the first time I've seen a graph with units "Hiroshimas per Seconds". https://climatecasino.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Ocean_Heating_CERES-1.jpg https://climatecasino.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Ocean_H...
  • dj_gitmo 3y ago
    very poor taste IMO.
    • connorgutman 3y ago
      What would you rather have us measure a mass-extinction event in, "sad puppies per second?" This shit is life-and-death. I'm sorry that reality offends you.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • dzamo_norton 3y ago
      I agree, Little Boys or Fat Mans per second would be make me think more of physical power and less of kill rate.
    • gautamcgoel 3y ago
      I found it very striking - it's a number that someone like me (not a physicist) can grasp.
      • dredmorbius 3y ago
        One thing that playing with GNU Units has taught me is useful equivalences between various energy measures. 1 Hiroshima ~= 15.5 kiloton TNT ~= 18 GWh. A large powerplant generates roughly 1 GW of electricity, so running for 18 hours is the equivalent of 1 Hiroshima. (GNU units ... seems to have this predefined, along with 'davycrocket", "nagasaki", "fatman", "littleboy", "ivyking", "castlebravo", "tsarbomba", "b53bomb", "trinity", and "gadget".) This also makes clear that it's not merely the amount of energy released, but the rate which matters. A powerplant running for three quarters of a day isn't tremendously destructive. A Little Boy type fission bomb exploding in a few microseconds ... is. Slowing your car from 100 kph to 0 over 10 seconds is a strong stop, doing that in 0.1 seconds is a fatal accident. Typically, a 10x increase or decrease in scale or magnitude is transformative. By very rough averages, a human walks at ~5 kph, an automobile travels at 50 kph, a commercial airliner at 500 kph, a fighter aircraft at 5,000 kph, and a spacecraft at 50,000 kph.
• brindidrip 3y ago
  So given this context and assuming it is accurate, where do you think would be the most viable areas to live? If I were to consider for the US, I'd say inland northern states like Wisconsin and Michigan thanks to the Great Lakes...
  • sverona 3y ago
    I moved to Grand Rapids for precisely this reason.
  • ashes-of-sol 3y ago
    [dead]
  • jtolds 3y ago
    I made a bunch of maps to answer this question! https://www.jtolio.com/2022/07/anthropocene-calamity-part-8-climate-models-101/ https://www.jtolio.com/2022/07/anthropocene-calamity-part-8-...
    • jtolds 3y ago
      Here's my wizard if you want to tweak the maps yourself: https://climatedash.fly.dev/?selection=tmean_avg_2050+&filter=elevation+%3E%3D+100%0Aand%0Aelevation+%3C%3D+8000%0Aand%0Atmin_avg_min_2050+%3E%3D+-6%0Aand%0Aprec_avg_2050+%3E%3D+20%0Aand%0Atmax_days_above_95_2050+%3C%3D+20%0Aand%0Atmean_avg_2050d+%3C%3D+3%0Aand%0Atmin_days_at_or_below_32_2050+%3C%3D+130%0Aand%0Awetbulb_avg_max_2050+%3C+79%0Aand%0Aprec_days_at_or_below_0_2050+%3C%3D+220 https://climatedash.fly.dev/?selection=tmean_avg_2050+&filte...
    • data_maan 3y ago
      Wonderful read! But a few thing I'm missing are: - second (higher) order availability: even if the hospital you need to go to is within biking distance, is the hospital itself sourcing it's materials (needles, plasters etc.) locally? Otherwise you might end up at a hospital that can't treat you - in your modelling you only accounted for weather effects and elsewhere assumed that, hopefully, immigration will somehow be managed well. Suppose it will not - how will you manage that and ensure you will not loose everything, when everyone suddenly moves to where you are and all wealth is taken from people who have some? Is Traverse city perhaps sufficiently insulated so that people won't easily reach it? Does it have a strong police? Lastly, I'm recommending the "nodes of persisting complexity" article, if you're interested. They carry out an analysis like you do, but at country level. Sadly, the US doesn't score too high.
