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Himalayas bare and rocky after reduced winter snowfall, scientists warn

140 points14 hoursbbc.com
an-allen8 hours ago

A third of humans are fed as a result of the melt of the Himalayan ice sheet. No ice sheet, no runoff, no flooding the rice paddy's, no rice…. famine.

bamboozled7 hours ago

What about all the people who say the world will be greener and therefore there will be more plants and food? It's almost like they just made that up to suit their worldview?

screye5 hours ago

The world will become unevenly greener. Population density and recent population rise is inversely correlated with places that will get greener.

Polar and Continental regions will get greener at the expense of the tropical and equatorial regions.

Mass migration is the inevitable conclusion of uneven impacts of climate change. Ie. In 2026, Political climate and physical climate are moving in mutually incompatible directions.

timr6 hours ago

The world will be greener in a high-CO2 environment. There’s no legitimate argument over that fact.

Where you go wrong is in misrepresenting the argument as “more plants and food”. That’s a straw man. Certainly it’s more favorable for growth of plants that make food, but that doesn’t mean that existing patterns of food production will exist unchanged, or that adaptation won’t be required. But we’re also talking about a 100+ year change timeline. People who tell you that this year’s weather are indicative of urgent, rapid change are exaggerating.

You seem to be willing to accept wild extrapolations of doom without evidence, while rejecting scientifically well-founded statements of fact, so I’d challenge you to examine your priors.

agentultra4 hours ago

At the levels of concentration of CO2 we’re seeing, plants are decreasing in size. Trees grow smaller.

There’s a balance to how much CO2 plants can adapt to and absorb while maintaining their growth and yields.

jgraham4 hours ago

> The world will be greener in a high-CO2 environment. There’s no legitimate argument over that fact.

However it's important to remember that world isn't a high school physics experiment, and you can't easily separate out CO2 concentration from the other impacts of increased CO2:

| Climate change can prolong the plant growing season and expand the areas suitable for crop planting, as well as promote crop photosynthesis thanks to increased atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. However, an excessive carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere may lead to unbalanced nutrient absorption in crops and hinder photosynthesis, respiration, and transpiration, thus affecting crop yields. Irregular precipitation patterns and extreme weather events such as droughts and floods can lead to hypoxia and nutrient loss in the plant roots. An increase in the frequency of extreme weather events directly damages plants and expands the range of diseases and pests. In addition, climate change will also affect soil moisture content, temperature, microbial activity, nutrient cycling, and quality, thus affecting plant growth.

[https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4395/14/6/1236]

In global models of climate change the overall impact on plant growth is significant, but not positive:

| Global above ground biomass is projected to decline by 4 to 16% under a 2 °C increase in climate warming

[https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2420379122]

> Certainly it’s more favorable for growth of plants that make food

That does not seem to be what agricultural researchers believe:

| In wheat a mean daily temperature of 35°C caused total failure of the plant, while exposure to short episodes (2–5 days) of HS (>24°C) at the reproductive stage (start of flowering) resulted in substantial damage to floret fertility leading to an estimated 6.0 ± 2.9% loss in global yield with each degree-Celsius (°C) increase in temperature

| Although it might be argued that the ‘fertilization effect’ of increasing CO2 concentration may benefit crop biomass thus raising the possibility of an increased food production, emerging evidence has demonstrated a reduction in crop yield if increased CO2 is combined with high temperature and/or water scarcity, making a net increase in crop productivity unlikely

| When the combination of drought and heatwave is considered, production losses considering cereals including wheat (−11.3%), barley (−12.1%) and maize (−12.5%), and for non-cereals: oil crops (−8.4%), olives (−6.2%), vegetables (−3.5%), roots and tubers (−4.5%), sugar beet (−8.8%), among others

[https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10796516/]

guelo4 hours ago

The greening is uneven. Canada/Siberia are getting warmer so plants have longer growing seasons there. But it's getting browner in other areas because of increased drought and heat. Overall the predictions are for lower global food production on net.

therealpygon6 hours ago

I mean, didn’t take more than 15 minutes for one to comment with some talking points designed for those who can’t read a scientific paper.

abc123abc1236 hours ago

[flagged]

reeredfdfdf6 hours ago

The thing is, not all edible plants like higher temps. Then there's the issue of changing weather patterns, more extreme weather, drought. Agriculture is easier when weather stays predictable and pattern.

