Scientists Spot Warning Signs of Gulf Stream Collapse (theguardian.com) 315
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Climate scientists have detected warning signs of the collapse of the Gulf Stream, one of the planet's main potential tipping points. The research found "an almost complete loss of stability over the last century" of the currents that researchers call the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC). The currents are already at their slowest point in at least 1,600 years, but the new analysis shows they may be nearing a shutdown.
Such an event would have catastrophic consequences around the world, severely disrupting the rains that billions of people depend on for food in India, South America and West Africa; increasing storms and lowering temperatures in Europe; and pushing up the sea level in the eastern North America. It would also further endanger the Amazon rainforest and Antarctic ice sheets. The complexity of the AMOC system and uncertainty over levels of future global heating make it impossible to forecast the date of any collapse for now. It could be within a decade or two, or several centuries away. But the colossal impact it would have means it must never be allowed to happen, the scientists said. The researchers published their findings in the journal Nature Climate Change.
Such an event would have catastrophic consequences around the world, severely disrupting the rains that billions of people depend on for food in India, South America and West Africa; increasing storms and lowering temperatures in Europe; and pushing up the sea level in the eastern North America. It would also further endanger the Amazon rainforest and Antarctic ice sheets. The complexity of the AMOC system and uncertainty over levels of future global heating make it impossible to forecast the date of any collapse for now. It could be within a decade or two, or several centuries away. But the colossal impact it would have means it must never be allowed to happen, the scientists said. The researchers published their findings in the journal Nature Climate Change.
Shouldn't be allowed to happen? (Score:5, Insightful)
If its that close I'm not sure we can stop it given that a 1.5C rise is already baked into the climate now from the current CO2 levels and will go higher. With our current and any forseable level of technology there's nothing we can do about where trillions tons of water moves around in the ocean.
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This is probably the third time I'm posting the text below. I'm wondering if the /. spamfilter is going to pick it up at some point, but it's something that never seems to come up during climate change discussions and bears repeating:
So, if we're saying "this is unstoppable" can we finally move to the "how do we mitigate the inevitable changes" stage rather than the "how can we best use the looming changes to increase our political and economic power" bit y'all have been stuck on for the last couple of dec
Re:Shouldn't be allowed to happen? (Score:4, Insightful)
So, if we're saying "this is unstoppable" can we finally move to the "how do we mitigate the inevitable changes" stage rather than the "how can we best use the looming changes to increase our political and economic power" bit y'all have been stuck on for the last couple of decades?
Welcome to the 21st century. You'll find that we, in fact, since before the start of the century (random document from turn of the century mentioning how climate change is driving flooding) [service.gov.uk] have been preparing to deal with the impact of climate change.
Nonetheless, the more CO2 we dump into the atmosphere the bigger those effects will be so we need to both prepare for change and prepare to reduce that change since the massive cost of handling change is even bigger than the large costs of reducing that change.
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It's difficult to predict at what point it will happen, but that doesn't mean we should stop trying to avoid it happening.
In any case we still need to reduce warming anyway, so doing nothing is not an option.
Evolution of the anti-science crowd (Score:5, Insightful)
1. There is no climate change
2. We're not causing climate change
3. Climate change won't be so bad
4. Climate change might be bad, but shit happens
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And the rest are partying like it's 2099. Note that every year there are news stories about the person who refuses to leave their home during a flood, or the person who refused to leave their home as the wildfires got close.
In the wise words of Agent Kay: "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it!"
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5. Can we speed it along so I don't have to hear about COVD, Trump and Climate Change anymore?
Re:Evolution of the anti-science crowd (Score:4, Insightful)
We are getting to Four Stage Strategy now.
Sir Richard Wharton: "In stage one, we say nothing is going to happen."
Sir Humphrey Appleby: "Stage two, we say something may be about to happen, but we should do nothing about it."
Sir Richard Wharton: "In stage three, we say that maybe we should do something about it, but there's nothing we can do."
