Canadian permafrost thaws 70 years earlier than predicted • Hacker News Board

Re: Canadian permafrost thaws 70 years earlier than predicted

#61

Post by 734129837261 » Tue, Jun 18, 2019, 8:47 PM UTC

theothermkn wrote: post #19

This phenomenon is curious, in a morbid sort of way. There is literally no way to stop it; we are, as Noam Chomsky fears, a lethal mutation. We developed the ability to create industrial and economic activity on such a scale, and with such sophistication, that we've overcome the planet's ability to cope, but we have no mechanism in place that seems remotely capable of remedying that situation without a global catastr…

> You're all dead. And you have no idea.

Such panic. Seriously. We'll be fine. We'll grow to 20 billion before the population declines. Humanity will adapt. The planet has been through far worse extinction events. This one isn't even remotely impressive compared to the others.

Humanity will be fine. And every single generation will keep whining about "WOE IS US, THE END IS NEAR!" for all eternity.

I believe in climate change, I also think it's pointless to worry about. We can't stop it. We can deal with it. And we'll get damn good at it in the process.

Re: Canadian permafrost thaws 70 years earlier than predicted

#62

Post by masterjack » Tue, Jun 18, 2019, 8:47 PM UTC

futureastronaut wrote: post #50

theothermkn wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. Three non sequiturs in three sentences. There are sites that suggest any number of things. Unspecified "sites" have little bearing on the actual facts. I'm not sure that Milankovitch Cycles imply the dumping of CO2. > Hopefully we can find a way to turn that into fuel. This is the silliest and most thermodynamically backward thing I've read in a year. CO2 is burnt carbon. It's burnt. Burnt stuff ain't fuel; it's…

Are you familiar with photosynthesis?

Yes but photosynthesis doesn’t generate energy but the opposite: it takes in energy from the sun in order to reverse the reaction

Re: Canadian permafrost thaws 70 years earlier than predicted

#63

Post by stcredzero » Tue, Jun 18, 2019, 8:49 PM UTC

pfisch wrote: post #7

Maybe I don't understand the ramifications of this, but it kind of sounds like we missed the offramp where we just stop burning carbon. Shouldn't we just be moving to something drastic like a massive sun shade project ASAP?

Shouldn't we just be moving to something drastic like a massive sun shade project ASAP?

Slowly on the scale of individual people, but a quick snap on geological time scales, a process of change was initiated in the global economic system by the widespread climactic shifts. a series of events moved the global system towards a phase change which sealed Homo sapiens' fate. No one can pinpoint the exact minute, hour, or day, but at a certain point, global civilization lost the necessary level of coordination to mount the necessary sun shade project. Just as the ancient empires lost the ability to coordinate their own defense and trade in the Bronze Age Collapse, the world lost the ability to avert the next Permian-Triassic level event.

Intimations of war and shifting alliances were punctuated with alleged sabotage and contested destruction of satellites and the closing of the nascent space infrastructure. No one country felt safe letting the other country control the sunlight and the sky. Acrimony only increased when the first nuclear submarine was lost to the loss of buoyancy amidst the first spontaneous mass methane clathrate release. We luckily averted prematurely ending ourselves in nuclear fire and ash, but future generations might look back at it as a lost chance at quick mercy. Eventually, the petty geopolitical squabbles faded and almost everyone universally believed the science, but it wasn't until it was several years too late.

Re: Canadian permafrost thaws 70 years earlier than predicted

#64

Post by sunshinelackof » Tue, Jun 18, 2019, 8:49 PM UTC

Fede_V wrote: post #27

Global warming is the single scariest existential threat our species has ever faced, and we aren't doing nearly enough to tackle it. Our future descendants will heap scorn and curses on our generation, and we deserve every bit of it. Every politician that refuses to do what is necessary or finds it convenient to play stupid language games about 'settled science' is doing incalculable harm. As citizens, I encourage ev…

> voting exclusively on how credible a politician is on tackling global warming

This is really the only important thing that we can do. Except maybe not flying in an airplane, there is little the average person can do in their daily life to inhibit climate change. Whether due to preventive policies or due to resource shortages our lives will change in the near future. Expecting individuals to shame themselves when the society at large encourages the opposite is counter-productive.

It is not to say that anyone is wrong to choose to live more frugally. More importantly, we need to recognize that any hope we have must come from the top down. We have more research and more solutions than we've ever had for any problem, but we don't have someone to pull the trigger.

Re: Canadian permafrost thaws 70 years earlier than predicted

#65

Post by cardamomo » Tue, Jun 18, 2019, 8:50 PM UTC

The oft-quoted opening of David Wallace-Wells's "The Uninhabitable Earth" comes to mind. Reviews have generally only included his first sentence: "It is worse, much worse, than you think."

