Reading the comments on any sort of environment adjacent news on this website is like a form of self torture. You'd think having access to a large corpus of humanity's written knowledge could help, but it seems like it's making it worse.
birdsongs 1 days ago [-]
I want to believe it's bots pushing propaganda, and not that a non-insignificant portion of HN refuses to believe in climate change. But I really don't know these days.
qup 21 hours ago [-]
Guess the papers shouldn't run headlines like that everything will collapse in four years, beaches will be underwater, etc.
They've been writing the same "decade to live" headlines since the 70s.
People are jaded.
Your comment is a non-sequitur just to personally attack me for a position I didn't take.
amanaplanacanal 20 hours ago [-]
It's a media literacy issue. Headlines aren't science, and people should learn that in school.
Same issue with believing that crime is terrible now, when it's objectively not. And politicians rely on the ignorance of voters to gain power, so they have no interest in making media literacy any better.
_blk 20 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
fooqux 19 hours ago [-]
> Try pushing anything scientific against the climate change Mafia or against evolution theory and see how hard it crashes
The climate change... Mafia? You make it sound like the group is so powerful. If it were, I think we'd see more change around here.
Instead of a Mafia are you sure it's not just inertia? There is a lot of data and evidence for both climate change and evolution. Any theories going a different direction would need to show some exceptionally good evidence to the contrary if you wanted it to be taken seriously. That seems perfectly normal to me. If you published a paper stating that eclipses were harbingers of doom, I would want to see some exceptionally clear evidence simply because it refutes so much established science. It's not impossible; such change has happened before, but again, only with solid evidence.
That aside, are you speaking from personal experience here? Or are you just projecting? If you actually have a paper you tried publishing I'd like to read it.
_blk 18 hours ago [-]
I sincerely appreciate your comment and your willingness to read through a potentially bad paper - many people are not willing to do that, so a heartfelt thanks. Alas no, I'm not in environmental research. But seeing how quickly my previous post died is somewhat telling of how the challenge-the-climate-theory topic is received here.. Bury rather than consider a different (and admittedly potentially wrong) opinion.
I get why mafia is received wrongly but I don't think it's over stated. If you [collective] look at how much money pushes the topic, it's hard to say that it's not powerful. Just looking at the number of private jets at the climate conferences is somewhat telling too.
How many speakers are there at those climate conferences that challenge the classic notion of we're all gonna freeze (20-30y ago) to we're all gonna drown (10y ago) to it's getting more extreme on both ends (nowadays)? I was brought up with all of them and yes climate is changing in some ways but change has been a constant with or without man.. Not looking to argue, you can have your opinions and cite your facts, I'm just saying the mainstream opinions and the constant cross-citing didn't convince me.
Just for reference, I'm not wearing a tin hat, nor do I think the world is flat and I love people of all faiths and backgrounds.
CrimsonRain 16 hours ago [-]
It is pointless to point out these _everyone's gonna die in 4 years due to climate change news published every few years since 19xx_ to climate warriors. They are idealists who bring upon disaster in the world with their moral high ground path. They refuse to understand how to cooperate with the masses, how their good lies made people jaded over these years and now they are even more mad because there are more "climate deniers" (even tho that's because of their own actions)
When people like you and me, who think logically and bring this up, we are illiterate, climate deniers, right wing Nazi etc.
chimprich 20 hours ago [-]
That is misrepresenting what the article says. It doesn't say anything about beaches being underwater. It reports one prediction from one expert that the Arctic would be ice free within 4 years.
This prediction was too pessimistic, but I'm not sure what general point you are trying to make by cherry-picking one article from 14 years ago. Care to expand?
birdsongs 15 hours ago [-]
> This prediction was too pessimistic, but I'm not sure what general point you are trying to make by cherry-picking one article from 14 years ago. Care to expand?
They're trying to downplay or deny climate change, without actually taking a contradicting position, because they know that will actually get downvoted to dead.
It's cowardly and intended to further the denial position.
fooqux 20 hours ago [-]
One has to separate the science from journalistic malfeasance. The news is heavily dependent on attracting eyeballs, and fearmongering does that well.
rythmshifter 16 hours ago [-]
It’s been very difficult to find the signal in the noise.
verisimi 18 hours ago [-]
Why do you believe in it?
portmanteur 18 hours ago [-]
>a non-insignificant portion of HN refuses to believe in climate change.
