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[Note: The announcement of these records just occurred; the highs actually occurred in the years: 1982, 1989, and 2015. --martyb]
Highest Recorded Temperatures In Antarctica Announced And They May Surprise You:
Antarctica is often misunderstood, and you commonly see people mischaracterize ice gains and losses in Antarctica compared to the Arctic. It is typically a region known for being cold. The South Pole's annual mean temperature is -76F (-60C) in winter and -18 (-28.2C) in summer according to data at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. In a previous Forbes discussion, I explained why the polar regions are so cold. However, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) announced today new verified record high-temperatures for the region, and they may surprise you.
WMO announced in a press release,
The highest temperature for the "Antarctic region" (defined by the WMO and the United Nations as all land and ice south of 60-deg S) of 67.6 F (19.8 C) , [was] observed on Jan. 30, 1982 at Signy Research Station, Borge Bay on Signy Island. The highest temperature for the Antarctic Continent, defined as the main continental landmass and adjoining islands, is the temperature extreme of 63.5 F (17.5 C) recorded on Mar. 24, 2015 at the Argentine Research Base Esperanza located near the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. The highest temperature for the Antarctic Plateau (at or above 2,500 meters, or 8,200 feet) was 19.4 F (-7 C) made on Dec. 28, 1989 at an automatic weather station site D-80 located inland of the Adelie Coast.
These records are quite impressive when you consider that average yearly temperature ranges from about about 14 F on the coasts to -76 F at the highest points in the interior. The ice sheet contains about 90% of the planet's freshwater supply and is about 3 miles thick in places. While unlikely to happen, if the entire ice sheet melted it would raise sea levels by around 200 feet (60 meters) according to the WMO.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 10 2020, @01:32AM (9 children)
I did study economics, though that was a long time ago. Possibly I should have used a different term like fiscally or monetarily motivated. Taking care of our environment does really fall within another economic term for that matter, "Public Good" or "Common Good".
I agree - efforts so far have been pretty mediocre and given results in-kind, with the exception of a few mitigations (limiting CFCs for example). Growing up we were reminded "only put as much water in the kettle as you need, don't fill it to the top". Recycling became more commonplace, now we're moving away from single use shopping bags at supermarkets, more solar installations are going onto individuals homes. This is a bottom-up solution. A top-down approach will cost stakeholders who have a vested interest in keeping things how they are now, and they've gotten very comfortable and wasted time they could have used becoming more agile.
Energy policy, at-least in this country is strongly influenced by the fact we have a shit load of coal. Building solar power and wind farms does cost money, but at the same time our energy needs have increased rather than diminished. Currently a new coal power plant is being debated and for the life of me I cannot understand why they don't build some kind of hybrid infrastructure. Shit load of solar panels or similar with a part-time fossil fuel burning operation attached that could either run an low capacity concurrently or be stepped up as-needed. In my ideal scenario you could rely solely on the renewable supply 95% of the time, but that would require a seriously battery bank/buffer. That tech is evolving, slowly getting better, but I'm painfully aware that the mining of materials used to make batteries have their own environmental cost attached. I'm not even entirely against nuclear power when done right, this country has plenty of uranium, but I digress.
Shortsightedness in the pursuit of the quick payoff, do the cheapest thing now, show results before the next election. This mindset is the problem.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday February 10 2020, @08:14AM (8 children)
Perhaps. But that motivation still comes from building up a life. Interests changed as they became better off economically.
Look at how trite those bottom-up solutions are. Recycling and conservation don't save much - unless they save human time (such as reducing the water in the kettle reduces heating time). Everything else is low value (or even negative value as in much of recycling which wastes our time to push a little low value plastic, paper, and glass around). Meanwhile if we look at actual human progress, waste is a common ingredient. For example, artists and engineers don't create by using the minimal amount of raw/recycled materials (unless that happens to be the goal of the project). The mediocre (and sometimes negative) value of top and bottom level solutions should be noted here because that's an important part of the problem.
Maybe the economics of that hybrid operation aren't as good as the boosters claim. Or maybe corruption is involved. Whatever the case, no one builds a coal burning plant without some expectation that they'll get more out of it than what they put in. It could indeed be as you say the quick payoff, but not necessarily so.
