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

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

theregister.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–176 of 176 posts

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

#171

Post by oelewapperke »

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…

Climate is a chaotic system. Any action on the part of humans can produce ANY result (within certain -wide- limits).

"but there is conservation of energy" - true, but the earth has more than enough energy stored up to heat up the surface to 6300 degrees celcius (at least). The fact that these stores exist means that they got their energy from somewhere. If said energy intake were to increase temperature would obviously drop, potentially by a lot (well, not by that much, it can only drop another 300 degrees after all, but if it were to drop 30 degrees we're all dead anyway, so small changes suck as well). We don't know what affects heat transfer from athmosphere/oceans mantle and reverse, we just know big transfers exist. Suppose, one of the variables had something to do with co2 ... "whoops"

So you want to change earth's climate in a controlled manner ? Too bad. It's the same kind of problem as walking on water. It's perfectly possible to walk on water, you just have to generate the correct amount of force in the correct direction by pushing water down with your feet. You might actually succeed in doing this for the first step, but then you get waves. There is no law of physics that states this directed splashing can't work, but I'm sure you can see what is going wrong in practice.

If we modify earth's climate, we'll be creating all sorts of different waves, which will affect our future modifications to the climate, and since we won't be able to correctly predict those waves, we can't know beforehand how things will interact.

Unless there are major errors in the theory, changing the climate in predictable ways is impossible.

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

#172

Post by itswindy »

officemonkey wrote: post #139
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.

>> I think it's pretty definite that each one of us will die

:). I meant die, dinosaur style.

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

#173

Post by FrojoS »

FrojoS wrote: post #89
RuadhanMc wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is probably because people are comfortable with the familiar. Sure, a warmer earth might be a positive-sum change, but there's an equally good chance that it won't be. So why take the risk of losing what you have if you can avoid it?

Exactly. The worst case, I'm afraid, would be another MARS in the solar system.

Down votes? I know physicist, who tell me in private, that they are afraid about a point of no return. That we heat the climate up to a point where the system gets unstable. This is, as far as I know, what could have happend on planet Mars and it could happen here. Yet, you barley see anyone mentioning this public.

A sane risk assessment number should be something like:

Gain / (Risk * Damage)

So if the, theoretical, damage on Earth could make it something like Mars, we should act, even if we loose a lot of gain, that is comfort, and though the risk might seem low. On a sight note, the same goes for other humanity threatening dangers, like big asteroids.

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

#174

Post by Shorel »

ugh wrote: post #56
randallsquared wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another way to look at (b) is "We're only being saved from a mini ice-age by CO2-induced global warming, therefore it's urgent to avoid cutting emissions and plunging into it for real". The Earth has seen warmer and colder than now, but the warm extremes have been better for life than the cold extremes.

Which life? Industrial age humans? That's who we care about. Our goal is (or at least I hope it is) to enable humans to thrive, we don't really care about other life (at least if we had to pick between humans and other life) as long as it is not instrumental to our success.

Thriving is overrated.

Taking a contrary view: there are too many of us already. A smaller population will be more sustainable in the long term.

Unless you want unlimited growth with a huge apocalyptic human extinction event at the end.

In other words, I don't care specifically about industrial age humans. I want post-industrial and post-post-post-industrial age humans to survive too.

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

#175

Post by Shorel »

saalweachter wrote: post #145
danparsonson wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Temperature as a single variable doesn't deal with /known/ problems. Besides the well-known effect on temperature, CO2 also causes ocean acidification, which among other things kills coral. In its own way, ocean acidification is far scarier than global warming, because there is absolutely no question that it is taking place. While you need a PhD to analyze climate data, you only need high school chemistry to demonstr…

Honestly, by analyzing fossil records of CO2 in past times, like the Jurassic period, I believe that somewhere in the ocean there are creatures with genomes adapted or rapidly adaptable to an increased acidic ocean.

The geological average of CO2 in the atmosphere seems to be about 20 times the current amount.

Not necessarily corals are the optimum staple life form of the oceans.

I do not claim to know anything about what would the optimum staple life form in the ocean, I'm simply open to the possibility that an increase in CO2 could lead to a improvement in photosynthesis ability for algae and therefore an increase in ocean life.

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

#176

Post by randallsquared »

Shorel wrote: post #174
ugh wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which life? Industrial age humans? That's who we care about. Our goal is (or at least I hope it is) to enable humans to thrive, we don't really care about other life (at least if we had to pick between humans and other life) as long as it is not instrumental to our success.

Thriving is overrated. Taking a contrary view: there are too many of us already. A smaller population will be more sustainable in the long term. Unless you want unlimited growth with a huge apocalyptic human extinction event at the end. In other words, I don't care specifically about industrial age humans. I want post-industrial and post-post-post-industrial age humans to survive too.

Eventually there will be some extinction event anyway. Is it more important to maximize number of humans who ever lived, or more important to maximize the age of the species? Your stated desires could mean either, but they prescribe very different strategies.
Post reply on HN