This strikes me as a Motte-and-Bailey style argument. I don’t think the issue is whether the climate is changing, but people who bang on about the climate changing are typically doing it in service of some policy outcome. If I don’t believe those policies will have their purported effect, or are feasible at the required scale, or if I think those policies with have far more disastrous consequences than maintaining the status quo (for example, mass de-industrialization in order to limit global carbon emissions, which after a series of waving hands, saves the planet or something). Does challenging those policy proposals mean that I refuse to believe in climate change? To a non-insignificant portion of climate commenters, the answer is probably “Yes.”
dbspin 18 hours ago [-]
Great, please state your expertise in these matters.
The issue here is you have a large number of people in the hacker news 'community' who are domain experts with insufficient humility. While it's great to be informed, essential in fact to engage with a useful conversation about public policy - it's ludicrous to get ideological about areas of scientific knowledge in which one is a layman. If the consensus is, based on UNEP, IPCC etc, that we're going to see the deaths of at least hundreds of millions, the loss of major sea fronting cities and a likely systems collapse of our civilisation... Then mannered critiques of policy outcomes read like defences of appeasement in 1939. Buffoonery masquerading as serious engagement with reality.
16 hours ago [-]
StanislavPetrov 16 hours ago [-]
The climate is going to change. The climate is always changing. ~12,000 years ago oceans were 200 feet!! lower and a large portion of the world was under a mile of ice. This drastic change in climate didn't come as a result of human activities. It is perfectly reasonable to accept that human industrial activity is changing the climate, but question the degree to which it matters in the big scheme of our constantly changing climate. Further, it is ridiculous to pretend that the constant stream of unhinged hyperbole coming from both the media and "scientists" for decades hasn't worked against mitigating this issue. This is the 20th anniversary of "An Inconvenient Truth" which was widely touted by scientists, luminaries and every other pointy head as being an accurate, sober and science-based view of climate change. Go watch it today and look at the predictions, stated as fact, and backed by "the science". Finally, even if you believe that climate change is the greatest threat to humanity (rather than nuclear war, pandemics, AI, ect) that doesn't mean that we have the sort of governance capacity to deal with this problem effectively. I certainly don't believe that giving our dear leaders infinite power to micromanage every ounce of energy people are allowed to use will result in anything but a more dystopian society with even fewer freedoms. The people running our society are incompetent and corrupt, and even if they were capable of dealing with such a massive, global problem (they aren't), they'd be more likely to use the power they are given to enrich themselves and tighten their grip on power.
bemtevi 22 hours ago [-]
The entire problem is that this website is so hyper-focused on curiosity. Which seems to be not a good thing when taken to this limit in some cases, because you get a bunch of people who become conditioned to hide in their inner world of mental stimulation, rather than actually caring about what they're reading.
It's basically a website to stimulate the good feelings that come from absorbing information, which creates a sort of pathological behaviour in most of the participants.
I mean, you just wouldn't find a gathering like this in real life. Debate and discussion here happens merely for the entertainment and distraction of those using it, and the information and news presented here becomes like a fictional version of real life, except that the fictional is actually real.
While the intentions of this website might be good, I think in the long run it just further promotes the behaviour of hiding away from the world, and as a result is a net negative to those who use it.
18 hours ago [-]
pugworthy 1 days ago [-]
To be clear, so far some of the oldest ice found is over 6 million years old...
> To be clear, so far some of the oldest ice found is over 6 million years old...
And they're working on finding even older!
"Given the spectacularly old ice we have discovered at Allan Hills, we also have designed a comprehensive longer-term new study of this region to try to extend the records even further in time, which we hope to conduct between 2026 and 2031"
One of the presentations was on this research, and I was somewhat amazed the new stretch goal is to find 10 million year old ice. More power to them!
jimmySixDOF 24 hours ago [-]
still blows my mind that there is debate about the origin of Water on earth and much of it is still attributed to the formation of the solar system and as much as 30% to 50% of the water we drink is older than the sun (4.6B years old)
What's most impressive to me is how razor sharp the slate arrowhead they show in the top photo is. I've seen photos of many stone age arrowheads but they are usually much more dull and blunted.
jacquesm 1 days ago [-]
That's because they weren't exposed to the weather as much. Essentially these were 'shrinkwrapped' in nature's own version of Cosmoline. No bacteria, no free oxygen. Once did this with a rose to see how long it would last and it basically was perfect until we moved house. Many years and not even the slightest change, it didn't even lose color.
