Earth may be headed into a mini Ice Age within a decade • Hacker News Board

Re: Earth may be headed into a mini Ice Age within a decade

#131

Post by pyre » Wed, Jun 15, 2011, 12:46 AM UTC

danparsonson wrote: post #118

jerf wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The nice thing about space mirrors is that of all the climate mitigation methods I've heard, they are by far the most controllable. Solutions like "let's stuff the oceans full of iron to grow plankton to absorb CO2", even assuming they work as intended, have the problem that they are irreversible. Space mirrors can put heat where we want it, and remove it from where we want it, and can do so on hours of notice. It's…

What makes it simplistic for me is really the idea that we can make the climate better by tinkering with a single variable (temperature in this case) - I'm not convinced we even know what 'better' is, let alone have enough understanding to predict what the side effects would be. What if we cause some imbalance that doesn't immediately manifest any problems but has a detrimental longer term effect? I do take your poin…

IIRC, plankton blooms were debunked. They tried it and the number of predators just a level removed from the plankton increased to offset the bloom.

Re: Earth may be headed into a mini Ice Age within a decade

#132

Post by Joakal » Wed, Jun 15, 2011, 12:53 AM UTC

wunderfool wrote: post #110

natmaster wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For instance Canada may want the earth warmer, whereas Indian would want it cooler. (Since it benefits their respective latitudes.)

why do people throw these arguments around? i don't know of any nation whose scientists find any rapid climate change desirable. who are they? the notion of a polar thaw is tossed around as being desirable for canada as a shipping route....BUT this would decimate the living biosphere of 90% of canadians who live within 100 miles of the US border. i've never heard a serious canadian climate science talk about rapid cl…

I've seen studies pointing out more land access for Canadians [0] but hardly anything about affecting the 'living biosphere of 90% of Canadians within 100 miles of US border'. What's the source?

[0] https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=farm+climate...

Re: Earth may be headed into a mini Ice Age within a decade

#133

Post by Perceval » Wed, Jun 15, 2011, 1:15 AM UTC

zheng wrote: post #4

For those who don't have time to read the article, "mini Ice Age" literally means that winter will last longer, and be more prevalent at lower altitudes/latitudes. Mildly sensational, but an interesting read.

There's a good book on the political and social consequences of the last little ice age: The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300-1850 by Brian Fagan.

Re: Earth may be headed into a mini Ice Age within a decade

#134

Post by dasil003 » Wed, Jun 15, 2011, 1:16 AM UTC

wunderfool wrote: post #64

Tyrant505 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what trumps a lot of your awesome points is our efforts in sustainability and forward thinking use of recycling with our products/waste.

wrong. that bottle of organic shampoo from whole food commits about 98% of the sins as a bottle of a nonorganic varity from safeway. both are put in plastic which may or may not be recycled but was certainly made from oil (like all plastics), and was driven to the store in a vehicle that emits CO2, stored in a room kept warm or cool with a device that emits CO2, and then driven back to your house in another vehicle t…

I agree that current efforts at sustainability are pathetically weak, but I disagree that CO2 emissions are fundamentally the problem. Global warming is an environmentalist boogeyman that makes for good PR, but climate disaster or not we have politically intractable problems with the waste of natural resources. We can always grow more plants to reclaim CO2, but we can't continue to just extract everything and then throw it in a landfill 6 months later.

Re: Earth may be headed into a mini Ice Age within a decade

#135

Post by arctangent » Wed, Jun 15, 2011, 1:24 AM UTC

redthrowaway wrote: post #97

dy wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not following Lean Climate Control practices.

Failing Fast seems suboptimal, here.

The morning weather forecast will promise that "some weather" will be delivered but they don't know what form it will take or how much of it there will be. They will go on to say that if you're not happy with the weather that is delivered then you shouldn't worry because they can guarantee that some more weather will be delivered the following day.

Re: Earth may be headed into a mini Ice Age within a decade

#136

Post by asciimo » Wed, Jun 15, 2011, 1:27 AM UTC

thaumaturgy wrote: post #128

Tichy wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the movie out yet? I am still not sure if I want to continue reading the series. It was so depressing.

I've been totally waiting with baited breath to launch this rant at some poor unsuspecting sap. So, hi Tichy! Man, I really really wanted to love that whole book series. The characterization was fantastic, the settings were detailed and rich, the story telling was great ... But, sometime part-way through A Feast For Crows, I just couldn't stand reading it any more. The violence seemed too unnecessary; the destruction…

Ha. The first thing I thought when I read that article was "winter is coming" so I immediately searched for that string in the comments. I'm glad I'm not alone.

