‘Something weird is going on’: Antarctic sea ice stays at historic lows

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/29/something-weird-is-going-on-search-for-answers-as-antarctic-sea-ice-stays-at-historic-lows

by tda • 3 years ago

59 108 3 years ago

theguardian.com

tda2• 3 years ago

“It is very much outside our understanding of this system.”

This is what worries me: climate change leading to entirely new regimes that we don't understand and thus can't model or predict with any accuracy. You just can't build a seawall for a sealevel rise of between 50 and 300 cm somewhere in about 20 to 50 years. Or for heatwaves of maximum 35 to 45 degrees, precipitation of max 20-100mm/hour, etc. Climate adaptation will be even more challenging if we don't know what we are adapting to

myshpa22• 3 years ago

in about 20 to 50 years

That's the optimistic timeline :)

I've read somewhere that up to half of Antarctic sea ice could easily disappear in hours or days, given right conditions. Greenland is not looking good either.

https://richardcrim.substack.com/p/coming-soon

When Greenland melts completely global sea levels will rise about 20 feet, or 7 meters.

We aren’t talking about “if” anymore. We are way past that. Now, we are discussing “how fast”.

It could happen much faster than we used to think.

With “Global Warming” temperature is only half of the equation. The other half is speed. With Global Warming, the faster it happens, the worse it is.

Very funny clip on the topic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNYp6oc37ds

PartiallyTyped5• 3 years ago

The sheer banality of the situation is astounding.

jacquesm4• 3 years ago

That's the big problem with anything involving feeback loops. There is a domain where it's unstable and then a small change can cause big and surprisingly rapid effects. Nature is full of such tricky stuff and there is unfortunately no manual so we are learning a lot of this stuff by experiencing it first hand.

basisword2• 3 years ago

If we aren’t able to predict it then we need to assume the worst. Start moving inland/to higher areas now. I’m not optimistic though. I don’t understand why people (with the means) continue to live and rebuild in areas that regularly get savaged by hurricanes, earthquakes and other natural disasters.

hotpotamus• 3 years ago

I think of Buckminster Fuller's "Spaceship Earth" concept of how we are all the crew on a spaceship and need to work together, and Jim Morrison's quote, "I'm just trying to get my kicks before the whole shithouse goes up in flames", and I believe the model that humanity operates under is most accurately summarized as "Shithouse Earth".

myshpa22• 3 years ago

Start moving inland/to higher areas now ... hurricanes, earthquakes and other natural disasters

Crop failures, famines, civilization collapse, wars, violence, slavery ...

lm284692• 3 years ago

This is what worries me: climate change leading to entirely new regimes that we don't understand and thus can't model or predict with any accuracy.

People have been talking about that for a while, we're playing god right now but we have no idea what's coming. It's the same thing every time we try something with nature, what seems easy and simple turns out to have massive side effects we couldn't imagine because every little thing is inter dependant

Gigachad2• 3 years ago

Meanwhile HN will freak out over some loose study about aspartame or nano plastics, but dismiss extremely sound research on climate change. Clearly brainwashed by decades of corporate marketing.

BasedAnon8• 3 years ago

faster... than expected you say?

https://www.fasterthanexpected.com/

FrustratedMonky2• 3 years ago

Yes. We have lots of models, some of the biggest super computers crunching them.

But models are still estimates. There can still be un-knowns. Scientist have been writing about un-known, or difficult to model feedback loops for awhile. That is the movie-style doomsday, where we hit some un-foreseen tipping point and climate change takes off.

Instead view climate as a large dynamic system, you hit it hard enough, maybe it moves to a different stability point. Even with small systems this can be hard to estimate with a model.

Of course, this is the plot to the movie "Day After Tomorrow".

But just because it was the plot to a movie doesn't mean it can't be a real risk.

fragmede3• 3 years ago

All models are wrong, some are useful.

At the scale we're talking about, with the number of cases we have (one, Earth), all our models are going to become more and more wrong the further off from our current equilibrium we get. But yes, Day After Tomorrow.

FrustratedMonky2• 3 years ago

Yeah. didn't mean to say models are wrong. Just that because they are estimates, that it is likely that some unknown variable, or unknown feedback, could dramatically shift climate more than the model would show. So this worse than expected melting in Antarctica could be some 'disaster-movie-level-unforeseen-event'.

