Arctic tundra is now emitting more carbon than it absorbs, US agency says | Hacker News Reader

Arctic tundra is now emitting more carbon than it absorbs, US agency says

theguardian.com

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This is very bad.

The warning signs were there

https://news.mongabay.com/2009/02/burning-rainforests-meltin...

I'd lie if I'd say that I'm optimistic about the future.

it's just a runaway feedback loop, no biggie. /s

It will self correct by the next ice age.

I don't think humanity will die out but there was this time we got down to very low numbers like 7k or less we might get to that...

We’re fucked, why do anything? Just ride it out. If you had kids that’s your problem to deliver the bad news.

This take is so deliriously apathetic that I am starting to wonder if HN is being infected with bot accounts.

The people who have not yet fallen into apathy are simply the people who have not yet realized the magnitude of the forces at work that we cannot stop or reverse.

Climate change is a matter of degree, and it will unfold over a long period of time. There is time to mitigate and adapt. It's just a matter of how much. Renewable energies are rapidly being adopted, battery storage and transmission are all improving. Nuclear is back on the table. We may still have a breakthrough in fusion. AI will help with better predictive models and eliminating waste.

None of that will do anything if we get into a runaway feedback loop where all the carbon is coming from natural sources. The change is speeding up.

The time to act was 60 years ago but Reagan and oil interests put profit over planet.

The last time to act was the last decade or so, as it appears we are too late and the us about to floor the gas pedal on oil instead of green tech.

Lyndon Johnson was president 60 years ago.

I always like to start 40 years ago with Carl Sagan

https://youtu.be/Wp-WiNXH6hI?si=2UJST6T6IBkHtZTq

Yea I ball parked it whenever the epa was told by Reagan to not do anything about carbon is when I start the clock

I start it with neoliberalism which really picked up steam with Nixon. But even Clinton and Obama were neoliberals every president since Nixon was neoliberal just with different social issues (divide and conquer the plebes). Globalization and exponential consumerism.

before 1990 you buy a phone like corded even cordless and they still work today if you have a landline.

Now I need a new phone every 3 years. All electronics are made to be replaced not to last and that just makes business sense but not very good environmental sense.

Solar, nuclear, fusion, NNs, batteries and so on does not mitigate climate change. This all is great tech but all it does is slows down climate change which will happen with the same severity, but a few decades, or centuries later (the same levels of change, with and without green tech). The only ways to mitigate climate change are either to lower temperatures or to remove greenhouse gas which works for increasing temperatures. nothing else. And humans are not doing anything which matters in this area.

I see that people somehow got in their heads that climate change is a fixed duration process, say a hundred years, and then it stops (or they don't think about it). So if we go all solar we will delay the increase, get lower temperatures by year 2100 and then we win, yay! Almost nobody it speaking out loud that climate change will simply continue even if we go all solar, remove all plastics, invent working fusion generation, switch to all EVs etc. And it will continue to the same end level as if we did nothing at all.

This comment puts you deep in the "have not yet realized the magnitude of the forces at work" category

> There is time to mitigate and adapt.

The ecosystem can't adapt fast enough, we depend on it for _everything_.

> Nuclear is back on the table.

Cool, it doesn't make steel, or cement, or asphalt, or plastics, or petrol derivates, which are all absolutely essential to our modern lifestyle.

> We may still have a breakthrough in fusion.

It still doesn't really solve anything

> AI will help with better predictive models and eliminating waste.

will ?

None of that solves ocean acidification, none of that revert the feedback loops, none of that allows us to continue with our wasteful lifestyles, non of that restores the wildlife we absolutely decimated. It all sounds like a sect now, ignoring the present, hoping for a better future while everything points the other way. "Just pray a little more and it'll come to life"

Though if you look at the history of the earth the climate has fluctuated constantly, millions of species have evolved and gone extinct, 99% have been wiped out by meteors at times. Humans have only been here for like 0.0025% of it and tech for like 0.000001% of it. It's a bit overdone to panic over it getting slightly warmer.

Well first of all it fluctuated much much much slower, and even if we skip that part, getting wiped out doesn't seem very desirable. Of course the planet and life in general will continue, what will degrade over time is the abundance we enjoyed up until now.