• avgcorrection 3y ago
  > The first WTF is in the Antarctic, where sea-ice extent is setting record lows daily, now fully over 2 million kilometers below the 1991-2020 mean. This is not some one-off event. A decline like this has long been predicted. The impact is that there is a lot more open ocean than normal for this time of year. Open ocean means the ability to absorb incoming solar radiation, and that means further heating in a well-known feedback loop. We already knew that it would get this bad, but then some other curveball came and made it worse. In other words just another Monday in the 2020s.
• tonymet 3y ago
  if someone can explain how global temps are measured and weighted i’ll give you a cookie
  • jazzyjackson 3y ago
    it's satellite photography of infrared emmission, no? combined with ground station measurements to calibrate?
  • dredmorbius 3y ago
    The source listed by TFA for SST, surface sea-water temperature, is <https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/ https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/> From the note on that page: The page provides time series and map visualizations of daily mean Sea Surface Temperature (SST) from the NOAA Optimum Interpolation SST (OISST) dataset version 2.1. OISST is a 0.25°x0.25° gridded dataset that estimates temperatures based on a blend of satellite, ship, and buoy observations. The OISST data product includes SST anomalies based on 1971–2000 climatology from NOAA. The datset spans 1 January 1982 to present with a 1 to 2-day lag from the current day. OISST files are preliminary for about two weeks until a finalized product file is posted by NOAA. This status is identified on the maps with "[preliminary]" showing in the title, and applies to the time series as well. Which further references <https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/products/optimum-interpolation-sst https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/products/optimum-interpolation-sst> can haz cooky plz?
    • tonymet 3y ago
      thanks we’re on the right track but it’s still lacking the stats. ie what is the distribution of the instruments and how are they weighted ? are dense and sparse weighted equally? how about close and distant instruments to settlements ? to me collapsing thousands of observations to a single average loses most of the signal
      • dredmorbius 3y ago
        Is there some peculiar technical limitation on your end which prevents you from following or reading links? From the NOAA link above: See Huang et al. 2021 for complete details Huang et al, "Improvements of the Daily Optimum Interpolation Sea Surface Temperature (DOISST) Version 2.1 " (April 2021): <https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/clim/34/8/JCLI-D-20-0166.1.xml https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/clim/34/8/JCLI-D-...> Notably: - "DOISST v2.0 and v2.1 have a resolution of daily and 0.25° × 0.25°" - "The large-scale biases of AVHRR SSTs are corrected against the available in situ observations from ships and buoys in DOISST v2.0 (Reynolds et al. 2007) and from ships, buoys, and Argo floats in this study (v2.1; Table 1). Daily biases of AVHRR SSTs (e.g., 15 January 2020) are calculated in the following procedures: 1) daily AVHRR and in situ SSTs are bin-averaged separately to 2° × 2° grids; 2) daily AVHRR and in situ SSTs are averaged separately within a 15-day running window (e.g., 8–22 January 2020); 3) the averaged AVHRR and in situ SSTs are projected onto a common set of empirical orthogonal teleconnection (EOT) functions; 4) the difference between EOT-filtered AVHRR and in situ SSTs is defined as AVHRR biases; and 5) the daily biases on 2° × 2° grids are interpolated linearly to 0.25° × 0.25° grids and applied to AVHRR SST [see more details in Reynolds et al. (2007); Huang et al. 2015b]." I'll trust in your competence to answer your remaining questions without my assistance.
• billiam 3y ago
  He tries a little too hard to make gradual global changes more tangible (what does 930 Hiroshimas even mean?), but in general he does a good job of stating the obvious for us lunkheads. The developed world is nearly at civil war in large part about the tiny number of refugees we have today---we will be completely unable to deal with climate refugees in the tens or hundreds of millions, and it won't be wet bulb temps that finish our society off, it will be us doing it to each other.
