Scientists Have Been Underestimating the Pace of Climate Change

The article describes how long-tail outcomes have been excluded from forecasts out of a desire by scientists to present a unified voice so as to minimize perceived doubt.

hammock• 7 years ago

This comment is the real headline. The communication around the models has been manipulated to make the entire body of work seem more confident and consistent than it really is.

ryanmercer8• 7 years ago

Scientists have been giving confidence intervals and no one really paid attention to the wurst case scenario

The problem is, we've passed the worst case scenario scientists came up with in some areas:

Greenland's ice is melting at the rate scientists thought would be our worst-case scenario in 2070 https://www.businessinsider.com/greenland-ice-melting-is-207...

ReptileMan• 7 years ago

wurst case scenario.

As long as we have rye bread, mustard and beer, I am willing to risk it.

Also - typo of the year.

adrianN7• 7 years ago

It's long been known that the IPCC reports tend to be too conservative.

Nevertheless politicians take the numbers for the least dramatic predictions and turn them into promises that they then don't keep.

I guess that it won't be long before some country or other embarks on a unilateral geoengineering experiment. Perhaps when river basins in India start reaching lethal wet-bulb temperatures regularly. Let's just hope that it won't make things worse.

kgwgk5• 7 years ago

If they were too conservative why did they need to revise down their forecasts?

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/01/01/ipcc-silently-slashes...

DennisP3• 7 years ago

That says the IPCC revised down their final report from the earlier draft, which accurately described what the models projected. Your article even said they did that revision without consulting the scientists who made the models.

That's entirely consistent with the claim that the IPCC's final reports have been underplaying the actual science, for political reasons.

(Your article is also from five years ago, and still talks about the "missing warming." That was always nonsense, but even hardcore deniers have abandoned that talking point since warming in the last five years has been dramatic.)

addicted• 7 years ago

Just based on the url. (After having spent years reading it, I’m not touching Wattsupwiththat anymore)

“Silently slashes”: So silently that the information is easily available everywhere and is published publicly.

“AR5 Final draft”: Yes, it’s shocking that drafts change. It’s almost like the purpose of drafts is for them to be revised multiple times before they are published.

And finally, it’s almost a 100% that the “slashing” happened to get sign offs from political leaders of governments, without which they wouldn’t be able to publish the reports. If anything, this only illustrates exactly why the IPCC reports are far too conservative.

yk2• 7 years ago

They are slashing the forecast because global warming looks less bad if we call it 1.5 K instead of 2 K, but they actually did change the baseline instead of their predictions.

At least I guess that is what whattsupwiththat tries to scandalize, unlike the IPCC they are very hard to read, because they don't actually write clearly. (For example, they do not label whether plots are observed data or model output.)

imtringued4• 7 years ago

Revising down forecasts is conservatism.

darkmarmot• 7 years ago

Well, here comes Snowpiercer.

deftnerd2• 7 years ago

The global disaster in that movie was a plausible plot concept. Humanity is already talking about geo-engineering concepts based on aerosols to reflect sunlight. The Snowpiercer universe just kinda took the 'Ice 9' from Vonnegut's "Cat's Cradle" book and used it for geo-engineering.

If we had that kind of technology, we would probably consider it with similar disasterous results.

Technology that impacts the entire planet, wielded by a desperate species, can have disasterous consequences if things go wrong.

Lucky for us, a form of ice that is stable and has a higher melting point isn't a thing in our world...

Us genetically engineering hardy organisms to terraform our way out of the climate crisis is the more plausible 'oops' scenario. All it takes is one project underestimating the results of their work for things to go wildly wrong.

mirimir3• 7 years ago

Perhaps when river basins in India start reaching lethal wet-bulb temperatures regularly.

Or when migration pressure substantially increases.

But whatever, I'm guessing that it'll be too little, too late.

mywittyname4• 7 years ago

This is already happening. Earlier migrations could be hand-waved away as being due to politics and war, but the current migration crisis in North America is absolutely due to climate change.

The chain of events appears to be climate change -> political instability -> war -> migration -> more political instability.

kgwgk5• 7 years ago

Here are the predictions from the first IPCC assessment report published in 1990 for the business-as-usual scenario:

Increase in global temperature of 0.3 C per decade (1 C increase in 1990-2025); uncertainty range 0.2-0.5 C per decade.

