One thing that a lot of people seem to miss is that we talk about sea-level rise so much in relation to climate change because it's one of the things we can at least reasonably predict (even if the how much and when is hard). But the impacts of climate change increasing become hard to model as the world falls out of predictable patterns.
A great example of just how extreme things can get was the last major climate change event ~10,000-20,000 years ago (which will likely be minuscule in comparison to what we're going through now in the geological sense once this plays out).
The Channeled Scablands of Eastern Washington[0] have a very distinctive geology. For many years it was believed that these features were carved out slowly over hundreds of thousands of years. It turns out they we created in hours, around 15,000 years ago (humans were already living in WA at that time). They were created by the Missoula floods. There used to be a glacial lake over what is now Missoula Montana which would have current day Missoula under 1,000 feet of water. The glacial damns holding back this lake started to break down resulting in frequent floods the scale of which it's hard to fathom. The peak flow is estimated to have been 6.5 cubic miles per hour (for context, the peak flow observed over Horseshoe falls was 0.0055 cubic miles per hour, the Amazon river flows at an average of 0.18 cubic miles per hour)
Imagine driving East on 1-90 from Seattle towards Spokane, then as you get through the Cascades you suddenly see a 200 foot wall of water racing towards you across the horizon.
That event was in the past and it still took us a long time to piece together what actually happened. As we head into states of climate never witnessed by humans, it's genuinely hard to predict what might happen other than "this probably won't be good". Humans have made a lot of progress in the last 10,000 years, but it's no coincidence that the last 10,000 years have been some of the most stable in the Earth's climate history.
TIL that Earth crust is pushed down by glaciers, and that when glaciers subsides, the crust swells up a bit over years from the missing weight, pushing away water, slush and sliding glacier even faster.
Hard to fathom how "fluid" our ball of magma really is.
Interesting notion, I'd never come across that before. I've seen many demos of what the Earth could look like with all the ice melted but I'm not sure any of them took what you're describing into account.
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The mass of ice on the earth's poles has also led to the shape of the planet via tectonics over thousands of millennia. As that mass melts and redistributes from a solid to a liquid spreading around the globe our spheroid will begin to rebound. We have sensors everywhere, even in space, so the resulting effects will not be a surprise to some when the 'mass'ive shift begins. As those tectonic events increase in frequency so too will volcanic activity so I ask if anyone else has been checking on such data?
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I think this can be summarized as “nobody knows but it might be very bad.” Mathematical models containing large uncertainties aren’t a crystal ball. They will likely be revised again.
You shouldn’t dismiss disaster scenarios since preparation for tail risks is important. But maybe don’t focus on them exclusively, either? It’s possible to keep multiple scenarios in mind, rather than focusing on one exclusively.
In California, there are wildfires, earthquakes, droughts, and (in some places) flooding to worry about, and this partly plays out via scarce and expensive property insurance.
To extend the though there, the main question is not if, not when, but how long it will take. Do you bet on 90 years, 90 months, 90 days, 90 hours? Even if the change happens over 90 months (about 7 years) is that enough time to rebuild major shipping ports, forget resettling a substantial portion of the human population.
> The model suggested that ice from Antarctica alone — before any additions from Greenland, mountain glaciers or thermal expansion — could raise the seas by more than a meter by 2100.
> In a 2021 update that incorporated additional factors into the simulations, DeConto and colleagues revised that estimate sharply downward, projecting less than 40 centimeters of sea-level rise by the century’s end under high-emission scenarios.
I'd think that "between 0.5 and 1 meters" is an idea. Like, we aren't worried about sea level dropping, and we aren't worried about +10m by 2100. This is still useful info, even if there's some uncertainty remaining.
I like how you changed "less than .4 meters" into "between .5 and 1"
That was some smooth propagandizing you just did, I wonder if anybody else noticed. Between less than .4 (0) and 1 (1) is a much bigger window than the one you invented wholesale in your reply.
I think the grandparent might be right, and your willingness to bend the statistics when they are literally on the same page as your comment, along with others like you doing the same thing for decades, is the reason your side is losing and continues to lose the public's trust.
If the problem is really so obvious and so serious you should not feel it necessary to exaggerate. So quit it.
Yep, as someone else said, I'm quoting a different part of the article.