GeoAtreides 22 hours ago [-]
it's slate, bacteria and free oxygen won't do anything to stone...
buildsjets 14 hours ago [-]
Stone is not inert and is absolutely consumed in biological processes. Lichens will grow on stone and reduce it to dust over aeons.
And the wood of the arrow would be gone otherwise.
spockz 1 days ago [-]
That would actually be a brilliant treatment to give wedding bouquets! I’ve never heard of Cosmoline. Going to look it up. Thanks!
jacquesm 1 days ago [-]
It's not so easy to freeze something that large without getting defects in the crystal due to different rates of freezing, to do that properly will be a major engineering project. But I'd love to see you succeed with that.
buildsjets 14 hours ago [-]
You can make your own cosmoline by dissolving a wax toilet seal ring (a new one please) in mineral spirits. Prevents rust for decades.
18 hours ago [-]
userbinator 1 days ago [-]
I’ve never heard of Cosmoline
Ironically it's made of petroleum, which is the decayed remains of prehistoric organisms.
jacquesm 1 days ago [-]
That's part of the story. The petroleum based part will go in a few years, what remains is the protective layer of wax that matters. I've bought some military surplus stuff that was coated in it, at first I didn't know what it was and then once I found out about it (and how to remove it) I was super impressed by how effective it is in preserving all kinds of materials from time's teeth. In particular these were parts for a 1940s vehicle, NOS that came out of the covering as though made the other day.
userbinator 6 hours ago [-]
The petroleum based part will go in a few years, what remains is the protective layer of wax that matters.
??? The wax is petroleum, just the heavier parts.
faangguyindia 1 days ago [-]
my lathe also came wrapped in cosmoline and shrink-wrap
autoexec 1 days ago [-]
Sure, our actions and inaction regarding climate change threaten the very future of humanity, but on the bright side we're going to learn so much about human history in the process!
undersuit 13 hours ago [-]
I think bringing back the glaciers would expose more human sites on coastlines than melting them to expose smatterings of mountain sites.
ant6n 1 days ago [-]
Climate is out. Climate tech too.
AI is in.
paulryanrogers 1 days ago [-]
With oil prices rising, climate tech is still quietly advancing.
SoftTalker 1 days ago [-]
This was the only way change was ever going to happen: when economics forced it.
paulryanrogers 1 days ago [-]
Really because Spain and Norway did it through government interventions to guide markets.
We don't have to be slaves to unregulated markets or the oligarchs they naturally breed.
IrishTechie 1 days ago [-]
I guess that could also be phrased as: out of 180+ countries only Spain and Norway managed it in limited ways.
DangitBobby 8 hours ago [-]
Not really true, many countries made moves. It didn't help that the US was/is being a gigantic ignorant petulant child about the whole situation, signaling to the rest of the world that we were going to make meaningful emission reduction an uphill battle.
ragequittah 3 hours ago [-]
My favorite line I hear as a Canadian is that we don't make up enough of the population of the world to care about our emissions. Usually followed or preceded by some form of 'and besides the other guys aren't doing it'. Somehow people can't seem to see the irony.
seb1204 1 days ago [-]
Untrue, or at least distorted with all the obvious and hidden fossile subsidies.
cucumber3732842 22 hours ago [-]
Over the past few decades harm was done to the advancement of things that err toward environmental sustainability by self professed "environmentalists" who were just dishonest swindlers selling the current snake oil. Trading away huge amounts of economic or political/social sustainability for middling amounts of environmental sustainability isn't progress except in the narrowest most irrelevant to actual reality way. You'd think that a bunch of technologists who can spot a "I've saved a bunch of memory at the expense of processing time" or "our startup is profitable if you use questionably honest spreadsheet math that ignores some elephants in the room" a mile away would have called out those people and what they peddled.
Being out of the news and not having hordes of people trying to ride it's coat tails in a "look at me, I'm a do-gooder too" fashion and trying to push it in various directions for their own gain is the best thing that could happen to it. Let the tech be advanced in the background in an economically and politically sustainable manner even if slightly slower.
autoexec 15 hours ago [-]
> Over the past few decades harm was done to the advancement of things that err toward environmental sustainability by self professed "environmentalists" who were just dishonest swindlers selling the current snake oil.
