I felt the article was clear collapse is not imminent, not even in this century.
I felt it noted focus was not on imminence, but on changes worth mentioning in aspects of interest.
Perhaps the difference is this article is talking of timing for transitions of significance, rather than the forthcoming collapse more likely to arrive sooner after such transitions?
Regardless, I would like to see humanity safely thrive. I don't want earth to become an example of the great filter theory.
If the entirety of humans were very likely to be wiped out from 2025 to 2095, you would definitely call that imminent, and is a much more apt comparison.
"DOOM ITS THE END OF THE WORLD!" is a tale as old as time... revelations has been screaming the end is near for thousands of years now.
It's "accurate to say" that prophets and prophecies are notoriously wrong which is why signs that the ice caps will be gone by 2000 have been removed from state parks.
hint: they aren't gone.
and "thousands of scientists" lol sure... thousands of priests say that miracles happen.
Meanwhile... those same "scientists" are silent as the solutions to "climate catastrophe" are mountains of "green" tech that's unrecyclable after destroying the earth to create batteries, wind mills and solar panels that under perform and end up in land fills.
https://www.newsweek.com/nobel-prize-winner-who-doesnt-belie...
But... if that's not enough? What about scientists - including Nobel prize winning scientists - that say there are no crisis?
My opinion? "Climate Change" is a religion just like other religions - some truth mixed with a lot of "follow what I say or WE'RE ALL DEAD!". Literally 100 years of failed predictions making global warming... I mean cooling... I mean acid rain... I mean CLIMATE CATSTROPHE! wrong at every step.
Can't have real conversations about real solutions to real problems when you're dealing with religious faithful which is why green solutions are going to fuck our planet up more than oil could ever dream of.
Name one and show their evidence
Meanwhile... those same "scientists" are silent
What are you talking about
as the solutions to "climate catastrophe"
Now you are mixing 'solutions' with just admitting there is a problem.
My opinion? "Climate Change" is a religion just like other religions
Climate change has huge amounts of evidence behind it. A religion by definition doesn't. If a religion had evidence it would be science.
Can't have real conversations
Is this your version of a real conversation?
Rushing to comment has deep effects on HN, the threading incentivizes appending to the top comments rather than replying. This will now be a philosophical debate about scientific trust for hours just because people assume the article says "collapse is happening shortly by X date", but its just a statistical model :(
Don't mean to make you feel bad or call you out, most people don't read the article if it's popular. It's my attempt to give a little back to the community to note it, been here a very long time, and when people try calling it out coarsely it isn't constructive.
[1] sort of: they understood it was a statistical model but spent so much time hand-wringing about Nature publishing a statistical model that it came off like there was something wrong with the article, causing a rush of replies of "how can I trust anything??"
I see your point that harping on this fact is perhaps boring and repetitive so I apologize for that.
I'd love to see a chatmodel as a forum board moderator. They understand nuances, so it would be able to spot people just fighting or adding too much snark. A real net nanny.
HN does reward earliness somewhat, but less so than many other fora.
Focus more on getting it right than getting it fast.
I right read about AMOC back in 1997 while in university. It was fascinating and frightening back then. Still relevant today. It would be sad if it did actually end up happening in my lifetime, but humans are notoriously bad at reacting to bad things that might happening in the future - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons. We tend to only really react once the bad thing has happened.
You want to both use your credentials to be taken seriously in your posts, but also you want to avoid too much scrutiny of who you are.
Not sure why people are eager to believe literally some guy on the internet. Maybe the people are afraid to believe the other guys, you know, the ones published in Nature.
Apply some philosophy on top of your "science" and you may learn something new and potentially interesting about your claim.
Ocean currents bring lots of warm water from the south towards Europe making it quite a bit warmer than other places at similar latitudes. Cities in Europe are quite a bit further north than most people think.
Lots of other side effects as well would happen but be less known or surely predicted by models.
During the night, the lack of cloud cover also means there is less insulation to trap the heat accumulated during the day.
This can lead to hot days and relatively cooler nights, which can be characteristic of certain climates, like in arid or desert regions.
AMOC is part of a tremendous thermal-energy circulation system from the tropics to the arctic within the Atlantic Ocean, and tying to global ocean circulation patterns. Specific impacts are difficult to identify, but could well be hotter tropics (and likely: stronger and more frequent hurricanes and extreme storms), colder North Atlantic (including a loss of the moderating influence of the Gulf Stream on Northern European climates, hence potentially far colder and more severe winters). There are also likely impacts on marine life, agriculture, general wildlife patterns (plant and animal), amongst others. Regional sea-level rise is another possible impact (through thermal expansion if I understand correctly).
Effectively: a predictable and beneficial pattern to which human and nonhuman life and existence has evolved over many thousands of years, if not longer, may be on the verge of complete disruption. That's an event without precedent for on the order of 10,000 years (since the end of the last major glaciation period).
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Ni%C3%B1o>
More on prospective impacts of an AMOC collapse:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_meridional_overturnin...>
<https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1181-8>
<http://phys.org/news/2016-01-greenland-ice-sheet-affect-glob...>
Global warming is the effect of decreased solar radiation (as compared to how much solar energy is absorbed), thus more energy added to the Earth. A new ice age in Norther Europe might slightly increase that area's albido, which would increase solar radiation and in theory mitigate global warming. But truth is, the effect of that change in albido will be very small compared to the effect of the atmospheric CO2 (which traps the solar radiation).