Global mean sea level raise of 6 cm per decade (20 cm in 1990-2030); uncertainty range 3-10 cm per decade.

How were those predictions “too conservative”?

RubenSandwich2• 7 years ago

Because the IPCC didn't account for runaway positive feedback loops. So while the rise is slow, it is projected to increase exponentially as more of the Arctic melts: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bc/Sea_Leve... which is from a 2017 NOAA study[1].

It's also worth noting that while 3.3mm a year seems low. That is the average, the sea level is not rising evenly across the world. To make this example a bit more real and close to home as HN is mostly US-centric. The current sea level rise is about ~8in/21cm[2], and Miami Beach is already flooding every year. This is because Miami Beach is experiencing almost a 1in of sea-level rise each year according to Hal Wanless, a coastal geologist at the University of Miami[3]. So using NOAA's own maps which show Miami Beach mostly underwater at 3ft we will hit that scenario in about 30 years at current rates[4], but once again sea level rise is not increasing linearly.

[1] https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/publications/techrpt83_Glo...

[2] https://science2017.globalchange.gov/chapter/12/

[3] https://gizmodo.com/why-are-sea-levels-in-miami-rising-so-mu...

[4] https://coast.noaa.gov/slr/#/layer/slr/4/-8927570.466376439/... (You have to search for Miami Beach, the web app doesn't allow linking to locations.)

SNACKeR99• 7 years ago

It's not even a thing that needs to be known specific to IPCC - this is a side effect of anything requiring consensus between many people, in this case thousands of scientists (and politicians?). For everyone (or the majority) to agree to sign their name to it, it must deal with the lowest common denominator.

arvinsim• 7 years ago

No one wants to pay the cost of tackling this problem.

Especially not the for-profit corporations that are responsible for some of the worst pollution in the world.

Ironically, they own the biggest capital and resources to be able to tackle the problem that they are creating.

agent008t• 7 years ago

Why? Are there reasons to believe that the shareholders/board members of these companies would not be negatively affected by climate change? Or are they ignorant?

tonyedgecombe• 7 years ago

Presumably they think they are rich enough to buy themselves out of any problems.

hcurtiss• 7 years ago

There is abundant incentive to not act unilaterally in a manner that hurts the bottom line in a competitive environment (i.e., most business environments). There is very little incentive in that environment to act collectively.

nestedcaveats• 7 years ago

It's a tragedy of the commons situation. Any individual company could bankrupt itself with climate action and not make a dent in emissions. Worse, any progress they did make would be an excuse for other actors to lessen their own efforts. Little serious progress will be made until nation states start putting the screws to corporations and each other.

ryanmercer8• 7 years ago

The vast majority of people, at best, think climate channge is something that'll be a problem for their grandchildren or great grandchildren. Many still believe it is a made up thing the news/politicians created.

Many people don't care about long-term stuff either. Look at how many people have no qualms throwing trash out their car window. Look at how many people have no qualms about taking vacations flying all over the place racking up tons of CO2 personally.

Even YC created http://carbon.ycombinator.com as they acknowledge it's an issue (to some extent anyway) yet they still fly hundreds of people out to the Bay Area for in-person interviews each year to select founders for funding, which could instead be done via video chat and used kilograms of CO2 at worst instead of many tons (on average, a plane produces a little over 53 pounds of CO2 per mile. This can be somewhat higher or lower depending upon the type of aviation fuel).

And then take people that truly realize how much of a problem is like I do.

- I have to go to work, it is not practical for me to walk to work so I have to drive a car to work.

- It is not practical for me to not use electricity, living in an apartment I have to use it to cook, to dry my clothes even if I chose to wash them by hand, to run the air conditioning a good chunk of the year to keep the humidity down to prevent mold, to run the heat in the winter because it gets down to -12F/-24C a few days of the year

- I can't walk around naked and both natural fibers and synthetic fibers rely heavily on oil to manufacture

- I can't go buy food from my neighbor or grow my own in a garden, so my food is trucked across the country or even shipped from halfway around the world

So people like me go "nothing I do on a personal level is going to make a damn bit of difference, why bother" and you sit there watching Netflix knowing that every gigabyte you stream is probably another 100-300 grams of CO2 into the atmosphere.

