Scientists Amazed as Canadian Permafrost Thaws 70 Years Early:
Permafrost at outposts in the Canadian Arctic is thawing 70 years earlier than predicted, an expedition has discovered, in the latest sign that the global climate crisis is accelerating even faster than scientists had feared.
[...] With governments meeting in Bonn this week to try to ratchet up ambitions in United Nations climate negotiations, the... findings, published on June 10 in Geophysical Research Letters, offered a further sign of a growing climate emergency.
The paper was based on data Romanovsky and his colleagues had been analyzing since their last expedition to the area in 2016. The team used a modified propeller plane to visit exceptionally remote sites, including an abandoned Cold War-era radar base more than 300 km from the nearest human settlement.
Diving through a lucky break in the clouds, Romanovsky and his colleagues said they were confronted with a landscape that was unrecognizable from the pristine Arctic terrain they had encountered during initial visits a decade or so earlier.
The vista had dissolved into an undulating sea of hummocks - waist-high depressions and ponds known as thermokarst. Vegetation, once sparse, had begun to flourish in the shelter provided from the constant wind.
[...] Scientists are concerned about the stability of permafrost because of the risk that rapid thawing could release vast quantities of heat-trapping gases, unleashing a feedback loop that would in turn fuel even faster temperature rises.
No word on whether or not the Wicked Witch of the West had anything to do with it.
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 19 2019, @09:16AM (38 children)
Scientists' Predictions Proved Hilariously Inaccurate - Demand They Keep Their Credibility
(Score: 4, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 19 2019, @09:39AM
FTFY.
'cause what follows is an increase in atmospheric methane in your life time.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by PiMuNu on Wednesday June 19 2019, @12:37PM (25 children)
Unfortunately, they are wrong in the bad direction - i.e. heating has been *underestimated*.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday June 19 2019, @01:06PM (23 children)
Fortune is a matter of perspective. From the perspective of the rich old men who have been driving climate science in a particular direction for decades, this was both the desired and fortunate outcome.
For anyone under the age of 30 who hasn't inherited $100M+ from previous generations, this could be very unfortunate indeed.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Funny) by PiMuNu on Wednesday June 19 2019, @01:15PM (22 children)
Could you unpack the comment a bit? I don't understand the subtext.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday June 19 2019, @01:47PM (17 children)
Old men who made their fortunes in industries which produced mass quantities of greenhouse gasses have been pushing the science to deny, delay, and otherwise push back the perceived impacts of said greenhouse gasses for as long as possible, so that they may continue to grow their fortunes without having to change their business models which have worked so fortunately for them.
Any scientist who might have come out in 1990 and predicted that by 2020 the permafrost would be thawed would have been laughed out of his career for the ensuing three decades - mountains of denial science have that kind of effect on otherwise unbiased researchers and theorists. Some of the denial science is obviously biased by its backers, but not all of it, and it skews the community, in the fortunate direction for the backers.
Of course, those of us who gave fortune to these titans of industry reaped some short term benefits in the exchange, but in the future we and our descendants will be paying the true costs of our past purchases of coal fired electricity, oil fired transportation, high energy building materials (steel, concrete), etc. On balance, I'd say if you didn't inherit $100M+ from the previous generation, in 50 years you and your descendants are going to be net-screwed by the decisions to press onward with mass greenhouse gas emissions.
Of course, we allow ourselves to be led by the $100M+ trust fund babies and their self serving goals, so I suppose we asked for this at the ballot box.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 19 2019, @02:55PM (6 children)
Are you just totally unfamiliar with the history of failed predictions from the global warning crowd? I've seen no evidence anyone would be laughed off the stage for making dramatic claims.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by nitehawk214 on Wednesday June 19 2019, @03:01PM (2 children)
Yeah, sticking your fingers in your ear and saying "LALALALA" will certainly help as the permafrost and glaciers melt.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 19 2019, @03:08PM (1 child)
Nice strawman, keep on sticking your fingers in your ears so you can ignore the grand solar minimum that is on its way.*
No need for you to prepare for that at all, I am sure the government will save you. The same one that is still paying people to move into flood plains...
