Nothing will change until developed rich countries are starting to hurt.
And I don't think it's going to hurt enough in 10 or 20 years.
The pain will come slowly, people won't see it.
It's like going back to the middle age so slowly, that the population don't realize or feel it.
And honestly, wars and trump are making climate concerns so difficult to think about.
bko 2 hours ago [-]
> Nothing will change until developed rich countries are starting to hurt.
Ironic OECD countries actually REDUCED their emissions based on a peak in 2007 and continue to do so. Not reduced as a percentage of GDP or adjusted for population growth, but reduced in absolute levels. It's all China, but I guess it's cool to blame things on developed countries.
There are literally 100k deaths in Europe that can be prevented if they lifted restrictions on AC so that they can feel good about making a negligible effect on carbon emissions. So I think you have it opposite, how much pain do rich countries have to endure before they realize that their efforts are in vain.
And before you say "that's because the West outsources all the dirty production to China", even trade adjusted emissions are down considerably and continue to be down.
Please do some research if you're interested in this topic, it's not hard to do. Just follow the logical steps.
1. What causes global warming
2. Who produces most of these chemicals
3. Are there any global trends over the last 20 years in production of these chemicals
> It's all China, but I guess it's cool to blame things on developed countries.
This is just a naive take. You'd obviously expect chinese emissions to be higher (than the US) assuming similar industrialization, because you are counting emissions for like triple the amount of people.
What you conveniently fail to mention: US citizens still emit over 50% more CO2 each, and China basically just caught up to emission levels of developed countries (EU, Japan), while still being significantly below US levels. High income countries combined still emit more than China, too (richest ~15% globally).
If your argument would make any sense, then the obvious solution would be to split China into 3 countries, making the emissions instantly negligible compared to the EU/US. Problem solved?!
There is no reality where we make good progress toward climate change without the "main culprits" (=> nations with highest historical and per-capita emissions) making the first steps.
Why would a country like India pay/sacrifice to reduce emissions while western citizens still pollute at much higher levels after reaping all the spoils from historical pollution?
You could argue that wind/solar is a huge success story in this regard already, with western nations driving lots of the research/development/commercialization efforts (over the previous decades) and now indirectly causing much bigger nations like China to transition onto those very quickly instead of basically fully relying on fossils for decades to come.
cataphract 26 minutes ago [-]
> Why would a country like India pay/sacrifice to reduce emissions while western citizens still pollute at much higher levels after reaping all the spoils from historical pollution?
To avoid their country having large regions become uninhabitable?
myrmidon 20 minutes ago [-]
Even for a giant country like India you control <20% of global population, and you are responsible for much less than 20% of the effect (climate change).
So why would India take more expensive and painful steps than say, the US or EU, or Japan? India both indisputably affects and controls climate change less then the US or EU, so why would they put in completely outsized amounts of effort to fight it?
BikiniPrince 19 minutes ago [-]
That’s a reach and a half. Did you practice they in a mirror? You can’t argue at scale so you blame the individual for not living in a hut. Nice try.
myrmidon 12 minutes ago [-]
What do you even mean by "arguing at scale"?
I have a point and numbers to back it up, I don't see either on your side.
exceptione 31 minutes ago [-]
Don't do the AC thing, it is a stupid trope under blogfluencers. There are no restrictions (beside positioning the outer unit in such a way that you don't cause your neighbors to lose sleep). As the summers get more extreme in Europe, more residents decide getting one is starting to pay off, so you see more AC's, but many people think they are doing fine without.
bko 12 minutes ago [-]
I can easily google restrictions and share them, and I have in other comments but let me throw it back at you.
Why do 90% of Americans have AC while only 20% of Europeans do?
Why does US have ~4 heat related deaths per million while Europe has ~235 per million?
Do you think it's just stupidity (Europeans don't know the relationship between heat and AC)? Or poverty? Any other explanation?
> Why do 90% of Americans have AC while only 20% of Europeans do?
Because Rome is further north than New York and Paris is just south of Ottawa/Montreal.
cataphract 20 minutes ago [-]
Yeah, never heard of such a thing. The restrictions are placing the units in common areas of the buildings -- in that case you need permission -- and external walls are usually common parts. Placing them in the façade may have additional restrictions.
But, if anything, energy efficiency standards for new construction are so strict that heat is becoming less of a problem.
crystal_revenge 53 minutes ago [-]
> Ironic OECD countries actually REDUCED their emissions based on a peak in 2007 and continue to do so.
Our economies are built on oil burning somewhere else in the world. You can try to point the blame at China, but the wealth generated in the middle east selling them oil is a major part of the reason why US stock markets keep going up.
If you forced China to use less fossil fuels you would personally feel a much larger hit to your quality of life.
We in the developed world love to outsource the violence and environmental damage we cause. It's one thing to wash your hands, but quite another to then try to point the finger.
Retric 42 minutes ago [-]
> If you forced China to use less fossil fuels you would personally feel a much larger hit to your quality of life.
Imports from China are a small fraction of GDP and offset by exports to other countries. OECD countries are largely exporting labor not the kind of heavy industry associated with heavy CO2 emissions. Which makes sense as China has relatively cheap labor, but they don’t get a discount on Oil.
crystal_revenge 15 minutes ago [-]
> Mexico, Canada, and the EU
Do you want to take a wild guess as to which country is a top 3 importer to all of these countries/regions?
Here's a clue: it's the same country that is a major exporter of oil from GCC countries, and the wealth from those GCC countries is a major contributor of investment to US industry/financial sector.
The correct answer, is of course: China
The global is economy is very tightly interconnected and still very much driven by oil and fossil fuels in general. You can do all the accounting tricks you want, but developed Western lifestyles, especially in the US, are entirely supported and made possible by growing global fossil fuel usage.
Retric 8 minutes ago [-]
> Do you want to take a wild guess as to which country is a top 3 importer to all of these countries/regions?
So you clearly don’t actually understand global trade if you think being top 3 trading partner somehow drastically changes the equation here. China is a massive economy with 1/6th of the worlds population, so yes it does a lot of trade but economies are a lot more than just trade.
epistasis 32 minutes ago [-]
That's a bit out of date, it's likely that China has already peaked. And it's not oil but coal that they tend to burn.
Renewables are cheaper than coal and oil energy, so we will see an increase in quality of life as China electrifies, at least for those of us that import Chinese manufactured goods.
Oil is mostly for people's cars, for an unsustainable transit system that locks us in little boxes and kills all our salmon and is one of the greatest threats to the lives of our children. Getting rid of oil and coal is going to be a loooot easier than getting rid of our car infrastructure.
hanspeter 24 minutes ago [-]
> 100k deaths in Europe that can be prevented if they lifted restrictions on AC
Please don’t repeat this anti-Europe myth. Anyone applying a bit of common sense should realize how improbable that claim is.
triceratops 12 minutes ago [-]
> Ironic OECD countries actually REDUCED their emissions based on a peak in 2007
OECD countries' past emissions are causing the warming we see today.
> and continue to do so
China's emissions declined last year. The US's increased.
> It's all China, but I guess it's cool to blame things on developed countries.
China used their emissions to make solar and batteries the cheapest source of electricity today.
gzread 2 hours ago [-]
China is some years behind our industrial development then undevelopment, and is building an entire USA of solar panels every year or whatever - can we expect them to quickly reduce emissions soon?
epistasis 27 minutes ago [-]
A year ago, the IEA thought China's emissions had peaked:
> can we expect [China] to quickly reduce emissions soon?
They did, last year.
bko 2 hours ago [-]
I thought the world and civilization would collapse because of carbon emissions. It's either serious or it's not. If it's serious then it doesn't really matter right?
It's like you're on a boat that sprung a leak and everyone grabs a bucket. But a few people choose to not help because it's not fair for whatever reason.
squibonpig 1 hours ago [-]
Are you a climate change doesn't matter guy or a china is the climate change causer guy? You can't do both at once.
triceratops 10 minutes ago [-]
To deniers both arguments are valid - just use whichever one is more convincing to the person you're talking to. The objective is continue using fossil fuels no matter what.
bko 54 minutes ago [-]
I'm pointing out the hypocrisy and the focus people have on developed countries is just signaling. A weird anti-west sentiment from people who almost exclusively live a wealthy life in the west.
I'm not an expert, but from what I have read I believe humans do have an effect on climate. However this doesn't mean that any draconian measure that would essentially impose one world government and population control (which is the inevitable outcome of all of this) is preferable. But more importantly I'm anti stupid measures like restricting air-conditioning because they make a negligible impact and literally kill 100k+ people a year.
lukeschlather 20 minutes ago [-]
China has roughly .4 AC units per person while the USA has roughly 1 AC unit per person. You are simultaneously arguing everyone should have an AC, and that China should stop expanding their usage of AC.
I'd argue everyone should have an AC if they need one (probably China needs more than they have.) But we shouldn't build any more fossil fuel extraction, people who need AC should figure out how to do it with batteries and renewable energy. (Nuclear is fine, if it makes sense economically.) We don't need population control, we just need to add sufficiently large taxes on things we want less of. AC isn't a thing we want less of, it's carbon emissions.
__s 51 minutes ago [-]
To your metaphor, their point is that if everyone is grabbing buckets while someone else is working to spring more leaks, maybe someone needs to set aside their bucket & stop the person springing leaks
thfuran 1 hours ago [-]
What?
bko 1 hours ago [-]
The point is that China is the only thing that matters at this point. It's a lot bigger, has surpassed OECD and is growing quickly. Every decline of emissions by developed countries is more than made up for by growing China emissions
To add to this, no matter what countries do, we can make our local environments nicer to live in by reducing pollution but across the globe, solar activity has exponentially more, and the ultimate impact. With the magnetic field weakening, it's going to continue going in this direction as it has throughout history.
I'm not saying we shouldn't do what we can to make our local environment better and protect and Preserve what we have. We absolutely should. I'm just stating that this is not the first time the Earth has heated or cooled and nothing that we do will ultimately stop it from this cycle from continuing.
HappyPanacea 56 minutes ago [-]
> There are literally 100k deaths in Europe that can be prevented if they lifted restrictions on AC so that they can feel good about making a negligible effect on carbon emissions.
What restrictions are there on AC?
bko 48 minutes ago [-]
Several EU countries have mandatory temperature limits for air conditioning in public buildings. Spain, Italy, and Greece have all announced that A/C in public buildings cannot be set lower than 27C (80F) in summer Some exceptions allow up to 25C like restaurants and some work places.
The EU's F-Gas Regulation creates significant restrictions on refrigerants used in air conditioning
There's significant red tape when installing AC due to building regulations
90% of US homes have AC while only 20% of European homes have it, I don't think that's by accident.
Fun fact, some EU countries even have laws telling you how much you can open your windows! In the UK, there is a law that in any public building, windows must not open more than 100mm (about 4 inches).
maxglute 26 minutes ago [-]
Euro intransience about AC is confusing.
As for PRC, they brrrted out enough solar last year to replace about 40 billion barrels of oil over their life time, or about annual global consumption of oil @100m barrels per day. They have enough renewable manufacturing capacity to displace global oil, lng and good chunk of coal.
PRC is basically manufacturing the largest carbon displacement, i.e. emission avoidance system in the world, and if not for them, global fossil consumption would double+.
It's even more retarded accounting that taxes PRC manufacturing renewables as generation emissions while fossils extractors, i.e. US whose massively increased oil/lng exports do not count towards US emissions.
At the end of the day, PRC's balance of emissions vs how much they displace via renewable manufacturing makes their emission contribution net negative, by a large margin. OCED countries reducing their emissions don't even compare in terms of contribution, it's borderline performative. OCED need to be reducing emissions and generating equivalent displacement to be net negative. It doesn't have to be domestic net negative, simply export/fund enough renewables to developing countries whose power consumption and downstream emissions will increase by magnitudes... you know subsidize them like OECD was suppose to do. Reality is rich countries don't want to do shit about the "global" emission problem, at least PRC selling renewables at commodity pricing to displace velocity of fossil consumption increase. Ultimately, 4 billion developing people going to 10/100x their energy consumption, which like AC is net moral good over net emissions. The real battle is how to keep new power use as emission free as possible, and only PRC is doing that in numbers that matter.
Wanking over OCED reducing their emissions is overlooking OCED was suppose to help developing countries minimize (not reduce) as they grow. All OCED has to do is give PRC renewables the 100b they once pledged on to help developing countries transition for PRC to run renewables manufacturing at 100% utilization (or even expand) so significant % of new power generation is renewables. 100b at current PRC prices of $0.1O/watt buys about 1000GW of panels (enough to power all of Africa & India and more). Or OECD can manufacture at sell at/below cost themselves.
nicoburns 2 hours ago [-]
A reminder that reducing emissions isn't enough. We actually need them to be net-negative.
epistasis 25 minutes ago [-]
Eventually we want to get there, post 2050, but at a very low rate compared to our net emissions right now. Still, it's far cheaper to avoid emitting now than it is to pull it down later, so every time you drive your kids to school remember the debt you are saddling them with.
energy123 3 hours ago [-]
The initial pain will be diffuse and not obviously caused by global warming.
For example, destabilization of equatorial countries due to wet bulb temperatures, through multiple causal paths: worse education outcomes (many days off school during hot months), worse economy (can't work outside), worse life satisfaction -> more autocracies, more water scarcity.
Then you get more emigration to the colder north, more conflict and more suffering. But not much of it is easily and directly attributable to temperatures.
Much of it is foregone upside, like GDP growth that's 3% instead of 5%.
ACCount37 2 hours ago [-]
That's the sum of climate change. "GDP growth of 3% instead of 5%."
Severe enough to be noticeable, but not severe enough to warrant radical climate action. Not an extinction threat. A "slow trickle of economic damage, some amount of otherwise preventable death and suffering, diffused across the entire world, applied unevenly, and spread thin across many decades" threat.
And stopping the GHG emissions demands radical, coordinated global action. Major emitters would have to pay local costs now - for the sake of global benefits many decades down the line. And those emitters are not the countries that face the worst climate risks. Global superpowers can tolerate climate change - it's countries that already struggle as it is, that don't have the resources to adapt or mitigate damage, that can face a significant uptick in death and suffering rather than damage in the realm of economics.
That makes climate action a very hard sell for the politicians. Thus the tepid response.
By now, I'm convinced that the only viable approaches to climate change lie in the realm of geoengineering. Which does not require multilateral coordinated action against a "tragedy of commons" scenario, and is cheaper than forcing local GHG emissions into negatives.
Even non-permanent geoengineering solutions offset impacts here and now - thus buying time for fossil fuel energy to succumb to the economic advantage of renewables. And geoengineering measures can be enacted unilaterally by many powers - as long as the political will is there to absorb a few strongly worded condemnation letters.
gzread 2 hours ago [-]
And then when the GDP finally collapses, there will have been nothing that could be done about it for the last 50 years and they'll ask wtf we were doing in 2040, why we didn't stop it then.
ACCount37 1 hours ago [-]
That's the nasty thing. It doesn't "finally collapse".
The world just eats the climate costs and keeps going.
There's no global catastrophe. No single moment when the magnitude of your folly is revealed to you a blinding flash. Just a slow trickle of "2% worse".
adrian_b 57 minutes ago [-]
Whether there will be a global catastrophe or not, it is unknown yet and unpredictable.
There are many mechanisms of positive feedback that can accelerate global warming instead of just reaching an equilibrium at a higher average temperature than now.
If some of those mechanisms of positive feedback would be triggered, a global catastrophe would be possible, due to the excessive speed of the climate change, which does not give enough time for the biosphere to adapt to it.
Instead of hoping that we will be lucky, it would have been much better to avoid such risks and prevent further increases in CO2 concentration and average temperature.
I am old enough to have seen a dramatic change in climate from the time when I was a child, when the seasons were still exactly as they had been described for centuries and millennia at that location in Europe, to the present time, when winters are no colder than autumns were before and I have never used again my winter clothes and boots for about 15 years.
I find such a radical change during my lifetime quite scary and I see no evidence for claims that "the world will keep going". The truth is that nobody knows whether this will be true and hoping that this will happen without doing anything to guarantee such an outcome is reckless.
ACCount37 49 minutes ago [-]
There is not enough "positive feedback" going around in the system to do anything of the sort.
Plenty of feedback mechanisms were proposed, investigated, and found lacking. It's a "makes climate change 10% worse than it would otherwise have been" kind of thing, not a "makes climate change 1000% worse than it would otherwise have been" kind of thing.
gzread 42 minutes ago [-]
Making the temperature rise 10% worse doesn't mean the GDP impact won't be 1000% worse.
gzread 1 hours ago [-]
There's only so much worse things can get before the fundamentals of civilization aren't there any more. 3 meals a day from anarchy.
ACCount37 1 hours ago [-]
The world got hit with WW2 and moved on. It takes a lot to destroy "the fundamentals of civilization" on a global level. Climate change is woefully insufficient.
applfanboysbgon 1 hours ago [-]
The problem is that we will not move on from WW3, and famine, water depletion, resource exhaustion etc. are all existential problems for individual countries that will cause conflicts between previously peaceful nations. At some point the nations in conflict will have alliances and nuclear weapons, and people will use them when the choice is between that or starving to death by the millions. I would be somewhat more optimistic about humanity's ability to weather worsening circumstances if we didn't develop the human extinction button in all of our grand technological wisdom.
ACCount37 53 minutes ago [-]
Climate change is not the great equalizer people want it to be.
Nuclear superpowers are among the least likely countries to actually collapse from climate damage.
US isn't Syria, and it's Syria that's at risk.
First world countries like France can absorb a +30% spike to food prices. Countries where the same food price spike would come with a major death toll don't have the tools to kick off WW3.
applfanboysbgon 47 minutes ago [-]
Pakistan and North Korea have nuclear weapons. What makes you think that other countries won't develop them when push comes to shove? Right now the status quo is such that smaller countries find violating international sanctions on nuclear weapon development to be disadvantageous (no immediate benefit from having them; expensive to have them; economic punishment for having them). The calculus on the status quo changes considerably when famine or other ecological disasters are threatening to wipe out half your population. Is the US going to invade all potential nuclear weapons developers like it did with Iran? Do you have complete confidence that will always work and never escalate towards anything larger?
ACCount37 20 minutes ago [-]
You know it. The country that was probably the closest to "developing nuclear weapons" is currently in the process of being bombed to shit for it.
Not the only reason, no. But their nuclear ambitions certainly did contribute to their current predicament.
Nuclear weapons take time, expertize, resources and sustained political will to develop and deploy. If you have all of that, you might be able to put all of that towards climate adaptation instead. Or: go for the nukes and bet hard that you aren't going to get bombed to shit for it. Worked out for NK, but doesn't seem to have worked for Iran.
Not to mention that merely having a nuclear bomb doesn't automatically allow one to cause WW3. Nuclear weapons were used in a world war already, and that didn't even destroy a single country - let alone the world. It takes a lot of nukes, and a lot of delivery mechanisms, to actually move the needle on the matter of human civilization existing.
JumpCrisscross 22 minutes ago [-]
> Is the US going to invade all potential nuclear weapons developers like it did with Iran?
Invade? No. Bomb? Probably. Same if for India if e.g. Sri Lanka decides it wants nuclear weapons.
Global warming will unfortunately disproportionately hit poor, equatorial countries. (Also, starving countries can’t afford a nuclear programme. There is no breakout risk in Sudan.)
gzread 41 minutes ago [-]
WW2 hit the higher layers of abstraction. You could still grow food plants in those countries during and after the war, but the governance structures were bombed. Climate change is the opposite. If you can't grow food, you're fucked.
marcyb5st 3 hours ago [-]
I am not sure how not directly linked to global warming. I am currently on the phone but I remember a study that mentioned that Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh would see a deadly heat (wet bulb temperatures) from basically 0 as it is right now to 30 days/year by 2050 or 2060. I can't remember right now.
If that is not linkable to global warming I am not sure what is. And that is a huge event. In Europe we are struggling with accomodating perhaps 10M people. What happens when 1.5B come knocking because if they stay they die?
dontwearitout 2 hours ago [-]
Chapter 1 of "The Ministry of the Future" describes a fictional wet bulb event. It's grisly and horrific and I highly recommend you read this chapter, it changed my view on climate change.
> What happens when 1.5B come knocking because if they stay they die?
We sink the boats.
gzread 2 hours ago [-]
Indeed, no reason to expect anything will happen differently from what is currently happening, but on a 150x bigger scale.
skvmb 2 hours ago [-]
Y E S
peterpost2 2 hours ago [-]
Are you that excited to see innocent people die?
Or am I misunderstanding your comment?
boutell 2 hours ago [-]
Patricia Anthony published a novel about this in '93. Cold Allies. It's good military sci fi. Doesn't pretend to offer answers.
cess11 2 hours ago [-]
"What happens when 1.5B come knocking because if they stay they die?"
More taxes go to ammunition for autonomous border guard systems.
rapind 2 hours ago [-]
> "What happens when 1.5B come knocking because if they stay they die?"
You think that’s bad... Up here in Canada we’ll have to deal with Murican immigrants as things heat up. Talk about killing the vibe.
un-diletante 2 hours ago [-]
I think the least of your worries will be immigrants when an imperialistic nation with superior military power realizes that the annexation of your land is necessary for its survival.
rapind 1 hours ago [-]
I actually am moderately concerned with that to be honest. If the US doesn't have free and fair midterms I don't think it's really that paranoid to be worried about it.
asdff 1 hours ago [-]
Why would the US annex canada? It is already in the american hegemony.