Sir Humphrey Appleby: "Stage four, we say maybe there was something we could have done, but it's too late now."
https://youtu.be/nb2xFvmKWRY [youtu.be]
Re:Evolution of the anti-science crowd (Score:5, Insightful)
""we(1) don't think you(1) have a prayer of stopping this(2), so let's talk about what we(3) need to do to survive it, rather than letting you(4) kill the economy(5) chasing 'solutions' that will not work(6), while all of the high profile people in your(7) camp continue to live lifestyles well beyond what the rest of us do(8) as they fly around in private jets(9) screaming about how we need to reduce emissions(10) and doing their level best to accrue political power to themselves(11)"
1. we/you tribalism
2. don't think/prayer: hand-waving is good enough
3. who's "we" now?
4. oh, its "you" again, the anti-'we"
5. placing hope that uncontrolled climate change won't kill the economy worse
6. "will not work": we opt to continue down this dark alley w/o a flashlight
7. Now it's "your camp" again? The old "them" vs. "us", except when it suits "us" to say "we"
8. That does need to change, but it will affect everyone
9. Funny how the environmentalist activists fly around in private jets all the time. They must own the entire private jet output.
10. I don't here screaming. Do you here screaming? I hear an attempt at reasoned discourse.
11. Finally, you get to the real issue: scientists gaining power at the expense of industry. Oh, how dare "they" suggest unbridled profiteering is bad for 99.999% of humanity! The gall!
Re:Evolution of the anti-science crowd (Score:4, Informative)
Not everyone on the other side of the argument from you is "anti science."
The very idea that there are two sides to the argument is anti-science. There are many potential shades of truth. Global warming might be going to end up as 3 degrees or 10 degrees. However we know it's going to happen and that the amount that it's going to happen can change. If you accept that then you are on the other side of the debate from the side you are acting, which is good.
Some of us are in the (and please forgive the run-on sentence) "we don't think you have a prayer of stopping this, so let's talk about what we need to do to survive it, rather than letting you kill the economy chasing 'solutions' that will not work,
Critical solutions such as wind power have turned out to be surprisingly much better than expected to the extent that they are actually now drivers of the economy. Countries that move soon to close to 100% renewable energy will have much better economies than the ones that follow later and will end up buying solutions from the ones that went first. At this point it's not an accident that China is massively investing in renewable energy at the same time as having a goal of challenging the US economically.
while all of the high profile people in your camp continue to live lifestyles well beyond what the rest of us do as they fly around in private jets screaming about how we need to reduce emissions and doing their level best to accrue political power to themselves" crowd.
See, now it's these strawman arguments that make me suspect that you are just yet another of these people in the sequence of "it's not happening" / "oh it is happening but it wasn't us" / "oh it was us but it doesn't matter"/ "oh it does matter but there's nothing worth doing" where there's no link between the logical arguments, however, by a strange coincidence they all end up with the same advice: "do nothing to try to stop climate change".
The differences that can be made by individuals are small in comparison to a) the energy industry - particularly elimination of fossil fuels and b) the building industry and elimination of concrete c) moving to better forms of transport such as rail. Even in climate mitigation what is needed are barriers around areas and conscious decisions to relocate cities and industries. These need to be done by governments not individuals. So why, suddenly is it so important to talk about individuals flying? Because it distracts from the main discussion.
To have a future, and a good economy people need to be working out which politician is most likely to eliminate fossil fuel subsidies and push for building new renewable energy sources. They also want to look at the people most supporting bio-diversity and maintaining ecosystems who are normally the same people.
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Hold on there for a second. You can be anti-science in several ways.
There's no evidence that economies have to be killed. Getting rid of fossil fuels will kill some companies, that's for sure. All change does that. It's called creative destruction.