Though: from experience in science, when someone says "less than 0.4" in this kind of context, you can expect they mean ">= 0.3". And if you want to be careful and rigorous about it, you can check the 2021 Nature research article being cited here, and verify this. This article puts the contribution of Antarctica to SLR by 2100 between [0.3, 1] under that emissions scenario.
Which, again, is not "we have no idea". We're not seriously concerned about Antarctica picking up a significant amount of ice mass, nor are we seriously concerned about 10+m of SLR by 2100. Both of these would be significant if they were actual possibilities, so: when you say "we have no idea", you are not fairly representing the actual uncertainty that we have. We have some idea, just not as much as we'd like.
....as a side note, the jump from "hey, this guy isn't quoting the same thing as me" to "wow he's trying to propagandize us" is not a healthy jump.
Assuming that someone's arguing in bad faith, rather than, say, quoting a different part of the article, is probably a key piece in the vaguely anti-science mindset that you have. It's gonna color every article you read, every discussion you have, and lead you to incorrect conclusions time and again. But I don't expect this argument to have any traction, either: the emotional responses that feed into villainization tend to be pretty deeply-wired and resistant to logic.
But they know that it is coming and we need to plan for it. 40 centimeters is still half a meter. If you filled my office with half a meter of water it would be between my butt and my ankle where I'm sitting. There are a lot of berms that couldn't withstand king tides 40 centimeters higher, especially with storm swell factored in. A lot of seaside infrastructure where I live needs to be relocated even with a lower estimate.
Obviously you get downvoted for this here, but you are absolutely correct.
Climate science is one of the most speculative fields of science, which for political reasons is rarely admitted towards the general public. The climate in 100 years is incredibly uncertain.
The general story of rising sea levels due to increased temperatures due to increased carbon in the atmosphere is of course very plausible. But it is just one of large number of effects at play and one of many ways the climate is changing. (Which isn't to say that the sum of these effects can not have server negative consequences)
Science communication around climate change has always been built around the obvious falsehood that climate models make good predictions, especially when it comes to long term trends. Instead of honestly communicating the actual state of science, which is that while specific predictions are hard, negative consequences of human intervention in the earths atmosphere likely will have sever negative consequences if they aren't mitigated, science communication has focused in on stories about "in X years Y will happen". When Y inevitably did not happen that was (and it is hard to blame people for this) taken es evidence that no negative consequences can be expected.
Edit: It is pretty surprising how anti science the crowd here is. These are just basic truths about he state of the science. Accurate climate models do not exist, if you disagree I suppose you should read a bit into the literature.
This is completely wrong and I'm frankly not sure how you came to this conclusion from the parent comment's data.
The uncertainty is "we do not know whether the amount of sea level rise due to human GHG emissions will be closer to 40cm, or closer to 100cm 75 years from now".
Science communication regarding this has generally always expressed uncertainty. Right wing entertainment masquerading as news frequently portrays it otherwise, but that's easy to do when unencumbered by a connection to reality.
Don't confuse what is most profitable to say, with what is most correct to say.
Can you please stop posting in the flamewar style to HN? We've asked you more than once before, and you've done it repeatedly in this thread. That's not cool.
Your comment here would have been fine without the swipes at the beginning and end.
Am I right that your shadow banning technique is the post rate limiting? Why don't you make those decisions public or at least communicate them to the user?
The response to my post was just as dismissive as my reply to it. I get that you can enforce the rules however you want, so feel free to ban me for that.
If I write out multiple paragraphs of good faith reasoning and get a "lol, everything you said of wrong" reply, I get pretty disappointed. The guy is now derailing the conversation about why I use sources from my home country instead of talking about anything of substance.
While we do (usually) post a comment when we're banning an account, we don't post such a comment when we're rate limiting an account. The main reason is that we don't have the resources to do everything that way. It's on the list to build an automated feedback system, perhaps with some sort of probation, but that's not done yet.
We can argue about whether or not another comment was as bad as what you posted, but I think this misses the important point, which is that you've been breaking the site guidelines repeatedly and we've already asked you many times to stop:
Pointing a finger at someone else isn't a helpful way to respond to this, since we need you (I don't mean you personally, of course, but everyone) to follow the rules regardless of what other people are doing or you feel they are.