I don't think it's a productive move to criticize others for shortsightedness while simultaneously not being able to show that acting as you propose is less shortsighted. This pattern of weak and sometimes counterproductive solutions needs to be looked at.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 10 2020, @09:00AM (7 children)
And we end up at square one. Weak solution don't work, the strong solutions cost more, implement lip-service micro-changes and around and around we go.
My hybrid suggestion was somewhat off the cuff, but what better way to make progress than to meet in the middle as a stepping stone? As for ROI being an issue, you're right, but this is a problem that requires a non-private sector actor. Selling off national infrastructure falls in the "quick buck" basket and has contributed to the problem by reinforcing the profit-driven decision making.
A nearby town has started discussing the practicality of a micro-grid, solar panels, charging batteries on enrolled homes with the collective charge shared around as needed. It's more of a solution to the poorly maintained infrastructure that results in semi-regular blackouts there, but it may yield something helpful in some other way.
Ultimately, politicians are afraid to be too progressive. That goes for all the large parties in Oz. The Murdock press would castrate anybody doing something overtly green that would use significant tax payer money. They also don't want to risk weakening their position in the global market by being less competitive than countries who can use the cheapest means of energy production. All pretty common-sense stuff.
Bottom line is that doing the right thing seems to be contingent on it being a smart move financially. I would love to see this country become a global leader in clean energy, but at this rate it won't be cheap enough quickly enough. All the politically backed discourse is just wasting time and I'm not happy about waiting for enough of the older voters (they don't want to lose over being green) to kick the bucket.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday February 11 2020, @03:23AM (6 children)
The point is that if the solutions, weak or strong, cost more than the value of the benefit you receive (and IMHO some would-be solutions are so bad that they're worst for mitigating climate change than if we did nothing at all), then square one is where you should be!
What would be the point? Without a major restructuring of the economy, the US wouldn't stay a leader (it has a notorious problem retaining industry). As to strategies for becoming a global leader, my take [soylentnews.org] is that renewables and nuclear are already massively oversubsidized as it is. I think that level of subsidy is more likely to result in a permanent dependency than in a global leader in anything.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 12 2020, @11:02PM (5 children)
Here lies my beef. Value does not only come in the form of dollars and cents. It's hard if not impossible to measure a public good in those terms. Sure you could f&^% about with data modeling and projections to try and convert the public good into money it would save in 50 or 100 years, then argue about that, but it's just not helpful.
Subsidies. That's a minefield. In this country it's coal that is very heavily subsidized. Our exports of it are subsidized to help the primary producers compete in the global market. The Government may as well just be paying our handful of coal barons directly. The argument that it's beneficial because of trickle-down economics is weak at best. At it's worst it's like a dark comedy - you can even compare trickle-down economics to communism (the argument for both being "it's okay to have several rich groups rise far above the rest because their prosperity will lift those around them over time").
We do have some solar subsidy schemes, but I've only seen them put solar panels on residential homes. It's the bottom-up model that keeps failing over and over. It's the least efficient way to do it. If you produce more solar power than you use you actually "sell" your excess KWh via a feed-in tariff. Your feed in rate is typically lower than what you pay the grid for power meaning that the power companies are profiting from the power they're "selling on". If you follow the money it's clear who it's designed to benefit.
If you removed all power subsidies here it would make renewable options more attractive, but the link between government and coal industry is too ingrained. Our PM Smoko back when he was Treasurer - https://imgur.com/a/NWZUleu/ [imgur.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday February 13 2020, @05:32AM (4 children)
Hence, why I used the term, "value" instead of a dollar amount. My view is that even if you ignore the dollars and cents, there's still a fair bit of climate change mitigation that is worse than doing nothing precisely for mitigating climate change. There's a big negative correlation between all of the environmental matters and poverty. Poverty leads to higher population growth leads to higher greenhouse gases emissions in the long run, plus a lot of other bad environmental problems like pollution and habitat destruction. My take is that a lot of these proposals are huge poverty magnets. Just look at the story, the developed world is curbing its emissions. Everyone else swamps those reductions. The poorer parts of the world are more than compensating for any reductions from the developed world.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 13 2020, @08:05AM (3 children)
Do you think that a top-down approach would result in less poverty being created than a bottom-up approach?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday February 13 2020, @01:34PM (2 children)
Approach to what? If I think Moon Nazis are the only danger out there, then any approaches I'll come up with will be a mess. It gets even worse, if I believe that merely going through the motions of what I think stops a Moon Nazi invasion actually would stop one (let's burn huge crop circles in our neighbors' corn fields without telling them first to confuse Moon Nazi spies!). Too often, at both levels of approach, doing something is confused with doing something useful.