JumpCrisscross 21 minutes ago [-]
To distract from the Epstein files.
wizzwizz4 2 hours ago [-]
This is not inevitable. We have time, now, to prepare for the future, which doesn't have to be a carbon copy of today.
wkat4242 2 hours ago [-]
Right now things are getting worse in that regard, not better
jedberg 2 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately most political systems around the world reward short term results, not long term thinking.
Just look here in the USA -- the Democrats tried to do some forward thinking things like subsidizing solar and wind, and they were rewarded by losing at the ballot box (of course that isn't the only reason, but it's one of many).
There are no rewards for long term thinking, so it's hard to get anyone to do it.
deaux 58 minutes ago [-]
> (of course that isn't the only reason, but it's one of many).
This is disingenuous. It's one of many in that it may have contributed 0.0001%. If they wouldn't have done that, would they currently have more power? Absolutely not, believing otherwise means being clueless about what has motivated people to vote in certain ways.
jedberg 55 minutes ago [-]
It's definitely more than .0001%. Look at the campaigns. How much time did the GOP spend harping on windmills and solar subsidies and "clean coal". Calling out democrats for trying to make the environment better at extra cost to US citizens was a huge part of their campaign.
deaux 36 minutes ago [-]
I expected you to say this, but hoped you wouldn't. Of course I know they talk about it. GOP campaigns say and do a lot of things, there's dozens of topics they shout about. From Benghazi to Hillary's Emails to gender-neutral emails to immigrants to indeed coal/renewables and so on. You could easily name 30 topics.
The topics have different purposes. Fossil fuels vs renewables in particular hasn't won the reps a single race, I repeat. Every race they've won, they would've won without it. And every race they've lost, they would've lost without it. The purpose of bringing up that particular topic for them isn't to help win close races.
jedberg 31 minutes ago [-]
> The purpose of bringing up that particular topic for them isn't to help win close races.
How can you possibly know this? How could you know what is in the mind of every voter and why they make the choice they do?
They bring it up for a reason -- because their research says talking about helps them win elections.
wizzwizz4 2 hours ago [-]
So, those of us with no suede in this race, who will see no reward from the system anyway, are the only people who can be trusted to make change. That means you and I (and I dare say a significant portion of the populace).
It's not obvious what we can do (individual actions taken within the context of a system are dwarfed by structural forces of the system), but we're the only ones who are going to do it. So, let's assume we did fix things, and we're looking back from 2050, doing a retrospective. What things did we end up doing, that got us to that point?
jedberg 2 hours ago [-]
There's nothing you as an individual can do, or even a small group of individuals. This is where government is supposed to work. Using its power to force everyone to do something for the collective good that isn't profitable.
Almost all emissions come from factories. There are only two ways to reduce that -- a global set of rules that increases costs to reduce emissions, and an overall reduction in consumption, via a carbon tax.
bryanlarsen 46 minutes ago [-]
> Almost all emissions come from factories.
industry, electricity and home use (heating & A/C mostly) are all roughly 30% of emissions.
But I agree with you about solutions. The market will quickly bankrupt any companies that induce extra costs to decarbonify. It's the governments job to ensure that externalized costs like CO2 emissions are internalized via carbon taxes.
wizzwizz4 1 hours ago [-]
Factories are staffed by people. Those people have the physical capability to change the way the factories operate. Any individual person attempting to modify / replace the factory equipment against their line manager's will would quickly find themselves out of a job, but collective action among factory workers (e.g. unions) might work. So might getting the line managers on board with the proposal, if you can get enough buy-in that "we used our discretion" is an acceptable answer: it's not like most companies actively want to pollute, rather that it's usually cheaper to do so, and they don't care about not. Being able to say "this move reduces turnover among our workers, slashing training costs; and you can probably use it in the B2B / B2C [delete as appropriate] marketing, since environmentalism sells in some markets; and this way, we're prepared for future legislation expected in jurisdictions A, B and C" may be sufficient justification. Alternatively, there may be ways to exploit the principal-agent problem.
I'm sure there are people who've specced out detailed proposals for this sort of thing. There might even be previous cases where they've succeeded, which we can learn from. Neither of those "two ways" you mentioned are things that I can do, but I may be able to slightly reduce the intensity of the opposition. (Companies tend to like when regulations require their competitors to do things they're already doing, after all.)
cess11 34 minutes ago [-]
Sure, but if you were to make that concrete, what would you recommend and where do you see potential for it to be implemented?
numpad0 2 hours ago [-]
> What happens when 1.5B come knocking because if they stay they die?
Like let them build few of those sci-fi domes and let them keep buying disposable bottled oxygen? I don't get the pessimism. India makes its own rockets. Pakistan has nukes. Why are they supposed to be incapable of holding the nation together on Mars-like Earth?
Tokyo is already hitting 40C/100F at >90% RH during summers. It's already mildly unsurvivable. Nobody cares. Maybe in 10-20 years we'd be wearing spacesuits, but do anyone seriously think the equatorial regions will be uninhabitable and land prices on northern Europe is going to skyrocket???
asdff 1 hours ago [-]
The fact people already live in some of the hottest places in the world today should speak a little to human resiliency.
realo 54 minutes ago [-]
"Migration to the colder north..."
Maybe that's why the Trump regime wants so badly to invade Canada and the Groenland?
morkalork 2 hours ago [-]
Wasn't a drought originally part of the cause of Syria's collapse into civil war? Climate change is already causing unrest in equitorial countries, mass migration and a corresponding rise in authoritarianism / right wing populism in Europe.
parineum 2 hours ago [-]
You're making the "It's snowing there can't be global warming" argument in reverse.
One local drought can't be attributed to or be proof of global warming.
It's like smoking causing lung cancer; (the following numbers are made up) 5 in 100 non-smokers might get lung cancer but 20 in 100 smokers do. 5 of those smokers would have gotten lung cancer anyway and 15 wouldn't have but there's no way to know which individuals are in which cohort.
gzread 2 hours ago [-]
Not necessarily. Climate change means there will be more droughts; and if droughts cause civil war, there will be more civil war (that's the GP's relevance); even if we can't tell which ones were caused by global warming, that's still bad.
morkalork 1 hours ago [-]
Oh no, on the contrary, I'm saying it's already started and people aren't paying attention.
asib 3 hours ago [-]
Developed rich countries are hurting. See the wildfires across North America, massive amounts of flooding across Europe, etc.
Nothing will change until many of the global electorate stop burying their heads in the sand. These people don't change their minds until things affect them specifically. Then they change their mind, and all their former fellows tell them they're brainwashed.
This doesn't change until nearly everyone is affected, and by then we're so far into the catastrophe that the consequences don't even bear thinking about.
jcfrei 2 hours ago [-]
I have a different take: Things will change once a big part of the electorate no longer feels like climate change policies will hurt their pocket. A lot of the opposition to the policies are from people who aren't in the richer percentiles and probably work in a field that's related to fossil fuels (like heating engineers, car mechanics, etc.). They fear job losses and that their commute and heating bills go up.
cogman10 2 hours ago [-]
I have a different different take. It's not the electorate's pocketbook that matters, it's the political donors pocketbook that matters.
"Drill baby drill" will be echoed so long as petroleum companies and petroleum rich nations dump billions into propaganda outlets, politician campaigns, and in the US, PAC groups to support "drill baby drill" friendly politicians.
So long as that dynamic exists, it doesn't matter if 80% of the electorate screams for change. So long as the incumbent advantage exists forcing people to vote mostly on social issues, these sorts of economic and world affecting issues will simply be ignored.
There's a reason, to this day, you'll find Democrats talk about the wonders of fracking, clean coal, and carbon capture.
IDK how to change this other than first identifying the issue. Our politicians are mostly captured by their donors. That's the only will they really care about enacting.
jcfrei 2 hours ago [-]
Not sharing your take of the electorate's powerlessness at all. It's not an overwhelming majority (only 57% of voters in the US: https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/54124-nearly-half-american...) which thinks they need to do more about climate change. I think most politicians are in tune with their voters - you need to change the people's minds if you want stricter policies. Refine the question a bit more and ask people if they still want to do more against climate change if some basic necessities in their life will get more expensive and you will likely even drop below 50%.
cogman10 2 hours ago [-]
Well part of that 43% I think have their opinions primarily because of propaganda from the same donors who are buying off the politicians.
But also, I'd point out that even in the Democrat party where this is more of an 80:20 issue with their constituents, the democrats are still far too friendly to fossil fuels (Biden, for example, specifically campaigned on how much he loves natural gas, fracking, and carbon capture).
This isn't the only 80:20 issue where democrat politicians are out of alignment with their base. That's also what informs my pessimism.
gzread 2 hours ago [-]
Solar power is cheaper than oil, but it doesn't work 24/7. If you can find a way to work with that, switching to solar is already financially incentivised. Even if you can't, we're already seeing whole countries and regions saturating at 100% solar electricity during daylight hours, significantly reducing oil usage. It doesn't matter what the oil sellers want, because it's a buyer's market for energy when the sun is out, and they're not going to throw extra money at oil companies just because.
asib 2 hours ago [-]
Not responding to climate change is hurting everyone's pocket. Home insurance premiums are obscene in some places. Energy insecurity due to reliance on fossil fuels sourced from overseas (particularly relevant right now with the US war on Iran and Russian war on Ukraine). Extreme temperatures mean we either spend more money on heating/cooling our homes or, if you're not wealthy enough to pay, you pay by having to endure the temperature extremes.
jcfrei 2 hours ago [-]
Not disputing that it will hurt everyone's pocket. But politically it is very fraught to push for policies that will benefit a new group of people (wind turbine engineers, solar cell installers) at the expense of an established group (gas turbine mechanics, fuel truck drivers). And for the home owners: It's not hurting them on a broad enough level - people who oppose climate change policies probably just don't care about homes in the coastal areas getting flooded - maybe because most of the opposition lives further inland.
deaux 55 minutes ago [-]
> Not responding to climate change is hurting everyone's pocket
No it's not. There's a large group of people whose pockets are being lined by it. A large group of billionaires.
virgildotcodes 2 hours ago [-]
The universe was not built to cater to our desires. We can't have our cake and eat it too.
Virtually all economic activity consumes resources and energy, directly or indirectly, and in the process creates ghg emissions.
If we want to curb climate change and our emissions, it necessarily means we're going to take an economic hit.
We either do that willingly with some degree of ability to exercise control along the way, or be forced by physics to take an even worse economic hit and face vastly more death and suffering without our hands on the wheel.
There's no option where we don't get our pockets hurt.
jcfrei 2 hours ago [-]
Same reply to you as the other commentator: Fully agree that not doing anything will hurt more. The hard part is finding policies that actually work without costing the lower and middle class more right now. The conservatives basically everywhere around the world are against redistribution - so they ideologically oppose anything that looks like it. At the same time if we just enact policies that limit CO2 the rich people won't really care that flying, heating, driving and some foods have gotten a bit more expensive. But the poor people will. And of the ones who would get hurt by the higher prices a lot of them are ideologically opposed to any kind of redistributing policies. So you are kind of stuck in a catch-22 for now.
gzread 2 hours ago [-]
An interesting policy proposal is negative tax. Basically take the carbon cap, divide by the number of people, and give the equivalent carbon tax price to each person. A person who uses exactly average carbon sees no change, while a person who uses less gets a tax rebate, and a person who uses more pays more. You can charge it at the source, tariffing oil by its carbon content and then reducing taxes by that amount for everyone.
jcfrei 1 hours ago [-]
Again - poor people, which:
- still drive old cars with lots of CO2 emissions
- live far away from their workplace
- probably have a poorly isolated home with oil or gas heating
will be the ones with higher than average emissions. And the rich people who do will just shrug at this minor extra expense. I feel like this is not mentioned enough in discussions (probably because wealth disparity is such a touchy subject) but your ability to reduce your carbon footprint is also directly tied to your wealth.
gzread 1 hours ago [-]
The average would also include rich people - if rich people are using far above average and poor people are using slightly above average, who's below average?
deaux 47 minutes ago [-]
> The hard part is finding policies that actually work without costing the lower and middle class more right now
You imprison the current administration for treason, seize their ill-gotten gains and there you go, hundreds of billions of dollars.
It's absolutely trivial. There's just a group of people that doesn't want it.
Simultaneously institute an inheritance tax as well as an exit tax of 90% of assets above $1+ billion, at time of death or leaving. That's a cool $1+ trillion in revenue for the next few decades. Both exit taxes and inheritance taxes are very established and work fine in plenty of countries, FYI. Not like yearly wealth taxes that are always criticized as not working or untested.
It's trivial to come up with policies that don't hurt the lower nor the middle class. Laughably easy. There's however a group of people that are blocking them. Those people are the problem and their blocks need to be removed to get closer to preventing then oncoming extinction event (which has complete scientific consesus). These policies work, and what needa to be done is removing of their blockers.
Come on now everyone, at least give an argument before you downvote. Warren Buffet is set to give away 99% of his wealth, so it's clearly possible. Humanity can no longer depend on the others to have the same basic decency as he does - clearly he's the exception, the others don't have it.
siruncledrew 2 hours ago [-]
Until climate plans align with short-term personal incentives, I don't see how there's going to be any serious persistent fight against climate change.
People might feel benevolent one day and do something good, but the next day when they are faced with a problem and the environment is a convenient trash can or resource bin, they'll go right back to those bad habits.
The only way things will change is if everyone's life gets made miserable by the effects.
selectodude 2 hours ago [-]
Eh, until “owning the libs” stops being a very valid electoral strategy, I think that’s optimistic.
Not sure how we fix that either.
arrowleaf 2 hours ago [-]
Wildfires across North America really scare me. I live in a valley in the west where wildfire smoke from not only our state but surrounding states comes in and settles, leaving an AQI over 150 for most of late July through September.
Not only climate change, but aggressive firefighting over the past 50 or more years has caused a lot of material low in the fire ladder to accumulate, which in natural or at least pre-Columbian forests would be cleared out by routine fires. Brush and deadfall for example. The larger trees in healthy forests don't succumb to fire, but these fires have been decimating whole stands of trees. Pair that with almost zero snowpack this year, the only positive thing I can say is that I'm glad I can enjoy spring a bit earlier this year.
BikiniPrince 15 minutes ago [-]
The wild fires are entirely because of lack of management. This is why insurance companies noped out. The crazies believe it is an environment impact to manage the lands and then it all burns down. At least someone can blame the fires on something else. I guess it’s a win?
marcyb5st 2 hours ago [-]
I agree. Also, we already tried to rely on the goodwill of the people and here we are with warming speeding up.
We need some mechanism that penalizes polluters, benefits low emitters, and stops/limits/taxes/... worldwide shipping when local alternatives are available to avoid these [1] abominations.
The problem is humans are really bad at perceiving externalities at this scale, cause / effect between small actions and large effects, and effects that play out over the span of their lifetime rather than the span of their day. The denialist rationale shifted over the years from doubting the very basis of the science, to claiming its just a short term blip, to its natural long term cycles, to … everything that involves not looking up.
I think the truth is we won’t really take this seriously globally until the changes are so severe that it’ll take generations to undo if ever.
kakacik 1 hours ago [-]
Politicians, at least freely elected, are a symptom of given population at given time. Don't blame trump for trump, he made it painfully obvious to whole world who he is and who he certainly is not, sort of kudos to him for being consistent.
Blame fully the people who saw all this and voted for him twice. At least if you care about root of the problems and not just venting off. I am not offering a solution to educating half of US population which clearly doesn't care about facts, or lacks any basic moral compass... I don't have a practical solution.
US 'special' form of voted democracy failed and failed hard, lets see how far this gets in next 3 years and if any actual lessons learned happen afterwards (I don't hold my breath since reality doesn't behave just because it would be nice and viable time to act is gone I think).
thinkcontext 1 hours ago [-]
> Blame fully the people who saw all this and voted for him twice
Thrice actually
xienze 2 hours ago [-]
Aren’t all these developed countries voluntarily self-depopulating by way of having birth rates below replacement? Seems like the problem will sort itself out if we can resist the urge to invite the entire third world to come in and instantly raise their carbon footprint to first world levels.
adrianN 2 hours ago [-]
That effect is much too slow.
socalgal2 3 hours ago [-]
What have you done? Why is it someone else’s problem?
wing-_-nuts 3 hours ago [-]
It's a collective problem that we all have to solve together. I'm doing my part. What have YOU done?
lotsofpulp 6 minutes ago [-]
I don't know how much surface area you consume, but the single biggest cause of energy use is spread out living in detached single family homes in the USA and other developed countries.
All the recycling, solar panels, electric cars, whatever don't come close to making up for the fact that each family of 4 living on a 0.1+ acre lot with all the various setbacks and whatnot, commuting many miles to work and school and grocery stores and the gym, moving all that mass of people, students, workers, food, water, sewage, trash, gas, etc is orders more consumption than if people were living in dense arrangements such as apartments in 4 and 5 story buildings.
Energy = Force * distance
From what I can tell, none of it means anything as long as detached single family homes are still the expected lifestyle, at current populations. Might as well consume as much as we can while we ride into the sunset, or cull the population quickly.
asib 2 hours ago [-]
I've voted for parties that care about addressing the climate catastrophe.
It's obviously someone else's problem if that someone refuses to accept there's a climate catastrophe.
deaux 46 minutes ago [-]
> What have you done?
Made a shitload of sacrifices, how about you?
kelvinjps10 3 hours ago [-]
How does he has the power to change it?
jmcgough 2 hours ago [-]
The top three emissions sources are industry, electricity, and transportation. There have been important federal and state-wide attempts to address these, but Trump guts regulation every time he's in office. Chevron is dead, SCOTUS repeatedly rules to let big business do whatever they want, and we're now burning even more coal to meet AI energy demand.
Compare this to China, where the government is aggressively promoting green energy and electric car tech.
tsunamifury 2 hours ago [-]
China is the number one burner of coal and other dirty fuels and only growing. This type of disingenuous analysis really sets the wrong understanding of the world.
jmcgough 1 hours ago [-]
China has 4x our population and emits 1/3 less per capita. They've also been flat or falling for the last 21 months. US emissions rose by 2.4% last year.
Furthermore, because carbon emissions stay trapped in the atmosphere for hundreds or thousands of years, one should also note that the US is responsible for more than a quarter of cumulative emissions, twice as much as China.
I'm more interested in solving the problem than assigning blame, but it baffles me when people argue that we shouldn't need to focus on this because it's really China's fault.
gzread 1 hours ago [-]
It's also the number one producer of solar energy and growing. It's just a huge country with a lot of everything. Can we help them use more solar?
jmye 2 hours ago [-]
What an odd question. Is this just the "and yet you participate in society" meme trying to act as insightful conversation, or did you have something to actually say?
newsoftheday 56 minutes ago [-]
> See the wildfires across North America
I asked Gemini, "How long have wildfires across North America happened and are they truly any worse now?"
"Wildfires have occurred across North America for millions of years, predating humans entirely." It also had some very detailed information backing that up.
I then asked, "Were any of those fires in the past 20 years started by arsonists?"
"Yes, arson is a significant factor in North American wildfires, though it is often overshadowed by accidental human causes (like downed power lines or unattended campfires) and natural causes like lightning."
islandfox100 46 minutes ago [-]
Well if Gemini says fires have existed, that's enough proof!!!!
abound 3 hours ago [-]
I've been mentally tabulating a list of reasons rich (and/or older) people should care about climate change, even if you're only looking out for your own interests:
- Your children and younger family members will have to deal with this
- Climate change is causing increasingly worse turbulence for airplanes
- It will disproportionately affect your favorite vacation spots
- Probably something about stock markets and pensions - a world constantly wracked with increasingly severe natural disasters isn't the most economically productive one
Findecanor 3 hours ago [-]
- The availability of food that you use often to get through your day, such as Arabica coffee and chocolate.
01100011 2 hours ago [-]
"Your children and younger family members will have to deal with this."
If my 50 years on the planet has taught me anything, it's that this is not a sufficient motivation the current generation in power.
cute_boi 12 minutes ago [-]
Yeah, they’ll just close their eyes and say our kids will figure something out.
nullhole 2 hours ago [-]
Wildfires have to be a big one as well, the time range and geographic range is growing on a seemingly yearly basis.
Related, home insurance cost increases (and, in places, unavailability) from wildfires & worsening storms hits the pocketbook directly.
9rx 7 minutes ago [-]
> - Climate change is causing increasingly worse turbulence for airplanes
Cutting out air travel is the single most accessible and impactful thing an individual can do with respect to climate change. You can stop turbulence from getting worse, but since you won't be flying in the first place...
niels8472 2 hours ago [-]
You should consider it's much easier rich people to deal with the fallout from climate change (or living in a failed/failing state for that matter) than for poor people. Plus they often have interests in the things that are causing the issue(s) in the first place. Additionally, the children argument is probably the most powerful, but they would probably expect their children to be rich too. All in all I'm doubtful the arguments you are providing have any effect.
asdff 1 hours ago [-]
I think there is a level of working class poor where it hardly makes a difference what goes on to the world around your life as you are working paycheck to paycheck with much of your available time regardless. How worse it could get doesn’t look appreciably different than how bad it can get already.
A little higher up the economic pole is who stands to lose the most. Those are the people who will see actual quality of life reductions and not be able to afford to return to old norms.
throwawaysleep 3 hours ago [-]
None of that would matter. Farmers are going bankrupt and losing family land and yet...
There are a certain number of people who just cannot change. There are large numbers of diabetics who die despite an enormous number of warnings.
cryptoegorophy 3 hours ago [-]
Climate change is not the main cause for turbulence.
lovecg 2 hours ago [-]
In an indirect way it kind of is though. At the end of the day there’s more energy trapped in the atmosphere (stronger jet streams, more frequent and stronger frontal weather)
mrintegrity 2 hours ago [-]
As you are probably aware, the op didn't say that it was
DennisP 2 hours ago [-]
And since perhaps a source would be helpful, here's the research saying climate change is having a significant effect:
> Nothing will change until developed rich countries are starting to hurt.