ChatGTP3• 3 years ago

Another day passes, another day nowhere near enough is being done to get on top of this situation.

If the US government had any brains, they'd be setting up a WW2 style mobilization against climate change and moving towards almost immediate decarbonization. This is an international effort working with NATO allies. It would only benefit everyone. New industry, safer economic outcomes long term, nicer world to live in. Lastly, it would be a sign that America are capable of leading the world into the future. IMO the longer the US drops the ball on this, the less competent it's starting to look. If China didn't follow suit, it would look equally weak, especially to it's own people so it would also need to respond.

I'm picking on the US here because they're happy to be leaders in war, arms, tech and economics, but in this case, we're hardly anywhere to be seen and showing pretty much zero meaningful leadership.

If we don't, who will?

Looking what is going on around the world, I really can't even imagine a functioning economy in 20 years. Looking at how many heat records have fallen this year, it's really hard to even imagine what the world will look like in 2043.

Look at parts of Europe, they seem pretty much uninhabitable during summer now. Phoenix, AZ... yes it's a hot place to being with but I mean, will people just be living there in the 130s?

myshpa22• 3 years ago

The worse the situation becomes, the less will be done.

We could have taken action even 10, 20, or 40 years ago, but so far, we have done nothing significant to prevent it from happening.

The longer we wait, the more expensive and complicated the solutions will become. Politicians are often reluctant to make unpopular moves that might anger their base, so they tend to focus on short-term goals rather than long-term sustainability (though Bernie might have been an exception, imho). We are searching for solutions that maintain the status quo.

One of the most significant issues is the exponential growth driven by our financial system's need for constant growth. Yet, we have not even begun to start discussing that.

https://futureearth.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/great_acc...

If we don't, who will?

Those few who'll somehow manage to stay alive.

basisword2• 3 years ago

> We've so far done nothing to stop it from happening.

That is completely untrue. We’ve certainly not done enough but the world of 40, 20 and even 10 years ago was much worse. Unfortunately most of the changes have been ones forced on individuals while businesses and governments continue to pollute and cause damage.

throwanem2• 3 years ago

the exponential growth of the human population driven by our financial system's need for constant growth. Yet, we have not even begun to start discussing that

Probably a good place to begin that discussion would be with some sort of demonstration that this is actually a thing that's happening. It seems like a difficult [1] argument to construct, so you should probably get on that.

[1] https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/world-populat...

oezi4• 3 years ago

Human population growth has stopped everywhere except some African countries.

candiddevmike• 3 years ago

Republicans have made climate denial part of their identity. The US isn't capable of doing anything federally until the nation is reunified.

ChatGTP3• 3 years ago

This is a good point, but is much being done while a democrat is in charge? Seems like Joe has squandered the best part of another term.

Amendment: I didn't mean he is doing nothing, or a bad job, but he could even just address the UN or NATO and actually explain that while his hands are tied, he could offer support in any other way possible until America gets his head correct.

jhgfjhgfjhfgjhg4• 3 years ago

Look up Democrats' views on nuclear energy.

fragmede3• 3 years ago

Thankfully, China has already been making large investments in solar power and batteries. Might not be enough to save us, but it's enough to note.

oezi4• 3 years ago

I think it wouldn't even require so much as a WW2 mobilization. It needs 3-6% of GDP (globally) to replace fossils fuels and get to net Zero.

zingababba• 3 years ago

The intellectual energy in the US is entirely beholden to economics at the present. There are plenty of intelligent individuals who could be mobilized on this issue but by and large they are subjugated by the language of economics into chasing teh dollarz.

Like you mentioned, mobilization is possible, look at WW2, intellectuals were entirely captured to serve military efforts during that period. Then w/ the neolib period it shifted to being captured by the language of economics which is where we are currently.

It really is on the precarious cognitariat to break the shackles of the current burden of working inside of the stagnant linguistic framework of economics. Economics is anti-science.

CrzyLngPwd2• 3 years ago

I don't believe there is anything we can do about the impending climate changes.

In my opinion all we can do is learn, prepare, and adapt.

myshpa22• 3 years ago

I don't believe there is anything we can do about the impending climate changes.

But there is (something we could do).

Climate change is caused by pollution and overconsumption.

We're perfectly capable to change that ... we just don't want to.

If we don't, the nature will force us.