We'll have other companies. And cleaner air and less noise pollution, more stable energy supply. Energy for machines is an essential part of today's life, being dependent on someone somewhere digging it out of the ground is simply madness, once we have developed b
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Some of us are in the (and please forgive the run-on sentence) "we don't think you have a prayer of stopping this, so let's talk about what we need to do to survive it,
I sure haven't seen much that here. Who, exactly, has been talking about "what we need to do to survive it"?
And... before you continue, could I hear you clearly and unambiguously state "yes, I understand that the science is well understood: the climate is changing due to the greenhouse effect, and this is the effect of greenhouse gasses such as carbon dioxide being emitted into the atmosphere by humans."
Until I hear that, I'm still thinking you're defending the fossil fuel industry, and not really discussin
Ice reflects sunlight (Score:2)
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First 10 posts (Score:5, Insightful)
Until then, its business as usual baby. In the mid 1900s humanity had a small ability to plan ahead, but thats long gone. Too many people have spent the last 50 years pushing an antiscience agenda, and about half the population has bought into it. Our species has a full blown case of head-up-ass-itis, and itll take decades to undo that programming. At least.
A gulf stream collapse MIGHT be extreme enough to punch through the mental walls that people have in place. I kind of doubt it though. If the climate change forces us all to the poles, half the population will blame George Soros while they move their items.
Re:First 10 post (Score:2)
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Um. Really? Slashdot people arent all that different than normies. And regarding policy - In democracies, policy makers pretty much do what the voters want. In non-democracies, the rulers are largely interested in their own skin, their cuban cigars, their mistresses, and the future good of the country is irrelevant. I would think you would have realized this by now. You must be very young.
Bull shit! "Our democracy" does NOT do what the people want. It has not done that, really ever.
https://scholar.princeton.edu/... [princeton.edu]
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But they’re old and probably vote for people who say the same things they agree with.
Re: First 10 posts (Score:2)
That is the big one (Score:2)
Lets hope it is centuries away, because otherwise the human race is far too incompetent to avoid it.
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We're not too incompetent to avoid it. We have all the competence we need.
About half of us are unwilling to suffer minor inconveniences to avoid it. Which has nothing to do with competence.
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By "incompetence", I was referring to the self-management capabilities of humanity.
But yes, the faction that does not want to be inconvenienced is a major part of the problem. But so is the faction that is deep in denial and also the faction that has not even noticed there may be a problem.
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Essentially you would have to give up your Western lifestyle
That would be the solution if we refuse to do any sort of collective spending. Which is why you folks insist it's the only alternative.
The horrors of increased taxes and government subsidies paying to build carbon-neutral infrastructure is so horrific to you that it doesn't even occur as an option.
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Because carbon-neutral power generation just appears out of thin air for free.
Again, the solution is easy and has been easy for decades. It horrifies you, so you refuse to consider it and prefer the collapse of civilization to paying higher taxes.
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Are you serious?
Actionable ? (Score:2, Insightful)
"It could be within a decade or two, or several centuries away. "
So, we know almost nothing.
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That is just denial. We know it is happening. We cannot be sure how soon it will take effect as predicting the future is always uncertain.
Many things in life are this way. For example if your doctor told you that you have cancer but could not tell you when you will die, are you going to tell him that he "knows nothing."
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Knowing almost nothing is a necessary step on the way from knowing nothing at all to knowing a great deal.
Weak willed fatalists (Score:5, Insightful)
The comments on this story thus far are perfect examples of another current story, describing the dramatic increase of depressed, cognitively distorted thought in our society:
https://science.slashdot.org/s... [slashdot.org]
This climate problem is eminently solvable. It's like we aren't even distantly related to the people that heard JFK's Apollo speech and got to the moon in less than a decade. Instead, you assholes hear about an incoming problem and decide to lay down and let the steamroller of environmental apocalypse roll slowly over your miserable corpses.
It's not even going to require deprivation on our part. Just a bit of fucking effort. Solar and wind are cheaper and more efficient than they've ever been, and the trendlines are still improving. Battery tech is showing similar cost and performance improvements. EV tech is going to transform transportation over the next decade. We CAN fix this, and the people who aren't worthless cynics are working their asses off to do exactly that. But a good chunk of society seems to have given up pre-emptively.
