Permafrost collapse is accelerating carbon release • Hacker News Board

Re: Permafrost collapse is accelerating carbon release

#51

Post by jamesblonde » Wed, May 01, 2019, 8:39 AM UTC

flukus wrote: post #42

lixtra wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is super relevant if it happened before because, even if no human witnessed it, there could be proxy data that shows how this unfolds. It could explain past sudden changes in climate change (and accompanying mass extinctions) that are not yet well understood for example.

Most sudden changes were long enough ago that continents were in a different configuration at different latitudes, so it's not very prescriptive. It's almost definitely played some role but past climate change has almost always been the result of a number of factors coalescing, we have to estimate it's effects on our specific conditions.

This is pure speculation. Configuration of continents has no affect on a warming ocean releasing large amounts of methane trapped as methane ice (methane clathrates).

You then set some arbitrary condition on us understanding the current configuration of continents and how that would interact with the release of methane clathrates based on warming. Sorry this is denialism mascarading as evidence-based requirements. The analysis must be risk based - without requiring absolute certainty. Currently, scientific consensus is there is a risk of large releases of methane from melting Arctic sea ice.

Re: Permafrost collapse is accelerating carbon release

#52

Post by roenxi » Wed, May 01, 2019, 8:41 AM UTC

NeedMoreTea wrote: post #39

subsubsub wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may well be an emergency, but inconveniencing [1][2] the very people you are attempting to persuade (the voting public) is not a strategy that is likely to work. In my opinion it will make them deaf to the underlying message (Although, I can provide no suggestions for strategies that might work!). [1] e.g. preventing them getting to work or flying to a holiday [2] Extinction Rebellion Protests: What happened? - ht…

> inconveniencing [1][2] the very people you are attempting to persuade (the voting public) is not a strategy that is likely to work Funny. Seems like it's working, remarkably quickly, to me: Michael Gove, the current Environment Minister, met with the protesters and accepted the need for urgent action, and other points. Far more than might be expected from the rather extremist position of today's Tory party. The opp…

If your first point of success is getting the Environment Minister to publicly commit to being pro-environment, you're working to a very low bar. It sounds like a problem that might be heading for a government committee rather than actual action.

This thing you call a 'rather extremist position' is a traditional position industrial societies have held since the industrial revolution in the late 18th century. Exploiting the environment for the benefit of the people. This strategy has worked out quite well so far - cities are more far popular places to live than jungles and fields.

Protesting can work - but there have been environmental protests for the last 20 years or so and have achieved much less than (1) big research spending on renewables and (2) using nuclear reactors. This is because apart from those two approaches, the environmentalists have proposed no solutions that don't involve committing the poor and middle class to reduced living standards. I'll spell it out even though I think it is self evident - we shouldn't put the environment ahead of the poor until we've exhausted every other option.

Re: Permafrost collapse is accelerating carbon release

#53

Post by chewz » Wed, May 01, 2019, 8:43 AM UTC

CzechTech wrote: post #15

cageface wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish I could downvote this 100 times. I wonder how future generations will explain our decision to just stand in front of an oncoming freight train. I remember growing up as a kid watching the intro sequence to the road warrior and thinking it was entertaining but pretty unlikely that we’d screw up that badly. But now it seems pretty prophetic.

Here's a question: What if I don't care about "future generations"?

I agree with you. I am 50, no children.

I have spent last 10 years travelling, sailing the ocean, hiking in jungles, diving in the reefs that would be extinct soon. I live in a climate where some moderate warming will make more pleasant.

I do not care what will happen beyond 20 years ahead. Maybe even less.

So why would I inconvinience myself? Why worry? People will get exactly what they deserve.

On the other hand somehow it doesn't seem right.

