How is something critical if it has been transgressed and we are still alive? Or on the very first moment every single one is past we all suddenly die?
If the engines on your plane fall off mid flight, everyone doesn't die instantly. They die instantly after 30 thousand feet of screaming terror.
This comment screams lack of education about complicated systems. For example take overpopulation in things like grazing mammals. The funny thing about being overpopulated is that it is not instantly deadly. Once the mammals eat enough of their food source that their food source cannot reproduce reliably the game is over. But they tend to have reserves of fat and muscle that last for some period of time. The weakest die first. Then the population reduces. But the population doesn't go back to what was previously considered at the over population limit. No, populations massively collapse because there is nothing to eat at all. 9 out of 10 members of the population can die. And if it's something like an island, extinction is on the menu.
Even if not on an island extinction is on the menu depending on how large the population was to begin with and the velocity of the crash. This is because the males in the population can't reproduce by themselves and the weakest are often the young. So when food runs out, even if it is temporarily, you may see one last generation of very fit males and possibly some cannibalism and after that it is game over. Calhoun did some pretty gruesome (and borderline unethical) experiments that are the closest thing we have to lab controlled overpopulation experiments. The results presented are pretty sobering.
The Titanic didn't sink the moment it hit the iceberg, it took a little over two and a half hours. During a significant portion of that time it wasn't all that obvious that anything was seriously wrong. The ship was listing slightly to one side and the engines were off.
The passengers weren't all affected equally either. A lot of first-class passengers made it onto lifeboats, whereas third class passengers mostly didn't.
(The analogy breaks down a little in that we don't have lifeboats and the collapse of our ecosystems probably won't be as absolute and catestrophic as a ship sinking. The Earth's ability to sustain large numbers of humans may decline significantly though, and a lot of things we take for granted now may be gone.)
We don't have life boats (yet) but I do wonder if some part of the massive increase in wealth disparity we've seen is due to uncertainty about the future, or if the reluctance to take meaningful action to slow/reverse the impacts we've had on the earth is because it's already clear that our time is running out and there's nothing that can be done to stop it.
Give it some time. Good news is that "faster than expected" seems to be a very common saying among people studying these areas, so you might not have to wait as long as the geological time might suggest!
Honestly, as someone who has been very concerned about climate for a while now, I'm surprised how much visible disruption of the climate system we've directly been able to observe. Earlier in my life I thought that, though dire, this was certainly a problem that would impact future generations but not so much ours. It turns out I might have been quite wrong on that front.
The Club of Rome's "Limits To Growth" study in the 1970s, in its central scenario, had the 2040s as the time when we'd start to really feel the consequences of "pollution" (broadly conceived, including things like fossil water drawdown and soil exhaustion as well as the results of using fossil fuels).
A little faster than expected maybe. Not all that much though.
There was a somewhat funny joke about the hunger winter here in NL: "Kids I've got good news and bad news, the bad news is that we will eat flower bulbs, the good news is you can eat as much as you want".
> Boundary positions do not demarcate or predict singular threshold shifts in Earth system state. They are placed at a level where the available evidence suggests that further perturbation of the individual process could potentially lead to systemic planetary change by altering and fundamentally reshaping the dynamics and spatiotemporal patterns of geosphere-biosphere interactions and their feedbacks
Probably would need to read more to get a clear understanding of exactly what they mean and how they're defined, but it sounds like we're to an unstable place. Perhaps somewhat analogous to skating on thin ice: you may not have haven't broken through yet, but you're in a spot where a break could happen at any moment and from any movement.
California's climate patterns are already changing but the state has managed to deal with the problems and will probably continue to do so. Texas on the other hand is starting to see problems with their electricity grid during summers and it's going to keep getting worse as temperatures continue to rise.
California's "dealing with the problems" seems like a lot of shortsighted non-sustainable policy. Parts of CA are burning right now. At this point they've been bragging about maybe not having to go back to rolling blackouts. Reliably providing even the most basic services like water and power is such an astonishingly low bar that only in the poorest developing nations should that even be in question yet here we are. Long term, I don't see Texas or California holding up very well to climate change.
I know there have been models to predict which areas of the country are expected to be most/least impacted by climate change but I'm not qualified to judge them. I suspect that increasing heat and desertification will leave much of the southern and western US in very bad shape. Anywhere prone to flooding now will only have it worse. The coastal areas will also deal with flooding and storms in increasing frequency/severity.
