14 ms·

With CO2 Levels Rising, Drylands Are Turning Green – Yale E360

53 points by bilsbie 2y ago

taylodl 2y ago
> The world was wrong to expect that climate change would trigger rapid and widespread desertification in the world’s arid lands. That's the problem with a simplistic climate story. Climate change is chaotic. The deserts may go green while the oceans die. Increased storms threaten your house. That's not to say that some things about climate change aren't beneficial, it's that, on balance, most of climate change is bad, at least from a peaceful human civilization perspective.
- sharpshadow 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - taylodl 2y ago
    > The climate change of nature is still overwhelmingly more apparent than the human part at least regarding the CO2 Sorry. We know that to be false. No one is debating that, if left to its own devices, Earth is in the process of warming since the last ice age. That's a scientific fact. Earth would be warming even if humans weren't around. What's also a scientific fact is that humans are accelerating that warming trend - and that's a problem. If the Earth were warming up on its own, it would do so much more slowly, and ecosystems would have lots of time to react. This has happened several times over Earth's past. The difference now is humans are accelerating the warming. We can find no evidence of any other time in the past 100 million years of Earth warming up faster than it is now. We're limited to 100 million years (give or take) because that's the limit we can measure Earth's past climate. It's the slope of that temperature gradient that's the issue and humans have increased that slope, mostly by our dumping of CO2 into the atmosphere. All this article "proves", as you say, is what we've known all along: by some measure climate change means some things will get better, other things will get worse. In the aggregate we expect things to get worse.
    - sharpshadow 2y ago
      The earth moves in milankovitch cycles around the sun which are a mayor contributor to warming and cooling cycles. The ice core data shows also that increases in CO2 concentration followed after the temperature rose first which could correspond to the milankovitch cycles. The greenhouse effect takes places which leads to faster temperatures rises and humans are definitely contribution to that, which might already have changed how the world will look in the future. Could youn link me to the record temperature rising right now in the last 100 million years please?
      - mrsilencedogood 2y ago
        It's demonstrated in a very digestible manner in this XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1732/ https://xkcd.com/1732/
      - taylodl 2y ago
        > The earth moves in milankovitch cycles around the sun which are a mayor contributor to warming and cooling cycles. Yes, and that is extremely well-known. As are solar cycles. We have a pretty solid understanding of the natural cycles affecting climate. That's how we're able to assess humankind's impact on climate change above and beyond the natural variation.
        sharpshadow 2y ago
        We also well know that CO2 is released with rising temperatures in different systems and absorbed with falling temperatures. As mentioned before the ice core data shows exacly this a release of CO2 after a temperature increase. One could argue that it's a false correlation between temperature and CO2 especially since we talk about a concentration of 0.04% CO2 in the atmosphere. But that are just talking points I don't know the answers but seemingly you know the truth and ignore a conversation.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
    - gyudin 2y ago
- astrodust 2y ago
  Change is bad because change can be catastrophically expensive. Civilizations don't die because they couldn't adapt, it's because they couldn't afford the cost of adapting, or because their entire society was predicated on a certain set of conditions that ceased to exist. We take a lot of stuff for granted, like regular rainfall patterns in certain areas, that would be impossibly expensive to replace with technological solutions.
- noah_buddy 2y ago
  > That's not to say that some things about climate change aren't beneficial, it's that, on balance, most of climate change is bad, at least from a peaceful human civilization perspective. I think it’s hard to know what ‘bad’ means here. I think that the truth is climate change presents a great uncertainty and it could be quite bad or it could not be so bad as we think. We have no real idea, we just have projections and estimates of physical phenomena that are based on our understanding of science and the world. These projections will likely come true to a degree and they’ll also likely be wrong to a degree, and we have no idea how that will change humanity in the process. That’s really scary and it’s the first time that humanity has ever faced such a large and unavoidable uncertainty. All that said, I don’t think we have the computational models to predict what happens when you increase the temperature on earth for a century. We have no idea if other reactions will trigger and cause unforeseen effects. Each rung of uncertainty presents potential for mass death, but not certainty of it. Only uncertainty.
  - jandrese 2y ago
    There are several effects of climate change that are undeniably "bad" for human civilization. Rising sea levels that wipe out coastal communities. Increased intensity of the biggest storms. Temperatures in some areas of the globe exceeding human tolerance for ever lengthening periods in the summer. Coral reefs dying off. Even with a few silver linings here and there we should be doing what we can to reduce and even reverse climate change.
  - rozap 2y ago
    > I think it’s hard to know what ‘bad’ means here I think with how slow evolution happens, bad is anything that isn't the status quo. Yes, some species that are more adaptable will survive and could even thrive as competitors die off, but many more species will go extinct. It's hard to imagine any path here (at least on a short to medium term timescale) where biodiversity increases. And given that biodiversity is what got us to where we are, I think it's easy to agree that it's a good thing, so anything that threatens it is bad. > All that said, I don’t think we have the computational models to predict what happens when you increase the temperature on earth for a century. This definitely seems true. As a layman it seems like this is a classic case where chaos theory comes into play. Even tiny errors in our projections will lead to wildly different outcomes, so the only thing that we can say for sure is that we don't know. That's scary.