There are two clear parallel points to this:
1. Over the time frames we're discussing (even the next 50 years) how many "poor" countries will there be left? We're seeing substantial progress on economic, educational, and other fronts over the past 50 years.
2. Will there ever be a time when the change occurring is direct and over a short enough time frame to matter to "rich" countries? Yes, it will suck if most of Florida is underwater, but this process has already started, and has been going on for 20, 30, 50 years? And most people care very little. If it takes a century for the state to completely submerge, that apathy will continue.
Disclaimer: none of the above is saying we should or shouldn't take a particular course of action about warming, just to speak to the way people deal with very slow-moving issues.
willis936 3 hours ago [-]
This is why I think the middle strength Global South countries, who hurt the most in the near term and have the necessary resources, will unilaterally start albedo modification. They don't need permission of rich nations and it will become an existential issue that they might risk sanctions and war over. That's when it will become "our problem" (in the eyes of the extremely selfish and/or stupid members).
gman83 3 hours ago [-]
I think it'll start hurting sooner than that. We're already seeing property insurance rates spiking, and in some places it's even impossible to get property insurance. We could well be up for a 2008-level real estate crash. That should get Americans' attention.
californical 2 hours ago [-]
I feel like the possible real estate crash could be really interesting.
Even different parts of a city would likely be affected very differently, where the edges near the fire risks crash, and the even mildly safer areas boom with high demand
jmcgough 2 hours ago [-]
Soon, we'll have millions of climate change refugees, battles over resources, regular once-in-a-century storms, more wars. We're close to the point where we'll be too busy thrashing to address the root cause.
gzread 1 hours ago [-]
This isn't a powerful motivator to people who think they will win those wars.
patwater10 47 minutes ago [-]
Look at the Colorado River situation to see how it's affected the US already. Now that hasn't really impacted consumers per say other than through indirect water conservation and higher consumer grocery prices (slightly not a primary driver on the latter). But it's a massive deal that will ripple out more and more in the coming years.
tlogan 2 hours ago [-]
China creates about 30–35% of global emissions. India about 8% but it is climbing fast.
What rich countries do is they just export their factories to other countries and say: look we do not pollute.
patmorgan23 34 minutes ago [-]
Just for reference China has about 17% of the world's population, and India has about 18%.
China has also been deploying lots of renewable and nuclear energy, and their carbon emissions actually falling.
Solar and wind have gotten so cheap we should be able to forgo more fossil fuel deployment in developing nations.
01100011 2 hours ago [-]
CA buying gasoline from Bermuda, shipped via the Panama Canal, because it refuses to allow new refineries is the perfect demonstration of this.
gzread 1 hours ago [-]
That's also kind of a pigovian tax though, right? By making gasoline more expensive they discourage its use. I guess they're chicken to make it an actual tax
Also why wouldn't it come from other US states? Seems easier
vixen99 2 hours ago [-]
Would someone like to explain why the Chinese (if as you say produce 30-35% of global emissions) don't appear to see a problem or at least if alluding to it as they do, fail to do much about it as major contributors of emissions? And then of course there are the countries proud of a relative lack of emissions who are merely exporting the problem to somewhere else, often enough, China.
youngtaff 2 hours ago [-]
Yes, they're still burning coal and gas but China are making huge strides in non CO2 intensive electricity generation
China are the reason solar has become so affordable for the rest of the world
DeepSeaTortoise 2 hours ago [-]
Exactly, this was the whole point of Trump calling climate change a hoax to benefit China, but somehow this got twisted by the media into not denying climate change being an anti-Trump position.
The base then started demanding this from their reps and Trump almost picked up on this himself. It took years to undo that damage and even now we're barely back at a pro-clean air, pro-solar and pro nuclear position...
lukas099 1 hours ago [-]
This is why politicians are usually expected to choose their words carefully. Most of them know that what they say matters and has effects on the real world.
youngtaff 2 hours ago [-]
US is the largest historical emitter… responsible for something like 25% of all man made CO2 emissions
tlogan 2 hours ago [-]
The entire west world contributes 28.8%. US is about 11%. [1]
A lot HAS changed. Europe even has a tax on CO2 emissions.
It's just not enough and it's very hard to convince the public to accelerate when the US not only gave up but it actively reversing to fossil fuels.
NDizzle 2 hours ago [-]
At what European tax rate will China and India work on reducing their CO2 emissions?
jgraham 2 hours ago [-]
China has now had flat CO2 emissions for two years, and experienced a decline in overall CO2 emissions during 2025[1]. Part of this is that they're deploying way more renewables than basically any other large economy [2].
They've also pivoted their industrial strategy so that basically the entire green energy sector depends on Chinese supply chains. This is significantly contributing to their economic growth [3].
I don't know to what extent taxation in Europe contributed to China's decision making here, but it presumably created an market for green energy and therefore helped solidify the economics.
This is of course not to say that there's nothing to criticize in China's environmental policies; there certainly is. But the trope of "why should we do anything because China won't" turns out to be spectacularly ill-informed. Indeed I think it makes more sense to ask the opposite: what are the likely consequences now that China has positioned itself as the global centre of green energy, and what should other countries be doing to ensure that they're not left behind?
I'd argue that many lower and middle class folks already feel the effects of GW, even if they may not be able to articulate it. The flip side is that developed rich countries will hurt because of this but the people in power won't care because it probably only (visibly) affects the lower class, and they can always take their jets and rockets to countries (and eventually planets!) that haven't been fucked.
And they'll spin it to blame it on immigrants somehow.
ToucanLoucan 53 minutes ago [-]
> (and eventually planets!)
This particular point is remarkably optimistic on the part of our ruling elites who genuinely seem to think they'll be abandoning Earth like the Titanic and running off to Mars or whatever. I wonder if it's just wishful thinking or if they genuinely believe living off-terra would be a luxury experience, and not what it far more likely would be, which is hurtling through a void separated from instant death by nothing more than sheet metal, and after months of that, living inside a specially pressurized biosphere on an alien world that is, at all times, trying to kill them. And is almost guaranteed to succeed if nothing else by attrition.
I wonder if any will think as they prepare to die whichever death comes to them first that maybe just paying taxes and not having a private jet wasn't that steep of an ask after all.
I initially supported this comment but no, I think it's worse than this. As rich countries cut back, dirty energy becomes cheaper and developing nations just use more. They'll need to use more just to fight the climate. India, for instance, is going to need a whole lot of air conditioning just to survive.
Sure, blame developed nations for getting us here, but the path forward isn't solely in the hands of those developed nations.
mountainriver 2 hours ago [-]
We are already seeing it in Colorado. Record low snowfall, record heat, record winds; which are a very bad set of conditions for fires.
The power company is now preemptively shutting off our power. Which is really fun in the winter.
I’m honestly not sure about the future of my hometown Boulder. The odds of it fully burning to the ground seem to increase significantly every year.
ragall 1 hours ago [-]
It will take a few fires like the one in LA, but eventually even the USians will learn it's not a good idea to build cities out of wooden houses.
chazburger 2 hours ago [-]
Get your own solar and batteries.
fortedoesnthack 2 hours ago [-]
it depends where you live... I live in Japan now. One comment I hear often and see reflected in old TV shows is how different summers are already. 20-25 years ago it would have been considered a hot summer day around 30c.
Now every summer day is 30c+.
Also, a comment I hear often is that people didn't really need air conditioners back then. You definitely cannot get away with living in Tokyo without an air conditioners these days!
jedberg 2 hours ago [-]
Same with Los Angeles. In the 1950s, when my parents were young, you didn't need AC in LA. You just opened a window on the few hot days, and those were like high 70s/low 80s.
By the 1990s, you didn't need AC, but your home/rental was more appealing if it had one, because there were a few hot days a year that were pretty uncomfortable otherwise.
Now, you can't not have it. There are far too many hot days to live without it.
_whiteCaps_ 39 minutes ago [-]
Same thing here in Vancouver. I took a picture of my car's dash display reading 43*C during the heat dome in 2021!
Aunche 2 hours ago [-]
> Nothing will change until developed rich countries are starting to hurt.
The EU reduced their emissions by over a third from their peak. Their emissions per capita is less than that of China (not meant to be a dig at China who is the leader the development of renewables). Even Americans reduced their CO2 emissions by 15% in absolute terms and by about 30% per capita as well.
Why is it so hard to understand that individual people, let alone hundreds of millions of people in aggregate, can have multiple priorities? This whole doomerist attitude doesn't help anyone. If anything, it contributes to the erosion of the good things we already have. Nobody gave a damn about USAID saving millions of people until it could be weaponized against Trump/Elon for taking it away.
chazburger 2 hours ago [-]
I don’t know, was in Haiti a few months ago and they burn all kinds of shit there.
Gotta get them on solar and wind.
Whatever happened to the Clinton foundation’s billions?
Eddy_Viscosity2 2 hours ago [-]
Nothing will happen until the super rich who define policy begin to hurt. And they won't hurt because they can exploit the situation to become even richer.
utopiah 2 hours ago [-]
> until developed rich countries are starting to hurt.
Well Spain, 12th largest by nominal GDP and the fourth-largest in Europe, isn't exactly poor and yet seems to hurt quite a bit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_in_Spain#Impact... ... but I bet the wealthiest Spaniards have air conditioning, heating, bottled water delivered at home by staff, etc to isolate themselves. That does include politicians.
So... IMHO until the richest of the rich countries hurt, then nothing will change. They (we?) are very sheltered precisely by leveraging their wealth to abstract away from the lowly difficulties of life, like the weather.
TL;DR : yes, but the more insulated feel it less and consequently, rationally, think they have more time thus postponing the process.
tencentshill 1 hours ago [-]
It's going to cause slow, constant refugee crises, which will affect everyone.
thewebguyd 45 minutes ago [-]
> Nothing will change until developed rich countries are starting to hurt.
More specifically, nothing will change until the politicians and billionaires personally get hurt.
The negative effects of climate change need to come for them personally for them to care.
pinkmuffinere 2 hours ago [-]
I think it will change when the people that don't believe in global warming die off, ala 'Science progresses one funeral at a time'. For the US, that's basically Boomers and Gen X [1], so I still think your 10 - 20 years estimate is decent (they don't have to _all_ die, but as more pass away I expect progress)
I wonder if the current war will significantly accelerate the roll out of non-fossil energy. If the Strait of Hormuz stays closed for a few more weeks there's going to be significant pain, not just for energy but things like fertilizer etc. Once you deploy a solar panel it works for 20+ years, conflict doesn't cut you off from energy.
wing-_-nuts 3 hours ago [-]
Nothing will change until billionaires start losing money over it. Then it will be a national priority.
It's also why I've sort of resigned myself to a cynical optimism that the worst won't come to pass. The rich are not going to tolerate losing money. They will force through geoengineering stopgap measures that will save us from catastrophic warming, at the cost of unknown consequences.
This is why I vehemently disagree with those who say we shouldn't be conducting research on geoengineering. It will be done. The only question is, will we have done enough research to understand the potential consequences, or not?
haizhung 2 hours ago [-]
Don’t get cynic. The good news is: the worse it gets, the more impact every single .1 degree of prevented climate change has.
I’m with you in the billionaires. Research has shown again and again that people do care about climate change and want it to be stopped - but only if they have the socioeconomic status to actually care.
If, as so many people on this planet, you are living paycheck to paycheck, and the social security nets are being dismantled by the uber rich, you instead switch into a „protect what’s mine“ mindset. This further exacerbates the tragedy of the commons.
So I am of the following opinion: fix wealth inequality; which will give people their actual lives back; and will reduce the political power of the sociopathic billionaire class.
Then, the rest almost takes care of itself.
3371 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah just fix that already, how hard could it be?
The problem is human, not society, I don't any any -ism can fix human.
htx80nerd 1 hours ago [-]
>Nothing will change until developed rich countries are starting to hurt.
They already are. China does whatever it wants en mass meanwhile.
slibhb 2 hours ago [-]
> Nothing will change
Things have already changed!
cess11 2 hours ago [-]
Why would something "change" because "developed rich countries" hurt? Why wouldn't those leaders just roll with it and see it as inevitable, or a purification of their degenerate populations, or just another day in the end times, or whatever?
I expect "change" when people form unions or union like organisations and withhold or redistribute their labour, both waged and in more subtle forms, such as attention, and unwaged but socially important labour (e.g. women refusing to be servile homemakers and instead get guns and start soup kitchens).
crystal_revenge 56 minutes ago [-]
> And honestly, wars and trump are making climate concerns so difficult to think about.
These are all related. All of them are connected to humans pushing the planetary resource limits from various directions. We're attacking Iran now in part because climate change has dramatically increased the water stress conditions making the population more susceptible to political collapse. It's also happening because it puts energy stress on our geopolitical adversaries (same with Venezuela). Trump emerged in the first place because declining American prosperity (despite GPD numbers) drove a large portion of the population to nihilism.
chewbacha 3 hours ago [-]
They are already in pain but are blaming immigrants instead of trusting science.
xienze 2 hours ago [-]
True or false: a person in a third world country has a lower carbon footprint than someone in a developed country.
Also true or false: an immigrant from a third world country will have a higher carbon footprint if they emigrate to a developed country.
Maybe they are part of the problem.
frogperson 2 hours ago [-]
Chaos is extactly where fascism thrives. Expect to see more trumps, not less.
dismalaf 2 hours ago [-]
Rich countries will never feel it. Look at the middle east. Already scorching desert, they build indoor ski hills...
On the plus side, I think we'll solve global warming, with technology, in a few generations.
deepsun 2 hours ago [-]
Well, most deforestation happens in poor underdeveloped countries. Yes, they hurt, but keep doing it.
jimnotgym 45 minutes ago [-]
For the UK at least, this must be in a large part because we already cut our forests down. We simply couldn't deforest at a high rate, because there aren't enough trees left to go at.
epistasis 40 minutes ago [-]
The energy situation is actually changing very quickly precisely because renewables and storage are so cheap. Building a new natural gas plant today is really hard to justify in most places in the world.
Capitalism will actually save the day, because a bunch of capitalists advanced renewable technology to the point where it was cheap.
The biggest impediment to change right now is actually political interference in deployment of cheaper renewables. You see this all across the US both in intentional and unintentional ways. Trump explicitly cancels permits for wind, tries to ban solar on federal lands, and forces coal plants to keep running even when they are super expensive and raise the cost electricity.
Unintentional political impediments are also endemic in the US; permitting and interconnection of residential solar makes it 5x-6x more expensive than places like Australia, even in places like California that should be accelerating residential solar and storage.
There's a lot to be hopeful about when it comes to climate change, in addition a lot to be scared about.
M95D 35 minutes ago [-]
> Capitalism will actually save the day, because a bunch of capitalists advanced renewable technology to the point where it was cheap.
That "bunch of capitalists"... why are you avoiding the true word: "China"?
epistasis 20 minutes ago [-]
That's not the true word though, is it? It's an effort of capitalists the world over. And crucially, German government incentives when solar was still very expensive.
deadbabe 2 hours ago [-]
> Nothing will change.
Fixed
Frogeman 3 hours ago [-]
The majority of pollution is caused by 3rd world/ eastern countries.
Do you want to go to war with China to enforce an environmentalist agenda?
jmcgough 3 hours ago [-]
Over the past century, the US has produced more cumulative carbon emissions than any other country, and it's not even close.
China is in the middle of a massive expansion in wind, solar, and electric vehicles. The US is burning even more coal to support AI, and has gutted much of its federal emission reduction efforts.
marcosdumay 2 hours ago [-]
This changed on the last decade or so. It's close now.
Of course, China has 5 times more people than the US, so they get a little bit of leeway. But they are close, and their emissions are growing.
That said, yes, they are investing more than anybody else. And they are improving the technology we need more than anybody else. People talking about military intervention are full of shit, but we could use some diplomatic collaboration.
jimnotgym 39 minutes ago [-]
> and their emissions are growing.
I know nothing about it. I have read comments on this very comments section, with references, that say China's emissions are not growing. This is what makes this subject so hard for the average numbskull like me, so much misinformation.
wffurr 3 hours ago [-]
If this was the stated rationale and goal of the trade war, I'd be all for it. This is exactly the kind of situation tariffs are for.
goatlover 2 hours ago [-]
Tariffs on goods the world pays China to make which drives up emissions?
mossTechnician 3 hours ago [-]
I don't see why war is necessary. There could be something like the Space Race, where nations flex their technological skills at producing solutions to environmental problems.
atlintots 2 hours ago [-]
That race already started, but China is the only one participating at the moment. The US has been running backwards, though.
queenkjuul 3 hours ago [-]
China produces a lot less carbon per capita than we do
wing-_-nuts 3 hours ago [-]
Global warming doesn't care about 'per capita'.
Edit: Individuals do not build coal power plants, utilities (and therefore, governments) do. India and China are continuing to build fossil fuel power generation. Global warming does not care about 'fairness', global warming cares about co2 PPM in the atmosphere. When we address climate change, we have to do so at the government level, or we mine as well not bother.
The whole idea that we should look at 'emissions per capita' or 'historical emissions' in the interest of fairness is simply giving a license to governments to kill genuinely poor people in the third world.
myrmidon 2 hours ago [-]
There is literally no charitable interpretation of this point.
How much of a problem any individuals CO2 emissions are is completely decoupled from what nation they live in, or how many people live in that nation specifically.
If you hypothetically split up Asia or the US into 100 smaller countries then local emissions are not suddenly more (or less) of a problem than the are now (duh).
And of course more people have more of an influence on global outcomes.
This whole argument makes about as much sense as demanding that black people in Europe should not pay any income tax, because the total tax income from black people in Europe is very low, and "national budget does not care about per capita".
wing-_-nuts 2 hours ago [-]
This is so disingenuous. Individuals do not build coal power plants, utilities (and therefore, governments) do. India and China are continuing to build fossil fuel power generation. Global warming does not care about 'fairness', global warming cares about co2 PPM in the atmosphere. When we address climate change, we have to do so at the government level, or we mine as well not bother.
The whole idea that we should look at 'emissions per capita' or 'historical emissions' in the interest of fairness is simply giving a license to governments to kill genuinely poor people in the third world.
myrmidon 2 hours ago [-]
> India and China are continuing to build fossil fuel power generation
Power plants are not built for specific national governments, they are built because individual people need and use the energy. More people => more powerplants (number of governments is completely irrelevant, this is purely a per-capita thing).
> When we address climate change, we have to do so at the government level
Yes. For example by setting somewhat coherent CO2/capita emission targets.
> Global warming does not care about 'fairness'
Irrelevant, because anyone affected does.
If you want a global reduction in emissions, how would you ever convince a poorer nation (like India) to change anything while your own citizens are jet-travelling around the globe multiple times per year?
It is obviously much easier and more effective to reduce emissions by limiting a family to a single cruise vacation per year (or only two cars) than to convince 10 rice farmers to stop firing their oven for heat during winter...
If rich nations can not get their emissions even close to a sustainable level, why would any developing nation sacrifice growth, wealth or anything, really, to make the attempt?
wing-_-nuts 1 hours ago [-]
I never said rich nations shouldn't cut their emissions. If I were king, I'd enact a heavy carbon tax, and I'd tell every country I traded with that they could either do the same, or face tariffs and sanctions weighted by emissions that would have basically the same effect on their economy. I'd also insist that the institute the same tariffs and sanctions on economies they trade with.
All of a sudden, you'd have the world's short term self interest aligned with solving the long term problem.
Longwelwind 2 hours ago [-]
It also doesn't care about arbitrary groupings of humans (a.k.a countries).
The fairest system would be for each human being to have an equal amount of pollution they are allowed to emit.
californical 2 hours ago [-]
And it also doesn’t care about arbitrary country boundaries. But it is affected by total emissions, and per-capita measurements is one fair way to judge how a country is doing
queenkjuul 2 hours ago [-]
The comment i replied to does
wkat4242 2 hours ago [-]
And they make most of the stuff we buy, including the climate emissions involved in making them.
afandian 4 hours ago [-]
This is open access. No need to post a researchgate link.
I’m out of the loop on researchgate, when you say “No need” is it like an archive.is? Why is it less desirable or, if I’m reading your tone correctly, a “backup option”?
afandian 3 hours ago [-]
I'm a bit of a scholarly infrastructure purist. The paper has a DOI, it leads to a landing page that has the full text, and the content is open licensed.
Like if someone posted a link to an archive.is version of a Wikipedia page, you'd probably prefer to get the canonical link to that content.
ResearchGate is a bit of commercial enclosure of infrastructure that is, and should be, open. Who knows, maybe it has other value. I'm not an academic so I don't know.
kergonath 2 hours ago [-]
My position is that when it’s open access, we might as well link the primary source. ResearchGate is generally legal. It’s the responsibility of the authors to upload accepted manuscripts if the final document is not open access. AFAIK it does not do anything dodgy like archive.is does.
pc86 2 hours ago [-]
If the original is available, posting anything else is by definition less desirable.
serioussecurity 3 hours ago [-]
They're a user hostile attempt to extract money from people. They make their website hard to use.
kergonath 2 hours ago [-]
How so? I am not paying anything and I don’t have any problem getting full texts when the authors uploaded them. In fact, I just logged in and don’t see even the possibility to pay for anything there. I assume they monetise their database, but everything there is supposed to be publicly accessible anyway.
