Will the increased snow cover at lower latitudes reduce warming? (I’m guessing probably yes, due to increased albedo. But, snow is also an insulator, and might be holding ground heat. I don’t know which effect will be greater.)
If it does reduce warming, will the amount be significant relative to anthropogenic climate change? (I’m guessing probably not.)
And just out of curiosity, did the Southern Hemisphere experience similar polar disturbances last winter, or in the past few years?
The problem here is that the snow will melt at some point. The reason this is happening is because the sea ice that existed year-round until now is nearly gone each summer. The lack of consistent ice covering means that there is a greater amount of energy being absorbed by the ocean, perhaps not year-round, but that it’s happening so much more in the summer is sufficient to utterly outweigh any amount of temporary snowfall anywhere else on the globe.
How do I quantify this to my hypothetical parents who reject climate change, and to my hypothetical siblings who don’t know one way or another?
I mean, you could think of it like rain. Imagine that you have a bucket, and it’s out in a rainstorm. There’s a plant in the bucket with some soil, and a tiny little pinhole in the bottom that lets out a couple of drips at any given time. Now, let’s say you want to make sure that the plant gets just the right amount of water, so that it still gets the right amount of rain, but it doesn’t flood and overpower the leak out of the bottom. What’s the simplest solution? Figure out how quickly the rain is coming down, and then cover part of the bucket so you only get the right amount of rain, right? Now imagine that some hooligan comes by and decides to muck with your bucket, because for the slightest moment, it will bring their sad, shriveled heart some measure of joy to make your life worse. They decide to move the cover. Maybe they take it off entirely, and that would guarantee the plant would die, but they’re a sick, evil little gobshite, so they only move it off when you’re out for the day, and then they put it back when you get home. When you go into your house, they take off the cover again, letting in the full torrent of rain. You look at the bucket, and wonder why the plant is getting flooded. Why isn’t the cover working anymore? Because it’s only there to help some of the time, and the damage that’s done while it’s missing is piling up faster than the drain can sink it away
The plant is the entire world ecosystem, you are the careful equilibrium that has been in place since the Oligocene, the rain is sunlight, the cover is arctic ice, the little gobshite is the corporations and individuals that have decided that their personal aggrandizement is the only thing that matters.
You want real trouble? Now imagine that when the level of water reaches high enough in the bucket, the cover doesn’t even fit anymore. That’s what happens when the permafrost and methane hydrates release their payloads in the coming years. That way lies the Permian mass extinction.
i heard climate change is a hoax
I’ll distribute the leopards. If you’re Republican or voted for the pile of shit, just see one of the leopards. Tell them to go back where they came from, they’ll know what to do. They’re trained, it only takes a second. Pretty painless during… I assume. Oh it’s figurative speech? Never mind! I’ll get the pumas back. It was pumas right? Ew, I think this one already ate a face. Sorry sorry…
It’s a riff on the leopards eating people’s faces party joke/meme/satire/sarcasm that goes something like “I can’t believe they ate our faces” says person who voted for the face eating leopards party. It basically means (in the original), you get what you vote for and shouldn’t be surprised when it happens.
Honestly we are way past the point of any scientific reasoning. The public has voted that they are uninterested, and the US government and large corporations are about to be uninterested too.
To be blunt… No one ever really cared, but the world kinda squeaked by putting scientists in front of statesmen and public broadcasts. Everyone kinda nodded along, and not just for global warming.
That period is over.
A few people cared, fewer did anything about it. Most were more concerned with mass production of cheap shit.
Got a heat pump to replace the gas boiler, bike instead of car and replaced the concrete paved garden with what will hopefully become a wildflower meadow with shrubs on the edges. You can actually just stop buying a lot of the stuff that is causing these problems.
God people like you make it sound so easy and then I tried it to find it’s actually even easier.
I know! Its so easy its great! Plus its generally cheaper too, so I don’t have to work very hard and I still have enough money. God damn life is easy.
The issue was never the average person. Corporations have always been the issue. Even if everyone on the planet tried to live as green as possible, the corporations would still cause too much damage for us to undo. The only way the average person could have made an impact was by attacking the corporations and their means of polluting the planet. That meant sabotaging their facilities. But the climate change movement was too focused on peaceful protest, and there has been evidence that points the blame for this on the corporations once again. For everyone, the issue wasn’t that they weren’t willing to live green enough (which is true that most people just didn’t bother, but it isn’t what caused the issue of climate change in the first place and wouldn’t have been the answer either), it was that they weren’t willing to risk their life and privileges to dismantle the system that caused it. The threat of climate change was not imminent or tangible enough for people to take real action.
No actually the people are interested and the megacorps still destroys the planet because they have no soul they worship only profit
They cannot survive without buyers. People as a statistical whole do not care when we’re talking about entire populations
Edit: sorry for the rant. Morning Adderall and lots of thoughts on the subject. :)
I think a lot simply don’t know what they can effectively do about it. As is usually the issue with lefty causes, it’s a lot more brain-work and more complicated than chanting a petty slogan and/or a vague willingness to raid a capitol with no actual goal or understanding in mind.
Right now, beyond just trying to hustle the next dollar to keep existing while under this stupidity, it’s very difficult for us average working-class folk to understand how we can actually punish these powers responsible. Corporations and their fascist backers have become hydras.
If there was some kind of “Here’s how you can effectively ruin these bastards’ day for a better tomorrow without risking prison” playbook we could agree on, I’m sure a lot of people would be willing.
We mock neoliberal masses for buying EVs thinking it’s saving the planet, but at the same time, buying something is one of the few levers the average person is allowed to pull, and they were told it would help. I’d like to think they mean well even though they’re being manipulated.
They try to recycle and try to vote and try to stop buying stuff on Amazon, then sigh and keep trudging along when that obviously doesn’t change anything. They probably get tired of being told they’re not doing anything, especially without some sort of unifying “do this instead.”
Some radicals block traffic and make a general nuisance of themselves occasionally and we watch as nothing happens.
Schoolkids appeal to liberal politicians to stop a doomed future and get chuckled out of the room. Nothing happens.
Whistleblowers expose corporate plans too evil for Saturday morning cartoons and end up conveniently killing themselves. Nothing happens.
I think we’re past the point of diminishing returns on silly stunts for “Raising awareness”.
Enough people know. Although complacent, they care. But give them a week off work to stop climate change and they still don’t know what options they have available to them. Or where their allies are.
Furthermore, generally we tend to want to be good people who don’t want to ruin our lives by openly warring with powers that be.
The Right gets away with their BS because they don’t negatively impact profits. They’re sock-puppet proxies for an astroturfed holy-war that’s ultimately about cutting labor and drilling more oil, so even treason charges aren’t enough.
But if we could finally stop arguing theory and get pissed off enough to march on Washington together or whatever, 2nd-amendment toting or not, we’d definitely be met with force for wanting to shut down the slave-driven garbage machines.
So besides “beg your reps” and “stop buying stupid things from evil companies” (almost everything at this point)…
What’s our rallying cry?
How do we engage? Who’s going to step up and lead?
Do you know? I don’t understand why I should know? I think many people are also so I don’t get the premise
There could be more options to choose from if we enacted electoral reform and gave voters the freedom to vote outside the two party system with no spoiler effect.
You need to convince them the Earth is a sphere first.
Then we need to convince them to build more big red arrows to keep the blue stuff up the top
Wouldn’t a big red circle have more power then smaller individual red arrows?
