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Just before visiting HN I read a news article about our glaciers in Norway also melting. One glacier has moved back 83 meters in a year, and the last ten years it's moved back 483 meters.
A glacier that normally melts a meter in thickness each year and gains it back during winter, has melted 4 meters.
We've lost 20 glaciers here the last decade.
It's scary.
https://www.nrk.no/klima/breforsker-sjokkert-over-hvor-mye-i...
The election cycle, at least in a small part a function of a human’s expected life span btw, is way too short for governments to be incentivized to do anything about it.
It’s going to be a wild ride for our grandchildren.
Meanwhile the most popular politician in Belgium claims that climate activists are overly dramatic and that we should trust technology to save us. Just great.
Which is a inherently insane argument, to trust on the exploration of a labyrinth (research) to uncover ever more powerful hot potatoes, to save you from the hot potatoes you already juggle with. One missed juggling motion and you are stuck in a position you are unlikely to get out of because the failure to juggle reveals the original tribal societies inability to hold it together and propel a scientific society under stress.
> we should trust technology to save us
I'd be curious about the actual stats, but I have the feeling it's a widely shared point of view, even in educated circles.
The alternative option which is consuming less in order to pollute less is pretty unpopular.
Yeah, also here I've seen commenters having faith that "some technology will come along and save us!".
It's a different sort of "climate denial"[1].
OK, my faith that we're totally fucked is also based on guesstimate, just in the opposite direction (it can be viewed as a denial of the idea that there's something we can do to rescue this extravagantly luxurious modern life).
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/jun/20/...
Fucking Bart, if that guy kicked the bucket everyone would be better off...
who is the most popular ? BdW ? JLB ?
Delusion is always an easier sell than hard work.
Who is this so if I move to Belgium I turn the TV off when they come on it?
In general very small part of population will choose certain suffering now to avoid uncertain suffering in future.
Actively doing enough against climate change will have very real and likely significant quality of life change now. And if lot of people don't think their quality of life is high enough now, why would they want it to go lower. And sadly rich are always insulated either way.
It's not that they know they're sacrificing their grandchildrens' future for their current quality of life. It's that they'll believe the flimsiest arguments that climate change isn't happening. Cognitive dissonance is undefeated.
They truly won't be. global supply lines will probably be the first casualties that will trigger mainstream realization, and however deep your Hawaiian bunker is, feeding your plumber without those will be difficult.
It’s going to be a wild ride for anyone under fifty.
This makes me wonder if society would be improved by radical life-extension therapies or technologies. Detractors generally say it would result in stagnation, but at least people would have a very good incentive to think long-term if they knew they had a good chance of still being alive in 200 or 1000 years and having to deal with the long-term effects of current policy.
Birth rates are dropping faster than predicted, which means both fewer grandchildren to suffer and fewer grandchildren to produce carbon. A lot of environmental issues just go away with fewer people around. We'll have to adapt the current ponzi scheme of government pensions but that seems a small price to pay.
These are all natural cycles, noooothing to worry about... :-/
(Sorry, sarcasm... I've had immense battles with deniers...)
We are going to be THAT generation that dropped the ball.
Assuming that the government is to a large part motivated by the electorate. Some governments certainly aren’t (e.g. the US).
Enough people run for office who want to do something about climate change. But a plurality of the population seems to be mainly concerned with being angry about immigrants and wanting lower taxes.
If you are interested in a prescient look at how climate change will impact geopolitics:
https://www.amazon.com/Climate-Wars-Fight-Survival-Overheats...
The author intersperses nonfiction summaries (from 2011, so a bit dated) with fictional accounts of geopolitical conflict.
Super scary but eye opening.
A bit more recent. Soylent Green was set in the year 2022, and was about how humans and climate killed the ocean as the world's largest food source. In the film, they are always sweating and it's 90 degrees F at night.
We won't save ourselves.
It's just not cost effective to do so.
They are shrinking at an alarming rate here in Iceland as well. This is causing sandstorms and possibly increased volcanic activity.
Y'all need to get some trees planted to stabilise the soil. I know some people in Iceland are attempting to do that.
It is the end of the recent ice age, those glaciers are set to melt anyway. With human contribution they melted slightly faster.
We should be at the end of the current inter-glacial, temperatures should be going down, not up and glaciers should be growing, not shrinking. If you are talking about the Wurm/Winsconsin glaciation, it has been pretty much over for 12000 years and the climate has been pretty stable since.
Sure seems like we ought to be more aggressive about this whole anthropogenic climate collapse problem
Like maybe problems like vast swaths of the world becoming both less livable and less arable all at once is somewhat to blame for all the refugee crises?
Not to be "political" or whatever
Just wait for the refugee crises yet to come. We have seen nothing so far.
My expectation would be that unfortunately after a certain point it would stop being a refugee crisis and start being a border enforcement crisis. I personally expect things to get quite ugly once the temp difference hits a more significant value.
Yes, it sure seems it could go that way.
This is a human problem, nobody bothers until they face the issue.
https://archive.is/QO7jd
An aside:
Why bother submitting paywalled articles? Why bother upvoting paywalled articles? > 95% of readers probably don't have access.
Not being facetious, I genuinely want to know. Do people upvote without reading? Will almost everyone take the effort to throw the link into a paywall buster? Do many HN readers subscribe to paywalled sources?
99% of the time the top comment is an archive link.
FWIW it wasn't pay walled here. I just had to press "Show full article" and could read on. Perhaps it's based on geo location (I'm not their market) or how much one's read them lately?
If you google "Where Glaciers Melt, the Rivers Run Red" the first hit is the nyt article, if you click on this link you'll find the article non-paywalled!
Edit: if it doesn't work try again in a private/incognito tab to make sure it's all fresh cookies
So depending on the http-origin header the article is paywalled or not.
This is a trick I always use, it works for many newspapers.
Oh right, that actually makes a lot of sense, thanks..!
I was prompted to create a free account to keep reading.
For me (NYT non-subscriber, US, blocking most js), only the first 4 paragraphs are visible. That's fairly common for web sites to do (# of visible paragraphs varies, obviously). And usually shows enough to convince me that the article is worth no more of my time.
I share your annoyance. I've convinced that the sites themselves are doing this to attract subscribers.
Every time anyone complains you get the backlash of "if you want good journalism you have to pay for it", yet few can afford to subscribe to more than one or two publications and yet we have to suffer paywalled links from all of them. For me, the one UK publication I pay for is enough (and that one is, ironically, not even paywalled).
It's a distribution and friction problem.
We solved it for music. We need the same for journalism.
Microtransactions never took off, so that leaves one option: journalism companies need to stop having their own websites and instead publish to an aggregator (or aggregators) that handle payment and monetization. Spotify or Netflix for news.
But perhaps that would turn them into an even lower margin business with no ownership of their own audience relationship. Doesn't seem like a fun business to be in.
Nevertheless, it's still a distribution and friction problem.
> Why bother submitting paywalled articles?
They are explicitly permitted, as long as there are workarounds.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#:~:text=Are%20payw...
Though I wish submitters would provide the workaround (or gift link) too when submitting (I try to do so). It’s often someone else who does it. Though in fairness I guess someone may forget something is paywalled when they’re paying for it and have access.
If people just marked the title with a (paywall) it would already be an improvement.
Save yourself the angst and give this userscript[1] a go. It adds some nice quality of life improvements for posts that link to paywalled articles.
Re aside: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989>
I subscribe to 4-5 paywalled sources. Rest, I rely on others to give me the archive links.
Available without paywall https://pulitzercenter.org/stories/where-glaciers-melt-river...
So upriver ph guard station with lime? and methan flaming of drones?