And you sit there depressed - knowing you are breathing in microplastics, knowing you are eating and drinking microplastics, knowing those microplastics and other air pollutants are likely increasing your risk of cancer considerably, knowing that 30 something cities with populations over 1 million people have run out of clean water (or water entirely) including India's 6th largest city by population, knowing that it's probably unwise to have children because sooner or later in their life the world is going to become a largely shitty and miserable place when food/water wars start, knowing that global insect biomass has considerably reduced in your short 34 years on earth, knowing because you are barely in the lower middle class you're probably going to be one of the ones to starve at some point because you'll lose your job and have a hard time finding another and a crop failure or three will cause food prices to go up 200%, 300%, 1000% or more in your lifetime and you'll get to experience what life is like for people in North Korea when you're eating whatever you can get your hands on.

The shareholders, the C-level employees, don't care because they aren't feeling the impacts already. They have fancy houses, fancy cars, take fancy vacations, they wear nice clothes and have more money than they need. The bulk of them have never filed bankruptcy or worried regularly how they're going to put food on the table, the majority of them have never known real struggle. They aren't concerned about climate change because they think the money will always be flowing in and they'll always have stuff.

Look at the articles over the past few years about the rich buying land in New Zealand like Peter Thiel did.

ptah2• 7 years ago

companies only plan 3 months ahead so it is not really on their horizon

jajag2• 7 years ago

It's a time value of money problem; there's been plenty of investigation into the future costs of climate change (most notably the Stern Report [1]) but people prefer to have money now, rather than pay now to defer future cost.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stern_Review

ryanmercer8• 7 years ago

No one wants to pay the cost of tackling this problem.

No one can afford to. The most practical (wildly impractical and at present completely impossible) known method would be something akin to what YC proposes on http://carbon.ycombinator.com/desert-flooding/

They want to create 'pools' in the Sahara. Incredible amounts of desalination and pump the water into these pools to grow algae and then store the algae under anoxic conditions to effectively sequester the carbon. Problems with this:

- The cost simply to construct the pools, bring the desalination plants online, deploy pipes would be the single most expensive things humans have ever done, and may ever do.

- The power required to do this would exceed what humans already produce

- The amount of brine created would kill all life in coastal waters, we area already seeing this in the coastal waters of areas that currently heavily use desalination to provide freshwater to their populations. This would be on a scale several orders of magnitude larger.

- The amount of mining that would need to be done to provide the algae with what they need to grow beyond sunlight and atmospheric carbon

- The problem of actually sequestering thousands of gigatons of desiccated algae. Especially for the decades to centuries that would be required.

- The massive change in global weather patterns that could likely be catastrophic, that much evaporation over such a wide area would absolutely change weather patterns globally and would be extremely difficult to even remotely accurately model.

- Doing this in the Sahara would negatively impact the Amazon, the Sahara heavily fertilizes the Amazon as winds carry fine particles from the sand across the ocean. [1]

- The amount of clay, concrete, etc to create these 1 square kilometer reservoirs would alone likely make the project unworkable at the scale needed

- The cost of upkeep at the desalination plants, salt water is extremely corrosive, would cost unimaginable amounts of money. Maintaining pipes leading out to the reservoirs would similarly be extremely expensive.

- Running all of this pipe, in a desert you are suddenly introducing obscene amounts of humidity too via evaporation... you're probably going to generate some pretty incredible storms and it would not surprise me at all if you have regular failures/ruptures from lightning strikes on the pipes, the flash flooding (deserts can not handle even minimal amounts of rain well) would regularly cause massive damage to infrastructure as well

- Etc etc.

Sadly, the only realistic solution to the scenario is a fleet of alien ships showing up with exotic-to-us technology, gifting us clean power generation to meet our needs several times over and giving us some sort of widget to pull carbon straight out of the air and create carbon bricks out of it in exchange for IP rights to all of our tv shows and music for sale to the Galactic Hegemony.

The next most realistic solution would be to agree as an entire planet to safely shut down all fossil fuel processing operations and nuclear reactors, then EMP the entire planet and hope we can survive the next several decades of destabilizing weather while we learn how to be a pre-industrial revolution society again and wait a few centuries for the Earth to start to deal with the carbon on its own.