If I am not mistaken we can get documents without an account as well, unlike others.
nyeah 3 hours ago [-]
ResearchGate isn't open access.
bee_rider 3 hours ago [-]
ResearchGate isn’t a journal, right? I think it is some sort of… pseudo-social-networking site for papers.
nyeah 2 hours ago [-]
Right, it's not a journal.
noboostforyou 3 hours ago [-]
How so? I don't have an account but I am able to read the entire paper directly from the OP's link, is there some sort of free limit or something that I have yet to hit? I get some banner ads served on their site but I'm not seeing how it isn't open access.
nyeah 2 hours ago [-]
You may be arguing that ResearchGate allows free access to its articles in general. If so, I believe there's a logical fallacy in your argument. But I've been warned that naming that logical fallacy is a ban-able offense on HN. (Surreal but true.)
noboostforyou 2 hours ago [-]
Ah, gotcha - yes that explains my misunderstanding. I was equating "open access" to free access to the content via website. Thanks for clarifying.
nyeah 2 hours ago [-]
Some content on ResearchGate can be downloaded for free. Some can't.
2 hours ago [-]
tokai 2 hours ago [-]
Researchgate has nothing to do with OA. Its a social media page for researchers. OA is open licensing that give the reader the rights to download, distribute, etc.
miclill 3 hours ago [-]
As far as I understand this is a pre-print under CC-BY license, if this answers your question?
dana321 2 hours ago [-]
The clue is in the name, research "gate"
sulam 2 hours ago [-]
FWIW my personal assessment is that this acceleration is both real and largely out of our control. Models in the past did not attempt to account for non-anthropogenic carbon emissions, but as we experience further warming, most especially in the Arctic, feedback loops and tipping points mean that this (carbon emissions caused by “natural” processes) are becoming more evident. This is especially sensitive because a large proportion of such emissions are methane, which is a much more powerful greenhouse gas vs CO2, albeit with a much shorter expected effect time once airborne (~12 years). Consider also that warming is not uniform and the polar regions are warming significantly faster (3x) than lower latitudes, making permafrost melting a very significant climate tipping point. The last point I’ll mention is not about non-anthropogenic emissions but rather absorption. The world’s oceans have been a significant absorber of CO2 however that process is sensitive to temperature and is less effective as the planet warms, not to mention acidic ocean waters prevent shell formation, which is a minor but meaningful carbon sink all by itself.
I’m of the opinion that direct air capture is the primary escape hatch we have for not hitting 3 or even 4C warming in the next 100-200 years, which mean major dieoffs in warm latitudes, even for humans, due to exceeding wet bulb limits. Oh and roughly 65M of sea level rise as the planet shifts to a snow/ice-free mode.
We only need solar energy at 1 dollarcent or eurocent and a little batteries for the convienience of using electricity when the sun does not shine.
In the north snd south you need more solar panels in the winter than in the summer by a factor of 50. But that pays it back in summer when you have a squanderable abundance of free and clean energy. We can store that surpless energy in purifying drinking water, melting iron ore or aluminum, melting plastics or silicon ingots.
Storing surplus heat or cold in the ground is another luxery, because it is more rxpensive than 1 dollarcent or eurocent solar.
Wind and hydro are also more vostlyvthan solar so they are another luxery with worse enviremental costs than pure solar cells.
We need to build Enernet, a peer to peer electricitynet and internet between all buildings with power routers. for around 100 dollar per building. You buy and sell your house surplus solar electricity to the neighbourhood where it can be stored in car batteries. See my Fiberhood white paper.
I don't understand the wood argument. Isn't it widely accepted we need to do burns to manage forests? Wood is a short-term cycle of carbon. It releases when it burns but frees up space to capture it right after. When people live on rural plots and trees fall, should they burn for heat (and lessen needing other energy sources) or let it decompose and cause the same thing? It's not the same as extracting deeply embedded carbon sources that won't make it to the atmosphere if untouched (fossil fuels)
crystal_revenge 1 hours ago [-]
This is why it's clear we will never do anything to slow the progression of climate change.
By far the most effective an immediate solution to limiting the damage of climate change is to simply to keep fossil fuels in the ground.
People talk about the economic pain of doing this, but that economic pain is nothing compared to the impact of unmitigated climate change.
Even though this would be painful, it is also by far the easiest and fastest to implement solution. It would take fantastically more time and resources to scale up direct air capture (even if it existed in a scalable format today) to come anywhere near addressing this problem.
> Yes it will take some grid and storage upgrades (US) and continue to embrace renewables
This is not exactly true, we would have to experience global economic collapse in order to reduce our fossil fuel use. 80% of energy is not spent on electricity globally and this is non-electricity usage is where most of the fossil fuels are consumed and this drives most of the global economy. There's a good reason there are multiple wars being fought over for oil.
Liftyee 6 minutes ago [-]
The economic pain is current. The impact of unmitigated climate change will happen in the future. Thus, the ingrained short-term thinking of the markets and politicians makes this sort of planning ahead difficult.
It seems like the whole economic system runs on a quarterly time scale - just look at all the times negligent maintenance to improve profits in the short term have caused disasters in the long term.
Not sure what the solution is though, so I won't complain too much.
jimnotgym 29 minutes ago [-]
Genuinely not being snide, I really do not know.
Is it possible to produce steel on industrial scales without coal?
I know early ironmaking (I live fairly close to Coalbrookdale!) used charcoal, but is that possible at a large scale?
Stopping burning fuel now will return us centuries in the past, I suppose to about 1700. Twenty years ago it would return us to 1500. Then a handful of people had heating in their homes and a horse to travel. This will happen again if we stop burning now.
adrian_b 19 minutes ago [-]
Such claims are ridiculous. Nobody needs burning fuel. Everybody just needs energy and it does not matter which is its source.
If enough energy is produced by other means than burning fossil fuel, nobody will return to the past.
I happen to be one of those who does not use directly any kind of energy, except electrical. Despite the fact that I am still connected to methane gas distribution, I have never burned it for already around a decade. (And unlike most, I cook myself from raw ingredients everything that I eat, but I stopped using flames for that many years ago.)
If burning fossil fuel would stop completely right now, that would not affect me at all, much less would return me centuries in the past, as long as the electrical energy supplier has enough sources in its hydroelectric, solar, wind and nuclear plants, all of which are abundant where I live.
For aircraft and spacecraft, hydrocarbon fuel will remain the best solution, but synthesizing hydrocarbons was already possible at large scale before WWII and it could solve easily this problem in a CO2-neutral manner, if a fraction of the money wasted for various useless or harmful things would be invested in improving the efficiency of such critical technologies.
masklinn 2 hours ago [-]
> Models in the past did not attempt to account for non-anthropogenic carbon emissions
They're literally mentioned by the first IPCC report already.
culi 1 hours ago [-]
Early IPCC reports, all the way up to AR5 basically threw their hands up when it came to permafrost emissions. They admitted we didn't have the necessary data yet and for the most part didn't account for it at all in their models
Check out the 1.5C special report. Go to section 2.2.1.2, last paragraph says
> The reduced complexity climate models employed in this assessment do not take into account permafrost or non-CO2 Earth system feedbacks, although the MAGICC model has a permafrost module that can be enabled. Taking the current climate and Earth system feedbacks understanding together, there is a possibility that these models would underestimate the longer-term future temperature response to stringent emission pathways
The claim being discussed is not that they didn’t account for it, but that they didn’t attempt to account for it. Reading that text, I think they did, but chose not to include it (I guess because they didn’t need to to make their point and, by not including it, avoided opponents from arguing about the validity of the result based on uncertainties in those models)
culi 42 minutes ago [-]
I don't get the distinction you're trying to make. It seems to me they considered it, but did not even attempt to account for it.
They admitted limitations of the data/research they had available. Their model explicitly does not attempt to account for it.
baq 2 hours ago [-]
> major dieoffs in warm latitudes, even for humans, due to exceeding wet bulb limits
my extremely pessimistic position is nothing will happen systemically even after the first few such events, and they'll take tens if not hundreds of thousands of lives.
I hope writing this out jinxes it.
wing-_-nuts 1 hours ago [-]
You saw our reaction to covid. Millions. It will take millions of deaths in a nuclear armed country. See 'The ministry for the future'
yoyohello13 1 hours ago [-]
I wish it were different but I would not be surprised if it’s billions before anything changes. And even then there will be a major proportion of people that celebrate it as the second coming.
estimator7292 1 hours ago [-]
We are already far past the point of mere thousands of lives. Entire cities have been wiped off the map by floods.
It will take millions, if not close to a billion lives before we get serious
zeryx 1 hours ago [-]
Are you kidding? It will be Millions easily. It will just take 1 or two blackouts in wet bulb conditions to cause that
pier25 2 hours ago [-]
Excellent comment. I would only add two points.
I think it's important to mention the effects we're seeing today are caused by the emissions from decades ago.
Second, not sure if the paper in the OP touches this but we've reduced aerosols in the atmosphere. These previously were masking the effects of climate change by cooling the temperature.
adolph 1 hours ago [-]
The paper states it adjusts for "ENSO, volcanic eruptions, and solar variations" and not (afaict) the changes in shipping bunker fuel that reduced atmospheric SO2 (if that is what you mean by "reduced aerosols"). Below is a summary of the topic for those who are unaware. I withhold any opinion of validity of mechanism or effect.
Sulphur particles contained in ships' exhaust fumes had been counteracting
some of the warming coming from greenhouse gases. Lowering the sulfur content
of marine fuel weakened this masking effect, effectively giving a boost to
warming.
pfdietz 2 hours ago [-]
Albedo modification (stratospheric aerosols) seems much cheaper than direct air capture, as a stopgap.
adrianN 2 hours ago [-]
That unfortunately doesn’t help with ocean acidification.
ryeights 2 hours ago [-]
We simply drop a giant tub of baking soda into the ocean every now and then.
The research isn't there. Jury is still out on whether the long term consequences are a net benefit. In the end you're talking about increasing emissions for a temporary decrease in temperatures. And the chemicals we have that are good candidates for albedo modification are quite toxic. Today more than 10% of deaths globally can already be attributed to air quality
pfdietz 1 hours ago [-]
If India is experiencing large scale mortality from warming, they aren't going to give a damn about your concerns. They're just going to inject aerosols into the stratosphere.
culi 60 minutes ago [-]
India especially is experiencing many more deaths from air quality than from warming
groby_b 1 hours ago [-]
Humans tend to not breathe in a lot of stratospheric aerosols, on account of that being pretty high up.
As they sink down, they grow larger (condensation & coagulation). Once they reach the troposphere, they usually get down via precipitation, which also isn't really affecting a lot of breathing.
They can absolutely have other effects (see SO2/acidification, e.g), but air quality isn't really the main concern. For SO2 specifically, there's actually very little mortality sensitivity: https://www.giss.nasa.gov/pubs/abs/wa01010x.html
You're right that the research isn't there yet to make statements with confidence, but that applies to the air quality claim as well.
deepsun 2 hours ago [-]
Re carbon capture -- we can cut trees and dump them in "carbon storage" places like the bottom of some water bodies where due to lack of oxygen no rotting happens, like peats and e.g. Black Sea.
And grow new trees in their place of course.
tasty_freeze 2 hours ago [-]
Considering the scale that we are burning oil and gas, our sequestration efforts would have to be comparable. Continuing to burn oil and gas and trying to recapture it is madness, like realizing you are driving way too fast and instead of taking your foot off the gas, you keep flooring it but start applying the brakes.
If we could actually grow trees to capture carbon equivalent to 250M+ barrel of oil per day, it would be better to just grow trees and burn them for energy.
adrianN 2 hours ago [-]
It’s difficult to scale this to the levels we would need to make a difference.
zdragnar 1 hours ago [-]
Depending on the tree, freshly cut wood can have anywhere from 1:3 to 2:1 ratio of water to actual wood fiber.
So, unless we want to remove a massive amount of fresh water from the ecosystem, we also need to invest energy in drying out the wood well below natural humidity levels (transport to a desert maybe?) on top of electrifying what is currently a diesel and gas heavy industry (cutting and transporting logs with heavy machinery).
There's definitely lower hanging fruit for getting C02 out of the cycle.
MarkusQ 1 hours ago [-]
Dumping wet wood--even very, very wet wood in a lake and sinking it to the bottom does not "remove a massive amount of fresh water from the ecosystem". It does not remove any fresh water from the ecosystem.
zdragnar 48 minutes ago [-]
Sinking wood into a lake won't remove the carbon unless you have a very deep lake, and you'd need many, many of them to have any impact on the CO2 levels whatsoever. The scale of wood that would need to be harvested is far beyond dropping some logs in a lake.
They need to go into a deep enough pit where the methane produced from anerobic breakdown won't reach the atmosphere.
The conditions that created the lignite coal and peat simply aren't that easily reproducible, especially with large volume of wood (rather than ferns over thousands and millions of years).
lazide 2 hours ago [-]
The more likely candidate is mineral based, because yes trees are hard to scale this way.
01100011 2 hours ago [-]
What about solar shades? Seems like a relatively quick and easy way to regulate solar input. It's nice too because you can quickly remove it if necessary.
tremon 1 hours ago [-]
How long would a single cargo-load of shades have to be operational just to offset the amount of CO2 emitted by its launch?
ACCount37 2 hours ago [-]
Only becomes viable if you have things like Starship online and fully operational, with launch rates at the level of Falcon 9 today. At the minimum.
Still a more viable option than bringing greenhouse gas emissions into the negatives globally, by the way. But that's a low bar. Nuking the ocean floor is probably a better call.
post-it 1 hours ago [-]
Reducing sunlight to the surface means we lose solar power effectiveness and we need to use more power for artificial lighting to grow plants.
altruios 50 minutes ago [-]
Most of the surface of the earth is covered with water...
What if we cover the ice caps, and cover parts of the ocean instead of messing with grow cycles of plants on land...
No reduction in solar power, no artificial lights to grow plants. What effects might that have on ocean life? (below a certain depth - probably nothing, so surface ocean life is what we need to look at).
Just my two cents... we got plenty of surface area we can cover and potentially not affect much at all for day to day for animals, plants, and humans.
post-it 49 minutes ago [-]
Plankton in the ocean produce our oxygen via photosynthesis.
mempko 1 hours ago [-]
Regarding carbon capture, it will take more energy to capture the carbon than we burned putting it up there in the first place. Alan Kay, who actually did some systems work on the environment, explained it to me that the climate system is like an upside down coke bottle. It doesn't take much energy to tip it over, but it takes a lot more to put it back up.
In other words, we shouldn't have tipped it over in the first place. We may not have the energy to put things back to a habitable place.
wing-_-nuts 2 hours ago [-]
Relying on DAC is putting our fate in the hands of a technology we've never deployed beyond some pitifully small pilot projects, and expecting that we're going to be able to deploy that at a larger scale than we've deployed any technology since electricity itself.
We're going to have to resort to geoengineering alright, but it's gonna likely be stratospheric sulfate injection given how cheaply that can be done. Is it ideal? Nope. Better than global warming itself? Time will tell.
auntienomen 54 minutes ago [-]
It's going to have to be a mixture of approaches. Stratospheric injection buys time for more holistic solutions.
marssaxman 2 hours ago [-]
The prospect that the future we're headed for will be one where the survival of civilization (and much of humanity) depends on a massive, ongoing industrial process of upper atmosphere pollution, in order to counteract the massive, ongoing industrial process of CO2 pollution we can't be arsed to rein in, leaves me feeling relieved to be mortal.
wing-_-nuts 1 hours ago [-]
I don't disagree. At this point, I'm thankful I never wanted kids.
jgalt212 2 hours ago [-]
> Oh and roughly 65M of sea level rise as the planet shifts to a snow/ice-free mode.
Where is this new figure coming from? It seems about 60X what's being published elsewhere.
toxik 2 hours ago [-]
If all glaciers and ice sheets on Earth melted, sea levels would rise roughly 65–70 meters (about 210–230 feet). It’s worth noting that a full melt of Antarctica alone would take many thousands of years even under extreme warming scenarios, so this is more of a thought experiment than a near-term risk. Current projections for this century focus on partial contributions, with estimates ranging from roughly 0.3 to over 1 meter of rise by 2100 depending on emissions pathways.
marssaxman 2 hours ago [-]
That's been known for a long time - it just hasn't been considered a likely scenario. It's the rise we'd expect if all the ice on Greenland and Antarctica were to melt:
No offense, but internet opinions are a dime a dozen -- do you have some special experience / credentials in this area? The arguments you provide are all just the sort of thing that PhD students would study, and incorporate into their models. I'm inclined to believe the experts, but if you _are_ one, and are saying with authority that these effects are missed, that is a much more interesting story.
hendler 2 hours ago [-]
The question is not if the commenter is an expert, but if they are correct.
The claim that some models didn't take larger systems into account is also because an expert in the arctic wasn't an expert in oceans. And the expert in biodiversity isn't an expert in food supply chains. Expertise isn't the question. Instead it is - do all of us who are non experts (all of us) have enough expert data to have a systemic understanding of an accelerating trend?
pinkmuffinere 2 hours ago [-]
Ya, I agree, but I am not familiar with the intimate details of present climate models, nor am I planning to be. I can't/won't directly evaluate whether the argument they present is correct. But if _they_ are familiar with the intimate details of present climate models (ie, if they are an expert), I will tend to trust them more.
sulam 2 hours ago [-]
I’m not a modeler but I have directly asked modelers if clathrates, permafrost melting, wildfire incidence and ocean drawdown responses to warming was incorporated in the major models. 5 years ago the answer was no. Today the answer might be yes, but this is not really the point I’m trying to make. It’s really that we should expect to see acceleration in warming as the natural environment responds to anthropogenic (“forced”) climate change.
mlyle 2 hours ago [-]
The models don't consider these because there's considerable uncertainty as to the size of these effects and potential countervailing forces of similar magnitudes.
The fact is, for all of these other secondary effects etc... we just don't know. It's too complicated of a system.
So as a result, we've got a prediction of something between "somewhat bad" and "catastrophically-is-an-understatement bad" with a maximum likelihood estimate of "really really bad."
crystal_revenge 1 hours ago [-]
> ... we just don't know. It's too complicated of a system.
I wish this comment was higher up.
The big thing under-discussed about climate change is that the deeper we get into it, the harder it is to predict and understand.
I recall Dr. Richard Alley discussing how Thwaites Glacier collapsing wasn't factored into any IPCC reports; but ultimately pointed out it was for good reason because it's simply not possible to model these things and their consequences accurately.
I don't do any climate modeling, but I do a lot of other modeling and forecasting: the biggest assumption we make in all statistical models is that the system itself more or less stays statistically similar to what it currently is and what we have seen in past. As soon as you drop that assumption you're increasingly in the world of wild guessing. If you wanted me to build you a RAM price prediction model 2 years ago, I could have done a pretty good job. Ask for one today and your better off asking someone with industry but no modeling experience what they think might happen.
This is the hidden threat of climate change most people are completely unaware of: we can know it will be bad when certain things happen, we know they will happen in the nearish future, but we can't really say exactly how and when they'll unfold with any meaningful confidence.
sulam 2 hours ago [-]
And yet we can still say something simple that is true: warming will accelerate due to non-human greenhouse gas emissions as the planet continues to warm, due to feedback loops and tipping points in the natural carbon cycle. This is an unassailable statement.
mlyle 2 hours ago [-]
> This is an unassailable statement.
No. I believe what you're saying is very likely to be true, but we know there's both positive and negative feedback and we don't really know how they really will interplay and where all the tipping points are.
There may even be significant phase delay in these mechanisms and so we could even get oscillation.
2 hours ago [-]
cyanydeez 2 hours ago [-]
On the internet the default pisition is not true/untrue; its, why should I acknowledge you?
If you are still trying to gauge truth before this, you are poisoning your mental heuristics. Thats why propaganda are ao effecfive: you can be told something is either, and it can still be effective.
Humans and LLMs are similar: the separation between input and commands is not a hard barrier.
So, back to GP: CLIMATE CHANGE is reversible. It just depends on whether we are talking about socipecnomics or physical processes.
sulam 2 hours ago [-]
2 years ago this was hard won knowledge, searching for papers and then putting it all together in survey form for analysis. Today I can tell you: feel free to ask Deep Research or another LLM you trust to do that work for you, generating citations along the way. You can convince yourself vs me having to convince you. It will take about 15 minutes.
order-matters 2 hours ago [-]
I do not trust any LLM. But I am with the other person, the intention is not to discredit you or make you convince us - you are doing exactly what a comment section is designed for. Your comment is so good, in fact, that we want to trust it more than a comment in general deserves to be trusted.
while i agree its better to go off and prove it to ourselves, there is merit in having a conversation here
pinkmuffinere 2 hours ago [-]
For better or worse, I don't trust an LLM to give me a correct answer in this space. But you've kindof dodged the question by recommending LLM's -- do you have special experience / credentials in this area?
sulam 2 hours ago [-]
I answered elsewhere. I’ve been doing research on this topic for about 10 years, but I am not a climate modeler. I have spoken to people who are climate modelers and, at the time, these non-anthropogenic factors were not controlled for. They acknowledged that this was a blind spot that needed more research. At the time Arctic warming was only just beginning to be recognized as happening more quickly than the rest of the planet and the implications of that were concerning but unclear. There is still some acknowledged lack of understanding for just why the polar regions are warming so much faster (it’s not all melting / albedo feedback, because it’s happening in Antarctica too). What is less debated at this point is that permafrost comprises a truly mammoth proportion of CO2/CH4 reserves that are on an accelerated melting path (~1000Gt was the last estimate I saw, although it’s not all likely to go up at once of course).