• civilitty 3y ago
  > There is another possible input to this heating worthy of note. Dust from the Sahara typically blows west this time of year, blocking incoming radiation while trapping existing heat. So far this year the dust has not come. The lack of dust is notable and could also be a direct cause of some of the North Atlantic heating. This caught my eye as a potentially much worse catastrophe in the short term than the extreme temperatures. That Saharan dust feeds several ecosystems like the Mediterranean and the Amazon with crucial micronutrients like iron and phosphorus. If that transfer stops for very long, they could start to collapse
  • ratg13 3y ago
    This was the only part of the post that I wasn’t relating to. I’m just coming back from a trip to the Caribbean where during my trip the sky was hazy for some days and all of the locals were claiming the weather effect to be the Sahara dust. I’m not a local so I don’t know if it is more or less than usual, but my personal experience makes me take issue with the “never come” part.
    • fps 3y ago
      The eastern islands of the Caribbean are currently getting hit with smoke from Canadian wildfires: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/us/smoke-maps-canada-fires.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/us/smoke-maps-canad.... Smoke is covering everything from Puerto Rico to Barbados.
      • ratg13 3y ago
        This was about 3 weeks ago, prior to the wildfires.
    • deanCommie 3y ago
      It's super important to not rely on individual data points when talking about year-long trends. Whatever the effect of the Saharan dust, it's not going to be all manifested in "some days". Just as in years of overall climate warning there can still be record cold streaks too.
• foxandmouse 3y ago
  How is this on the front page? It's as poorly rooted in science as anti-global warming articles. This level of alarmism is dangerous because thoughts of others imprison us if we’re not thinking for ourselves... why would a young person care about the climate if it's already too late.
  • kzrdude 3y ago
    What we have already done is enough to keep the momentum of global warming going the next centuries. That's a very difficult political reality, it is a great challenge. How can we deal with politics and everything else when the facts look like this? When the best we can do is to "not make it worse", then it's very hard for people to see the benefits of the changes we have to make.
  • jchmrt 3y ago
    The fun thing about climate change is that it is never really too late to make a difference, since every reduction in emitted CO2 results in less warming (even if not in a perfectly linear fashion due to various feedback loops). This means that even when we've already locked in 2C, it is still worth preventing it from going to 2.5C. So alarmism is good and necessary, we just need to make sure that we also need to take action based on it.
  • distortionfield 3y ago
    How is it poorly rooted? They cite all of the data they used for their sources, and link to research supporting their broad claims. You can’t just call something poorly sourced and alarmist because it’s actually alarming. That’s the problem, right now. Alarming is very much the word I should hope this article is.
• brightball 3y ago
  Can somebody explain this part? > By cleaning up shipping fuels, massive regions of the world’s oceans that were protected from heating by shipping sulfate aerosols are now experiencing rapid warming. This includes the main shipping routes between Asia and the Western US as well as the major routes from the Easter US to Europe and the Middle East. And that’s where the warming is happening. This rapid heating is known as “termination shock,” and it appears to be what’s happening right now.
  • adregan 3y ago
    Certain chemicals in the atmosphere can increase the planet's albedo, meaning that less of the sun's energy is absorbed. When people speak of geoengineering, they are referring to intentionally spraying these elements (sulfur) into the atmosphere to reflect more of the sun's energy and temporarily cooling the earth. However, the problem with this system is that the second you stop, you get a huge bump in temperature. Like a whip, you get a quick increase. Turns out, the shipping industry may have been inadvertently geoengineering and now that there are regulations on the amount of sulfur expelled, we may be experiencing that snap to warmer temperatures. You may think "Let's just spray some sulfur of our own," but there are unintended consequences associated with it. In my mind though, the biggest issue is that without a reduction in emissions, you'll need more and more sulfur sprayed into the atmosphere and eventually it will not be effective. Supposing you've continued to emit all that time and are still emitting, then the snap would be even greater.
