https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8b/To...
so Greenland will soon have an inland lake
Greenland ice sheet is close to a melting point of no return
141–150 of 224 posts
Re: Greenland ice sheet is close to a melting point of no return
#142Does anyone have suggestions for how an individual can feel like they’re actually doing something. I already make donations to organizations that advocate for climate activism, vote at local and national level for candidates what support climate action, and in my own live I try to be conscious about the environment impacts or my lifestyle and purchases. Despite all that I still feel like I'm changing nothing. I still…
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Re: Greenland ice sheet is close to a melting point of no return
#143Does anyone have suggestions for how an individual can feel like they’re actually doing something. I already make donations to organizations that advocate for climate activism, vote at local and national level for candidates what support climate action, and in my own live I try to be conscious about the environment impacts or my lifestyle and purchases. Despite all that I still feel like I'm changing nothing. I still…
The best thing you can do in continue to innovate and build more efficient things. We can use that technology to stop wasting resources, stop pushing negative externalities to the environment, and rapidly bring the entirety of the planet out of abject poverty where they are more concerned about where dinner is coming from than their environment, local or global.
I hate the way now, we're all making it worse by leaning on"AI".
People can't even write code now without it being a carbon intensive activity, it's pretty insane...we just can't stop.
Re: Greenland ice sheet is close to a melting point of no return
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
The best thing you can do in continue to innovate and build more efficient things. We can use that technology to stop wasting resources, stop pushing negative externalities to the environment, and rapidly bring the entirety of the planet out of abject poverty where they are more concerned about where dinner is coming from than their environment, local or global.
The most important innovation is behavioural: if we collectively stop travelling by ICE to a remote office, we can meaningfully and significantly reduce global emissions. WFH isn't just a pandemic response measure, it's a climate change measure. We should all fight to WFH, even if we hate it, to reduce carbon emissions.
How does this get shoehorned into every thread?
Re: Greenland ice sheet is close to a melting point of no return
#145Let me preface this by saying that I believe climate change and decarbonization to be one of the critical challenges of our time. That said… This article’s title and its content are completely at odds. Here’s a critical passage: > As the ice sheet melts, its surface will be at ever-lower elevations, exposed to warmer air temperatures. Warmer air temperatures accelerate melt, making it drop and warm further. Global ai…
100 years is not a lot. Your kids kids will already be affected.
It feels very short sides.
Re: Greenland ice sheet is close to a melting point of no return
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
Temperature is a function of elevation. It's saying that if you move the surface down by removing the top layer of material (ice), the temperature at the surface increases, all else being equal including the temperature at sea level. The effect is real, and big enough to feel with the naked skin. One generally says one kelvin per 100m elevation, although the Greenland surface will be different from that rule of thumb…
> One generally says one kelvin per 100m elevation That's not true in Europe nor Asia nor South America nor Africa, although I didn't climb mountains specifically in Greenland to be factual. Better value is cca 0.6C per 100m, or 6C per 1km (sorry, no conversion to feet/yard vs F and similar fun games for lazy sunday afternoon... seriously, with all the love, fix this shit guys, we are not living in 15th century when…
>But at this level, where glacier starts, its already the dreaded temperature they want to avoid, so glaciers should be melting from the bottom with this logic.
Yes, that's generally what happens to glaciers even ignoring climate change. The bottom melts, but is replaced by snow/ice that accumulated on top. Glaciers grow top down, not bottom up. But, if you lower the top so it's warmer, less ice accumulates, which can't replace all that melts, and so you get net shrinking.
Re: Greenland ice sheet is close to a melting point of no return
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the only correct answer from all of these. The highly educated are far more likely to make a significant difference especially if they have knowledge that spans multiple fields.
exactly, fly all over the world and tell the dirt poor uneducated masses about the dangers of carbon emissions! and then realize the dirt poor uneducated masses already have a low carbon footprint because THEY'RE DIRT POOR
What the f are you talking about?