Yhippa 2 hours ago [-]
If they said yes, would you blindly trust them? They told you to "do your own research" effectively and you punted. That would arguably be a more reassuring path for you I assume.
pinkmuffinere 2 hours ago [-]
Truthfully, because they dodged the question I am now a bit suspicious of everything they say. It just seems a bit deceitful. I explicitly called out the dodging not because I wanted to hear from them after they'd dodged it, but because I want to make it clear to GP that their answer is not sufficient, and highlight to others that they maybe shouldn't trust GP.
If they had answered my first question in the affirmative (something like "I am a researcher at X institute on this topic"), ya, I think I would have trusted them.
sulam 2 hours ago [-]
I don’t type fast on my phone, so you’re getting responses as I can give them. I think I’ve answered your questions sufficiently to draw your own conclusions at this point. Feel free to ignore me. Physics doesn’t care.
philipwhiuk 1 hours ago [-]
The people who say the Earth is flat have been "searching for papers" too.
No offense, but you sound like an oil shill.
nostrebored 2 hours ago [-]
Surely the children churning out papers in a memey field, with no real special insight into computational modeling, are the real ones to trust! Their papers are in Nature!
Ridiculous take, and you’d know that the OP was correct if you cared enough to know what researchers were actually saying.
Climate arguments devolve into appeals to impact claimed by authorities rather than any examination of what they’ve said.
transcriptase 2 hours ago [-]
Would a PhD student incorporate something into their model that flipped their results from agreeing to disagreeing with the premise that has not only practically become a religion, but forms the foundation for more and more funding flowing into their field each year?
Would they really want to risk being basically excommunicated from their area of research for daring to provide ammo to “climate change deniers”?
philipwhiuk 1 hours ago [-]
> I’m of the opinion that direct air capture is the primary escape hatch we have for not hitting 3 or even 4C warming in the next 100-200 years
Why is it always never 'burn less fossil fuels'.
Anything but the oil company bottom line huh?
wing-_-nuts 1 hours ago [-]
We could cease burning all fossil fuels tomorrow and we'd still have to resort to geoengineering. Read the IPCC projections. All of the ones that keep us below 3c require 'negative emissions'. That's code for DAC, a technology that we've only ever deployed to small pilot projects, deployed more widely, more quickly, than we've deployed any technology ever.
TLDR: We're gonna have to use sulfate injection until we can transition our economy
zargon 58 minutes ago [-]
Yes. And if we don't also stop burning fossil fuels then we'll never even break even.
culi 1 hours ago [-]
nobody will champion degrowth because it means less profits
eykanal 4 hours ago [-]
For those (like me) who don't know the authors, apparently they are well-published authors in the field of climate science whose work is very highly cited:
Not a perfect measure of whether this is a reputable article but at least readers should know this isn't from some randos in a basement somewhere.
notarobot123 3 hours ago [-]
Ironically, those still unconvinced of the human influence on climate change seem to be the sort that would trust the basement randos more than they would reputable scientists
jihadjihad 1 hours ago [-]
Because they are practicing the reverse scientific method. They hold a conclusion in their hand, like, man-made climate change is a hoax, and seek to find any threads of "evidence" that support their foregone conclusion.
rootusrootus 2 hours ago [-]
It's a culture thing, nobody on the right would ever be convinced by science, they will shop around until they find what they need to hear. My sister in law sent me a video and told me that she thought it was a really good explainer and had a lot of good facts and figures to support it. To humor her, I took a brief glance at it, and saw that it was produced by Dr. Shiva. I was thinking "no way, it can't be that Shiva, could it, email guy?" Yes, yes it was.
We are doomed.
tarr11 3 hours ago [-]
It says this in bold red at the top - "This is a preprint; it has not been peer reviewed by a journal."
I am not a climate scientist - how should I think about this statement? Normally I am looking for some statement that shows a document has been vetted.
sleet_spotter 3 hours ago [-]
Peer review is still very relevant in climate science. But given it is from well-respected authors, I am more inclined to trust the results at this stage.
Do you want to tell us to trust the authority instead of the presented data and arguments?
Usually, insisting on references, citations, and author status is a sign that the study doesn't hold on its own merit.
Sharlin 3 hours ago [-]
No, it really does not work like that, for reasons that should be obvious.
unethical_ban 3 hours ago [-]
Yes, credibility is one component of evaluating conclusions from evidence.
ceejayoz 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
3 hours ago [-]
captainbland 3 hours ago [-]
Today: this
Tomorrow: trillions invested in new technology for simulating human torture accurately at the molecular level, requiring twice the level of all consumer electricity use on the planet. Advocates claim "all use is valid".
FrustratedMonky 3 hours ago [-]
Is this a reference to "Torment Nexus"?
captainbland 3 hours ago [-]
While I'm sure that subconsciously influenced what I wrote, it was more a general jab at the sentiment that negative externalities can always be justified so long as a technology has users who prefer to use it.
z2 3 hours ago [-]
Ah, I thought you were just referring to the decades-long use of the most massive supercomputers to simulate nuclear arsenal maintenance and explosions (maybe literally at the molecular/atomic/sub-atomic level).
FrustratedMonky 3 hours ago [-]
Yeah. Did you see article that they made a brain organoid (actual brain neurons on a chip) play DOOM?. What are those neurons experiencing?
AlexeyBrin 3 hours ago [-]
> What are those neurons experiencing?
A reasonable explanation is that a few neurons probably don't have conscience so they can't really experience anything.
captainbland 2 hours ago [-]
It's an interesting question as to what that level is likely to be though. The chip in question apparently has around 800,000 neurons (https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2025/06/04/hardwar...) so not a trivial quantity which makes it significantly more complex than most insects' forebrains but still less complex than any mammal.
I think once they're able to put 15 million such neurons on a single device that puts them in the range of more relatable animals like mice and Syrian hamsters, and I also expect that relatability is also what will drive most opinions about consciousness.
p_j_w 38 minutes ago [-]
>a few neurons probably don't have conscience
Given our piss poor understanding of consciousness, I have to ask: on what grounds do you make this claim?
layer8 3 hours ago [-]
> What are those neurons experiencing?
Doom. (Obviously.)
captainbland 3 hours ago [-]
I hadn't until you mentioned it but now I have! I expect one day they'll generate a language model on one and then we can just ask it, assuming they don't give it a special rule about never describing its experiences.
wizzwizz4 2 hours ago [-]
The language model's output would be informed by its weights, not by its experiences as wetware. Substrate does not make a computation special: that's the whole point of the Chinese Room thought experiment.
What mechanism are you imagining that would allow a LLM built of neurons to describe what it's like to be made of neurons, when a LLM built of GPUs cannot describe what it's like to be organised sand? The LLM in the GPU cluster is evaluated by performing the same calculations that could be performed by intricate clockwork, or very very slowly by generations of monks using pencil and paper. Just as the monks have thoughts and feelings, it is conceivable (though perhaps impossible) that the brain tissue implementing a LLM has conscious experience; but if so, that experience would not be reflected in the LLM's output.
captainbland 41 minutes ago [-]
When I say language model, I mean of whatever form would make it native to the wetware medium. This brings with it a few key distinctions. The distinction I think is most relevant is that human neurons including in chips like the CL1 have the capability to dynamically re-organise topologically (i.e. neuroplasticity) which is something that computed LLMs can't do, which have a fixed structure with weights.
We can't assume that a computer based neural network will have the same emergent behaviours as a biological one or vice versa.
The interesting point for me is in the neuroplasticity, because it implies that the networks which are specialised for language could start forming synapses which connect them to the parts which are more specialised to play doom giving rise to the possibility that this could be used for introspection
3 hours ago [-]
inciampati 3 hours ago [-]
I prefer to think of it as a reference in the Torment Nexus.
heavyset_go 3 hours ago [-]
It would also work as a jab at Roko's basilisk
oofbey 2 hours ago [-]
Actually “last year: this”. It was published in early 2025.
inetknght 3 hours ago [-]
Arguments against call it immoral, while counter-arguments call it "legitimate".
Meanwhile, three-time Billionaire claims he's solved the problem using soylent green while fifty thousand people react in awe at the live presentation.
ecshafer 3 hours ago [-]
The issue with any significant steps to curbing the climate or environmental impacts with laws or treaties is always: But the economy. It creates an incentive where someone doesn't follow the laws, burn everything they can to accelerate their economy, and take industry from other countries.
My proposal is thus: create a supranational treaty organization with a EPA like authority(or whatever the European equivalent is) that can inspect and fine companies in member organizations. Then any treaty members agree with the following conditions: The EPA can enter their nation freely, inspect, and are able to fine companies that break rules. Members send delegates to a session to create new rules democratically. And most importantly all members act as a cartel, imposing large tariffs on any country outside of the organization. So if US was in and Mexico was out, you couldn't just pollute in Mexico, without some massive tariff. This creates an economic incentive to be in and clean.
jtr1 3 hours ago [-]
"But the economy" is an out-of-date framing. The cost of renewables has been plummeting for well over a decade. New renewables are now cheaper than new fossil fuel plants in most of the world, and in many regions they're already competitive with or cheaper than simply running existing fossil fuel infrastructure. As modern wars in Ukraine and now Iran are increasingly demonstrating, they are not only cost effective but rapidly a matter of energy sovereignty and national security.
That's not to say we won't need treaties and supranational entities for some aspects of decarbonization. Methane emissions outside of agriculture are notably a problem of enforcement.
We're badly in need of a collective update to our priors regarding renewables. In the US, a hostile policy toward renewables is not only shooting ourselves in the foot environmentally, we are now actively impoverishing ourselves due to entrenched economic interests across the fossil fuel industry and the cultural inertia they actively worked to develop.
goatlover 2 hours ago [-]
A new US administration and Congress need to be voted in. There is one party who backs fossil fuel interests and denies anthropogenic climate change. They're currently in charge. The American public didn't see that as an important enough issue in 2024.
Findecanor 2 hours ago [-]
We have needed tariffs for many years now. The EU has some tariffs on imports, but they are only used to level the playing field for companies in EU countries with emission rules against companies in countries without, and only in some select industries.
They need to apply overall, on all goods and services.
And emission limits need to be progressive over time, with a limit for each year, not just "x% at year 2030".
bryanlarsen 2 hours ago [-]
There is a Nobel memorial prize winning plan to do something like this in a more elegant, voluntary fashion. Nordhaus' Climate Club.
It's essentially a carbon tax on local production and a corresponding carbon tariff on imports. Countries that already have a carbon tax or equivalent don't get tariffed. IOW, they're part of the club.
Usually a carbon rebate is also included in the plan, although that's not strictly necessary.
Germany was spear-heading an effort to create a carbon club, but it fell apart, unfortunately. At the time a club that didn't include the US seemed infeasible.
In 2026 a club that doesn't include Trump's America is a good thing, not a bad thing IMO.
WarmWash 3 hours ago [-]
The real problem is that everyone has to sacrifice, but half the people think there is no problem and then other half thinks only corporations need to sacrifice (and are unwilling to sacrifice themselves).
cogman10 3 hours ago [-]
> It creates an incentive where someone doesn't follow the laws, burn everything they can to accelerate their economy, and take industry from other countries.
I think the flaw in this thinking is thinking that burning things is the cheapest way to get energy.
Oil processing and extraction is a complex industry which requires a huge continued investment. Coal requires massive mining operations. Natural gas is probably the least intensive of the burny things, and it still requires a pretty advanced pipeline to be competitive.
Renewables are relatively cheap one time purchases. Save energy storage, the economy that is most competitive at this point is one powered by renewables.
That transition is already happening in the US without a massive government regulation/mandate. In china, it's happening a whole lot faster because the government is pushing it. And the chinese economy is at no risk of being outbid by smaller economies burning fuel.
The main reason burning remains a major source of fuel is that for most nations, the infrastructure to consume it has already been built. It's not because it's cheap.
microtonal 3 hours ago [-]
The issue with any significant steps to curbing the climate or environmental impacts with laws or treaties is always: But the economy. It creates an incentive where someone doesn't follow the laws, burn everything they can to accelerate their economy, and take industry from other countries.
Or quickly develop to the point where solar, wind, and hydro is cheaper than getting dead fossils out of the ground and processing them.
I am not familiar enough with the economics of this to know whether we are close to that point, but I can imagine once we cross it, combustible fuel burners will be at a disadvantage if they haven't invested in infrastructure needed for renewables.
queenkjuul 3 hours ago [-]
Solar plus batteries is the cheapest form of energy now as of 2025
vrganj 2 hours ago [-]
Honestly, if the economy is killing us all, then screw the economy.
The way our economic systems are set up is inherently anti-human and only benefits a tiny fraction of the population anyways.
It's time for a fundamental rethink.
mcdeltat 1 hours ago [-]
Bu-bu-b-bu-b-b-b-bu-bu-bu-but supply and demand bro!!!! It's the free market bro! If people are buying, the free market has decided the planet is right to be destroyed!!
cmxch 50 minutes ago [-]
And what exactly would prevent a country like the United States to use its outsize resources to moot this org?
jmye 3 hours ago [-]
My country mines rare earth metals. Your country processes them into computer chips. Joe and Jane's country want those computer chips to fuel their economy.
Who's getting fined, here? Me, because mining the stuff is inherently dirty (without, probably, significant research and capital investment)? You, because you need the stuff to build other stuff? Joe and Jane because they're the ones ultimately driving the production of the stuff? If you fine me into not producing the raw materials, what, ultimately happens to your economy and Joe and Jane's? If I don't sign up, where are you going to get the raw materials, if I'm tariffed into oblivion?
Sorry, I'm not trying to like, doom this away - but there are so many interconnected pieces, that I don't think it's a problem that can even start to be solved from an internet comment. At some point, voters in democratic societies need to decide that they care as much about the world their children will inherit as they do a ten cent difference in gas prices ten minutes from now. It's unclear that they ever will on a long term, consistent basis.
Rationally, you apply fines as close to the source as possible. Because they will pass those costs up the stack.
But the source could be the most likely place for corrupt reporting. Or: Maybe the source element is not dangerous but downstream by-products are.
Like you’ve said: It’s a problem.
lapcat 3 hours ago [-]
The economy is an abstraction. Millions of individual consumers are concerned with the environment and have demonstrated that they're willing to take individual actions to reduce their environment impact. However, individual consumers are not in charge of the economy, which is increasingly consolidated and monopolistic. The majority of pollution is coming from industrial activity, not from consumer activity, not even auto exhaust, and the most important decisions are made by wealthy industrialists who seem to care only about unlimited growth of their own wealth and power, at the expense of the planet. (Even if we're talking only about auto exhaust, think about how return-to-office was forced on workers against their will after the pandemic. Non-wealthy individuals simply don't have the leverage over mega-corps.)
From a political perspective, I think the problems of global warming and wealth disparity go hand-in-hand. It's difficult to solve one without solving the other. To the extent that the ultra-wealthy own the politicians, or actually become politicians themselves, there is little hope for environmental regulation.
Consumers don't need or necessarily even want unlimited economic growth. That only "helps" consumers if they're relying essentially on trickle-down economics, where we have to allow the ultra-wealthy everything they want in the hope that they'll spare us some change. A more equitable distribution of the current wealth would reduce the pressure to produce ever more, more, more.
Consumers usually want products that they own, not rent, products that last for a long time and don't need to be constantly updated or upgraded. Coincidentally, this is also better for the environment. Producers often want the opposite of that, in order to maximize profit. So what we get depends crucially on the power balance or imbalance between consumers and producers. This is where consolidation and monopolization become a major factor.
A lot of the "convenience economy," dominated by temporary, disposable goods, is predicted on consumers having no free time, because they're constantly working. Despite vast improvements in worker "efficiency," we haven't seen comcomitant reductions in the number of hours worked. The future of leisure facilitated by technological advances, which everyone was imagining 50-60 years ago, never became a reality. The technology did advance, but the leisure did not. The other day (or night) I noticed Amazon delivery drivers arriving for neighbors after 9pm; this is a dystopia.
taeric 3 hours ago [-]
Wasn't this attributed pretty much directly to cleaning of the shipping lanes? With more direct sunlight on the ocean, we are getting warmer oceans. With warmer oceans, we get everything that goes along with that.
I didn't see it mentioned in the article, though I did do a very brief read through. And it has been a while since I looked at the shipping lanes thing.
I hasten to add this is not to claim we should not have cleaned the shipping lanes. I don't know enough to say on that front. My gut would be that it was still the correct move.
pjmlp 3 hours ago [-]
What a surprise with all the wars going on, and AI depleting Earth resources, what a change from about the pandemic era when everyone was into paper straws and cups and promising to be a better person, because that is what was going to change anything.
qgin 3 hours ago [-]
All data centers in aggregate (AI and all other uses) use about 1.5% of electricity production, which itself is about 20% of total energy use.
So when people are focusing on AI above all other energy uses, it doesn't really paint an accurate picture of what's going on.
lm28469 2 hours ago [-]
You can split up every single industries/topics/&c. into "yeah but it only use 1.5% of energy", "yeah but it only produces 1.5% of the co2"
Guess what happens when you add them up...
moralestapia 4 minutes ago [-]
>Guess what happens when you add them up...
I'll guess, they add up to 100%?
I don't see what's the insight here.
logicprog 2 hours ago [-]
This kind of logic only works if the percentages for each industry are all equally that small, so you can treat them as all equally bad, but they are absolutely not.
tencentshill 1 hours ago [-]
Wasn't crypto a significant percentage as well? And that was before the AI buildout started.
Fricken 2 hours ago [-]
I've heard many different groups tell me their small fraction is not the small fraction that matters.
qgin 43 minutes ago [-]
It's not really about which one matters. They all matter. But here is a rough breakdown of global fossil fuel energy usage:
* Electricity: 27%
* Industry: 24%
* Transportation: 15%
* Agriculture & land use: 11%
* Buildings: 7%
Then within electricity, data centers use about 1.5% of global electricity. Within data centers, AI accounts for somewhere between 15-20% of energy use.
So if you take 27% × 1.5% × ~17%, you find that AI is currently responsible for something like 0.07% of global fossil fuel emissions.
It definitely matters in the "every bit matters" sense, but also the numbers paint a really different picture than you'd get from statement like the one we started with.
unglaublich 3 hours ago [-]
AI is nothing compared to automobiles and heating, construction and shipping.
It uses a bunch of energy, but not so much compared to moving yourself around in a car of plane.
lambdaone 3 hours ago [-]
Yes. The obsession with demonizing AI/data centre loads seems to be a deliberate distraction from the much, much larger carbon loads of the economy at large relative to which IT power consumption is a tiny proportion.
DangitBobby 3 hours ago [-]
I think it's much less cynical than that. People both fear and dislike AI, recognize that the "it may destroy my livelihood and commodify human creativity" complaint falls on deaf ears, and are latching onto anything resembling a credible ethical complaint that people may actually listen to.
1 hours ago [-]
alex_young 3 hours ago [-]
Animal agriculture is around 15% of global emissions, and AI is probably .1% to .5%, but sure, stop using LLMs. That will solve the problem.
9rx 2 minutes ago [-]
> Animal agriculture is around 15% of global emissions
Of course, animals are carbon neutral, and methane only has a 7-12 year life, so that can be fixed in nearly an instant.
pjmlp 1 hours ago [-]
Indeed lets tear down forests to build soya fields for all that fake meat tofu.
pingou 27 seconds ago [-]
You must have been misinformed, they tear down forests to grow soya to use as feedstock (mostly for beef). Nothing to do with fake meat tofu, quite the opposite actually.
al_borland 3 hours ago [-]
Most people pushing back against data centers simply don't want invite something into their city that will use up resources (likely raising prices), while the big selling point is that it will put them out of work. You can say that won't actually happen and everyone will keep their jobs, but that has not been the messaging. CEOs want to know how many people they can get rid of once they start using AI. Why would anyone sign up to have that in their backyard?
pjmlp 3 hours ago [-]
A bunch of energy, water and Earth rare materials, nothing really to care about.
moogly 3 hours ago [-]
I would be fine if LLMs disappeared tomorrow, but if I couldn't heat my house, I'd freeze to death. But I guess some would argue that everyone needs to live in a city with district heating.
bluGill 3 hours ago [-]
It is also much more likely to use renewable energy. Data centers look at the local energy mix when planning where to put one. (though they are perhaps taking energy that would otherwise be shipped to a different city/state)
3 hours ago [-]
valiant55 3 hours ago [-]
This is definitely not always the case[0], let's not pretend these companies give a fuck about the communities in which their data centers operate[1].
> AI is nothing compared to automobiles and heating, construction and shipping.
When the oil in your frying pan is smoking, adding a tiny bit more heat may be unwise.
hackeraccount 3 hours ago [-]
Yeah that assumes that AI is an absolute negative. What if it impacts positively? I mean you gotta spend money to make money.
epolanski 3 hours ago [-]
Which in turn are also relatively small compared to the damages of cattle and fishing.
Seriously adapting our diets around being more sustainable. I'm not advocating for veganism or such, but at least to understand that eating a burger pollutes as much as driving a large vehicle for 50 miles and that maybe we can substitute that with poultry or eggs or cheese many times.
pjmlp 1 hours ago [-]
What about putting trees down for soya fields?
noslenwerdna 50 minutes ago [-]
As we all know, global warming wasn't happening until AI data centers started being built. They are honestly a drop in the bucket
3 hours ago [-]
chinathrow 2 hours ago [-]
Companies are setting up constantly running gas turbines for powering AI datacenters - insanity.
standeven 2 hours ago [-]
The main driver of this is human-produced CO2, and there are meaningful ways to reduce usage.