Are you talking about carbon credits? Electric cars have probably helped, even though there are trade offs. Solar has been a net positive.
jareklupinski 1 days ago [-]
what if we used AI on the climate
trismus 1 days ago [-]
Just gotta build out those data centers first. For the climate, of course.
yako21000 1 days ago [-]
Impact compared to other life necessary structures of big cities is small. (Water, power etc...) But yeah, it still consumes.
autoexec 1 days ago [-]
A single data center can consume over well over 650 MW which is enough electricity for nearly 500,000 homes, which is more homes than the entire population of Miami Florida. Amazon has a 1,037 MW AI data center.
jandrewrogers 1 days ago [-]
The main consumers of electricity are industrial, not homes. Nothing we take for granted in a home would exist without those industrial supply chains, including data centers. The homes are downstream of continued investment in and expansion of the processes that actually consume most of the electricity.
parineum 1 days ago [-]
I'm sure you're abstaining from using AI, for the climate of course.
trismus 1 days ago [-]
I'm not here to lose, but my definition of winning might be different.
Razengan 1 days ago [-]
Imagine if we move to Mars only to find out we used to live there...
quotemstr 1 days ago [-]
Nah. For centuries up to the 1850s, climate was looking pretty dicy. The little ice age, had it gone on, might have represented a return a big ice age.
The heroic efforts of early industrialists adding carbon to the atmosphere avoided this calamity and set us up with a level of comfy and productive climate unknown in the quaternary.
Amazing how humanity keeps lucking out like this.
didgetmaster 1 days ago [-]
I wonder if there were any climate change alarmists around 20,000 years ago; telling everyone that the planet was doomed if those mile-deep glaciers covering New York ever melted?
Alwayshasbeeb 23 hours ago [-]
Even if they knew it, climate change on the scale we're experiencing today wouldn't be as big of an issue for them because their populations were tiny and entirely self sufficient by hunting and gathering from local sources.
Today's bloated world population, completely reliant on mass agriculture only made possible by stable climate patterns, isn't so lucky. A fact your cheeky, inch deep provocative comment entirely ignores.
quotemstr 18 hours ago [-]
Agriculture is CO2-limited and would improve in yield with a somewhat hothouse climate.
Right. Our food staples, and especially barley, wheat, rice, and potatoes all produce more calories per acre at higher CO2 concentrations.
That's because RuBisCO is a terrible enzyme that only barely works; photosynthesis works better the more CO2 you feed it. RuBisCO actually evolved in a higher-CO2 atmosphere and is optimized for that one, not ours. Terrestrial plants today are basically an alien species trying to adapt to a marginally (from their POV) frontier planet.
Now, you could argue that this climate model or that climate model increase net productivity once you take into account land use patterns, population shifts, blah blah blah. You can make these models say whatever you want them to say. Truth is, biomechanically, more CO2 means higher yields with same inputs on the same land, and we are very good at making land suitable for agriculture.
assimpleaspossi 1 days ago [-]
So this means these areas were once not ice covered? Does this mean the area is returning to what it was a thousand years ago? And, back then, this was the normal or is ice covering the normal?
kadoban 1 days ago [-]
> And, back then, this was the normal or is ice covering the normal?
"Normal" is probably not a very useful framing. We're currently in an interglacial period in an ice age. So, on one scale we'd expect ice there, on one scale we'd not. On another scale we're just waiting for the sun to swallow the Earth and burn it all away. What's "normal" out of that?
If you happen to be asking if the current human-caused warming is an issue, yes it is. The Earth doesn't care, and "normal" doesn't care. We do though, we're fucking up our environment pretty good and it's causing misery and death.
Turskarama 1 days ago [-]
6000 years ago was about the time of the last interglacial period so likely it was ice free at that time.
As was stated "normal" is not really a useful framing. It has at various times been both "normal" for the glaciers to extend much further south, and it has also been "normal" for the earth to have no glaciers at all. When thinking about climate change the issue is not that the climate IS changing, but rather how quickly. There is no evidence that global climate has ever changed as quickly as it is today, with the fastest rates we have evidence for being on the order of 1 degree every thousand years, as compared to the current rate of about 1 degree per 50 years.
amanaplanacanal 20 hours ago [-]
Yes, and the whole world economy is based on the climate we've had the last couple hundred years. A lot of people are going to die, because we refuse to wean ourselves off fossil fuels.