Maybe some of the northern flyover states would be best? Higher land around the great lakes for example? If I were looking to buy up some land today I'd even consider Canada, but only after the fires have died down. The only nice thing about wildfires burning 40 million acres of forest to the ground is that it'll be a while before there's enough fuel for it to happen again.
I'd have more faith if I saw a lot more effort being expended. It seems like most places are still pretending nothing will change. People are still buying property that regularly floods even while insurance companies are refusing to cover them. States are selling off their clean drinking water to industries that will waste and pollute it. Important infrastructure is left outdated and crumbling. Environmental protections are being rolled back, fracking and drilling continue.
My man, this comment is so wildly antiscience. I don’t know where to begin.
I’m not sure if it would be with forest management, or the complexity and reasons that cut Texas has its own grid, separated from everyone else. I’m not sure I would say either directly applicable to this topic.
Texas throwing a tantrum and refusing to have their power grid under federal regulation will become increasingly applicable to the topic since the changes we're causing to our planet and its climate will put even more strain on their weak and inflexible power grid. People in texas are already dying from the heat in the summer and freezing to death in the winter and it's only going to get worse.
This is looking at changes over a scale of centuries, and the potentially irreversible effects of what we are doing right now.
> Had Earth system remained forced by 1988 conditions (350 ppm and 85%/50%/85% of tropical/temperate/boreal forest cover remaining), the simulations show that temperature over the global land surface would not have increased by more than an additional 0.6°C in the subsequent 800 years
> If climate and land system change can be halted at 450 ppm and forest cover retained at 60%/30%/60% of boreal/temperate/tropical natural cover, then the simulation indicates a mean temperature rise over land of 1.4°C by 2100 (in addition to 0.7°C between preindustrial time and 1988) and 1.9°C after 800 years as vegetation evolves in a warmer climate
The latter is an optimistic projection assuming we will do more to stop climate change, the paper goes further into the odds of a >3C increase.
To put that in context, a 1.5°C increase in average temperature is considered a doomsday scenario where wildfires and storms ravage the earth, killing over half of the global population.
Breathing is critical to keep me alive, but I can hold my breath for a minute, and if forced by external means to stop breathing, will still be ok for a few minutes.
Ha, good point, let's not focus on the main issue and instead argue semantics shall we... /s
To ELI5 like you seem to prefer, the iceberg breaching the hull of the Titanic seems like a critical transgression, but the ship stayed afloat another hour or so...
> How is something critical if it has been transgressed
I don't think the paper claims we've passed criticality. Instead, it talks of boundaries and risk, the latter reflecting that we don't know where the critical points are.
> on the very first moment every single one is past we all suddenly die?
Biosphere collapse could happen suddenly and without warning. That would throw the global south into political turmoil while prompting a global and destabilizing refugee crisis.
It reminds me a bit of radiation poisoning - you can receive a lethal dose in moments. After that, you can carry on for a time; hours, maybe days feeling normal, but your death has already been ordained and your biochemical systems will collapse from the insult.
If you have a pond with 1000 fishes, and each year the population of fish doubles, you can remove 501 fishes/year for quite a while. You are clearly in an unsustainable situation, yet it will take time for the population to completely collapse. These limits are in the sense that we cannot stay above forever, not in the we cannot go above ever sense.
Echoing the kind of climate change scenario 5 year old kids have seems kind of cruel the week thousands of people in Libya died of events that are exasperated by the climate crisis. People are already dying of climate related causes, like crop failures and natural distasters.
What you are saying is technically not wrong, but misleading, as it omits the fact the dams broke due to a natural disaster, Storm Daniel, which previously also "affected Greece, Bulgaria, and Turkey with extensive flooding.".
No kidding, but to say that climate change did this when hurricanes have been on the decline the last thirty years is misleading. This is weather and engineering failures.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-24268-5
> No kidding, but to say that climate change did this when hurricanes have been on the decline the last thirty years is misleading. This is weather and engineering failures.
This HN user categorically and obsessively has their own opinion on climate change, and how it is influenced by humans.
Their "evidence research" is taking the first Google search result that they believe to support their position in the discussion at hand - even if it doesn't make sense (hurricanes in North America versus Mediterranean).
If they don't invest in such sloppy research, their arguments hit rock-bottom Tiktok factoid niveau. one can better just assume nonsense/randomizing/lying and ignore this user for anything climate-related.
Use the drop down and look at accumulated cyclone energy. There's no trend in 42 years and last year was the third lowest total tropical cyclone energy for earth in the last 42 years. This year seems on track to be very low for cyclone energy too.
