Where Glaciers Melt, the Rivers Run Red

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/19/science/peru-glaciers-water-pollution.html

by Petiver • 2 years ago

79 84 2 years ago

An aside:

Why bother submitting paywalled articles? Why bother upvoting paywalled articles? > 95% of readers probably don't have access.

Not being facetious, I genuinely want to know. Do people upvote without reading? Will almost everyone take the effort to throw the link into a paywall buster? Do many HN readers subscribe to paywalled sources?

matsemann2• 2 years ago

FWIW it wasn't pay walled here. I just had to press "Show full article" and could read on. Perhaps it's based on geo location (I'm not their market) or how much one's read them lately?

isoprophlex2• 2 years ago

Oh right, that actually makes a lot of sense, thanks..!

asimpletune• 2 years ago

I was prompted to create a free account to keep reading.

joak2• 2 years ago

If you google "Where Glaciers Melt, the Rivers Run Red" the first hit is the nyt article, if you click on this link you'll find the article non-paywalled!

Edit: if it doesn't work try again in a private/incognito tab to make sure it's all fresh cookies

So depending on the http-origin header the article is paywalled or not.

This is a trick I always use, it works for many newspapers.

thom• 2 years ago

99% of the time the top comment is an archive link.

bell-cot• 2 years ago

For me (NYT non-subscriber, US, blocking most js), only the first 4 paragraphs are visible. That's fairly common for web sites to do (# of visible paragraphs varies, obviously). And usually shows enough to convince me that the article is worth no more of my time.

oniony• 2 years ago

I share your annoyance. I've convinced that the sites themselves are doing this to attract subscribers.

Every time anyone complains you get the backlash of "if you want good journalism you have to pay for it", yet few can afford to subscribe to more than one or two publications and yet we have to suffer paywalled links from all of them. For me, the one UK publication I pay for is enough (and that one is, ironically, not even paywalled).

echelon• 2 years ago

It's a distribution and friction problem.

We solved it for music. We need the same for journalism.

Microtransactions never took off, so that leaves one option: journalism companies need to stop having their own websites and instead publish to an aggregator (or aggregators) that handle payment and monetization. Spotify or Netflix for news.

But perhaps that would turn them into an even lower margin business with no ownership of their own audience relationship. Doesn't seem like a fun business to be in.

Nevertheless, it's still a distribution and friction problem.

dredmorbius• 2 years ago

Re aside: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989>

latexr2• 2 years ago

Why bother submitting paywalled articles?

They are explicitly permitted, as long as there are workarounds.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#:~:text=Are%20payw...

Though I wish submitters would provide the workaround (or gift link) too when submitting (I try to do so). It’s often someone else who does it. Though in fairness I guess someone may forget something is paywalled when they’re paying for it and have access.

marcosdumay2• 2 years ago

If people just marked the title with a (paywall) it would already be an improvement.

anjanb• 2 years ago

I subscribe to 4-5 paywalled sources. Rest, I rely on others to give me the archive links.

ctippett• 2 years ago

Save yourself the angst and give this userscript[1] a go. It adds some nice quality of life improvements for posts that link to paywalled articles.

[1] https://github.com/MostlyEmre/hn-anti-paywall

matsemann2• 2 years ago

Just before visiting HN I read a news article about our glaciers in Norway also melting. One glacier has moved back 83 meters in a year, and the last ten years it's moved back 483 meters.

A glacier that normally melts a meter in thickness each year and gains it back during winter, has melted 4 meters.

We've lost 20 glaciers here the last decade.

It's scary.

https://www.nrk.no/klima/breforsker-sjokkert-over-hvor-mye-i...

baq3• 2 years ago

The election cycle, at least in a small part a function of a human’s expected life span btw, is way too short for governments to be incentivized to do anything about it.