- wredue 2y ago
  [flagged]
- bcrosby95 2y ago
  I think it's less that it's on the whole "bad" and more that it's bad because we spent the last few hundred years, trillions of dollars, and billions of years worth of personpower building our infrastructure based upon the current climate.
  - SirMaster 2y ago
    Sounds like a good opportunity to drive more economic growth and create more jobs to have to do it all over again for a new climate.
    - jl6 2y ago
      Broken civilization theory > broken windows theory.
    - Pet_Ant 2y ago
      I cannot tell if that is a joke or not. I could see it both being said sincerely and sarcastically.
      - SirMaster 2y ago
        Haha, that was intended.
    - taylodl 2y ago
      But that requires energy and materials which, if not managed properly, will make the problem even worse. Politically speaking, the biggest challenge to us is mass migrations may be required in order to adapt to the changing climate. Such migrations are rarely peaceful.
    - lenerdenator 2y ago
      But then you inconvenience incumbents who expect to be able to retire to Florida on the value generated by capital that was allocated without regard to the impact that humans have on the planet's climate.
    - aetherson 2y ago
- glitchc 2y ago
  I don't think there's any proof, just projection and speculation, that the overall net result will be bad. For much of human history, the equator has been the Goldilocks zone while the poles have been uninhabitable. If that were reversed, humans would adapt. It only feels scary because we're used to the equator norm and take it be the natural state of affairs, whereas there's nothing objectively natural about that. Change is always scary. Trying to preserve something when change is inevitable is the mistake.
  - throwup238 2y ago
    Humans as a species would adapt, but that adaptation will likely manifest in the suffering of billions.
    - glitchc 2y ago
      This is hyperbole. The entire world's population is only 8 billion, very small on the scale of "billions". And it's unlikely given the timescale on which things occur. As patches of the Earth become uninhabitable, humans will migrate to other areas, as they have multiple times in the past.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - j-wags 2y ago
        A proximal cause of the Syrian civil war is drought [1]. > Factors contributing to social disenchanment in Syria include socio-economic stress caused by the Iraqi conflict, as well as the most intense drought ever recorded in the region.[ This has led to half a million deaths, and the migration of 6 million refugees has caused political fractures in several developed nations. The world is not set up for mass migration on the scale that will be needed if regional agricultural productivity changes unpredictably, even on the scale of decades. I could easily believe that a larger number of these events could compound into millions of famine deaths and a conflagration of military conflicts. 1+ billion deaths is well within range if global food logistics break down or a general military conflict is triggered. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syrian_revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syrian_revolution
- TeeMassive 2y ago
  And not equally distributed across the world. Nordic countries like Russia, Canada and Scandinavian countries will benefit a lot from a warmer climate while equatorial countries will suffer the most.
- indoordin0saur 2y ago
  > That's not to say that some things about climate change aren't beneficial It seems like on the net the changes are beneficial to a more productive biosphere - if they were happening on the scale of hundreds of thousands of years. Instead things are changing on the scale of decades and life won't have time to adapt. Delicate ecosystems are having a hard time.
- hooverd 2y ago
  As someone who has lived in both environments, high wet bulb temperatures suck way more than high arid temperatures. Sure, the latter can feel like living in a hair dryer but cooling is actually quite efficient. The former is just oppressive and is way more taxing on any AC. The moment you go outside everything is just covered in a sheen of sticky humidity.
debacle 2y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
dgfitz 2y ago
[flagged]
- silverquiet 2y ago
  Someone needs to throw the lever on solar radiation management. It's half-assed in the extreme, but I don't see any other options now. If I was in charge, I'd do it.
  - dgfitz 2y ago
    I was trying to say how ineffective this whole point is when everyone just downvoted everyone else. If we can’t sort this out we are all… screwed.
    - silverquiet 2y ago
      Of course you're right, and it is quite apparent to me that we will not sort it out; there isn't even a "we" that's really in charge of the global atmospheric CO2 level - it seems like an emergent phenomenon of our civilization. I guess you get used to it after awhile, and it probably helps that I never wanted to have children.
    - dredmorbius 2y ago
