Me either. Completely blew my mind, but it makes sense. One of the theories I’ve seen for our modern fertility crisis is that obesity and other sources of heat are driving up sperm temperature, which leads to many fewer viable sperm than usual.
And WTF is wrong with Chinese Govt policy when they want to just have these ivory doo-dads so much that if their populace don't have access to ivory they eviscerate Clam population in the south china sea.
Truly, driving giant clams to near extinction for ivory because elephant poaching is harder now is insane. Same with the Pangolin scales for used for "libido enhancement" (which don't even work)! What is wrong with China?
China has "traditional" medicine, the US has the prosperity gospel
Maybe the human race is fine on average, but the stupid outliers are an order of magnitude more destructive than the average person in unpredictable and ignorable ways.
>> China has "traditional" medicine, the US has the prosperity gospel
Better analogy would be chiropractic and homeopathy. Both are total junk and are held up by nothing other than anecdotal evidence (and massive amounts of PR and lobbying).
Chiropractic has a wide variation in meaning, i discovered, coming from sports physiology patient experiences: some of the most effective physical therapy for sports injury i had was by chiropractor people in larger sports medicine clinics.
I guess one has to evaluate what any particular instance claims to be capable of solving?
It's not scary. Earth is a lush place with warmer temperatures. The deserts turn green and there's more rainfall everywhere.
Earth has never suffered a mass extinction from a warming climate. The only climate which does cause a mass extinction is an ice age.
If you are a climate scientist that goes against the narrative you get your funding cut. The result is a dearth of doom and gloom, because that's where the money is at. Dissident climatologists like Judith Curry get the boot.
Additionally, and what the main stream science won't tell you is that "global warming" is happening on other planets as well, where there are no humans and thus no industrial activity that could account for this.
The media and captured scientific institutions are trying to cover this up by saying that the planet is darkening.
The solution to climate change will only be taxes and more regulation. Solutions like Nuclear, which produces abundant carbon free energy has been sabotaged by regulation so that had no choice but to have a carbon based economy. Also, it's very effective blackmail against a country that decides to not pay the IMF for it's predatory loans, where the oil imports can be shut off via mandate, and the economic system of said country grinds to a halt.
The entire global warming system has been caused by... the sun. The sun is getting a little bit hotter right now but the string pullers that own the global financial system are using their influence to say it's the trace gas CO2, despite the fact that H20 has even more heat trapping capabilities than CO2 does and is far far more abundant.
> Earth has never suffered a mass extinction from a warming climate. The only climate which does cause a mass extinction is an ice age.
Europe lost a lot of its megafauna just after the ice age, when temperatures raised. Is not if is warm or cold, is the sudden change in the environment. And now is even faster
Yeah, and they're going to keep breaking records for the next 100 years at least, and as a consequence atmospheric water vapor will continue to increase, with the various knock on effects of drought in some places, floods in other places, and increasing random extreme weather events all around the planet. Get used to it, and plan to adapt, because it isn't going away. Ask the chatbot, it seems to understand the current state of science (this is after querying it about Fourier, Manabe, planetary science etc. for a bit)
> "Let's say we take an Earth-like planet with a similarly sized ocean, increase the concentration of infrared absorbing gases in the atmosphere about two-fold, then stabilize the atmosphere. How long will it take for the ocean to stop warming, from the perspective of both transient and equilibrium climate sensitivity estimates?"
Transient: > "Using this model, we can estimate that it would take roughly 100-200 years for the ocean to stop warming, depending on the specific assumptions used."
Equilibrium: > "Depending on the specific assumptions used in the model, it could take several centuries or even millennia for the ocean to reach a new equilibrium state."
The closest thing to this is lifeless planets. Mercury is in pretty good equilibrium.
Life is chemical reaction, and chemical reactions are inequilibria.
Life and equilibrium are opposites -- life is inequilibrium. It's possible because Earth has been in constant change, facilitating energy transfer between organisms, which themselves have been causing changes, like what we're doing or like that one time that cyanobacteria killed everything by creating oxygen[0] or like that other time that methanogens killed everything by creating methane[1].