The fact that we changed so much despite being "here for like 0.0025% of it and tech for like 0.000001% of it" is the alarming part lol

https://xkcd.com/1732/

https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1200,h_600,c_fill,f_jp...

Great. 1 step forward and then 3 steps back. Then soon it’s 6 steps back, then 12. That’s what it means to have a runaway effect.

Its one thing to not acknowledge we are in for a wild ride,its anotherventirely to throw helmets ,paddles and vests .

That's a bad analogy. A better analogy would be to be on the titanic as it sinks and have two choices:

- find the last bottle of champagne, have a drink and enjoy the stars one last time

- scream like a mad man while trying to patch the gaping hole with duct tape, eventually give up and attempt to make a raft from Q tips and wood glue

You can drink the bottle, plug it back and put it under your clothes. Then drink another one.

Not everyone died in the Titanic, which means there is a third choice: when facing a catastrophic event, work as hard as possible to save whoever can be saved. Even if you are not in the selected list.

I think you're confused about who/why survived on the Titanic...

One of the most famous survivors spent hours in the frigid waters without dying because he had hurriedly gotten drunk while the titanic was sinking.

I do not belive that to be a true story. Alcohol will not help prevent freezing to death.

It is not necessarily why, but it is true: https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/how-a-baker-survived-th...

its not bots, its just privileged software engineers, surprising amount of which are libertarian.

Eh, plenty of people in this boat. If you can’t change it (or think you can’t), what else are you going to do?

It matters how fucked we are. There is a big difference between disaster that wipes out humanity, one that sends back pre-industrial technology, or one that keeps some modern technology. We might want to prepare preserving knowledge for next civilization.

It matters if we can slow it down. More time means more technology. For example, robot industry might transition happen faster, and might also make possible for smaller civilization survive. It also means more time to use resources that are available now before they get scarce.

It matters if we work together towards goal. That will reduce chances of people fighting which will make things worse. With fighting, "riding it out" will be unpleasant.

Maybe the horse will sing.

This assumes the problem is a binary. Either we are fucked or not fucked. When in fact it's a gradient of more and more fucked that goes on indefinitely making us more fucked the longer we take to deal with it.

The problem very much is binary. Ocne you have a self sustaining feedback loop going it's game over.

Its a gradient until it isn't.

Being vegan or buying an electric car would surely change everything.

That's the negative things about positive feedback loops, eventually they grow enough to be noticed, and by then is already too late to avoid them to become massive, because taking action will take time, and meaningful action even more.

And it is not the only system that went from net absorber to net emitter of carbon, the Amazon rainforest crossed that line some years ago already.

thinking damage control: can a least destructive CO2 absorber invasive species / ecosystem outpace this positive feedback loop?

> thinking damage control: can a least destructive CO2 absorber invasive species / ecosystem outpace this positive feedback loop?

Humans can fit this description and can definitely fix this if we tried. The technology we used to cause this issue in the first place is about as complex as fire and the pointy stick compared to what we have today, our executive capacity has simply not kept pace with our technological one.

its not really an executive issue, the systems that govern our world were imposed by force and perfer loop that maintain the status quo. with such a system in place, we can't address any issue unless it is obcenely profitable.

We have far more effective executive systems available, but we aren't using them.

We invented guns centuries ago. Technology must, by now, be advanced enough to undo the effects of its bullets.

Well, that's depressing... luckily the upcoming US administration will put a stop to those bad news by defunding NOAA and making scientific results illegal, because it's bad for big business.

Putting your head in the sand is a noble way to tackle novel problems. Just look at the noble ostrich... lol

Don’t Look Up

This is depressing. If we could just stop testing the carbon would stop increasing.

That may happen very soon.

Similarly for temperatures. There's reason to expect the longitudinal ocean wind monitoring station on Mauna Kea (think that's the one?) will some time early next year cease to report measurements, rising every year as they have since mid-20th century.

Possible words to consider from a nobody thinker.

