Comment by phkahler | Hacker News Reader

Comment by phkahler | Hacker News Reader

This is why I cant accept the climate alarmists. From TFA:

>> The discovery helps confirm a new and troubling understanding that the Greenland ice has melted off entirely during recent warm periods in Earth's history—periods like the one we are now creating with human-caused climate change.

What is troubling? That this goes against the alarmist narrative? That this has happened before, and might well happen again even without human activity?

It's like the final episode of that Neil Tyson show where he's looking at tundra eroding in the arctic and they note there are buried leaves and such in there - ignoring the implication that it used to be nice up there.

Does this invalidate human effects? NO. Does it invalidate the idea that we are solely responsible for some cataclysmic outcome? IMHO it suggests both inevitability and that it won't be so bad. I'm more concerned that the warming somehow triggers the next glaciation - which... is there a reason to think won't happen?

Literally the next paragraph:

> Understanding the Greenland Ice Sheet in the past is critical for predicting how it will respond to climate warming in the future and how quickly it will melt. Since some twenty feet of sea-level rise is tied up in Greenland's ice, every coastal city in the world is at risk. The new study provides the strongest evidence yet that Greenland is more fragile and sensitive to climate change than previously understood—and at grave risk of irreversibly melting off.

Is "the Greenland ice sheet could melt faster than we thought and raise sea levels twenty feet, flooding every coastal city" not troubling to you?

I agree with this. Knowing what we know now, there should be a plan to get everyone moved to higher ground while we have time. Perhaps a tax incentive program and a land buy-back program. The governments can use that land for non civilian purposes. Maybe let nature reclaim it to some degree. I realize this is not easy, given people won't want to give up their expensive coastal homes.

We could start the tax incentives on the low end financially and as climate change ravages the land value of coastal homes more and more people will qualify. /S... but only slighty.

Not so bad for whom? The article says that this happening would put coastal cities under 20 feet of water:

> Since some twenty feet of sea-level rise is tied up in Greenland's ice, every coastal city in the world is at risk.

>> Not so bad for whom? The article says that this happening would put coastal cities under 20 feet of water

The point is that we should expect this to happen anyway, weather we speed it up or not. Once that's accepted, we can talk about moving people instead of trying to stop the inevitable.

Looking at one-and-only planet we can ever call home...

* The idea that greenhouse gases like methane and co2 warm the planet, is not controversial.

* The idea that green plants capture co2 and release oxygen is not controversial.

* The idea that over billions of years, a very green earth captured and stored a lot of co2 and held it in the form of oil, coal and gas, is not controversial.

Looking at human activity over a few generations...

* The idea that humans have cut down co2-absorbing forest, burn them, and replaced them with methane emitting cows, is not controversial.

* The idea that humans have mined and burned vast quantities of fossil fuels, releasing their co2 into the atmosphere, is not controversial.

It's super easy to casually cite natural rhythms in glacial periods or shrug and point at "uh, the carbon cycle". Denial is super easy. Just pull point at any sufficiently complex part of climate science, shrug and say "It's probably nothing to do with me!"

But here's a simple question: Do you believe that the human race, by chopping/burning millions of acres of forests and mining/burning trillions of tons of fossil fuels that took millions/billions of years to store, over just a few generations, has made an impact on the climate?

Nope? Yep?

If "Yep", and it's simply a wild coincidence that this dramatic change "was going to happen anyways" and has nothing to do with our perfectly timed co2-releasing activity on the planet... well, that's some fucking coincidence.

Guys like you are not able to be convinced. You accept scientific articles such as this one as evidence of "alarmism". But you'll dismiss other scientific articles about climate change because they are "alarmist". You'll cherry-pick whatever's convenient to you. Debating with someone who can't be convinced by rational arguments is futile.

So you’re saying that in the past about 130k years ago Greenland ice sheets were much smaller and our hunter gatherer ancestors either weren’t disrupted by it or didn’t write down an account of their hunter gatherer lives being disrupted. And because of that, concerns about our modern built up and fixed in place infrastructure being disrupted by the sea level rise implied by returning to that state are overblown?

Where did I misinterpreted your point?

The point is that we can't stop it no matter how much we jump up and down about CO2. So let's deal with the real problem of having built shit in a 130k year flood zone instead of pretending we can prevent it.

Okay but that seems short sighted. If we don’t worry about the CO2 then we’ll have to start building for something much more extreme than just Greenland melting. Also implying it’s like a flood plain is not treating sea level rise seriously. Floods plains are under water in temporary events. If it’s going to be underwater for thousands of years that is not a flood plain.

Humans were also not at fault when the meteorite struck and wiped all dinosaurs.

It doesn’t mean we can’t stop it from happening again.

The problem with the current climate change is the rate of change. Yes, the climate has been warmer at various times in the past and life survived (though it changed as a result). The problem is that the rate of change is too fast for ecosystems to adjust without collapsing. Plants can’t adapt and move quickly enough. The animals that depend on them cannot evolve fast enough to avoid starvation. Extinctions happen faster and greater as a result. That is bad for humans.

Even in those slower climate changes in the past, areas suitable for agriculture were often deserts or otherwise unsuitable for human needs.

Humans can adapt to some extent but we are dependent on the ecosystems around us. As we try to adapt, you see floods, fires, drought, disease, starvation. these lead to migration, conflict and war. Even if you survive the changes, it may not be a world that you want to live in.

It's not (so much) the magnitude of the change but the speed of the change.

There's a massive difference between a few degrees of temperature changing over millenia vs it changing over decades. Evolution and migration can adapt to the former, but not the latter.

How does the presence of twigs and leaves underneath the ice in Greenland suggest that it won't be so bad? How does this imply that the climate would be tolerable for humans?

It's the classic mistake of thinking the problem with anthropogenic climate change is the change itself when the real problem is the rate of that change.

And how much more difficult it is for us to adjust to that change now. Even if the climate had shifted extremely quickly and moved inland 100 miles in 10 years, a tribe of hunter-gatherers or a herd of wolves can migrate 10 miles per year. That's about a quarter mile a day.

When you put down roots and build New York City, good luck picking back up and moving to dry land.

I think the biggest problem for humans is not the loss of our coastal cities as devestating as that may be but what happens to our food.

Big picture of climate change, agreed that food is a huge concern. Sea level rise in particular is an issue for coastal cities though.

>> thinking the problem with anthropogenic climate change is the change itself when the real problem is the rate of that change.

No, people keep acting like life on earth is going to die due to higher temperatures. It will probably just move north. In that sense it's not so bad. It is still disruptive, but not the end of the world.

It's also not unstoppable just by going green.

It would be great if you could answer my questions in the parent comment. I'm curious to hear your opinion.

> No, people keep acting like life on earth is going to die due to higher temperatures.

Yes, some people are saying this.

> It will probably just move north. In that sense it's not so bad. It is still disruptive, but not the end of the world.

Only some life is instinctually nomadic or migratory. Dispersion of species usually occurs on the scale of thousands of years not over the course of decades. It is no exaggeration to say the extinction we are facing could be quite devestating. You can dismiss this by saying that several times the earth's biodiversity has been reduced to single digit percentages of its recent past. This is true but it does not make those periods a time you might prefer yourself or your children to inhabit.

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