* Afaic, people should prepare for both possibilities, the climate is always changing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 19 2019, @03:14PM
Really, there are four general climates:
1) Dry, Cool
2) Dy, Hot
3) Wet, Cool
4) Wet, Hot
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday June 19 2019, @04:28PM (2 children)
Not "laughed off stage", but many predictions were eliminated as "alarmist" or "politically unacceptable...try to say something they'll be willing to hear". And, to be fair, the observable evidence even a decade ago wasn't really convincing...there were multiple ways to interpret it (and they were ALL used...including "it's nothing to worry about"). Face it, prediction is an inexact science, so a model should never be completely convincing.
OTOH, the reason the more extreme predictions weren't factored into the IPCC report was that they were unacceptable, not that the models were unreasonable.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 19 2019, @05:14PM (1 child)
Observable evidence for what? That the temperature record shows an increase since 1900? I don't think anyone ever doubted that. Instead they wondered about the reasons for this change (bad data, some natural cycle, etc).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 20 2019, @11:22PM
Given the way they keep altering historical data to fit their current theories, and then deleting the original data I do doubt exactly that.
Note I said doubt, not disbelieve. They have screwed with the data enough that I no longer trust them.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 19 2019, @03:04PM
Also, here you go:
https://ascelibrary.org/doi/10.1061/%28ASCE%290887-381X%281990%294%3A1%286%29 [ascelibrary.org]
So there you go, it was predicted the temperature would rise ~1 °C per decade back in 1990 and needed to rise 2 °C to start thawing the permafrost. So by 2020 they would predict a temperature rise of 3 °C and a thawing permafrost.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Wednesday June 19 2019, @03:09PM (4 children)
Thanks, it wasn't clear whether
> From the perspective of the rich old men who have been driving climate science in a particular direction for decades, this was both the desired and fortunate outcome.
referred to Al Gore/etc pushing pro-warming lobby (I guess he is billionaire, I don't really know, he seems part of US oligarchy) or big oil pushing anti-warming lobby.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday June 19 2019, @07:56PM (3 children)
There are always exceptions - Al Gore talks a good game about the importance of change for the future, but that doesn't stop him from building a huge air-conditioned mansion for himself.
On the other hand, the number of people making $1M+ per year in the oil and coal and steel and so many other industries who simply refuse to listen to arguments that their industry needs to change for the good of our children - that's a scary high number indeed.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 20 2019, @12:21AM (2 children)
Do you normally just ignore all input that shows you are wrong and just go on repeating the same stuff?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 20 2019, @01:20AM
As I said there are always exceptions - Al Gore talks a good game about the importance of change for the future, but that doesn't stop him from building a huge air-conditioned mansion for himself.
On the other hand, the number of people making $1M+ per year in the oil and coal and steel and so many other industries who simply refuse to listen to arguments that their industry needs to change for the good of our children - that's a scary high number indeed.
(Score: 3, Funny) by JoeMerchant on Thursday June 20 2019, @02:45AM
AC's not me, but this time he speaks well.
As for
from ACs, normally yes.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 19 2019, @09:29PM (3 children)
Yup, experts were still predicting another ice age was just around the corner back then, and only a fool would go up against such groupthink.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday June 19 2019, @11:05PM (2 children)
Citation Required.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Thursday June 20 2019, @05:01AM (1 child)
http://www.populartechnology.net/2013/02/the-1970s-global-cooling-alarmism.html [populartechnology.net]
It really was one of the big climate worries in the seventies and very early eighties. There were several trends that indicated the planet was cooling, and the fear was that more snow meant more reflected sunlight, more cooling means more snow. Cool the atmosphere enough and all the water falls out of it, greatly reducing the greenhouse effect and locking in the 'Snowball Earth'. There were semi-serious proposals to spray graphite on expanding snowfields.
Those citations in the above link are mostly media stories, but not all. Current warmists claiming that there was never an ice age scare is just another way they damage their credibility with those who can remember just that.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Thursday June 20 2019, @08:30PM
So, not in 1990 then? Which was the original claim.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 19 2019, @03:14PM (3 children)
And the subtext of TFS is "orange man bad".