I'm a few pages from the end of A Game of Thrones and I have been shocked by some of the character abuse you're talking about. Right now, it's kind of exciting, but I can definitely see it getting tiresome if it becomes gratuitous. Thanks for the warning--I won't feel guilty if I abandon the series midway through!

Re: Earth may be headed into a mini Ice Age within a decade

#137

Post by wanderful » Wed, Jun 15, 2011, 1:30 AM UTC

run4yourlives wrote: post #32

hugh3 wrote: post #10

This is exactly why I think the debate should be less about "how can we as humans stop affecting Earth's natual climate" and "how can we as humans gain control over Earth's natural climate". Climate change happens with us or without us. If we're going to protect our huge investments in climate-dependent infrastructure (i.e. cities) then we're gonna want (say) giant space mirrors to compensate for any zany things that…

It's probably easier to just colonize other planets than it is to go farting around with something as delicate as Earth's climate.

I don't know if the Earth's climate is as delicate as we fear. Our infrastructure is far more delicate when it comes to the Earth climate. The Earth is able to function within a homeostatic range (say, established over the past billion years) far more effectively than our infrastructure (established over the past few hundred years). The biosphere may also be involved with this, which has been raised in the Gaia theory line of argumentation.

Re: Earth may be headed into a mini Ice Age within a decade

#138

Post by Retric » Wed, Jun 15, 2011, 1:46 AM UTC

hugh3 wrote: post #10

This is exactly why I think the debate should be less about "how can we as humans stop affecting Earth's natual climate" and "how can we as humans gain control over Earth's natural climate". Climate change happens with us or without us. If we're going to protect our huge investments in climate-dependent infrastructure (i.e. cities) then we're gonna want (say) giant space mirrors to compensate for any zany things that…

Minor changes in the suns output have a tiny impact on earths climate. The vastly simplified reason is black body radiation increases as the 4th power of temperature (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan%E2%80%93Boltzmann_law). And the sun is vary stable when you average over a day sitting at +/- .05% since we have been able to detect it. And unlike earths climate astronomers have plenty of other vary similar stars to directly compare the sun to and they are also vary stable.

PS: Now a gigantic increase in the suns output relative to the norm of say 0.11% = an increase of 1.0011(288K)^4 = (288K+x)^4 = ~0.08 degrees C.

Re: Earth may be headed into a mini Ice Age within a decade

#139

Post by officemonkey » Wed, Jun 15, 2011, 2:10 AM UTC

itswindy wrote: post #65

So we will either die of cold or heat. Maybe.

>Maybe.

I think it's pretty definite that each one of us will die. The only relevant factor is how, and how much we suffer between now and then.

Re: Earth may be headed into a mini Ice Age within a decade

#140

Post by ak217 » Wed, Jun 15, 2011, 2:24 AM UTC

Hawramani wrote: post #57

Reading the comments on here and many other places about global warming, it makes me sad that nobody is open-minded enough to entertain the possibility that an increase in the Earth's temperature could be a positive-sum change. We know very little about the Earth's natural cycles and the effects we have on them, so we are very far from knowing whether things are going in a good* or bad direction. * Good for everyone…

There's a fine line between open-mindedness and having a hole in your head.

Seriously though, it's very certain that global climate change of unpredictable magnitude right now is not desirable. The key problem is that we're not prepared to preserve biological diversity.

We're placing our ecosystems under extreme pressure, severely compromising them, sometimes depleting their resources so they will take hundreds or even thousands of years to recover. This results in mass extinctions and near-extinctions (which can be very damaging through genetic bottlenecks, aka inbreeding). For most species, we currently have no adequate technology to preserve single individuals, let alone entire populations, outside their original habitat.

Why does this matter? Because biological diversity is critical to our long-term success in bioengieering, and mind-bogglingly hard to replenish in an accelerated way. We will be able to preserve and resurrect species much sooner than we will be able to mutate them in a natural way to preserve their intraspecies diversity. But so far we can't even do that, so we're losing entire genotypes forever - genotypes that we have no idea how to reconstruct, or what hidden treasures lay in their genomes.

And this is just the biggest problem, not taking into account the philosophical preservationist argument, or the smaller problems like increased risk of global conflicts due to mass displacements, ocean acidification, etc.