      HN has an extreme challenge in discussing high-conflict issues. I've pointed this out myself (see: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30376111 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30376111>), and it's one of my major frustrations with the site. I do agree with you, strongly, that finding effective ways to break through this communication deadlock should be helpful. That said, I've also found that the most effective way to counter this is not: - Complaining, snarking, or even substantively mentioning voting trends. Among other issues, this goes specifically against HN guidelines (<https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>), and even where arguably defensible such comments tend to draw downvotes and flags, largely for the reasons given in HN's guidelines: they make boring reading (and discussion). There's also the fact that HN tends to sort out bad voting / bad comments eventually, though as with most online discussion sites it's strongly influenced by initial comments. That's another reason your top-level comment here was likely flagged and hard: it simply doesn't help resuscitate the discussion. - Point-by-point rebuttal of myths and falsehoods. "Fisking" (<http://catb.org/jargon/html/F/fisking.html http://catb.org/jargon/html/F/fisking.html>) might have some validity in scientific argument, though as Einstein noted, if an idea is truly wrong, it takes only one sufficient rebuttal (<https://hsm.stackexchange.com/a/3485 https://hsm.stackexchange.com/a/3485>). Cutting to the root of a specious argument is far more effective in my experience. What I've done, to varying degrees of success, where I see a discussion going off the rails is to take the time to craft a top-level comment addressing what I see as a key, substantive, or under-discussed point, with the hopes of steering discussion back on track. It's not always successful, but it often is, even where I feel that I'm arriving late in the game. Key is to not reply to earlier comments (which amplifies them), or to address downvotes or other noxious behaviours. What I suspect is that there are enough readers of HN who are seeking the sort of comment I'm writing that even late contributions can substantively swing discussion. They key is raise the issues or arguments you think are being underrepresented. That's more work than a casual dismissal, but also far more valuable to HN as a whole. And of course, climate change has been politicised out the wazoo. Downvoting the bullshit is key, though naturally the bullshitters employ a similar tactic. If this seems egregious, the proper response is message the moderators at hn@ycombinator.com raising the question of possible shilling or voting manipulation. Mods can step in, and HN's ultimate behaviour is a mix of moderation actions by members, staff moderators, and a fair bit of programmatic manipulation. Administrative mods are the ultimate backstop, but they are neither omniscient nor omnipresent and often take actions only after having been contacted directly. Some recent-ish examples: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37523055 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37523055> <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40860788 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40860788> <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40834058 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40834058> (surprisingly successful) <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40372531 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40372531> (also successful) An example of editing a comment of mine after some initial downvotes. I entirely ignored the downvote issue, and merely clarified my intent: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40673847 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40673847> And a rare case of a direct refutation (initially posed as a request for sources / clarification, also on a climate-adjacent topic as it happens). Turns out the OP was sharing some long-debunked bullshit disinfo: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40664837 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40664837> Some more thoughts here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39201710 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39201710>
ConanRus 2y ago
[dead]
flavius29663 2y ago
> The world was wrong to expect that climate change would trigger rapid and widespread desertification in the world’s arid lands The science never said that. It was popsci, magazines and attention brokers that pushed that narrative. A warming world looks like Jurassic park, not Mad Max, but that doesn't sell, so they had to make it scary to sell it, hence the desertification narrative.
- NathanKP 2y ago
  In this case the "greening" is not mutually exclusive with "Mad Max". One of the major points of the article is that the greening arid areas are also highly vulnerable to brush fires. CO2 is captured temporarily but then released back into the atmosphere again every time it burns.
  - enthulhusiastic 2y ago
    Yes, but imagine all the free fire we’ll have.
- jandrese 2y ago
  Exactly, if you look at it from a thermodynamic standpoint a warming world means increased evaporation which leads to increased rainfall. There's simply more water in the air. So the threat isn't so much expanding deserts as it is more severe flooding events. These effects can already be seen with many insurance companies abandoning low lying states like Florida and Louisiana. There are few instances of people more willing to put their money where their mouth is than insurance company actuaries.
  - flavius29663 2y ago
    The even more annoying fact is that the whole global warming crisis is BECAUSE of that thermodynamic effect. With increased CO2 alone, if we emit as much as we could, would only warm the Earth 1C at the most. CO2 has a narrow band of light that is obstructs, and once that is filled, there no more heat it can trap. The scientists believe that global warming will be as high as it will because of the positive feedback loop a little warming from CO2 causes with water vapor(which is a more potent greenhouse gas): you heat up 1C, which means more water evaporates, which means more heat trapped, which means more water evaporates etc. If it wasn't for more water in the atmosphere, just CO2 warming, there would be no Global Warming crisis, it would be just a blip. And still, somehow people widely believe we'll overall be in desert-like conditions?
beanjuiceII 2y ago
[flagged]
radicalbyte 2y ago
Desertification is largely man-made and caused by land degradation - clearing forests for agriculture, using the land irresponsibly, then moving on. Sure some plains may be burning more green, but those plains were once rainforests. The place I grew up - South Devon - was once a temperate rainforest. Yet the landscape I know (and thought was beautiful) is fields of grass and shrubs. The Moors. It would almost certainly return to being a rainforest if not for the active management (grazing and controlled burns). It's funny that that landscape looks very similar to the picture in the article despite being in a very different part of the world.