Of course that's mostly going to be poor people, and it's really hard to get rich people to care about that.
skew-aberration 20 hours ago [-]
I'm all for decarbonization, but 'refuse' is doing a lot of heavy lifting. These are very hard problems with a lot of people working on them. Dropping fossil fuels today would kill people too.
DangitBobby 8 hours ago [-]
> refuse to wean ourselves off fossil fuels
> Dropping fossil fuels today would kill people too
Wean and drop are pretty different. Many US citizens and Republican politicians have shown less than 0 interest in making progress and the Trump administration in particular has actively sabotaged the effort.
skew-aberration 5 hours ago [-]
Investment in decarbonization is vast and has been for decades. Even in Trump's America.
The US, a nation in huge debt, is committed to around $1T in tax subsidies and $500B in loans and other funding for clean energy in the next decade. Private capital investment in that same time will account for another several trillion - driven by these subsidies and the regulations which force industry to adapt (and because clean solutions are genuinely cheaper in many applications).
The government tax subsidies and direct spending (depending on tax projections) are on the order of 5-10% of the discretionary budget (around 2-3 times the annual 'extra' cost above baseline of assisting Ukraine or bombing Iran Feb-Oct which are each on the order of $50B). It's hard to get an exact number of course, since 'funding which decreases carbon emissions' extends way beyond clean energy and electrification. For example, Defense Production Act may be used to fund manufacturing or refining capacity in key areas.
That's a long way from 'refusal' and represents only one country.
Public and private combined, the EU is investing at about the same rate as US, China is investing on the order of about double the rate of the US.
These are very hard problems to solve.
samudrijan 19 hours ago [-]
The establishment O&G cartel is actively working against the transition. See Trump, et. al.
jkahrs595 14 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
PowerElectronix 2 days ago [-]
Does this mean that the ice wasn't there during the stone age?
kzrdude 2 days ago [-]
Yes: most mainland Norway ice was gone during the holocene climatic optimum (9–6 thousand years ago), and glaciers recovered since then (until approx the 20th century, when deglaciation started accelerating again).
The climate is varying in long cycles, and the deglaciation 20 thousand years ago (last glacial maximum) was driven by a spike in summer temperatures, and this peak has already long passed. Ice ages and interglacial periods have a certain momentum to them, so it takes more than just that to go back to full ice age..
chrisco255 2 days ago [-]
Yes, the early Neolithic was warmer than modern era.
amelius 20 hours ago [-]
Did they have coral reefs?
mistrial9 1 days ago [-]
wrong: IPCC AR6 puts the warmest Holocene stretch (~6.5 ka) at about 0.2-1°C above 1850-1900. 2011-2020 already beat that
chrisco255 1 days ago [-]
No, it's not wrong or we wouldn't be finding 5K year old instruments underneath melted glaciers as this article's evidence shows. And ice core samples from Greenland and Antarctica support this.
saalweachter 22 hours ago [-]
The glacial cycle was longer duration, lower fluctuation.
Glaciers don't melt instantly the moment the temperature flips from "form glaciers" to "melt glaciers". They operate on the integral of temperature -- heat. The temperature determines how fast they melt or form.
These melted really, really fast.
fc417fc802 1 days ago [-]
Without taking a position I will point out that your stated reasoning doesn't hold due to how much momentum these systems have and how slowly they respond. It seems entirely plausible that this outcome would still have happened if temperatures had plateaued several years ago.
Cerium 1 days ago [-]
Do you also wait until the inside of the meat is the temperature you want before taking it off the grill, then are later surprised when it is overcooked?
qup 21 hours ago [-]
He's talking about information, not actions to take
throwaway173738 2 days ago [-]
Whatever you put in the glacier the glacier gives back to you. Anything you leave there ends up at the bottom of it in the moraine.
lexicality 2 days ago [-]
I'm slightly surprised they're just holding these artefacts with bare hands. I thought that was generally a no-no for dealing with objects untouched for thousands of years
AlotOfReading 1 days ago [-]
Conservationists and archivists (sometimes) use gloves on cleaned samples, but not archaeologists. An archaeologist wearing gloves is almost certainly just cold.
There's no real reason to immediately protect the find from light handling when it's discovered. It's a dirty object that's still coated in whatever was floating around the environment for those thousands of years. The rock will be fine and probably handled multiple times before it gets back to an archive.
