Ice core scientists in East Greenland reach bedrock • Hacker News Board

Re: Ice core scientists in East Greenland reach bedrock

#161

Post by cycomanic » Mon, Jul 31, 2023, 7:25 PM UTC

toshk wrote: post #119

snowwrestler wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People worry about accelerating climate change now because we live here now. It’s not a theoretical science thing. We have farms and cities and towns and bridges and dams and reservoirs in particular places, and we are accelerating the depreciation of many of them. The result will be tremendous loss of wealth, movement of populations, and the associated social consequences of those. Humanity doesn’t hate itself, we l…

Yeah but there is more to it. There are active crisis, like cancer & heart disease. Or upcoming ones like Alzeimer & Parkinson. That in the current day already affect more people per year, then the climate crisis will affect in the worst prognoses in a 100 years*. But Climate change is different, it speaks to the psyche of humans, the modern story of the flood. And in the same way it gives people meaning & without re…

Except that neither of the things you mention affects more people than climate change will. The estimate is that there are about 54 M people World wide suffering from alzheimer.

The worst case projection for 2100 for just sea rise is 4-5m on global average (but much higher in some areas) https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/acb504

To put that into perspective the average altitude of Bangladesh is 9m above sea level, but the majority of the population lives in he south at about 0-1m of altitude. So there would just in Bangladesh alone be more people (let's say 50% of 160M) directly affected by climate change than alzheimer world wide. We are not even talking about the indirect effects of displacing 60M people, all the other countries and all the other effects of climate change.

Apart from that, the argument is under the false premise that we shouldnt do anything anyway because there is worse things. By that argument we should also not do something about alzheimer, because more people die of cancer.

So I question what your aim was with your argument. It was clearly using wrong facts and was under a false premise.

Re: Ice core scientists in East Greenland reach bedrock

#162

Post by thrawa8387336 » Mon, Jul 31, 2023, 7:25 PM UTC

thrashh wrote: post #153

sleet_spotter wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pre-industrial CO2 concentration is synonymous with the "natural concentration", at least in the recent past. We made a very large change that has thrown Earth's systems out of equilibrium. Returning to pre-industrial CO2 levels would undo that change and bring things back towards equilibrium.

Like the other reply said, there is no natural equilibrium. We want to return to pre-industrial levels because we’re used to it and we liked it more then.

Really

Re: Ice core scientists in East Greenland reach bedrock

#163

Post by BenjiWiebe » Mon, Jul 31, 2023, 7:27 PM UTC

samstave wrote: post #117

There is a design for an ice-melting-slurry-bot that could be made, where the outer diameter of the bore is melted by heat/lasers - where the lasers/heat is also projected into a cone at the point of the bore-ing machine, where the center pipe is a vacuum to slurp up the slurry as it melts the ice around the bore-head...

You aren't going to be able to vacuum slurry up from several km down.

Re: Ice core scientists in East Greenland reach bedrock

#164

Post by hinkley » Mon, Jul 31, 2023, 7:31 PM UTC

TechBro8615 wrote: post #51

FredPret wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a bright future in big holes. Imagine what we can get our hands on if we could find a nice, cheap way to dig 10+ km down all over the place. The mantle is 2000+km thick. Our deepest mines are 3-4 km deep. We could also harvest a ton of heat this way - and maybe even use it for garbage disposal. Master Of Orion 2 had the Deep Core Mines and Core Waste Dumps - maybe that's the way to go!

Is the idea of using a big hole for garbage disposal that we would dump the garbage into the molten core and let it burn? Or is it more about using the hole as a really deep landfill?

Do you know what a hole from the surface to the molten core is called?

An active volcano.

Re: Ice core scientists in East Greenland reach bedrock

#165

Post by anon25783 » Mon, Jul 31, 2023, 7:32 PM UTC

albert_e wrote: post #128

what is the risk of uncovering ancient viruses and bacteria from permafrost that we don't have immunity to

Negligible. You're far more likely to fall ill from bacteria in your garbage disposal or fungi in your bathroom.