Re: Permafrost collapse is accelerating carbon release

#54

Post by LoSboccacc » Wed, May 01, 2019, 9:08 AM UTC

NeedMoreTea wrote: post #39

subsubsub wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may well be an emergency, but inconveniencing [1][2] the very people you are attempting to persuade (the voting public) is not a strategy that is likely to work. In my opinion it will make them deaf to the underlying message (Although, I can provide no suggestions for strategies that might work!). [1] e.g. preventing them getting to work or flying to a holiday [2] Extinction Rebellion Protests: What happened? - ht…

> inconveniencing [1][2] the very people you are attempting to persuade (the voting public) is not a strategy that is likely to work Funny. Seems like it's working, remarkably quickly, to me: Michael Gove, the current Environment Minister, met with the protesters and accepted the need for urgent action, and other points. Far more than might be expected from the rather extremist position of today's Tory party. The opp…

> need for urgent action

funny because most contaminants in water and air come from China and India

what is the UK environmental minister going to do about that?

unless the rest of the world agrees on the need on both regulate local industry and heavily tax import from unregulated countries nothing is going to change for the planet situation

the rest are mostly feel-good measures that carry increased cost on the population without shifting the global scenario very much.

Re: Permafrost collapse is accelerating carbon release

#55

Post by rjf72 » Wed, May 01, 2019, 9:14 AM UTC

martinpw wrote: post #40

rjf72 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's one big issue inhibiting any sort of productive change on this issue. "A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2030. Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of ″eco- refugees,′ ′ threatening political chaos, said Noel Brown, director of the New York office of…

> The most conservative scientific estimate that the Earth’s temperature will rise 1 to 7 degrees in the next 30 years, said Brown." This quote seems suspicious. The only place I see it is in this AP article, as a quote from this one person, and from a bunch of denialist websites that link to this article. I couldn't find any original source for the number (or any indication whether it is Fahrenheit or Centigrade, wh…

Noel Brown was the director of the UN Environmental Program in North America. He's going to be sourcing whatever internal figures they're working with. And yeah, given that he is the directory of the program in North America, I expect you're right that he was referencing fahrenheit and not celsius. I assumed celsius as he was described simply as a "senior UN Environment official." Given he directed the program in North America and was likely being interviewed in this context for public consumption, I agree it was probably fahrenheit. This, however, does not really change the point. Hitting 1.2 when you claim that "1 to 7" is "the most conservative scientific estimate" indicates a general tendency of inflation.

The reason I chose this report was it was the earliest authoritative statement I could find on climate change that we could then test against reality. I'm sure you appreciate that this sort of hyperbole is not an isolated incident. Would it really change your mind if I dug up x more authoritative sources of predictions that were completely unrealistic? Even with the IPCC report we ended up barely squeeking by the bottom of their range which was 0.6.

So results are putting us at or below the bottom of most all estimates. Why is this? And going forward, why should we expect the results to be more accurate? I don't think these are particularly radical questions to ask. To be clear I'm completely in favor of mitigating against carbon emissions, even for reasons that have nothing to do with climate change. I enjoy the outdoors. Millions of internal combustion engines, fossil fuel driven refineries, etc do not do pleasant things to the outdoor experience. The only thing I'm not in favor of is people freaking out to the point that they think climate change is "the most probable factor for the possibility of a near-term extinction event." That's nonsense by any measurement and is counter productive to ever actually getting anything done, though you might help spur on a loony or two with a few screws loose.

[1] - https://archive.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/far/wg_I/ipcc_far_wg_I_s...

[2] - https://archive.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/publications_i...

Re: Permafrost collapse is accelerating carbon release

#56

Post by LoSboccacc » Wed, May 01, 2019, 9:18 AM UTC

cageface wrote: post #17

CzechTech wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a question: What if I don't care about "future generations"?

A species that destroys its habitat will go extinct. So I guess we’ll see if natural selection removes people like you from the gene pool so the species itself can continue to evolve or if the dynamics are too extreme and this is part of the great filter.