I think the only times I've worn gloves in the field were for a very rusty metal dagger and some especially sensitive human remains.
mncharity 1 days ago [-]
> no real reason [...] still coated in whatever was floating around the environment
I wonder, might one instead make an argument that it's not currently economic-technologically feasible to avoid artifact surface information destruction and contamination, at any stage of the dig-to-archival-conservation pipeline, nor to extract whatever information might be there, outside of very rare cases? Rather than there's no information there to lose?
Perhaps it becomes possible-and-affordable at some point, to frequently check, say, "oh neat, here are some 10 um notches on the surface, with some nice yeast, and some pollen, and oh, maybe that's a bit of calcified biofilm for nanopore DNA?"? Does automated lab tech progress, someday make "brushed, handled, dusted, washed, and shelf in the basement" start sounding like 19thC "we accessed the site using dynamite"?
apothegm 1 days ago [-]
Nowadays they don’t in fact brush off artifacts immediately upon extraction, just clear them of large clumps of dirt. Precisely because the fragile remains of paint and whatever else might have been stuck to them can often teach us more than the artifact itself.
narnarpapadaddy 1 days ago [-]
That one notch further on the spectrum that’s being described. Will “clear large chunks of dirt in the field” be found to have damaged information? Is there genuinely nothing to learn from the chunks of dirt? Or is it still too expensive to pay attention?
AlotOfReading 1 days ago [-]
We can only understand the coarsest information available in the soil. Any particular cubic centimeter has thousands of completely undocumented bacterial taxa, miles of fungal threads, organic residues left behind by higher lifeforms, etc. Each bit of soil is essentially unique.
Moreover, just being in the general vicinity is enough for us to leave behind contamination, since humans (and all other animals) constantly shed detectable eDNA into the environment. And even if they wanted to deal with this complexity, the budget for an entire project's archaeological testing is often less than my coworkers' monthly token budgets. You might get less than a dozen radioisotope, TL, or dendro tests for the entire thing, let alone anything more expensive.
apothegm 18 hours ago [-]
They sift all the dirt they remove from the site. They also typically sample it for pollen and such, which they can learn a lot from as well.
dieselgate 1 days ago [-]
Me too but presumably they’re not really that unique as there are hundreds? Or maybe the stone/hard artifacts are handled different than organic/soft.
thenthenthen 1 days ago [-]
Thats one pretty arrowhead
rq1 17 hours ago [-]
For anyone still doubting of the contemporary decline, and the looming moroseness.
There comes the undeniable proof that we’re back to the Stone Age!
gosen 16 hours ago [-]
This is a bit scary (because ice is melting) but very fascinating because of the findings, I'm confused. And happy
gAI 2 days ago [-]
Including Stone Age diseases?
octaane 1 days ago [-]
Yes.
skeledrew 1 days ago [-]
Just wait for a few ancient-but-novel pathogens to start emerging too.
red75prime 23 hours ago [-]
Ancient bacteria will be surprised to encounter penicillin. Viruses are less resistant to degradation. But, yeah, it's nothing to look forward to, horizontal gene transfer and all.
SoftTalker 1 days ago [-]
unlikely there are any in the ice that were not also present outside the ice
beansovertoast 1 days ago [-]
[dead]
mikert89 2 days ago [-]
Hyperborea
Creamsicle47 1 days ago [-]
I come from a land down under
taneq 1 days ago [-]
Crom!
bpbp-mango 1 days ago [-]
I wonder what we will find beneath Greenland's ice?
pestatije 1 days ago [-]
Imagine if the water disappeared
peatweald 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
dyauspitr 2 days ago [-]
[flagged]
sublinear 2 days ago [-]
That last sentence is how we know you've never been there. The ratio is the same as anywhere else.
dyauspitr 2 days ago [-]
I’ve been to Norway, Sweden, Iceland, Denmark, Finland, the British Isles, all of it really.
Rendered at 10:28:24 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/sep/17/arctic-c...
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-10-30/high-tid...
If you don't believe it and want to ignore science, that's your ignorance.
https://science.nasa.gov/climate-change/evidence/
They've been writing the same "decade to live" headlines since the 70s.
People are jaded.
Your comment is a non-sequitur just to personally attack me for a position I didn't take.