Once upon a time, tech enthusiasts would get excited about a challenge like this - an opportunity to save the whole fucking world with scientific innovation and technological might. Those are the stories I grew up on, early sci-fi, with the promise that with intelligence, innovation, and grit there was no problem we couldn't solve. We, more than any people that have lived before, enjoy the prosperity and possibility of that technological development. We live in a reality made possible by that drive to progress and improve.
But now, I mostly see people throwing in the towel and complaining. It's a travesty, and a disservice to the minds that came before us and risked their lives to open up new frontiers and used the power of science to gift us with greater capabilities than any generation has ever possessed.
Are we going to squander all of that and resign ourselves to letting major ecological systems collapse because we can't be bothered to get off the couch and do something about it? It's just so. damn. weak.
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Your post is about a decade out of date. The denialists have put us so far behind, it would be like JFK saying "we choose to go to the moon next week".
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Nope. Because it can still be worse if we continue to do nothing.
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How can it be any worse?
A 1.5C rise in average temperature causes far less trouble than a 3C rise, which causes far less trouble than a 5C rise, which causes far less trouble than a 10C rise....
We are all going to be cracking each others heads open and feasting on the goo inside.
Only if we allow it to get to the later versions of those "causes more trouble".
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Learn your thermodynamics. Energy is everything. When we have cheap, abundant, clean energy, there's no problem we can't engineer our way through.
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Warm water from the tropics has to go somewhere (Score:2)
Re:Earth's Habitability (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately people like yourself conflate the extinction of humanity with the collapse of civilisation. The former is very unlikely to happen anytime soon, the latter is highly likely. I think the phrase is 3 missed meals from anarchy and as we've seen in the middle east and elsewhere you don't have to push hard for the whole facade to fall down. Yes thats due to war, but water wars are already starting and a massive change in climate that causes crop failure on a global scale is not something I want to be around to see.
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Yes, the water wars are starting. This has been predicted for a long time.
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Water Wars?
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Thanks for the heads up there. Any other nuggets of profound insight you have to offer or is that your lot for today?
Re:Earth's Habitability (Score:5, Insightful)
The Earth is 4.5 billion years old and has had life (in some form) on it for billions of years. Humanity has only been around for the last 200,000 years of it.
Sounds good so far...
Conditions prior to humanity were unsuitable and uninhabitable.
And now we get to the part where you're just making stuff up.
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Live your life. Humanity is not going to end during your lifetime.
Humanity, no. But Human civilization? If the gulf-stream flips in 10 years, there will not be much left in 20 years. Fortunately it is unlikely to happen this fast. On the other hand, there is _no_ reversing it if it happens. No amount of carbon-capture or emission reduction is going to do anything.
Re: Earth's Habitability (Score:2)
Re: Earth's Habitability (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, it is powered by cooling in the north, where water sinks down and flows back on the bottom. It is a pull-effect, not a push effect. What warming does is dilute the water to a lower salt-content by melting ice and snow and at some point the pull-effect stops working due to that.
The gulf stream does _transport_ a lot of heat, but that is not what powers it. What powers it is the heat difference. Neither making it warmer, nor making it colder is a good idea. It depends on pretty specific conditions.
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Well, maybe. Would require a major space-flight and space-engineering breakthrough though. Also, we would need much better predictions about how close we are to the event. Apparently, the research done so far is pretty preliminary and that is not good at all. All major catastrophe-management critically depends on prioritization of measures.
I do agree that we are largely screwed though. This problem is a few orders of magnitude too large for the pathetic shit-show that humankind is.
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The Earth is 4.5 billion years old and has had life (in some form) on it for billions of years. Humanity has only been around for the last 200,000 years of it. Conditions prior to humanity were unsuitable and uninhabitable.
