Yes, I can already see all the articles saying that the meltdown of the ice sheets is "not that bad after all", even though the melting is on record levels in the last few years.

This is why even in the age of the Internet, it's going to take decades until the measures that actually need to be taken to combat climate change to be put in place.

By then we will be well above the 1.5 degrees rise in temperature, and population north of 10 billion.

We don't control the climate. The climate is a non-linear dynamic system. There are dozens of natural cycles that control the climate (AMO, PDO, ENSO, solar cycles, to name a few). And all predictions of catastrophic, runaway warming have failed to materialize in the 21st century despite over 30 years of doomsday predictions. We've seen maybe a 0.13C per decade increase in temps. Well within cyclical norms. Our understanding of the climate has to be driven by facts on the ground and not computer models and hype.

We still do not have good models for understanding or predicting global low cloud cover. Clouds are hugely important to our climate system. There is no way to accurately predict the temperature in the future, especially 100 years into the future, without modeling fundamental and extremely complex systems. Our current models do not match reality or even closely approximate it.

> There are dozens of natural cycles that control the climate (AMO, PDO, ENSO, solar cycles, to name a few)

You don't think scientists are aware of these? You don't think they're already tracking solar cycles and the like?

For example, see this graph:

https://climate.nasa.gov/internal_resources/1896/

from this NASA article:

https://climate.nasa.gov/causes

showing how solar input does not explain climate change.

NASA has a collection of scientists that believe a range of things about the climate. I watched a good video by JPL back in April discussing how lacking our models are of clouds and cloud cover and their influence on climate: https://youtu.be/ra9AFNco3lI

Solar cycles indirectly affect cloud cover not by variations in irradiance but by increases in cosmic rays from reduction in solar magnetic shield.

Some call this the Svensmark effect, after the Danish scientist who proved this influence in cloud chamber experiment from 2017 (https://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2019/03/SvensmarkSol...)

Finally, even the IPCC has acknowledged this and are in the process of altering their CMIP model for 2021, CMIP6, to include stronger solar forcing: https://www.geosci-model-dev.net/10/2247/2017/

Climate science is not settled.

> Climate science is not settled.

No science really ever is.

The problem you run into, though, is that people who don't understand science confuse "we're continuing to refine our knowledge" with "we were completely and totally incorrect".

Discovering clouds play more of a role than expected is useful information, but it's a far cry from shaking the consensus on climate change as a whole.

The addition of solar forcing to CMIP6 means that they completely missed it for the first 5 models, so the consensus was wrong. Science is driven by observation and experiment not by consensus.

We should not expect their first iteration to accurately model clouds, but at least they are factoring it in now. How much did consensus override the concerns about cloud cover during the formation of climate models over the last few decades? Consensus is just a fancy word for groupthink.

We should be asking how much more accurate do our models need to be in order to predict future climate?

There are cycles such as the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation that we still don't really know how to model with a high degree of accuracy. The AMO has dramatic effects on climate. So does the PDO.

We don't know how volcanic activity is going to play out over the 21st century.

We don't know how much cosmic ray flux will increase if we enter a prolonged solar minimum cycle like the Maunder Minimum.

There are a ton of factors that influence climate that our models don't account for.

Solar forcing was considered well before CMIP6. The idea that it was "completely missed" is false.

https://www.geosci-model-dev.net/10/2247/2017/

> We compare the climatic effects of the CMIP6 solar forcing dataset to its CMIP5 predecessor by using time-slice experiments of two chemistry–climate models and a reference radiative transfer model... This solar-cycle response is slightly larger, but not statistically significantly different from that for the CMIP5 forcing dataset.

We may not know the exact values of cosmic ray, volcanic, etc. inputs into the systems, but we can make reasonable conclusions about their high and low end values and the likely impacts that result. A quick Googling will reveal plenty of research on (and mentions in IPCC reports) the things you assert are being ignored.

So going on 10 billion humans don't have anything to do with it? A large part of the habitable land covered in agricultural fields, polar caps melting, forecasts of 2 degrees increase in temperature by the end of the century, its just all a coincidence?

Genuinely curious why your posts are being downvoted?

Because it's the same bad-faith argument that people have seen dozens of times from climate-action-deniers before. The idea that scientists at NASA and dozens of the most prestigious and reputable institutions and journals in the world have all conspired to miss That One Thing That Explains Climate Change that isn't the obvious CO2 that has been known to contribute to global temperatures for about a century.

