
The Arctic as it is known today is almost certainly gone - qubitcoder
http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21721379-current-trends-arctic-will-be-ice-free-summer-2040-arctic-it-known-today
======
chollida1
Global warming aside, as a Canadian, I'm disappointing in what our government
has down to protect our sovereignty in the Canadian northern archipelago.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Arctic_Archipelago](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Arctic_Archipelago)

Had we invested in a navy base in the north, and a few ice breakers, then we
could have been the owner of the "panama canal of the arctic".

We would have a monopoly on what traffic goes through the Canadian archipelago
which would help offset the cost of policing the north.

We would be able to do things like prohibit oil tankers and other hazardous
materials if we wanted.

At this point I think we've all but given away any claim to being able to
dictate who travels through our northern islands. The arctic will be policed
by the American's and Russians, and used heavily by ships travelling to the
east coast of the US and Europe from China.

Hopefully at the least, we'll be able to push for things to protect the arctic
waters like no resource mining, think offshore oil rigs, and no oil tankers
travelling through those waters.

~~~
dpc59
The panama canal of the arctic won't be the northwest passage, it's going to
be the eastern passage over russia. The NWP water is too shallow, badly
cartographied, you still risk getting caught in ice and it has very dangerous
storms. Shipping companies would rather take a few more days to get to the
pacific than take a big risk.

~~~
jamesblonde
This is correct. The only passage open the last few years has been the
Lancaster Sound route which is not suitable for shipping. The Prince of Wales
Strait is the only viable route, but hasn't opened up fully the last number of
years.

In contrast, the Northeast passage has opened up every year for the last 10+
years and offers huge gains for ships from Asia to Europe. From wikipedia, the
difference between Suez and NEP for Yokohama to Rotterdam is 37% shorter.

------
Turing_Machine
2017: "On current trends, the Arctic ocean will be largely ice-free in summer
by 2040."

2009: "[S]cientists at Cambridge University predict the Arctic ocean will be
largely ice-free during the summer within the next ten years (i.e., by 2019)"

[http://www.voanews.com/a/a-13-2009-10-15-voa41/414370.html](http://www.voanews.com/a/a-13-2009-10-15-voa41/414370.html)

2007: Arctic summers ice-free 'by 2013'

[http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7139797.stm](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7139797.stm)

The date for the Arctic becoming "largely ice-free" appears to be receding
about as fast as break-even fusion power. :-)

~~~
epistasis
It's good for you to point out how little the headlines represent the actual
content of the articles, much less the science itself.

For example, that 2007 article:

"In the end, it will just melt away quite suddenly. It might not be as early
as 2013 but it will be soon, much earlier than 2040."

Which lines up with the 2017 article.

Cutting edge science is not headline-friendly!

~~~
mxfh
A bit of a buried lede, and not quite headline material in the 2007 BBC
article:

 _" My thinking on this is that 2030 is not an unreasonable date to be
thinking of."_

------
niftich
On a sobering note, the Arctic is a tremendous shortcut for shipping, and
despite its vast and remote coastline, it's surrounded solely by states with a
strong rule of law, making piracy unlikely.

Cargo traffic between will re-orient from the current crop of chokepoints like
Suez and Malacca; the Panama Canal will see a decline of Asia-Atlantic traffic
and a rise in intra-Americas traffic; and more shipping overall will be
conducted in waters adjacent to the coasts of Russia, Canada, US, Norway, and
Greenland (Kingdom of Denmark).

Even without additional exploitation of the Arctic, changes like this will
affect the strategic priorities of states.

~~~
hackuser
> the Arctic is a tremendous shortcut for shipping

The Economist article says, "the much-vaunted sea passages are likely to carry
only a trickle of trade". Do you have any information on the prospective
volume of trade?

> it's surrounded solely by states with a strong rule of law, making piracy
> unlikely.

For another reason too: Piracy usually is conducted by people.

~~~
niftich
> Do you have any information on the prospective volume of trade?