    • selimthegrim 3y ago
      I guess this geoengineering has left the ozone stable.
• latchkey 3y ago
  Warm water fish death happening now. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/11/us/dead-fish-texas-climate-change.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/11/us/dead-fish-texas-climat...
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• Glyptodon 3y ago
  I shared it with my dad. He's basically a socialist boomer. His response? "I don't read articles starting with 'WTF'". I wish people were in general more intentional in writing for a broad audience.
• lettergram 3y ago
  Let’s see the last 200-400 years of climate data. Curious the fluctuations 1991-2020 has decent variance, there’s also 30 year solar cycles. We only see one cycle in this data, we need more data tip make conclusions
  • josho 3y ago
    > we need more data tip make conclusions Skeptics have been raising questions like yours for decades. If you are truly interested in answers then it is only one or two google searches away. In short scientists have already factored those concerns into their analysis.
    • lettergram 3y ago
      Oh I fully know they have a lot more data than 1991-2023 (as is this chart). But of course they have no way to factor beyond like 1900. They don’t have the data and it’s why the models are always off. It’s also why I’m asking for it. It’s obviously constructed data designed to reach a pre-determined conclusion. The 1960-1991 data and 1930-1960 data is available (though likely using different sensors, locations, etc to calculate temp)
• carlosjobim 3y ago
  I was skeptical, but when the author introduced "Hiroshimas per second" as a scale to measure temperature I understood that this was a truly scientific article.
  • distortionfield 3y ago
    Why does converting units for convenience nullify a scientific hypothesis? Please explain.
    • carlosjobim 3y ago
      Who said it was nullifying the scientific hypothesis? On the contrary, it strengthens it significantly. I suggest he further strengthens his science by converting carbon emissions to Auschwitz' per minute, so that the everyday Joe gets a better grip on the numbers.
      • distortionfield 3y ago
        avoiding the question and argumentum ad absurdum isn’t an answer.
• data_maan 3y ago
  Post your companies that are withdrawing because of climate change here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36297304 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36297304
• giarc 3y ago
  This article and discussions here in the comments motivated me to send off 3 emails to relevant ministers of my provincial government. When I had my first kid, the environment and what our Earth would look like when she was my age really got to me. I realized that small, individual actions aren't going to cut it (ex turning off a light). It's not to say I don't do those things, but I had to do more, things that may actually move the needle. I pay for Bullfrog power to my house (https://bullfrogpower.com/ https://bullfrogpower.com/) and I now email my local representatives to make sure they know their constituents care about this. What will you do today?
  • data_maan 3y ago
    We need more people like you! Most of us (me included) just lurk on HN and post the odd comment, without pushing for change. We're pathetic!
• golemotron 3y ago
  > These next two years are a pre-amble to what it will mean for the world to pass the Paris 1.5°C barrier. The end of global industrial civilization is where we are headed right now, not at some future dystopian moment. I wish I had a hopeful word to end with. But I don’t. This isn't going to age well.
• jonplackett 3y ago
  Is there anywhere on earth I can move to where it’ll take longer to get terrible?
  • jgoodhcg 3y ago
    I chose to live in Michigan mostly for climate crisis and natural disaster reasons. One of the largest fresh bodies of water, no earthquakes, hardly any tornadoes, no hurricanes, ocean levels won’t impact directly, forest fires aren’t common in the scale of California. Projections show it will still be farmable in 50 years. The downside is it’s a Midwest flyover sate, and the winters can be tough. The lack of sun and abundance of snow can be impactful on mood.
    • jcpst 3y ago
      Michigan is where my research led me on this. In several ways looks an improvement to my current life in Kansas.
      • jgoodhcg 3y ago
        Summer is a great time to check it out.
  • ejb999 3y ago
    non-coastal new england - especially VT, Maine and Western Mass are some of the safest areas based on articles I have read.
