Incredibly misleading title. The expected ice sheet contributions to future sea-level rise are, per the article:
26 cm (Assuming CO2 emissions from the Paris agreement)
51 cm (Assuming CO2 emissions in line with current emissions)
69 cm (Assuming CO2 emissions in line with current emissions and incorporation of thermal expansion)
The 2m value comes from the large error bars in the predictions. Global climate change is a huge problem, but misrepresenting results from a scientific study like this is just presenting ammunition to climate change deniers on a silver platter. I suggest replacing 'to' with 'may' in the title, as that is a better summary of the article.
I think you corrected the wrong axis, warming will continue for centuries even with the Paris agreement, even with no warming ice sheets will continue melting for quite a while until temperatures return to normal, the "by 2100" timeline is the most significant variable.
It’s definitely ammunition, deservedly so. This sort of misrepresentation is par for the course. “The world is ending in 12 years.” I seem to hear that every 12 years just when people have forgotten about how the world was supposed to have been flooded already. Activists seem to have a ha but if exagération, if not downright lying.
I understand. That said, in retrospect, we seem to be well ahead of "X will happen by Year Y" predictions. I guess my point is, better safe than sorry. Because as it is, we're fast-tracking to worst case.
Can you point to any scientifically demonstrated conclusion on how much humans affect climate via CO2 emissions? It's definitely some, but how much?
You won't find the answer and that should make the most critical thinkers amongst you to question how much you actually can rely on much of these predictions about the future 30-80 years out.
It seems like that would be a great place to start if you want to convince people that they should spend a lot of money on something that isn't even demonstrated to be a problem we can't handle already now.
What are you ready to do, who's money and freedoms are you ready to spend on being "safe rather than sorry"?
This is the real question we should be asking ourselves.
You have on hackernews a study from Exxon from 1978 that correctly predicted carbon in the atmosphere and global warming because of it correctly for today. I have started taking most of the studies numbers as conservative numbers as sadly because of billions spend by the oil industry on destroying research and science reputation related to global warming and carbon the researchers publish the most conservative numbers.
I'm not sure how this applies to my statement. My scope was simple: Time and again the predictions have been wrong, and the majority of the time milestones are being hit earlier rather than later.
To be clear, the 2m increase is the analyzed 95th percentile (very high end) of the estimates of this meta-study, when you take both glacial melt and glacial expansion. The median values for low and high estimates are 69cm and 110cm.
Not that this isn't still terrifying, worth of action, worthy of international collaboration, and so on. Just let's be accurate about our titles.
Doesn’t Earth’s being a spinning oblong sphere mean some places will experience only minimal change while others will see significant change? So all this is “average” rise.
It's a much more complicated process (e.g. the weight of the ice changes the shape of the mantle). The Verge did a good high level overview of some of the different factors in play here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SA5zh3yG_-0
If you're interested in getting involved in addressing climate change, here are two options for citizens to get involved:
1) The Citizens Climate Climate Lobby has been around ten years, and it currently has a bill in Congress that has bipartisan (1 Republican) support: The Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act (http://energyinnovationact.org/). With this plan, all the revenue from a carbon tax* is directly returned to citizens as a yearly check--no enlargement of the state. This is the organization cofounded by NASA scientist James Hansen, who first testified to Congress about the perils of climate change over 30 years ago.
2) If you're a millennial/gen Z, and you're more skeptical of a market-based solution, the Green New Deal and Sunrise Movement are making waves. Rather than a concrete policy in Congress, they have a set of principles/values that they are pushing forward. This includes economic and social justice issues.
*Carbon pricing (which can come in the form of a tax or cap and trade) is the single most effective mechanism to address climate change. The idea is to internalize the _real_ costs of climate change into the price we actually pay--ramping up the price on carbon over time until it is prohibitively expensive to use fossil-fuel-expensive products, and incentivizing the economy to adapt. That fundamental price signal, where renewable energy becomes cheaper relative to fossil fuels (and similarly less fossil fuel-intensive goods are cheaper relative to fossil-fuel-expensive ones) reverberates throughout the economy. However, it's worth noting that while this solution should theoretically appeal to Republicans, almost none have stepped forward...
I think their position is: 1) don't shut don't existing nuclear plants to replace them with fossil fuels and 2) wind and solar should make up the new energy mix. But for what it's worth, the membership has diverse views. I'm pro-nuclear.
CCL tends to be more pragmatic and have many more nuclear proponents.
Im very much pro science and have no strong feelings on nuclear either way but I havent quite understod the pro nuclear arguments. What are they? From the very very limited understanding about energy systems I have wind (and sometimes solar) seems to be more economic. And to complement wind and solar you need some type of power source which can be switched on and off depending on current weather and nuclear is not really suited for that. The energy simulations I’ve seen for my own country (Sweden) only shows nuclear as a small part of a future sustainable and economic energy system. But I’m really interested in the pro arguments.