[1] https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/nasa-satellite-reveals-...

rficcaglia6• 7 years ago

Anything looking at 2040 timescales is inherently not enough. That’s the definition of passing the buck!

No, there needs to be a decision at the individual level and the investor level to forego easy money on building the next furry slipper delivery startup and only buy (a lot less for a lot more) from companies that take this seriously, work for companies that take this seriously, and invest in companies who can be serious today.

Otherwise, Earth will solve this little problem one way or another. The talking monkeys may not like it, though...

blacksqr2• 7 years ago

Why grow freshwater algae to sequester carbon when there's already a readily available supply of saltwater algae in the form of seaweed?

Take seaweed from ocean. Turn it into activated charcoal using solar pyrolysis. Bury the charcoal in farmland and marginal land to make terra preta. Terra preta sequesters carbon for hundreds of years and makes the soil more fertile, reducing the need for fossil-based fertilizers. Plant trees and grass on the marginal land.

Scarblac3• 7 years ago

Removing CO2 is extremely expensive, sure.

But we're still adding CO2, in fact we're still increasing the rate at which we're adding it!

selimthegrim2• 7 years ago

Brine can be recycled (as someone previously posted on HN)

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/desalination-brea...

goodcanadian• 7 years ago

It's a classic tragedy of the commons. It is in everyone's best interest for everyone to act, but it is in hardly anyone's individual interest to act alone if no one else does.

kingkawn2• 7 years ago

waiting for business people to solve this problem is silly.

We need an institution that represents a broad cross section of the population. Something like...government

KnightOfWords• 7 years ago

And on top of that, inter-government cooperation to tackle a global problem. Like we had to address CFCs pollution. With the political will to sanction countries that deny the evidence and won't play ball.

rficcaglia6• 7 years ago

If one country can’t get its stuff together across religious, educational, socioeconomic and cultural barriers....how can a planet scale coordinated governmental effort by committee work?

Ask Al Gore how that worked. Or the Paris Treaty folks.

1PlayerOne2• 7 years ago

It is a strange moment in time we are in when government is no longer seen as a viable solution to problems. The consensus to act in the common good is being diverted into niche outlets. Is it a result of technological advance in communication? And how do we solve this problem? With more technology?

crazynick4• 7 years ago

Yes, as long as the government recognizes that the ones who created the problem are the ones who should pay for it, in other words the businesses and not the people.

rayiner• 7 years ago

Geez, I didn’t know that “for-profit corporations” where out there releases GHGs into the atmosphere just for funsies.

Also, fun fact: “not for profit corporations” in the Soviet Union were massively more polluting per unit of output: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-grim-pollution-pictur_b_9.... GHG emissions scale with energy efficiency, and in a socialist state that subsidized energy as an essential need, they had no incentive to be efficient.

GHGs are the result of the stuff people want—food, transportation, next day Amazon delivery, etc. for-profit corporations are a way to deliver that level of stuff as efficiently as possible.

orthecreedence2• 7 years ago

You're right. The problem isn't the corporations, it's the system that allows them to exist.

We need a system that prices items based on actual costs: scarcity of raw materials, labor, pollution, and difficulty of recycling/reuse.

Currently capitalism only prices in scarcity of raw materials and labor, and even those it does a pretty shitty job of. Whether the state controls industry or not is ancillary to the need for pricing actual costs into things, which capitalism is completely incapable of.

What's really needed is complete transparency in primary production, such that if I buy a TV, I can see all the manufacturers/shippers, all the inputs to production, and all the workers and what they are paid in order to make that TV. Then the individual can decide between the TV that takes a liter of oil to produce or a TV that used solar energy for 60% of its production.