No idea since I can't read German, but that looks like a news site not a scientific site to me. I'm talking about things written by scientists, not reporters or talking heads.
I do think it's telling that you felt the need to reach for things written in a foreign language to try to make your point on an English language discussion site
>No idea since I can't read German, but that looks like a news site not a scientific site to me.
It is one of the largest German magazines, which certainly has the ambition and ability to shape public perception of issues. What they are saying matters more than any scientific journal.
>I'm talking about things written by scientists, not reporters or talking heads.
Then you just ignored my post. I was talking about how science is communicated, I was explicitly saying that how scientist talk about this issue and how journalists talk about it are different.
It is journalists who shape how an issue is perceived, not scientists. My point was, again, that the uncertainty scientists have in their models is not adequately reported.
>I do think it's telling that you felt the need to reach for things written in a foreign language to try to make your point on an English language discussion site
It is not a foreign language to me. I brought it up because it is what I am seeing. This is not far right propaganda, it is how the main stream center left is covering the issue of climate change in Germany.
Clearly it isn't a foreign language to you, but it's a remarkably self centered act to decide that therefore it's appropriate to use as a part of a discussion on a site that is exclusively in a different language.
If you do not want to talk about this issue then don't. I brought it up because you claimed it was only something the far right claimed. Demanding that someone from another country has to be able to point to a media environment he has no interaction with just so that he can talk about an issue seems incredibly close minded and petty. We both know how to use a translator for a website, this isn't some unreasonable obstacles I am asking you to overcome.
Am I just now allowed to share my perspective on anything, because the only sources I can point to on this specific topic are in my native language? How idiotic is that.
> Am I just now allowed to share my perspective on anything, because the only sources I can point to on this specific topic are in my native language? How idiotic is that.
You may shout whatever noises you like into the void. If you would like positive responses, then the noises you make should be tailored to the audience. Being in a language the recipient understands is the bare minimum.
Perhaps if you articulated why you were convinced that the article you linked was incorrect, that would help you have an argument that boiled down to something more substantive than "nuh uh"
The models are always wrong. It's virtually impossible to model something with an impossible amount of unknown inputs. Even accurately measuring the Earth over time is a joke. Unfortunately the models are presented in pop science and mainstream culture as accurate or something that we should use to create public policy.
> It's virtually impossible to model something with an impossible amount of unknown inputs.
Nah. We have a pretty good idea of what the main unknowns in climate are, and they have an associated uncertainty range. Yes, it's a lot of work to model such systems with a useful level of accuracy, but "a lot of work" is very far from "virtually impossible". ?
If the climate was that unpredictable, then the Earth would be uninhabitable.
(FWIW, I do computational modeling for work - not in climate, though - and you would not believe how much misinformation there is about modeling from conservatives)
Lying about science is not helpful. The key driver behind climate change denial is science communication misrepresenting climate science. All climate science models are incredibly uncertain and making concrete predictions based on them has and will continue to make scientists look like idiots.
I'm not so sure, ground water will turn salty and make large swaths of land unlivable and river mouths will change stream upwards so all dike infrastructure as it is now will be unusable.
This is already happening along the internal Eastern Shore exposed to the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland were I live and it is documented in recent publications by those accredited in such topics. The low lying wet forests that have lived just above the salt line are now all dying from the rising salt water intrusion. I have one of those low lying forests right behind my property and in the last 10 years I have witnessed all the trees within this area die. As an avid walker of these shores near daily in the last 15 years I have also witnessed unprecedented erosion of the shoreline of at least two vertical feet thus extending the beaches however these are not those types of beaches.
As a collector of things lost in time, such as Native American artifacts of which I have found thousands immediately around me in the last 15 years, I can say that erosion does have its benefits. Just as we are now reading from those exploring glaciers finding previous human tools and more. The word "benefit" here is clearly subjective.
There is nuisance flooding, which is definitely up already in many parts of the world, and then there is the kind of flooding that essentially makes it impossible to live in certain places. My own country (NL) has been working since a bad flood in 1953 to raise the various flood protection systems to account for rarer events and the mechanisms put in place have already been triggered several times. Right now they're working on raising the whole protection level another meter (three feet), and if necessary they'll do more than that but there are some complicating factors. At some point the rivers won't empty any more and you end up with either reverse flow or internal flooding simply because that river water has nowhere to go to.