There is really no "they". There are various not well defined groups pushing for some kind not well defined "Green New Deal". There are some who are anti-nuclear and some who aren't.
The thing is, you can still use the momentum of GND to push for your preferred climate change mitigation action. You don't have to subscribe 100% to the ideology of someone else.
Science behind ideology, or ideology behind science?
If you look at sociology and anthropology, the evidence of the ability of human civilizations to handle problems with the time scale nuclear waste requires seems to be lacking. That the physics says it can be done safely does not prove that the other fields of science say it is likely to be done safely.
It's also important not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I agree that nuclear is a requirement to stemming climate change, but I still support the GND because it represents a lot of good steps in the right direction. We can always patch up the imperfect bits later.
Well, it advocated stopping travel by plane in favor of trains... which in terms of practically is almost literally insane. So, there was more wrong with it than just being anti-nuclear (which it was).
> Carbon pricing (which can come in the form of a tax or cap and trade) is the single most effective mechanism to address climate change.
Is it? That's how France ended up with the yellow vests. It seems likely that demand for fossil fuels will prove rather inelastic, such that everyone just ends up paying more and not changing behavior in a significant enough way.
I think this is a very worthwhile point to consider, and my thinking is moving in this direction as well, which is why I've been getting more involved with the Green New Deal in recent months.
1) In British Columbia, consumption of fuel has actually _gone_ up despite a tax on carbon (now at $35/ton). It had initially gone down when the tax was introduced...
2) The theory of change of the fee and dividend model was that it wouldn't enlarge the state, and therefore it would be attractive to Republicans. I've seen firsthand all the hemming and hawing of Republicans, and I've pretty nearly lost confidence in any of them coming forward--let alone with the conviction and speed we need. It's more likely to me that a liberal majority will strong-arm a green new deal type program in the next decade.
Almost all economists agree a carbon price is the most economically efficient way to cut carbon emissions. Putting economic proscriptions into political effect are of course another matter.
> It seems likely that demand for fossil fuels will prove rather inelastic
Doesn't the contrast between the US and Europe belie that? Petrol prices are double or more in much of Europe and their cars are smaller and more fuel efficient, their cities are denser, they drive less miles per capita, they invest more in public transport, use more bikes and scooters, etc.
Actually, it is the other way round and there is nothing wrong about that. In fact it is an essential part of any anti-climate change action. Poor people cannot afford a lot of the necessary proposed taxes on consumption and re-alignment of the economy that is needed to fight climate change so a core component of any action needs to be how to safeguard their living standard while acting against climate change.
Thank them for their support (these calls actually matter)!
You may also live in a city or state that is passing its own form of climate legislation, and CCL is a great way to get involved with that. Similarly, you could provide support for citizen lobbyists in neighboring districts who don't yet have support from their reps.
Current estimates, before this finding, are that it's rising by about 3mm/year, up from an average of 1-2mm/year for the previous century. About 55% of that is estimated to be due to continental ice melt and 30% to thermal expansion of the oceans.
I don’t understand your last point. A 2m rise by 2100 isn’t the prediction of the article, it’s more likely under a metre. 2m is the 95th percentile outlier or something.
Even so, if carbon emissions are continuing, the rate of warming will increase. Also I’d expect to see a hysteresis effect, where the effects of warming lag the cause so it wouldn’t be surprising to me to see an acceleration of its consequences.
Finally, if the rate of sea level rise could up to triple in a few decades, why couldn’t it triple again? And again? I just don’t see the basis of your argument.
I don't doubt humans are affecting the climate. I do doubt that humans can extrapolate the effects of what they are doing out into the future very well.
That article describes one scientist's hypothesis based on an extreme year - another more conservative scientist is quoted also. The thing to pay attention to is peer reviewed consensus, which is still alarming.
Not to hijack this thread but does anybody know of a list of companies/start-ups who are trying to combat climate change/protecting the environment especially if they are hiring?
With a brother who has a master's specialising in glacier reduction (and a keen interest in data science) he is finding it a demoralising experience looking for companies who actually seem to be taking action.
> Today the Earth has 148 million sq. km of land area, of which 16 million sq. km is covered by glaciers. A sea level rise of 66 meters would flood about 13 million sq. km of land outside Antarctica. Without polar ice, Antarctica and Greenland would be ice free, although about half of Antarctica would be under water. Thus, ice-free land would be 128 million sq. km compared to 132 million sq. km today.
I can't check all the calculations, but this result doesn't seem too terrible since we'd likely be able to migrate affected people in time.
The amount of migration that has completely upended political systems in the United States and Europe since 2010 or so will be a historical footnote compared to the migration we will experience due to climate change. The United States elected a professional wrestling character to the Presidency because he promised to be cruel to immigrants. Forgive my pessimism but I do not think "we will be able to migrate affected people in time" barring a major transformation of our society.