That's not really a relevant comment. We aren't talking about Earth being in equilibrium, we are talking about ocean temperatures ending their rise. Parent used equilibrium to describe the end of warming, not to suggest that we'd reach some kind of desirable global homeostasis. I think we'd all be happy with a disequilibrium that made things cool down from where they are presently, or from where they'll be in 200 years.
You can hover with the mouse over the year labels at the bottom to highlight their curves... go on and do that for each column of years, from top to bottom... that will let you see how the curves rapidly went up for every single column, which is roughly a decade for each row. And it seems to be going up *faster* for the latest decades. This is really scary.
The system in question has always been something that combines various sensors, interpolating and adjusting to produce broad numbers. There's an extensive academic reference list here under the "About" tab: https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/products/optimum-interpolation-sst
Climate change research is often people's first look at how professional scientists operate, so things which are merely carefully working around systematic errors in other contexts may be suddenly deemed evidence of a fraudulent conspiracy.
No it isn't. Most people learn about the scientific method in school, where the rules are taught.
Then later they discover that climatologists routinely hide original data, present edited data as if it were measurements, drop inconvenient data, flip data upside down to ensure things get warmer, present conclusions whilst refusing to explain how they arrived at them, attack anyone who tries to double check their work and a million other things you're not meant to do because it results in deriving data from theory instead of the other way around.
But when they point out that this isn't scientific, suddenly they supposedly don't understand the scientific method anymore because they aren't "professional scientists". A pure appeal to authority fallacy! Professional scientists are unfortunately the people with the strongest incentives to break the rules and obfuscate about it, because rule breaking isn't penalized in academia but lack of papers is.
People can also see how much it varies by field. Climatological predictions get way more skepticism than, say, physical predictions about the nature of bosons, both because their methods are deserving of skepticism and because they constantly engage in fraudulent conspiracies to cover up those methods. Lest we forget:
Phil Jones 2009: For much of the southern hemisphere between 40 and 60S the normals are mostly made up as there is very little ship data there
In my experience I have spent a lot of time explaining what a systematic error is to people who went to school at least a decade ago.
> Present edited data, drop data
This is exactly what I mean. The people at the LHC (and probably LIGO) have to do this all the time because they generate vast amounts of noisy data too. CERN actually invented quite a lot of machine learning techniques to be able to drop as much data as they have to do.
For example, there's a famous temperature sensor in the UK that is obviously biased by being in the middle of London, how you would you use that data?
Berkeley Earth, funded by Koch brothers, independently produced a report concluding that global warming was not only real, but also with a curve that was broadly consistent with the IPCC curve too.
And it's probably fair to say that I did make an appeal to authority, however I stand by it because I have spent quite a lot of time listening to people who obviously have no idea what goes on in a physics department — forget conspiracy, just the basics of how to make a quantitative statement about a process e.g. "How can you predict something that hasn't happened yet" is one example, or using "correlation isn't causation" as a Crux to deny literally any causal argument.
Climate scientists for the most part aren't the best and brightest scientists however that doesn't really matter, because the basic concept of drawing a line through an obviously increasing curve and noting a strong link with CO2 emissions isn't very hard. The difficult stuff is working out which parts of the world will be more effected by local phenomena.
Energy doesn't come from nowhere. It comes either from the sun, from nuclear fuel, or from fossil fuels being burned. If it's not one of those three, we have a nobel prize winner.
So, it probably comes from the sun¹. The sun didn't change its output much according to relevant science in the last few years, solar cycles notwithstanding. So, it must be related to the amount of energy not being reflected into space.
Which is where greenhouse gases come into play. The earth reflects a certain amount of energy it receives back into the vastness of space. The ratio of how much it reflects is affected by greenhouse gases.
