Concerns grow regarding sea ice and Greenland’s ice sheet | Hacker News Reader

Concerns grow regarding sea ice and Greenland’s ice sheet

washingtonpost.com

70 pointspseudolus9 comments

Another factor is burning forests. Heat waves provokes fires. For example in Russia huge territories of forests are burning right now, freeing CO₂ and somewhat contributing to the heat. The worse part is that apparently government does not want to put out fire, as it is "economically disadvantageous".

It's already baking[0,1], so I'm not sure why they include "about to" in the title.

[0] - https://archive.fo/CrVBV

[1] - https://archive.fo/UfS4A

> [...] it could promote a widespread and significant melt event like the one in 2012. During that summer, nearly all of the ice sheet experienced melting, including the highest elevations that rarely exceed 32 degrees.

I think it's because we aren't there yet, so baking is probably a relative term. Also the title refers to the heat wave specifically and doesn't say that it's not already unusually warm.

Guess we need to start naming heatwaves as we do storms. As storms move, so do heat waves move/shift. After all, most heatwaves in Europe are born out of hot air coming up from Africa.

Apart from people migration, I wonder, was there any analysis of the climate change and sea rise on the global economy points - vital scientific research facilities, high-tech and complex manufacturing sites, major global financial institutions (e.g. stock exchanges), major agriculture sites. Most analyses I saw consider only agriculture changes, but not the rest.

Well, as usual, seems humanity underestimated climate change speed. Even the scientific community tend to predict the lower pace and temperature rise.

Scientific community estimates annual average temperature rises. Individual peak heatwaves are beyond simulation.

Scientific community can also estimate longer-term the size of the oscillations from the averages and they do that too. The simulations even include and reflect the real local behavior (the local effects), but still aren't "weather" prediction.

So it's not that the scientific community didn't warn about the "more extremes" that are going to be the results of the climate change.

https://www.science.org.au/learning/general-audience/science...

"Human-induced climate change is superimposed on natural variability"

"Extremes are expected to change in the future"

The extremes always existed, and they will continue to exist, but the level of the average moves upwards through the years. Moreover, our human perception will see the extremes as even extremer, as the absolute records for some locations are broken again and again, changing the local climate from "pleasant" to "hard to live" there. The whole world can't be covered with air conditioners, a lot of places where humans live grew because these were not necessary. Also, even when the average of the planet changes only two degrees, there will be locations where the local change will be much bigger, and we know of them too: it is known that Arctic will be especially much warmer than that, which is going to have a significant non-local effect.

The hardest to predict are only the shorter-term movements, like "how exactly the next month will be on every specific place" as they depend on too many local variables that technically can't be all observed and calculated. But it is important to note: that limitation is irrelevant for our ability to know what will happen longer term if we don't act.

Regarding Arctic again, we still track it with the satellites and update the data daily, see the changes from the previous years:

https://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/2012/05/daily-image/

https://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_iq...

Also Antarctic:

https://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/S_iq...

Do bookmark the links and check them again when you stumble to somebody who wants to claim that "yes Arctic is losing ice, but Antarctic not, so it will be fine on average."

The IPCC tend to be on the very conservative side as they only endorse the most certain, and play down the most extreme as they tend to use normal distributions, which in a situation of rising temperatures they aren't. That they are government appointed probably has some influence too.

Some have called it dangerously misleading in the underestimates - sea level rise has been tracking the worst case of the IPCC range of projections. Where that leaves us, I'm not sure.

More info from last year:

https://www.sciencealert.com/international-climate-change-re...

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