Not really, though COSCO (a top-5 shipper by capacity and market share [1])
expressed interest again in 2016 [2], sending 5 ships through; they were the
first Chinese shipping company to send a ship this way in 2013 [3], and
express a continued interest almost every year -- like in 2015 [4].

Russian forecasts are extremely ambitious to the point of being pure wishful
thinking [5]. There are some challenges with the route [5][6], and not all
shippers are on board, and of course global shipping has just had its lowest
growth in years [7].

[1] [https://www.alphaliner.com/top100/](https://www.alphaliner.com/top100/)
[2] [https://thebarentsobserver.com/en/arctic-industry-and-
energy...](https://thebarentsobserver.com/en/arctic-industry-and-
energy/2016/10/cosco-sends-five-vessels-through-northern-sea-route) [3]
[http://barentsobserver.com/en/arctic/2013/08/first-
container...](http://barentsobserver.com/en/arctic/2013/08/first-container-
ship-northern-sea-route-21-08) [4] [https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinese-
shipper-cosco-to-schedu...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinese-shipper-
cosco-to-schedule-regular-trans-arctic-sailings-1446133485) [5]
[https://thebarentsobserver.com/en/arctic-industry-and-
energy...](https://thebarentsobserver.com/en/arctic-industry-and-
energy/2016/09/shipping-companies-snub-russian-arctic-route) [6]
[http://www.platts.com/latest-news/shipping/moscow/feature-
de...](http://www.platts.com/latest-news/shipping/moscow/feature-despite-
russian-aspirations-international-26397694) [7]
[http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2016/08/20/490621376/a...](http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2016/08/20/490621376/amid-
industry-downturn-global-shipping-sees-record-low-growth)

~~~
hackuser
Thanks for sharing all that and informing the rest of us.

------
themgt
PIOMAS (arctic sea ice volume model) is showing ice on the edge of collapse:
[https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C9SaElxXoAAl0zU.jpg](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C9SaElxXoAAl0zU.jpg)

~~~
Afforess
My favorite graph is this one:
[http://i.imgur.com/ZgJaXCy.png](http://i.imgur.com/ZgJaXCy.png) \- you can
clearly tell 2016 was the year we broke away from all the others.

------
alpsgolden
How do we square this statement from the article "In the past 30 years, the
minimum coverage of summer ice has fallen by half; its volume has fallen by
three-quarters. " with this chart of global sea ice --
[http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/global.daily....](http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/global.daily.ice.area.withtrend.jpg)
From the chart, looks like sea ice is down a little bit, but not only by a few
percent, not by half. So are there massive gains in sea ice elsewhere in the
world, areas where sea ice has nearly doubled?

Also how do we square the statement about the decrease in volume with this
statement from a year and a half ago? "However, very little ice thickness
information actually exists."
[http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2015GL065704/full](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2015GL065704/full)
How do we actually know how much volume has fallen in the last 30 years if two
years ago "very little information on thickness actually exists"?

I don't really understand the appeal of this article when it doesn't link to
any sources. The article doesn't tell us what the actual new information
prompted the article and where that new information came from.

~~~
idlewords
Yes, sea ice has increased in the Antarctic.
[https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/antarctic-sea-ice-
reach...](https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/antarctic-sea-ice-reaches-new-
record-maximum)

The coupling between climate and sea ice is more complex in the southern polar
regions, and the increase in sea ice there is also likely to be an artifact of
global warming. But this may explain why a global chart doesn't show the sharp
decrease you'd expect.

~~~
alpsgolden
_and the increase in sea ice there is also likely to be an artifact of global
warming._

Was there anyone predicting in the 1980s or 1990s that with global warming
arctic ice would decline while antarctic ice would increase? Was anyone
predicting this before the observation occurred? How do I know that the idea
that global warming causes an increase in southern ice is not just an after
the fact rationalization?

~~~
josho
Yes, I got in a debate with a denier not so long ago and was quickly able to
find papers and summaries of the predictions on growth of ice in the south and
decline in the north.

What I find more alarming are folks like yourself that have so little respect
for science that they think there is potentially some cover up of the truth.