53 points by bilsbie 2y ago

> The world was wrong to expect that climate change would trigger rapid and widespread desertification in the world’s arid lands. That's the problem with a simplistic climate story. Climate change is chaotic. The deserts may go green while the oceans die. Increased storms threaten your house. That's not to say that some things about climate change aren't beneficial, it's that, on balance, most of climate change is bad, at least from a peaceful human civilization perspective.

sharpshadow 2y ago
[flagged]
- taylodl 2y ago
  > The climate change of nature is still overwhelmingly more apparent than the human part at least regarding the CO2 Sorry. We know that to be false. No one is debating that, if left to its own devices, Earth is in the process of warming since the last ice age. That's a scientific fact. Earth would be warming even if humans weren't around. What's also a scientific fact is that humans are accelerating that warming trend - and that's a problem. If the Earth were warming up on its own, it would do so much more slowly, and ecosystems would have lots of time to react. This has happened several times over Earth's past. The difference now is humans are accelerating the warming. We can find no evidence of any other time in the past 100 million years of Earth warming up faster than it is now. We're limited to 100 million years (give or take) because that's the limit we can measure Earth's past climate. It's the slope of that temperature gradient that's the issue and humans have increased that slope, mostly by our dumping of CO2 into the atmosphere. All this article "proves", as you say, is what we've known all along: by some measure climate change means some things will get better, other things will get worse. In the aggregate we expect things to get worse.
  - sharpshadow 2y ago
    The earth moves in milankovitch cycles around the sun which are a mayor contributor to warming and cooling cycles. The ice core data shows also that increases in CO2 concentration followed after the temperature rose first which could correspond to the milankovitch cycles. The greenhouse effect takes places which leads to faster temperatures rises and humans are definitely contribution to that, which might already have changed how the world will look in the future. Could youn link me to the record temperature rising right now in the last 100 million years please?
    - mrsilencedogood 2y ago
      It's demonstrated in a very digestible manner in this XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1732/ https://xkcd.com/1732/
    - taylodl 2y ago
      > The earth moves in milankovitch cycles around the sun which are a mayor contributor to warming and cooling cycles. Yes, and that is extremely well-known. As are solar cycles. We have a pretty solid understanding of the natural cycles affecting climate. That's how we're able to assess humankind's impact on climate change above and beyond the natural variation.
      - sharpshadow 2y ago
        We also well know that CO2 is released with rising temperatures in different systems and absorbed with falling temperatures. As mentioned before the ice core data shows exacly this a release of CO2 after a temperature increase. One could argue that it's a false correlation between temperature and CO2 especially since we talk about a concentration of 0.04% CO2 in the atmosphere. But that are just talking points I don't know the answers but seemingly you know the truth and ignore a conversation.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - gyudin 2y ago
astrodust 2y ago
Change is bad because change can be catastrophically expensive. Civilizations don't die because they couldn't adapt, it's because they couldn't afford the cost of adapting, or because their entire society was predicated on a certain set of conditions that ceased to exist. We take a lot of stuff for granted, like regular rainfall patterns in certain areas, that would be impossibly expensive to replace with technological solutions.
noah_buddy 2y ago
> That's not to say that some things about climate change aren't beneficial, it's that, on balance, most of climate change is bad, at least from a peaceful human civilization perspective. I think it’s hard to know what ‘bad’ means here. I think that the truth is climate change presents a great uncertainty and it could be quite bad or it could not be so bad as we think. We have no real idea, we just have projections and estimates of physical phenomena that are based on our understanding of science and the world. These projections will likely come true to a degree and they’ll also likely be wrong to a degree, and we have no idea how that will change humanity in the process. That’s really scary and it’s the first time that humanity has ever faced such a large and unavoidable uncertainty. All that said, I don’t think we have the computational models to predict what happens when you increase the temperature on earth for a century. We have no idea if other reactions will trigger and cause unforeseen effects. Each rung of uncertainty presents potential for mass death, but not certainty of it. Only uncertainty.
- jandrese 2y ago