Here is his entire opening paragraph:

> It is worse, much worse, than you think. The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn't happening at all, and comes to us bundled with several others in an anthology of comforting delusions: that global warming is an Arctic saga, unfolding remotely; that it is strictly a matter of sea level and coastlines, not an enveloping crisis sparing no place and leaving no life undeformed; that it is a crisis of the "natural" world, not the human one; that those two are distinct, and that we live today somehow outside or beyond or at the very least defended against nature, not inescapably within and literally overwhelmed by it; that wealth can be a shield against the ravages of warming; that the burning of fossil fuels is the price of continued economic growth; that growth, and the technology it produces, will allow us to engineer our way out of environmental disaster; that there is any analogue to the scale or scope of this threat, in the long span of human history, that might give us confidence in staring it down.

Re: Canadian permafrost thaws 70 years earlier than predicted

#66

Post by omegaworks » Tue, Jun 18, 2019, 8:51 PM UTC

crispinb wrote: post #35

magwa101 wrote: post #23

We'll adapt, but the global ecosystem is dying. It'll be cows, cats, dogs, pigs, chickens, us and stories of animals.

Depends what you mean by "we". Homo sapiens has enormous cultural flexibility (though clearly, as the worldwide ecosystem collapse shows, this doesn't scale). So groups of humans will continue to live. But our global civilisation will inevitably collapse. No-one can predict in detail what that will entail, but we can be sure it won't be pretty.

People are already being displaced from their countries by climate. Economies that relied on the stability of their rainfall for their agriculture are declining. They're building camps for them at the border here in the US.

Re: Canadian permafrost thaws 70 years earlier than predicted

#67

Post by cardamomo » Tue, Jun 18, 2019, 8:51 PM UTC

magwa101 wrote: post #23

We'll adapt, but the global ecosystem is dying. It'll be cows, cats, dogs, pigs, chickens, us and stories of animals.

The failure of our species is a failure to adequately recognize that we are part of that ecosystem, and we will go down with it.

Re: Canadian permafrost thaws 70 years earlier than predicted

#68

Post by BowBun » Tue, Jun 18, 2019, 8:52 PM UTC

734129837261 wrote: post #51

HugoDaniel wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah we will adapt, but not fast enough.

We will. We always do. There is no reason to assume we won't. The wealthy westerners will not notice because of air conditioning and endless bottled water. The less wealthy ones will suffer the heat a bit more. The poor ones will be taken care of. Third world nations will suffer. Some might die. Maybe many. But humanity will adapt. We might lose a few hundred million in the next few decades until their folks find new…

To be fair, there's no reason to assume we will be fine either. Our timeline is pretty short and humanity has hardly ever had to face a climate event on the scale that people expect will happen: some kind of massive ice-age event and/or rising seas taking out coastal land, where a majority of humans live. Not to mention there's billions more people on earth than there were for any similar previous events (they weren't similar, we didn't have cars).

Healthy skepticism is great, but personally I'd rather not our entire species die off because a majority of people assume we will be fine!

Re: Canadian permafrost thaws 70 years earlier than predicted

#69

Post by HugoDaniel » Tue, Jun 18, 2019, 8:52 PM UTC

734129837261 wrote: post #61

theothermkn wrote: post #19

This phenomenon is curious, in a morbid sort of way. There is literally no way to stop it; we are, as Noam Chomsky fears, a lethal mutation. We developed the ability to create industrial and economic activity on such a scale, and with such sophistication, that we've overcome the planet's ability to cope, but we have no mechanism in place that seems remotely capable of remedying that situation without a global catastr…

> You're all dead. And you have no idea. Such panic. Seriously. We'll be fine. We'll grow to 20 billion before the population declines. Humanity will adapt. The planet has been through far worse extinction events. This one isn't even remotely impressive compared to the others. Humanity will be fine. And every single generation will keep whining about "WOE IS US, THE END IS NEAR!" for all eternity. I believe in climat…

"This one isn't even remotely impressive compared to the others."

This one is provoked by your mindset and it is going to make life unsustainable for everyone you know. It is called science bitch.

"I believe in climate change"

Do you also believe in gravity ?

Re: Canadian permafrost thaws 70 years earlier than predicted

#70

Post by ForHackernews » Tue, Jun 18, 2019, 8:52 PM UTC

entropea wrote: post #53

theothermkn wrote: post #19

This phenomenon is curious, in a morbid sort of way. There is literally no way to stop it; we are, as Noam Chomsky fears, a lethal mutation. We developed the ability to create industrial and economic activity on such a scale, and with such sophistication, that we've overcome the planet's ability to cope, but we have no mechanism in place that seems remotely capable of remedying that situation without a global catastr…

>There is literally no way to stop it All people have to do is put their arms behind their backs, stop working, and demand it happen from the most powerful people in the world. I assure you that this isn't as bad as having humanity go extinct from climate change. Admittedly, getting enough people to do that is the real challenge, especially in the face of capital trying to tell them the exact opposite. If an asteroid…

> If an asteroid was about to direct hit in say 2029. Would society just argue on the internet and die?

I think many people would deny the asteroid exists and populists would claim it's a lie to put more money in the pockets of Big NASA government bureaucrats.

We might well die.

I think too many people are assuming that climate change will get worked out because previous threats to humanity have. As they say in investing, past performance does not predict future results.