
The great thaw of America’s north is coming - fmihaila
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20171016-the-great-thaw-of-americas-north-is-coming
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japhyr
I live in southeast Alaska, and climate change frightens me here as well.

Our area, a temperate rainforest with steep mountains rising almost straight
up from the ocean, has always experienced landslides. You can see slide scars
throughout the mountains, from a boat or from a plane. But in recent years
we've had a few that cause people to be much more concerned about the
possibility of being caught in a slide.

Two years ago there was a slide in town (Sitka) that killed three people.
Before that there was a slide that took out a remote cabin, and the two people
staying at the cabin barely outran the slide. Now every time it rains hard
people talk to each other about the risk of slides. Meteorologists'
predictions haven't helped much, because most slide forecasts are just general
statements about an elevated risk of slides for the entire region. No one can
predict a high likelihood of slides in particular locations, so everyone is
left to evaluate the risk for themselves in deciding whether to stay at home
during heavy rain.

We live in a rainforest, but most of our rain comes from light steady rain
most of the year. We have some heavier rainfall events in the spring and fall.
It seems the slides have happened during periods of intense heavy rain - 2+
inches over the course of several hours.

What scares me about climate change is what might happen if we end up with
significantly heavier amounts of rainfall in short periods of time. What
happens if we get 6+ inches in a day like we've seen more recently in other
regions?

When I get a lull between my various projects I'm going to do some analysis of
our long-term weather data, and try to correlate it with slide events. I'm
curious to see if the rainfall patterns are changing over time, beyond just
total amounts each year. I'm curious to see if I, as a local, can identify
some weather patterns here that outside meteorologists haven't noticed yet.

~~~
KGIII
I went to boarding school in the same State I now live in. I have seen the
climate change. Even in the decade since my retirement, the climate has
changed.

It's had an interesting effect in that the summer hasn't had many hot days,
but the average is higher. This year, I only had a couple of days go above 90
deg f. My winter has fewer longer cold snaps, but some pretty steep cold snaps
(-48 deg f this past year was the record). My snow totals have actually
increased from area historical norms. I've been able to get the historical
data and have a weather station that logs my local conditions.

There's also a bit of microclimate effect going on here. I'm not a climate
scientist, so I am really only capable of comparing the results.

If it wasn't so damaging, I'd be all for it. I love snow and hate when it goes
above 90. I don't get grumpy until it goes below -20. It's too bad that it's
going to cause lots of damage for other people.

Sort of related: You can get the data and run the models yourself. I used to
model traffic and there are some similarities. It seemed like a good thing to
learn a bit about, so I spent a couple of years poking at it in my free time.

~~~
paulmd
I live in Michigan and it's blatantly obvious here too.

Apart from lake effect on the west side of the state, we hardly get snow
anymore, because it's barely dropped below freezing. The last few winters have
been incredibly mild _apart_ from the "polar vortex" events where dry cold air
blows down from the north. Since it's so dry, these don't really generate a
lot of snowfall, it just snaps cold. These polar vortexes are a new weather
pattern for us.

This fall we've been getting literal monsoon weather from the remains of
hurricanes coming up the east coast. Each storm turns into days of warm
drizzling and fog, which is much more typical weather for the spring, not
October. Another atypical weather pattern.

That's just on a local scale. Then you look at how we're now getting multiple
extreme hurricanes per year, one after another, multiple 100-year floods, and
it's just insane that people could possibly deny the reality of climate change
when it's literally happening over a span of just a few years, right before
their very eyes. The weather we had ten years ago is not the weather we have
today.

Trump has taken office at a very unfortunate time, because we urgently need to
mitigate both carbon emissions and the direct impacts of the weather _right
now_. But instead we're going to spend the next 3-7 years going backwards
during one of the most critical junctures. At least he's so utterly
incompetent that he's mostly just stalling out his agenda - going nowhere does
beat going backwards at least. Just kinda sucks for the people most directly
in the line of fire for climate change, because it's very obvious that no
relief is going to be forthcoming for the parts of America that have been
devastated over the last few months.

~~~
canoebuilder
I wonder how much these sorts of accounts are attributable to the beat of the
Climate Doom drum combined with human recollection which is notoriously
unreliable, malleable, and open to suggestion.

The US has just exited a period of a record setting "hurricane drought," so
maybe the hurricane remnant weather seems unusual because no such storms have
made landfall in the US for the past decade plus.

That this year had a cluster of large storms isn't really indicative of
anything in and of itself. Most things appear to happen in clusters. Things
aren't perfectly evenly distributed.

[https://weather.com/storms/hurricane/news/major-hurricane-
us...](https://weather.com/storms/hurricane/news/major-hurricane-us-landfall-
drought-study#/)!

~~~
zipwitch
One of the challenges when it comes to assessing the full impact of
anthropogenic climate change is that while it does drive extreme weather, it's
far from the only input into such events. Combined with the limited number of
such events, it makes it easy to dismiss them as ancedotes instead of data.

Scientific American has a good overview of this:
[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/yes-some-
extreme-...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/yes-some-extreme-
weather-can-be-blamed-on-climate-change/)

You can also do a google search for graphs on the frequency of extreme climate
events.

------
i_feel_great
Here in Australia we are still planning to build large coal mines to fuel the
furnaces in India and China and for our own power plants. Solar and wind are
hippie conspiracies to make us all unemployed and gay, so our politicians keep
telling us. You poor fools are doomed!

~~~
canoebuilder
I'd guess that the amount of energy harvestable in the form of sunlight from
otherwise unused land far exceeds the amount of energy in the form of coal
resources in Australia.

But how to ship it to China and India? Set up some high voltage lines? Convert
the locally generated electricity to some form of transportable, easily re-
convertible embodied energy?