As it does with every species in overshoot.

all we can do is learn, prepare, and adapt

But we don't know how it will play out. Imagine building a jenga tower. You'll remove a brick from the base and put it on top. The more you build the less stable the structure becomes.

Our society is an extremely complex system.

We don't know when and how, but we know it will collapse. And nobody can even know how it will look, what to expect, and what to prepare for.

Even those bunkers of our tech elites won't do them much good.

revscat• 3 years ago

We would need to immediately stop the production and sale of all fossil fuels worldwide, at the point of a gun if necessary.

The chances of this happening are zero.

bluescrn3• 3 years ago

Climate change is caused by pollution and overconsumption. We're perfectly capable to change that ... we just don't want to.

Yes, we can turn rich countries into poor countries by taking away transport, energy, and protein from the working class, and there's growing support for that approach.

But that approach also destroys most of the hope for technological solutions.

And even if the richest countries did sacrifice everything, would it be enough, if many other countries continued pursuing growth of economies, consumption, and population?

BasedAnon8• 3 years ago

Climate change is caused by pollution and overconsumption.

Which has already happened and is irreversible as far as we know

We're perfectly capable to change that ... we just don't want to.

No, change on the scale that would be needed to mitigate (there is no reversing, only mitigation) would require mass casualties, because it would require deindustrialization.

But we don't know how it will play out

Yes, but we know what may improve our chances.

jfengel• 3 years ago

We can't adapt to something that keeps changing. If we keep putting out CO2, the climate will keep getting hotter. It's not as if giving up will make it stop here. It really can go to 8C or more, a temperature that will make large parts of the earth uninhabitable.

We're going to be forced to make changes -- not just "adapt" but substantially alter society. The longer we wait the worse it will be.

jacquesm4• 3 years ago

I've seen the analogy be made that it is comparable to avoiding the grounding of a big vessel, say an ocean tanker. The sooner you act the smaller the course and velocity changes will have to be, the later the more extreme and violent they will have to be.

We're already well into the territory where we will in all likelihood not escape a grounding. But we can still choose the spot where we ground and indirectly affect how much work it will be to get the boat afloat again once that happens.

CrzyLngPwd2• 3 years ago

Of course we can adapt to things that keep changing. Noting is static in the universe, change is inevitable.

Sure, billons will die and it will be the end of our civilisation as we know it, but either we'll adapt to the new life or we won't.

oezi4• 3 years ago

Adapting is actually a bad decision. If everyone invests into local counter measures such as ACs or flood walls rather than reducing emissions, we might take away resources spend on the cause of climate change.

The estimated cost for net zero are only 3-6% of global GDP per year until 2050. Totally doable.

jaybrendansmith• 3 years ago

Sure we can. We can start spreading Serpentine rock on the Ocean's surface. We just need some billionaires to fund it.

Serpentine rock, which is primarily composed of the mineral serpentine, has been considered in the context of climate change mitigation due to its potential to sequester carbon dioxide (CO2) through a natural process called mineral carbonation. This process involves the reaction of CO2 with certain minerals, like serpentine, to form stable carbonate minerals like magnesite.

The reaction kinetics of carbonation using serpentine rock are generally slow under ambient temperature and pressure conditions, which is one of the main challenges in utilizing serpentine for carbon sequestration. The rate of the natural carbonation process depends on various factors, such as the particle size of the serpentine, temperature, pressure, and availability of CO2.

At ambient conditions, the carbonation of serpentine can take from several months to thousands of years to proceed to completion. The slow reaction kinetics is mainly due to the formation of a passivating silica-rich layer on the surface of serpentine minerals, which hinders the further reaction with CO2.

However, if we ground up serpentine rock into 1cm pieces and sprinkled it on the Caribbean sea between Cuba and Jamaica, we can estimate how many tons we would need to use to carbonize our deficit of 15 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide:

To estimate this, we need to consider the stoichiometry of the carbonation reaction. Serpentine rock primarily contains the mineral serpentine, which has the chemical formula Mg3Si2O5(OH)4. The carbonation reaction involving serpentine can be represented as:

Mg3Si2O5(OH)4 + 3CO2 → 3MgCO3 + 2SiO2 + 2H2O

Here, one mole of serpentine reacts with three moles of CO2 to form three moles of magnesite (MgCO3) as the primary carbon capture product.

