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Re:Greenland ice has shrunk beyond return, study finds by cel1ne on Saturday August 15, 2020 @12:44AM (#24166014)
I like the way the 350.org science page put's it:

   1.  It’s warming.
   2.  It’s us.
   3.  We’re sure.
   4.  It’s bad.
   5.  We can fix it.
(https://350.org/science/)
Re:Greenland ice has shrunk beyond return, study finds by roenxi on Saturday August 15, 2020 @01:00AM (#24166094)
The 'its bad' section could use some work; it isn't immediately obvious why it is bad. It says things like 10% decrease in grain yield. World population has increased by ~40% in my lifetime; so a 10% grain yield is not the biggest problem we're facing for food security.

Ditto the 10 million migrant number. Australia has 7 million migrants living here right now; 10 million globally spread over many years is not particularly devastating.

Climate change is supposed to be a threat significant enough for people to abandon their way of life, not those so-so numbers.

Re:Greenland ice has shrunk beyond return, study finds by ben_w on Saturday August 15, 2020 @02:27AM (#24166507)
> 10 million globally spread over many years is not particularly devastating.

While I personally agree with you, the UK (news and opinion polls) regularly regard ten thousand on that island (1/10th of a fair share of 10 million worldwide) as an existential threat. Most recently, the addition of half a dozen bailing out a rubber dinghy with Tupperware are seen as so dangerous that the Royal Navy is considered an appropriate response by a majority.

Re:Greenland ice has shrunk beyond return, study finds by tomp on Saturday August 15, 2020 @03:18AM (#24166745)
Not actually true. UK is considering offering citizenship to 3 million HK citizens. So it’s really not about immigration in general, but the kind of immigrants (e.g. “immigrans taking our jobs” or “importing terrorists”).
Re:Greenland ice has shrunk beyond return, study finds by imtringued on Saturday August 15, 2020 @10:17AM (#24169027)
How are 3 million HK citizens not going to be "immigrants taking our jobs"? When you are thinking about something like the economical impact of immigration then lower numbers always mean lower impact.
Re:Greenland ice has shrunk beyond return, study finds by tomp on Sunday August 16, 2020 @02:41AM (#24175769)
There’s a big difference between immigrants that are willing to take low-paid jobs for even less money than the least educated locals (such as construction, fruit picking, ...), vs immigrants that are highly educated and can contribute to the society in novel ways (e.g. by performing research, invention, entrepreneurship, ...).

People more frequently oppose the former.

Re:Greenland ice has shrunk beyond return, study finds by TeMPOraL on Saturday August 15, 2020 @03:02AM (#24166675)
Same all around EU. The very mention of "ten thousand refugees" = immediate EU-wide political shit storm. I can easily imagine the sudden pressure of 10 million refugees on the border could end the EU and cause atrocities to happen.

And with climate changes accelerating and yielding areas around the equator uninhabitable, I don't believe it'll stop at 10 million. Not to mention, some parts of EU itself are close to equator.

Re:Greenland ice has shrunk beyond return, study finds by roenxi on Saturday August 15, 2020 @02:54AM (#24166637)
> The 2011 census recorded that 2,998,264 people or 36.7% of London's population are foreign-born [0]

The politics of the situation would be brutal; but the UK has a pretty reasonable tolerance for migrants. Strategically the numbers in the article are not a global threat.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_London

Re:Greenland ice has shrunk beyond return, study finds by tonyedgecombe on Saturday August 15, 2020 @03:12AM (#24166720)
Yet the UK voted to leave the EU largely because of immigration.
Re:Greenland ice has shrunk beyond return, study finds by goatlover on Saturday August 15, 2020 @04:20AM (#24167044)
Which although probably not in UK or the EU's longterm interest, is not an existential threat. Political unrest and migration are not new.
Re:Greenland ice has shrunk beyond return, study finds by tonyedgecombe on Saturday August 15, 2020 @09:53AM (#24168855)
No but it does make me question the statement "but the UK has a pretty reasonable tolerance for migrants".
Re:Greenland ice has shrunk beyond return, study finds by ben_w on Saturday August 15, 2020 @04:41AM (#24167154)
I ought to have specifically said “refugees”, which is what I think people fleeing catastrophic climate change count as.
Re:Greenland ice has shrunk beyond return, study finds by kergonath on Saturday August 15, 2020 @09:03AM (#24168557)
London is not the U.K.
Re:Greenland ice has shrunk beyond return, study finds by chrisco255 on Saturday August 15, 2020 @01:42AM (#24166281)
Crop yields have trended up for the past century. CO2 fertilization improves crop yields.