~~~
alpsgolden
Define "science."

------
mythrwy
I'm not a "denialist" by any stretch, I believe CO2 causes warming. I believe
the scientists probably know at least somewhat of what they speak (although I
am skeptical of timelines).

That being said, what is feasible to do? Stop eating hamburgers? Drive Teslas?
Carbon Tax Credits derived in meetings attended by people who arrive in jets?
There just isn't a practical solution in sight. There really isn't. Just feel
good type measures that don't solve the problem and wont. Never mind that the
science is a bit unclear on exactly what, when and how much.

It's a global problem. The "globe" hasn't been able to effectively work
together to solve much simpler problems like drugs and human trafficking at
any scale. And this is a bigger problem requiring more collaboration.

I'm sorry, for all the hand wringing effective solutions are just not going to
happen. No how, no way. Not in a timely manner.

The only "real" solution in sight that I see is a massive population decrease
through war or famine or plague. Or else sudden loss of civilization and
technology which will produce the same thing.

Is that price worth the benefits? I may consider this when "timelines"
actually turn out as predicted. Until that time I'm driving a car and eating
hamburgers. And living somewhere away from coastlines.

~~~
knz
Personally I think we are way past prevention and rapidly approaching the last
hope for mitigation of climate change. The answer doesn't have to be a massive
population decline - measures like reducing our emissions from power
generation ([https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-
emis...](https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emissions) \-
29%) and more electrified transportation would have a real impact. It _is_
unrealistic to assume dramatic lifestyle changes will help us but instead of
wasting billions of wars and walls we could be investing in renewable energy
and more efficient use of carbon fuels. Instead we have an administration
pushing hard in the opposite direction - investing in coal and oil, removing
fuel economy improvements, and destroying the ability of organizations like
NASA to even observe the effects of climate change. It's madness.

~~~
alphapapa
> measures like reducing our emissions from power generation and more
> electrified transportation would have a real impact.

This always confuses me, because human CO2 emissions are about 3% of natural
emissions. If the planet were so sensitive to +/\- 3%, wouldn't it have gone
past the point-of-no-return millions of years ago? But here we are today, and
the ice core data shows wild fluctuations over periods of tens of thousands
and hundreds of thousands of years that greatly exceed anything we've
experienced.

~~~
donarb
It's not change that is alarming, it's the rate of change. In the past, you'd
have something like 1 degree C of change over the course of tens of thousands
of years. Now you have that same change in less than a few hundred years.
Short of a massive asteroid hit, the Earth hasn't experienced that sort of
short term change.

------
pthreads
This is on all of us not just the climate science deniers and the profit
hungry corporations, selfish individuals, crazy governments, or, uninformed
individuals. It is not enough to protest, give speeches, start "green"
companies, and whatever else we do to feel good about "doing something for the
environment."

If only we could have enough courage to curb our uncontrolled consumption of
resources. Why is it so hard for each one of us to just reduce our intake by,
say, just 15% to begin with? How about eating less, not changing cell phones
every ear, shopping less, driving less, and a hundred other things we can
reduce?

In the end nature always wins. We are either with her or against her!

~~~
ashark
> Why is it so hard for each one of us to just reduce our intake by, say, just
> 15% to begin with?

Because if you do it and no-one else does then you're hurting yourself for
basically no reason. It's a coordination problem.

~~~
pavlov
There's a good argument to be made that it's actually the opposite of hurting
yourself if you do the things the grandparent listed: "... eating less, not
changing cell phones every year, shopping less, driving less."

But of course nobody wants to hear that either, it's considered preaching
about personal choices.

~~~
josho
You truly need to have heroic levels of dedication to sustain eating 5% less,
keeping your home 5% warmer/cooler, and driving 5% less over the long term.