Re: Greenland ice sheet is close to a melting point of no return
#148Every time there's an article about climate change, it's always about how we're "close to the point of no return." It's felt like the Truck Almost Hitting The Pole GIF[1] for like 10 years now. Has anything actually gone past the point of no return? I'll almost be relieved when we're officially inevitably fucked... at least these "nearly there!" articles won't keep popping up. 1: https://tenor.com/view/truck-crash-te…
We already are officially inevitably fucked. If you corner a climate scientist in private and point out the real implications of their work, they might even admit it. The problem is you can't admit that we're officially inevitably fucked in public. If you did that, funding for climate science and climate mitigation would dry up, because there's nothing we can realistically do about it. Trust in governments would evap…
> We already are officially inevitably fucked.
Well.. the second law of the thermodynamics guarantees that.
> The problem is you can't admit that we're officially inevitably fucked in public.
I see several people attempting to start a career off of just that, some of them are quite successful, even. It helps if you add a lot of theocratic and pseudo-religious ideology into your message. People need _something_ to latch on to after all.
> because there's nothing we can realistically do about it.
We are a dynamic species. My proposition is we are currently living through a sort of "modern dark ages." Government imposition and corporate monopolization are at all time highs, to the extent that most new wealth is captured and not used to create new technologies and to progress the species. This is an artificial situation and it is not sustainable.
If you let this cloud your judgement of what is possible you may arrive at this position and feel it is logical. I suggest to you that it is actually a form of insanity or odd religious fervor to actually believe this.
Perhaps, in afterthought, more generously it's a desire to not lose any current level of comfort that you enjoy while "realistically" being able to solve the problem. A solution to this problem will obviously require drastic and hopefully generally positive change, something we've been known to do sporadically many times before.
Re: Greenland ice sheet is close to a melting point of no return
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
We already are officially inevitably fucked. If you corner a climate scientist in private and point out the real implications of their work, they might even admit it. The problem is you can't admit that we're officially inevitably fucked in public. If you did that, funding for climate science and climate mitigation would dry up, because there's nothing we can realistically do about it. Trust in governments would evap…
It's not quite this binary. Yes, we're fucked. But the less we do, the worse we're fucked. It's better to have a glimmer of hope and use that to unfuck what you can.
That's true but also risks misallocating resources to efforts that won't make a big difference now when we should be focusing on mitigation rather than avoidance.
If we had taken Al Gore's warnings in the 80s and began an aggressive push to move off of fossil fuels then, we could perhaps have avoided the whole climate change problem. We didn't, and we can't now. Instead, the rational approach is to accept that the climate will change, there will be consequences of this, and then do our best to avoid the worst effects of the consequences. That includes:
We should be building seawalls and flood barriers around major low-lying areas. Every major city should have an evacuation plan for how to get everyone out in a natural disaster. If the road capacity for this doesn't exist, we should build it. We need systems in place to deal with mass migration. We need housing tech, ways to quickly build housing in new locations because the population is soon going to be forced to move to new locations. We should be researching ways to add back the seed diversity that we've extinguished over the past 60 years, because major agricultural staples are soon going to be out of their climate windows. We need local renewable energy - the biggest benefit of renewables isn't going to be reducing carbon emissions (it's too late for that), it's divorcing ourselves from global energy supply chains that are going to get increasingly unreliable.
My wife works in climate investing, which was a sleepy backwater when she started 12 years ago but now is the hot field to be. There's billions of dollars in capital chasing hare-brained carbon capture schemes that have basically 0% chance of working. That capital should instead go into mitigation efforts, programs that accept that we're fucked but try to avoid the worst effects of that. But if anything, government policy is going the opposite way - we're making it harder to migrate, refusing to build housing or transportation infrastructure, telling people they're on their own when a hurricane hits, and centralizing seed ownership under Monsanto.
Re: Greenland ice sheet is close to a melting point of no return
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, the story is that we begin the melting by raising the earth's temperature a little. You'd think that if we reduced our carbon emissions, the ice would stop melting. > But once the ice crosses the threshold, it would inevitably continue to melt Bear in mind that the atmosphere retains carbon dioxide for ~50 years, that other melt events are dumping methane into the atmosphere from permafrost. It's not just one fac…
> Bear in mind that the atmosphere retains carbon dioxide for ~50 years It's 300-1000 years [1]. [1] https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2915/the-atmosphere-getting-a-...
Good thing plants eat carbon dioxide then, so we don't need to wait for it to break down by itself. The more CO2 in the atmosphere, the more plants grow and convert it to oxygen.