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Antarctic sea ice – rapid decreases, reduced to lowest area in 40 years

pnas.org

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Re: Antarctic sea ice – rapid decreases, reduced to lowest area in 40 years

#31

Post by alex_young »

EGreg wrote: post #25

Getting whiplash reading this. What’s the upshot? Following over 3 decades of gradual but uneven increases in sea ice coverage, the yearly average Antarctic sea ice extents reached a record high of 12.8 × 106 km2 in 2014, followed by a decline so precipitous that they reached their lowest value in the 40-y 1979–2018 satellite multichannel passive-microwave record, 10.7 × 106 km2, in 2017. In contrast, it took the Arc…

I think the visualizations help a lot here: https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/early/2019/06/25/190655611...

Seems like there is a lot of extreme variance, but it's hard to imagine that the ice is going to come back quickly from such a huge and steep decline.

Re: Antarctic sea ice – rapid decreases, reduced to lowest area in 40 years

#32

Post by spodek »

ralusek wrote: post #6

I think that it's important for free market advocates, myself included, to understand something. Negative third party externalities, having direct impacts on individuals that did not consent to the responsible transaction(s), are fully within the responsibility of the government to regulate and/or tax. You are not violating your principles by backing state intervention for environmental issues.

Beyond not just "not violating your principles," it's necessary accounting. If the public pays for part of the costs of something -- say of cleaning up after extraction or pollution -- you haven't accounted for its costs.

Without proper accounting, unprofitable businesses can thrive and would-be profitable businesses fail.

No economic system can sustain itself without proper accounting.

Re: Antarctic sea ice – rapid decreases, reduced to lowest area in 40 years

#33

Post by rypskar »

jsingleton wrote: post #29
rypskar wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for the links. Need to check them out more later today to see where I can help, but from first view they all looks like "We want to do something about climate change, join us if you also want to", but not much about what they actually do.

There are some projects listed on those pages but not all. Here's an incomplete list to give you an idea. https://climatechoice.co/ (plenty of small issues up for grabs https://github.com/impactmakers/climatechoice/issues ) https://offset.earth/ https://fixathon.io/ (more sponsorship opportunities available, get in touch. https://bit.ly/fixathon-sponsor ) https://medium.com/clean-coffee

Thank you. I have for a long time been thinking that it probably is some way for me to make a larger impact without going into politics, today I can start to be more involved

Re: Antarctic sea ice – rapid decreases, reduced to lowest area in 40 years

#34

Post by Kaiyou »

adrianN wrote: post #2

Doomsday messages are coming in in rapid succession. First the permafrost is melting 70 years earlier than expected, then Greenland losing massive amounts of ice, then glaciers that provide fresh water for hundreds of millions in India and China disappearing at an alarming rate, now this. And still politicians do nothing. What we need is an effort to build renewables, insulate homes, and build charging infrastructure…

All these doomsday messages! And they have zero impact on the quality of my life. I wonder why nobody cares. \s

Re: Antarctic sea ice – rapid decreases, reduced to lowest area in 40 years

#35

Post by cies »

baxtr wrote: post #5
adrianN wrote: post #2

Doomsday messages are coming in in rapid succession. First the permafrost is melting 70 years earlier than expected, then Greenland losing massive amounts of ice, then glaciers that provide fresh water for hundreds of millions in India and China disappearing at an alarming rate, now this. And still politicians do nothing. What we need is an effort to build renewables, insulate homes, and build charging infrastructure…

My guess is that this is related to the "exponential growth" of humanity

Which is related to capitalism needing it to even "work".

Re: Antarctic sea ice – rapid decreases, reduced to lowest area in 40 years

#37

Post by ash »

refurb wrote: post #36

Still, when considering the 40-y record as a whole, the Antarctic sea ice continues to have a positive overall trend in yearly average ice extents Sounds like the trend is an increase in the overall area of ice?

From the Discussion section:

> The ice covers of each of the 5 sectors of Fig. 1 and of the Southern Ocean as a whole have experienced considerable interannual variability over the past 40 y (Figs. 2–7). In fact, the Southern Ocean and 4 of the 5 sectors (all except the Ross Sea) have each experienced at least one period since 1999 when the yearly average ice extents decreased for 3 or more straight years only to rebound again afterward and eventually reach levels exceeding the extent preceding the 3 y of decreases (Figs. 2–7). This illustrates that the ice decreases since 2014 (Fig. 2) are no assurance that the 1979–2014 overall positive trend in Southern Ocean ice extents has reversed to a long-term negative trend. Only time and an extended observational record will reveal whether the small increase in yearly average ice extents from 2017 to 2018 (Fig. 2C) is a blip in a long-term downward trend or the start of a rebound.

And:

> I hope that the 40-y record discussed in this paper will encourage further studies into the atmospheric and oceanic conditions that could have led to the extremely rapid 2014–2017 decline of the Antarctic sea ice cover, the comparably rapid decline in the mid-1970s, and the uneven but overall gradual increases in Antarctic sea ice coverage in the intervening decades.

Re: Antarctic sea ice – rapid decreases, reduced to lowest area in 40 years

#38

Post by notabee »

martincollignon wrote: post #10
ForHackernews wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should also take political action. With due respect to people who are trying to take positive individual action, it will not be enough. We've been waiting 30 years and people are still driving SUVs. Only large scale government policy can move the needle for an entire society. Maybe you have political views that you find that distasteful, but unfortunately we're running out of time, and you'll have to choose betwe…

Everything will be needed - incl. political action. Not everyone wants to be political, and people should be offered other choices.

If people don't want to be political now, they're really not going to like the choices (or lack thereof) left after politics have failed and the crisis, famines, and other impacts start to become apparent to the general population. Choices are what we are rapidly running out of.

Re: Antarctic sea ice – rapid decreases, reduced to lowest area in 40 years

#39

Post by breakyerself »

Kaiyou wrote: post #34
adrianN wrote: post #2

Doomsday messages are coming in in rapid succession. First the permafrost is melting 70 years earlier than expected, then Greenland losing massive amounts of ice, then glaciers that provide fresh water for hundreds of millions in India and China disappearing at an alarming rate, now this. And still politicians do nothing. What we need is an effort to build renewables, insulate homes, and build charging infrastructure…

All these doomsday messages! And they have zero impact on the quality of my life. I wonder why nobody cares. \s

Kaiyou falls off a 10-story building. As he passes the sixth story, someone yells from the window, “How’s it going?” He yells back, “So far, so good!”

Re: Antarctic sea ice – rapid decreases, reduced to lowest area in 40 years

#40

Post by kenpomeroy »

ralusek wrote: post #6

I think that it's important for free market advocates, myself included, to understand something. Negative third party externalities, having direct impacts on individuals that did not consent to the responsible transaction(s), are fully within the responsibility of the government to regulate and/or tax. You are not violating your principles by backing state intervention for environmental issues.

Even still, you're assuming the government has the ability to address climate change if given the chance. But, there would need to be global consensus and enforcement or government intervention could actually make the problem worse (e.g. heavy environmental regulatory burden means products get manufactured and shipped from Asia, and actually generate more carbon emissions).

Perhaps, free market solutions a la Tesla are all we've got?

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