The earth is currently a spheroid which has shaped itself over eons of time per the slow ice accumulation at the poles. Some "simple" math can roughly speculate the weight of that ice at each pole and such calculations reflect very large mass numbers that many humans have difficulty comprehending given the large numerical value let alone the consideration of the vast quantities of time that these processes have occurred. Science now reflects an accelerated melting to which the normalized equilibrium established over those eons prior to humans is changing. Scientific proof also exists that the poles once had flourishing plant life and global water levels over our studied geological record have both been higher and lower than they are now as we know them. Returning to the spheroid mentioned relative to the ice mass that is now being dispersed back into liquid spread throughout the oceans our real problems have yet to begin of which I have heard few mention but some have paused in awe when talked upon. As that ice melts and that mass is redistributed from the poles our spinning ball of rock will naturally rebound to a sphere and in doing so that rock will crack and shift in time to return to that shape not incurring the weight provided by the poles. In our data driven connected world everyone can now play along with this nobody thinkers theory watching in near real time by observing the ever increasing anomalous seismic and volcanic activity as that rebound sets in. We do not know what we do not know however no one can escape our future which is being dictated by every past human action. A truly great time to be alive as change is the only thing guaranteed.

Stay Healthy!

Awesome learning about the potential for this feedback loop in highschool chemistry back in 2005. Sadly I think my chemistry teacher cared more about this stuff than the people running the country.

Or the voters.

> than the people running the country.

This attitude and its variants with different scapegoats really irks me. Let's say that in 1980 all the world's governments and businesses conspired and implemented measures to get close to 0 carbon emissions by 2010.

For the moment let's ignore the most dire issues[0] and just focus on the economic cycle. Do you honestly think that they could have stayed in power in the face of a severe economic depression with no end in sight? Even in non-democracies such policies would be political suicide.

[0]: lack of fertilizer, labor demand of non-mechanized agriculture, breakdown of the food supply chain

First the Amazon forest, now it's the Arctic tundra. What will be next? Our oceans? I fear the catastrophic chain reaction has begun.

The oceans are already fucked as well, we have disrupted their carbon cycle, warmed up and acidified it. For example, we've killed some 20-30% of phytoplankton already, ocean stratification is increasing, etc.

Don't forget: Antarctica is becoming greener.

The oceans have already changed over the last decades and yes, the chain reaction has very likely already started: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mm_YZ2juQL4

Such news always remind me of the great filter hypothesis [1].

They also remind me on how ignorant we all are/were. Now "simply" stopping high energy consumption is not enough anymore.

Perhaps SpaceX-Musk is right in what he does, although Mars makes a terrible home.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter

We are our own biggest enemy

As bad as climate change is, it will never make Earth harder to live on than Mars. Even the most egregious runaway scenario feedback loops won't make the planet unlivable.

It might be extremely uncomfortable. Billions of people might die. Civilization could collapse utterly.

But it's still going to have more oxygen, better temperatures, and more resources than Mars.

There can be good reasons to go to Mars, but a "backup planet" just isn't really a good one. If all we care about is the survival of the human race, it's really not in jeopardy. Certainly not from climate change, and not even from a war, asteroid, or pandemic.

Please don't give any credence to Musk. He's a pathological liar and schemer and cares negatively about the environment and about people for that matter.

The early conquistadors were horrible people as well and they brought about epochal change.

I'm not supportive of any billionaire much less the ones actively corrupting democracies. But that doesn't mean that they won't cause historical things to happen.

What positive change, particularly to the environment, is he bringing?

Did I say anything about positive changes?

Slightly off-topic, if CO2 increases in the atmosphere, would plants and trees not take advantage and grow faster/bigger?

What about farming food? Would it be easier/cheaper to grow grains, vegetables, and fruits?

Plants release most of CO2 when they die. Locking CO2 in plants only works with actual living green mass. And we need a colossal and ever increasing amount of plants to offset our emissions. And plants needed just don't live in the tundra now.

As for easier food - tundra is poor environment, so it will be hard to grow anything there, even simply due to solar day/night issues. On the other hand, climate change on a scale when tundra becomes a place to grow food, would mean that some of the existing places to grow food could possibly stop being it. Imaging rice dies out in the hottest regions of the planet, where billions live. World war would be a child play compared to that.

Growing food is already dirt cheap, that's why we don't care so much about wasting 30%-50% globally.

> would plants and trees not take advantage and grow faster/bigger?

Not significantly, and it still doesn't solve any of the other issues, CO2 is but a tiny part of the problem, we talk about it because it's the only one we can pretend to be able to fix

If you need me, I'll be arranging deck chairs on the Titanic...

Sounds like a problem for the rich to fix. Good luck!

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