Also, it's entirely possible Europe will get a new ice age as a result of global warming, as it might cause AMOC to collapse. Thus, it appears global warming is causing more harm than good to food production.

jibal4 hours ago

A reliable citation for any of these claims is lacking.

tasuki7 hours ago

Are you saying we need global warming for the melt to increase?

mort966 hours ago

You can't melt snow that's not there.

gambiting7 hours ago

Global warming is the likely reason why there is nothing to melt in the first place.

adrianN12 hours ago

It won’t be long before climate change starts causing mass migrations and the associated conflicts. With the current unstable world order we could really do without another massive problem.

jmward0111 hours ago

Arguably Iran is seeing turmoil, at least partially, due to drought.

https://www.npr.org/2025/08/17/nx-s1-5500318/iranian-officia...

baxtr10 hours ago

But the drought was not caused by climate change, but by mismanagement ie complete neglect of the problem.

pmezard10 hours ago

Is not climate change mismanagement or complete neglect of the problem?

schainks10 hours ago

Iran specifically had infrastructure in place to help manage the water for Tehran (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qanat). The Ayatollahs not only _destroyed_ that infrastructure and the system of humans needed to maintain it, but they also encouraged pumping of water from local aquifers, among other obviously stupid water management techniques: https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/khomeini...

So, you are right, but in Iran's case, the current regime pretty much did the opposite of anything you should have done, while also chopping of their hands to do anything more.

+2
baxtr10 hours ago
graemep7 hours ago

Climate change is actually a strong reason for better management. The same is true everywhere. More floods? You need to provide better drainage. Drier climate risking more forest fires? You need to manage forests better.

In many cases governments are cutting back on spending on dealing with these sorts of problems because they can avoid blame by saying it is a result of climate change and few people ask why they did not act to mitigate the effects.

bamboozled7 hours ago

Thank you!

energy12310 hours ago

Monocausality is quite the assertion.

+1
baxtr10 hours ago
Y-bar10 hours ago

Arguably the climate change we see today (and will see in the future) is also largely caused by mismanagement and complete neglect of the problem.

magicalhippo11 hours ago

I recall reading about a paper in SciAm or American Scientist a couple of decades ago, where they had trained a ML model to predict regional conflicts or civil wars. The main input was scarcity of food, mainly through price IIRC.

They trained it on historical data up to the 90s or so, and had it predict the "future" up to the time of the article. And as I recall it did very well. They even included some actual near-future predictions as well which also turned out pretty accurately as I recall.

Which I suppose isn't a huge surprise after all. People don't like to starve.

schainks10 hours ago

Link?

magicalhippo9 hours ago

My memory isn't good enough to recall the name of the paper, however doing some searching I see the field has not stood still. Here[1] is an example of a more recent paper where they've included more variables. A quote from the conclusions:

The closest natural resource–society interaction to predict conflict risk according to our models was food production within its economic and demographic context, e.g., with GDP per capita, unemployment, infant mortality and youth bulge.

[1]: https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/16/6574 Revisiting the Contested Role of Natural Resources in Violent Conflict Risk through Machine Learning (Open Access)

chii11 hours ago

while the drought was the last straw, i think the mismanagement of their water resources by the regime (for embezzlement of public funds, direct or indirect, into insider pockets etc) is the true root cause. There's "enough" water to last thru the current drought, if it was better utilized in the past.

lysace5 hours ago

Supporting this:

https://e360.yale.edu/features/iran-water-drought-dams-qanat...

