
Major Report Prompts Warnings That the Arctic Is Unraveling - jonbaer
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/major-report-prompts-warnings-that-the-arctic-is-unraveling1/
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dghughes
A new Canadian naval base is being constructed in Nanisivik, Nunavut I was
reading about the Alert base and saw info on the new base at Nanisivik.

The new base is almost right in line with the Northwest Passage so I assume
it's meant to police it just in time for the big melt.

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lambdasquirrel
On one hand, Russia may soon finally have year-round maritime access that
can't easily be blocked by other powers. On the other hand, will it still be
able to count on its winters to shut out invaders?

I wonder what all of this will portend.

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mrfusion
They do have 1000s of miles of pacific coastline. I wonder why they don't
develop that more militarily?

Everyone seems to ignore it.

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jcranmer
Russia's Far East is basically colonies that never decolonized. Most of Russia
is situated in its Europe, and its hinterlands have notable density only along
roughly the region of the Trans-Siberian Railroad once you get past around the
Irtysh River (western tributary of the Ob). Even past Lake Baikal,
Vladivostok, Khabarovsk, and Yakutsk are virtually the only cities.

Vladivostok was developed heavily, as Russia's only ice-free ocean port, but
most of the rest of that region is far too sparsely populated. It's telling
that, in modern times, Russia is quite paranoid that China is planning an
invasion and takeover of that area.

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melling
We have climate deniers, and we have another group of people who don't want to
spend money to solve the problem; probably the Republican party. Global
warming simply isn't a priority.

More important problems than global warming. Skip to minute 6:

[https://www.ted.com/talks/bjorn_lomborg_sets_global_prioriti...](https://www.ted.com/talks/bjorn_lomborg_sets_global_priorities)

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KirinDave
Right, but they also want to _spend_ money to accelerate the problem. With
just a dozen years of subsidy, we're now at a point where unsubsidized the
solar and wind industries do better than the still heavily subsidized fossil
fuel industry for everything but the midsized high-output applications (e.g.,
trucks & shipping) and some specific industrial cases.

The first would could do commensurate good by spending its enormous resources
accelerating the reliance on renewable resources. So this argument against
Kyoto (which is indeed a proposal that is more a gesture than a solution) is
basically used to dismiss other things.

For example, Trump's proposed to wipe out the EV tax credit (please don't, I
want my tax credit!) in the US. It'd reclaim less than a billion dollars but
substantially deter the uptake of EV cars.

Similarly, the US is facing a grim truth that even it cannot maintain its
entire massive infrastructure in the face of modern economic challenges.
Renewable resource generation offers an alternative, distributed power grid.
Between this and modern manufacturing techniques, we see a glimpse of a future
where socialists, centralists and anarchists all see a world resembling more
of what they want, with regional control and generation of power resources and
control over economics, but a framework left in place for a top down
government to govern things that are advantageous overall (central planning
for scarce resources & conservation, rights and health care, etc).

Resistance to the topic on the grounds that Kyoto is bad is over-applied to
all attempts to grapple with climate change, even when they actually have huge
positive effects only tangentially related.

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melling
"Trump's proposed to wipe out the EV tax credit (please don't, I want my tax
credit!) in the US. It'd reclaim less than a billion dollars but substantially
deter the uptake of EV cars"

Hmmm. I guess you don't understand that many Republicans don't like the idea
of government subsidies. If it comes down to subsidies, we aren't going to
solve the problem, according to this economist:

[https://youtu.be/pQSGuC9GF70](https://youtu.be/pQSGuC9GF70)

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KirinDave
Republicans have no problem subsidizing industries that they like.

What they dislike is competition. Weirdly, the Democrats morphed into a
weirdly lightweight party on regulation of markets and the Republicans
continue to grow towards something that incrementally becomes a planned
economy.

And let's just reiterate: less than a decade of subsidizing renewables kicked
it over an economic hump and we've accelerated it to the point where it's
actually radically changing first world economies. So anyone saying that
subsidies "don't solve problems" is clearly using a different definition of
"solve", "problem", and maybe even "doesn't."

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omginternets
>Republicans continue to grow towards something that incrementally becomes a
planned economy.

This is worth repeating twice, in case people missed it. The irony would be
funny if it weren't so damn catastrophic.

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eli_gottlieb
There is no irony. They just wanted the centrally-planned oligarchy to be
privately owned.

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omginternets
Maybe I was unclear: the irony is in the fact that the Republican party loves
to appeal to the communist boogyman, all the while vying for a planned economy
(albeit at the hands of private actors).

This is ironic because much of their apparent hatred for socialism/communism
stems from the idea that these lead to planned (i.e. non-free) economies.

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iconjack
[http://realmode.com/glaciers.html](http://realmode.com/glaciers.html)

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alphapapa
> Air-temperature data from 2000 to 2014 show that parts of the Arctic are now
> 3 deg C warmer as compared to the 1971-2000 baseline.

29 years constitutes a baseline.

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mikeash
You have to put zero somewhere. "Baseline" does not imply normality or
desirability.

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alphapapa
> "Baseline" does not imply normality or desirability.

I agree with you that it does not. However, the article (and climate reporting
in general) implies that it does.

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mikeash
I thought they usually used "pre-industrial" as the "normal" level for things
like temperature and atmospheric CO2.

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alphapapa
"They" is quite vague. But let's run with it for a moment...

Was the temperature and CO2 level stable before the Industrial Revolution?

