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

The Great Siberian Thaw

newyorker.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 104 posts

Re: The Great Siberian Thaw

#41

Post by JamisonM »

kragen wrote: post #35
lmilcin wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The gases being released aren't toxic until a hundred times higher than current levels. You obviously have no idea what you are talking about. Current atmospheric CO2 level is 400ppm which already has a measurable impact on performance on tasks (compared to 250ppm couple decades ago). Increasing it to just 1000ppm further degrades performance. And 2500ppm makes it difficult to concentrate on anything complex. Even…

It's true that high CO₂ levels cause cognitive impairment, but submarines routinely operate for months in the 2000–5000 ppm range, sometimes as high as 13000 ppm, over 30 times higher than the current atmospheric level but still too low to kill people by about a factor of 8. Subtle cognitive impairments at these levels have been found by some researchers, while others have been unable to replicate them even at 30000…

> "the quality of the discussion would probably be significantly improved without you saying, "You obviously have no idea what you are talking about.""

Amen.

Re: The Great Siberian Thaw

#42

Post by deanCommie »

vermilingua wrote: post #17

The Newsroom said it best, "your house is burning to the ground, the situation is dire; your house has already burned to the ground, situation's over." [1] I don't see a way that we plausibly reverse course, when nearly every government, the people running them, and the private sector leaders are all just doing an end-run to accumulate as much as they can, planet be damned. Every "climate target" gets re-evaluated an…

Except the situation isn't over when your house has burned to the ground.

Taking the metaphor literally...

You have a family and you need shelter. You need to figure out how to survive without shelter. You need to see what you can salvage. Which means still trying to put the fire out so that some of your things or some of the materials can be salvaged so you can consider rebuilding. You need to start clearing out the rubble so that you can think about eventually rebuilding your house on that land.

Yes, it's discouraging, yes it's demoralizing. But humanity (and individual humans) has faced all sorts of extreme adversity over our history. As living creatures we have a survival instinct that requires us to continue fighting. Yes, this particular crisis is our own creation. Yes, it will damage the Earth and our specific ecosystem more than any other action we've ever done in our short time here. Yes, we might have a generation or several generations globally who will have a worse quality of life than the previous one for the first time in several hundreds of years. Yes, it's frustrating that this was caused by selfish greedy humans who will never be held accountable for it, and who will most likely have to coexist with, and collaborate on solutions when they finally decide when it's too late.

Nevertheless, we persevere, and we each do what we can to minimize the damage, to innovate solutions that may protect that what remains, and we think long-long-term.

Our ancestors frequently knew that they were a part of something much bigger and that the impact they could have had on the world or improving the lives of their children were miniscule. Yet they did so anyway. We have been brought up in a generation of boundless optimism thinking that we would all change the world for the better, while living in continuously growing prosperity. Not all of that turned out to be true. That's okay. We still keep going.

Understand, I did not start out with this point of view. I'm not an optimist by nature. I spent years being depressed and fatalist as you might be. I chose this mindset as a survival tactic. But I do believe everything I wrote.

Re: The Great Siberian Thaw

#43

Post by JamisonM »

lmilcin wrote: post #37
sometimeshuman wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many stressors have an adaptation phase. It is plausible those effects get reduced with prolonged exposure in humans although that wasn't necessarily the case in mice: "Long-term exposure of mice to 890 ppm atmospheric CO 2 alters growth trajectories and elicits hyperactive behaviours in young adulthood" https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34731494/

I think I red a study, many years ago, about lowered performance in Mexico City due to their local higher CO2 concentration.

I feel like if it was many years ago lead pollution would be a nearly insurmountable confounder in such a study, but if you could find it I am sure it would be an interesting read.

Re: The Great Siberian Thaw

#44

Post by gremlinsinc »

dukeofdoom wrote: post #36
xwdv wrote: post #22

Once the permafrost starts melting off, there isn’t much time left for us. Hold your children tight, and comfort them for the rest of their short lives.

Don't worry you'll be okay. Every culture had an end times prophecy.

there's a difference between an end times prophecy and a confirmation that a planet killing asteroid will hit the earth in x months/years...

there's ambiguity on how long we have left.. but we're headed towards extinction or nearly... maybe a few million survive to rebuild..

but life as we live today is completely unsustainable...

Re: The Great Siberian Thaw

#45

Post by screenbreakout »

kragen wrote: post #26
vermilingua wrote: post #17

The Newsroom said it best, "your house is burning to the ground, the situation is dire; your house has already burned to the ground, situation's over." [1] I don't see a way that we plausibly reverse course, when nearly every government, the people running them, and the private sector leaders are all just doing an end-run to accumulate as much as they can, planet be damned. Every "climate target" gets re-evaluated an…

The article says of Ted Schuur, "He and his colleagues estimate that permafrost emissions might make up five to fifteen per cent of the I.P.C.C.’s allotment." So I guess we need to cut our greenhouse gas emissions 5–15% below where we would have otherwise needed to. We did need a moonshot tech breakthrough, namely scalable affordable renewable energy. But that breakthrough has already happened: both PV and wind are c…

Wouldn't just a change in the way we view our economy work? If a lot of the emissions come from creating GDP, why not take a break, live off our assets,like when Covid initially happened... i'd continue but would probably get buried as a utopian (tbh it seems like businesses a machines getting people create more machines while getting very little actual return...)

