Yet another Hacker News

67 points guillego 1 hour ago 17 comments

maelito 48 minutes ago | parent

Just checked the Glacier Blanc in the Massif des Écrins. The map's glacier vector perimeter is completely wrong : the glacier has retreated hundreds of meters already.

I hope this is just a map thing, and not the base for these predictions :/

mitxela 45 minutes ago | parent

We chose this and we're still choosing it right now.

alangibson 30 minutes ago | parent

Agree. It's been my position for a while that we've de facto decided to do nothing to prevent warming and we'll just live with the consequences.

FLeXMurphy 13 minutes ago | parent

Strong agree on this. I don't think I could do nothing any harder than I already am. Could you? Could any of us?

encomiast 9 minutes ago | parent

Some people are clearly doing less nothing: there are activists protesting, formal political action groups, scientists doing research, etc. What isn't as clear is whether any this can actually overcome the huge social and economic structural issues to actually make a dent.

kpil 7 minutes ago | parent

The CMIP7 scenarios were just released. AR7 is not yet completed but it's the input for it.

The "worst" RCP8.5 / SSP5-8.5-style futures (coal-dominated, ~4.4–4.9 °C) are no longer treated as plausible given policy already in place, renewable cost declines, and observed emissions.

The policy changes have changed the projections.

Warming will continue, yes. The consequences will have to be dealt with. In some regions this will be problematic. It's still political and economical factors that determines the outcome.

It's worth noting that there is a fair amount of eschatology or even apocalypticism going on. It's built into the human mind somehow.

latexr 2 minutes ago | parent

> In some regions this will be problematic.

Indeed. Specifically, in the region called “Earth”. Even if some region is magically unaffected by climate change, what do you think will happen when the people in the other regions move to run for their lives? Everyone will be affected.

encomiast 23 minutes ago | parent

This does seem to be the result of human activity. But I'm not really sure how the words 'we' and 'choose' work in a sentence like that. The collective of humanity doesn't really make choices the way I understand that word. And, while individual citizens make choices that contribute to this, and business people and politicians make choices that prioritize the short-term over the long term, it's not really correct to say they prefer and therefor choose the climate change. It seems like we don't have a good vocabulary for talking about the cumulative results of small choices.

latexr 7 minutes ago | parent

I get what you’re saying, but that doesn’t seem helpful. We don’t need to discuss better words to describe the intricacies of the situation, we need to do something about it.

It also doesn’t help to keep saying “this does seem to be the result of human activity”. “Seems to be”? It is, the science has been clear on that for a long time. But even if it wasn’t our fault, it would still be our responsibility to fix it. Because, you know, we live on the planet.

If I’m inside a house and it catches on fire, I’m not going to kick back on the sofa and not do anything because I didn’t start the fire. If it started because a group of idiots decided to launch fireworks inside, I’m not going to argue semantics about who exactly thought it was a good idea and who didn’t—the fucking house is on fire—what we need is for everyone to work together right now to put it out.

a1exyz 5 minutes ago | parent

i am doing something about it personally with the citizens climate lobby

a1371 40 minutes ago | parent

I don't understand why a glacier would survive longer in the 4°C scenario than 2.5°C but this seems to suggest so.

Perz1val 37 minutes ago | parent

Water has the highest density at 4°C, but I have no idea how that'd relate

abdullahkhalids 4 minutes ago | parent

The system is highly non-linear and has a lot of flippable components. For example, average temperature increase will cause the AMOC to collapse which will make parts of Europe cooler (while also increasing extreme weather events).

Similar things could happen with whichever glacier you are looking at.

mbty 34 minutes ago | parent

Okjökull is considered extinct, yet according to this website it should survive until the 2070s at least? It also gives 2079 for 1.5°C vs. 2075 for 2.7°C (I know that the local dynamic is not the same as the global one, but still).

snthd 19 minutes ago | parent

The maximum category is "Survives through 2100". Not great, not terrible.

Aditya_0315 19 minutes ago | parent

Reviewed this and it is quite impressive. The map adds much more reality to the data as opposed to regular climate maps. The one feature that I think would be awesome to add would be an interactivity layer to the bottom-right panel indicating the extinction years where you can click or hover over the warming period to view the affected glaciers on the map and their numbers.