In the US, for example, tens of millions of people sort their recyclables and offer them to the Recycling God, who then dutifully dumps them in the local landfill since recycling is so expensive with the shutdown of the pipeline to China. Some municipalities have done this for years [baltimoresun.com] without people caring. It's a failure there of both the top-down and bottom-up approaches.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 14 2020, @04:33AM (1 child)
*Sigh*. Generally we environmentally conscious younger people want to achieve progress, think about the problems and try to develop worth-while ideas, get behind ones we see as having worth. It's a process, missteps will happen, and we'll keep trying.
What I've taken away from our discussion is that all of your "wisdom" has resigned you to being unhappy with all ideas on the table, seemingly leaving you nothing other to contribute than crapping on every presented option rather than supporting one that might not be perfect but have merit. You're welcome to disagree with this observation but it's based on the exchange we're just had above. It's painted quite the picture.
Regardless, I appreciate what I can learn from discourse, and have taken some things away from our exchange. When who your talking to starts blathering about Moon Nazis (when they know full well to what you were referring) it might be time to walk away and reflect on what has been said.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday February 15 2020, @01:14AM
Want progress != achieve progress. And maybe they're trying, but I'm not so confident of that either.
For me, there's several tells that things have gone profoundly wrong. First, as I noted, a lot of big problems are ignored or glossed over like habitat destruction, normal pollution, and mismanagement of natural resources - all which presently can cause a lot more damage than global warming can. Too often I see people talk and talk about climate change, and then half-heartedly acknowledge these other problems exist. Research papers go out of their way to mention climate change because that can help their future funding.`
Second, there's no plan B. To be blunt, climate change mitigation has lost this round - the 2 C line in the sand will be crossed. There's too many poor people in the world for us to entertain the extreme restructuring of human society that mitigation advocates want. Yet where's the discussion of adaption - both in society and the environment? Prioritizing mitigation targets or going after low lying fruit? My take is that this is intentional. If other options were on the table, then people would not choose the hardcore full stop option that causes the most poverty and harms the most people. It's also why I think the harm of climate change has been greatly exaggerated while the costs of mitigation have been greatly understated. A lot of people are trying to make it look like we have no choice in order to stampede us in the desired direction.
And that brings me to my third tell - the money. There's plenty of it in climate change mitigation even for the supposed opposition like Big Oil. I think that's why any sort of funding for opposition to climate change mitigation has been so sparse. It is also is one of the big reasons for this exercise in the first place. It's the environmentalist equivalent of terrorism, something to scare the rubes and get those sweet public funds.
Then we get to the fourth tell, the ridiculous narratives that have diverged far from reality such as people complaining about huge but nonexistent pro-fossil fuel propaganda (getting wrong the relative spending on such propaganda by at least an order of magnitude), hand wringing about the end of the world in the next few decades (particularly, when the threat is supposed to be at most a few meters rise in sea level), insisting that any disagreement is a sign of greed and shortsightedness, and claiming there's all kinds of evidence for radical positions that aren't supported by actual science. That incidentally isn't "trying" in your sense above.
Just in this thread, we have the ridiculous narrative of a large number of "Boomers" holding us back. This story ignores that the Boomers are a huge, environmentally aware demographic responsible for the great environmental improvement throughout the developed world of the last half decade. If they aren't on board, maybe it's worth thinking about why?
Bottom line is that I've grown tired of listening to people both young and old speak of the harms of climate change while treating the greatest improvement of humanity ever as if it didn't exist.