Edit reply: Yes, it has. This macronutrient myth has to do with the profile of carbs to proteins shifting by single digit percentages, whereas crops will produce more carbs per gram and less protein per gram under higher CO2. The effect is extremely minimal. In soy beans, it's just 2% difference. Either way, when your yields double and you lose 2-10% protein per gram, you are still producing more food overall. This has nothing to do with GMOs. It's just a natural effect of photosynthesis. Most plants are C3 plants, which means genetically they are optimized for CO2 levels that are at least 3x higher than modern levels. It is theorized that this is because plants evolved under these conditions for millions of years. Only very recently in geological terms, did Earth's CO2 levels drop to sub-1000 ppm.

https://www.cropsreview.com/c3-plants.html

Re:Greenland ice has shrunk beyond return, study finds by tsimionescu on Saturday August 15, 2020 @01:49AM (#24166315)
That's yield by kg, but în tema of calories or nutrients, the yield has not improved because of CO2 (there were other improvements of you eat GMOs).
Re:Greenland ice has shrunk beyond return, study finds by RestlessMind on Saturday August 15, 2020 @01:14PM (#24170430)
Highlighting the cost alone is not sufficient. Entire Maldives and big parts of Bangladesh going underwater thus resulting in millions of refugees will generate at most a few outraged tweets and a touching article in some news outlet in USA (something similar in China).

For climate change to be taken seriously, one needs to find the lever which will move the powerful actors. For example, leaving oceanfront homes' insurance to market forces. Swing states of Florida and North Carolina will instantly propel this to a big political issue, leaving the party of Free Markets and Climate Change Denial (TM) in an awkward position.

Sadly, the politicians on all sides are way too smart to let this happen - they will instead prefer driving issues which sap electorate's attention but affect <5% of the population (transgender bathroom access, extreme cases of the spectrum of abortion issue, marginal tax rate on 0.1% of people etc).

Re:Greenland ice has shrunk beyond return, study finds by jlebar on Saturday August 15, 2020 @03:51AM (#24166895)
> 10% decrease in grain yield

Wikipedia has a good article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_and_agriculture

One thing to consider when you're reading anything about the predicted effects of climate change: The effects will not be uniform in space or time.

For example, warming itself has been highly nonuniform. It's not that every day, every location on earth is X degrees warmer. Rather, that's an average; some days in some places are a lot hotter, and on other days in other places, it's less hot. This means that in addition to the average temperature increasing, extremes are also more common (has to be).

See the first picture at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming, or this video: https://climate.nasa.gov/climate_resources/139/video-global-...

I expect that "10% decrease in average [time and space] grain yields" would also be spiky, in time and space. That means some places and times will experience significantly more than a 10% drop.

Re:Greenland ice has shrunk beyond return, study finds by cel1ne on Sunday August 16, 2020 @12:40AM (#24175176)
> For example, warming itself has been highly nonuniform. It's not that every day, every location on earth is X degrees warmer.

What is happening is this:

For a location and a time somewhere on earth plot a curve depicting the probability of it's temperature. The highest point in the middle is the average, typical temperature for that day, but of course there are less probable outliers left and right, like in a normal distribution.

What climate change does is

a) it flattens that curve, meaning more varying temperatures, unusually hot or unusually cold days, become more likely and

b) it moves that entire curve to the right, so that the average overall temperature becomes hotter, even though there are more cold outlier-days than before.

Re:Greenland ice has shrunk beyond return, study finds by thaumasiotes on Saturday August 15, 2020 @02:43AM (#24166583)
"It's us" could use much more work. Suppose you could make the case

    1. It's warming.
    2. It's not us.
    3. We're sure.
    4. It's bad.
    5. We can fix it.
What would be different? That point speaks exclusively to the morality of the issue (It's us: environmentalists are noble! - It's not us: environmentalists are evil!), not to what's happening or what should be done.
Re:Greenland ice has shrunk beyond return, study finds by tonyedgecombe on Saturday August 15, 2020 @03:05AM (#24166692)
What would be different?

It would be incorrect, the evidence is clear that it is a man made problem. This has nothing to do with the morality or lack of, that's your projection.

Re:Greenland ice has shrunk beyond return, study finds by thaumasiotes on Saturday August 15, 2020 @03:12AM (#24166717)
> It would be incorrect, the evidence is clear that it is a man made problem.

This isn't how you do hypotheticals. If, in the hypothetical world, it isn't us, the claim that it isn't us is correct, not incorrect by virtue of disagreeing with the non-hypothetical world.

And you didn't even address my point that this bullet point is completely irrelevant to what's happening and to what should be done. All the recommendations are identical in either case. Why is the bullet point present in the list? Wouldn't it make more sense to have a four-item list?

Re:Greenland ice has shrunk beyond return, study finds by cel1ne on Saturday August 15, 2020 @03:21AM (#24166761)
You are right, you could say: "It's a problem, it doesn't matter if it's us or not, but we have to fix it".

Question is whether this helps the debate or not. It could help.