-Switch to an electric vehicle
-Migrate from gas appliances (range, furnace, water heater) to electric (induction, heat pumps)
-If your power grid isn’t clean, add rooftop or balcony solar
-Encourage friends and family to do the same
tgsovlerkhgsel 2 hours ago [-]
Prices are a great incentive.
In Germany, 1 kWh of electricity costs roughly 3x as much as 1 kWh of gas. That doesn't make heat pumps very attractive. Historically the differences were even worse.
Relying on people individually making choices that are better for the environment at a disadvantage for themselves is not going to work.
yesfitz 2 hours ago [-]
Reduce consumption of farmed animal products to zero.
nairoz 2 hours ago [-]
And don't fly
hnfong 2 hours ago [-]
COVID proved that not flying barely made a dent in the global emissions.
Sure, if we never fly again and reverted to living like a medieval peasant, maybe things will kinda work out.
pinkmuffinere 2 hours ago [-]
My impression is that flying on a commercial plane produces less CO2 than driving? So if your only options are drive vs fly, I think flying is the correct choice -- is that right?
zaken 47 minutes ago [-]
It's about 60 mpg per passenger to fly domestically and 90 mpg per passenger to fly internationally.
If you have a family of 4, you can think of it as the equivalent of a 15 mpg vehicle for domestic flight and 22 mpg vehicle for international flight. So somewhere in the range of a full-size pickup truck.
But -- when you fly, you go very far. If you go on vacation to Hawaii from San Francisco once a year with your family, that's the equivalent of driving a Ford F-150 for 5000 miles. If you visit India or China that's 15,000 Ford F-150 miles! In a single trip, more than what most people drive in an entire year!
So you can make a big difference just preferring local vacations instead of remote ones.
tgsovlerkhgsel 2 hours ago [-]
It's code for "don't travel, especially long distance"... because most people would simply not be willing to make many trips if the trips took as long as the non-flight option would require.
2 hours ago [-]
mr_mitm 2 hours ago [-]
And eat vegan and regional produce
And don't build things out of concrete
And better get a few room mates
mbgerring 47 minutes ago [-]
The only extant “X-risk” is, and always has been, climate change. “AGI” is science fiction, and actually-existing AI is making climate change harder to deal with, by increasing electricity demand on our fossil-fuel-powered grid with no attendant increase in clean generation.
Serious engineers need to stop whatever they’re doing and work on this problem.
Also, if you’re hiring: I’m an expert on the U.S. regulated utility industry, demand management, and solar & battery system design, fabrication and deployment.
chneu 39 minutes ago [-]
Really AI is a drop in the bucket compared to other things. Beef and dairy take up an incredible amount of water, land, and energy but we don't complain about that.
AI could lead to massive savings and improvements in terms of emissions and climate change. AI could possibly help us out of this.
Beef and dairy have no chance of helping us. They'll kill us and the beef nuts will say how they saved 4% of emissions by moving some cows around. Problem solved.
tdb7893 26 minutes ago [-]
I remember a couple years ago my family was worried about the Amazon burning and I was like "well, you could eat less beef as that's driving a lot of that in Brazil". Turns out they didn't care that much. With how generally hippie my family is it really made me realize how absolutely screwed we are ecologically.
AI is also a useful tool that offers a lot of potential to untangle the permitting thickets that make it difficult to build the infrastructure necessary for the energy transition...
shashurup 46 minutes ago [-]
To be honest, looking at Paleogene climate reconstruction I believe it was the best time in earth history. The way things go shows us that all attempts to resist burning fossils are quite futile. It takes some kind of catastrophe to change people habits. The level of coordination required to achive the goal of lowering emissions looks unachievable to humanity. We have enough time to adapt, adaptation is more reasonable and pragmatic approach.
tgsovlerkhgsel 2 hours ago [-]
The paper doesn't seem to account for the reduction in sulfur emissions from ships, which was widely reported to be the cause for some of the recent warming?
ben5 31 minutes ago [-]
I think we're well past the point of no return. In my part of the world, this year's weather has been ---- weird. Global warming doesn't mean warming per se - but it does mean unpredictability.
tsoukase 3 hours ago [-]
This ship has sailed, warming is irreversible. Developing nations mainly in Asia (China, India etc) are, well, developing and burn like there is no tomorrow. But they are not to blame. It is their turn to live nicely, like the US and Europe did for decades. Nobody can remove this right from them.
fjwater 3 hours ago [-]
I don't think that's fair to say; the USA's CO2 emissions per capita are roughly 150% of China's, and the average Canadian emits more than 7x as much as an Indian citizen.
The entire EU produces only about half of the USA's total emissions, despite having a population of over 100 million more people.
O5vYtytb 2 hours ago [-]
Fair? Maybe not, but IMO it doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is gross emissions. The effects of a warming planet will not be fair. We should be looking to reduce/eliminate emissions wherever they are happening.
fjwater 28 minutes ago [-]
I don't think it's fair to look only at gross emissions by country. How can we demand that India drastically cut its emissions when its per capita output is already so low?
Forcing reductions there effectively caps their living standards while developed nations continue to enjoy the benefits of much higher individual carbon footprints.
U.S. and EU CO₂ emissions have been actively dropping for the last ~20 years [0]. (Of course, it's different question how quickly they ought to be dropping.)
Fairness matters because the only way we can collectively decide to reduce emissions is if people everywhere feel its fair.
52-6F-62 41 minutes ago [-]
Lol. Not exactly an apt comparison.
"Average" Canadian. A lot of the population lives in a climate where half the year more energy is required to survive the climate. And the population is exponentially smaller than the United States, India, or China.
That's like calling out the guy in the mountains burning a campfire to stay warm at night when the guy sleeping on the beach in Hawaii requires none.
Point being, brand new account, if we want solutions it needs to be done without such angling or it all reduces to absurdities and jabs instead of cooperation. It needs to be realistic in terms of where people are being absurdly wasteful, but also sympathetic that we do not all face the same circumstances.
It's a hole and we don't get out by digging downward.
fjwater 16 minutes ago [-]
I agree that climate is a factor, but the survival argument only goes so far. Finland, Sweden and Norway face similar sub-zero winters but maintain a higher standard of living with less than half the per capita emissions of Canada.
kergonath 2 hours ago [-]
> This ship has sailed, warming is irreversible.
Nobody who understands the subject claims that it is reversible on a human life scale. In the realistic best cases, it’d stabilise in a couple of decades and slowly decrease from there.
The real question is not whether it is reversible, but how high it will go and how we are going to deal with it.
Findecanor 3 hours ago [-]
We can still limit the amount of the global warming. It does not run by itself, but it could start doing so.
hskalin 3 hours ago [-]
No only that, but per capita emissions of developed countries still remains higher. For example I found that US/Russia have 6x per capita emissions compared to India
padjo 3 hours ago [-]
This perspective is so important. The wealthy in western society are responsible for a massively disproportionate amount of emissions.
ks2048 2 hours ago [-]
There is not "one ship" to sail or not - it is a matter of degree.
Warming is here and will continue.
Our decisions from here on could vary the outcomes between massive disruption and movement of people to a wholly uninhabitable planet.
conception 2 hours ago [-]
This assume you can’t have a modern, high quality of life without destroying our ecosystem we depend on to survive. When in fact, we can have both. It would just require making a few very wealthy people less so.
O5vYtytb 2 hours ago [-]
Ideally us rich countries would help pay for overhauling of infrastructure in developing nations since each $ goes way further to reduce emissions there compared to at home.
bluedino 2 hours ago [-]
At least when the USA did it they only had 75-100 million citizens doing the polluting.
stainablesteel 1 hours ago [-]
this strangely self-hating and suicidal message has been spread for decades now, this falls along the same kinds of thinking as blood grudges and blood wars.
we don't need to adopt this form of thinking at all, no one is owed anything.
nancyminusone 1 hours ago [-]
Don't kid yourself - we closed this one with "Won't Fix" a while ago.
"But what about <technology/option>?"
No. Full stop. We're not going to do it, and we're not even going to apologize for it either.
All we can do now is prepare, not that I've seen a lot on this front either.
boxedemp 1 hours ago [-]
We'll fix it if it become cost effective. It might, but probably won't because if the scale.
shevy-java 2 hours ago [-]
I think it is already pretty clear to everyone, save a few scientistis who keep on preaching "we can prevent this!!!" that global warming will continue. I am all for being more energy efficient and what not, but the reality of the situation is that there are factors that are orthogonal to this - as well as a few states that sabotage everyone else. The USA in particular; the US government is by far the biggest troublemaker here. China and India are also troublemakers because they are so huge, although to be fair, China also invested a lot into green energy.
We need to adjust strategies here. The "zero emission" strategy failed; it is not practical. Politicians love them because they are in the media, but everyone sees that this strategy is not working. Same with carbon tax - it drove prices up but didn't really help much at all otherwise. We need to stop pursuing strategies that do not work here.
amelius 2 hours ago [-]
> We need to stop pursuing strategies that do not work here.
We tried top down. Didn't work.
We tried bottom up. Didn't work.
rcMgD2BwE72F 10 minutes ago [-]
What did we even try? We did talk a lot though.
vorticalbox 1 hours ago [-]
i think the only real strategy is that people take a hit to their standard of living but i don't think anyone will sign up for that.
yoyohello13 1 hours ago [-]
They don’t need to sign up for it. It will happen regardless.
lambdaone 3 hours ago [-]
This is terrifying, and those fighting against stopping or reducing global warming should at this point be regarded as hostis humani generis
jpadkins 3 hours ago [-]
yes, we must kill the non-believers! Enemies of mankind!
lambdaone 3 hours ago [-]
Amazing hyperbole, and a deflection from the real issues. You can fight against wrongdoing without actually advocating people being killed.
Right now, climate change is an undeniable fact, its causes well-known, and the evidence for it now part of everyday life. If anything, its effects have been underestimated to date, and 'non-believers' in it are either fools or acting based on morally repugnant principles.
jpadkins 3 hours ago [-]
hostis humani generis is latin for "enemies of mankind". It is not hyperbole, it is not deflection. The GP is advocating that everyone is compelled to attack or persecute anyone who is "fighting against stopping or reducing global warming".
queenkjuul 3 hours ago [-]
They didn't say "kill," you did
tgsovlerkhgsel 2 hours ago [-]
"hostis humani generis" implies "subject to violence and execution by anyone" (Wikipedia). The label has historically been a term/label for pirates, with the penalty for those caught generally being death. So yeah, they did suggest death for those people.
maest 1 hours ago [-]
Instead of this lazy deflection, you should suggest what you believe would be an appropriate attitude towards these people.
sourcegrift 2 hours ago [-]
I wish more people understood the severity of the situation but all we ever get is that "New York has been underwater since 2010". Do people really want to take action only after the problem is irreversibly bad!?
bigattichouse 1 hours ago [-]
I'm hoping the current oil-war will cause people to re-assess fossil fuel use as expense becomes untenable and we start choosing electric vehicles and renewables.. which will just become "normal" and oil can stick around for synthetic chemistry routes.
thinkcontext 52 minutes ago [-]
Agreed, it's a big sovereignty issue. Once a solar panel is installed it keeps working for 20+ years. It doesn't get cut off if there's a political problem that interrupts supply.
tantaman 51 minutes ago [-]
How are people handling this... mentally? and preparedness wise? I can't imagine what the next generation may have to live through.
oxqbldpxo 41 minutes ago [-]
For a 1000 points:
For the turkey, what is Thanksgiving?
What is a Black swan?
throwway120385 3 hours ago [-]
We might actually hit the jackpot from The Peripheral.
giraffe_lady 3 hours ago [-]
It really does seem to be the goal.
FrustratedMonky 3 hours ago [-]
I don't buy it. I read the Peripheral, and through the whole thing I was always asking "who actually built all the stuff these guys were inheriting"??? Are we assuming robots got to a level where incredible magical worlds could be built to server just a few people?
ceejayoz 3 hours ago [-]
> Are we assuming robots got to a level where incredible magical worlds could be built to server just a few people?
Given the other tech in the novel, that seems highly likely. It includes nanobot "assemblers".
giraffe_lady 3 hours ago [-]
We built it, before we were intentionally allowed to die of climate change and flu pandemics. If you sell your labor for money you are building it, there is no plan for you afterwards.
TychoCelchuuu 3 hours ago [-]
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2 hours ago [-]
lunias 2 hours ago [-]
It's my understanding that if you look at a large enough historical time window, although warming has accelerated recently (and we are in part to blame); the Earth is still relatively cool compared to historical averages.
pcl 2 hours ago [-]
Of course, the relevant thing for us as a species is whether or not the forecast temperatures are sustainable for us.
The planet as a whole will do just fine. We're not going to break the planet. The reason that people bring up the huge anthropogenic spike in temperature is because us anthropoids evolved in the context of a narrow band, and it would seem as though we're moving the global climate out of that band.
tencentshill 1 hours ago [-]
Milankovitch cycles? What time frame? Did humans live in the same areas during that time? At -4C cooler new york city was under 2000 feet of ice. +4C would be devastating for most of humanity.
Because from a human perspective, it doesn't matter. The planet used to be a ball of molten rock at one point, it doesn't mean we should shrug our shoulders at the thought of it returning to a molten state. It may be "natural" but it's not suitable for humans.
blueeon 2 hours ago [-]
I am in Wuhan, China. This past winter, I was able to bike along the lake all day. In previous winters, due to the cold and strong winds, we rarely exercised by the lake. This has had the biggest impact on me, and it's still a positive one.
apt-apt-apt-apt 23 minutes ago [-]
Isn't this like a frog in a pot saying, ah the water was cold but now it's warm!, moments before getting cooked?
shrubby 34 minutes ago [-]
We could chop of a quarter of total emissions (directly + rewilding effect) by ending factory animal production and swapping to plant based.
Another quarter from the top 5 percent emissions that have practically nothing to do with the wellbeing, but only social comparison mechanisms (envy, herd mentality).
But for that humanity would need leaders that are not either idiots, corrupt or spineless and toothless.
But hey, I guess that's too much to ask, after all we're talking about unconscious reactive species that's only rumored to have brains or morals.
epolanski 3 hours ago [-]
World is plagued by consumerism and gaslighted into over focusing on relatively smaller energy savings instead of overall habits.
I have friends shoving sausages and burgers into them while ordering countless things on Amazon every day, yet they think they help by buying a hybrid car, couldn't even be bothered by using public transport even though it's faster and cheaper where they live, because "too many people, dirty".
Go figure.
3 hours ago [-]
tlogan 2 hours ago [-]
The sad reality is that much of the climate work done in the West does not matter because China, India, and the rest of the world are not involved.
kergonath 2 hours ago [-]
That is completely wrong.
First, the West and particularly the US are still well ahead of China regarding both historical total emissions and per-capita annual emissions. And regardless of what China does in the future we still need to get our acts together domestically.
Also, China is aggressively pushing low-carbon energy sources on all fronts. Where they are now is not necessarily an indication of where they will be in a decade or two.
A large part of their emissions is the result of stuff they make for us. If we are serious about climate policy, we have to set up trade barriers proportional to greenhouse gases emissions to limit this effect. These policies must be informed by climate science.
Finally, regardless of what the rest of the world does, mitigation depends only on us and how well prepared we are.
Really, there is absolutely no scenario in which it is not a good idea to understand what the hell is going on with our climate.
tlogan 2 hours ago [-]
If the United States stopped polluting 100%, global pollution would decrease by only about 10%. Probably even less, because much of that pollution would simply be exported through outsourcing. So what happens next?
ryeights 1 hours ago [-]
>If we are serious about climate policy, we have to set up trade barriers proportional to greenhouse gases emissions to limit this effect.
Consumption economies can incentivize production economies to emit less.
kergonath 1 hours ago [-]
Please remember that we are not talking about stopping climate-related policies. The point here is climate-related science. And even if you are an arch-conservative and you assume (despite all observations) that you can do fuck all about it, knowing how things are going to be is very useful if you intend to survive, never mind thrive.
hnfong 2 hours ago [-]
You're arguing a hypothetical where the US stopped all emissions 100% and the rest of the world isn't doing anything.
The reality is that China is aggressively pushing solar and electric vehicles, and the West is complaining about it. Meanwhile the current US president's maxim is "drill baby drill".
I mean, if we don't need to stick to facts, let's discuss the hypothetical scenario where I am a powerful wizard, and when I say a magic word and I can halve the total amount of CO2 in the atmosphere?
OK, now where's my Nobel peace prize dammit??
Shin-- 2 hours ago [-]
Hilarious take. China and India have historically emitted much less carbon than many western countries, per capita they emit less Co2, and a large part of emission is to produce for western countries, which have effectively outsourced their emissions to other (poorer) countries.
At the same time, the US is the main force fighting against carbon neutrality, renewable energy and pretty much anything reasonable. By directly burning a lot of fossil fuels and by lobbying and poisoning discourse in other countries.
Meanwhile China is by far the biggest producer of anything related to renewable energies and installing more renewable energy than the rest of the world, by far.
If anything, the work done worldwide does no matter (it still does though) because USA is doing their best to destroy the planet.
tgsovlerkhgsel 2 hours ago [-]
China has long surpassed most countries in per-capita emissions and is still on an upward trajectory. India is on an upward trajectory but still below the world average. The US and Canada are higher than China but on a downward trajectory. The EU is on a downward trajectory and below China.
You quickly start seeing people's root biases about when you bringing info like this up, "well but historically ...", "you know, the colonialism", "per capita ...", etc. I wish we could deal with the here and now and deal with this scientifically.
tlogan 2 hours ago [-]
Using the IEA’s 2024 energy-related CO₂ data, advanced economies emitted 10.9 billion tonnes out of a global 37.8 billion tonnes in 2024, which is about 28.8% of the world total.
So if developed countries completely eliminate all pollution we will reduce it by 30%. Good. Then what is the next step? War with China? Attack India?
Western efforts matter because they allow less wealthy nations to follow along a proven path towards sustainability.
Nnobody is going to follow a hypocrite, and no one in east asia is gonna cut back on consumption/growth/lifestyle if rich westerners can't even pretend to put in some token effort for the same cause.
Solr and wind power is arguably a huge success story (looking at china specifically) because it was arguably enabled and triggered by western efforts in research, development and commercialization.
jjtheblunt 2 hours ago [-]
curiosity rabbit hole spawned from the article, which got me wondering if the earth axis precession over ~26k years influences ice ages and those cycles:
Let's be real, this won't be solved by reducing consumption, only carbon capture technology (likely well into the future).
It's in no nation's interest, from a game theory perspective, to stunt their own growth to reduce emissions. If the US stops, Russia and China will destroy the west. If China stops, they'll never catch up technologically. Ditto for India. Smaller nations have even less incentive (they'll easily be conquered by neighbours), except for the ones surrounded entirely by friendly nations...
santiagobasulto 2 hours ago [-]
What! you're saying that my selective recycling of paper and having the plastic caps attached to the bottles didn't work? SHOCKING
(only europeans will understand)
vrganj 2 hours ago [-]
It did work. There's wayyyyyy fewer lose plastic caps littering the streets now.
There's more than one aspect to the environment. Plastic pollution and global warming are two separate concerns with separate ways of dealing with them.
draw_down 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
madman2890 2 hours ago [-]
We need the government to release the alien technology to the public now.
alansaber 2 hours ago [-]
Only good news these days eh
zer0zzz 2 hours ago [-]
This entire thread is a demonstration in how doomed we are.
pvaldes 2 hours ago [-]
Dropping bombs has accelerated significantly. The last one to leave, turn the light off.
dcchambers 57 minutes ago [-]
There's literally nothing that can be done about it. The people with actual ability to make a change don't care.
We're going to have to figure out how to adapt to it. Expect many of the things you love now (seafood, coffee, etc) to be gone within your lifetime.
n8cpdx 40 minutes ago [-]
There were voters who could do part of it. Long term, having a US President that doesn’t cancel wind projects, tear up EV subsidies, and promote coal would probably be a difference maker for US emissions.
And if the voters were just a bit smarter and not bought into the “China bad” narrative, we might even get proper, nice, affordable EVs in the US.
tencentshill 30 minutes ago [-]
Trump is still all bluster and words. He can't change the math. I've convinced 2 people to get EVs over ICE this year. They still make economic sense even without federal subsidies (dependent on your home/work situation). Though I don't deny that most OEMs are likely selling at a loss now.
It's foolish how foreign wars directly affect how much it costs you to get to work.
pstuart 3 hours ago [-]
There's plenty of money to be made mitigating this, unfortunately, there's plenty of money currently being made causing this, and those moneymakers are the ones in power and are happy to kill the planet as long as they themselves can live in luxury while it happens.
sealthedeal 3 hours ago [-]
Oh no!!! The Earth is Earthing!
TimorousBestie 3 hours ago [-]
A weird title.
The content of the paper is summed up as “everyone felt like the climate changed after 2015, the data up to 2023 was inconclusive; we finally have enough to prove it with 95% confidence.”
EDIT: The title is weird because it’s generic to the point of being unsearchable. I’m not disputing the facts of the paper.
epistasis 3 hours ago [-]
It's one of those titles that makes perfect sense to a scientist working in the field, but which is quite inscrutable to those not working in the field. (Just like the titles of most HN submissions)
Since manuscripts are written for those working in the field, and need to be, it's one of the big challenges of science communication. In the past these articles would be in a library and mailed out to the subscribing specialists, which minimized the confusion. In the age of the internet, even our dogs can read highly specialized scientific pre-prints that haven't even been peer reviewed yet.
tjnaylor 3 hours ago [-]
The title is a fair summary. The paper isn't simply confirming the "climate changed [warmed]" since 2015. The paper is showing the climate warmed the past decade twice as fast as it had between the decades from 1960-2000.
