131–140 of 324 posts
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Thanks for pointing this out, I missed that
This is becoming a perennial refrain in HN stories based on scientific papers. ("Oh, wait, this dubious study or lazy meta-analysis isn't really appearing in Nature , it's some other publication to which Nature has whored out their name and credibility.") It sounds like the 150-year-old scientific journal of record has been taken over by private equity, or by MBAs with KPIs to optimize.
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What's happening right now could still be a very unlikely anomaly and everything may change back to "normal" soon. Or it isn't. Hard to judge for me, I'm not an expert.
Yeah, everything that's been predicted for decades is happening but it could just be a total coincidence. And if it isn't I'm sure they'll just magically figure out economically viable fusion or spray some aerosols into the atmosphere or somehow just magically fix everything. I'm sure everything will be fine. That's why I'm not having kids. /s
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Satire?
No, actually the truth. The climate change "hype" comes from journalists and editors. The actual research papers are generally very conservative in their estimations, and we've been exceeding the predicted outcomes for decades without making any real changes to improve our situation.
I've got a background in this field and I am very surprised to see this published in Nature. The model presented is purely statistical with no representation of the underlying physics. When we are dealing with a phenomenon that is driven by well-understood physical laws (e.g. geophysical fluid dynamics, radiation physics etc) then these physical models are the most reliable basis for prediction. When I say physical m…
As a lay-bystander to the climate debate, I get a little spooked when I see comments like this. Like 99.9% of people, the science of complex climate systems is beyond me as are the de facto black box models that project climate change. Instead I use “appears in a credible journal” as a basis for trusting the apparent direction of travel and I’m disconcerted when I see that proxy challenged. I also, I am somewhat sorr…
I've got a background in this field and I am very surprised to see this published in Nature. The model presented is purely statistical with no representation of the underlying physics. When we are dealing with a phenomenon that is driven by well-understood physical laws (e.g. geophysical fluid dynamics, radiation physics etc) then these physical models are the most reliable basis for prediction. When I say physical m…
Skepticism on this was called out in WaPo's article on the same subject: Other experts on the AMOC also cautioned that because the new study doesn’t present new observations of the entire ocean system — instead, it is extrapolating about the future based on past data from a limited region of the Atlantic — its conclusions should be taken with a grain of salt. Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment…
I've got a background in this field and I am very surprised to see this published in Nature. The model presented is purely statistical with no representation of the underlying physics. When we are dealing with a phenomenon that is driven by well-understood physical laws (e.g. geophysical fluid dynamics, radiation physics etc) then these physical models are the most reliable basis for prediction. When I say physical m…
As a lay-bystander to the climate debate, I get a little spooked when I see comments like this. Like 99.9% of people, the science of complex climate systems is beyond me as are the de facto black box models that project climate change. Instead I use “appears in a credible journal” as a basis for trusting the apparent direction of travel and I’m disconcerted when I see that proxy challenged. I also, I am somewhat sorr…
I spent a few years studying climate models. I have lots of background in mathematical modeling and numerics, but not climate per se, so this was a big undertaking but possible. I have to admit that -- although I can now read and understand papers better -- it hasn't been particularly illuminating.
The global climate is changing. The long-term impact of these changes is difficult to know, particularly because there are many plausible bifurcation points. Beyond some basics, the TL;DR is "we just don't know exactly what will or won't happen, or when, but it's probably not going to be good for most people on the planet and things are probably going to start getting bad within 1-2 hundred years".
In my mind it's really just a case where being a conservative is the best approach.
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> compound and significantly accelerate the timeline There's a misconception that the biosphere is a delicate machine that will have a catastrophic internal failure if we don't follow the maintenance bibl^H^H^H^Hmanual, which apparently some experts have access to. In reality, it is a highly dynamic, self-repairing living organism, which we are a part of. There are at least as many negative feedback loops as positive…
> it is a highly dynamic, self-repairing living organism Organisms are self-repairing (to a certain extent) because they evolved to be so due to natural selection. The Earth as a whole and its climate are not subject to evolutionary pressure (they don’t reproduce) and thus are nothing like that.
This is the only planet that supports life (that we know of). That's because it's natural properties endured through billions of years to support life.
It's not exactly an arms race. And it's a different, but similar mechanism. But I think the underlying principles are the same.
In this case, evolution won't look like the earth changing over time. It's more like, there are billions of potential earths out there, and over billions of years, some of them will more subtly change to support life.
So, we may destroy our earth, but that doesn't impair the ability for other earths to evolve. We just may not see it.
An article from livescience.com that may be worth a read. TLDR: if slowdown occurs, temperatures could drop by 5C in Europe and North America. What a 5C drop actually looks like they don't say. https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/climate-change/gulf...
How does that 5C drop interact with the rise that we're currently concerned about? (Heatwave, wildfires in the med etc). I'm guessing it's hopelessly naive to assume it'll just... kinda cancel each other out?
I'd expect averages might drop in spots, and raise in others, regionally. But the variance will be all over the map. And already is.
Summer heat waves, droughts, intense tropical storms.
And then winters with unusually warm days followed by record lows.
For Northern/Western Europe, with the gulf stream interrupted I'd imagine the could expect a climate closer to what the northeast of the Americas already get: erratic inconstant weather patterns with lower lows than they're used to.
Remember that the northeast and midwest is quite a bit further south than many western & northern European cities, but suffers far more brutal winters.
Here in southern Ontario, we're at the same lattitude as northern Italy or south of France, and our summers can be just as hot, and growing season about as long (and way more humid). ... But in the winter there's episodic lows below -25C, -28C. And I can tell you, you can't easily grow e.g. vitis vinifera grapes with those patterns, and certainly not figs, citrus, etc.
I don't think Europeans are mentally prepared for this, if it's coming.
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Yes. We're not sleepwalking to an uninhabitable dystopia, we're sprinting towards it. We may all be in for some serious problems in 5 to 10 years. I'm not a climate scientist, this is just an uninformed opinion, but everything I'm reading has me very worried.
There are challenges to overcome but thinking of the future as dystopia can be counterproductive.
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The terms "imminent" and "predict the time" seem like missing the point of the article you acknowledged you have only skimmed. I felt the article was clear collapse is not imminent, not even in this century. I felt it noted focus was not on imminence, but on changes worth mentioning in aspects of interest. Perhaps the difference is this article is talking of timing for transitions of significance, rather than the for…
You are completely correct I regret that word choice now. I was rushing to comment because I felt it was important to provide context on AMOC collapse scholarship.
Rushing to comment has deep effects on HN, the threading incentivizes appending to the top comments rather than replying. This will now be a philosophical debate about scientific trust for hours just because people assume the article says "collapse is happening shortly by X date", but its just a statistical model :(
Don't mean to make you feel bad or call you out, most people don't read the article if it's popular. It's my attempt to give a little back to the community to note it, been here a very long time, and when people try calling it out coarsely it isn't constructive.
[1] sort of: they understood it was a statistical model but spent so much time hand-wringing about Nature publishing a statistical model that it came off like there was something wrong with the article, causing a rush of replies of "how can I trust anything??"