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Posted by koolhead17 14 hours ago

Himalayas bare and rocky after reduced winter snowfall, scientists warn(www.bbc.com)
141 points | 128 commentspage 2
aussieguy1234 8 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?

snowwrestler 3 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 crumbling rock.

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

nQQKTz7dm27oZ 8 hours ago||
[dead]
MORPHOICES 9 hours ago||
[flagged]
Arun2009 10 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.

mb7733 9 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

adrianN 7 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_ 7 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.

adrianN 6 hours ago||
More and faster warming is always worse than less and slower warming, so every reduction in CO2 helps.
leosanchez 9 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.

wojciii 7 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".

The_President 3 hours ago|||
While it's clear the parent poster was talking about another country, I'll add in the context of your reply: The current US administration is pushing low-carbon pro-nuclear energy which for one plant replaces hundreds of wind turbines.
leosanchez 7 hours ago|||
We are talking about India here...
wojciii 5 hours ago||
Oops. I assumed it was about Trumpism. :)
throw3456 9 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.
tehjoker 9 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).
leosanchez 7 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.

SanjayMehta 9 hours ago|||
Industrialists are scared of communists and unions, for good reason.

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

M95D 9 hours ago||
That's not communism, nor a union. That's just racketeering.
SanjayMehta 5 hours ago||
Clearly you haven't experienced socialism or Fabian socialism which is barely disguised communism.

This state is one of two in India which have been run by communists for decades.

random_ind_dude 4 hours ago|||
Kerala has alternated between a left-wing coalition(the Left Democratic Front - LDF) and a centrist to centre-right coalition(the United Democratic Front - UDF) for a long time. The current major communist party in Kerala, though ideologically Marxist-Leninist, is practically a social democratic one in its policies and actions.
SanjayMehta 3 hours ago||
Some years ago I was planning to set up subsidiary development centres in tier 2 cities, including Trivandrum.

My team - mostly from Kerala - came to me en masse and told me not to, and this was long before Nokku Kooli became a well known thing.

Don't know or care whether it was during UDF/LDF or whatever rule.

A couple of years ago a major clothes manufacturer, founded in that state, packed up and left.

A parallel from WB: Tata's moved their automobile factory to Gujarat, which has since then shipped over a million cars.

random_ind_dude 2 hours ago||
I have a hard time believing that your team who were mostly from Kerala asked you not to set up a development centre there, as IT is pretty immune to militant trade unionism. A lot of companies have development centres in Trivandrum, some were set up more than twenty years ago.

I don't disagree that Kerala was known for being rather unfriendly to big industries, but things are changing. The Union Ministry of Commerce and Industry ranked Kerala at the top in 2024 for "Ease of Doing Business Reforms".

https://www.newindianexpress.com/states/kerala/2024/Sep/06/e...

As for the clothes manufacturer, I believe you are talking about Kitex. They didn't go anywhere and their factories are still there in Kerala. They did set up a new factory recently in Telengana though, which, along with the rest of the company, is going through a rough phase now because of Trump's tariffs.

M95D 4 hours ago|||
Worse. I experienced true undisguised communism.
timwalz 7 hours ago||
[flagged]
rafterydj 2 hours ago||
This is inflammatory, dismissive, and hardly constructive for discussion. Flame wars are discouraged by the rules.

All said, you're comment worked. I'm angry now. Good job.

jibal 18 minutes ago||
Check out his other comments ... wow.
jibal 3 hours ago||
Where "you guys" is apparently anyone who knows anything at all about the subject.

When in Congress, Al Gore worked hard to turn the government owned and run network into something that the entire population can use. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore_and_information_techno...) I suggest that you take advantage of the incredible resource known as the Internet (and the WWW layered on top of it) to learn something about climate change and its underlying cause, anthropogenic global warming. See for instance https://skepticalscience.com/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_consensus_on_climat...

zkmon 7 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_ 7 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.

zkmon 5 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.
jibal 3 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.

zkmon 3 hours ago||
> This is not at all true.

What else, other than science, has enabled climate change through uncontrolled exploitation of resources and nature? I resisted myself not to comment on your authority on science.

What else has enabled global trade and business motives that led to everything that caused the climate change?

jibal 23 minutes ago||
> What else, other than science, has enabled climate change through uncontrolled exploitation of resources and nature?

You're changing the subject and attacking a strawman. That's not at all what I said is not true. And you're cherry picking, focusing entirely on negatives and ignoring all positives of science, which is how you come up with "only a force to drive us towards these directions". Science is also giving us wind, solar, and geothermal power, EVs, etc.

I won't respond further.

bamboozled 5 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?

nandomrumber 5 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-god 5 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.

zkmon 1 hour ago||
If it is man-made, blame your science, not people who is interested in path forward, instead of wailing about what happened, as if someone else did that. Western world is mostly responsible, and they are the ones who keep blaming some imaginary agent and shouting in online forums.

Let's talk about per capita energy usage and garbage dumping. Your businesses are cramming you homes, offices and roads with the stuff that you don't need. Basically, businesses are like high pressure pumps that circulate garbage through homes.

jibal 3 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.

bmitc 6 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?

lm28469 7 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/