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

This month is the planet’s hottest on record by far – and hottest in 120k years

cnn.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 266 posts

Re: This month is the planet’s hottest on record by far – and hottest in 120k years

#131

Post by myshpa »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #26
vaylian wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. The time for nature and us humans to adapt to these new circumstances is vastly shorter than in any earlier age of the planet. edit: bryanlarsen pointed out that there was an even more extreme event in earth's history.

That's not quite true. 252 million years ago we also had a very quick 8 degree Celsius rise in global temperature. It kicked off the largest mass extinction event. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic_extin...

We're about to outpace that.

"very quick" = 60 ± 48 thousand years, we're aiming for 100 years or so

> It kicked off the largest mass extinction event

Yet. Let's wait few decades.

> It is also the largest known mass extinction of insects.

We're already 75-80% down.

https://www.businessinsider.com/germany-insect-population-fl...

https://www.worldwildlife.org/pages/living-planet-report-202...

https://wwflpr.awsassets.panda.org/downloads/lpr_2022_full_r...

There has been about 69 per cent decline in the wildlife population of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish across the globe in the last 50 years. The highest decline, 94 per cent was in Latin America and Caribbean region. According to WWF report, Africa recorded 66 percent fall in wildlife population, the Asia Pacific 55 percent and population of freshwater species reduced by 83 percent globally.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/brv.12816

The Sixth Mass Extinction: fact, fiction or speculation?

"Estimate that, since around AD 1500, possibly as many as 7.5–13% (150,000–260,000) of all ~2 million known species have already gone extinct, orders of magnitude greater than the 882 (0.04%) on the Red List."

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22287498/meat-wildlife-bi...

The way we eat could lead to habitat loss for 17,000 species by 2050

https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/press-release/our-glob...

Our global food system is the primary driver of biodiversity loss

Re: This month is the planet’s hottest on record by far – and hottest in 120k years

#132

Post by PartiallyTyped »

gottorf wrote: post #60
PartiallyTyped wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Climate change affects both variance and mean of the weather. Which means both colder and hotter weather, and worse large scale events.

Abundant and reliable energy sources will let us deal with the higher variance; notably, deaths related to climate have decreased to one-third over the fifty years from 1970 to 2019[0], even as the human population more than doubled. That isn't one-third the rate, it's one-third in absolute number. [0]: https://library.wmo.int/doc_num.php?explnum_id=10989

Even a perfect engine is not 100% efficient, if we don’t find a way to expel more energy or reduce the energy we use, we will only create more heat and will need even more energy to deal with it.

It is also the case that a large part of the world is simply not built to withstand such temperatures, and using more energy to accommodate that means putting more heat into the atmosphere.

Re: This month is the planet’s hottest on record by far – and hottest in 120k years

#133

Post by ecshafer »

wombat-man wrote: post #90

Cool, well, we just have to wait for enough people on the planet to believe in the problem and then we'll get right on it.

The popular consensus seems to be that global warming is happening. I doubt the few hold outs are actually what is holding back action, as opposed to some powerful and rich organizations getting very rich off it, and a lack of general will to make drastic changes.

Re: This month is the planet’s hottest on record by far – and hottest in 120k years

#134

Post by resoluteteeth »

crypot wrote: post #62
vaylian wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. The time for nature and us humans to adapt to these new circumstances is vastly shorter than in any earlier age of the planet. edit: bryanlarsen pointed out that there was an even more extreme event in earth's history.

You climate guys crack me up. 15 thousand years ago Canada was under 3 kilometers of ice. Now it is home to 40 million people and covered in wildlife. The human population went from 2 million to 8 billion during this warming period. All the evidence points to a warmer planet supporting more life, not less.

The abstract question of whether a higher or lower temperature would result in more habitable land (assuming, say, a gradual change over a million years) is completely 100% irrelevant to the issue of climate change.

A fast enough change will:

- Make places where large numbers of people currently live uninhabitable due to temperature and sea levels

- Kill off most plants and animals because the ones in a given place won't be adapted to the new climate, even if theoretically the climate in other places would now be suited to them, in a way that will take millions of years to recover from.