Re: The Great Siberian Thaw

#46

Post by kragen »

screenbreakout wrote: post #45
kragen wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article says of Ted Schuur, "He and his colleagues estimate that permafrost emissions might make up five to fifteen per cent of the I.P.C.C.’s allotment." So I guess we need to cut our greenhouse gas emissions 5–15% below where we would have otherwise needed to. We did need a moonshot tech breakthrough, namely scalable affordable renewable energy. But that breakthrough has already happened: both PV and wind are c…

Wouldn't just a change in the way we view our economy work? If a lot of the emissions come from creating GDP, why not take a break, live off our assets,like when Covid initially happened... i'd continue but would probably get buried as a utopian (tbh it seems like businesses a machines getting people create more machines while getting very little actual return...)

Coordination problem: whoever takes a break gets invaded, overthrown, and annexed by whoever doesn't.

Re: The Great Siberian Thaw

#47

Post by AtlasBarfed »

Retric wrote: post #38
klipt wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Solar geoengineering could potentially stop further thawing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_geoengineering

That’s probably a significantly more difficult problem than stopping pollution as you actually need someone to pay for it directly. And of course we don’t know a good way to only try and cool the Arctic. You can ballpark this yourself a 288 K black body in equilibrium is radiating as much energy as it receives, at T^4. To drop that by 1C to 287K means blocking 1- ( 287^4 /288^4) or roughly 1.4% of all sunlight. As th…

Why does every solar geoengineering project seem to pretend that decreasing solar radiation wouldn't impact photosynthesis which also binds CO2, and, uh, supports the entire food web / our civilization?

We already are massively stressing the biosphere: mass extinctions, mass destruction of habitat, mass disruption of migration patterns, warming, plastic pollution, invasive species.

And the suggestion is to reduce incoming photosynthetic energy by percentage points????????

I get that photosynthesis happens in a narrow band of frequencies compared to other solar radiation that would be absorbed then emitted back/trapped as IR radiation... but still, geoengineering should focus on methods that explicitly track the bound/removed CO2.

Note I do not for a second believe that schemes for sequestration by pumping CO2 deep underground won't have huge amounts of ignored/undetected leakage, especially since it is a petroleum industry scheme that already pretends massive methane leaks aren't occurring far more than is accounted for in current petrol extraction.

Re: The Great Siberian Thaw

#48

Post by selectodude »

hh3k0 wrote: post #15
sega_sai wrote: post #10

I've found the article so well written. It was a joy to read, notwithstanding the grim topic.

I agree, it made me hope there'd be a way to pay for this particular article when I reach its end.

There is - get yourself a subscription to The New Yorker. This piece of long-form is not unusual for them.

Re: The Great Siberian Thaw

#49

Post by jay_kyburz »

deanCommie wrote: post #42
vermilingua wrote: post #17

The Newsroom said it best, "your house is burning to the ground, the situation is dire; your house has already burned to the ground, situation's over." [1] I don't see a way that we plausibly reverse course, when nearly every government, the people running them, and the private sector leaders are all just doing an end-run to accumulate as much as they can, planet be damned. Every "climate target" gets re-evaluated an…

Except the situation isn't over when your house has burned to the ground. Taking the metaphor literally... You have a family and you need shelter. You need to figure out how to survive without shelter. You need to see what you can salvage. Which means still trying to put the fire out so that some of your things or some of the materials can be salvaged so you can consider rebuilding. You need to start clearing out the…

I think its both valuable and important to recognize that the climate change is inevitable so that we can stop talking about how we might prevent it, and start talking about how we can sustain our civilization regardless of the weather. (How would we sustain ourselves if we lived in a satellite orbiting the sun?)

I also think neither democracy or capitalism is well equipped to ask people to make large sacrifices for the benefit of future generations. I think we should stop talking about people making sacrifices, and put effort into engineering our way out of this problem.

Re: The Great Siberian Thaw

#50

Post by jay_kyburz »

chillwaves wrote: post #21
vermilingua wrote: post #17

The Newsroom said it best, "your house is burning to the ground, the situation is dire; your house has already burned to the ground, situation's over." [1] I don't see a way that we plausibly reverse course, when nearly every government, the people running them, and the private sector leaders are all just doing an end-run to accumulate as much as they can, planet be damned. Every "climate target" gets re-evaluated an…

After the coming resource\migration wars, some of this will sort itself out. Don't worry.

I just realized that perhaps the problem is not global warming. Perhaps the problem is that we are having children. If we all just decided to stop having kids, nobody would care what the weather was like at the end of the century.
Post reply on HN