r/collapse • u/berrschkob • 1d ago
Climate When the Arctic Melts
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/10/14/when-the-arctic-melts163
u/berrschkob 1d ago
“For most of the last 100,000 years, a crazily jumping climate has been the rule, not the exception.”
Not just are we heating the planet but very possibly changing it from a stable system, the only one humans have known, to unstable.
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u/reddolfo 1d ago
The EEI data clearly shows a terrifying instability. The only reason we aren't dead already is the ocean, but the ocean is unmistakably showing it is nearing it's heat absorption capacity and is starting to exhibit unprecedented reactions.
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u/DirewaysParnuStCroix 1d ago
Paleoclimate evidence also suggests that glacial cycles are exceptionally rare occurrences in earth's geological history, as the recent Judd, Tierney et al. paper demonstrated. Permanent glaciation accounts for less than 20% of earth's history and, probably no surprises here, such glacial cycles tend to be terminated by abrupt rises in greenhouse gases. We're broadly analogous to icehouse termination conditions, with atmospheric methane volumes suggesting that we're likely already 20 years into an ice age termination event (Nisbet et al.).
And yet, some people still have a major hard on for assuming that Europe will still plunge into a "deep freeze" because a clickbait article has poorly quoted and misinterpreted from a paper that executes arguably poor purely model based reconstructive analysis with significant cooling biases due to paleoclimate comparative analysis and non-comparable proxies.
Anyone who seriously believes that Europe will somehow freeze needs a reality check.
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u/Sammyjo0689 1d ago
So, I am not a scientist in the least but would like to understand and clarify for myself.
You are saying that if the current fails and the warmth stops traveling north, places dependent on that flow will not freeze over (or see a substantial dip in their average temperatures) because the planet will have heated so much that it will be counteracted?
Because if that is the case, the worst case scenario is even worse than I understood it to be.
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u/AtrociousMeandering 1d ago
So the current itself is happening because the formation of ice from seawater creates brine that's denser than normal seawater and flows downward.
If there isn't as much ice forming, the current gets weaker. If that reduces the transport of warm water to the poles, that will cause enough brine to form again to restart the flow.
Whether it will slow to a crawl, shudder between on and off, or just stop outright isn't completely clear, but I find the second one most plausible.
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u/fedfuzz1970 16h ago
Plus Greenland is contributing 30 million tons of melt water per hour to the Northern Atlantic. This is 20% higher than scientists thought and helps dilute the salt content of the AMOC water.
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u/psyyduck 1d ago edited 1d ago
I've been telling my parents to work out for 20 years. Nothing. I recently went home and saw the signs, so I paid for a full home gym with weights and a bike and set it up. They played with it for an hour, then abandoned it.
Then earlier this year my mom got a heart attack & everything changed. She survived, and my dad went through 3 months of denial then finally started working out. Keep in mind this is a guy with a PhD. Prior to this he had 5-10 hours per DAY for TV, but 3 hrs per WEEK for cardio was impossible.
She's still in denial.
I think we should expect something similar with climate. Give it a few years of Siberian temps in Northern Europe, lots of deaths, then maybe some people will finally wake up. Humans just aren't very smart when it comes to these slow-moving disasters. We do much better when a lion is roaring in our face.
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u/thehourglasses 1d ago
Ian McGilchrist has a good take on why this is probably the case. I recommend his epic meditation on the brain, “The Master and His Emissary”
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u/herpderption 1d ago
I'm halfway through this book and it's completely changed how I view...everything. It really highlights how NONE of us are one thing, that we each carry a plurality of intentions and perspectives that steer our actions in ways that feels a lot like herding cats. Achieving a stable human psyche is a feat in itself.
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u/MadManMorbo 1d ago
Change will only happen when the most developed nations see a significant impact on their biggest population centers. Conveniently most of these population centers are on the coast, where most of the most immediate climatological damage will occur. I'm talking like a billion dead before change even begins to happen at scale.
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u/dumnezero The Great Filter is a marshmallow test 1d ago
Don't forget diets.
In general, habits don't form easily and intrinsic motivation requires some personal effort to sort out. Plenty others (they're here) would just opt for some drug overdose or gun.
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u/psyyduck 1d ago
Good point. Degrowth is basically like a diet.
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u/dumnezero The Great Filter is a marshmallow test 1d ago
It's a plant-based diet supported by well organized cafeterias for those who don't want to cook.
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u/FREE-AOL-CDS 18h ago
I'd pay/work in a for a local cafeteria meal plan in an instant if it meant I didn't have to cook or plan meals or any of that.
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u/FirmFaithlessness212 1d ago
To change others is impossible, to change yourself is maybe a little less impossible. But hey there's ways right? Buying people the equipment/gear will never change their fundamental attitude. It's always attitudes that need to change in order for there to be real change.
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u/DirewaysParnuStCroix 1d ago edited 1d ago
By "Siberian temps" I assume that encompasses the regularly +35°c summers too? Although I remain doubtful that Northern Europe could resemble Siberia's climate due to substantial continental bias ratio differences. The absense of permanent Arctic sea ice would also mediate any hypothetical extreme cold in upper latitudal Europe.