Now, there are a lot of greenhouse gases. CO² is one of the least potent of all, but its sheer volume in the atmosphere - being increased by human emissions - makes it the most relevant actor here: https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/overview-greenhouse-gases
So, we're keeping more solar energy within earth's atmosphere. We can use that energy as solar energy, or as wind energy, or whatever we like, but as long as it is solar energy, the energy budget within earth's atmosphere won't change. We either have to reflect it back to space, or we'll suffer the same consequences as not using it as renewable energy².
That's it. This is just a collection of facts which are really obvious, but from my experience few people really consider in their threat model. I think not one fact I just posted is false, but I would really welcome to be educated where I am wrong.
¹ Energy generated on earth compared to energy received from the sun is almost negligible: the energy generated on Earth is roughly 0.0000000000054% of the energy received from the Sun (3.8 x 10^26 watts, compared to a ballpark around 10^15 watts of fossil + nuclear fuels combined).
² This is probably obvious, but by reducing greenhouse gases in absolute terms, we reduce the albedo of earth, which in turn means reflecting more energy into space. Right now, we're just focusing on reducing the 2nd derivative of greenhouse gas emissions. In 2023, we do nothing at all in terms of actively increasing the albedo, that is, reflecting energy back into space.
>Energy doesn't come from nowhere. It comes either from the sun, from nuclear fuel, or from fossil fuels being burned. If it's not one of those three, we have a nobel prize winner.
Re footnote 2: Good effort, but it's not reflection (albedo). Greenhouse gases are all about the part of solar radiation that isn't immediately reflected.
Most incident sunlight is absorbed (either in the lower atmosphere or on the surface). At the same time long wave infrared radiation (heat) is emitted, proportional to the temperature of the surfaces. Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere slow down the rate at which that heat escapes to space.
Given that the energy needed to change ocean temp is massive and the current momentum, no tech solution will be able to prevent ocean ecosystem collapse of 90% ocean lifeform death. We're probably past the point of no return already.
As others have explained, there is the unprecedented loss of diversity of species and change in climate. I’d add that there’s also no evidence this will slow or stop (at least that I’m aware of), but there is mounting evidence that it will continue and even accelerate (which we are possibly even witnessing today).
The loss[1] of diversity is primarily due to the way we abuse the ocean - bottom dredging of shellfish beds destroying whole slow-growing ecosystems, dumping sediments, toxins and excessive nutrients (which amount to toxins) in the ocean via runoff from land, indiscriminately catching whole populations of free-swimming fish, and so on.
Climate change is just the cherry on top, really, compared to our other efforts to reduce biodiversity.
1. I don't know why we use the word "loss", which implies an accidental outcome, when we're systematically setting out to plunder and strip-mine ecosystems.
Do you know if diversity collapses in the ocean is more severe than on land? I know vast deforestation and destruction of the water cycle (either by reduction or degrading via pollution) has a virtually incalculable impact on this, but perhaps in the ocean it’s even worse.
The current mass extinction doesn’t have much to do with the climate crisis though, it’s caused by good old fashioned massive exploration of the environment for human gain. (This is, of course, not a good thing. It’s an already massively fucked with ecosystem that climate change is causing increasing strain in)
We’ve been collapsing ocean ecosystems simply through fishing.
200 million tonnes of seafood per year is an unprecedented and unsustainable change. Global warming will of course make things worse but it’s not like the oceans are currently healthy.
Pre-history usually refers to a time period approximately up to the invention of writing, so some several thousand years. If your time scale is the past 500 million years, there have been some real big mass extinctions to go along with those rapid climate changes. Not sure that's an encouraging precedent.
The climate has rapidly changed throughout Earth's history. Our current period of warming over the past couple of centuries began at the end of a mini ice age, so its not surprising temperatures rise when exiting the ice age. Just like its not surprising that temperatures rise after winter into spring & summer. CO2 is more likely a side effect of warming, coming from the warming ocean, than it is the driver of the warming.
This is just badly wrong and ignorant. Ask anyone who's actually studied the interglatial periods - in other words, the scientists who've provided the temperature information you're referring to - and they'll tell you why you're wrong.
