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Antarctic sea ice hits lowest minimum on record

nature.com

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Re: Antarctic sea ice hits lowest minimum on record

#61

Post by pdonis »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #49
Gravityloss wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The scientists know this. Paleoclimatology is one big part of climatology. But the outcome is the opposite - you should be more scared, since it shows that climate can change massively. That affects things like agriculture or sea level. What would you assume the sea level was, when those plants were alive? For example, with very quick search: "In general, world oceans were about 100 to 200 metres (330 to 660 feet) hi…

Okay, I'd like to respond to this, " ... you should be more scared, " Can you reason to that position? Here is how I see it, and perhaps that will make my position more clear. I'm going to die (so are you). Every year, the probability that I'm going to die in the next year goes up bit by bit. I don't expect to read articles that continually harp on "look how close to death you are, are you sure you don't want to eat…

> All the science tells is that there is more energy available for things like hurricane and cyclones which are powered by the difference between surface and atmospheric temperatures

Actually, they're powered ultimately by the difference between polar and tropical temperatures, correct? A cyclone is basically just a big thing that transports energy from the tropics to the poles to equalize an imbalance. And warming affects the poles more than the tropics, so the difference between polar and tropical temperatures, and hence the energy available for cyclones, should be decreasing, not increasing.

Re: Antarctic sea ice hits lowest minimum on record

#62

Post by jjcon »

anonporridge wrote: post #29
systemvoltage wrote: post #5

Pardon my crudity, but is there a reason to not build a bunch of nuclear power plants + carbon suckers powered by electricity?

Ok, you spend your time and resources doing that, and I'll spend mine increasing my military and economic might. Now replace 'you' and 'me' with competing nation states and super powers. It's a kind of geopolitical prisoner's dilemma. We're all screwed to different degrees if we do nothing, but everyone has an incentive to be a parasite, letting 90% of the world use their energy working on this problem that distribut…

I actually think if we had the technology to do that we probably would be, we spend billions on climate research and even on carbon sequestration tech but we just don't have a good scalable way to do it yet.

Re: Antarctic sea ice hits lowest minimum on record

#63

Post by rajup »

anonporridge wrote: post #18
generalizations wrote: post #6

If the temperature drop becomes inevitable, I wonder if it'd be worthwhile to just colonize Antarctica to make up for the lost landmass elsewhere. Maybe it's time to have more than scientists living there.

The vast mass of humans who will be displaced by sea level rise will come from hot, humid regions of the world, primarily southeast Asia, https://www.climatecentral.org/news/report-flooded-future-gl... Suggesting that people who are both biologically and culturally adapted to hot, equatorial climates migrate to Antarctica as a primary solution to this displacement strikes me as absurd. Having said that, I think colon…

I sort of understand the cultural aspect of it, curious what you mean by the biological adaptation needed. As far as I know a person from the tropics has no problem living in Canada (well sure they complain about how cold it is, but they do fine).

Re: Antarctic sea ice hits lowest minimum on record

#64

Post by NineStarPoint »

sfe22 wrote: post #10
systemvoltage wrote: post #5

Pardon my crudity, but is there a reason to not build a bunch of nuclear power plants + carbon suckers powered by electricity?

Do we even have an efficient way to extract carbon using electricity?

Define efficient. We have ways that take about as much electricity to remove the CO2 from the air as we get from burning the fossil fuels today. If we got to a point where we have an extreme energy surplus, we could do it. But as long as we're burning fossil fuels to generate electricity, we can't really pull the CO2 out of the atmosphere more efficiently than we can put it here. It does allow a type of location arbitrage, where places that are good at producing clean energy could pull gas out of the air for places that don't have any options besides fossil fuels. You'd have to convince the places burning fossil fuels that it's worth paying the clean energy rich places for that service though. Then after you have it out of the air, storage becomes another hard issue.

At the moment there's the low hanging fruit of carbon capture at plants that burn the fuels, which can be done many times more efficiently.