Now, let's calculate the molar masses:

Serpentine (Mg3Si2O5(OH)4): (3 × 24.305) + (2 × 28.085) + (5 × 15.999) + (4 × 1.008) = 277.24 g/mol CO2: (12.011) + (2 × 15.999) = 44.01 g/mol

From the balanced equation, three moles of CO2 react with one mole of serpentine. Therefore, the mass ratio of serpentine to CO2 is:

277.24 g/mol (serpentine) / 3 × 44.01 g/mol (CO2) = 2.087

To sequester 15 Gt of CO2, we would need:

15 Gt × 2.087 = 31.305 Gt (gigatons) of serpentine rock

However, this calculation assumes that the carbonation reaction would go to completion, which is unlikely in a real-world scenario, especially with 1 cm pieces of serpentine rock. The reaction kinetics would be extremely slow with such large particles, and the reaction may not proceed effectively in the ocean environment. Grinding the serpentine rock into much finer particles, using catalysts or additives, or applying pressure and temperature could enhance the reaction rate, would perhaps make it go faster.

myshpa22• 3 years ago

What about energy and emissions from mining, transport, grounding, shipping, dispersing it?

How does it look then?

danny_codes5• 3 years ago

I agree there is nothing we can do to prevent the next 30 years or so of climate change.

However, there is plenty we can do longer-term.

Step 1: USA via coalition (or alone, it doesn't matter) goes Nuclear (Fission). Global energy consumption is 17.4 Terawatts. About 4 Terawatts of that is us. We therefore need about 4000 nuclear power plants to cover our usage (which, given the economy of scale, would probably cost about 4 Trillion or so). It would take 15 years to build them out, so that's about $280 billion a year. Not particularly expensive, given the overall federal budget is $6 trillion. In addition to domestic construction, we offer generous construction deals to all other countries at-cost with shared IP. Any country can sign up, and the US will use it's hegemony to backup all deals in a "too big to fail" kind of way. Note that we only need about $24 trillion to build out power for the rest of the world, which again isn't a substantial component of anyone's budget (except for developing countries, for which we would just provide the reactors for free/via loan schemes). China will probably do it themselves, so that's like another 5TW capacity we don't need to build.

Step 2: We change out the infrastructure. Massive funding, drowning-in-money level funding for Hydrogen aircraft. Massive funding for electric cars & electric grid improvements. Build out HSR between all cities & build out public transit to sap down air travel / car travel. Cut energy use & de-carbonize.

Step 3: Turn the CO2 in the air back into fossil fuel, or capture it into some other form. We build 17 TWatts of nuclear capacity, so we have plenty of energy. We need only scale up the chemical processes for doing the conversion.

Once completed, we can now "tune" CO2 levels, giving us a lever for global weather control. This will likely be a useful tool for humanity & will let us dynamically control mean surface temperature.

kardianos• 3 years ago

The ethical skeptic talks about this: https://theethicalskeptic.com/

myshpa22• 3 years ago

Don't look up!

jacquesm4• 3 years ago

Gah what a load of drivel. Seriously, if this is the kind of site that informs you there are other priceless nuggets on there such as 'China’s CCP Concealed SARS-CoV-2 Presence in China as Far Back as March 2018'. I'm all for engaging the argument but in this case there is this torrent of nonsense that doesn't even begin to compute and which it would take you a lifetime to properly debunk, at which point I don't doubt the author has created some more masterpieces. The name of the blog already sets you up for being gullible.

defrost2• 3 years ago

That's a whole boatload of misdirection and but maybe.

Yes, the sun shines and brings energy from above, yes the core is hot and brings energy from below.

This was known centuries ago and is accounted for.

"The ethical skeptic" is just parroting another form of denialism; it's not us, it's the flucuations from the sun, it's not us, the core is suddenly radiating more heat outwards, maybe it's the volcanos, perhaps it's cosmic rays.

The thermodynamics here is straightforward enough, we have put a measureably significant volume of thermal insulating gas into the atmosphere and have the records to prove it, more energy from the sun is being trapped, the land | sea surface layer has more energy for storms, tipping climate cell behaviour, heating, etc.

lm284692• 3 years ago

Yep, and in fine doesn't matter if it comes from the sun, the earth core or too many cow farts, the end result is the same

tzs3• 3 years ago

We know by direct measurements that the warming is largely due to greenhouse gases, because we can measure radiation inflow and outflow and see that greenhouse gases are stopping incoming radiation from being radiated out and we can see how much is being trapped.