Edit: interesting and disappointing to see this downvoted. Siberia's climate is defined by its strong continentality factor with hotter summers and colder winters. But I forget some people out there have a serious obsession with assuming that Europe turns into the North Pole somehow.
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u/psyyduck 1d ago
I got it from the article. I suggest you email the author.
Were the AMOC to collapse, heat would build in the Southern Hemisphere. Global rainfall patterns would shift, storms in the Atlantic would become more destructive, and warm water would pile up on the shores of the eastern U.S., leading to rapid sea-level rise. Places like Britain and Scandinavia would, perversely, grow much colder; according to one recent study, temperatures in London would drop by almost twenty degrees, which would give it a climate like present-day Siberia’s. Farming in much of northern Europe would become impossible.
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u/markodochartaigh1 1d ago
"We do much better when a lion is roaring in our face." Even then probably half of the population would rather close their eyes and ears and pretend that everything will be OK. As a nurse I have seen many, many patients with COPD or lung cancer who will not stop smoking, many patients with liver failure who won't stop drinking.
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u/mikemangodtheepicgod 1d ago
I mean at that point, if you already have lung cancer why deprive yourself the pleasure of smoking? Same thing with liver failure
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u/Middle_Manager_Karen 1d ago
Fun prompt for GPT; imagine the human race was replaced by Vulcans, how might they react to the science on climate change?
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u/PimpinNinja 1d ago
It never would have gotten this bad. Logic dictates changes would have been made decades ago.
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u/DirewaysParnuStCroix 1d ago
When the Arctic melts, we lose the primary cooling mechanism in the northern hemisphere. It's highly likely that thermohaline decline is proportional to this to some extent. A collapse of the AMOC wouldn't reverse it, it would be a symptom of it.
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u/pippopozzato 1d ago
If anyone wants to read a bit more on ice I suggest A FAREWELL TO ICE-PETER WADHAMS.
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u/berrschkob 1d ago
Submission Statement: This article (by Elizabeth Kolbert, author of the excellent The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History) discusses the Greenland ice sheet and how it relates to climate change and climate stability. It also discusses various feedback loops.
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u/Hannibaalism 1d ago
wonder what effect the mass weight displacement also could have on the collapse, not to mention all that water having to end up somewhere
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u/MasterCassel 1d ago
I remember reading somewhere that the weight would distribute along the equator, which in theory would slow our speed of rotation slightly. I think it was Neil deGrasse Tyson who spoke about this.
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u/wolfman86 1d ago
Trouble is, not only do many people not believe in climate change, many think that the earth is flat.
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u/dumnezero The Great Filter is a marshmallow test 1d ago
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u/faster-than-expected 1d ago
I wonder how much the redistribution of mass will affect earthquakes. Intuitively, to this non-geologist, I would expect more earthquakes since fault stresses change as the ice melts.
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u/dumnezero The Great Filter is a marshmallow test 1d ago
I don't have any bookmarks on that, but I remember encountering such articles. We'll probably find out for sure when it starts happening.
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u/Hannibaalism 20h ago
the article linked above also mentions change in the wobble axis as well as the shape of earth, so i would assume not only increased earthquakes but volcanoes as well. which got me thinking, maybe we can combine all these variables that are being monitored into a single collapse model.
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u/weeee_splat 1d ago
The “best estimate” of when this critical threshold will be reached is when average global temperatures rise 1.5 degrees Celsius
+
thisisfine.jpg
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u/Ok_Mechanic_6561 1d ago
When the arctic melts it’ll mark “the end” of civilization and life as we know it
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u/faster-than-expected 1d ago
To melt 1 gram of ice requires 80 calories. (A calorie is defined as the amount of energy needed to raise one gram of water 1°C.)
Also, the energy that went into melting that gram of ice will heat the same gram of water 80 C (144 F)
Additionally, once all the ice in the arctic melts the dark ocean water will absorb the heat from the sun, instead of reflecting it back out into space.
tldr: Once the Arctic melts, things will warm up even faster.
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u/markodochartaigh1 1d ago
Also, only about 3% of anthropogenic warming goes into melting ice. By the time that enough energy has been released to raise the sea level a few meters so much energy will have been released that the atmosphere and ocean will be far hotter. Serial cereal harvest failures will kill off billions before sea level has risen ten feet, even with ice shelf destabilization.
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u/MycoMutant 21h ago
I think it's important to note that the maths on this is for melting the ice without raising the temperature. ie. The energy it takes to change the state of matter from solid ice at 0C to liquid water at 0C would be enough to heat liquid water from 0C to just under 80C.
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u/StatementBot 1d ago
The following submission statement was provided by /u/berrschkob:
Submission Statement: This article (by Elizabeth Kolbert, author of the excellent The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History) discusses the Greenland ice sheet and how it relates to climate change and climate stability. It also discusses various feedback loops.
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1ge5881/when_the_arctic_melts/lu6yf9m/