"This 58 indicates that the warming trend has been accelerating from a rate of 0.15 – 0.2 ◦C 59 per decade during 1980-2000, to more than twice that rate [0.4°C] most recently."
guenthert 3 hours ago [-]
"inconclusive" only regarding the significant acceleration. The warming part wasn't in question.
The actual abstract reads: "Recent record-hot years have caused a discussion whether global warming has accelerated, but previous analysis found that acceleration has not yet reached a 95% confidence level given the natural temperature variability. Here we account for the influence of three main natural variability factors: El Niño, volcanism, and solar variation. The resulting adjusted data show that after 2015, global temperature rose significantly faster than in any previous 10-year period since 1945."
TimorousBestie 3 hours ago [-]
Man, I get definition-lawyered a lot on HN but this is something special.
kai_mac 1 hours ago [-]
capitalism is going just great
nsxwolf 2 hours ago [-]
We already mined enough uranium for 500+ years of energy but people want to bury it in a mountain instead.
0ckpuppet 1 hours ago [-]
Until they ban private jets, why take this seriously?
BurningFrog 3 hours ago [-]
Coordinating shared sacrifice between 7 billion people was always unlikely to achieve much. There are good workarounds though. I think this is what will/should happen:
1. For now, we can cool Earth artificially. 1 gram of SO₂ in the stratosphere offsets the warming effect of 1 ton of CO₂. It's known to be safe and effective. This company is already doing it: https://makesunsets.com
2. Fossil fuels will be phased out over the next few decades, but CO₂ stays in the atmosphere for several centuries. The practical solution will probably have to be "carbon sequestration", where you capture CO₂ from the air and pump it underground where it stays forever. Such storage is mature tech in the natural gas industry, but the capturing CO₂ tech needs a lot of work.
paganel 3 hours ago [-]
It's also closely correlated with this not very happy decision put in place in 2020 [1]:
> On 1 January 2020, a new limit on the sulphur content in the fuel oil used on board ships came into force, marking a significant milestone to improve air quality, preserve the environment and protect human health.
bobson381 3 hours ago [-]
well we can stick planes in the upper atmosphere and sprinkle sulfur around to get some cooling, but it'll get worse before then. gonna be interesting.
honkycat 1 hours ago [-]
we have had several manhattan project in the last 100 years, but they have all been for stuff like:
- creating a new addictive form of entertainment we can use to brainwash people
- Creating expensive data centers that MAY end up being extremely useful in the long run
and never for saving the lives of the people on our planet.
Humanity is doomed. We deserve it.
Invictus0 1 hours ago [-]
absolutely nothing can be done about this
spwa4 3 hours ago [-]
Was anybody really expecting anything else? The only factor that would matter is if oil producing nations STOP producing oil entirely. Not reduce, not limit, stop. Same with coal and other small contributions. Note: limiting exports, CO2 limits in oil customer states, ... all of that just doesn't matter.
And, obviously, this is just not on the table. There is no way these nations will make such a decision because what it would mean for their economy. Plus it wouldn't matter unless they all make that decision.
DrBazza 3 hours ago [-]
And when we've somehow stopped using fossil fuels for electricity, what next?
Guess what a lot of plastic is made from? And how planes fly, and boats move?
And there's lots of countries that aren't at 'Western' living standards. So we have decades of those countries building and emissions to come.
Plus of course there's a lag in CO2 emissions to climate change. The next couple of decades are going to get a lot worse, before they get better, if at all.
People are losing their minds at the prospect of oil availability dropping just 20% for a month or two with the closing of the Strait of Hormuz - even just this could collapse the global economy.
So yea, no way is oil stopping or even dipping slightly any time soon.
ncr100 3 hours ago [-]
Your initial question is a fantastic thought focus.
The intention of the United States and the world is divided.
We love our money too much to care about the Next generation, In my view.
spwa4 2 hours ago [-]
"The intention of the United States and the world is divided."
What do you mean?
The intention of the United States is maximizing oil use.
The intention of the World is maximizing oil use. Even EU countries are panicking over maybe being forced to use just a little less oil.
So where do you see this difference? Clearly, the entire world agrees: global warming is less serious than higher prices on oil. Much less important.
This is good! Better to be numb and stupid when we die of hunger on the streets
luxuryballs 3 hours ago [-]
It’s these dang seltzer waters I can’t quit them!
ck2 3 hours ago [-]
Basically the oceans are way way way too hot which is melting even the most ancient ice and that can never be undone in our lifetimes (well maybe from a nuclear winter)
USA is about to have another El Nino summer which will be scorching from overheating oceans
But don't worry, USA is solving the problem by Biden banning cheap electric cars and Trump ending electric subsidies entirely, forcing coal plants to restart
_heimdall 3 hours ago [-]
Electric cars aren't a magic bullet. We need to drive less, not scrap ICE vehicles and buy new electric vehicles made on the other side of the planet with globally sourced materials and shipped to the US.
bojan 3 hours ago [-]
Do they have to be a magic bullet?
Switching from ICE to electric is a much smaller ask than switching from personal cars to... bicycles?
microtonal 3 hours ago [-]
Switching from ICE to electric is a much smaller ask than switching from personal cars to... bicycles?
Bikes are awesome. I do 95% of my trips by bike. It's healthy, cheap, and has very low amortized emissions. Everybody can repair a bike with a small amount of training.
More countries/cities have to do bike-centric road design.
NicuCalcea 3 hours ago [-]
Why not encourage people who can reasonably cycle to do so? It's not a magic bullet either, but it's no less magic than EVs.
bojan 54 minutes ago [-]
Why not both? Encourage cycling when possible, and when not, an EV.
Looking at American commute distances however, cycling, even with an e-bike, is likely not a reasonable option.
NicuCalcea 4 minutes ago [-]
Of course, both are better.
A lot of Americans probably won't be able to commute on a bicycle, but could easily use one for shorter trips like visiting friends, doing groceries, getting a burger, etc.
Even with commutes, there are lots that could be done on a bicycle. I briefly lived in the US and had a 6-mile (~10 km) commute. It was an unpleasant experience because there was exactly zero cycling infrastructure along the way, but otherwise it was a brief 25-minute trip, shorter than any of the commutes I've had in Europe. Not a single one of my American colleagues, all of whom lived locally, cycled or took a bus.
bdangubic 37 minutes ago [-]
The issue is not just commute distances, it is cultural. Just in my personal "click" there are 5 people of which:
- 2 live less than 5 minutes from a metro that literally takes them to the office, they never take the metro
- 2 live easily within a biking distance to work, 1 has a bike, another has e-bike, they never bike to work
- 1 lives literally walking distance to work, she never walks to work
Public transportation where I live is vast, you can easily commute with the public transportation to just about everywhere but only low(er) income people will take public transportation.
Two most-frequently cited reasons I hear why not bike/walk/...
1. Dangerous - every female friend I have lists this as #1 reason they always drive. Regardless of the fact that I live in the area where I often forget to close my garage overnight and leave the front door open (very very low crime rates) the women feel unsafe. A lot of sensationalism in the news regarding every minor thing happening might be to blame but I have a wife and a daughter and am godfather to several girls so I understand
2. Inconvenient - what if after work I want to go to ____ and ____ and ____. Now I got to track back home and then perhaps change clothes, clean the house... and then get into the car to go to _____.
nDRDY 3 hours ago [-]
With a correspondingly smaller decrease in CO2 output. We're in a Climate Catastrophe on the edge of Global Tipping Points, remember!
Sarcasm aside, I think this is why people have generally stopped caring as much. What we are being asked to do (buy new shiny things for some estimated small percentage decrease in lifecycle CO2 output) does not match the messaging.
FWIW I cycle almost everywhere.
bluGill 3 hours ago [-]
If there was some investment most of us could switch to public transit. The problems people have with transit are mostly around there isn't enough of it to be useful - when /where it is useful people use it.
alberto467 3 hours ago [-]
That's not the full story, you're right that they "could switch", but would they actually?
Good, working and efficient public transit still means having significantly less comfort compared to having your private vehicle. Pretty much the only exception is using the metro in a congested downtown area at peak traffic (still, your metro experience will also be degraded by the peak traffic), or perhaps if parking your vehicle will be very difficult. And i say this as someone in a rather big city in Europe who is currently only using public transit. And there is a lot of stuff that i'd like to do but i can't do since i currently don't have access to a car or motorbike.
People don't just want "useful", at least the majority of people in developed countries also want "comfortable", and "nice", and "easy", and "enjoyable". A peak-hour metro ride or missing your tram by one minute is none of that.
bluGill 2 hours ago [-]
If the next bus/tram isn't almost there when you miss the previous then it isn't nearly as useful.
there are things you can't do with transit. However nearly everyone is living in a family - so keep the truck to tow the boat, but get rid of the other cars that you won't need if transit is good. That is a much more reasonably goal that transit can aim for. A few like you won't own a car/truck at all, but most won't need to go that far
alberto467 3 hours ago [-]
True but also building a new electric car consumes many order of magnitudes more resources (and it will keep consuming them) compared to a bicycle.
But hey, at least you get to keep 99% of your comfort while making 50% less emissions! (if it really is that much).
queenkjuul 2 hours ago [-]
Switched from driving to biking and my life is 10x better, js
3 hours ago [-]
pcthrowaway 2 hours ago [-]
I suspect the reason Trump is talking about annexing Canada is because of our vast swathes of land which have historically been too cold for settlement, which are going to become much more temperate in the near-ish future.
ActorNightly 15 minutes ago [-]
I really wanna know the kind of person you are that thinks that Trump makes logical decisions.
hnfong 1 hours ago [-]
That explains the 300 IQ attempt on claiming Greenland.
everdrive 3 hours ago [-]
>But don't worry, USA is solving the problem by Biden banning cheap electric cars and Trump ending electric subsidies entirely, forcing coal plants to restart
People really think if they just buy the right products we'll solve this problem. People are really fundamentally unable to solve global warming issues. There are a few fundamental problems:
- Broad, collective action is not possible in just any direction. People can broadly get behind causes that are related to some fundamental human motivation, but generally cannot be guided towards nuanced political topics except via general tribalism and coalitions. (eg: you can go to the moon, but there's only broad support for this in the sense that it has consequences for national pride. You didn't have a whole nation helping the the logistics; you just had broad coalitional support.)
- People think that merely buying the right product will help, but major impacts to climate would require a serious modification in quality of life and material wealth. This will never have broad support. People will always scrape out the most comfort and most material wealth that is possible, and will only allow themselves to be constrained by hard limits. Technology can help here to a degree, but once technology helps, people just advance to the next hard limit. For instance the use of insecticides, industrial fertilizer, and large-scale factory farming just allowed for more population boom. Rather than arriving at a place where where had near infinite abundance, we just ate up the gains with expanded population and luxury products. (sort of how computers don't get faster; once the computer is made faster, the software does more and the actual UI responsiveness just stays in the same place.)
- People would need to intentionally decrease population and find healthy limits with the environment. No living thing does this. If you watch population curves in predators and prey, they occur because the hard limits force starvation and population decline. (ie, if the wolves eat too many deer, then the wolf pups starve, the wolf population declines, and then the deer can rebound.) In other words, nature is not "wise and balanced" but instead the balance is a mere fact of competition and death. The moment we produce an abundance, we use up that abundance. This may not be true in the case of some individuals, but broadly this is true for any population.
- No political body, even an authoritarian regime could force these things. People would revolt. Authoritarians themselves often get into power by promising abundance they can never actually deliver on. No authoritarian has gained power by promising to reduce abundance and material wealth.
bobson381 3 hours ago [-]
So I've been on a journey of discovering basically this - limits to growth - for the last few years. It's been .... an emotional roller coaster as someone living in the developed world. I'm following the work of Nate Hagens and others in the space, but The Dread still ebbs and flows.
How do you hold this dispassionately? How do you get to a point of wanting to reproduce, or even wanting to continue, as an act of radical hope? Absurdism? Pure interest in watching it all unfold? I'm pretty aware that we are going to have constraints forced on us as like, a thermodynamic function, but ... how to cope? Go back to the tragedy?
-confused, interested, fascinatedly dreading
MaxHoppersGhost 2 hours ago [-]
Throughout human history entire families, tribes, villages, and cities were on the edge of death, whether it was by disease, famine, or invaders. This is nothing new. Don't by into the people selling fear.
mrlonglong 3 hours ago [-]
Biden?!
whynotmaybe 3 hours ago [-]
It reminds me of what I used to say whenever I've completed a contract for a client.
"And remember, now that I'm gone, every problem that occurs is my fault. So stop looking for the culprit, find a solution"
Some fraction that will not be enough to produce "orders of magnitude more"
myrmidon 3 hours ago [-]
Disagree with this perspective entirely.
Not only is it factually wrong (US emissions are much higher than Indian ones despite India being like 4x as many people), it also ignores second order effects of sane environmental policy completely:
By demonstrating that emission reduction is feasible, smaller wealthy western nations can have giant effects on billions of people living in poorer states. Not only does this demonstrate that wealth and environmental concerns are compatible, it also allows "follower-nations" to emulate such efforts cost effectively by picking proven technologies and avoiding technological dead-ends.
Just consider wind/solar in China: I would argue that the whole industry and growth rates only got to the current point so quickly is thanks to research, development and investment done in western nations in the decades prior.
Countries like Germany (<100M) had a huge effect on energy development in China (>1b people). If they had just kept using fossils until now, Chinese electricity might well be >90% coal power as well.
Geoengineering is a naive pipedream in my view because all proposals are either the height of recklessness and/or completely financial lunacy: CO2 capture for small individual emitters like cars is never gonna be even close to cost competitive with just reducing those emissions in the first place (but I'm always curious about any novel approaches).
boudin 3 hours ago [-]
Our behaviour is also responsible for China's and India emissions.
We've exported lot of our production to those countries and are importing it back. If we were to measure emissions not by the country of the producer but the country of the consumer, our numbers (USA and Europe) would look dramatically different.
As consummer we are responsible for the whole world emissions in the end. Changing those habbits, can impact things far beyond borders. But that's a political choice which goes against a constant growth based economy and it seems that not many people in our countries are ready to accept this.
We want to buy and travel as much as we always did but bear no reponsibilities for the impact it has.
kreyenborgi 3 hours ago [-]
Actually it would matter. Less CO2 would be released. It just wouldn't stop all the CO2 being released - but we don't need nor want to stop it all for it to matter.
redwall_hp 3 hours ago [-]
China outpaced the US for renewable energy rollout years ago, and isn't stopping now, because it's seen as energy security. It's not even close.
Right on schedule folks, it's a climate topic and we will now have the traditional recitation of the lies.
rcruzeiro 3 hours ago [-]
America could set the standard and then use its soft power (or sanctions if it came to that) to make India and china follow suit. The problem is that America is now hellbent on burning the world, and its soft power is all but gone.
giwook 3 hours ago [-]
China has actually been leading the charge in terms of green energy lately, at least in terms of making solar power equipment more accessible by way of driving down cost.
I have no idea however if they're just exporting this to other countries or if they're also pushing renewable energy domestically.
From what little I've read on this topic in recent years though they seem to realize that all of that smog is coming from somewhere and are taking meaningful action to remedy it, which is in stark contrast to what we're doing in the states these days with stifling clean energy and promoting coal.
_heimdall 3 hours ago [-]
China has continued to rapidly increase their use of coal for power generation. Just a few days ago there was an article about them hitting an 18-year high of new coal power installations [1]
It is deceptive to compare coal % of power generation, because China specifically substitutes coal for gas because they have none of that (and no reliable source). This also means those coal plants run at lower/decreasing utilization because a big part of their role is to provide dispatchability. So for China you have 55% coal and 3% gas while the US uses 16% coal and 40% gas for electrical power.
If you compare numbers, you will also find that lower per-capita consumption more than compensates for currently still higher CO2 intensity of chinese electricity (3000kWh/person * 0.5kgCo2/kWh for China vs 5500kWh/person * 0.35kgCo2/kWh, i.e. 1.5 vs 1.9 tons of Co2/year/person from electricity for China vs the US).
triceratops 3 hours ago [-]
New coal power installations != increased use of coal for power generation. You have to stop this lie by omission.
Their new coal plants either replace older ones. Or they are left idle. Close to 90% of all their generation growth comes from solar and wind.
They use coal because they have coal. Just like the US uses natural gas and then pats itself on the back for "reducing emissions" by switching from coal to gas. But their current trajectory will see them going to burning very little coal. It's a national security issue for them.
giwook 3 hours ago [-]
I'd guess that this is in large part due to the sheer amount of datacenters they plan to bring online in the coming years and the fact that they can't scale up green energy quickly enough to meet the expected demand.
In an ideal world I think they'd prefer to be powered by 100% clean energy but not at the cost of losing the AI race.
wat10000 3 hours ago [-]
China's coal consumption has been pretty much flat for the past decade. That's certainly not ideal, but it's not a rapid increase.
wereHamster 3 hours ago [-]
China is already slowing down the addition new fossil fuel power plants. Yes, they still build new ones, yes they generate a lot of emissions. But they are also adding more than the rest of the world combined of renewable (solar, wind) electricity generation each year. Realistically, if China stopped 100% of emissions tomorrow, they'd be in much better position to replace it with clean alternatives than most other countries.
azan_ 3 hours ago [-]
USA burns orders of magnitude more per capita. And if you take historical emission (and you should!) then the disproportion is absolutely absurd.
WorldMaker 3 hours ago [-]
That's a bit defeatist, and kind of a whataboutism. Sure, it is the greatest tragedy of the commons in history playing out as a slow motion trainwreck, but you don't solve the tragedy of the commons by continuing to make it tragic "because everyone else is doing it". You focus on your own impact and you also focus on diplomacy with your neighbors. You don't just stop, you put in twice the work.
It's also somewhat easy to shift that viewpoint a little, too, right now: China's emissions numbers have started a rapid deceleration downward. They are doing more about their emissions faster than the US. Does the US want to lose to China that badly that we shouldn't even try to align US policy to more of the emissions reductions that China is already succeeding at today? (Much less their robust plans for future emissions reductions?)
3 hours ago [-]
mitthrowaway2 3 hours ago [-]
Orders of magnitude more? Do you have a citation for that tremendous claim?
wat10000 3 hours ago [-]
Stopping 100% of emissions from the US would not be enough, but it would absolutely matter. We're still the #2 CO2 emitter. China is only about 3x more, not anything like "orders of magnitude." India is quite a bit less than the US.
_heimdall 3 hours ago [-]
Why so blatantly lean into Jevans paradox?
In this case, there is no ceiling on global emissions. If one country reduces to zero there would absolutely be less emissions than if they hadn't. There's no incentive for China and India to pick up the slack and create more pollution just to cover what the US stopped making.
triceratops 3 hours ago [-]
It's not real. Even if it's real it doesn't matter what I do. Any more lies?
monkaiju 3 hours ago [-]
Thankfully none of the serious solutions are nation-specific. Also they do not emit "orders of magnitude more"
> Here we account for the influence of three main natural variability factors: El Niño, volcanism, and solar variation.
Whoops! Whoopsies! Oopsy doodles!
gedy 1 hours ago [-]
All those RTO commuters /s
gethly 37 minutes ago [-]
[flagged]
SV_BubbleTime 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
ldoughty 3 hours ago [-]
models are only as good as our understanding. From the abstract:
> Here we account for the influence of three main natural variability factors: El Niño, volcanism, and solar variation.
All of these events are decades-long (or longer) cycles that don't have a substantial amount of data points... Sure, solar cycles seem to be 11 years, but we don't have a lot of scientifically usable (for forecasting) data points on that -- maybe 8 cycles? less? And the cycles are not consistent. It's not like Year 4 of one cycle is like year 4 of another cycle, we just determined there's a period of about 11 that looks significant.
Same with El Niño -- it's not like its 'true' or 'false', there's degrees of it.. and when it starts, and if other conditions are right to make additional hurricanes that year, and how much cloud cover that generates, etc. etc. a lot of which we don't have data on past 1960 when we launched our first weather satellite ...
As for volcanos... there's lots of them, and we are not great at predicting the high-impact events... we certainly don't have sufficient data to accurately predict what happens if we had a huge eruption on an El Niño strong year during the height of a solar cycle.
epistasis 3 hours ago [-]
Your comment seems to assume that this is somehow counter to the modeling; what models in particular do you think this contradicts?
1970-01-01 3 hours ago [-]
Go ahead and read the first sentence of the paper. It explains why.
abm53 3 hours ago [-]
The article doesn’t present any hypotheses regarding this, and I suspect we simply don’t know yet.
But if true presumably it’s one of the usual reasons for observing data with low likelihood according to a model: misspecification or statistical bias/variance.
Nevermark 3 hours ago [-]
Models point to ranges of scenarios.
When they say worst case, it means it’s possible. And only worst case within a percentage (like 95%) certainly, and based on known effects.
Worst cases are not some obligatory pessimism to scare people into accepting the mean probability case. They are serious warnings.
Given we are playing roulette with our planet’s climate stability, any major unaccounted for factors that reveal themselves are most likely to result in worse outcomes.
There have been people trying to bring attention to this sober information since the 80’s. Welcome to 2026. There will still be people complaining predictions are too dire.
jpadkins 3 hours ago [-]
solar variability? Hard to model, as we don't understand it well enough to model it.
aqme28 3 hours ago [-]
Modeling is hard. Some did, some didn’t. Generally we have historically underestimated climate change.
czbond 3 hours ago [-]
SV_BubbleTime is being sarcastic.
devin 3 hours ago [-]
You should educate yourself on the phrase: "All models are wrong, but some are useful".