Then at the end of the day it still won't matter because your government
chooses to continue burning coal.

It's even worse because if enough green minded folk can reduce enough energy
use to make a difference then it drives down the cost of energy which makes it
cheaper for others to use more.

This really is a problem that requires everyone to play a role.

~~~
pavlov
My point was that doing those things would be good for you personally,
regardless of any environmental impact.

Most American adults are overweight and should eat 5% less. Driving 5% less
simply means that you would avoid one trip out of twenty, maybe by arranging
to do something remotely or by taking public transport -- hardly an enormous
sacrifice. Driving increases stress levels anyway, so this reduction is also
good for your health.

------
jamesblonde
The article is actually very good, without being alarmist, giving the facts:

 __the arctic will be ice free within many of our lifetimes

 __there are two main feedback effects from an ice-free Arctic that we know
will be bad, but there is uncertainty in how bad they will be:

 __(1) the albedo effect means less of the suns energy will be reflected back
into space by white ice and warming will accelerate due to darker water
absorbing more energy

 __(2) the clathrate gun hypothesis - how much of the methane in the Arctic
basin that is trapped as ice clathrates will be released into the atmosphere
(methane is about 8 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2).

The other main point of the article is that the Arctic sea ice melting is
unambiguously bad. Ignore the opening of the NE-passage. It's all-round bad
news for us and our progeny.

------
alistproducer2
Even if it turns out the 2% of scientist who doubt man made global warming are
right, you would think that it would at least be worth trying to save the
world. This failure is not on regular people, it's on the people who know
better and are in positions of power yet failed to fight hard enough, make
winning arguments and treat the fight with the urgency it deserved.

If people can be convinced to vote for taxes on themselves to build stadiums
in cities that already have one, I don't believe for a second that it is a
lost cause to convince people of a tax to literally help save the fucking
world.

~~~
pdonis
_> you would think that it would at least be worth trying to save the world_

Not if "saving the world" means spending trillions of dollars on things that
(a) might well not fix the problem, and (b) could be better spent on other
things with a much more certain payoff. For example, bringing people out of
poverty and building up our infrastructure so it is more robust against any
kind of disruption. Especially if doing those things makes it a lot easier to
adapt to whatever happens to the climate anyway.

~~~
epistasis
Yeah, that "trillions of dollars" is a baseless assumption that's just pulled
out of somebody's behind. There's this assumption that it's going to cost so
much, when in reality, renewable energy and storage are shaping up to be
cheaper than fossil fuels in the coming decades.

Pretty much the worst case spending on mitigation plans is 3% of GDP. Less
than we spend on the military. And that's _worst case_. Over the long run,
most mitigation analyses have us saving money.

I think that these baseless assumptions about the cost of mitigation are just
as much a problem as the denial. A good amount of the denial comes from people
that assume that they'll have to give up driving and eating meat. Another good
amount of the denalism comes from dark money that influences political
thought. That dark money is hard to eliminate, but we need to stop the
speculation that fighting climate change means a significantly lower quality
of life.

~~~
Turing_Machine
"renewable energy and storage are shaping up to be cheaper than fossil fuels
in the coming decades."

If they actually become cheaper, there won't be any government action
necessary to make people adopt them.

~~~
_ph_
Right, going forward, the need of government action is going to be
considerably less necessary. But new technologies have a certain cost
disadvantage, and government support helps to cross that gap quicker.
Especially, when new power plants have to compete with 30 year old coal
plants, which are cheap to operate but very dirty.

But the crossover point seems to be very near - here in Germany a big offshore
wind project failed to qualify for government support, but the driving company
decided to go ahead nevertheless, as they plant to be cost efficient enough
without any support. So this is very good news.

------
13of40
Assuming this change (a) lasts hundreds or thousands of years and (b) doesn't
spiral out of control and kill us outright, at some point in the next couple
of hundred years we're going to have people denying there ever was ice in the
Arctic.

------
RcouF1uZ4gsC
Does anybody have any idea of how bad climate change would actually be to the
United States? It is actually isolated from most of the world by two oceans.
The US southern border is pretty inhospitable desert. The US would have
defacto access to all of Canada's resources (worst case it would invade Canada
and annex the productive areas most of which are near the border). With the
fall of the global trade, over time the US may be more like the 1950s in terms
of wealth equality. While the rest of the world becomes a hell, the US might
become an isolated paradise.