“The government blames the current crisis on changing climate [but] the dramatic water security issues of Iran are rooted in decades of disintegrated planning and managerial myopia,” says Keveh Madani, a former deputy head of the country’s environment department and now director of the United Nations University’s Institute of Water, Environment and Health.

rob7411 hours ago

That, plus decades of mismanagement and corruption...

grumbelbart29 hours ago

Some say it was a factor in Syria as well:

https://www.dw.com/en/how-climate-change-paved-the-way-to-wa...

Cthulhu_7 hours ago

As others have said, it's already happening, and it'll only get worse. But since it's not western countries it's not highlighted much.

But when the AMOC stops and western Europe's winters get longer there will be huge changes too. If I recall correctly, the AMOC stopping is a trigger for an ice age, that is, ice sheets / the north pole going down way south. This would make anything above France uninhabitable, if not wiped off the map entirely.

But it'd be a steady process of increasingly cold winters, so likely in our lifetime it'd mainly mean we change how we build houses and buildings. But long term, people would move.

bryanrasmussen7 hours ago

I'm not sure I get why everything above France would be rendered uninhabitable? The coldest place inhabited by humans year round is Oymyakon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oymyakon

Temperatures are generally above 0°C in summer, -50 approximately in winter.

Will an Ice Age actually be worse than that?

I would expect somewhat better, although maybe not much. I might expect Denmark and Southern Parts of Sweden and England to reach 10 degrees in Summer, and -20 in Winter. But that is of course just a guess on my part so I am certainly willing to hear that I have guessed wrong.

HighGoldstein5 hours ago

If the Earth's atmosphere gradually disappeared over the next 10-50 years would that be okay because humans live in the ISS?

Hikikomori7 hours ago

Last ice age had a km thick ice sheet going down to Berlin.

+2
bryanrasmussen7 hours ago
closewith4 hours ago

This completely overstates the problem, is not supported by the evidence, and is exactly the kind of alarmism that undermines genuine climate science.

An AMOC slowdown or even collapse does not trigger an ice age. Full glacial periods are driven by orbital forcing, not ocean circulation alone.

The evidence points to regional cooling of a few degrees in parts of Western and Northern Europe, not rendering everything north of France uninhabitable.

Past ice sheets advanced over millennia under much colder global conditions than today, not on human timescales.

Even severe AMOC scenarios would be major and costly disruptions, not close to Europe being wiped off the map.

j-krieger5 hours ago

Any source for this? Every source I can find speaks for three to eight degrees colder in longer winters. That's still very much survivable, most of Germany rarely gets in the negative double digits as of now.

psychoslave7 hours ago

So did global temperature was higher during last ice age? Or is that only two related to Europe and more local dynamics?

gambiting7 hours ago

>>But it'd be a steady process of increasingly cold winters

I was in Switzerland last summer, in Glarus Alps, and walking around I found a sign that basically said that the reason why all the mountains around it were "smooth" in appearance is because during last ice age all of it was covered in ice, and the rock got smooth as the ice started to shift and slide over the course of hundreds of years. It said that only the highest peaks would be free of ice, and even then just barely - and all of those were above 2000m above(current) sea level. It's crazy to think that an ice age doesn't just mean "it's very cold" - it means there is enough ice to bury europe under 2 kilometers of ice. That's not survivable in any way, we would just have to move south somewhere - but like you said, even if it happens again it will take thousands of years to get to that point.

RHSman24 hours ago

You should study a bit of physical geography and glacialology.

Not all ‘ice ages’ are the same.

A true ice age as you discuss is due to the distance we are from the sun. Unfortunately, we are in the opposite and the compounding effects of human induced greenhouse effect will doom us. It’s a bit like nature/nuture.

There is stuff we can control. How we handle our species and our home, the earth.

arethuza7 hours ago

Not sure it would take that long - the Younger Dryas only lasted 1,200 years and resulted in fairly significant glaciation here in Scotland - although nothing like the depth of ice of the full ice age.