• intalentive 3y ago
  What's up with the straight line across the equatorial Pacific? https://climatecasino.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/GLOBAL_SST_ANOMALY-1024x720.jpg https://climatecasino.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/GLOBAL_...
  • jazzyjackson 3y ago
    Lack of wind, since the trade winds of the north and south hemispheres converge or cancel each other at the equator https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intertropical_Convergence_Zone https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intertropical_Convergence_Zo...
    • intalentive 3y ago
      TIL. Thanks.
• thx-2718 3y ago
  "The end of global industrial civilization is where we are headed right now, not at some future dystopian moment. I wish I had a hopeful word to end with. But I don’t." Sunshade: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_sunshade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_sunshade I'm not too concerned with climate change destroying us all within a 100 years. I'm excited to see the innovations and discoveries to be made while we develop technology to mitigate disaster. Edit: Furthermore I am excited to see the ROI I will receive from investing in mitigation technology.
  • dbmnt 3y ago
    You realize the Sunshade is science fiction, right? Picking two examples from the Wikipedia article you linked, the Fresnel lens is a proposed object that would float in space between the Earth and Sun, approximately 1000 km wide and only a few mm thick. The article notes "at a science fiction convention in 2004, Benford estimated that it would cost about US$10 billion up front, and another $10 billion in supportive cost during its lifespan." Lol. This idea is pretty hilarious, just in general. A lens so wide as to span the entire US state of South Dakota. Please explain how you'll launch and/or assemble that at the L1 point. (This was a subplot of a Simpsons Episode by the way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Shot_Mr._Burns%3F#Part_One https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Shot_Mr._Burns%3F#Part_One) Or there's the "Lightweight solution", "a distributed sunshade with a mass on the order of 100000 tons, composed of ultra-thin polymeric films and SiO2 nanotubes", which "estimates that launching such mass would require 399 yearly launches of a vehicle such as SpaceX Starship for 10 years." Also lol!
• phkahler 3y ago
  Not doubting any of it, but what do we know about the effects of: 1) The war in Ukraine - changes in air travel routes will affect cloud cover. 2) Wild fires in Canada - this is really huge at the moment. 3) That giant blob growing in the Atlantic Ocean.
  • josho 3y ago
    The wild fires represent a massive positive feedback loop. The fires are releasing CO2 into the atmosphere, that I believe effectively doubled Canada’s emissions for this year.
• redtriumph 3y ago
  > while the world attempts to recover from a pandemic that is still ongoing but ignored by global media. I wonder what parts of world are still going through the pandemic. Without citations, some of the facts in article come up as alarmists.
  • forgetfreeman 3y ago
    Literally everywhere on the planet where it is still trivially possible to catch covid, so....everywhere.
    • shawabawa3 3y ago
      By that logic we've been in a common cold pandemic for the last 200+ years
      • forgetfreeman 3y ago
        Ok, and?
• orwin 3y ago
  I will start this post saying i'm not a techno-solutionist guy, nor a denier. My last post on the subect was basically: * This is why Co2 do not have any effect until it reaches the high troposphere. That takes 20 years. The average climate we have right now is caused by emissions from 2003. * However: we never had this meteorology scenario before. We cannot predict what will happen this summer. Yes, if you're a public servant or work with them or whatever, prepare for the worst please. But ultimately, we cannot know. we started an experiment that will bring us fast changes, lead us to discover retroaction loops and a lot of different things. Some will help, some wont, we can't know. If it wasn't this dangerous and violent, the uncertainty would be fascinating (it still is, somehow).
• rednerrus 3y ago
  Accelerating global warming through means meant to slow down environmental degradation would be peak human behavior.
• Ancalagon 3y ago
  A lot of comments deriding this article as alarmist. Excuse me if I'm incorrect in saying so, but even the data seems to tell me that alarmism is where we are at: This articles data. Incredible floods in Pakistan. Heat domes over the PNW. Fires in Australia, Canada, California. And now a warming event in the North Atlantic unlike any other. All of that and this is likely to be one of the coolest summers for the remainder of our lives. Its only getting warmer from here (barring geoengineering). What about this is not alarming? As disheartening as it is, this is what is needed for action at this point.