  There are several effects of climate change that are undeniably "bad" for human civilization. Rising sea levels that wipe out coastal communities. Increased intensity of the biggest storms. Temperatures in some areas of the globe exceeding human tolerance for ever lengthening periods in the summer. Coral reefs dying off. Even with a few silver linings here and there we should be doing what we can to reduce and even reverse climate change.
- rozap 2y ago
  > I think it’s hard to know what ‘bad’ means here I think with how slow evolution happens, bad is anything that isn't the status quo. Yes, some species that are more adaptable will survive and could even thrive as competitors die off, but many more species will go extinct. It's hard to imagine any path here (at least on a short to medium term timescale) where biodiversity increases. And given that biodiversity is what got us to where we are, I think it's easy to agree that it's a good thing, so anything that threatens it is bad. > All that said, I don’t think we have the computational models to predict what happens when you increase the temperature on earth for a century. This definitely seems true. As a layman it seems like this is a classic case where chaos theory comes into play. Even tiny errors in our projections will lead to wildly different outcomes, so the only thing that we can say for sure is that we don't know. That's scary.
wredue 2y ago
[flagged]
bcrosby95 2y ago
I think it's less that it's on the whole "bad" and more that it's bad because we spent the last few hundred years, trillions of dollars, and billions of years worth of personpower building our infrastructure based upon the current climate.
- SirMaster 2y ago
  Sounds like a good opportunity to drive more economic growth and create more jobs to have to do it all over again for a new climate.
  - jl6 2y ago
    Broken civilization theory > broken windows theory.
  - Pet_Ant 2y ago
    I cannot tell if that is a joke or not. I could see it both being said sincerely and sarcastically.
    - SirMaster 2y ago
      Haha, that was intended.
  - taylodl 2y ago
    But that requires energy and materials which, if not managed properly, will make the problem even worse. Politically speaking, the biggest challenge to us is mass migrations may be required in order to adapt to the changing climate. Such migrations are rarely peaceful.
  - lenerdenator 2y ago
    But then you inconvenience incumbents who expect to be able to retire to Florida on the value generated by capital that was allocated without regard to the impact that humans have on the planet's climate.
  - aetherson 2y ago
glitchc 2y ago
I don't think there's any proof, just projection and speculation, that the overall net result will be bad. For much of human history, the equator has been the Goldilocks zone while the poles have been uninhabitable. If that were reversed, humans would adapt. It only feels scary because we're used to the equator norm and take it be the natural state of affairs, whereas there's nothing objectively natural about that. Change is always scary. Trying to preserve something when change is inevitable is the mistake.
- throwup238 2y ago
  Humans as a species would adapt, but that adaptation will likely manifest in the suffering of billions.
  - glitchc 2y ago
    This is hyperbole. The entire world's population is only 8 billion, very small on the scale of "billions". And it's unlikely given the timescale on which things occur. As patches of the Earth become uninhabitable, humans will migrate to other areas, as they have multiple times in the past.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - j-wags 2y ago
      A proximal cause of the Syrian civil war is drought [1]. > Factors contributing to social disenchanment in Syria include socio-economic stress caused by the Iraqi conflict, as well as the most intense drought ever recorded in the region.[ This has led to half a million deaths, and the migration of 6 million refugees has caused political fractures in several developed nations. The world is not set up for mass migration on the scale that will be needed if regional agricultural productivity changes unpredictably, even on the scale of decades. I could easily believe that a larger number of these events could compound into millions of famine deaths and a conflagration of military conflicts. 1+ billion deaths is well within range if global food logistics break down or a general military conflict is triggered. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syrian_revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syrian_revolution
TeeMassive 2y ago
And not equally distributed across the world. Nordic countries like Russia, Canada and Scandinavian countries will benefit a lot from a warmer climate while equatorial countries will suffer the most.
indoordin0saur 2y ago
> That's not to say that some things about climate change aren't beneficial It seems like on the net the changes are beneficial to a more productive biosphere - if they were happening on the scale of hundreds of thousands of years. Instead things are changing on the scale of decades and life won't have time to adapt. Delicate ecosystems are having a hard time.
hooverd 2y ago
As someone who has lived in both environments, high wet bulb temperatures suck way more than high arid temperatures. Sure, the latter can feel like living in a hair dryer but cooling is actually quite efficient. The former is just oppressive and is way more taxing on any AC. The moment you go outside everything is just covered in a sheen of sticky humidity.