I'm sick of people pretending that capitalism is "democracy through spending." We don't have the information needed to make it democracy through spending. The market pricing system obscures all useful information and aggregates it into a completely useless number.

mbostleman• 7 years ago

By they, you mean collectively? In the US the government annually diverts more than 25% of GDP, which is about 650 times what the largest private company diverts annually as profit and 100 times more than what that company has on it's balance sheet. So if we want to find the single entity that "own[s] the biggest capital and resources to be able to tackle the problem", it's the government. I think it might be more effective if we, being in a democracy, would tell the government to change its priorities for all that resource. But then that would mean it's our fault which means we wouldn't be able to point fingers at others.

michlsemn• 7 years ago

One of the memes on https://reddit.com/r/collapse is "faster than expected," referencing the frequent articles mentioning how climate change's effects are kicking in much sooner than expected.

diveloper• 7 years ago

I don't know how to feel about that subreddit. On one hand, they discuss the daunting reality of climate change in a way you don't see in many other corners of the internet (besides HN). On the other hand, reading it is definitely not good for one's mental health and they often don't propose any solutions, and generally the mood is a very "we lost, the game is over" attitude. That's not going to help anyone, even if we are too late to stop a large amount of warming.

CalRobert2• 7 years ago

I stop by that subreddit every few months and it is frustrating that the only places people seem honest with themselves about the real impact of this is also filled with fatalism. Maybe they're right.

Even so, it's still worth _trying_ to fix it, or barring that, to try to save as many billions from a horrible death as possible.

The approach taken by Dark Mountain is a little better I think - they don't focus on false hopes, but a literary response to the catastrophe (apocalypse might be a better word) on the horizon and how to deal with it on a human level.

We're all doomed, after all, by dint of our mortality (or our sun's, barring that). Moments of joy can still be had.

SlowRobotAhead• 7 years ago

Doom and gloom porn.

You can be certain the people on that sub throw plastic forks into their recycling for someone else to “sort”, drive so inefficiently their foot might as well always be on the brakes, order things from Amazon Prime they could get locally, spray pesticides and fertilizers on their lawn so they’ll have greener grass than their neighbors, make posts supporting climate change summits where everyone shows up in private jets....

Basically I’ve found extremely few people who make climate change their primary issue - walk the walk. They’ll be the first to tell you it’s tankers shipping all over the world of meat production that is the issue - while driving their aluminum and lithium Tesla (both shipped around the world for processing/production) to the store to get a New York steak for dinner and plugging in to their house which is powered by coal. There is no shortage of hypocrisy in this topic but I find it most ironic from the doom and gloomers of course.

deftnerd2• 7 years ago

Oh, we've certainly lost as a society, but we'll likely survive as a species for a few hundred or thousand years, albeit at vastly reduced population levels. We're scrappy as a species.

We kicked in a climate shift that's triggering an unstoppable mass-extinction event that'll wipe out 99.9% of all species. Historically, recovery from mass extinction events like these take 50 million years for a new ecosystem to develop. We might survive through that, but it's longer than we've even existed as a species so we'll be nothing like what we are now.

I was a Gen X'r. My 9-year-old has started saying that he's Generation Omega - something he picked up from youtube - He believes that he's a member of the last generation (and I think I concur... things will get bad enough that by 2030 or 2040, people won't want to have kids because the death of the ecosystem and civilization will be a lot more obvious and something that impacts their daily life)

In anticipation of this, I moved to a region of Upstate New York that prediction models indicate will handle the climate impacts a little more gracefully. The goal is to build a self-sufficient homestead with longevity and extremes in mind.

Humanity cannot survive as a species like that though. We really need to start thinking of how to build town-sized or city-sized "arcology" habitats while we still have the resources and energy to do so.

Arcologies should be viewed as a backup plan to trying to save the planet. A sort of civilization time-capsule. If we fail to save our ecosystem and climate, then arcologies could provide a shelter for a few million people for a few thousand years while we figure out what to do next (engineering our biology to handle the environmental changes? terraforming? going off planet? expanding underground? engineering a new ecosystem?).

Sadly, arcologies are too expensive and would take so long to build that they're politically untenable with governments that either don't believe in climate change, or change every 4 years. Norway could probably do it with 25% of their Sovereign Wealth Fund.

I know it's fatalistic, but I honestly only see our chance of survival at this point is if someone cracks inexpensive and easy fusion power. With that, we could power a lot of carbon sequestration concepts that are just currently impractical. That, or a benevolent AI that takes over and forces a lot of uncomfortable changes to our society "for our own good"

rv-de2• 7 years ago

You're at stage "bargaining", they're already somewhere between "depression" and "acceptance" - that's all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%BCbler-Ross_model

TekMol5• 7 years ago

What if humans collectively decided to not have any new kids anymore and maximize quality of life for the humans that already are living on planet earth?