We know it is the greenhouse gases because we can measure the wavelengths of the incoming and outgoing radiation and see from spectrographs of greenhouse gases that the outgoing radiation falls into greenhouse gas absorption bands.

We can tell that the increase in greenhouse gases over the last couple hundred years is largely from human burning of fossil fuels because the carbon in fossil fuels has a different isotope ratio than that of carbon in living or recently living things. (Volcanic greenhouse gases would also have a similar isotope ratio to fossil fuels but we have sufficient monitoring to detect and account for geologic greenhouse gases).

hermannj314• 3 years ago

In other news, population is declining among Japanese and this is a huge crisis as well.

What exactly does life look like per capita if population continues to increase or stay the same? How is the solution to this problem not exactly what the Japanese are doing?

Time to kill off our pyramid scheme economic growth models and barbaric bronze age "be fruitful and multiply" religions.

thelastparadise• 3 years ago

This is a bit of a conspiracy-laden, incoherent approach to the problem.

How about we don't try to control the population (but still take good care of the environment?)

Perhaps by now we could already be building space colonies if it weren't for these kind of reactionary, knee-jerk responses to problems.

PartiallyTyped5• 3 years ago

Then you need to deal with every nutjob pushing the whole “spread your seed and raise obedient children in the name of $prophet”

brmgb2• 3 years ago

You are 30 years late. The world at large didn’t wait for you. Fertility has been declining worldwide for decades and been subreplacement in the USA and Europe for quite sometimes. South East Asia and Africa are slowly getting there too. Population is only an issue because of demographic lag. It’s already sorted out. We just have to pass the bump.

7e• 3 years ago

The U.S. population is still growing, which of course may be lag, but can also be caused by immigration. Countries need to keep the population growing to support Ponzi-schemes like retirement benefits. I expect poorer countries to continue to be baby factories indefinitely.

tda2• 3 years ago

Indeed. Essentially, the resources available to the average person are sum_of_all_resources / total_nr_of_people. The amount of a lot of resources (energy, food, mobility, communication) to go around has grown greatly since the industrial revolution. But some resources, like land, minerals, fish in the sea, are just fundamentally limited. The only way to have more on average is to diverse what is available by less people.

Or you can just take more for yourself by stealing it from the less privileged and future generations, which seems to be the current modus operandi...

mynameishere2• 3 years ago

Whatever disaster you might want to impose on the world to solve the problem--and decarbonization without fusion power would be a terrific disaster--will be as bad as the sea levels rising a few feet. Actually, much worse.

The real solution, of course, is population control. And step one in population control is shutting down immigration. Very few politicians want that, and basically none on the left. So it won't happen. They will continue demanding that the government seize control of the means of production and distribution, and not actually fix anything.

myshpa22• 3 years ago

step one in population control is shutting down immigration

Yes, overconsume so much, that it heats the entire planet. Live in an area where is isn't as bad as elsewhere.

Build walls around borders to keep those suckers threatened with loss of livelihood to keep them our of our utopia.

Bad news, buddy.

Once those hundreds of millions/billions start moving, no walls are gonna stop them.

https://i.imgur.com/LaEFQmV.png

The relevant overpopulation is the overpopulation of rich people (curable by removal of wealth).

danny_codes5• 3 years ago

How does preventing immigration effect the global population?

mynameishere2• 3 years ago

Countries with high birth rates will hit their local maximum carrying capacity. Immigration allows it to "blow off". As a past example, there are about 100 million people of Irish descent in the world. This is many more than there would be had they been limited to Ireland itself, when Ireland's birth rate was very high.

simonblack• 3 years ago

While the floating ice in the northern Arctic has behaved as scientists and climate models expected in a warming world – that is, on an apparent terminal decline – Antarctica’s sea ice has held steady.

So now the lag in the Southern Hemisphere is going away, and the Southern Hemisphere is finally playing 'catch up' with the Northern Hemisphere. Except that in geological terms where thousands of years are the norm, those decades of lag are negligible, really.

the_70x• 3 years ago

The damage to the atmosphere was made long ago and we just started to see the hard consequences.

‘Something weird is going on’: Antarctic sea ice stays at historic lows

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