You need to have extreme weather into account. Global sea rise is a slow process, it won't happen overnight, and even with an accelerated, but not catastrophic, melting of some of the fragile glaciers in Antarctica it will take years.
Extreme weather, in the other hand can affect big areas for extended amount of time, right now. In 2022 a third of Pakistan ended flooded, in 2024 there were big floods in parts of Europe and South America. Droughts, extended forest fires, tornadoes and similar has been changing in area patterns and strength in the last years. And things may get extremer in the coming years
Something like 2 billion people rely on glacier melt for their fresh water supply and these supplies will end abruptly before catastrophic sea level rise.
It will be a big one for people living near the coast. Basically all port infrastructure will need to be moved. Of course there a things like extreme heat waves, cold snaps, lack of rain or floods that will make a lot of land unlivable too. Lack of food will be another thing. But land being under water is not a lesser thing at all, as it makes the land unavailable.
I think the point was more that even if you're on a coast a lot of other problems are more likely to impact you first: higher energy and more frequent hurricanes, insurance, costs, etc.
It's not as a-vs-b as this. Rising sea levels will increase the damage of those more frequent hurricanes long before one's house falls into the sea. And that increases insurance costs, and so on. The whole thing is a single system with a giant feedback loop.
Or say, a country bordering Bangladesh. Sea rise of 1 meter would inundate 10% of Bangladesh, a country of 170M in 150,000 sq miles. I suspect a refugee crisis in Bangladesh would end in genocide…
I mean, I can tell you why. It's not feasible if it costs too much. If it makes sense (i.e. the land is worth X and cost of a wall is some fraction of X that people can afford) people will do it.
"see pockets of high heat and pockets of deep freezes" does not at all contradict a statement that overall global temperature is rising. In fact, one would expect that an overall rise in temperature would lead to local pockets of colder temperatures.
That isn't what I said, though. I was making a broader statement. I'm really surprised HNers don't spend more time familiarizing themselves with climate change fundamentals. It's the defining challenge of current and all future generations, might be worth looking into beyond a third-grade "things get hotter" level. But whatever.
the rise in temperature makes a more turbulent atmosphere, this disrupts familiar atmospheric distribution of thermal energy, we already have unusual atmospheric stalls and vortexes, along with changes in oceanic circulation.
Despite this comment being an ignorant throwaway, the irony is that markets can sometimes force the price of scarce natural resources up, which attracts investments because the goods are becoming scarce. In the short term, it could cause a spike in coastal property prices that would cause superficial analyses to conclude that there is no problem whatsoever, further fueling an exploitative short term bubble.
What will definitely be affected is insurance prices. Those are a better gauge of what the actuaries think is going to happen. We are already seeing that in Florida today and on the eastern seaboard, as insurance prices have skyrocketed. Some places are not even insurable.
I think you might have overlooked the point they were making.
Whether or not the market price is properly pricing in future risk is irrelevant. What OP is implying is that activists are engaged in cognitive dissonance, similar to what you commonly find in religious people. They say they 'believe' in something but you would not find any evidence of that 'belief' revealed in their behavior.
For example: believing that the world will end tomorrow, posting to social media that the world is going to end tomorrow, and then checking your work email at 8pm.
Yes, you can probably make a just-so story where they are buying beachfront property based on a belief they can unload it, or they will die, before it becomes worthless due to being underwater or destroyed by storms. I think the point stands however, and it underlines the importance of looking at revealed beliefs rather than simply stated beliefs.
(To be clear, the point depends on climate activists actually buying beachfront property, which I doubt is very common at all, so I don't actually think it's a good argument at all. However your response still misses the point.)
I believe that world ocean level will be catastrophic by 2100. I do not plan on living until anywhere near 2100. In fact, 2050 would be pushing it. If I wanted to have a nice seaside house *now*, why is that cognitive dissonance? Sure, it is likely that I'd have to give it up in 15-20 years, but I might not make it that long myself.
This is a great argument for renting. As the world updates it's estimate of the value of this property based on the fact it will have 0 value in the next 25-50 years your rent will keep going down, and you will preserve the massive investment you would have otherwise had to make, possibly by buying land 1-2 meters higher up that is currently undervalued.
But if someone has and enjoys beachfront property, that might actually be a motivation for wanting to protect it, and thus be an activist. That relationship is not so clearly hypocritical.