~~~
detaro
Hydrogen or other synthesized gas is an option, but the transfer losses are
pretty brutal (and there aren't massive-scale deployments yet, so unexplored
terrain as well)

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marcoperaza
Since it's come up in the comments and it's one of my pet peeves: there's some
incredible confirmation bias around claims of personally observing climate
change. Historical temperature fluctuations are huge, so no, you are almost
certainly not "observing" climate change in your hometown. Human-caused
climate change is expected to cause steady changes in the average, almost
invisible in short time periods compared to the wild fluctuations that would
anyway occur year to year, decade to decade, in any area.

Climate change has now become a religion though, so I'm not surprised that the
faithful are having the equivalent of apparitions. (This doesn't mean it's not
real, just that it's a point of political dogma for some, which I think is
unfortunate because it only makes doubters more skeptical by foreclosing
opportunities for persuasion.)

~~~
KGIII
You can observe climate change. It's pretty easy. You can't easily attribute
it to human activity, however.

~~~
richardw
Incontrovertible is hard, especially when many make a living from not seeing
the evidence. That's why the tobacco industry was able to hang on for so long.
This is more important but we'll waste decades convincing the holdouts.

~~~
refurb
_especially when many make a living from not seeing the evidence_

Doesn't that cut both ways?

~~~
KGIII
I'll give you a serious response.

It can and there is quite a bit of politics involved, unfortunately. Your best
bet is to take the time and do some learning in your own, at least that is
what I did.

I'd suggest not paying much attention to the extremists on either side.
Chances are really good that AGW isn't going to result in human extinction.
Chances are really good that AGW is real.

The journalism is generally terrible and I do have a negative opinion about
some of the more vocal scientists. However, I have a stronger opinion about
the people who refuse to acknowledge the results.

The planet is absolutely warming and we are almost certainly adding to that
warming. Our contribution to this warming is due to our adding greenhouse
gases to the atmosphere. The greenhouse effect is well studied and can be
replicated.

Models aren't certainties and can only make broad predictions. Anyone citing
them as absolute fact is poorly representing the science. There are multiple
models, many data sets, and variable results.

More greenhouse gases will increase the rate of warming. Global warming is
only one part of global climate change. The exact results aren't entirely
known and the models attempt to predict this.

The system is very large and very complicated. We don't even know the initial
starting state. So, they make approximations, which is what these kind of
models do.

When I modeled traffic, I couldn't tell you when you'd get to your
destination. I could accurately predict the results, however. They would be
largely true for everyone. On an individual scale, they could be wrong but
they were much more likely to be true. We had a high confidence in the
results.

Modeling the climate is a bit like that, only bigger and more complicated. It
is also politically charged - another similarity with traffic modeling. But,
the end result is we are, almost certainly, going to get to our destination
unless we change our route.

I am not a climate scientist and was a bit skeptical of the claims of accuracy
and certainty. I have since put in a lot of effort to learn. I am really,
really certain that the climate is changing, we are speeding that up, and that
the models are accurate enough to where we should reduce our output of
unconstrained greenhouse gases.

Make of this what you will. I've tried to be as clear as I can. I'm not
suggesting you trust me. I'm suggesting that you'll reach the same results if
you put the effort into learning.

------
throwaway5752
Has anyone starting tracking wealthy individuals' purchases of land in
northern latitudes (Canadian immigration, Alaska land purchase, north
European/Russian relocation)? [https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/23/science/on-
a-warmer-plane...](https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/23/science/on-a-warmer-
planet-which-cities-will-be-safest.html) suggests the Pacific northwest, could
this be driving some of the land purchases in Vancouver? It mean, climate
change is ridiculous obvious to everyone at this point. It was summer
temperatures across the east coast of the US until a week ago, and looking at
20 year trend data, things are rapidly deteriorating.

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dghughes
I saw "Americas" but I see BBC means America's as in the US. But anyhow the
north in Canada is obviously affected too.

I recall seeing on the news an RCMP barracks in the far north had to extend
its foundation stilts no concrete foundations in the north. The stilts stick
into the permafrost and are cooled by refrigeration during the summer so the
building doesn't sink. The stilts used to stick into the permafrost a few
metres now they have to put them down 15 metres.

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mjevans
Individual data points don't isolate temporally local events sufficiently.

A better measure would be to chart each season as an error-bar range on a
graph and visually compare the averages over time to observe trends. I think
you might be able to compare that with data at other observation points
(airports are usually a good candidate) to show how things likely looked when
they weren't under observation.

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RickJWag
If climate change does bring the predicted changes, automatic wealth
redistribution would be a side-effect.

The current holders of high-dollar waterfront properties would be pushed away.
Those holding less expensive properties further inland will be given an
unexpected windfall.

Scientists are predicting warmer temperatures will also bring increased crop
yields, lessening world hunger.

If climate change does come to pass, it won't all be bad.

~~~
mac01021
Citation about that crop yields thing?

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artur_makly
NYTimes made an awesome interactive chart on global cities and their
historical temperatures :
[https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/01/18/world/how-
muc...](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/01/18/world/how-much-warmer-
was-your-city-in-2016.html)

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weeksie
I wonder if this means the US will become more or less belligerent with
Canada?

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md2be
It was a very cool winter last year here in lA