Re:Greenland ice has shrunk beyond return, study finds by cel1ne on Saturday August 15, 2020 @03:19AM (#24166753)
If you don't say "it's us", you generally mean that it's a natural occurring phenomenon / cycle. And with that generally comes the assumption "...therefore we don't need to fix it, because it will fix itself.".
Re:Greenland ice has shrunk beyond return, study finds by thaumasiotes on Saturday August 15, 2020 @06:19AM (#24167720)
That really isn't an assumption that people make about natural phenomena. Let's compare a swamp, anywhere:

    1. It's causing disease.
    2. It's not us.
    3. We're sure.
    4. It's bad.
    5. We can fix it.
And we do! Draining swamps is an important way to make uninhabitable land habitable. But there's no one out there saying "why bother, just wait for the swamp to go away on its own".
Re:Greenland ice has shrunk beyond return, study finds by dqpb on Saturday August 15, 2020 @02:49AM (#24166616)
It's relevant to item 5.
Re:Greenland ice has shrunk beyond return, study finds by dorgo on Saturday August 15, 2020 @03:43AM (#24166849)
How? We can only fix it if we caused it?
Re:Greenland ice has shrunk beyond return, study finds by dqpb on Saturday August 15, 2020 @03:45PM (#24171744)
Imagine a building is on fire and one side firemen are spraying water on it and on the other side someone is spraying gasoline on it.
Re:Greenland ice has shrunk beyond return, study finds by Udik on Saturday August 15, 2020 @04:23AM (#24167062)
> the 10 million migrant number.

Just the other day I read a long and detailed article about a predicted number of 200 million "climate migrants" by 2050, 86 million from Africa alone.

Nowhere in the long article was ever mentioned that in the same timespan Africa's population is predicted to double, adding 1.2 billion people to the current number. But of course, hey, "climate change".

Re:Greenland ice has shrunk beyond return, study finds by imtringued on Saturday August 15, 2020 @10:26AM (#24169093)
10 million migrants just from sea level rise. Sea level rise is actually one of the smallest threats that arise from climate change. There are some specific countries like Bangladesh that will suffer heavily from flooding but the vast majority of countries can deal with it. Climate change involves much bigger threats than that.
Re:Greenland ice has shrunk beyond return, study finds by ed25519FUUU on Saturday August 15, 2020 @01:41AM (#24166280)
Is there any evidence at all that global warming is causing any migration? I look at the problems in Syria and I’m definitely not saying “Yep global warming causes that.”
Re:Greenland ice has shrunk beyond return, study finds by tsimionescu on Saturday August 15, 2020 @01:50AM (#24166323)
Given that one of the 10 biggest countries in the world has virtually no elevation and is already having drinking water problems (Bangladesh), a migrant crisis is certain.
Re:Greenland ice has shrunk beyond return, study finds by Udik on Saturday August 15, 2020 @04:39AM (#24167143)
The water problems of Bangladesh seem to have little to do with climate change. It's a mix of political problems with neighboring countries, arsenic contamination of the soil, lack of sanitation.
Re:Greenland ice has shrunk beyond return, study finds by tito on Saturday August 15, 2020 @01:50AM (#24166322)
The World Bank's Groundswell Report [0] from 2018 may be a useful resource for you: "Internal climate migrants are rapidly becoming the human face of climate change. According to the new World Bank report "Groundswell - Preparing for Internal Climate Migration", without urgent global and national climate action, Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Latin America could see more than 140 million people move within their countries’ borders by 2050."

[0] https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/infographic/2018/03/19/gro...

Re:Greenland ice has shrunk beyond return, study finds by Udik on Saturday August 15, 2020 @04:43AM (#24167163)
Ok. So that infographic mentions 147 million migrants, of which 86 in sub-saharian Africa. It also says that the population of sub-saharian Africa is projected to double in the same timeframe, but of course it's easier and less expensive to decarbonize the entire world than to introduce family planning practices in Africa?
Re:Greenland ice has shrunk beyond return, study finds by tonyedgecombe on Saturday August 15, 2020 @03:09AM (#24166698)
The "Arab Spring" kicked off in response to escalating bread prices following droughts in Russia, Ukraine, China and Argentina and torrential storms in Canada, Australia and Brazil. All major wheat and grain producers.

I might or even probably would have happened anyway but climate change probably accelerated it.

Re:Greenland ice has shrunk beyond return, study finds by ant6n on Saturday August 15, 2020 @02:10AM (#24166424)
Drought is a big factor for the conflict in Syria.
Re:Greenland ice has shrunk beyond return, study finds by Udik on Saturday August 15, 2020 @05:10AM (#24167294)
Sure, it's not the fact that the US, UK and Saudi Arabia financed, trained and armed the rebels with 1 billion dollars a year [1].

Noo, it's climate change. Imagine what would happen in your country if any group of rebels or terrorists where given weapons and training for several billions to take down the government.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timber_Sycamore

Re:Greenland ice has shrunk beyond return, study finds by lightgreen on Saturday August 15, 2020 @07:16AM (#24168037)
The website starts good, but loses all credibility for not mentioning nuclear in “we can fix it”. Shame.
Re:Greenland ice has shrunk beyond return, study finds by oh_sigh on Saturday August 15, 2020 @12:56AM (#24166069)
Interesting that the claims get less and less certain as you go down the list.