Re: Ice core scientists in East Greenland reach bedrock

#166

Post by ChuckMcM » Mon, Jul 31, 2023, 7:33 PM UTC

anigbrowl wrote: post #110

ChuckMcM wrote: post #41

This is a very important project. There is a joke in here about "why not wait 2 years for the ice to melt off if you wanted to look at the mud underneath?" But as the article states, "'This will change climate models because it redefines our basic understanding of how ice moves,' explains Dorthe Dahl-Jensen." Much, if not the majority, of climate science is the creation of models (differential equations mostly) that…

A lot of modeling is moving toward Julia, so if you don't want to give money to Mathworks here are some alternatives: https://juliaclimate.github.io/Notebooks/

I have moved all my "matlab like" work (mostly signal processing) into Octave for that same reason.

Re: Ice core scientists in East Greenland reach bedrock

#167

Post by adhesive_wombat » Mon, Jul 31, 2023, 7:35 PM UTC

nonethewiser wrote: post #154

sleet_spotter wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pre-industrial CO2 concentration is synonymous with the "natural concentration", at least in the recent past. We made a very large change that has thrown Earth's systems out of equilibrium. Returning to pre-industrial CO2 levels would undo that change and bring things back towards equilibrium.

“Natural concentration” is not the right way to look at it because there are higher concentrations that predate the industrial revolution and humans. The all time high (that we know of) is from about 350,000 years ago. This was by all means natural and pre industrial revolution.

"The only known natural concentration empirically compatible with long-term human civilisation".

"The planet did exist/will exist just fine without us" is a pretty worn truism. You might as well wryly note that water isn't natural because everything was hydrogen once.

Re: Ice core scientists in East Greenland reach bedrock

#168

Post by specialist » Mon, Jul 31, 2023, 7:36 PM UTC

angiosperm wrote: post #152

elzbardico wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do we need to get back to the levels pre-industrial revolution?

We have also pumped a very large amount of long-lived fluorine compounds into the air, that will last for centuries. They have from 2500x to 25000x times the "greenhouse gas warming potential", kg for kg. They are mostly refrigerants (CFCs, HFCs, and soon their successors) and transformer insulation gas (SF6). Volcanoes do emit some amount of fluorine compounds, too. We also have a great deal of methane leakage, whic…

Yes and: I understand that we want to prevent the non-human emissions from becoming a positive feedback loop. Meaning that at some tipping point, the thawing tundra, burning forests, and acidic oceans will continue to get worse, even if/when human emissions completely stop.

Re: Ice core scientists in East Greenland reach bedrock

#169

Post by renegade-otter » Mon, Jul 31, 2023, 7:37 PM UTC

detourdog wrote: post #130

newfonewhodis wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a scientist so I'm curious why this is interesting.

It's interesting because the whole ice cap as we know it is around 120k years ago which I don't consider the long ago on human development scale. This also appears to mean that in the past 120K there wasn't a polar ice cap. I read that as the worst case scenario we should be using for long term planning. This also may help determine how fast the ice was built and how fast it will melt. I'm completely an armchair pond…

Maybe humans become more developed because it got colder? Even on a country and global scale, the south is usually "behind" the north. It's hot, no one wants to do anything.

The American south (Arizona, Florida) were tiny and unimportant until air conditioning entered the chat. Phoenix was at 100 thousand people in the fifties.

The cold makes us think, the cold make us survive, keeps us on the edge - where we need to be. Respek the cold!

Re: Ice core scientists in East Greenland reach bedrock

#170

Post by mytailorisrich » Mon, Jul 31, 2023, 7:38 PM UTC

angiosperm wrote: post #152

elzbardico wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do we need to get back to the levels pre-industrial revolution?

We have also pumped a very large amount of long-lived fluorine compounds into the air, that will last for centuries. They have from 2500x to 25000x times the "greenhouse gas warming potential", kg for kg. They are mostly refrigerants (CFCs, HFCs, and soon their successors) and transformer insulation gas (SF6). Volcanoes do emit some amount of fluorine compounds, too. We also have a great deal of methane leakage, whic…

I don't know about all compounds but CFCs stay in atmosphere for about a century only and we've already banned them, and methane has a very short lifetime of about 12 years. So we 'only' need to control emissions of those to solve the problem.

On the other hand, as said, CO2 stays for centuries if not 1,000+ years so at this point net zero is only half the job though probably the hardest part.