~~~
noiv
Check out this book:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Degrees:_Our_Future_on_a_H...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Degrees:_Our_Future_on_a_Hotter_Planet)
It has some examples what happened to the US territory in a warmer climate.
Can't remember thinking of a paradise.

------
brentm
I have trouble believing a significant amount of the population truly doesn't
believe in climate change (I guess I'm a climate change denier denier /s). I
think the problems lie mostly with the voting population not prioritizing
climate change when making voting decisions and major campaign donors who feel
directly (or indirectly) threatened by environmental protection initiatives
having the ears of politicians. The major problems almost always have to do
with money.

~~~
ams6110
I think a fairly large number of people either don't believe it or don't
belive it's man-caused (to whatever extent) and therfore don't believe there's
anything practical to be done about it.

------
musgrove
Then in other words, how it's known today is uncertain. "Almost certainly"
isn't the same as "certainly." Subtle, but huge and important difference that
coders should know.

------
dotancohen
What will happen to the energy that is now melting the ice? Surely the energy
source (i.e. the summer sun) will not go away, so where will the energy go
that was until now melting the ice?

If the answer is "it will warm the ocean" then that is troubling indeed. It
takes almost as much energy to melt a given mass of ice (-1° to 1°) as it
takes to bring it to a near boil (1° to 99°).

------
basicplus2
The arctic as we know it today is as it is today and therefore cannot possibly
be gone.

------
faragon
How that will impact in international shipping prices, for good?

------
clarkrinker
Hopefully there is a Stargate in there

------
beemanners
More alarmism. [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/10/07/experts-
said-a...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/10/07/experts-said-arctic-
sea-ice-would-melt-entirely-by-september-201/)

~~~
triplesec
The Torygraph is known for printing a lot of shoddy data-illiterate denialist
articles (Christopher Booker is one of the main culprits), so I'd take this
article as if it were on Fox or even Breitbart and fact check the s[now] out
of it, if you're inclined to believe it.

------
YSFEJ4SWJUVU6
Arctic is indeed shrinking. 15000 years ago (or so) there were miles of ice on
top of the place I'm currently sitting.

~~~
jackmott
These posts that pretend or imagine they have a deeper understanding of the
science than the rest of us are super irritating.

The writers of the economist article know, climate scientists know, and
hackernews readers all know that the climate has been colder and hotter in the
past over geologic time scales. We all know this.

It is not correct to imply that the current warming is just a continuation of
the usual inter-glacial cycles. It isn't, the rate of change is completely
different by orders of magnitude, and the causes are observably different.

~~~
Turing_Machine
What's "super-irritating" is that you guys keep trotting out the same
predictions in an attempt to induce panic, even though those predictions have
failed time after time.

See up-thread, where scientists were predicting an "ice-free Arctic" for 2013.
And 2019. And now 2040.

I believe there were predictions for the Arctic to be "ice-free" by 2000 as
well, but a quick Google isn't turning up a solid reference.

Yes, the earth has been colder than it is now. Many times. It's also been
warmer than it is now. Many times.

"It isn't, the rate of change is completely different by orders of magnitude"

That is simply not correct. There is plenty of evidence that ice ages can
occur over a time scale of less than a hundred years, and some evidence that
it can happen on a decadal scale.

Heck, some of us are old enough when the threat of an ice age was the scare
story.

~~~
antisthenes
You posted a bunch of headlines by journos, not scientists and expect us to
take that as some holy grail of evidence that GW isn't happening.

That's nor surprising, considering you're a libertarian, but from the
perspective of people who live in the real world, it's lunacy.