Anyone have any idea what a 1m and 2m rise in sea level looks like in terms of impact to land that is currently dry but will eventually end up underwater?
It’s quite clear that in 2019 it is not possible to get all powerful entities in the world to work together on an issue like climate change. We should focus on band-aid solutions like reflectors in space above the poles that prevent sun from hitting the earth at all. We are past the “if only everyone bought electric cars” phase of solutions and need special projects that assume the amount of CO2 emitted stays the same or increases.
We probably don't want all powerful entities in the world working together on anything anyway. Nothing good can come of that. A diverse range of localized solutions reacting to local experiences and problems is better than top-down central-planned solutions.
It should not be an either-or proposition when the stakes are so high. We should work full time to have governments work on breaking climate change speed (reduce/limit emissions, alternative energy, carbon tax, etc.) while at the same time work on scientific methods to fight climate change, if possible (e.g. Prometeus, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19842240.
I have no idea if that’s possible, what I mean is we should stop trying to get the US and China to agree on anything let alone climate change so we need grand silver bullet solutions.
China does accept the reality of climate change and is enacting policies against it. It might not be nearly enough but it's not fair to lump them with the USA on this one.
80%+ of the plastic in the ocean comes from China. It's not fair to lump the US in with China.
"They recognize it and want to do something" doesn't mean shit when you're by far the worst part of the problem. Especially when "wanting to do something about it" and "doing something about it" are ridiculously different things.
the latest climate-engineering proposals for sunshades involve placing a cloud of reflective or diffracting solar sails at L1, not in close earth orbit over any specific region.
well, technically you need less silver in orbit since you can use extremely thin films which just wouldn't survive on the ground. but yeah, it's still a very impractical proposition.
If we’re living in “reflectors over the poles” fantasyland, I’m sure we can come up with a way to put continuously firing boosters on it to keep it over the pole.
I don't see the word "orbit" used at all, except by you.
Sounds like you'd imagine a permanent eclipsing body is something that would employ an orbital insertion into earth orbit, which is your own assumption.
But not while maintaining anything like current first-world culture. You either need to reduce energy consumption significantly or reduce population significantly.
We do it currently. Holland is a good example of fighting back the sea, but at great expense. And not every country will be able to do this type of engineering.
The temp rises are another thing that we can adapt to. Maybe even some global engineering to thwart it. But again it will be at great cost. And this will probably have the bigger impact on all of us. Our eco-system is very susceptible to small temp changes.
potentially very dumb question but could you build hydro power solutions(from the ice melt/run off) that you then get clean power from / help cool ice...? So out of my depth here but genuinely curious. Also appreciate building a hydro power plant on a very unstable platform (ice) is problematic just curious of other solutions to generate hydro power...
Most of these ice sheets are already quite close to sea level and distributed across vast areas - like most of the coastline of Antarctica. Hydro power works best with significant altitude drops across very narrow choke-points.
I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation and was surprised how much ice a square meter of solar power can make in a day. But to scale ice making machinery to planetary capacity you'll probably need to use all the metal we've mined, ever.
With this kind of massive industrial effort, it's probably cheaper to build big towers and get rid of excess heat by pumping it up and radiating it into space off the night side of the planet. You don't need to make ice, you just need to reduce global temperatures. You could accomplish the same thing with a shield in space to reduce insolation.
Regarding your radiating tower idea, wouldn't the radiation need to be in the visible light spectrum in order to avoid the greenhouse effect? Probably better to just do carbon capture to reset the greenhouse gas thermostat. But that still doesn't refreeze the ice which will require centuries of snowfall to build up the ice sheets again.
Not exactly a zero-sum game because the earth isn’t a closed system. We’re constantly getting heat energy from the sun and radiating it back out into space at an equal rate. The composition of the atmosphere (greenhouse gasses) decides what equilibrium temperature will be. So if we had big refrigerators refreezing the arctic (without creating greenhouse gasses), they would put a ton of heat into the air but it would radiate away into space just like any other heat captured by the sun, and wouldn’t really affect the earth’s average temperature.
The cynic in me has wondered the past couple days whether all this new climate change coverage is a full-court press by Democrats in anticipation of the next election. Seems to have become a hot topic in the news just within the past few weeks.
See the article. Headline is for the extreme scenario, total clickbait.
There is a massive problem in tying a real issue we don’t understand fully into being synonymous with a specific solution (tax policy) supported by a single political ideology.
It’s a wedge issue being used as bulletproof points to get elected. The politicians who are flying private everywhere and supporting policies like preventing nuclear are not actually interested in solutions, just power.
Climate change is constantly in the headlines because it’s constantly causing various newsworthy conditions and being actively studied. Some stories bubble up to the mainstream audience and some don’t, but that’s not much different with shootings or any other regularly occurring news event in the US. Attention on climate change has always ebbed and flowed.