debacle 2y ago

[flagged]

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

dgfitz 2y ago

[flagged]

silverquiet 2y ago
Someone needs to throw the lever on solar radiation management. It's half-assed in the extreme, but I don't see any other options now. If I was in charge, I'd do it.
- dgfitz 2y ago
  I was trying to say how ineffective this whole point is when everyone just downvoted everyone else. If we can’t sort this out we are all… screwed.
  - silverquiet 2y ago
    Of course you're right, and it is quite apparent to me that we will not sort it out; there isn't even a "we" that's really in charge of the global atmospheric CO2 level - it seems like an emergent phenomenon of our civilization. I guess you get used to it after awhile, and it probably helps that I never wanted to have children.
  - dredmorbius 2y ago
    HN has an extreme challenge in discussing high-conflict issues. I've pointed this out myself (see: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30376111 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30376111>), and it's one of my major frustrations with the site. I do agree with you, strongly, that finding effective ways to break through this communication deadlock should be helpful. That said, I've also found that the most effective way to counter this is not: - Complaining, snarking, or even substantively mentioning voting trends. Among other issues, this goes specifically against HN guidelines (<https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>), and even where arguably defensible such comments tend to draw downvotes and flags, largely for the reasons given in HN's guidelines: they make boring reading (and discussion). There's also the fact that HN tends to sort out bad voting / bad comments eventually, though as with most online discussion sites it's strongly influenced by initial comments. That's another reason your top-level comment here was likely flagged and hard: it simply doesn't help resuscitate the discussion. - Point-by-point rebuttal of myths and falsehoods. "Fisking" (<http://catb.org/jargon/html/F/fisking.html http://catb.org/jargon/html/F/fisking.html>) might have some validity in scientific argument, though as Einstein noted, if an idea is truly wrong, it takes only one sufficient rebuttal (<https://hsm.stackexchange.com/a/3485 https://hsm.stackexchange.com/a/3485>). Cutting to the root of a specious argument is far more effective in my experience. What I've done, to varying degrees of success, where I see a discussion going off the rails is to take the time to craft a top-level comment addressing what I see as a key, substantive, or under-discussed point, with the hopes of steering discussion back on track. It's not always successful, but it often is, even where I feel that I'm arriving late in the game. Key is to not reply to earlier comments (which amplifies them), or to address downvotes or other noxious behaviours. What I suspect is that there are enough readers of HN who are seeking the sort of comment I'm writing that even late contributions can substantively swing discussion. They key is raise the issues or arguments you think are being underrepresented. That's more work than a casual dismissal, but also far more valuable to HN as a whole. And of course, climate change has been politicised out the wazoo. Downvoting the bullshit is key, though naturally the bullshitters employ a similar tactic. If this seems egregious, the proper response is message the moderators at hn@ycombinator.com raising the question of possible shilling or voting manipulation. Mods can step in, and HN's ultimate behaviour is a mix of moderation actions by members, staff moderators, and a fair bit of programmatic manipulation. Administrative mods are the ultimate backstop, but they are neither omniscient nor omnipresent and often take actions only after having been contacted directly. Some recent-ish examples: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37523055 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37523055> <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40860788 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40860788> <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40834058 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40834058> (surprisingly successful) <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40372531 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40372531> (also successful) An example of editing a comment of mine after some initial downvotes. I entirely ignored the downvote issue, and merely clarified my intent: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40673847 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40673847> And a rare case of a direct refutation (initially posed as a request for sources / clarification, also on a climate-adjacent topic as it happens). Turns out the OP was sharing some long-debunked bullshit disinfo: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40664837 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40664837> Some more thoughts here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39201710 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39201710>