Eventually people tire of living in Groundhog Day and go through the same thing over and over again and they just click the downvote button and move on.

When you say "we" - are you speaking as one of the many who have puts years of work into these matters? If not shouldn't you at least say "they... do not have good models" etc ?

I don't mean suggest that you/we have no ability to look over experienced shoulders to cast judgement on their works, but to speak as them without having their full experience seems problematic.

Is this a parody of what the above two comments are worrying about?

The thing about cycles is, well, they're cyclical. That means on a long enough time scale they factor out. That's why it's easier to predict the long-term climate than it is to predict what the weather will be tomorrow, next week, or next year.

Honestly where do you get this stuff? It's like time-cube level of nuttery.

I started trying to write out a reply going point by point, but it's just exhausting. When someone is that far from reality it's just too much work to try to pull them back, and they're not going to do any of the work themselves.

Arctic sea ice has a third of the volume it had when I was young, smaller than at any point we've ever measured, can reconstruct from ships logs, or estimate from ice cores. You'd think that kind of absurd level of change would give some of these people pause, but it doesn't.

Which claim is nuttery?

1. Getting clouds right is extremely important for the climate models. 2. We still do not know how to get clouds right.

Well for one there's contradicting comments. First saying that there has been warming every decade, but then saying that's somehow cyclical (warming and cooling cycle) when it's really a trend (continuous warming). Then saying we need facts and not computer models, but then going on to saying we need computer models.

Anecdotal, but something an economist friend of mine said: there are currently better models for predicting economics than there are for predicting the weather tomorrow.

That's because predicting economics is like predicting climate, not weather.

Predicting weather is like predicting if the stock market will go up or down tomorrow. We can't, really. Like climate, though, we can predict with decent accuracy what it'll do over years.

It won't take decades, because we are not going to do anything.

Well, there might be a bit of corruption. Politicians have relatives who can make big money on environmental projects. The financial industry is all excited about carbon trading, with high-frequency trading and insider trading and intentional crashes and lots more fun. Political "donations" have to be generated somehow, and the lingering possibility of legislation does that well no matter which side a politician has chosen.

Crashing the economy to combat climate change seems like an abstract far-off concept until you lose your source of income. Most countries aren't about to crash their economies. The ones that do so will end up under new management after revolution or after being conquered in their weakened state.

I remember in middle school (~2004) in Cambridge we had a school assembly about global warming, and they showed an animation of a cup of water filled with ice, the ice melting, and then the cup overflowing.

In retrospect it was a simplified analogy for kids to understand, but on the other hand, massive ammunition for climate skeptics such as my parents who instantly debunked the analogy as soon as I told them about the assembly and put a cup of ice water on the kitchen table to show how silly the claim was.

That analogy may hold for arctic ice, but not antarctic ice, which is mostly a set of glacier's above the ground - some of it even has its base more than a mile above sea level.

So think of a full cup and dropping ice cubes into it. Totally different result.

https://antarctic-logistics.com/about-antarctica/antarctic-e...

Sure, but even now the analogy is not great because the melting part has nothing to do with it.

In other words, if you drop an ice cube into a cup of water, it will either immediately overflow or it will never overflow. The melting part has nothing to do with whether it will overflow. If the snow on the roof melts -> the cup overflows

I think a better analogy is a cup sitting at the drain pipe of a rain gutter and the roof is covered with snow.

I think you missed a word in my comment.... "a full cup".

No I understood, but at that point it doesn't matter if it is ice or not. You could drop rocks into a full cup and it would overflow

Ahhh - now I see what you mean. Yes, that's a better analogy.

Good point, don’t forget same is true of Greenland’s glaciers.

link is not working

You may want to check your blocking software or company firewall.

Works fine on my person device running ABP ( I just double checked to make sure).

If you want to simulate Greenland/Antarctica, you have to put the ice cubes outside the cup, and have them drain into the already full cup as they melt.

> It's unfortunate that this will be used as ammunition for climate skeptics.

On the contrary, skeptics' argument that climate science is being suppressed and manipulated just took a heavy blow.

Conspiracy thinking doesn't require, or reward, consistency. It doesn't matter how trivial it is to refute a talking point. They'll just Gish Gallop on to the next one -- including ones that have been refuted for them before.

I found the terms confusing so looked them up. Does this look right to you?