This is true, but I think a rational person would rent in this scenario?
The key thing is whether their belief that this property will be under water in 50 years is their actual belief, or if it's performative, or if they are experiencing cognitive dissonance where they 'believe' it in one context (what they say) but don't believe it in other contexts (like managing their finances). Again this is extremely common, people 'believe' that prayer works but also only rely on it when they lack practical solutions like taking Motrin, and the few people who really believe in the power of prayer are treated like they are mentally ill (for example when they refuse medical treatment for their children) by the very people who claim to 100% believe in the effectiveness of prayer.
This is just cope to try to find some coherent position to avoid dissonance collapse. If prayer works you should just use it exclusively.
The funny implication of this stupid parable is that God has become more effective at answering prayers exactly at the rate and in exactly the ways that humans have no longer need him Him to be. The ancient god of the bible had was powerless to cure cancer, but in 2025 he cures cancer all the time - via chemotherapy.
I wonder how many activists own ocean front properties? Not of course counting wealthy people who are concerned about climate change but are not activists.
But you should start worrying now. As someone who has been exposed to the environment all over the United States the change is here. And farmers are already adapting to it, they just do not believe it is caused from humans.
This is one of those comments that evokes an emotional response, but is devoid of actual content.
Is there some sinister plot involving activist beachgoers!?
What kind of data would anyone even have on whether or not climate change activists own oceanfront property and what percentage they own?
What would it even matter?
If anything, one would imagine that oceanfront property owners would in fact care more about the effects of climate change because they are most impacted, lol.
We've been in an ice age for millions of years (standard definition of an ice age: there is persistent ice sheets at the poles; on Greenland and Antarctica).
Within ice ages, there are glacials and interglacials. Glacial periods are what normal people think of when they say "ice age"; like when the ice sheets covered Canada and extended down to Chicago/NYC areas.
Without manmade climate change, we'd be slowly sliding back to another glacial period. So in that sense, the warming is welcome, but we're overdoing it and shooting too hard in the opposite direction.
Not how soon will the seas rise, but in which direction are they trending? The world is not static - it's dynamic, always changing. Long before human civilization, the environment was getting warmer, then cooler, then warmer, etc.
Instead of freaking out about it, work to understand how we as a civilization can make it through the changes. Attempting to hold the environment stable is like plugging dikes with your finger.
Humans are causing a change to the environment drastically faster than any normal ebb and flow. In the same way that you can get from 0-60 either by pushing on the gas pedal, or being hit by a train, rates of change matter a lot.
I don’t think anyone here is advocating for freaking out about it, and I do not see any suggestion we should that you’re replying to.
Also, it’s pretty clear from the IPCC report that holding the environment stable isn’t an option. At this point about 0.5m minimum sea level rise this century is probably locked in. However a 1m rise might not be.
So yes, the issue is that either way policy planning needs to be considered in the long term.
A great example of just how extreme things can get was the last major climate change event ~10,000-20,000 years ago (which will likely be minuscule in comparison to what we're going through now in the geological sense once this plays out).
The Channeled Scablands of Eastern Washington[0] have a very distinctive geology. For many years it was believed that these features were carved out slowly over hundreds of thousands of years. It turns out they we created in hours, around 15,000 years ago (humans were already living in WA at that time). They were created by the Missoula floods. There used to be a glacial lake over what is now Missoula Montana which would have current day Missoula under 1,000 feet of water. The glacial damns holding back this lake started to break down resulting in frequent floods the scale of which it's hard to fathom. The peak flow is estimated to have been 6.5 cubic miles per hour (for context, the peak flow observed over Horseshoe falls was 0.0055 cubic miles per hour, the Amazon river flows at an average of 0.18 cubic miles per hour)
Imagine driving East on 1-90 from Seattle towards Spokane, then as you get through the Cascades you suddenly see a 200 foot wall of water racing towards you across the horizon.
That event was in the past and it still took us a long time to piece together what actually happened. As we head into states of climate never witnessed by humans, it's genuinely hard to predict what might happen other than "this probably won't be good". Humans have made a lot of progress in the last 10,000 years, but it's no coincidence that the last 10,000 years have been some of the most stable in the Earth's climate history.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channeled_Scablands