Same issue with believing that crime is terrible now, when it's objectively not. And politicians rely on the ignorance of voters to gain power, so they have no interest in making media literacy any better.
The climate change... Mafia? You make it sound like the group is so powerful. If it were, I think we'd see more change around here.
Instead of a Mafia are you sure it's not just inertia? There is a lot of data and evidence for both climate change and evolution. Any theories going a different direction would need to show some exceptionally good evidence to the contrary if you wanted it to be taken seriously. That seems perfectly normal to me. If you published a paper stating that eclipses were harbingers of doom, I would want to see some exceptionally clear evidence simply because it refutes so much established science. It's not impossible; such change has happened before, but again, only with solid evidence.
That aside, are you speaking from personal experience here? Or are you just projecting? If you actually have a paper you tried publishing I'd like to read it.
This prediction was too pessimistic, but I'm not sure what general point you are trying to make by cherry-picking one article from 14 years ago. Care to expand?
They're trying to downplay or deny climate change, without actually taking a contradicting position, because they know that will actually get downvoted to dead.
It's cowardly and intended to further the denial position.
This strikes me as a Motte-and-Bailey style argument. I don’t think the issue is whether the climate is changing, but people who bang on about the climate changing are typically doing it in service of some policy outcome. If I don’t believe those policies will have their purported effect, or are feasible at the required scale, or if I think those policies with have far more disastrous consequences than maintaining the status quo (for example, mass de-industrialization in order to limit global carbon emissions, which after a series of waving hands, saves the planet or something). Does challenging those policy proposals mean that I refuse to believe in climate change? To a non-insignificant portion of climate commenters, the answer is probably “Yes.”
The issue here is you have a large number of people in the hacker news 'community' who are domain experts with insufficient humility. While it's great to be informed, essential in fact to engage with a useful conversation about public policy - it's ludicrous to get ideological about areas of scientific knowledge in which one is a layman. If the consensus is, based on UNEP, IPCC etc, that we're going to see the deaths of at least hundreds of millions, the loss of major sea fronting cities and a likely systems collapse of our civilisation... Then mannered critiques of policy outcomes read like defences of appeasement in 1939. Buffoonery masquerading as serious engagement with reality.
It's basically a website to stimulate the good feelings that come from absorbing information, which creates a sort of pathological behaviour in most of the participants.
I mean, you just wouldn't find a gathering like this in real life. Debate and discussion here happens merely for the entertainment and distraction of those using it, and the information and news presented here becomes like a fictional version of real life, except that the fictional is actually real.
While the intentions of this website might be good, I think in the long run it just further promotes the behaviour of hiding away from the world, and as a result is a net negative to those who use it.
https://news.oregonstate.edu/news/six-million-year-old-ice-d...
And they're working on finding even older!
"Given the spectacularly old ice we have discovered at Allan Hills, we also have designed a comprehensive longer-term new study of this region to try to extend the records even further in time, which we hope to conduct between 2026 and 2031"
One of the presentations was on this research, and I was somewhat amazed the new stretch goal is to find 10 million year old ice. More power to them!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_water_on_Earth
https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/minersoc/books/edited-volum...
And the wood of the arrow would be gone otherwise.
Ironically it's made of petroleum, which is the decayed remains of prehistoric organisms.
??? The wax is petroleum, just the heavier parts.
AI is in.
We don't have to be slaves to unregulated markets or the oligarchs they naturally breed.
Being out of the news and not having hordes of people trying to ride it's coat tails in a "look at me, I'm a do-gooder too" fashion and trying to push it in various directions for their own gain is the best thing that could happen to it. Let the tech be advanced in the background in an economically and politically sustainable manner even if slightly slower.
Are you talking about carbon credits? Electric cars have probably helped, even though there are trade offs. Solar has been a net positive.
The heroic efforts of early industrialists adding carbon to the atmosphere avoided this calamity and set us up with a level of comfy and productive climate unknown in the quaternary.
Amazing how humanity keeps lucking out like this.
Today's bloated world population, completely reliant on mass agriculture only made possible by stable climate patterns, isn't so lucky. A fact your cheeky, inch deep provocative comment entirely ignores.
https://sustainability.stanford.edu/news/climate-change-cuts...