_ink_9 hours ago

I am really puzzled that this topic is not present in the public discourse.

zvqcMMV6Zcr7 hours ago

Politicians look at best at next term, CEOs look at next quarter. Climate changes took decades to manifest effects. And those 2 groups produce most news "worthy" messages. Journalism is quite close to being dead (with local reporting already being buried), as rephrasing PR statements is cheapest and fastest way to produce "content". Who is supposed to nudge public discourse in that direction, "influencers"?

HighGoldstein5 hours ago

> Climate changes took decades to manifest effects.

*centuries, it was first predicted in the 19th century when Britain was burning increasingly massive amounts of coal.

Cthulhu_8 hours ago

I'm puzzled why you think it isn't.

stinkbeetle6 hours ago

Do you mean how it is verboten to suggest that mass migration would cause conflicts or be at all problematic?

mvdwoord9 hours ago

Not sure, but I have heard that more than plenty in public discourse (NL / W-Eur) and even the repeated blatant lies about the 2015 wave of migration to be due to climate change.

grumbelbart29 hours ago

Climate change was likely a factor in 2015.

https://www.dw.com/en/how-climate-change-paved-the-way-to-wa...

> even the repeated blatant lies

It is difficult to have a reasonable discourse when starting with such overkill positions. The topic is way too nuanced. The civil war in Syria had many reasons, political, economic, religious, but also environmental.

Climate change massively increases the risk on water supply and harvesting yields, and if that risk manifests in a situation where people are already unhappy due to other reasons, it can be the trigger for large-scale reactions.

With all that having many factors, you'll rarely be able to point to one thing as "the" cause. That does not make it less relevant, though.

verisimi7 hours ago

They have been talking about climate change for years (ozone layer - get rid of your old fridge). And the media really does highlight weather events in other countries. I think the idea is one corporations can get behind - change, like war, is good for business.

netsharc12 hours ago

Are you writing from e.g. 2008? In 2010 Russian forest fires caused grain shortages and the price to go up, creating the Arab Spring and including the start of the Syrian civil war. That caused a wave of refugees that peaked in 2015. That caused the rise of right wing racist populism in Europe...

adrianN8 hours ago

In that instance climate change (probably?) played a role, but that is unfortunately not obvious enough to reach the people who are not already concerned about climate change. Millions migrating from India somewhere else because there is no water or wet bulb temperatures become deadly hopefully would cause more people to notice.

BLKNSLVR7 hours ago

That will be the case, ie. cognitive dissonance / denial, for many future climate change caused incidents as well.

This kind of reasoning: "California wildfires and tornadoes have always been part of the US weather patterns"

Whilst ignoring the increasing frequency and magnitude / intensity.

fleroviumna10 hours ago

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delta_p_delta_x8 hours ago

If you know languages, the 'phrase Himalayas bare and rocky' is particularly sad, because himālaya/हिमालय in Sanskrit literally means 'house of snow'.

bloak4 hours ago

Thank you for pointing that out. Also, according to Wiktionary, the first part, "hima", is cognate with English "hibernate" (snow and winter are close enough), and the second part, "alaya", is cognate with English "slime" (which is less obvious, but slime is sticky and you stick things together to make a house).

softwaredoug10 hours ago

Even in optimistic scenarios we won’t see this actual global temperature decrease again in our lifetimes. We can only hope to minimize the impact so that the curve softens and maybe in a century starts to go down.

lm284698 hours ago

Hey, not so fast, we might fuck up the AMOC and reduce western europe temps by up to 15c!

arethuza7 hours ago

On the bright side, at least the ski areas here in Scotland would have reliable snow!

bamboozled6 hours ago

For someone who loves winter, it's really sad news, but it's likely true.

Qem4 hours ago

IIRC the Himalayas are still being pushed up, as the indian plate pushes against Eurasia. That makes me wonder if the loss of ice will result in taller mountains, with less ice to grind the upwelling rock.

snowwrestler4 hours ago

The ice grinding primarily happens at the base of glaciers, in valleys.