~~~
Turing_Machine
"You posted a bunch of headlines by journos"

So what? The whole thread is predicated on an "article by a journo".

"expect us to take that as some holy grail of evidence that GW isn't
happening"

Please don't put words in my mouth. Thanks.

Far from "expecting you to take it as a "holy grail of evidence", I'm pointing
out that these sensationalist scare articles have been around for a long, long
time (at least since the time of Malthus in the 1700s), and yet the promised
doomsday has never occurred.

And far from saying that climate change "isn't happening", I explicitly said
"Yes, the earth has been colder than it is now. Many times. It's also been
warmer than it is now. Many times."

Do you guys feel _any guilt at all_ when you grossly misrepresent someone
else's statements, or does the warm glow of virtue you get from Proper
Thinking counteract it?

"considering you're a libertarian"

You act like that's some kind of pejorative.

~~~
m52go
Big props for taking one for the team.

Becoming critical of "climate change" just happened to me recently. I've been
critical of the usual suspects like foreign policy, finance, media, etc. for a
while, but climate change was a sacred cow.

Then I read this.

[https://www.fairobserver.com/more/environment/forgotten-
sun-...](https://www.fairobserver.com/more/environment/forgotten-sun-climate-
catastrophe-called/)

Before anyone accuses me of bringing scientism onto HN, realize that never did
I call climate change a "hoax." Most intelligent people critical of climate
change don't either. Obviously, it's happening...to some degree. I'm merely
critical of the mainstream perspective of its causes and effects.

And I'm not sure one can ever be too critical in science.

~~~
mikeash
The speed of the current change is unprecedented. Your article makes the
standard argument that climate changes in the past and this is more of the
same, but it's just not true.

Xkcd summed it up nicely: [https://xkcd.com/1732/](https://xkcd.com/1732/)

~~~
Turing_Machine
Xkcd's chart starts a mere 22,000 years ago.

It is not representative of the history of the Earth.

To take just one example, I'm pretty sure that the sudden arrival of the
Chicxulub "dinosaur killer" asteroid produced a change in Earth's climate that
was vastly more devastating and immensely more rapid than anything we're
seeing today.

"Unprecedented", indeed.

Edit: added a few references.

[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277379104...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277379104003245)

"We revisit the portion of (Nature 391 (1998) 141) devoted to the abrupt
temperature increase reconstruction at the Younger Dryas/Preboreal
transition...Three quasi-independent approaches employed in this work all give
the same result of a +10 °C warming in several decades or less."

[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012821X08...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012821X08000642)

"Here, we report on the second abrupt warming (4 ± 1.5 °C), which occurred at
the end of a short lived cooler interval known as the Preboreal Oscillation
(11,270 ± 30 B.P.). A rapid snow accumulation increase suggests that the
climatic transition may have occurred within a few years."

One ten degree event and one 4 degree event. Both much larger than anything
we've seen.

There have been many others. In fact, it is believed that at least _25_ such
events took place in the last glacial period alone. See:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dansgaard%E2%80%93Oeschger_eve...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dansgaard%E2%80%93Oeschger_event)

~~~
mikeash
Thanks for the links. I guess I should have said unprecedented within the
timescale in question. Note that the link you provided above only discusses
the last 10,000 years, so the xkcd timeline is more than adequate when
discussing its particular claims.

I'd like to know what you think about my sibling comment, about how this five-
year-old article makes a prediction that has already failed. In particular,
the article talks about how the 0.8C warming since 1850 fits their
hypothesis... but warming has continued quite rapidly since that article was
written, so if you wrote that today you'd have to talk about ~1.4C warming
since 1850. Does that still fit?

Finally, although it's not relevant to your overall argument, I have to say
that Chicxulub is the worst argument I've seen in this space for quite a long
time.

