The Arctic as it is known today is almost certainly gone

To the detriment of Canadians, major players around the rest of the world consider these waters international waters, and on the international level, might (or the lack of response thereof) leads to facts-on-the-ground, as we've seen time and time again.

[1] http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/the-north/myth-... [2] http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/franklin-find-as-much-ab... [3] http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trudeau-obama-arctic-1.39059...

There are just too many ways for US to exert soft pressure on Canada: softwood lumber, NAFTA repeal, extra tariff and transit charges for oil sand output. (admittedly that last one might be a good thing for Earth)

For them, in theory, a rare single cruise missile from Norad ought to suffice. Even then, you could start with a warning shot, and bill the ship's owner for the missile.

For more complicated missions, we could fly out a small inspection or police team in a flying boat. Instead of relying on arrays of 20cm cannons for protection, they would depend on the above mentioned system (which is similar to the Norad system already in service).

As it always has, because we don't have the millitary power or population to defend any of our own territory. The US does that for us. It's unfortunate Canadians have been unable to expand in our own territory over the few hundred years Europeans have been in this place.

The way Trump has acted towards Canada, talking about NAFTA etc, made me think of someone who has an eye for the territories up north...

For example, that 2007 article:

"In the end, it will just melt away quite suddenly. It might not be as early as 2013 but it will be soon, much earlier than 2040."

Which lines up with the 2017 article.

Cutting edge science is not headline-friendly!

Don't forget 2040 is only 22 years away, on that time scale weather becomes important not just climate.

Of any number of people who read headlines only some subset of those read the articles, and even fewer of them remember what the article said.

They literally have been saying, for at least a couple decades before I started paying attention, the world is going to end, for one reason or another, quite soon now.

I thought that if the world was going to end we were meant to lie down or put a paper bag over our head or something.

The Economist article says, "the much-vaunted sea passages are likely to carry only a trickle of trade". Do you have any information on the prospective volume of trade?

> it's surrounded solely by states with a strong rule of law, making piracy unlikely.

For another reason too: Piracy usually is conducted by people.

When it's summer in the arctic, it is winter in the antarctic, whose area of ice is necessarily going to vastly outweigh the other when you add them together. So the trend will be less visible.

Just looking at arctic ice extent in summer, on that page, you can see the trend.

The coupling between climate and sea ice is more complex in the southern polar regions, and the increase in sea ice there is also likely to be an artifact of global warming. But this may explain why a global chart doesn't show the sharp decrease you'd expect.

On a personal scale, at least: live close to work, and save as much money as you can; the amount you spend is a tolerably good measure of your carbon footprint.

The ideal would be to live close to work, save money, and do a bit of backyard bio-sequestration (like growing dwarf hazelnut trees and burying the nuts' hulls); but it's not likely that you'll have a backyard if you're living close to work. Cities with compost collection are the next best thing on this score, then.

You _believe_ CO2 is a greenhouse gas? How sure are you about 2 + 2 = 4?

I have to disagree. Please keep doing something good for the environment. Please keep making companies that replace old harmful ones. Keep protesting to politicians and by all means, keep doing speeches to inform the public.

> just reduce our intake by, say, just 15%

Everything I know about psychology tells me this advice won't work. You need to provide an alternative or you'll be fighting a losing battle against habit and enjoyment.

But I should dogfood on my own advice here, so here's what you should do instead:

- Give people specific advice on habit changes instead, ie. switch from beef to chicken, from chicken to fish and from fish to vegetables.

- Tell people HOW to change electricity provider (if your country or region allows it)

- Tell people to VOTE for the environment

Because if you do it and no-one else does then you're hurting yourself for basically no reason. It's a coordination problem.

Bear in mind that global warming isn't the end of the world, it's just a change. Humans will certainly adapt and carry on. The problem is the costs might be inconveniently high - or they might be tolerable.

Not if "saving the world" means spending trillions of dollars on things that (a) might well not fix the problem, and (b) could be better spent on other things with a much more certain payoff. For example, bringing people out of poverty and building up our infrastructure so it is more robust against any kind of disruption. Especially if doing those things makes it a lot easier to adapt to whatever happens to the climate anyway.

Incidentally, and this is food for thought not an opinion of any sort, I'm almost 50 years old, and I've now been a part of 3 global climate scares. One cooling; one warming; now both after previously warming, but none of the predictions have come to pass, except the world has become infinitely friendlier to it than we were when I was a kid, which were the days of the crying indian commercial, 10 MPG behemoth cars, and a shiny new EPA.

The world wont end, it will just change... happens all the time. Seriously 99.9% of all species that have walked the Earth are extinct. Humans are not exempt from that process, there is nothing to save here, the Earth will continue on just as it always has.

There is little to no consensus on all of that. There isn't a consensus on how sensitive the climate is to carbon and to what feedback loops exist. Even the IPCC ranges are fairly broad.

Then we don't know how much the warming will affect the actual climate and what the effects will be. What does earth at +5 degrees C even look like?

What if in 20 years solar, wind and battery tech is so cheap that natural gas and coal plants shut down. Everyone goes to electric cars, and carbon output plummets?

Regular people are the ones who voted for those in power who declared that Global Warming was a hoax. Regular people are the ones who voted for leaders who prized returning to coal instead of advancing renewable energies.

I do believe that there is man made climate change, however, but this meme has to end.

>"Bob Ward, of the Grantham Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, added: “Peter Wadhams has made predictions of the imminent disappearance of summer Arctic sea ice which have not been fulfilled, but the evidence still shows a rapid decline."

One guy missing a prediction isn't reason to dismiss the entire line of thought. All the evidence in the article shows the trend pretty clearly. Wadhams being aggressive in his prediction is not the story.

The writers of the economist article know, climate scientists know, and hackernews readers all know that the climate has been colder and hotter in the past over geologic time scales. We all know this.

It is not correct to imply that the current warming is just a continuation of the usual inter-glacial cycles. It isn't, the rate of change is completely different by orders of magnitude, and the causes are observably different.