Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Canadian permafrost thaws 70 years earlier than predicted

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 251 posts

Re: Canadian permafrost thaws 70 years earlier than predicted

#201

Post by AstralStorm »

Fricken wrote: post #144
radicalbyte wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need to turn this amazing machine of capitalism we've created towards solving the problem. That requires strong political leadership and buy in. American needs to turn back into the country represented by Captain America. They need to be leaders again, instead of acting like they're being run by one of those infant English kings from the Middle Ages..

Capitalism is for solving problems of scarcity, and for that it worked quite well. It's quite useless for dealing with problems of abundance. All our biggest problems today are problems of abundance.

More importantly, it rewards externalizing costs. Such as to climate, future and others.

Re: Canadian permafrost thaws 70 years earlier than predicted

#202

Post by AstralStorm »

fooblitzky wrote: post #187
_ph_ wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a few more things a person can do to fight global warming: - most of all, speak out for reneweable energies and against coal - if possible use some solar yourself - try to buy an electric car or a real fuel efficient one, don't drive too much - in general, try to use energy efficient devices

Ride a bike!

Or walk more and use public transport, being more efficient still than even a bicycle.

And finally, eat less, especially meat and highly processed foods. It's not free neither for you, not for the environment.

Re: Canadian permafrost thaws 70 years earlier than predicted

#203

Post by fooblitzky »

omegaworks wrote: post #166
nosleeptill wrote: post #164

It's already too late. It's unfortunate that we didn't understand what was happening 100 years ago, if we did we might have been able to do something about it, but as it stands right now, we can't even slow down what's already been set into motion. The earth is now changing, it's not just the climate, and the earth changes will drive the climate, the feedback loop has started. Unless someone can invent a technology i…

>It's already too late. The next stage of climate denialism is climate nihilism. It is not too late to mitigate some of the effects on our societies. At the very minimum we need the political will to reallocate resources so that we stop accelerating the process and start structuring safety nets for vulnerable communities.

Exactly right. Every tenth of a degree of warming averted is going to make a big difference to someone down the line.

Re: Canadian permafrost thaws 70 years earlier than predicted

#204

Post by polyfractal »

entropea wrote: post #139
polyfractal wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a real difference between a singular event like an asteroid, and a slowly boiling frog like climate change. You can point at an asteroid and say "That thing. It's going to melt half the planet." I'd like to think we could collectively get our shit together and find a way to fix that. But climate change is more insidious because it's so slow. It's in every nations best (short term) interest to ignore climate…

>You can point at an asteroid and say "That thing. It's going to melt half the planet." How do you get people to believe it up until the day it gets close enough to make out with the human eye that it's approaching the planet? It's too late at that point. How many people have a telescope with that type of resolution, cameras that can pull out something likely low magnitude? We present scientific evidence to the publi…

Because enough people will believe it when they see an asteroid looming towards them on CNN, Fox, whatever. There are plenty of people that deny climate change because it's convenient, either politically or economically. There are considerably fewer people that think the moon landing was faked, or the earth is flat, or pluto and mars and jupiter are actually jewels hanging from threads in a crystal sphere.

An asteroid is a sufficiently "concrete" science that the average person would believe if they see it. You can't "see" climate change, which is part of the issue.

Re: Canadian permafrost thaws 70 years earlier than predicted

#205

Post by flukus »

AstralStorm wrote: post #199
graeme wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tend to agree. We've had 30+ years of exhortations for individual action against climate change. Yet global emissions are the highest they've ever been. Meanwhile, we haven't really tried an effective government policy. One that would replace other forms of taxation with a carbon tax. We've only tried individual solutions, dabbling around the edges, carbon offsets, cap and trade. Manifestly they haven't reduced emi…

Not even the tax can do it, because polluters will migrate. You would have to combine the tax with more serious measures like duties based on either estimated or actual emissions level. Or outright bans. Additionally mandating certain important practices like garbage disposal, reduction and methane capture.

> Not even the tax can do it, because polluters will migrate.

High tariffs on countries not following suit will take care of that. Try the carrot first but if they don't want to contribute then use the stick.