Above the bergschrund (the head of the glacier), erosion in high mountains is accelerated by freeze-thaw cycles. Temps above freezing obviously contribute to this. But even well below freezing ambient temps, exposed dark rock in sunlight can absorb enough energy to cause local thawing, which results in rockfall.

profsummergig12 hours ago

Maybe they'll finally find the nuclear device lost on Nanda Devi, that has the potential to - *checks notes* - poison North India (via the glacier that feeds the Ganges).

Guestmodinfo9 hours ago

What's your opinion on a sudden flooding that happened some years ago in that region. I am an Indian so for some days our news were showing only that flooding news. It was sudden and super mssive and some news people suspected that same device or maybe one of the devices being accidentally going off. It was all speculation but the sudden and massive flooding was also unexplained to some extent. There has been several massive flooding in the region recently but all are due to extensive rain and cloud bursts. But one was unexplained in my untrained opinion. I remember it was some huge construction site. Wha they were building now I have forgotten that

ceejayoz6 hours ago

The entire world would notice a nuke going off. Like we did with North Korea’s nuclear tests.

krasin12 hours ago

> that (checks notes) has the potential to poison most of North India.

How large is the amount of plutonium in there? I highly doubt that it has the claimed potential.

krasin11 hours ago

I found the specs for the fuel source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e9/SNAP-19C_Moun...

The high-power unit had 300 grams of Pu-238 in 1965. Given its 87.7 years half-life, only 187g of Pu-238 remaining. It's very hard to do much damage with this amount of radioactive material.

onion2k11 hours ago

It decays to uranium-234 though, which still isn't exactly nice. It'll be a long time before it's a block of inert lead.

krasin10 hours ago

U-234 is ~3000x less radioactive than Pu-238, so having ~120g of U-234 is negligible.

I really fail to see a problem with these tiny amounts of non-brittle material embedded into a solid case. It's still very dangerous, but it's locally dangerous (meters away), not at the scale of whole countries.

khuey11 hours ago

Around three pounds, and something like 40% of it has already decayed away since this happened in the 60s.

s530011 hours ago

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hahahahhaah8 hours ago

What notes did you check?

zvqcMMV6Zcr7 hours ago

I always considered the conflict between India and China a bit silly, considering the size of those countries compared to tiny disputed territories. But the are totally are going to war over Himalayas water resources, aren't they?

bamboozled6 hours ago

Meteorologists, however, also add that there have been heavy snowfalls during some winters in recent years, but these have been isolated, extreme events rather than the evenly distributed precipitation of past winters.

Anecdotal but this is not dissimilar to how Japan has been lately with snowfall in the northern regions. It was once 30cm a night, almost every night during winter, fairly stable and predictable weather, we're still getting a lot of snow most winters, but it seems to happen in these major storm events now. Not consistent manageable snowfall, but more like a snow bomb goes off once a week, it gets warm, quite a lot of melt occurs and then boom, hit again. It's actually. taking some getting used too and requires adaption. It's a small thing but it makes it quite hard to plan for, and it makes life generally quite stressful. Also due to the rapid warming and cooling ice is a bit more of an issue now, like more injures from people getting hammered on icy / slick roads and paths.

malablaster8 hours ago

I’m disappointed at the lack of before/after photos in that article. My ape brain would love them.

dukeofdoom9 hours ago

On the flipside, it might make greenland actually green.

manarth9 hours ago

I visited Greenland for 6 weeks in 1998 (youth expedition with BSES) and it's surprisingly green in the summer, with thick foliage at the lower altitudes. And the midges, oh my! They sure had a taste for visitors.

aussieguy12349 hours ago

Climate change is obviously the cause and this is not good for the environment.

But on the flip side, does this mean it's never been easier to climb the Himalayan mountains?

snowwrestler4 hours ago

No, the lack of snow and ice has greatly increased the rockfall hazard. It’s way easier to climb the highest mountains on snow and ice than on crumbing rock.

https://www.instagram.com/p/DM5sYghMr2g/

nQQKTz7dm27oZ9 hours ago

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MORPHOICES10 hours ago

[flagged]

Arun200910 hours ago

What we tend to forget is that even with the catastrophic effects of climate change, the Earth is still vastly more inhabitable than other planets in the solar system. More pertinently, today we also have the intellectual tools to come with the right solutions for a good part of this problem. Solutions most likely won't require dramatic breakthroughs in fundamental science; probably just more clever engineering and better social and political coordination.