Unprecedented in the era of human farming is sufficient enough for my worry. Yes, life as a whole probably survives whatever happens in one form or another. But those rapid climate changes tend towards seriously limiting the resources available to species living through them. Modern civilization relies on keeping things in a situation where it’s possible to grow enough food to feed 7+ billion people, and I’d rather we not create our own mass environmental change that has a serious possibility to disrupt said food making process.
Ice core records don’t go back that far. But some past mass extinction events were believed to be caused by more rapid climate swings resulting from asteroid impacts etc.
The thing about our situation is that no asteroid strikes or major geological events have occurred. So we know it’s possible to have major swings, but it’s less clear that they should occur without some obvious trigger.
What resolution does ice core records have? Do they really show year-over-year change or are the core records being smoothed through natural processes?
I read a book about this once, forget the title. Greenland’s cores have clear annual layers for several thousands of years (validated by extra ash layers from known volcanic eruptions), and they can measure carbon and temperature from the isotopes trapped inside (temp is measured due to some effect of oxygen isotopes following a reliable temperature gradient or something like that, they had a couple independent measurement methods that matched up). At some point the compacted layers start to merge but they can still reliably estimate because the overall cyclic trends (on multi thousand year scales, due to mathematically regular wobbling of earth’s rotation and other factors) follow the same trends from the clearly annual layers. This goes back several hundred thousand years, with temp increases always following carbon increases.
Edit: the book was The White Planet by Jean Jouzel, Claude Lorius, and Dominique Raynard
Apparently the meaning of 'surface' depends on the article. From wikipedia " The exact meaning of surface varies according to the measurement method used, but it is between 1 millimetre (0.04 in) and 20 metres (70 ft) below the sea surface."https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_surface_temperature
My understanding of this came from an article Karina Von Schuckmann, for which I can't find the PDF right now, which said they were measuring the top few millimeters.
One thing is the definition of the surface layer of water (0 to -20m correct) and other how to measure its temperature.
If you use a floating thermometer the sun-rays are probably warming it or the winds are cooling it, so you are including an error in your sample. The results are higher or lower water temperatures than the real ones.
It is assumed that the water layer mix uniformly in the first meters by wave forces and wind so we can measure surface at 10m perfectly
Ad absurdum, dust in the higher parts of the atmosphere can cause to literally freeze over the whole planet.
I am no optimist, but not due to technological limitations, but economic ones — the only hope is “unknown unknowns”. We might invent some new technology that could wipe clear our existing estimates for the better.
In the last few million years there were massive swings in Earth (and sea) temperature.
A couple hundred million years ago there was a warm era, there were no ice anywhere on Earth.
I can see how climate change might be highly destructive to human habitat, but "90% ocean lifeform death" is the best excuse for not taking climate activists seriously.
It all depends on the rate at which things change. Greenhouse gasses we emitted already changed temperatures faster than ever before (1ish °C in less than 2 centuries). Nature doesn't have time to adapt to such a repentine change and so another "great dying" is a concrete possibility.
The first thing to understand is there is a carbon cycle just like the water cycle. If it comes out of the ground then it needs to go back in the ground. This happens naturally on large geologic time scales, except humans are pulling it out faster than normal. To balance this all out we have to put it back in faster than normal. The solution needs to be cheap and easy otherwise it will never get done. Carbon capture is expensive and hard so it won't work for political and socioeconomic reasons.
