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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday March 14 2017, @09:47PM   Printer-friendly
from the did-they-expect-to-find-handwarmers? dept.

https://www.usnews.com/news/news/articles/2017-03-13/arctic-ice-loss-driven-by-natural-swings-not-just-mankind-study

OSLO (Reuters) - Natural swings in the Arctic climate have caused up to half the precipitous losses of sea ice around the North Pole in recent decades, with the rest driven by man-made global warming, scientists said on Monday.

The study indicates that an ice-free Arctic Ocean, often feared to be just years away, in one of the starkest signs of man-made global warming, could be delayed if nature swings back to a cooler mode.

Natural variations in the Arctic climate "may be responsible for about 30–50 percent of the overall decline in September sea ice since 1979," the U.S.-based team of scientists wrote in the journal Nature Climate Change.

Sea ice has shrunk steadily and hit a record low in September 2012 -- late summer in the Arctic -- in satellite records dating back to 1979.


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday March 15 2017, @04:06AM (5 children)

    by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Wednesday March 15 2017, @04:06AM (#479274) Journal

    Sure, the negative feedbacks work...until they don't. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Your blithe assumption that the negative feedback systems have infinite capacity and can react instantaneously to perturbations of arbitrary size is the same kind of bullshit that makes economists think growth is infinite.

    Have you ever played with a basic buffer solution? The pH of the solution as a whole changes very little as you add more and more acid to it, until suddenly you've used up all the buffer and--whoops! There it goes! And this is what's happening in the ocean, though IIRC there are two layers of equilibrium (carbonate/bicarbonate and bicarbonate/CO2).

    See, that's what negative feedbacks are like. They work and work and work, until suddenly...they don't. Catastrophic failure.

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Wednesday March 15 2017, @10:20AM

    by GreatAuntAnesthesia (3275) on Wednesday March 15 2017, @10:20AM (#479330) Journal

    Exactly. Underneath this "feedback loop" assertion there seems to be an underlying assumption that the world is under some kind of obligation to maintain a nice, comfortable, convenient environment for humans. That somehow the laws of physics are conspiring in our favour, which suggests belief in some kind of benevolent deity / gaia figure. Why should these feedback loops all conspire to keep everything at a nice equilibrium and keep Florida above the waterline? The Earth's environment has undergone some radical changes in the past, there's no reason to believe it can't do so again. Reminds me of that quote from Feynman regarding the shuttle disaster: "reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."

  • (Score: 1) by Arik on Wednesday March 15 2017, @04:36PM (3 children)

    by Arik (4543) on Wednesday March 15 2017, @04:36PM (#479477) Journal
    Well I can't speak for him but for me:

    I don't assume that the negative feedbacks can't collapse as you say. I don't think I assume anything about them - I mean I know they exist as a class, I know how some of them work, roughly speaking. But no more than that.

    What I've done is asked questions. What about these negative feedback loops? How can you be certain they won't hold? Just how much do we really know about both the positive and negative feedbacks involved? Who's quantified them, how have these quantifications been tested and verified and proved? What do we know about how one set interacts with the next?

    Funny how I never get satisfactory answers to those sorts of questions. The positive mechanisms are sometimes studied intensely but the negatives are sometimes ignored or dismissed with a handwave. "OF COURSE we've corrected for all this you silly layman." Oh really? If you've corrected for them all then you must know exactly what all of them are, you must have an exhaustive list and you must have quantified them all. Where's the data? That would be absolutely HUGE. Somehow no one can ever seem to find it though.

    Perhaps that's because no one really knows. People that have been studying this their whole lives are still only in a position to make educated guesses, perhaps. Otherwise surely these tremendous expansions of human knowledge would be, you know, published somewhere. Why not?

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    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 15 2017, @08:37PM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 15 2017, @08:37PM (#479563)

      Not sure what to call your fallacy... skeptic science fallacy? Those are all good questions to ask, but I suspect this is simply your own research failures paired with a lack of understanding. Here is the quick and dirty result: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_feedback#Negative [wikipedia.org]

      Since you are so concerned, and obviously making bold assumptions with no evidence, then why don't you be the person to put the list together? Put in some time after work, gather the data, email the researchers. Let us know if they all fail to provide what you're looking for, but come back empty handed and prepare to be dismissed. Your post is basically just a big conspiracy rant similar to the "no stars" in the moon pictures argument.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 16 2017, @03:16AM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 16 2017, @03:16AM (#479660)
        Been there, done that. There are people that get paid to propagandize wikipedia full time and they are ruthless. Go learn.
        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 16 2017, @04:16AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 16 2017, @04:16AM (#479670)

          Wow, just wow. Hopeless people are hopeless. Or shills, hard to say which is which nowadays eh comrade?