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Earth's clouds are shrinking, boosting global warming

(www.science.org)
157 points Helmut10001 | 3 comments | 05 Apr 25 12:08 UTC | HN request time: 1.599s | source
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kacesensitive ◴[05 Apr 25 13:16 UTC] No.43593217[source]▶
Earth gets over 170,000 terawatts of solar energy every day—10,000 times more than humanity uses. Losing just a fraction of our cloud cover means a massive, invisible throttle is coming off the climate system. If this trend holds, we’re not just warming—we’re stepping on the gas.
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amazingamazing ◴[05 Apr 25 13:50 UTC] No.43593530[source]▶
These types of comments are pointless. We are destroying the world. Ok. What’s the solution? All involve pain, but no one wants to talk about that. Tech isn’t going to solve it. For one, the kind of person on this site is contributing literally 10000x more to the issue than the worlds bottom, so we can start there.

People love tech solutions, because then they don’t have to stop consuming and live modestly.

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TheBigSalad ◴[05 Apr 25 13:59 UTC] No.43593606[source]▶
We could solve this problem in a few years with technology if we really wanted to.
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anthropodie ◴[05 Apr 25 14:08 UTC] No.43593654[source]▶
I don't necessarily agree with GP's comment but they do have a valid point.

> We could solve this problem in a few years with technology if we really wanted to.

Everybody wants to solve the problem with technology. What if, the solution is just plain old hard work like planting trees, conservation, better recycling, better laws that help in saving ecosystem. But who would do that. So let's keep on creating problems with technology and then solve them with more technology.

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jansan ◴[05 Apr 25 14:10 UTC] No.43593674[source]▶
What technology specifically has caused the clouds to shrink?
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1. tovej ◴[05 Apr 25 14:25 UTC] No.43593786[source]▶
Anything that facilitates or requires extracting carbon from the ground: Coal plants, petrol engines, cars, airplanes, mass production, modern agriculture processes.

The only way to stop global warming is to stop extracting carbon from the ground, where it's stored. After that we can think about capturing carbon. But first if all we need to stop pumping it into the atmosphere at a faster rate than the earth can absorb it (about 40% is absorbed at the moment, 60% of all human carbon use is added to the atmosphere).

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2. jansan ◴[05 Apr 25 14:36 UTC] No.43593855[source]▶
Sorry, but did you read the question or the article at all?
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3. tovej ◴[05 Apr 25 14:49 UTC] No.43593928[source]▶
Yes, what do you mean? The biggest climate effect at the moment is human carbon use, which is changing weather patterns, and the cause of the cloud shrinkage is changing weather patterns => cloud shrinkage is driven, to some degree (I would guess strongly, but let's be careful, so some degree) by human carbon extraction.