I would love to see this thought experiment thought out in detail. What decisions would we make? Where would we invest? Would climate control still be an issue?

malvosenior6• 7 years ago

Humanity would die out. Doesn’t seem very useful.

rficcaglia6• 7 years ago

It would be to the other 99.9999% of species. Maybe E Coli amd Herpes beasties get the shaft.

hyperbovine• 7 years ago

Define useful.

ptah2• 7 years ago

i think it would lead to humanity's extinction as the humans that are around now will eventually die

kzrdude• 7 years ago

We could start with a global two children policy. But it's extremely hard to go even there.

Two because we should have second chances, and alone children are less socially adapted than those with siblings.

kgwgk5• 7 years ago

The global fertility rate is below 2.5 children per woman today. We're almost there.

martythemaniak3• 7 years ago

Children Of Men is a great movie on this topic, you can give it a watch.

But I'm genuinely curious about people that think like you. Okay, so everyone dies by about 2100, then what? What is the point of basically anything?

TekMol5• 7 years ago

What is the point if humans exist another 1000 years? Or does it have to be a million years? How many years does it need to breed meaning?

rficcaglia6• 7 years ago

I love Childhood’s End [0]

Also there’s this : http://vhemt.org/

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childhood%27s_End

alistproducer2• 7 years ago

A gigantic "no thanks" to vhemt.org. Thanks for the recommendation on the book. I'm gonna pick that up.

jessaustin• 7 years ago

A good investment would be armaments and ammunition. The only way such inhumane rules could be satisfied would be through large-scale violent enforcement. "Collectively decided" is a euphemism.

imtringued4• 7 years ago

And Mars colony technology. We can simply use it on earth.

adrianN7• 7 years ago

Since the large majority of all humans will still be alive in twenty years the climate will still be ruined even if no more children were born starting today.

TekMol5• 7 years ago

How do you know that?

There are over 100 million kids born per year.

So after one year we would already have less emissions caused by 100 million people.

After 20 years we would be 2 billion people less. That's quite significant.

vgoh1• 7 years ago

First of all, humans are the only sentient beings in the known universe. Second, most humans have children because that is maximizing their quality of life - it is a living organisms instinct to replicate, and (most) humans are no different. If you feel different, check the stats on how many have children, and think, you may just be in a bubble. Humans have endured millennia of starvation and disease, try to keep our upcoming hardships in perspective.

Beyond reasons why it would not maximize our quality of life, collectively deciding to not have kids just would not do any good. You are taking people 'like you' out of the gene pool, while people who choose to not go with the collective will procreate.

TekMol5• 7 years ago

    most humans have children because that is
    maximizing their quality of life

Citation needed. I have read several studies about which factors improve quality of life. I cannot remember a single one that had "children" in the list of factors that significantly improve happiness.

plevexier• 7 years ago

selfishness + nihilism, what a program...

Scarblac3• 7 years ago

It would change fuck all. The regions where there is still a lot of population growth (e.g. Africa) are so far behind in qualify of life compared to the massively CO2-emitting countries that any attempt to improve their qualify of life means we continue to increase the CO2 output for decades more.

Anyway, there is no chance that humans will collectively decide anything, least of all that.

Dumblydorr5• 7 years ago

We rely on a mixture of generations in society, you need young healthy taxpayers to support the elders who raised them.

GrayTextIsTruth• 7 years ago

what if humans collectively aligned with populist ideologies and stoped caring about equality, democracy, capitalism, materialism, consumerism?

systems that maximize human rights and equality were created in a vacuum and ignore external side-effects.

francisofascii• 7 years ago

What about the idea of adding particulates to the atmosphere to block a portion of the sun's rays?