Either that or evolution simply hadn't got around to making humans yet, because, like there's been animals a LOT longer than 200,000 years. Orders of magnitude longer.
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I doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand that the Earth was not going to stop changing as time goes by, regardless of what may be the 'dominant' species on the planet and the actions that species takes.
You missed the point. The point is that humans have caused this change; that was always the point. Your point is like saying, "It does not take a rocket scientist to understand humans die, we should not prevent murder or diseases."
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Either basically all of Europe becomes a block of ice several miles thick *OR* sea levels rise.
Thanks for the advice but the article at no point suggests Europe basically becoming a block of ice several miles thick so I guess they're just going with the sea level rising?
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Someone must have just watched The Day After Tomorrow https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0... [imdb.com] .
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> The gulf stream slowing is caused by cooling
I mean, literally everything published on the matter says the opposite of that, so global warming it is, then!
=Smidge=
Re: Please, 1600 Years Ain't That Old (Score:5, Interesting)
It should be noted that the 2000 year old Olmec civilization on the Gulf coast collapsed around that time.
Re:Please, 1600 Years Ain't That Old (Score:4, Informative)
That is not what the article says at all.
The actual source of the "1600 years" is this phrase:
But now two new studies have provided comprehensive ocean-based evidence that the weakening is unprecedented in at least 1,600 years, which is as far back as the new research stretches.
There is nothing in this research that says "it has happened previously", only "we know it hasn't been this bad in the last 1600 years".
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"Civilization has not collapsed in at least a decade" is a true statement, though some may dispute it.
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Re:Please, 1600 Years Ain't That Old (Score:5, Funny)
That kind of answer is so passive-aggressive that you'd think Ghandi was Canadian.
Re: LOL (Score:3)
Youâ(TM)re absolutely right. We should inly believe science that completely supports our worldview.
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The Golf stream tracking has been one of the warning signs from climate change that scientists have been concerned about. As we have been doing basicly nothing about climate change, it is undoubtedly going to happen at some point, while they are worrying about climate change in general.
It is like a mechanic saying you really should replace the oil in your car, you don't change the oil because you didn't want to pay the $100 for him to do it (or the $20 to do it yourself), he then goes you should change th
Re: LOL (Score:4, Funny)
I wonder if this can be linked to the deterioration of Tiger Wood's game over the past years?
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Global Warming cases The Gulf Stream Collapse, creates more weather irregularities, which created the conditions for the perfect storm to be more likely.
Said storms can hit locations very hard, which is not helpful to their economies, in which when people lose what what use to have, they get angry and create wars against someone else, these Wars spread viruses across borders (Also many viruses are spread by animals that have a new migration pattern due to global warming and place said viruses in an environm
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That's sort of a garbage dump of wildly different things, and completely different types of things.
SO, it comes at the perfect little time; the perfect storm at the same time as a climate change
This isn't "at the same time as" climate change, this is climate change.
war,
There's no particular threat of war at the moment-- possibly less than any time in my life. The number of nuclear warheads on alert in the world has dropped down from over 60,000 in the early 1980s to about 10,000 now. https://ourworldindata.org/gra... [ourworldindata.org]
economic collapse,
People are always worried about economic collapse. It's not coming "at the same time" as
Re:meh (Score:5, Informative)
CO2 has the properties it has, and thermodynamics can't be dodged with rhetoric
Re:meh (Score:5, Insightful)
This rhetoric is about as stupid as realizing human hubris won't overcome the inevitability of death. So why bother with medicine people will die eventually anyway?
Of course we can't keep things exactly the way they are. And there's not a lot of scientists that argue this. But that doesn't mean we can't possibly make things go to shit at a more comfortable rate.
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"So why bother with medicine people will die eventually anyway?"
This sort of nihilism seems to be the new end-goal of conservatives. There's the sense that "you all will be screwed and must accept your fate; whereas we're rich and we'll be fine and that's how it should be, because God ordained it."