The best solution appears to be growing biomass and the ocean is the perfect environment for it because of its size and the fact there is already a mechanism in place. Sea water is high in calcium and nitrogen but lacks iron in comparision. Algea need these as a basis to grow and reproduce. Micro organisms feed off algea, plankton feed off micro organisms, small fish feed...etc. By releasing iron oxide into the ocean it causes an algea bloom, an immediate proliferation of biomass. Once the iron is consumed the ecosystem normalizes, returning to levels prior to the application of iron oxide. By requiring a distribution system on container ships, and determining seasonal application amounts and times, we could seed our way to large biomass. The key is that unconsumed biomass sinks to the bottom of the ocean effectively capturing carbon, moving it along in the cycle to the point where the next step is oil conversion. Once the CO2 levels in the water are at a negative differential with the atmosphere, the ocean will pull the carbon back in as a simple matter of equilibrium. Over time this decreases global CO2 not only cooling the air but also the ocean. This mechanism is both easy and cheap and requires minimal regulation and minimal ongoing funding to monitor and manage.
So, if this solution exists, and seems to be the best solution to overall warming of the earth, then ask yourself...why aren't we doing it?
Are there calcs for how much energy these consistent rises take? I know it's basic chemistry so I assume those numbers have been run. Is warming from greenhouse gasses alone enough to cause, or are there other unknown contributors?
Albedo of the ocean changing over time can mean significantly more heat is absorbed. An example of this would be a loss of ice reflecting light rather than absorbing it. This won’t account for all of this energy, but it’s an example of one non-gas origin of warming.
The change in albedo is due to ice receding and revealing darker water, which absorbs more energy than ice does. The net effect is more solar energy being held in the ocean and atmosphere.
The same thing happens anywhere there is ice. Think of mountain tops revealing dark gray rock which heats to 30 degrees Celsius in summer in a ___location where there was previously ice. The ice would melt, yet reflect energy and still be cooler than the air, but the rock just radiates heat into the atmosphere (and remaining ice surrounding it).
Warming from greenhouse gases is the driver of the warming, but there are multiplies. Most obvious one is water vapour which is a very powerful greenhouse gas. So the warming caused by the raised CO2 enables more water vapour in the air (warmer air can take up more water) which amplifies the greenhouse effect. Then come all the secondary effects like melting of highly reflective ice and others.
Not surprising, with the high IR absorption of water vapor (higher than CO2). Together with Oxygen, Water Vapor basically is the global greenhouse effect. There aught to be a law.
Well, eventually, yes. Personally it's hard to see parents around me trying to do their best for their children (gadgets, comfort, road trips, holidays) and inadvertently make their life difficult in the future. I try to gently point them to articles like this, however denial is strong, even among cultured people.
Do you have a source for that data? According to NOAA [0], that doesn't appear to be true for world average sea surface temp data. 2021 and 2022 data appear to be tracking fairly consistently.
Confirmation bias. People select what they want to remember.
In any case, it's the trends that matter, not the year-to-year variation. Some years will be cooler than the previous, but both will be part of a worrying multi-decade trend of upward temperature trends.
Temperatures can increase without going in a straight line up (eg, last year may have been cooler than the year before, but it's still up overall and continuing to go up).
Saying what you said in your original comment is akin to, "Look, it's January and I just made a snowman, so much for global warming huh?".
Really? I'm surprised -- every other time I visit my parents I overhear conservative media gloating over how the latest downward fluctuation in something or other casts doubt on global warming. They've been doing this for at least 20 years but the lines keep going up.
True I guess (I did not search), but records were not broken on coolness. There is always an up/down variance over the years, as other people posted, the trend is up, not down. So being cooler than last year is not an "event". Breaking records is an "event".
2015 was the last year with much time at all below the +2-sigma line for daily mean ocean temperature since 1980. That's terrifying - the mean is moving upwards /very/ quickly.
What do you think the primary theme of HN is? Because the stated theme is:
> Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: *anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.*
Your understanding of hacking is entirely irrelevant if the official scope of HN is literally “more than hacking” and even includes the word “anything”.
Yes, unless the data has been doctored or outright fabricated to present a dismal picture that has the effect of coercing society to adopt globalist elitist agendas that rob the populations of their rights and power "for the greater good". We can no longer "trust the science". There are too many examples of it being utterly corrupted to substantiate narrow and extremist political goals.
If the data has been doctored, it's in the opposite direction. You are completely misguided if you think the majority of wealthy "elites" are making any serious efforts to address climate crises.