Re: Canadian permafrost thaws 70 years earlier than predicted

#206

Post by hodgesrm »

pier25 wrote: post #174
hodgesrm wrote: post #17

I was up at Camp Muir on Mt. Rainier for the first time in 29 years last weekend. It's located at 10,000 feet and is surrounded by glaciers. The temperature was around 60F in the sun. We're getting temps in May/June that were rarely seen in August in previous decades. The impressive thing is how quickly the glaciers are receding. The Nisqually glacier, which used to be down near 4000 feet in the 1970s is about a mile…

Considering climate lag (see below) it's almost certain most glaciers on Earth will be gone in 30 years. There is a delay of a couple of decades between emissions and effects on the climate. This means we are now seeing the effects from the emissions from the 70s and early 80s. The problem is that we have emitted more GHG in the last 40 years than the previous 150 years since the industrial revolution started. We hav…

The glaciers on Cascade mountains are relatively small but on Mt. Rainier it's extremely unlikely they will disappear in 30 years. The Emmons and Tahoma for example are large and start at 14,000 feet. They will continue to have accumulation zones for many decades. Plus it takes a while for ice to melt even with heat waves, even at lower elevations and even if the temperature rise accelerates.

That said it's not unreasonable to suggest that glaciers with an accumulation zone below say 8-9,000 feet will be toast. That takes out most glaciers in the Cascades outside of the volcanoes and a few peaks in the North Cascades. I was just eyeballing things based on having spent a lot of time on the mountain, but this conclusion seems to be supported by recent geological work. [1, 2]

[1] https://gsa.confex.com/gsa/2017AM/webprogram/Paper299694.htm... [2] https://glaciers.nichols.edu/north-cascade-glacier-retreat/

Re: Canadian permafrost thaws 70 years earlier than predicted

#207

Post by jammygit »

pier25 wrote: post #181
anm89 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who agrees with your suggestion as to how serious climate change is, I've come to think asking individuals to change their behavior to fix the problem is actually counter productive. People generally want to do the right thing and they want to matter whereas in my experience the average person is not a great systems thinker. So people are very receptive to calls to "be better" because it let's them fight f…

There isn't much the individual can do to fix climate change. Even if you went completely off the grid to live in the woods outside of the industrial civilization eating plants etc this wouldn't fix anything. Yes, you would certainly reduce your emissions but this is not nearly enough. Even if a miracle happened and we reached global zero emissions today there are already 415ppm in the atmosphere which will remain th…

Researching or deploying green tech would take a chunk out of things on an individual level

Re: Canadian permafrost thaws 70 years earlier than predicted

#208

Post by orhmeh09 »

DuskStar wrote: post #200
samhain wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The next two most effective things to reduce carbon footprint beyond not having children is, one, killing yourself, or two, killing the board members of a company responsible for the majority of carbon emissions.

Are you sure that not having children or killing yourself actually reduces long term global carbon emissions? Because the second order effects start to get odd, here. Imagine that all the people who believed in climate change - globally - committed suicide in some appropriately low-carbon manner. Everyone remaining does not believe in climate change. How long does it take the population to bounce back, and what sort…

Adoption is a thing.

Re: Canadian permafrost thaws 70 years earlier than predicted

#209

Post by cardamomo »

jammygit wrote: post #207
pier25 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There isn't much the individual can do to fix climate change. Even if you went completely off the grid to live in the woods outside of the industrial civilization eating plants etc this wouldn't fix anything. Yes, you would certainly reduce your emissions but this is not nearly enough. Even if a miracle happened and we reached global zero emissions today there are already 415ppm in the atmosphere which will remain th…

Researching or deploying green tech would take a chunk out of things on an individual level

Do you have a specific technology in mind? What do you mean by that impacting things on the individual level?

Re: Canadian permafrost thaws 70 years earlier than predicted

#210

Post by lexpar »

akvadrako wrote: post #135
lexpar wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really hope you'll change your mind, specifically about that last sentence. Probably billions of the world's poorest people are likely to see their environment become unlivable. That's not a problem a little AC and migration will easily solve. Just look how poorly rich countries are reacting to the current levels of migration from less rich countries.

I'm not going to change my mind just because of mindless downvotes. If you want to show that global warming could cause the end of the human race, you have to give some plausible argument.

For the record, I didn't down vote you (I don't even have enough HN cool-points to do so).

I was responding more to the callous nature of your comment than whether or not current warming trends are an absolute existential threat.

Post reply on HN