Simply saying "warmer is better" is utterly missing the point.

Re: This month is the planet’s hottest on record by far – and hottest in 120k years

#135

Post by briantakita3 »

ajkjk wrote: post #117
briantakita wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who cares? if everyone dies and you say "well it always changes" the answer is still "...and we could have done something about it and we didn't do enough." I don't take a nihlist approach. I take a realistic approach. The changes will occur. What will we do about it? Go into a delusion that we can stop the change or take steps to prepare? > Well it was one bearing if it was like this in the past: it gives people a…

No, you argued that it has happened before, which does not imply that the fact that it is happening now is not anthropogenic this time -- which it obviously is. If you can do work now to make "the planet getting very hot and messed up everyone's lives" take thousands of extra years, during which time it is more livable, why would you not? Obviously you would balance this against other economic and policy concerns, wh…

[dead]

Re: This month is the planet’s hottest on record by far – and hottest in 120k years

#136

Post by gottorf »

vkou wrote: post #116
gottorf wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that there's a lot of historical precedent against what you described, so we can reasonably expect the outcome of such an idea. Could explain why it's not in vogue, though it does appear more and more popular among the young.

> The difference is that there's a lot of historical precedent against what you described, so we can reasonably expect the outcome of such an idea. Whereas we have exactly zero historical precedent to know whether or not climate change will even be a 'net plus'. (I do know that organ redistribution would definitely be a net plus, though. We kill one person, we save the lives of N people, the calculus seems to add up…

> we have exactly zero historical precedent to know whether or not climate change will even be a 'net plus'.

My point exactly! If you respect Chesterton's fence, we shouldn't make radical changes to the status quo without clear and convincing proof that the change is worth the cost. Fossil fuels, as bad as they are, also brought up living standards for literally billions of people. There are still billions of people who have yet to enjoy Western standards of living. We shouldn't handicap their growth by demonizing fossil fuels before alternatives are ready.

Re: This month is the planet’s hottest on record by far – and hottest in 120k years

#137

Post by russdill »

NelsonMinar wrote: post #78

It's also likely to be the coolest July for the next twenty to hundred+ years. Enjoy it while you can!

That certainly is the impression I get from this graph https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v4/

Re: This month is the planet’s hottest on record by far – and hottest in 120k years

#138

Post by russdill »

sublinear wrote: post #112

Ugh this sensationalized trash reduces the trust of the public in the science. The reality of weather should not be reduced down to politics, yet here we are. Living in idiocracy. We're in a strong el nino at the moment and it's not even the worst one in the last 50 years.

So what you're saying, is that even with a weaker el nino, we still have higher global average temps? And this is somehow "sensationalized?"

Re: This month is the planet’s hottest on record by far – and hottest in 120k years

#139

Post by flooow »

listenallyall wrote: post #81
flooow wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may be ignorant or even insane, but this sort of thinking is also taken seriously in certain places, and even highly rewarded. William Nordhaus won the Nobel Prize for a model which predicts that if the planet warms by 6C - an extinction level event!! - GDP will only be reduced by 8.5%. Why? Because most high-value production happens indoors, where we have aircon. [1] [1] https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2020/sep/nobel-…

The article you linked to clearly states in paragraph 1 that the paper in question was published after he won the Nobel Prize.

Yep, but the model I referred to (DICE) had been developed by him (and others) over many years - unsurprisingly, since it's what he won the prize for.

More thorough critique: https://mahb.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/The_app...

Re: This month is the planet’s hottest on record by far – and hottest in 120k years

#140

Post by flir »

jhedwards wrote: post #96
briantakita wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Mathematical models with curated inputs & ever changing factors are not extraordinary evidence.

What I find extraordinary is that you can in good faith (which seems a little questionable tbh) say that the absolutely incredible amount of sophisticated evidence that scientists have developed in the last 100 years to repeatedly affirm that humans are dramatically altering the climate with fossil fuel use is NOT extraordinary. The technology and mathematics behind climate science are absolutely incredible and you m…

[flagged]
Post reply on HN