The real problem is that this is happening in one of the most socio-economically underdeveloped regions of the world. Despite isolated centers of modest excellence, India still hasn't fully absorbed the implications of the scientific revolution at a popular, cultural level. A good part of the population are still caught up in pre-modern modes of thinking. Rather than addressing this gap, the political establishment is only deepening an irrational and romantic belief in the worth of India's classical worldviews to continue their hold on power.

More than climate change, I dread the self-inflicted servitude to infantile notions that is holding India hostage. It's not really difficult to emerge out of this - we just need to shed our intellectual timidity and face reality as it is.

mb773310 hours ago

> What we tend to forget is that even with the catastrophic effects of climate change, the Earth is still vastly more inhabitable than other planets in the solar system.

Speak for yourself. I have never forgotten that Earth is more inhabitable than Mars or Jupiter

adrianN8 hours ago

We already have all the tools needed to stop climate change. The current problem is that nobody wants to pay for it.

Cthulhu_8 hours ago

Nobody wants to sacrifice their own economic growth / position.

But also, would it actually make a difference at this point? That is, can it be stopped, or have we passed the point of no return? I believe the latter.

adrianN7 hours ago

More and faster warming is always worse than less and slower warming, so every reduction in CO2 helps.

throw345610 hours ago

India produces abundance of food and got vast fertile lands. Modern farming is good but its gonna wipe out tens of millions of jobs if its done in no time.

leosanchez10 hours ago

I don't know what you are on about. You have pivoted to politics needlessly.

Current administration is investing in renewable energy. You are making them seem climate change deniers.

Keep your politics to reddit.

wojciii8 hours ago

I don't know what you are on about.

Your current administation stopped large offshore wind projects and uses the slogan "drill baby drill".

leosanchez8 hours ago

We are talking about India here...

wojciii6 hours ago

Oops. I assumed it was about Trumpism. :)

tehjoker10 hours ago

There are also pockets of India that are more advanced than many places elsewhere. I have a lot of love for Kerala. It doesn't have too many jobs, but it has a ton of heart and forward thinking people (which is why industrialists are scared of it).

leosanchez8 hours ago

> but it has a ton of heart and forward thinking people (which is why industrialists are scared of it).

You can check the name of the party in power to check what industrialists are scared of.

SanjayMehta10 hours ago

Industrialists are scared of communists and unions, for good reason.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokku_kooli

M95D9 hours ago

That's not communism, nor a union. That's just racketeering.

+2
SanjayMehta6 hours ago
timwalz8 hours ago

"cLiMaTE cHaNgE" ("man-made")

Al Gore would be proud of you guys.

zkmon8 hours ago

Question is, is this human-caused change or the usual natural climate shift that Earth goes through every few thousand centuries or millennia? And is there anything humans should do about it, other than adapting to it?

Cthulhu_8 hours ago

This isn't actually the question though, and have you done any research yourself or are you Just Asking Questions [1]?

tl;dr we have extensive historical records of past weather progression through e.g. ice cores and the recent weather and climate changes are unheard of outside of cataclysmic events like meteor strikes or volcano eruptions, with a very close correlation with emissions. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_record_of_the_last....

As for whether we can do anything about it, personally I don't think so, we passed the point of no return... probably decades ago, even if emissions suddenly stopped then, the wheels were set in motion, for example through the melting of permafrost causing ???? amounts of sequestered plant matter to start decomposing and releasing methane and the like.

zkmon6 hours ago

If we are past the point of no return decades back, what are the current goal of talking about it now? Our social and economic structures, and life styles are also well past the point of no return. Energy and resource consumption is at vulgarity levels. We bring a 10 ton machine from 10 miles, to sweep a floor of 10 square foot area. That's us. The expectations are set, supply chains are set, global domination goals are set. Science is only a force to drive us towards these directions. That's our choice made.

jibal4 hours ago

You asked whether there anything humans should do about it other than adapting to it, and the answer is yes. And we may be past the point of returning to some baseline (it's interesting that you took one person's opinion that we are as if it were an established fact) but that doesn't mean that we can't possibly hold the line at some higher level.