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Re:meh (Score:5, Insightful)
The hubris of control freaks pretending that humanity has the power to take a climate snapshot in time and "keep things the way they are" is rather rich.
Spoken like a coward and quitter. In other words, exactly the kind of person the human race can do without. Unfortunately, your attitude leads to problems for a lot of the kinds of person the human race can't do without at all.
We know humans can cause massive changes in the environment because we have done so. Being able to destroy the system doesn't mean being able to maintain it, but being able to make massive changes with negative impact does imply being able to make them with positive impact.
As a species we have deliberately chosen the route of greed and exploitation instead of cooperation and responsibility. Some chose to enact it, others chose to permit it. And so it goes.
Re:meh (Score:5, Insightful)
The hubris of control freaks pretending that humanity has the power to take a climate snapshot in time and "keep things the way they are" is rather rich.
Spoken like a coward and quitter. In other words, exactly the kind of person the human race can do without. Unfortunately, your attitude leads to problems for a lot of the kinds of person the human race can't do without at all.
Exactly what the fatalistic death cult of the right-wing wants people to buy into is that there is no hope for a better future and so you might as well shut up and go along with the status quo. That's why they constantly respond to complaints about the status quo with things like:
All politicians are equally evil and corrupt.
All governing approaches/economic models are equally incompetent and broken.
All news sources are equally unreliable and unfairly biased.
No matter what we do, misery and poverty will always exist.
No matter what we do now, we're headed for some imminent total societal collapse.
And of course when you buy into these things, they become self fulfilling prophecies. So then they get to point at how things only continue to stay the same/get worse and use that as proof of how they were right all along.
The world may always be far from perfect, but I choose to struggle against it regardless in the hope that maybe a little bit at a time, things do in fact get better.
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Are you insane or just repeating right wing radio talking points
Masks do not hurt children, I have watched my grandchildren do just fine with masks
Schools are not closed, all of our local public and private schools allowed attendance via google meet
Get out and meet some real people, talk radio and right wing media have distorted your reality
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We know humans CAN and ARE changing climate. Those that deny it are mostly either with the heads in the sand or have vested interests in the status quo. Sure, oil will run out, but it will be long after I die in my large mansion built on oil company profits. Sure, we might run out of whales but dammit I'm making good money off of whale oil. Sure, we have enough nukes to destroy the world many times over, but there are customers still anxious to buy my munitions.
Or, sure, I am spending more on my credit
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Yes but we depend on this climate snapshot continuing as it is. Everything about human civilization from the food supply to human habitation is tailored to these conditions. And actually most of the current global ecosystem has evolved in, is adapted to, and dependent on, these recent mild conditions. Sure there's survival of the fittest, but all in all, climate change does pose an existential threat. To say nothing of increased misery and suffering. Now if you're a nihilist then of course none of it mat
Re:meh (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact temperatures varied thought time has never been the point. The points are that 1)humans are causing this change and 2) it is happening at a much faster rate than ecosystems can adapt, and 3) since humans have caused it, they can do things to slow it down/reverse it. People like you keep missing these points.
Your point is as silly as saying "Well humans have died over history of time, we should not do anything to prevent murder or diseases."
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Where I live it is summer right now. If tonight the weather drops to negative a lot of crops will die, we may suffer from hypothermia, our pipes will burst... A lot of nasty problems, that don't happen when the temperature follows the normal patterns. Plants will often prepare themselves for winter by shedding leaves. Animals will go into hibernation, humans, will stock up on heading supplies Fill their OIl tanks, get wood chopped and stored, have their winter blankets out and their coats out of storage
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In geological time frames, the seas rise and the seas fall. Global temps rise and fall. Like every time in the past, the planet will adapt.
Yeah, in geological time frames, sea levels change, global temperatures change, species come and go, and the planet continues on. But on a human scale, sea level and global average temperatures used to be stable. And the species that go don't continue on. No one is concerned for the geology of the Earth, we're concerned for the ecosystem (which we are a part of).
