91–100 of 152 posts
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I don't know if anyone is researching this, but couldn't we manufacture stupidly large floating reflective tarps and start deploying them anywhere sea ice is melting? Seems like this would be a high benefit for relatively low cost.
I'd think they'd work better at the equator to reflect the most heat.
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+2.5C increase will render earth uninhabitable? Or will it upset insurance coverage of high dollar coast lines?
2.5C global increase is huge. It's a chaotic system, with a crazy number of interconnected feedback loops. Think of the earth's climate like a boulder balanced on a hill. Aside from just counter-arguing your point which is easily brushed off, I want to ask a genuine question - What about this dialogue makes you skeptical? What's your view of what's really going on? Politically or otherwise.
source
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That's the downside of boys crying wolf... when the actual wolf comes we don't listen.
Except nobody was crying wolf. If we took the problem seriously back then, we wouldn't be fucked now. The reality is that we're living through a mass extinction driven by climate change. Over 60% of animals have gone extinct since the 70s. The fact that people are looking at the world today and asking where's the problem is beyond belief.
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+2.5C increase will render earth uninhabitable? Or will it upset insurance coverage of high dollar coast lines?
+2.5C will not render the World uninhabitable, but it will do nasty stuff to the weather patterns in many parts of the globe, and it is expected that this will result in decreased food production and rising sea levels. Most of the people on HN will be fine; we'll be alive, we'll still have jobs, and we'll have food and energy albeit at a higher price. Our societies may end up a bit poorer and the standard of living w…
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Citations on wild predictions in past not being correct?
The Population Bomb by Paul Elrich back in 1968 predicted worldwide famine in the 70s and 80s because of overpopulation. There's been quite a few over the last few decades relating to overpopulation, environmental destruction and running out of vital resources to keep civilization going. So far, these dire predictions have not come true. Which doesn't men they can't, but they should give us some pause about predictin…
A population bomb leading to famine has never been the result of prolonged scientific discussion, just one guy's theories (published in book form, which is subject to editorial review but not peer review), and saying "this is a prediction that someone made that was false" is true but unhelpful. Anyone can make a prediction, and a lot of dumb stuff gets published. Never made it meaningful or true.
My father, before he succumbed to dementia, had this belief that if it's been published, it must be true. He'd read the weirdest stuff and ultimately decided that nothing is true; when really, it's because he was overly credulous at first, and in rejecting truth as a concept, he went too far the other way.
I feel like that's a lot more common than we realize; the error is not in believing in a consensus reality, it's in believing in something that wasn't very good to begin with (a book about worldwide famine, the handful of "global cooling" articles in the 70s -- not even a book! just a handful of magazine articles!! why would ANYONE put stock in that??), and deciding that, because that was wrong, nothing is knowable.
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Because the vast majority of the earths history has been without ice on the poles. Obviously this will force changes on humans no doubt. However, trying to shoehorn this natural fact into a political / carbon-credit trading scheme is deeply cynical that is apparent to most >100 IQ people.
I think talking about Earth history is misleading or trying to distract from the problem. Sure Earth climate was worst 4,5 billions years ago, however Earth capacity to support the life of billions human is and will be severely impacted, and this is was matter for us, mere mortals.
The title is very misleading. There is no hard deadline to save ourselves from climate change, or if there is, we already passed it. We're currently at the point were every year we continue doing nothing, means it takes multiple years (decades? centuries?) to recover from the accumulated effects. Permanent ice is already melting, climate is already changing. Even if we completely stop emitting CO2 right now (which we…
Do you have any data on this? If you look at how quickly things cool off at night, Earth's biosphere reaches steady-state thermal equilibrium over the course of a few days. Your claim is essentially that we've already set off an albedo forcing function that we can't stop, and which is also stronger than existing negative feedback loops. Seems unlikely to me.
Does "no more permanent ice" means there is a period of the year where there is no ice at all at the poles? That seems hardly believable. I was also under the impression that melting ice would push the level of the oceans by multiple meters. If 75-80% of ice has already melted, wouldn't we have seen significant elevation already? Just some facts that I found surprising, coming from someone who doesn't know much on th…
The problem with predictions like this is that this prediction will look silly in 4 years when the Earth has not ended, similar to how wild predictions in the past have not borne fruit. I understand their desire to sensationalize, but people like AOC make the same predictions, and she is not seen as smart by a large portion of the public. I think if we just stick with the experimental science research, the general pu…
Our climate is like that: it takes ages to respond. We've been building up excess CO2 in the atmoisphere for over a century now, and we're finally starting to notice the effects. Even if we were to completely stop producing CO2 now, there's still enough CO2 in the atmosphere to continue to increase heat absorption. Even if we could remove all excess CO2 from the atmosphere somehow (we can't), it would still take time for the excess heat to disappear. (The quickest way to lose the excess heat is if we could somehow block the sun, which we can't and would be harmful in a dozen other ways.)
The problem is that this concept is really hard for most people to wrap their heads around, so people tend to simplify it in ways that emphasize the urgency but exaggerate the timeline of the effect, or at least sound like they do, because that's how most people tend to interpret that urgency.
So no, the Earth is not going to end in 4 years, but it will be 4 more years of accumulated damage that will have repercussions for centuries.
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Except nobody was crying wolf. If we took the problem seriously back then, we wouldn't be fucked now. The reality is that we're living through a mass extinction driven by climate change. Over 60% of animals have gone extinct since the 70s. The fact that people are looking at the world today and asking where's the problem is beyond belief.
"Over 60% of animals have gone extinct since the 70s" Citations?
[1] https://www.wwf.org.uk/updates/living-planet-report-2018