Scientists have been ringing the alarm since the 1970s. In the US and Canada, conservatives have gone to great lengths to censor this science and and the center-left has collaborated in the advancement of oil in spite of the increasingly overwhelming evidence that we're causing significant climate change. This study is just some climate scientists doing their jobs, and the publication date was Monday. Such things happen on a very regular basis.
A new generation of progressive candidates are advancing concrete plans to tackle climate change, and candidates talking about their policy proposals should be expected ahead of an election.
Is there a recent swell of coverage? Yes, that's normal. Is this article part of a "full court press?" Sounds to me like correlation but not causation. In fact, I'd say that the Democrats who care, care because they're familiar with the science: the causative relationship is quite the opposite of your cynicism.
I will admit I didn't read the article, which now that I look, it's from a scientific journal. So you're right, this article doesn't apply to my statement.
As others have pointed out, the headline is trash. My takeaway is that the melting ice sheets introduce greater uncertainty to climate models. Loss of uncertainty means that our ability to reason about the climate is diminished.
In sports terms: imagine that the star players on two teams are all suddenly taken out. Suddenly it's a rookie game, and there's barely any stats to go by. Do you bet more aggressively, or more conservatively?
In this case, the "conservative" bet is to pump the brakes on the most significant anthropogenic source of climate change: greenhouse gasses such as carbon emissions. The "aggressive" bet is to continue subsidizing the profiteering oil/gas/coal industries.
Case in point, some of the most little-c conservative institutions are treating climate change as real: insurance companies, and the US military. Insurance companies because they can't survive catastrophic losses, and the military because climate change will cause global instability. Their reasoning is a result of pragmatism, not politics.
A better analogy is that one of your star players (ice sheet stability) maybe isn't as good as you thought he was (turns out snow accumulation > surface melting is not the whole picture) and has some major potential weaknesses (marine ice sheet instability and marine ice cliff instability) which you probably really need to investigate or you might be losing in the big game. Also, call your bookie and adjust your bets appropriately.
This is speculation not actual scientifically demonstrated furthermore it's speculation based on the most catastrophic predictions.
On top of that, sea-level rise is not some even distribution around the globe, some places will get more others will get less. It's a very local phenomenon.
This is so misleading yet this level of inaccurate reporting is the basis for the current political debate.
Meta studies are to often used as political tools NOT science.
I 10 years when the climate catastrophism hopefully have subdued we will se a host of lawsuits against the words offenders of this scaremongering and "cry wolf"
Yes the climate is changing yes it's getting slightly hotter.
No there isn't any scientifically demonstrated consequences of climate change we don't know how to deal with.
EDIT: The title has been updated: it used to say: "Ice sheet contributions to future sea-level rise to exceed 2m by 2100"
_________________________________________________________________
Incredibly misleading title. The expected ice sheet contributions to future sea-level rise are, per the article:
26 cm (Assuming CO2 emissions from the Paris agreement)
51 cm (Assuming CO2 emissions in line with current emissions)
69 cm (Assuming CO2 emissions in line with current emissions and incorporation of thermal expansion)
The 2m value comes from the large error bars in the predictions. Global climate change is a huge problem, but misrepresenting results from a scientific study like this is just presenting ammunition to climate change deniers on a silver platter. I suggest replacing 'to' with 'may' in the title, as that is a better summary of the article.
I think you corrected the wrong axis, warming will continue for centuries even with the Paris agreement, even with no warming ice sheets will continue melting for quite a while until temperatures return to normal, the "by 2100" timeline is the most significant variable.
It’s definitely ammunition, deservedly so. This sort of misrepresentation is par for the course. “The world is ending in 12 years.” I seem to hear that every 12 years just when people have forgotten about how the world was supposed to have been flooded already. Activists seem to have a ha but if exagération, if not downright lying.
Please read the IPCC reports, not ... whatever your current source is.
I understand. That said, in retrospect, we seem to be well ahead of "X will happen by Year Y" predictions. I guess my point is, better safe than sorry. Because as it is, we're fast-tracking to worst case.
Can you point to any scientifically demonstrated conclusion on how much humans affect climate via CO2 emissions? It's definitely some, but how much?
You won't find the answer and that should make the most critical thinkers amongst you to question how much you actually can rely on much of these predictions about the future 30-80 years out.
It seems like that would be a great place to start if you want to convince people that they should spend a lot of money on something that isn't even demonstrated to be a problem we can't handle already now.
What are you ready to do, who's money and freedoms are you ready to spend on being "safe rather than sorry"?
This is the real question we should be asking ourselves.