Do you understand how creepy it is of you to go digging into other users comment history and posting about it when there's a disagreement on a topic? Maybe let the arguments speak for themselves? We're not supposed to be some kind of commissars looking for dissidents or witch hunters looking for heretics.
Well I guess I'm guilty of posting my own opinion on various aspects of climate change along with links from time to time. Is that evil in your books, should I be banned? I think you can go back to every post I've ever made and not find any cases of ad hominem attacks. I'm satisfied with that.
> And why should commenting and posting history count any less than a specific comment?
Because the user/writer is completely unimportant in an endless flowing sea of anonymous text. Whatever one of us writes in a comment, somebody else could as easily have written, that's why only the argument itself is interesting. It is misguided effort to care about any "reputation" of an anonymous user on an anonymous discussion platform, unless you're moderating said platform.
Because the user/writer is completely unimportant in an endless flowing sea of anonymous text.
I reject both of those assertions.
Authorship matters. Comments are not anonymous, but optionally pseudonymous, where reputation (karma) is explicitly tracked.
The significant point of karma tracking isn't the accuracy of that karma, but the tracking of it. Other measures, such as flags and moderator admonishments, are also presumably tracked, at least by mods.
All imply that reputation is an integral element of Hacker News participation.
The very concept of science is a revolution against the idea that author matters more than content. What you propose is how the world used to work, and still does in many aspects and places, ie that something is to be judged not by what is said, but by who said it. If a nobody or disreputable person says something it is to be considered false, and if a reputable and honored person says something it is to be considered true. But that's backwards and hurts both science and justice. Instead we must dare to take arguments at face value in order to move forward.
Studying court cases, I've seen too many instances of people who initially weren't believed or just dismissed, because they weren't considered the right "who", but in the end were proven to be completely right. Studying the history of science, there are many such famous cases.
As for the science of meteorology, it shouldn't be treated as an ideological war, where people go after each other's characters – even pseudonymously. It's the study of elements that don't care what humans think of them.
Apart fromt this, you seem to confuse moderating with discussing. Wether somebody or somebody's comments are subject to moderator actions have nothing to do with the truthfulness of what they wrote.
Nullis in verba means that the authority of no person should be the basis of belief. It was born out of a tradition in which authority, particularly religious authority, was paramount, and notions such as papal infallibility reigned.
The reputation and credibility of speakers may, however, count against a consideration of what it is that they have to say. If someone is known to have been an unreliable guide in the past, or violated other precepts of dialectical discussion, they deserve little consideration, or at best might be offered reserved judgement until a more reliable narrator appears or independent verification can be provided.
You are confusing a positive claim of authority against a negative claim of credibility.
The notion of empirical evidence does not mean that every last fact or claim must be verified. It relies profoundly on the credibility of the messenger, witness, and/or experimenter. Expertise in field lies both in specific knowledge of a domain as well as credibility in relating that knowledge. Experience without credibility is charlatanism. Lacking both credibility and experience is the foolish fraud.
In the specific domain of weather, it's those with an axe to grind against credible impartial experts from an overwhelming number of independent disciplines and organisations who'd launched character assassinations, as is exceedingly well documented. Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway's Merchants of Doubts is only one of many accounts of this. Oreskes is interesting herself as a historian of science, who's specifically studied another instance in which heterodoxy became not only orthodoxy but the central organising principle of an entire scientific study: the development of plate tectonics theory as the foundation of geology. That revolution occurred over the course of about 50 years, in which, again, evidence from many independent individuals, disciplines, and institutions provided overwhelming justification for a new model of understanding. Those include the discovery of radioactivity, the use of radiometric dating, the fossil record, gathering and dating of extraterrestrial rock samples from asteroids and the Moon, ocean core data, magnetic field history revealed in those cores, bathymetry, volcanology, seismology, and others.
Science does occasionally make hasty judgements; the ideal of empirical validation runs up against fallible humans and human institutions. Ultimately, however, it corrects itself, which is the one thing ideologically-motivated reasoning cannot do. Alfred Wegener's initial hypothesis proved to be in the right direction, but of itself lacked sufficient evidence for the theory to be accepted on its own. Over the course of a half century, and despite quite strong resistance within and outside the scientific community, that evidence was gathered, however, and a theory based on the broad outlines proposed by Wegener was all but certain by the mid-1950s and was eventually accepted in 1965.
The ideology in climate science comes largely from commercial interests who would be gravely harmed should the full implications and conclusions of what is now the overwhelmingly supported scientific consensus be adopted and realised. Upton Sinclair is validated yet again.