ConanRus 2y ago

[dead]

flavius29663 2y ago

> The world was wrong to expect that climate change would trigger rapid and widespread desertification in the world’s arid lands The science never said that. It was popsci, magazines and attention brokers that pushed that narrative. A warming world looks like Jurassic park, not Mad Max, but that doesn't sell, so they had to make it scary to sell it, hence the desertification narrative.

NathanKP 2y ago
In this case the "greening" is not mutually exclusive with "Mad Max". One of the major points of the article is that the greening arid areas are also highly vulnerable to brush fires. CO2 is captured temporarily but then released back into the atmosphere again every time it burns.
- enthulhusiastic 2y ago
  Yes, but imagine all the free fire we’ll have.
jandrese 2y ago
Exactly, if you look at it from a thermodynamic standpoint a warming world means increased evaporation which leads to increased rainfall. There's simply more water in the air. So the threat isn't so much expanding deserts as it is more severe flooding events. These effects can already be seen with many insurance companies abandoning low lying states like Florida and Louisiana. There are few instances of people more willing to put their money where their mouth is than insurance company actuaries.
- flavius29663 2y ago
  The even more annoying fact is that the whole global warming crisis is BECAUSE of that thermodynamic effect. With increased CO2 alone, if we emit as much as we could, would only warm the Earth 1C at the most. CO2 has a narrow band of light that is obstructs, and once that is filled, there no more heat it can trap. The scientists believe that global warming will be as high as it will because of the positive feedback loop a little warming from CO2 causes with water vapor(which is a more potent greenhouse gas): you heat up 1C, which means more water evaporates, which means more heat trapped, which means more water evaporates etc. If it wasn't for more water in the atmosphere, just CO2 warming, there would be no Global Warming crisis, it would be just a blip. And still, somehow people widely believe we'll overall be in desert-like conditions?

beanjuiceII 2y ago

[flagged]

radicalbyte 2y ago

Desertification is largely man-made and caused by land degradation - clearing forests for agriculture, using the land irresponsibly, then moving on. Sure some plains may be burning more green, but those plains were once rainforests. The place I grew up - South Devon - was once a temperate rainforest. Yet the landscape I know (and thought was beautiful) is fields of grass and shrubs. The Moors. It would almost certainly return to being a rainforest if not for the active management (grazing and controlled burns). It's funny that that landscape looks very similar to the picture in the article despite being in a very different part of the world.