The claim wasn't that the elite are making a serious effort to address the climate issue. The claim was that the elite are making a serious effort to use the fear of the climate crisis to push everyone else to give up freedom and give the elites more control.
Mind you, I'm not saying I agree with the claim. But before you dismiss it as baloney, at least be sure you know what is actually being claimed.
Verified and certified video of CNN executives discussing their plans - why not be serious? CNN never even denied it. Those are their employees. Do you have any proof that this isn't legit?
With this attitude you'll see conspiracies everywhere, and that's a self reinforcing spiral.
If this is how much evidence you need to dismiss something without checking, then you'll dismiss everything and you'll never find out if/when the hunch was wrong.
My attitude is scientifically based. When you see data that is "too good to be true" for a certain political side, you should assume that it likely is. If this "completely vindicates" the drive and cause of the left-wing globalist elites, and is then used to substantiate their argument that personal freedoms need to be removes so that they have "enough power" to stop the oncoming Climate Armageddon, then no, the data should not be trusted. Too many studies have recently been proven to have been entirely fabricated or heavily doctored to back up a political cause. We should not be sheep.
How many studys of this kind did you read yourself? How many of those studys you read, if you read some, you were able to understand? In my experience, people talking about not beeing sheep are the ones who get their "information" from some obscure youtube channel that tells them to not be a sheep.
We have a crisis in science where the data for too many studies has been doctored. So we must trust in common sense, defend personal freedoms, and reject globalist elitist agendas that promise us easy solutions and impossible utopias.
Believe me, scientists are very well aware of the problems in academia, publishing papers, peer reviewing, it is not perfect. But don't make the mistake to turn this into a global elitist conspiracy, yes there are some people who like to control the narative, but you really need to learn to distinct good from bad scientists. For starter, people who make money only by telling some other people that everything they believe in is crap, and that all other people except your little group needs to wake up and dont be sheep, that shouldnt be the guys/girls to trust.
No. This study can be used to change public policy in hundreds of countries. Its importance is paramount, and the findings can be used to radically alter and remove your freedoms, so the default position should be to not trust it. Before we believe a shred of it, every input needs to be thoroughly investigated and reviewed by multiple independent parties. The reason I am claiming this is a conspiracy is because it perfectly lines up with globalist elitist talking points. That flawless supporting study is their dream come true, which is enough of a reason to cry foul.
No, you're just talking bollocks. There is no replication crisis in everyday, known physics. We know how the greenhouse effect works, better than we know how gravity works.
Ironically, we know precious little about gravity. We couldn't even properly scale our classic understanding of gravity to orbital mechanics without significantly upgrading our models. And discoveries in particle physics expand our understanding of the phenomenon in completely wild ways.
I wonder if this is how the pendulum swings from interglacial to glacial periods. More water vapor in the atmosphere means heavier rains overall and heavier snowfall in polar regions. More snow takes longer to melt in the summer making it more likely that snow remains to be buried by more snow the next winter. Increased albedo of polar regions reduces global temperature making winter colder allowing the ice caps to creep towards the equator.
I think it is good to remember that Earth has cyclic glacial periods. We just happen to live during a warm period.
This feels a lot like someone saying "Volcanoes have periods with high pressure and low pressure. We just happen to live during a high pressure period." in Pompei, as it ignores the problem in-between: the current change in glacial period is unprecedented for natural cycles.
Is it though? The Earth has been ice free for 85% of its history. That makes the hysteria over climate change look like freaking out about summer coming around because its been cold for a few months.
This is a non-sequitur. I explicitly stated that the rate of change is the problem. Why does it matter how often the earth has been ice-free? Do you understand the difference between a value over time, and its derivative?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermohaline_circulation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_meridional_overturnin...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_zone_(ecology)
https://www.psu.edu/news/research/story/global-warming-led-c...
Peter Ward: “Oceans - What’s the Worst that Can Happen?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eM1aakTzMw