That's because RuBisCO is a terrible enzyme that only barely works; photosynthesis works better the more CO2 you feed it. RuBisCO actually evolved in a higher-CO2 atmosphere and is optimized for that one, not ours. Terrestrial plants today are basically an alien species trying to adapt to a marginally (from their POV) frontier planet.
Now, you could argue that this climate model or that climate model increase net productivity once you take into account land use patterns, population shifts, blah blah blah. You can make these models say whatever you want them to say. Truth is, biomechanically, more CO2 means higher yields with same inputs on the same land, and we are very good at making land suitable for agriculture.
"Normal" is probably not a very useful framing. We're currently in an interglacial period in an ice age. So, on one scale we'd expect ice there, on one scale we'd not. On another scale we're just waiting for the sun to swallow the Earth and burn it all away. What's "normal" out of that?
If you happen to be asking if the current human-caused warming is an issue, yes it is. The Earth doesn't care, and "normal" doesn't care. We do though, we're fucking up our environment pretty good and it's causing misery and death.
As was stated "normal" is not really a useful framing. It has at various times been both "normal" for the glaciers to extend much further south, and it has also been "normal" for the earth to have no glaciers at all. When thinking about climate change the issue is not that the climate IS changing, but rather how quickly. There is no evidence that global climate has ever changed as quickly as it is today, with the fastest rates we have evidence for being on the order of 1 degree every thousand years, as compared to the current rate of about 1 degree per 50 years.
Of course that's mostly going to be poor people, and it's really hard to get rich people to care about that.
> Dropping fossil fuels today would kill people too
Wean and drop are pretty different. Many US citizens and Republican politicians have shown less than 0 interest in making progress and the Trump administration in particular has actively sabotaged the effort.
The US, a nation in huge debt, is committed to around $1T in tax subsidies and $500B in loans and other funding for clean energy in the next decade. Private capital investment in that same time will account for another several trillion - driven by these subsidies and the regulations which force industry to adapt (and because clean solutions are genuinely cheaper in many applications).
The government tax subsidies and direct spending (depending on tax projections) are on the order of 5-10% of the discretionary budget (around 2-3 times the annual 'extra' cost above baseline of assisting Ukraine or bombing Iran Feb-Oct which are each on the order of $50B). It's hard to get an exact number of course, since 'funding which decreases carbon emissions' extends way beyond clean energy and electrification. For example, Defense Production Act may be used to fund manufacturing or refining capacity in key areas.
That's a long way from 'refusal' and represents only one country.
Public and private combined, the EU is investing at about the same rate as US, China is investing on the order of about double the rate of the US.
These are very hard problems to solve.
The climate is varying in long cycles, and the deglaciation 20 thousand years ago (last glacial maximum) was driven by a spike in summer temperatures, and this peak has already long passed. Ice ages and interglacial periods have a certain momentum to them, so it takes more than just that to go back to full ice age..
Glaciers don't melt instantly the moment the temperature flips from "form glaciers" to "melt glaciers". They operate on the integral of temperature -- heat. The temperature determines how fast they melt or form.
These melted really, really fast.
There's no real reason to immediately protect the find from light handling when it's discovered. It's a dirty object that's still coated in whatever was floating around the environment for those thousands of years. The rock will be fine and probably handled multiple times before it gets back to an archive.
I think the only times I've worn gloves in the field were for a very rusty metal dagger and some especially sensitive human remains.
I wonder, might one instead make an argument that it's not currently economic-technologically feasible to avoid artifact surface information destruction and contamination, at any stage of the dig-to-archival-conservation pipeline, nor to extract whatever information might be there, outside of very rare cases? Rather than there's no information there to lose?
Perhaps it becomes possible-and-affordable at some point, to frequently check, say, "oh neat, here are some 10 um notches on the surface, with some nice yeast, and some pollen, and oh, maybe that's a bit of calcified biofilm for nanopore DNA?"? Does automated lab tech progress, someday make "brushed, handled, dusted, washed, and shelf in the basement" start sounding like 19thC "we accessed the site using dynamite"?
Moreover, just being in the general vicinity is enough for us to leave behind contamination, since humans (and all other animals) constantly shed detectable eDNA into the environment. And even if they wanted to deal with this complexity, the budget for an entire project's archaeological testing is often less than my coworkers' monthly token budgets. You might get less than a dozen radioisotope, TL, or dendro tests for the entire thing, let alone anything more expensive.
There comes the undeniable proof that we’re back to the Stone Age!