Dumblydorr5• 7 years ago

We could try to simulate a volcanic eruption, which have demonstrably cooled the planet in the past. Also I wonder with cheaper rocket flights, can we put sunlight reflectors over the arctic regions to save their ice?

sitkack3• 7 years ago

A couple of strategically detonated nukes on a tradwind path should cool things down. The same super computers that predict the weather can predict exact placement and yield.

chr1• 7 years ago

Instead of putting reflectors into orbit it would be cheaper to use hot air balloons, but in general either reflectors or balloons are the best solution to climate change, because they allow to actually control the weather, and the amount of rain different places get. By creating more rains over sahara, we'll not only get more place to live, but the new ecosystem there would consume all the CO2 that was added by us into atmosphere, so we even wouldn't need to reduce the oil usage for now.

elijahlito• 7 years ago

Seems to be a really good solution, which is I am perplexed on what all the panic is about

arctangos• 7 years ago

Large releases of atmospheric sulfuric particulates tend to be highly correlated with mega-droughts in the southern hemisphere and disruption of the African and Indian Monsoons, leading to famine and mass displacement.

Of course, It's very difficult to establish causality, but there's some information about it.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221209471...

climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/pdf/GeoengineeringJGR9inPress.pdf

https://archive.org/details/travelsthroughsy02voln/page/n6

gambiting• 7 years ago

We're already doing this. If we stopped all of our emissions tomorrow, the global temperatures would suddenly get a lot hotter, not colder for a while.

It's called an Aerosol Masking Effect and it's explained here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/cl3ger/record_he...

doe883• 7 years ago

I think given the current political climate (sic), scientists tends to be overly cautious on these subjects. They know they can be berated for any not fully proven detail or tiny error. All in all I don't think this is a bad thing, forces against real changes are such that incremental actions are the norm anyway.

s9w4• 7 years ago

It's curious how the situation can be viewed like this. In my experience it's the exact opposite. Headlines in my country (Germany) are absolutely dominated by the climate doomsday scenarios. Taxpayers spent hundets of millions of euros for "greener" energy, entire industries are ruined. We even killed nuclear because it's somehow not green enough. Heck even fusion energy is too evil. Fridays for future and the green party are dictating what is allowed to be said. Dozens of German cities are literally in a climate state of emergency (no joke). The sky is falling according to everyone.

std_throwaway• 7 years ago

Well, the sky is very likely falling but it is falling so slowly that the older generation won't see any severe effects. In the great scheme it won't matter so much what Germany does if the rest of the world continues to burn the coal. The only direct effect that deindustrializing Germany has is it will kill the German economy today.

doe883• 7 years ago

I'm no expert but seems to me your country (Germany) has long been in front on these issues, you have a strong green party and activists since the 70'. But hidden forces were and are nevertheless still looming, see the automobile industry and the scandal with diesel emissions, I'm sure there are scrambling to transition toward EV but in the meantime I would not be surprised if they battled behind closed doors to slow the adoption or proposal of measures that could hurt their business and in the end German economy.

p0nce• 7 years ago

I wish we were all as concerned as germans.

mgoetzke2• 7 years ago

But in Germany it is mostly us (i.e. the citizens) having to pay directly via taxes on electricity or fuel etc and arcane ways to get any subsidies.

Where big corporations are doing squat it seems.

adrianN7• 7 years ago

And yet Germany has missed their climate goals for 2020 (which were already incompatible with the Paris agreement), and has dramatically slashed wind turbine construction (after dramatically slashing solar construction a few years earlier).

makomk• 7 years ago

I'd tend to agree - we're not even remotely cautious about claims about the pace of climate change. For example, a few months ago there was a (now largely retracted) scientific paper claiming the oceans had been soaking up much more heat than previously thought due to global warming, something like 60% more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18352506

This was clearly suspect. The paper used a weird, indirect method to measure something that we could measure pretty much directly and got results that contradicted the direct measurements. The obvious conclusion was that their measurement method didn't work and it should've required some really strong evidence to overcome that presumption. Yet the entire press ran terrifying headlines and stories treating its conclusions as indisputable facts showing our world was even more doomed than previously though and the HN discussion was dominated by prophecies of doom.

It fell to a climate change skeptic to figure out that they'd substantially underestimated the margin of error in their calculations and that their complicated indirect measurement method simply wasn't accurate enough to conclude that the oceans had absorbed more heat than the previous measurements said. Which is why it's been corrected and the better news outlets have published corrections abandoning the original claims of doom which, naturally, most of the people who saw the original terrifying stories would never see.

ryanmercer8• 7 years ago

We even killed nuclear because it's somehow not green enough.