Europe may be colder, but somewhere else is going to be much, much hotter.
The total amount of heat entering the Earth is increasing, cold spots not withstanding.
Uncomfortable truths and all that...
Meanwhile, you should try to respond to the arguments made, not to the man. From behind -ironically - your own anonymity.
Am I reading this right—currently scientists that bring bad news aren’t treated all that much better than…being executed?
One of the bits that made it into the guidelines is that if there are multiple explanations for a comment that you're supposed to go with the stronger one. You seem to have picked the wrong interpretation on purpose. Please don't do that.
I didn’t suggest that my reading was that they are being executed in the literal sense. I was saying that my reading was that what’s happening to scientists is only a little bit better than literal execution—and because I found that reading so surprising, I asked if that was correct.
> One of the bits that made it into the guidelines is that if there are multiple explanations for a comment that you're supposed to go with the stronger one. You seem to have picked the wrong interpretation on purpose. Please don't do that.
Seems to me there’s a bit of hypocrisy going on here. I literally asked if my reading of it was correct. For you to say that I purposely picked a wrong interpretation (though I’m not sure your explanation suggests that my actual interpretation was wrong) would seem to mean that you think my question was insincere—that I wasn’t actually wanting to know if my interpretation of it was correct. That’s fine, but you had the choice of believing I was being sincere or that I was being insincere. Did you pick the “stronger”?
And to be clear, I’m generally on your side with regard to your overall point. The trend over the last decade or more of people attacking scientists who dare find results that conflict with their politics makes me furious.
You are totally right that my comment is worth significantly less than a peer reviewed study.
Awarding credibility on the basis of having a public face is absurd, and it's trivial to conceive of the way that could be politically silencing of dissident views, or that lack of anonymity would incentivize sticking to consensus.
People disagree anonymously on the internet all the time, since the beginning. Are you incapable of judging the merits of an argument without requiring some appeal to authority?
The crux of my disagreement was his claim a name attached to an argument a priori makes it more valid than one that is anonymous.
In a highly politicized environment, it can possibly be argue that a real name makes it less credible and more likely to be consensus. Putting that aside, it certainly doesn't it make it more credible.
It's very easy to shape public opinion, dang; we shouldn't let anonymous posters set the tone of discussion or flung FUD around on the most important issue of our lives.
When I go to the doctor, I know I can trust them because I see a diploma on the wall, they have a name, I can ask other doctors about them. Would you, dang, let someone you just met on the street operate on you? Or diagnose you? Just because they said they were a doctor?
Re costs: Look at https://news.ycombinator.com/posts?id=oceanthrowaway - the odds that this commenter is legit are quite high. Would it would have been better if they had posted under a regular username? Sure, but people sometimes have good reasons for making throwaway accounts to post about topics they're professionally expert in. Such comments add value to HN, sometimes a lot of value (e.g. sometimes they give important inside information about a topic), and punishing people for doing that is against the community interest.
Re benefits: it's not at all easy to "shape public opinion" by an anonymous comment on an internet forum. You'd have to do it repeatedly, and the more repetitive it gets, the more predictable the comments become, and the more likely the community will have an immune response to it. In my experience from moderating this place over the years, internet users are far too quick to assume that they're encountering manipulative stealth behavior.
What you should be responding to instead is the quality of the comments. If a throwaway account is repeatedly posting low-quality comments, then sure, that's a good reason to be critical - but the throwawayness of the account should not be the high-order bit.
If you had made your point less aggressively, I probably wouldn't have responded, but you came down on the GP like a hammer (e.g. "spreading FUD from behind anononymity") and that put your comment on the wrong side of the HN guidelines.
But that's the thing, isn't it? I'm not an expert in climate science, I can't judge what's quality and what's FUD reasonably phrased. Neither the vast majority on HN. There is no way for us to determine if this anonymous guy makes some good points or just wants to spread some doubt towards the study. Just because climate science seems more approachable than maths, doesn't mean people are equipped to determine what's true, what's manipulation or what's plausible.
Blows my mind some guy made an account, said he was a physical oceanographer, made some grammatically correct comments and everyone believed it. Just like that!
> internet users are far too quick to assume that they're encountering manipulative stealth behavior.
It's 2023 and it's about climate change, dang...
> I can't judge what's quality and what's FUD
I hear you! but you attacked the other person specifically for "spreading FUD". That is not a helpful thing to do, even if you can judge the question.
1) The AMOC is one of the most studied parts of the world ocean and predictions about its collapse have been made since Stommel in 1961. I think in general any study on its imminent collapse should be taken with a grain of salt and it would be wise to wait for further replication and the consensus of the community. You can google AMOC collapse and find articles stretching back decades.
2) This may be my bias a dynamacist but I am skeptical of purely statistical models of AMOC collapse. The AMOC is complex and trying to predict the time of a complete collapse is a significant simplification (especially when, as the authors note, a slowdown rather than shutdown of the AMOC seems more likely from our current understanding).
Nevertheless this is a very interesting study and contribution to the field.