You have on hackernews a study from Exxon from 1978 that correctly predicted carbon in the atmosphere and global warming because of it correctly for today. I have started taking most of the studies numbers as conservative numbers as sadly because of billions spend by the oil industry on destroying research and science reputation related to global warming and carbon the researchers publish the most conservative numbers.
So in other words, you dont have anything.
I'm not sure how this applies to my statement. My scope was simple: Time and again the predictions have been wrong, and the majority of the time milestones are being hit earlier rather than later.
I said nothing about CO2, who and/or why.
It was your better safe than sorry statement I reacted too. Sorry if that was unclear.
IPCC report predictions have been correct, do they count as demonstration?
To be clear, the 2m increase is the analyzed 95th percentile (very high end) of the estimates of this meta-study, when you take both glacial melt and glacial expansion. The median values for low and high estimates are 69cm and 110cm.
Not that this isn't still terrifying, worth of action, worthy of international collaboration, and so on. Just let's be accurate about our titles.
I'm lucky, I live in an area with high amount of post-glacial rebound (yea, thats a thing).
The land here is on average rising with 1 cm per year out of the ocean.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-glacial_rebound
Doesn’t Earth’s being a spinning oblong sphere mean some places will experience only minimal change while others will see significant change? So all this is “average” rise.
It's a much more complicated process (e.g. the weight of the ice changes the shape of the mantle). The Verge did a good high level overview of some of the different factors in play here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SA5zh3yG_-0
If you're interested in getting involved in addressing climate change, here are two options for citizens to get involved:
1) The Citizens Climate Climate Lobby has been around ten years, and it currently has a bill in Congress that has bipartisan (1 Republican) support: The Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act (http://energyinnovationact.org/). With this plan, all the revenue from a carbon tax* is directly returned to citizens as a yearly check--no enlargement of the state. This is the organization cofounded by NASA scientist James Hansen, who first testified to Congress about the perils of climate change over 30 years ago.
2) If you're a millennial/gen Z, and you're more skeptical of a market-based solution, the Green New Deal and Sunrise Movement are making waves. Rather than a concrete policy in Congress, they have a set of principles/values that they are pushing forward. This includes economic and social justice issues.
*Carbon pricing (which can come in the form of a tax or cap and trade) is the single most effective mechanism to address climate change. The idea is to internalize the _real_ costs of climate change into the price we actually pay--ramping up the price on carbon over time until it is prohibitively expensive to use fossil-fuel-expensive products, and incentivizing the economy to adapt. That fundamental price signal, where renewable energy becomes cheaper relative to fossil fuels (and similarly less fossil fuel-intensive goods are cheaper relative to fossil-fuel-expensive ones) reverberates throughout the economy. However, it's worth noting that while this solution should theoretically appeal to Republicans, almost none have stepped forward...
> Green New Deal
Aren't they strongly anti-nuclear? Putting science behind ideology is not a very good position to take about climate change.
I think their position is: 1) don't shut don't existing nuclear plants to replace them with fossil fuels and 2) wind and solar should make up the new energy mix. But for what it's worth, the membership has diverse views. I'm pro-nuclear.
CCL tends to be more pragmatic and have many more nuclear proponents.
Im very much pro science and have no strong feelings on nuclear either way but I havent quite understod the pro nuclear arguments. What are they? From the very very limited understanding about energy systems I have wind (and sometimes solar) seems to be more economic. And to complement wind and solar you need some type of power source which can be switched on and off depending on current weather and nuclear is not really suited for that. The energy simulations I’ve seen for my own country (Sweden) only shows nuclear as a small part of a future sustainable and economic energy system. But I’m really interested in the pro arguments.
There is really no "they". There are various not well defined groups pushing for some kind not well defined "Green New Deal". There are some who are anti-nuclear and some who aren't. The thing is, you can still use the momentum of GND to push for your preferred climate change mitigation action. You don't have to subscribe 100% to the ideology of someone else.
Science behind ideology, or ideology behind science?
If you look at sociology and anthropology, the evidence of the ability of human civilizations to handle problems with the time scale nuclear waste requires seems to be lacking. That the physics says it can be done safely does not prove that the other fields of science say it is likely to be done safely.
It's also important not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I agree that nuclear is a requirement to stemming climate change, but I still support the GND because it represents a lot of good steps in the right direction. We can always patch up the imperfect bits later.
Well, it advocated stopping travel by plane in favor of trains... which in terms of practically is almost literally insane. So, there was more wrong with it than just being anti-nuclear (which it was).
> Carbon pricing (which can come in the form of a tax or cap and trade) is the single most effective mechanism to address climate change.
Is it? That's how France ended up with the yellow vests. It seems likely that demand for fossil fuels will prove rather inelastic, such that everyone just ends up paying more and not changing behavior in a significant enough way.
I think this is a very worthwhile point to consider, and my thinking is moving in this direction as well, which is why I've been getting more involved with the Green New Deal in recent months.