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 19 2019, @05:44PM (2 children)
How do you get that?
The subtext *I* got was. "Oh shit! things are rolling faster than we thought they would. We're fucked now."
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 19 2019, @06:15PM (1 child)
Scientists' predictions not coming true, or arriving at contradictory results, is nothing new. I'm sure we all have heard scientists' opinions on what diet is most healthy at the current second. Yet it is palpable that, as soon as Trump was elected, if there was a global warming angle to be made with such a story it would receive more "airplay".
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 19 2019, @08:02PM
Do you even remember what you had for breakfast?
As you clearly don't remember that we've been talking about this for *decades*.
While L'Orange was calling for innocent children to be put to death [wikipedia.org], mouthing off on the Howard Stern show [youtube.com] showing what a jackass he is, and all manner of other nasty, hateful, malignant shit, we'd already been discussing and trying to figure out how to mitigate the effects of climate change for more than a decade [whrc.org].
So no. This is nothing new and has nothing to do with Donald Trump.
Are you 12 and just don't know, or do you suffer from severe memory loss?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 19 2019, @08:08PM
You ask me a numeric question. I tell you my prediction is that it's 50, with a viable range of 40 to 60. Whether the actual answer is 90, or 10 would mean exactly the same thing - whatever I'm using to predict things is worthless.
Things happening radically ahead of pace doesn't mean "See, everything we predicted would happen - but even faster!" It simply means that people making predictions are likely using completely broken models. These models have, time and again, proven themselves to be extremely inaccurate even on relatively short time frames such as the 10-30 year range which we now have numerous prediction:test pairs to contrast against. This, of course, does not mean that we should go balls out and start building coal plants every 50km, but it does mean that what these models say about what Earth might look like 50, or 100 years in the future is almost entirely irrelevant.
We've had 40 years of alarmism now, and it seems to have done nothing but split society into two groups. One group that's having borderline anxiety disorders with a neverending series of apocalyptic predictions, and another group that's grown even more distant from the issue in no small part because of constant reminders, such as this, that climatologists are starting to act more and more like astrologers. That's also not a random slight - astrology was treated as a science as serious and scholarly as any other for hundreds of years. Even thought we can now see it was based on less than nothing (e.g. - one important aspect of astrology is planets suddenly stopping and starting to go the other way - an optical illusion driven by the assumption that everything in the universe rotated around the Earth), the ability for weak correlations to affirm biases was enough for many very intelligent individuals to take it very seriously for many centuries.
The only thing that gives climatology an austere of meaningfulness is that 'they may not be getting it exactly right, but climate science is hard and they are definitely getting the general trend correct.' But this general trend is meaningless. The Earth is obviously warming and has been warming since even before the industrial revolution. This argument of a 'general trend' meaning something is like me claiming to have a system that can predict where the stock market will be in 100 years, and because I said it'd be really high - you defend my model because, even though it gets everything completely wrong, it says the stock market will go up and, lo and behold, the market is going up!
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 19 2019, @01:57PM (8 children)
What credibility do climatologist have? Very little. What predictions from 40,30, 20 years ago came true? Their predictions aren't any less ambiguous that daily horoscopes.
Climatologist now blame any weather that does not match the 40-year average on any give day on global warming/climate change. The worst thing is that a certain segment of the population, especially the youngins that aren't old enough to know better yet, eat-up and drink the climate-change-kookaid and take it as undeniable and infallible fact.
A week of sunshine and warm weather -> caused by climate change
A week of showers and cool weather -> caused by climate change
Windy day -> caused by climate change
Calm day -> caused by climate change
Cold winter -> caused by climate change
Warm winter -> caused by climate change
Arctic ice is shrinking -> caused by climate change
Arctic ice is growing -> caused by climate change
(Score: 5, Insightful) by HiThere on Wednesday June 19 2019, @04:31PM (7 children)
There really needs to be an "idiot" mod, as I don't really think "troll" fits the parent post.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 19 2019, @05:05PM (5 children)
no one cares about your mod, you whiney little bitch.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 19 2019, @05:46PM (4 children)
Actually, it was my mod.