Adapt, or die. Or both. [Re:meh] (Score:2)
Not disagreeing here, just adding some nuance:
Cities do not adapt, people die.
Cities adapt, and people die while they are doing so.
But sometimes they can't adapt enough, and die. The Earth is littered with ancient cities that have been abandoned because climate changed.
Farms do not adapt people starve.
Farms adapt, and people starve while they are doing so.
Sometimes farmland of one kind becomes farmland for a different crop. It takes time to change. But sometimes farmland dries up and becomes desert. There are vast regions of the Earth that used to be farmland, but no lo
You've wandered off into the state of the Nile... (Score:4, Insightful)
You distinction about location of Egypt is pointless to the issue as it seems that you are confusing and conflating Egypt, North Africa, deserts, climate change and the agricultural outputs of the Roman Empire.
But sometimes farmland dries up and becomes desert. There are vast regions of the Earth that used to be farmland, but no longer is because of climate change. (Do recall the north Africa was once considered "the breadbasket of the Roman empire.")
Egypt's status as "the breadbasket of the Roman Empire" and the loss of its ability to be "a breadbasket" has nothing to do with climate change. Or deserts. Or the fact that it is in Africa.
It has (almost) everything to do with growing populations.
At around the year 1 of the current calendar there was somewhere between 150 and 300 million humans on the entire planet.
At the beginning of the 20th century there was ~1.5 billion of us - now we're happily moving towards 8 billion and will probably top 10 billion by the end of the century.
Roman Empire, in it's entirety, around the year 1 had some 45 million humans, [wikipedia.org] Egypt being about 10% of that.
Today, Egypt alone clocks at over 100 million humans. [wikipedia.org]
Further, Egypt's status of "a breadbasket" was due not to a different climate but to constant flooding of the NILE.
Which no longer happens - thanks to the Aswan Dam, which has actually increased Egypt's agricultural output, turning desert into arable land, multiplying number of crops and crop yields etc. [wikipedia.org]
Today Egypt produces far more food, farming far more ground, than ever during the existence of ANY EMPIRE.
It's just that there is far, far, FAR more people in both Egypt and in the world today.
And Sahara is still a desert. Just as it was back then.
Again, you seem to be conflating "long ago" time of the Roman Empire with MUCH LONGER AGO time of the "Green Sahara", [wikipedia.org]thousands of years before both the Romans and the Pharaohs.
Before there was agriculture there. [wikipedia.org]
Re:Sun at solar minimum & Moon wobble shifting (Score:5, Insightful)
I will say this again. We measure the solar output.
We know that solar output changes are not responsible for observed climate change because we measure it.
In any case, the discussion here is about changes on the time scale of ~50 years, while the solar minimum comes every 11 years. An 11 year cycle would average out in their data.
But then again I'm just a computer scientist.
The phrase "I'm a computer scientist" should not be used as a synomym for "I am stupid."
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Just because you measure something doesn't mean you can know if it is correlated to a change. Science 101. Quite ironic.
Turns out that pretty much all of science is trying to figure out what causes what. Measurement is integral to that.
Since over the measurement period solar output is not changing over time, science suggest that changes in solar output are not affecting climate over the measurement period.
Solar output does have a 11 year periodicity (the "solar cycle") with a variation in brightness of slightly under one part in a thousand. That's a pretty small amount, but nevertheless, scientists have been trying for the l
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Most people's attitude towards that is about the same as their attitude towards global warming.
ie. If it isn't happening right now before my very eyes then it's not something that concerns me.
Now go away, I'm watching my show on TV.
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That's far enough out that most people that even consider it see it realistically as one of two possibilities. We'll either have made ourselves extinct, or we'll be multiplanetary by then. If we can't get off this rock in the next few billion years, well we deserve to go down with the ship.
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A far far bigger problem is going to be when the sun goes nova. Ever thought about what's going to happen THEN?
The sun is not going to go nova. Novae are white-dwarf stars in binary systems. The sun is a main-sequence G type star.