1) In British Columbia, consumption of fuel has actually _gone_ up despite a tax on carbon (now at $35/ton). It had initially gone down when the tax was introduced...
2) The theory of change of the fee and dividend model was that it wouldn't enlarge the state, and therefore it would be attractive to Republicans. I've seen firsthand all the hemming and hawing of Republicans, and I've pretty nearly lost confidence in any of them coming forward--let alone with the conviction and speed we need. It's more likely to me that a liberal majority will strong-arm a green new deal type program in the next decade.
But that's just my take.
Almost all economists agree a carbon price is the most economically efficient way to cut carbon emissions. Putting economic proscriptions into political effect are of course another matter.
> It seems likely that demand for fossil fuels will prove rather inelastic
Doesn't the contrast between the US and Europe belie that? Petrol prices are double or more in much of Europe and their cars are smaller and more fuel efficient, their cities are denser, they drive less miles per capita, they invest more in public transport, use more bikes and scooters, etc.
Wasn't Europe always like that though? I don't think that has to do with petrol prices.
> This includes economic and social justice issues.
In other words, it’s co-opting the environment crisis to push for wealth redistribution.
Not that some wealth redistribution wouldn't be nice, but doesn't it have potential to actually increase global carbon emissions?
"Not that some wealth redistribution wouldn't be nice" == "Not that some theft wouldn't be nice"
Actually, it is the other way round and there is nothing wrong about that. In fact it is an essential part of any anti-climate change action. Poor people cannot afford a lot of the necessary proposed taxes on consumption and re-alignment of the economy that is needed to fight climate change so a core component of any action needs to be how to safeguard their living standard while acting against climate change.
The green new deal is absolute garbage, along with this notion of "social justice", christ.
Anything more I can do to support that bill? Both my reps are sponsors
Thank them for their support (these calls actually matter)! You may also live in a city or state that is passing its own form of climate legislation, and CCL is a great way to get involved with that. Similarly, you could provide support for citizen lobbyists in neighboring districts who don't yet have support from their reps.
So how much was the actual global sea-level rise in the past 10 years and how does it relate to previous estimates?
Current estimates, before this finding, are that it's rising by about 3mm/year, up from an average of 1-2mm/year for the previous century. About 55% of that is estimated to be due to continental ice melt and 30% to thermal expansion of the oceans.
> it's rising by about 3mm/year, up from an average of 1-2mm/year for the previous century
That's a questionable comparison since we don't have reliable data from before 1993.
If the actual sea level rise was 3mm/year recently, we should surely not expect it to rise 25mm/year on average for the next 80 years?
Yep the historical data is an estimate.
I don’t understand your last point. A 2m rise by 2100 isn’t the prediction of the article, it’s more likely under a metre. 2m is the 95th percentile outlier or something.
Even so, if carbon emissions are continuing, the rate of warming will increase. Also I’d expect to see a hysteresis effect, where the effects of warming lag the cause so it wouldn’t be surprising to me to see an acceleration of its consequences.
Finally, if the rate of sea level rise could up to triple in a few decades, why couldn’t it triple again? And again? I just don’t see the basis of your argument.
Maybe something like this?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7139797.stm
I don't doubt humans are affecting the climate. I do doubt that humans can extrapolate the effects of what they are doing out into the future very well.
That article describes one scientist's hypothesis based on an extreme year - another more conservative scientist is quoted also. The thing to pay attention to is peer reviewed consensus, which is still alarming.
Not to hijack this thread but does anybody know of a list of companies/start-ups who are trying to combat climate change/protecting the environment especially if they are hiring?
With a brother who has a master's specialising in glacier reduction (and a keen interest in data science) he is finding it a demoralising experience looking for companies who actually seem to be taking action.
If you are interested in seeing a map of sea level rises, the NOAA publishes a website with one. At 7 ft there are significant coastal differences.
https://coast.noaa.gov/slr/
Here's a more complete picture for the case when all ice melts and sea levels rise by 60+ meters: http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/environment/waterworld.html (note: by a "skeptic")
> Today the Earth has 148 million sq. km of land area, of which 16 million sq. km is covered by glaciers. A sea level rise of 66 meters would flood about 13 million sq. km of land outside Antarctica. Without polar ice, Antarctica and Greenland would be ice free, although about half of Antarctica would be under water. Thus, ice-free land would be 128 million sq. km compared to 132 million sq. km today.
I can't check all the calculations, but this result doesn't seem too terrible since we'd likely be able to migrate affected people in time.
The amount of migration that has completely upended political systems in the United States and Europe since 2010 or so will be a historical footnote compared to the migration we will experience due to climate change. The United States elected a professional wrestling character to the Presidency because he promised to be cruel to immigrants. Forgive my pessimism but I do not think "we will be able to migrate affected people in time" barring a major transformation of our society.