And while GP is correct, '-1 troll' will do just fine as a stand in for '-1 moron'.
Thanks for sharing. I find your ideas interesting and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Wednesday June 19 2019, @06:16PM (3 children)
Maybe try the "disagree" mod next time, or come up with a valid response? Idiot != troll, a troll can be an idiot or wise man; Socrates is perhaps the most famous of all trolls. I'm not convinced that GGGP was arguing a point they didn't believe (though FTR, I don't believe their point).
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 19 2019, @08:06PM
Perhaps you're right, and he's just a moron and not a troll. but as I pointed out [soylentnews.org]:
I stand by that statement.
(Score: 2) by quietus on Wednesday June 19 2019, @08:32PM
It's a long time since I read Hippias Minor and Hippias Major, but my impression of Socrates was more like a ridiculizer of trolls. In which I define a troll as somebody who's overly convinced of his own superiority, like all of these climate change deniers tend to be: look Ma, I'm so much more smarter than that worldwide conspiracy of idiots who call themselves scientists.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 20 2019, @02:18AM
How about "-1 intellectually dishonest" and "-1 flawed logic" ?
There are smart, intellectually dishonest trolls; these are good for honing our argumentation on.
There are smart, nontrolls, who have flawed logic. I don't want to call them an idiot (not every time) but I do want to let them know their "A->B, and C, therefore D" doesn't hold.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday June 20 2019, @02:26AM
Earlier I was wishing for a "fuckwit" mod... maybe we need a secondary set of mods just for this kind of thing.
On the plus side, it could culminate in "godlike powers of perception".
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by corey on Wednesday June 19 2019, @10:41PM (1 child)
RealDonaldTrump, did you forget to log in first?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 20 2019, @02:20AM
Posting before first covefe of the day.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 19 2019, @03:50PM (3 children)
We need to set up electric discharge stations throughout polar circle, or to send drones into higher atmosphere layers (methane is lighter than air) to ignite the methane. Better to have even more CO2 and H2O than CH4.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday June 19 2019, @06:12PM (1 child)
There's CO2-capturing vegetation, and the risk of massive methane release.
This calls for the building of a giant greenhouse, with methane capture piping! The anti-greenhouse greenhouse !
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday June 20 2019, @02:50AM
The taiga has these things called trees - they actually skew the CO2/O2 balance a significant amount because of all the CO2 conversion they do. No greenhouse required, but... if you did launch a megatons of CO2 project to build greenhouses on the melting permafrost, you might recapture more CO2 than you release after a few decades. Better make them long lasting, low maintenance greenhouses.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday June 20 2019, @02:48AM
Actually, burning methane in those concentrations won't work, but with enough catalyst it can happen. Send as much platinum as you can afford to me and I promise to do my best to save the planet with it.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Wednesday June 19 2019, @06:44PM (4 children)
Come on! I was just starting to get used climate change! Damn it all...
compiling...
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 20 2019, @03:15AM
No, now it is global warning. It doesn't really matter what the warning is about as long as you are very concerned and turn to them for "help".
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday June 20 2019, @03:28AM (2 children)
It always was global warming; it's just that the worthless sensitive fucking melting snowflakes on the conservative/greedhead side insist on euphemizing the hell out of everything.Put another way, technically, the climate change is the end result of global warming.
In any case, it's well past "too late" now. I've been saying this since childhood, and as usual, no one listens to me. Cassandra strikes again!
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 20 2019, @04:37AM (1 child)
Where are you getting this? The term climate change comes from the researchers:
> During the 1970s, the term climate change replaced climatic change to focus on anthropogenic causes, as it became clear that human activities had a potential to drastically alter the climate.[2] Climate change was incorporated in the title of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Climate change is now used as both a technical description of the process, as well as a noun used to describe the problem.[2]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday June 20 2019, @11:44PM
And where do you think the pressure to change that came from?
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...