It’s going to be a wild ride for our grandchildren.

adrianN2• 2 years ago

It’s going to be a wild ride for anyone under fifty.

shiroiushi3• 2 years ago

This makes me wonder if society would be improved by radical life-extension therapies or technologies. Detractors generally say it would result in stagnation, but at least people would have a very good incentive to think long-term if they knew they had a good chance of still being alive in 200 or 1000 years and having to deal with the long-term effects of current policy.

lifeinthevoid• 2 years ago

Meanwhile the most popular politician in Belgium claims that climate activists are overly dramatic and that we should trust technology to save us. Just great.

InDubioProRubio3• 2 years ago

We are going to be THAT generation that dropped the ball.

Ekaros• 2 years ago

In general very small part of population will choose certain suffering now to avoid uncertain suffering in future.

Actively doing enough against climate change will have very real and likely significant quality of life change now. And if lot of people don't think their quality of life is high enough now, why would they want it to go lower. And sadly rich are always insulated either way.

noelwelsh3• 2 years ago

Birth rates are dropping faster than predicted, which means both fewer grandchildren to suffer and fewer grandchildren to produce carbon. A lot of environmental issues just go away with fewer people around. We'll have to adapt the current ponzi scheme of government pensions but that seems a small price to pay.

https://x.com/_alice_evans/status/1849668492951220483

zaik• 2 years ago

Enough people run for office who want to do something about climate change. But a plurality of the population seems to be mainly concerned with being angry about immigrants and wanting lower taxes.

fractallyte• 2 years ago

These are all natural cycles, noooothing to worry about... :-/

(Sorry, sarcasm... I've had immense battles with deniers...)

keybored• 2 years ago

Assuming that the government is to a large part motivated by the electorate. Some governments certainly aren’t (e.g. the US).

MrVandemar• 2 years ago

We won't save ourselves.

It's just not cost effective to do so.

dagurp2• 2 years ago

They are shrinking at an alarming rate here in Iceland as well. This is causing sandstorms and possibly increased volcanic activity.

noelwelsh3• 2 years ago

Y'all need to get some trees planted to stabilise the soil. I know some people in Iceland are attempting to do that.

ponector• 2 years ago

It is the end of the recent ice age, those glaciers are set to melt anyway. With human contribution they melted slightly faster.

propater• 2 years ago

We should be at the end of the current inter-glacial, temperatures should be going down, not up and glaciers should be growing, not shrinking. If you are talking about the Wurm/Winsconsin glaciation, it has been pretty much over for 12000 years and the climate has been pretty stable since.

mooreds• 2 years ago

If you are interested in a prescient look at how climate change will impact geopolitics:

https://www.amazon.com/Climate-Wars-Fight-Survival-Overheats...

The author intersperses nonfiction summaries (from 2011, so a bit dated) with fictional accounts of geopolitical conflict.

Super scary but eye opening.

Hilift• 2 years ago

A bit more recent. Soylent Green was set in the year 2022, and was about how humans and climate killed the ocean as the world's largest food source. In the film, they are always sweating and it's 90 degrees F at night.

aodj• 2 years ago

Available without paywall https://pulitzercenter.org/stories/where-glaciers-melt-river...

ashoeafoot• 2 years ago

So upriver ph guard station with lime? and methan flaming of drones?

advael• 2 years ago

Sure seems like we ought to be more aggressive about this whole anthropogenic climate collapse problem

Like maybe problems like vast swaths of the world becoming both less livable and less arable all at once is somewhat to blame for all the refugee crises?

Not to be "political" or whatever

KeplerBoy2• 2 years ago

Just wait for the refugee crises yet to come. We have seen nothing so far.

entropi• 2 years ago

My expectation would be that unfortunately after a certain point it would stop being a refugee crisis and start being a border enforcement crisis. I personally expect things to get quite ugly once the temp difference hits a more significant value.

cute_boi• 2 years ago

This is a human problem, nobody bothers until they face the issue.

Where Glaciers Melt, the Rivers Run Red

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