  • nomel 3y ago
    > Fires in Australia, Canada, California. Please don't use California as an example here. It's supposed to be on fire. Several species of trees and plants here cannot germinate without fire. The loooong known problem [1] is mismanagement, building houses where places burn, and blaming the wrong people, which leads to overgrowth from lack of fire. Fires aren't, by any measure, optional. If you impede them, they will come back harsher the next time around, which has very recently been addressed with laws to help increase the frequency of fires [2][3]. I don't see how it's possible to even measure global warming impact with the mismanagement that has accumulated. [1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/decades-mismanagement-led-choked-forests-now-it-s-time-clear-n1243599 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/decades-mismanagement-l... [2] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/12/3/new-california-law-affirms-indigenous-right-to-controlled-burns https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/12/3/new-california-law-... [3] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-10-07/newsom-signs-fire-law-paving-way-for-more-prescribed-burns https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-10-07/newsom-s...
    • nomel 3y ago
      Please read the links. I'm not some anti climate nut. This isn't some controversial take, if you're at all familiar with local politics/policies.
    • civilitty 3y ago
      Same with Australia. There’s so many pyrophytes that the Eucalyptus tree adapted to produce an oil that burns especially hot in order to wipe out competitors and prevent them from sprouting after the fire. Canada, on the other hand, is a powder keg waiting to blow. The ecosystem is too wet to have any fire adaptations and as the peatlands dry, they expose meters thick layers of undecomposed plant matter that are dense enough to be used as a cheap and dirty fuel in some parts of world. It’s one of the largest carbon stores on the planet and we’ll soon have months long fires a the peat burns.
• ciconia 3y ago
  There's this paradox where, on the one hand humanity is convinced it can overcome any problem nature throws at us, and can completely subjugate nature; and on the other hand, human beings are tragically grossly understimating the impact of their actions on their environment. This is really what stands out to me when people on HN suggest that global warming is totally solvable with just enough technological innovation. The sad truth, and what this article is really driving home, is that while we're waiting for a deus ex machina, we continue to trash our planet, as if we can just move to Mars or something when earth is done. I'm quite skeptical about the whole "collapse of industrial civilisation" schtick, but I am worried, most of all for my children and their generation.
  • Invictus0 3y ago
    The deus ex machina is the coming global population decline. By 2100 the population could be 6 billion.
• bioinformatics 3y ago
  Garbage, that the highbrow Reddit users here, adore
• martin82 3y ago
  [dead]
• freestate 3y ago
  Here goes the planet
• stefek99 3y ago
  > "pandemic that is still ongoing but mostly ignored by global media" That is good right? Watch the PART 2: https://plandemicseries.com/ https://plandemicseries.com/ (Event 201) Putin captured media headlines. Speaking of Putin, Russia is probably the only country that benefits from melting Arctic - opening Northwest Passage - figured it out after debating with a bunch of climate change deniers on Twitter. (I enjoy debating, I had fun doing it, at some point they were quitting, if they were like me they would continue debating) In all seriousness, I'm working on Metacrisis - a new term reaching mainstream consciousness: — Runaway climate change + food system + global hunger — Economic inequality + compound interest + exponential growth on finite planet — Nuclear proliferation + pandemics + lost trust in media + lost trust in government — Regulation of AI + polarisation and engagement metrics + mental health Problem well defined is problem half solved
• Aerbil313 3y ago
  Haha! It’s relieving to finally see the optimistic technologists of HN finally getting a taste of their own medicine. This is what your much-praised technology did to the world, folks, and no, this was inevitable due to the very nature of it. If you fear what lies ahead, know that it’s not a fear in vain! Collapse is finally getting mainstream.