> United States elected a professional wrestling character to the Presidency because he promised to be cruel to immigrants
Seriously, if that is what you honestly think happened without hyperbole... I worry for 2020.
Anyone have any idea what a 1m and 2m rise in sea level looks like in terms of impact to land that is currently dry but will eventually end up underwater?
I wholeheartedly recommend the 2006 An Inconvenient Truth [1] as it shows nice animations of expected flooding of, for example, the Manhattan.
[1] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Inconvenient_Truth)
Do a web search for "sea rise impact map".
It’s quite clear that in 2019 it is not possible to get all powerful entities in the world to work together on an issue like climate change. We should focus on band-aid solutions like reflectors in space above the poles that prevent sun from hitting the earth at all. We are past the “if only everyone bought electric cars” phase of solutions and need special projects that assume the amount of CO2 emitted stays the same or increases.
We probably don't want all powerful entities in the world working together on anything anyway. Nothing good can come of that. A diverse range of localized solutions reacting to local experiences and problems is better than top-down central-planned solutions.
It should not be an either-or proposition when the stakes are so high. We should work full time to have governments work on breaking climate change speed (reduce/limit emissions, alternative energy, carbon tax, etc.) while at the same time work on scientific methods to fight climate change, if possible (e.g. Prometeus, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19842240.
There's no stationary orbit over the poles
I have no idea if that’s possible, what I mean is we should stop trying to get the US and China to agree on anything let alone climate change so we need grand silver bullet solutions.
China does accept the reality of climate change and is enacting policies against it. It might not be nearly enough but it's not fair to lump them with the USA on this one.
80%+ of the plastic in the ocean comes from China. It's not fair to lump the US in with China.
"They recognize it and want to do something" doesn't mean shit when you're by far the worst part of the problem. Especially when "wanting to do something about it" and "doing something about it" are ridiculously different things.
Have you been to Beijing? China is in a class all of its own when it comes to pollution. It’s not fair to lump the US in with China.
Have you bought products manufactured in China? That's your pollution.
the latest climate-engineering proposals for sunshades involve placing a cloud of reflective or diffracting solar sails at L1, not in close earth orbit over any specific region.
Also, the snow is pretty reflective. And silver-plating any exposed rock is cheaper than going to orbit, per kg of silver/kg-to-LEO.
well, technically you need less silver in orbit since you can use extremely thin films which just wouldn't survive on the ground. but yeah, it's still a very impractical proposition.
If we’re living in “reflectors over the poles” fantasyland, I’m sure we can come up with a way to put continuously firing boosters on it to keep it over the pole.
I don't see the word "orbit" used at all, except by you.
Sounds like you'd imagine a permanent eclipsing body is something that would employ an orbital insertion into earth orbit, which is your own assumption.
Please explain how you put "reflectors in space" without putting them into orbit.
Are humans advanced enough to engineer around sea rise and temperature changes?
Humanity should be fine. The problem is how to deal with millions of displaced people. We will probably need a few wars to figure that one out.
Humanity may be fine but we're also disrupting other life on the planet that we can't predict the impact of. Humanity may not be so fine after all..
Yes.
But not while maintaining anything like current first-world culture. You either need to reduce energy consumption significantly or reduce population significantly.
Two guesses how that plays out.
We do it currently. Holland is a good example of fighting back the sea, but at great expense. And not every country will be able to do this type of engineering.
The temp rises are another thing that we can adapt to. Maybe even some global engineering to thwart it. But again it will be at great cost. And this will probably have the bigger impact on all of us. Our eco-system is very susceptible to small temp changes.
The first problem is what you do with the billion displaced people. That’s not a tech problem, so much as an ethical / pragmatic problem.
Yes already now, certainly in 2100.
potentially very dumb question but could you build hydro power solutions(from the ice melt/run off) that you then get clean power from / help cool ice...? So out of my depth here but genuinely curious. Also appreciate building a hydro power plant on a very unstable platform (ice) is problematic just curious of other solutions to generate hydro power...
Most of these ice sheets are already quite close to sea level and distributed across vast areas - like most of the coastline of Antarctica. Hydro power works best with significant altitude drops across very narrow choke-points.
No, the scale of energy potentially captured would not come close to the amount of energy needed to cool tons of water below freezing.
Can't we make solar powered ice makers on a huge scale and just re freeze it?
I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation and was surprised how much ice a square meter of solar power can make in a day. But to scale ice making machinery to planetary capacity you'll probably need to use all the metal we've mined, ever.
With this kind of massive industrial effort, it's probably cheaper to build big towers and get rid of excess heat by pumping it up and radiating it into space off the night side of the planet. You don't need to make ice, you just need to reduce global temperatures. You could accomplish the same thing with a shield in space to reduce insolation.