> natural selection removes people like you

natural selection pressure the species whole, what survives next is just those that were somehow more adapt to the new environment, it doesn't carry any punitive or karmatic meaning.

it might very well be that psychopaths will be the one surviving the first aftermath by virtue of their selfishness

Re: Permafrost collapse is accelerating carbon release

#57

Post by pjc50 » Wed, May 01, 2019, 9:20 AM UTC

NeedMoreTea wrote: post #39

subsubsub wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may well be an emergency, but inconveniencing [1][2] the very people you are attempting to persuade (the voting public) is not a strategy that is likely to work. In my opinion it will make them deaf to the underlying message (Although, I can provide no suggestions for strategies that might work!). [1] e.g. preventing them getting to work or flying to a holiday [2] Extinction Rebellion Protests: What happened? - ht…

> inconveniencing [1][2] the very people you are attempting to persuade (the voting public) is not a strategy that is likely to work Funny. Seems like it's working, remarkably quickly, to me: Michael Gove, the current Environment Minister, met with the protesters and accepted the need for urgent action, and other points. Far more than might be expected from the rather extremist position of today's Tory party. The opp…

None of those are actual action that could be seen in the overall CO2 emission levels, though.

Re: Permafrost collapse is accelerating carbon release

#58

Post by cageface » Wed, May 01, 2019, 9:27 AM UTC

LoSboccacc wrote: post #56

cageface wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A species that destroys its habitat will go extinct. So I guess we’ll see if natural selection removes people like you from the gene pool so the species itself can continue to evolve or if the dynamics are too extreme and this is part of the great filter.

> natural selection removes people like you natural selection pressure the species whole, what survives next is just those that were somehow more adapt to the new environment, it doesn't carry any punitive or karmatic meaning. it might very well be that psychopaths will be the one surviving the first aftermath by virtue of their selfishness

That's the problem. Generally there are selective pressures against excessively selfish behavior but since climate change is relatively slow and distributed I'm not sure if that will apply in this case.

Maybe in this case selection pressure applies to entire species or planets and is one of the reasons we haven't detected any signs of intelligent life outside the solar system?

Re: Permafrost collapse is accelerating carbon release

#59

Post by rjf72 » Wed, May 01, 2019, 9:49 AM UTC

martinpw wrote: post #45

rjf72 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, nobody is making accurate predictions right now and that's the fundamental problem. We want to enact change on future predictions, but the models we're using to predict things have a history that's shown them to be unreliable. Each time a prediction fails to pass it ends up undermining the entire system of climate modeling more and more. We can't expect national bodies to engage in anything other convenient chang…

I don't understand why you are doubling down on your misunderstandings here. The actual increase that you yourself quoted falls entirely within the error bounds of the IPCC estimates. It doesn't matter that it is towards the bottom of those error bounds - the whole point of an error bound is that it is a range that captures the uncertainty. To argue about where in the range it falls is to fundamentally misunderstand…

This is a misunderstanding of ranges. Imagine you flip a coin 100 times and you only get 41 heads. Is this coin fair? 41 heads falls just within the 95% confidence interval for a fair coin over 100 flips, so you can answer yes in that regard. But things are not binary. It's all probabilistic. In other words, it's not like 40 heads = rigged coin, 41 = legit.

Your assumed interval is going to be a normal distribution. That means, if your assumption of it being a fair coin is correct, that you'll hit close to the perfect spot (50 in this case) disproportionately more often than you'll hit at the tails ends of your distribution. By contrast, now let's assume the coin was rigged to hit tails about 60% of the time. Now you'd be hitting extremely near that 41 constantly.

Climate predictions are annoying because we can only get one sample at a time on a time frame that generally requires years to decades, so it's really really hard to determine whether we're right or wrong. But what you can safely say is that the further you fall away from your expected value - the less probable it becomes that your hypothesis (of said expected value being true) was accurate. In other words hitting 1 on e.g. a range of 1 to 7 with an expected value of 3.5 is a much less likely scenario than hitting 1 on a range of 0.5 to 1.5 with an expected value of 1.

Re: Permafrost collapse is accelerating carbon release

#60

Post by ThomPete » Wed, May 01, 2019, 9:50 AM UTC

Again a speculative article. “Might” is the important word in that article and Might” is not the word you use in scientifically demonstrated claims.

This debate have become so ideological that all reason has left the room a long time ago.

Show me scientifically demonstrated consequences not just speculated consequences we cant deal with, then ill rally behind you until then i am quite confident in my non-alarmist position.