> Energy and resource consumption is at vulgarity levels.

That sounds like a very good reason to be talking about it.

> Science is only a force to drive us towards these directions.

This is not at all true. And given your original very uninformed question about "natural cycles" vs. human causes (which is quite the false dichotomy), I don't think you're any sort of authority on science.

bamboozled6 hours ago

People who hold this viewpoint interest me because you always seem to display a certain confidence that because the changing climate is "just part of a natural cycle" it's going to be fine. Not all changes on earth have been "just fine" and quite the contrary.

Look at a chart and you will see just how quickly the climate is changing and how we've done almost nothing to improve the situation, then why do you think it's "ok" because its "natural"? Are you nor alarmed about the mysterious force making the earth hotter? Isn't that alarming to you that we're just going along with a hotter and hotter planet? At what stage does this natural cycle stop?

Clearly, thanks to science, we know it's because of human activity, and I guess you could argue that is "natural", like our behavior is part of nature, but to pretend it's just some unknown warming force that's making the climate change seems much more disturbing to me than actually know why it's happening and addressing the issue?

nandomrumber6 hours ago

> certain confidence that because the changing climate is "just part of a natural cycle" it's going to be fine

What nonsense.

That’s rarely the opinion of those who hold that view.

If climate change has any non-human causes, then to what extent are we humans able to have an affect on those non-human causes?

inference-god6 hours ago

> Question is, is this human-caused change or the usual natural climate shift that Earth goes through every few thousand centuries or millennia? And is there anything humans should do about it, other than adapting to it?

From the parent post who he was talking about...it does say "natural climate shift" and mention adaption. I think the point is that some people are way too sure sure that we can just adapt to a rapidly shifting climate even if we don't understand the mechanism behind the warming.

Most natural shifts are explainable by science, so why is the trend of the last 75 years, unexplainable yet people are fine with it and just make assumptions we can adapt if we don't understand what's driving the warming?

I do see this view a lot on podcasts like Joe Rogan (which has one of the largest audiences in the world) and it does seem to maintain the idea that climate change is a natural thing and because of that it will be fine. It's not really a fringe idea even though it's a completely baseless idea IMO.

jibal4 hours ago

> What nonsense.

What rudeness.

> That’s rarely the opinion of those who hold that view.

I've tracked climate science deniers for decades and that simply isn't true.

> If climate change has any non-human causes, then to what extent are we humans able to have an affect on those non-human causes?

Of course climate change has some non-human causes, but most of them aren't the ones that we humans are able to have an effect on, so the question is off base. It's the human causes that we humans are able to have an extensive effect on, obviously.

Your question can possibly be read as implying that the causes are either non-human or they are human, rather than there being both types of factors ... if that's the case then it reflects an extraordinary lack of knowledge about the subject.

bmitc7 hours ago

Have you seen literally any chart covering just the past one to two hundred years, or even just the past 50-70 years that covers emissions, population, industrial scale, environmental destruction, weather patterns, etc.? They would answer your question.

There is no end to the concrete evidence of the negative effect of humans towards the climate.

Here's something simple. Deforestation is directly caused by humans. (Note that wildfires "deforest" but without human intervention, they grow back and thus reforest.). So then ask yourself, what is the role of forests and jungles within the environment and climate?

Look at this article: https://ourworldindata.org/deforestation. What began 10,000 years ago, 200 years ago, and 100 years ago? This couldn't possibly be major changes in human activity could it?

lm284698 hours ago

The human impact is unquestionable. Is it part of a bigger cycle? maybe, but I feel like people use that as a cope to not do anything. "it doesn't exist", "it exist but it's not bad", "it's bad but it's not our fault", &c.

https://xkcd.com/1732/