Glacier: Large ice masses created by snowfall that has transformed into ice and compressed over the course of many years. Ice sheets, ice streams, and ice shelves are a few types of glaciers. [2]

Ice Sheets: Freaking huge glaciers

Ice Cliffs: the vertical edges of an ice sheet. Like a rock cliff but made of ice.

Ice Shelf: the "hanging chad" of the ice world. Chunk of an ice sheet that extends out over the ocean (nice diagram in source below) [1]

Sea ice: Frozen seawater, floating on the ocean. Not made from snowfall.

Iceberg: Ice floating on the ocean, chunk of an ice sheet/ice shelf

[1] Helpful: http://www.antarcticglaciers.org/glacier-processes/glacier-t...

[2] https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2018/02/05/glaciers-ice-sheets...

> It's unfortunate that this will be used as ammunition for climate skeptics.

That will always happen, though it only shows that these people don't understand science: That "we don't know every detail about climate change and there's scientific controversy and new discoveries about many details" does not equal "we have a controversy about the basic facts of climate change".

Interesting enough the collapse of the west antarctic ice shield was a major point of criticism where people said the IPCC got things wrong, because they were underplaying risks. It seems the debate isn't over. We'll see how it plays out.

> Sometimes I wonder if science can ever truly be put to work for mass society? It seems not.

Come now, that's short-sighted. Have you forgotten the hundreds of scientific discoveries making your daily life better than it was for your great-great-grandparents?

of course, but I'm not sure those discoveries have been "put to work" with the intention and mass organization in the same way climate science has been. I think with climate science we are trying to organize scientific knowledge and use it to solve a problem on a planetary scale that has not really been done before. There have been huge international interdisciplinary efforts like CERN and the ISS for example. But nothing so messily intertwined with people's personal lives, values, principles as climate science.

Actually, that's not what I said.

I also want to mention that I don't agree with whoever flagged the above comment. Silencing and/or hiding people with different opinions is never the way to go.

> Silencing and/or hiding people with different opinions is never the way to go.

I completely agree with this. But looking at the (now dead) comment (not having flagged it myself)...it's not really an example of a differing opinion. It's a cheap rhetorical shot that adds absolutely nothing to the discussion. If the commentor had actually expanded on their disagreement, the remark could certainly stand as part of that. There are examples of substantive comments in this thread that disagree with yours. On its own, that one has no merit except to lower the level of discourse here.

My last post was satirical about the stake, but it is exactly why I mentioned it.

I feel like we are in the dark era of Christianity burning witches and dissidents.

The More Things Change, The More They Remain The Same.

Nah. It's like having a study come out that shows smoking doesn't cause toenail cancer like the previous ones did. You know the tobacco industry will portray it as "new study shows smoking doesn't cause cancer!" or "scientists cast doubt on smoking-cancer link".

I'm sorry that this is what you got from my comment, because it wasn't my intention.

I was trying to say that the nuance in the article will be completely lost in the media. Even commenters in this thread who "believe in" climate change and claim to subscribe to the scientific orthodoxy are missing the distinction between ice sheets and ice cliffs, which was one of the main points of the article. And HN is one of the rare places on the internet where people actually read things, so imagine what the conversation will look like when someone posts it on facebook.

Ultimately I was trying to raise the question of whether it's even possible to communicate science to the general public. And this thread so far is answering that question with a big fat "NO".

It's inherently impossible to communicate advanced scientific research results in a quick, meaningful way to a layperson.

By definition a layperson doesn't understand any scientific field in depth.

Since they don't, they do not have the tools to truly understand anything in the field's research - you need to understand the field's current state to understand what's going on in the latest research.

Ever tried to explain something highly technical to non-technical management? That's another instance of this problem.

They're both special cases of the general problem that only experts can really understand and appreciate great work in their field, and that a very fortunate person might get to be an expert in four or maybe five fields before they die.

> Even if CO2 was a problem the only way to fix it at this point is to keep the 2 billion people down that are striving for a much larger footprint.

Or, help them skip over the heavily polluting stages of that growth. We subsidize electric cars and solar installations in the US; helping developing nations do the same might go a ways.

Pollution is the real problem and it really feels like it has been given a back seat to the climate. Those Chinese factories are churning away for the same American corporations that lobby for the CO2 laws.

> ammunition for climate skeptics

That climate change alarmist’s predictions have been shown to be wrong - again - will be used as “ammunition” by the people who can’t help but notice that climate alarmists predictions are wrong each and every single time they pronounce them strikes you as a problem… why, exactly?