Re: Antarctic sea ice hits lowest minimum on record

#65

Post by Gravityloss »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #49
Gravityloss wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The scientists know this. Paleoclimatology is one big part of climatology. But the outcome is the opposite - you should be more scared, since it shows that climate can change massively. That affects things like agriculture or sea level. What would you assume the sea level was, when those plants were alive? For example, with very quick search: "In general, world oceans were about 100 to 200 metres (330 to 660 feet) hi…

Okay, I'd like to respond to this, " ... you should be more scared, " Can you reason to that position? Here is how I see it, and perhaps that will make my position more clear. I'm going to die (so are you). Every year, the probability that I'm going to die in the next year goes up bit by bit. I don't expect to read articles that continually harp on "look how close to death you are, are you sure you don't want to eat…

No post body was provided.

Re: Antarctic sea ice hits lowest minimum on record

#66

Post by elevenoh »

988747 wrote: post #60

At the same time Arctic is having close to record high ice coverage: https://weather.co/analysis/arctic-sea-ice-extent-second-hig... Can it simply be some natural cycle that makes the ice cap shift from one pole to the other?

>At the same time Arctic is having close to record high ice coverage

Too bad there's no incentive for media balance surrounding climate-hysteria

Re: Antarctic sea ice hits lowest minimum on record

#67

Post by CalRobert »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #3

I am not a "denier", I can recognize that anthropomorphic activities are changing the climate over time and we're not prepared to deal with that. But this sort of article annoys me because "on record" represents a nanosecond of geologic time. There are mountains, and plant fossils [1] under the ice at Antartica, so at some point in the geologic record there was little to no ice at all! And no humans likely either, wh…

That doesn't seem like the right comparison to make, though. The time when there was no ice was not a time conducive to humans (or civilisation, at the very least).

Re: Antarctic sea ice hits lowest minimum on record

#68

Post by Gravityloss »

jjcon wrote: post #43
gnatman wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just went looking for a map to see how different coastlines would look with a 200m sea level rise. It's, unsurprisingly, significant!! https://www.floodmap.net/

Certainly significant but that also happens on a massive time scale - the best estimates have us up 0.7 meters in 2100. https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/us-coastline-to-see-up-to-...

Unfortunately, that's just linear extrapolation from current rates.

Ice sheet collapse can be extremely nonlinear, accelerating rapidly. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-05003-z.pdf?origi... Or watch any of Eric Rignot's presentations in youtube. The term is Marine Ice Sheet Instability.

This video in my opinion gives a fun demonstration of it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLdaAKIkpKA

Miscommunicating sea level rise risk is a big problem.

Re: Antarctic sea ice hits lowest minimum on record

#69

Post by CalRobert »

988747 wrote: post #60

At the same time Arctic is having close to record high ice coverage: https://weather.co/analysis/arctic-sea-ice-extent-second-hig... Can it simply be some natural cycle that makes the ice cap shift from one pole to the other?

https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/arctic-sea-ice/ might be a more reputable source. It does not support the claim that the arctic is near record high ice coverage.

Re: Antarctic sea ice hits lowest minimum on record

#70

Post by jl6 »

gnatman wrote: post #14
Gravityloss wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The scientists know this. Paleoclimatology is one big part of climatology. But the outcome is the opposite - you should be more scared, since it shows that climate can change massively. That affects things like agriculture or sea level. What would you assume the sea level was, when those plants were alive? For example, with very quick search: "In general, world oceans were about 100 to 200 metres (330 to 660 feet) hi…

I just went looking for a map to see how different coastlines would look with a 200m sea level rise. It's, unsurprisingly, significant!! https://www.floodmap.net/

Interesting that even at a ridiculous, unprecedented 500m sea level rise, there are still substantial areas of dry land. It would be a radically different world, and a smaller one for us land based animals, but it doesn’t seem outlandish that civilization could persist.
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