Regarding your radiating tower idea, wouldn't the radiation need to be in the visible light spectrum in order to avoid the greenhouse effect? Probably better to just do carbon capture to reset the greenhouse gas thermostat. But that still doesn't refreeze the ice which will require centuries of snowfall to build up the ice sheets again.
You understand that a refrigerator puts out heat so in the end it’s a zero sum game?
Not exactly a zero-sum game because the earth isn’t a closed system. We’re constantly getting heat energy from the sun and radiating it back out into space at an equal rate. The composition of the atmosphere (greenhouse gasses) decides what equilibrium temperature will be. So if we had big refrigerators refreezing the arctic (without creating greenhouse gasses), they would put a ton of heat into the air but it would radiate away into space just like any other heat captured by the sun, and wouldn’t really affect the earth’s average temperature.
By that thinking you could just cool down the air. No need to freeze the arctic.
freezing is white and reflects more
Thermal energy storage might be able to capture the waste heat. That’s assuming we can make such a massive amount of ice to begin with.
I think the scale of the effort would be way too big. Same probably for carbon sequestration. It’s just too much.
energy will keep getting more efficient
What you really need is a way to turn heat into some sort of long term energy storage.
What you'd need is something like a thermal->chemical energy converter. You could even make it do something useful, like desalinate water.
However, good luck pulling enough thermal energy from the air or ocean to have any significant effect on global climate.
When is the next US election due? We might need a new administration to get moving on this one.
You know... Before we're all fucked.
The cynic in me has wondered the past couple days whether all this new climate change coverage is a full-court press by Democrats in anticipation of the next election. Seems to have become a hot topic in the news just within the past few weeks.
See the article. Headline is for the extreme scenario, total clickbait.
There is a massive problem in tying a real issue we don’t understand fully into being synonymous with a specific solution (tax policy) supported by a single political ideology.
It’s a wedge issue being used as bulletproof points to get elected. The politicians who are flying private everywhere and supporting policies like preventing nuclear are not actually interested in solutions, just power.
Climate change is constantly in the headlines because it’s constantly causing various newsworthy conditions and being actively studied. Some stories bubble up to the mainstream audience and some don’t, but that’s not much different with shootings or any other regularly occurring news event in the US. Attention on climate change has always ebbed and flowed.
Scientists have been ringing the alarm since the 1970s. In the US and Canada, conservatives have gone to great lengths to censor this science and and the center-left has collaborated in the advancement of oil in spite of the increasingly overwhelming evidence that we're causing significant climate change. This study is just some climate scientists doing their jobs, and the publication date was Monday. Such things happen on a very regular basis.
A new generation of progressive candidates are advancing concrete plans to tackle climate change, and candidates talking about their policy proposals should be expected ahead of an election.
Is there a recent swell of coverage? Yes, that's normal. Is this article part of a "full court press?" Sounds to me like correlation but not causation. In fact, I'd say that the Democrats who care, care because they're familiar with the science: the causative relationship is quite the opposite of your cynicism.
I will admit I didn't read the article, which now that I look, it's from a scientific journal. So you're right, this article doesn't apply to my statement.
Anyway, thanks for the reasoned response.
As others have pointed out, the headline is trash. My takeaway is that the melting ice sheets introduce greater uncertainty to climate models. Loss of uncertainty means that our ability to reason about the climate is diminished.
In sports terms: imagine that the star players on two teams are all suddenly taken out. Suddenly it's a rookie game, and there's barely any stats to go by. Do you bet more aggressively, or more conservatively?
In this case, the "conservative" bet is to pump the brakes on the most significant anthropogenic source of climate change: greenhouse gasses such as carbon emissions. The "aggressive" bet is to continue subsidizing the profiteering oil/gas/coal industries.
Case in point, some of the most little-c conservative institutions are treating climate change as real: insurance companies, and the US military. Insurance companies because they can't survive catastrophic losses, and the military because climate change will cause global instability. Their reasoning is a result of pragmatism, not politics.
A better analogy is that one of your star players (ice sheet stability) maybe isn't as good as you thought he was (turns out snow accumulation > surface melting is not the whole picture) and has some major potential weaknesses (marine ice sheet instability and marine ice cliff instability) which you probably really need to investigate or you might be losing in the big game. Also, call your bookie and adjust your bets appropriately.
This is speculation not actual scientifically demonstrated furthermore it's speculation based on the most catastrophic predictions.
On top of that, sea-level rise is not some even distribution around the globe, some places will get more others will get less. It's a very local phenomenon.
This is so misleading yet this level of inaccurate reporting is the basis for the current political debate.
Meta studies are to often used as political tools NOT science.
I 10 years when the climate catastrophism hopefully have subdued we will se a host of lawsuits against the words offenders of this scaremongering and "cry wolf"
Yes the climate is changing yes it's getting slightly hotter.
No there isn't any scientifically demonstrated consequences of climate change we don't know how to deal with.