Unfortunately for some areas, that might be a necessity going forward. Just last month France had to scale back their nuclear power when they couldn't sufficiently cool the reactors due to a combination of the heatwave and less rain than normal, Germany was also affected by that.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-electricity-heatwa...

carapace• 7 years ago

Dr. Gwynne Dyer gave a talk, "Geopolitics in a Hotter World" – Sept. 2010

So when the Hadley Centre put these numbers out they were incorporating (which the IPCC does not) the early impacts of positive feedbacks, as well as just how much carbon dioxide will we put into the air by 2060. First time that had been done, but it gives you a really frightening number…and then they did the map. Which is again, something that’s not normally done, and the consequence is we don’t have a lot of time. We’re in deep trouble. And the military know this; the military know this everywhere.
the rule of thumb is that you lose 10% of global food production for every 1 degree Celsius higher average global temperature.
So food becomes the critical issue and the countries most impacted are tropical and subtropical and this is where the geopolitics comes from.
“people always raid before they starve.”
There’s already a well established pattern: when you’re in deep trouble and you can’t feed your family, head north.
But the dirty secret is that you can only shut a border if you’re willing to kill people.
No government that cannot feed its population survives.
We’re going to go through the point of no return (and probably a good deal further) in terms of the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Almost certain.
And there is maybe a way to cheat: and that is geoengineering.
“we’ve crunched the numbers and we figure we could get one degree Celsius of cooling average worldwide just by painting all the roads and the roofs white.”
I talked–actually, the head of the Bangladesh Institute of Strategic Studies about this (you didn’t even know that existed, did you?). Well, there is one, it’s quite serious–run by a General, bright guy. I said, “have you heard about geoengineering?” and he smiled–seraphically–and he said, “Mmm. Yes. Your question?”
And I asked the question, “Do you think that this is something the Bangladesh government might want to do a little bit, before, let’s say, the US government or the Chinese government?”
He said, “yes it has crossed our minds.”–and then he stopped talking.

...

Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mc_4Z1oiXhY

Transcribed: https://spaswell.wordpress.com/2016/11/18/dr-gwynne-dyer-geo...

aszantu• 7 years ago

Doesn't water cool when it changes state? Ice melting should be pulling down temps for the time in that spot? More heat would evaporate more water and thus cool more?

RyanAF74• 7 years ago

Except methane is the cause and intentionally so as it will dissapate in less than a decade but make it appear as if the world is warming more quickly than estimated.

It's a trick and people eat this shit up hook line and ignorant sinker.

EForEndeavour• 7 years ago

What a sad account.

RyanAF74• 7 years ago

What a pedestrian response.

mikelyons4• 7 years ago

It is really interesting to look through. Ton's of conclusion jumping, ideology, cynicism. I mean, it's only sad if you have transcended this stuff, otherwise it's relatable probably!

mikelyons4• 7 years ago

This comment seems like it would be flagged/dead by now ... Do you have any citations for the claims you make?

RyanAF74• 7 years ago

You're welcome to research and learn - I suggest you start with hydroxyl radicals.

Asking for citation in a world of counter examples and studies is a little technocratic. Maybe just logic and learn it.

GatitoLindo2• 7 years ago

"Elsewhere we have documented a pattern we label "erring on the side of least drama." By this we mean that scientists often have a tendency to avoid dramatic findings, because drama is associated with emotion, feelings, irrationality, and even femininity, qualities that have traditionally been viewed as at odds with scientific rationality. We have shown that in several domains related to climate change, scientists' estimates of various threats - CO2 emissions, Arctic Sea ice loss, Sea level rise - have tended to be low relative to actual outcomes. Scientists considered such underestimates to be "conservative" because they are conservative with respect to the question of when to sound an alarm or how loudly to sound it. (It is of course not conservative when viewed in terms of giving people adequate time to prepare.) The history recounted here is consistent with this finding: That WAIS assessments underestimated the threat of rapid ice sheet disintegration, because most of the scientists who participated were more comfortable with an estimate that they viewed as "Conservative" than with one that was not." (Discerning Experts, 2019. Michael Oppenheimer, Naomi Oreskes, Dale Jamieson, Keynyn Brysse, Jessica O'Reilly, Matthew Shindell, and Milena Wazeck)

Scientists Have Been Underestimating the Pace of Climate Change

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