And, no, before you bring it up, no, it won't go supernova, either. Supernovae are blue giant stars.
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"“The study method cannot give us an exact timing of a possible collapse, but the analysis presents evidence that the AMOC has already lost stability, which I take as a warning that we might be closer to an AMOC tipping than we think.”"
Re:if someone tells you science is "settled," (Score:4, Insightful)
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Settled means that if the apple falls, it will almost certainly hit the ground. There's an infinitesimal chance that it doesn't. Gravity is still being researched and theorized over; but the basics of every day gravity are "settled" even if we don't know all the details and haven't discovered how it works below the quantum level. Similarly, we know that humans are changing the climate, that's not as settle as gravity but the science is much more likely to be right than that my next door neighbor wins the l
Re:if someone tells you science is "settled," (Score:5, Informative)
Actually they're talking about something you think you understand but apparently don't. "Settled" simply means there is no further burden of proof *at this time* required to support a claim.
It is possible to attack a settled proposition in science, but you have to follow the maxim "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof". Recently some physicists have been trying to show that a reactionless space drive is possible. If you wanted to claim that such a thing can't work because it violates conservation of momentum, you bear no special burden of proof, because conservation of momentum was settled centuries ago.
Everyone knows what these reactionless drive people are up to, but when they publish they don't say "We've disproved conservation of momentum". They say "we were unable to account for all the momentum". If nobody can account for that momentum then that's a step to overturning long established science, but people attacking the paper face a very low burden of proof. They can say "You didn't account for thermal expansion in your experimental apparatus", and they don't have to reproduce that apparatus and show thermal expansion accounts for the discrepancies; the burden is on the original researchers.
At this point anthropogenic climate change is settled; you don't face any *further* burden of proof to claim that human CO2 emissions are increasing the average thermal energy of the troposphere. Of course, precise predictions, like whether rainfall will increase or decrease in Denver, or whether a 4 degree increase in tropospheric temperatures will halt the Gulf Stream, those are still open questions.
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"Settled" simply means there is no further burden of proof *at this time* required to support a claim.
It is possible to attack a settled proposition in science, but you have to follow the maxim "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof".
Wow, wish I had mod points. That's a nice succinct statement of what we mean by "settled" in science. Hope you don't mind if I copy that and repeat it next time somebody says "science is never settled".
In terms of climate science, what is well-settled science is that carbon dioxide is an infrared absorber, that we are putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at a known and well-measured rate, that infrared absorption in the atmosphere causes greenhouse warming, and that this warming is being observed. Wha
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Quick! Tell every single scientist that actually studies and understands this that they completely forgot about cold water density!!
Alternatively, they know this, and the system is way more complex than you think.
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The equatorial regions are always warmer than the polar regions, colder water is always denser and sinks, therefore there will always be a potential gradient from equator to poles.
Freshwater injected at the poles may shidt the boundary conditions temporarily, but no gulfstream at all is energetically unstable to put it mildly.
Right, because there's only one route from the equator through the Atlantic to the north. It would be impossible for the water to go a different route, melt Greenland and Iceland and kill all the polar bears whilst at the same time starving the West of Africa. Rule of fiziks. Right?
Re:Didn't the ice caps melt before in the Cretaceo (Score:4, Insightful)
Didn't the ice caps melt before in the Cretaceous ? Several other times since?
Analogy: "Didn't people die before guns were invented; therefore no one can die from being shot by a gun today." The point is this climate change is being caused by humans and at a faster rate than naturally occurring ones in the past.
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Not over the course of a few hundred years, they didn't.
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If the people won't wear masks, I doubt they're going to listen to those in charge with regards to climate change mitigations anyway. Use less water, use less petroleum, don't cut down forests to make farms, etc - all government interference according to all the anti government types. A total collapse of the gulf stream may be due to total collapse of rationality as well.
Re:Yeah, yeah, we know already (Score:5, Funny)