Your attempts at derailing the discourse is not only frustrating – in the case of climate change it might just kill us all. You're a danger.
alberto467 3 hours ago [-]
I don't know what bothers me more, the guy trolling or you calling people "a danger" for posting literally a single question.
devin 2 hours ago [-]
It's a bad faith question or one so deeply uninformed that parent is correct. It only takes a couple clicks to see the ideas of the people who are "just asking questions".
FrustratedMonky 3 hours ago [-]
Chill. People need to cope, and humor, sarcasm, etc.. are ok
devin 2 hours ago [-]
It is neither of those things. Their post history is pretty clear.
a456463 2 hours ago [-]
And yet yesterday people were gushing about more toxic waste from Apple!
pluc 3 hours ago [-]
Yeah but now you can ask a question instead of providing a search term!
azan_ 3 hours ago [-]
It's not a great idea to blame AI, which is small addition to the global emissions. I suggest focusing on what's really important, not what's currently trendy.
topaz0 3 hours ago [-]
This is like saying in 1910 "cars are a tiny fraction of our emissions, you should be focusing on the steam train and the woodstove"
azan_ 2 hours ago [-]
No, it's not. The comparison makes zero sense and is fuelled by social-media sentiment, not facts.
xyzelement 4 hours ago [-]
As an observation, global warming has completely disappeared as social concern in the last few years. Great that someone is still publishing research, but it seems like being a climate scientist has gone from hottest field to nobody cares.
latexr 3 hours ago [-]
Are you based in the US? Seeing how the current regime is doing its best to gut climate protections I get how it could seem that way, but it’s definitely not the case in e.g. Europe where energy from renewables continues to grow.
stfp 3 hours ago [-]
Anecdotally, as I spend time between the US and the EU, the divide is large and clear now. It feels like folks in the US sort of just gave up (me included to an extent), whereas in Europe there seems to be a stronger resolve at a personal level and institutional level, to keep reducing energy use, plastics, driving, waste, etc. The US on the other hand is accelerating overconsumption in all directions.
It's especially depressing for me when it comes to younger folks. In Seattle where I live (not the suburbs, actual Seattle) some teenagers drive to school in 6 seater SUVs and spend their lunch time in there, with the engine on. A minority of students of course but that's still a mindfuck... in Europe they would get so much shit from other kids and neighbors. Drop in the bucket in terms of actual emissions but a very strong symbol of the lack of awareness/motivation.
ActorNightly 17 minutes ago [-]
The individual contributions from emissions are much smaller than industrial scale emissions. People can still do what you describe if we magically move all power production to solar/nuclear, and move to cleaner airplanes, and things would be headed in the right direction global warming wise.
missedthecue 3 hours ago [-]
Most countries including the US are deploying record amounts of renewables. But the climate conversation is definitely reduced, and that's global. Its been a good while since I saw angsty euro teens throwing tomato soup on paintings or gluing themselves to motorways. That used to be a monthly occurance.
pjc50 3 hours ago [-]
That was .. last year?
There's a "top of stack" effect in that there can be only a certain number of issues which are most important in discourse, and the Israel/Iran situation has taken over the top of discourse as has the US President.
A vital part of good governance is caring about things which aren't in today's newspaper.
missedthecue 3 hours ago [-]
No, it was more of a 2023 thing, which is now three years ago. It had definitely calmed down by 2025 too. Iran situation is only a few days old.
latexr 3 hours ago [-]
The US still produces more than half (58%) of its electricity from fossil fuels. In the EU, it’s less than a third (29%).
In the EU I hear of new climate initiatives all the time. From the US every bit of news I know about is how they’re making it worse.
vixen99 2 hours ago [-]
What is the effect of the new climate initiatives? Undoubtedly $trillions have been spent on what might be termed 'fighting climate change' by all means possible. Looking at the Mauna Loa data on C02, can anyone see any effect at all?
https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/. I merely present this as an observation. In other words, your comment is spot on at least with respect to the EU.
marginalia_nu 3 hours ago [-]
Everyone and their mother is running digital influence operations, so the overall media landscape is just extremely noisy right now.
This is an art that has been refined with every election cycle and every major political event since the early 2010s, and it had already gotten dang bad 5-6 years ago[1], and definitely did not get an ounce better once LLMs came along and drove the down the cost of this type of op.
The result is that it's very hard to get any sort of coherent message across.
[1] 'member the absolute clown fiesta surrounding COVID?
pjc50 3 hours ago [-]
Well, yes, due to systematic propaganda efforts and the general shift from being against mass death to being in favor of it.
I assume because the public has been consumed by narratives over data. Narratives have probably always been more powerful than data for us humans, but we now have really powerful tools to generate the narratives we like. Combine that with algorithmic feeds that prefer certain types of narratives, boring and/or annoying data gets ignored.
avereveard 3 hours ago [-]
as soon as there was money to be made by concentrating data center, no matter the energy density impact on environment, the once philanthropist changed tune real quick
with gems like
"Although climate change will hurt poor people more than anyone else, for the vast majority of them it will not be the only or even the biggest threat to their lives and welfare. "
alberto467 3 hours ago [-]
I think a lot of people have lost faith in the ability of the world to come all together and make the necessary sacrifices to make a difference. Especially when some parts of the world are in competition with each other and not making these sacrifices allows them an edge.
Also another group of people have realized they are not willing to forgo all their petty and unnecessary comforts nor are they willing to pay any price increases that would be required to adopt less economical but more sustainable services or production methods.
I don't think there's been any big change in climate change believers/deniers, but i do think some people have started accepting that we're doomed and that there is no "practical" solution. And if you think you're doomed, you might as well skip the sacrifices and enjoy your last days (decades) to the fullest.
ActorNightly 8 minutes ago [-]
Its not that.
Basically, on the average, people don't have ability to think rationally into the future. Most people think only 1 level of cause and effect.
Right now, for the vast majority of people, global warming isn't a problem when your house has AC, your car has AC, your workplace has AC. When you are forced to do things that you see no direct effect of, it makes it seem less important, and its a self reinforcing cycle where you see other people not doing it and you wonder why you have to make your life harder.
People will start caring only when their direct lives are affected. So unfortunately, the only way to fix global warming is to let it get bad enough to where there is enough death and destruction for people to start paying attention.
bondarchuk 3 hours ago [-]
"People aren't willing to pay price increases" is interesting. Of course that's what they say when you ask them directly. Yet everyone is currently paying massive price increases as a result of covid-era money printing. I'm not saying you're wrong necessarily but what it shows it that it has been possible in very recent times that a collecive decision was made which increased general prices for everyone.
alberto467 2 hours ago [-]
> that a collecive decision was made which increased general prices for everyone
I think you're referring to inflation with that? I wouldn't necessarily say that inflation is the result of a "decision", certainly not a direct decision of any single person nor any collective group. Economies can move around in weird and unpredictable ways, and they are also quite intertwined at the global level making policy decisions even more complicated and unpredictable.
The "money printing" decision wasn't made by asking the public: "would you like to help our economy and businesses and our essential public services in this tragic event? Oh btw you'll be paying for all of this with inflation, are you still sure?". Politicians tend to conveniently leave the second part out, and also, this questions wasn't asked to the public at all. I believe a sizeable amount of the public would've responded "no, let the people die, let the businesses die, i'm not paying for them".
Which is why for example, in many democracies with tools of direct democracy, such tools cannot affect fiscal policy, because people are dumb and they would just say "i want all of the welfare and zero of the taxes", bringing the country to ruin.
jmye 2 hours ago [-]
People are largely unaware of the sources of those price increases, at least in the US, which is why they were such a successful bludgeon in recent elections.
mixdup 3 hours ago [-]
This is the biggest headscratcher about AI. Before 2020 every big tech company had a net neutral, if not net negative, carbon goal. And many of them were talking about not just buying offsets but actual neutrality. And others were talking about even accounting for the emissions caused by their customers using their products
LLMs hit the market and you never hear anyone talk about carbon at all. At all. Maybe Apple will mention it a little bit but they're not in the big datacenter game
The costs of LLMs are just being completely paved over. We don't let manufacturers dump cadmium into the rivers in the US anymore, even if it would enable cheap or magic products, it's insane that we're just ignoring all the external impacts in this particular area
jordanb 3 hours ago [-]
They're grifters. They thought climate tech would be a big grift. When that slowed down they dropped it like last season's trendy outfit and jumped on the AI bandwagon.
mitthrowaway2 3 hours ago [-]
Well, this did hit #1 on HN. A bunch of us might actually still be worried about it.
superxpro12 3 hours ago [-]
Seriously? I see anti-global-warming propaganda every day.
Every f'ing time it snows someone has to snide in with "BuT I ThOuGhT GlObAl WaRmInG WaS ReAl!?!?!?!?!" And i have to take a breath.
2 hours ago [-]
mrweasel 3 hours ago [-]
Denmark is having a parliamentary election in 18 days, and other than one of the left wing parties, it seems like no one gives a shit about environmental issues right now. Even the debate about clean drinking water is a bit one sided, where part of the left want to implement measures to secure it, while the right is "Fuck it, fixing it will hurt our heavily subsidized farmers".
Part of the problem seems to be that many countries won't do shit, so all the improvements that have been made are just completely negated by other poluting more.
dboreham 3 hours ago [-]
I'm in the US and even here this is absolutely not true. It has disappeared as a government concern, because the government has been subverted by vested interests.
bena 3 hours ago [-]
We've had other existential threats to worry about of late.
People are way more alarmed by Rapid Local Temperature Rises By Mechanism of Thermonuclear Energy Being Suddenly Released.
Pxtl 3 hours ago [-]
Because of first COVID-19 and the post-peak economic chaos distracting us, and then afterwards Trump and Putin and Netenyahu and the global rise of erratic mayhem as a political platform.
Eventually we'll have to deal with the Giant Spider Downtown, it's just that the to-do list is growing from the top.
superxpro12 3 hours ago [-]
It's foolish to assume this is not a calculated effort. It's make us feel good that there isn't people who are actually evil enough to coordinate these full-blown authoritarian campaigns.
Consider for a moment that there ARE people this straight-up evil....
Pxtl 3 hours ago [-]
Maybe for Putin, but for Trump it's hard to see it as anything but his completely mercurial nature just causing so much random melodrama that less-urgent problems completely vanish. The same people who love carbon also hate the damage he's doing to global markets. I mean except Putin again.
afh1 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
hackyhacky 3 hours ago [-]
Polls say otherwise. 63 percent of Americans are worried you about the environment.
Attempts to minimize the danger of climate change, as you have just done, are usually politically motivated.
Lol this is SUCH a great data set. People say "yes" to every question except "do I think climate change will affect me personally" and "I talk about it to people in my life" - two metrics that could actually translate to "care"
fragmede 3 hours ago [-]
Rich people with no real concerns is one way to put it. The idea that my children, or my children's children, won't have food to eat or water to drink? I don't know that it is a concern reserved for the rich. That is certainly one viewpoint, and you gotta be some level of rich to have kids in the first place.
hackyhacky 3 hours ago [-]
Nothing like fascism and war to take your mind off the environment.
Octoth0rpe 3 hours ago [-]
Because of how policies are grouped together in many countries (particularly the US), the fight against fascism is necessarily concurrent with the fight against climate change.
Fricken 3 hours ago [-]
I haven't seen much fight against either fascism or climate change so far in the US
xyzelement 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
acdha 3 hours ago [-]
This is a function of your personal media diet: when you spend time consuming rationalizations funded by the fossil fuel industry, it’s easy to deride people who were right as “screamers” and the longer you do so the easier it is to project your intellectual failure onto nebulous “other” people you don’t know. It’s not your fault that climate change is costing lives and billions of dollars, the people who tried to stop it were engaged in hyperbole. It’s not your fault that people are being illegally killed, assaulted, or detained, it’s their fault for allowing you to ignore the clear evidence that this was going to happen.
ghurtado 3 hours ago [-]
"many people are saying my comments are the greatest on all of hacker News. Maybe the whole Internet. Who knows, but people are saying it"
Imagine being so in love with a reality TV clown that you end up talking and thinking like a toddler for the rest of your life just to imitate him.
superxpro12 3 hours ago [-]
ok so this has to be a bot or propaganda account.
The US is checking a new box every day in the quest to parallel Nazi Germany.
Immigrant Concentration camps? Check
Elimination of public education in favor of religious private school? Check
Remove all free press in the government? Check
Remove all free press in the military? Check
Embrace "Unitary Executive Theory"? (Sure sounds a lot like when Hitler removed the legislature to me) Check.
Create an army of brown-shirts? Sorry i mean ICE Agents... Check
Fuck literal children and suppress all evidence? Check
Like... what EXACTLY is normal about this??????
zoklet-enjoyer 3 hours ago [-]
More or less normal? Look around you. Look outside of your community. Does this seem normal?
hackyhacky 3 hours ago [-]
> the world would end the day Trump became president
Have you been reading the news lately? Things are not going well.
xyzelement 3 hours ago [-]
I've been reading the news accross views and geographies for a looong time. Many people would say things are going great with a lot of long-standing problems getting solved.
jmye 2 hours ago [-]
"Many people" "a lot of long-standing problems getting solved"
Weasel words. How many? Who, specifically? Which problems have actually been solved and aren't just "solved" via people metaphorically standing on an aircraft carrier with a "Mission Accomplished" sign pretending they've been solved?
unethical_ban 3 hours ago [-]
In my social circle of liberal people, the reason is despondence.
Climate change has been known for decades now, and despite the alarms and concerns, the current administration is cheerfully, maliciously removing all initiatives in the US to combat it. Attempting to destroy the solar industry and wind power. Rolling back the most common sense environmental controls for public health.
Meanwhile our country has had its place in the world destroyed irrevocably (for at least a generation) and is turning further and further away from a country that cares for its citizens and its freedoms.
People are losing hope, not interest, because climate change and fascism are are more alarming than ever and our government is complicit.
Long standing problems are not being solved.
timacles 3 hours ago [-]
What a coincidence that any fight that might impact corporate profits is always the “left’s” interest.
knicholes 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
hackyhacky 3 hours ago [-]
Yes, everyone is a gullible NPC, except you.
f6v 3 hours ago [-]
The problem is, no amount of climate policies in the West is going to offset burning fuel in the developing counties. It’s a global phenomenon and addressing it locally is futile. That, and you don’t have the luxury of green solutions when energy prices were going through the roof.
hackyhacky 3 hours ago [-]
> addressing it locally is futile.
Imagine what could be accomplished if Americans used their global influence to affect global change on climate issues with the same zeal that they pursue manipulative trade deals.
nDRDY 3 hours ago [-]
It's a good job Americans are right if they were to start swinging their global weight around.
3 hours ago [-]
rounce 3 hours ago [-]
Surely it's better to be more reliant on domestically/locally produced wind and solar when oil and gas production by 3rd party countries is plummeting?
wolttam 3 hours ago [-]
Someone needs to set the example and be the model?
triceratops 3 hours ago [-]
So pay for developing countries to go green. If they can get free solar energy they won't spend their money on gas.
3 hours ago [-]
acdha 3 hours ago [-]
This is not only wrong but you are bending over backwards to maintain the state of ignorance which makes it possible to say that. Most of the carbon in the atmosphere did not come from developing countries, and every reduction buys more time to deal with the problem so, yes, local measures matter: as an example, the U.S. transportation sector is so carbon intensive that getting our average efficiency up will reduce global emissions by more than entire other countries produce.
This is even more wrong when you look at how Africa is electrifying. Unlike the United States, China continued to invest in solar panel production and so they’re now the cheapest option for electrical power for millions of people since solar panels run for decades and don’t require trucking diesel fuel around or building out power grids. Investments in batteries are having the same cycle: richer countries have the research universities and product development but then anyone can buy the product.
That’s why the fossil fuels spend so much money spreading messages like yours: they grew fat on government subsidies and they need those subsidies to continue or even expand as the basic economics increasingly favor renewables. Trump has to force coal plants to stay open because otherwise the operators would switch to cheaper options.
nyeah 3 hours ago [-]
Nice take on the trolley problem. "No amount of pulling the emergency brakes is going to prevent passengers from dying when this runaway train finally crashes. So let's be responsible adults and put the pedal to the metal."
nDRDY 3 hours ago [-]
The messaging on "global tipping points" was over-done, and also many people are now aware that enforcing low-carbon policies is costing Western economies a huge amount of money while resulting in very little net reduction in global CO2 output.
Why care when we're already over the edge and there isn't anything we can do about it?
ndiddy 3 hours ago [-]
I don't see the US doing anything about global warming regardless of who's in charge. China has won on manufacturing cheap wind/solar energy and is scaling up their cheap EV manufacturing right now. Trump is definitely accelerating China's future dominance by completely forgoing anything related to developing or manufacturing green tech in favor of fossil fuels, but I think both parties would rather get into a conflict with China than cooperate with them and purchase their energy tech to deploy domestically. Solar and wind power are already far cheaper than coal or natural gas, and are much quicker to deploy, but the US government would much rather prop up the domestic fossil fuel industry than cooperate with China on renewables because fossil fuel is where all the incumbent money is.
cogman10 3 hours ago [-]
The one thing the US could do to combat global warming is dropping the tariffs on chinese renewables. That's something that could possibly go through a regular spending bill.
Power companies in the US are already deploying renewables pretty quickly without incentive. If the tariffs are dropped that'd further incentivize build out.
What should be done is carbon taxes and subsidies, but that's not likely to be done. And since that's not going to happen, economics is what will drive transition.
WarmWash 3 hours ago [-]
China installed the most new coal power last year than it has in 20 years.
If you think China is developing renewables out of some kind of green future plan, well there is a whole lot of geography and geopolitical information that you are out of the loop on.
maffyoo 2 hours ago [-]
some context here is really important:
China started construction on an estimated 95 GW of new coal power capacity in 2024 it accounted for 93% of new global coal-power construction BUT, importantly, Coal power's share in the electricity mix has steadily declined, dropping from around 73% in 2016 to 51% in June 2025 heavily driven by renewables push in China
China's average utilisation rate of coal power plants in 2024 was around 50% meaning there's already spare capacity. The continued building is driven largely by energy security concerns, financial incentives for coal-mining conglomerates, and institutional momentum. The most immediate trigger was power shortages of 2021, when factories had to cut production due to blackouts. That was politically embarrassing, so provincial governments and energy companies rushed to approve new coal capacity as an insurance policy. More than 100 billion yuan in capacity payments were made to coal plants in 2024 essentially the government paying plants just to exist after all half the capacity isn't being used.
Chinese policy makers have plans to "strictly control" coal use during the current period and start phasing down coal use during the 15th Five-Year Plan period covering 2026–2030. China also has a long-stated goal of peaking carbon emissions before 2030 and reaching carbon neutrality by 2060. which probably explains the apparent paradox of being world leaders in renewables but investing more in Coal than anyone else. usual caveats notwithstanding
shadowgovt 3 hours ago [-]
At this point, one possible 50-years projection of outcomes here is that China eventually declares the US an existential threat to humanity's continued existence and deploys economic or military power to stop it unless the US gets its act together on carbon emissions. Can't build those AI datacenters if China has physically embargoed the chips.
That may seem extreme, but the Chinese culture is more collectivist than its Western counterparts and (perhaps unlike the US culture) can recognize a threat as complicated as "This entire nation's set of rules they treat the universe by threatens humanity existentially" even when said nation can't recognize it in themselves. Plus, India is hit hard and fast by climate change in the short run so China already has an ally in their backyard who would support them doing something about polluters.
Correct; they are currently a major polluter. They are also cognizant of that issue and taking concrete steps to transition their power dependency off of fossil fuel. I don't think the same can be said for the United States, sadly.
China currently emits per-capita co2 about half that of the US.
bluGill 3 hours ago [-]
China is clearly gearing up for war for Taiwan, and it is highly likely the US will be involved if that happens. That is why both Republicans and Democrats are worried about China. I can't say what will happen in the future, but if you are not worried about this you are not paying attention.
htx80nerd 1 hours ago [-]
let me guess we only have 10 more years, again?
cetinsert 2 hours ago [-]
Good! Won't change a thing in how I live my life!
maest 1 hours ago [-]
You must be American.
fragkakis 2 hours ago [-]
Isn't it an irony that much of this is in the name of resolving World Problems, such as Global Warming
>We remove the estimated influence of three main natural variability factors: El Niño, volcanism, and solar variation. The resulting adjusted and thus less “noisy” data show that there has been acceleration with over 98% confidence, with faster warming over the last 10+ years than during any previous decade.
Dumblydorr 2 hours ago [-]
I’m not sure if this comment was low effort or sarcasm but it certainly doesn’t further discussion per HN guidelines.
Those are factors in this analysis that weren’t in all prior analyses, and the confidence levels in this analysis have improved greatly and we know much more certainly that global temps are rising faster now than earlier decades.
knowaveragejoe 1 hours ago [-]
Any excuse to pretend we aren't contributing.
code4life 3 hours ago [-]
Where i live, we had the coldest winter on record in 30 years. I’m going with that.
throwway120385 3 hours ago [-]
The jetstream which prevents the polar vortex from migrating south is getting weaker.
cetinsert 2 hours ago [-]
Sure.
therealdrag0 1 hours ago [-]
You don’t think weather is explainable, or?
bakies 1 hours ago [-]
Dismissing thousands of years of global temperature averages because you had a cold winter, very smart.
karol 1 hours ago [-]
It's gonna be great, when it's warmer.
PowerElectronix 59 minutes ago [-]
And yet the minimum extension of artic ice ever recorded was in 2014.
I think there are more effects to account for when extrapolating measured temperatures, mostly made on the ground with cataclismic effects. After all, all the carbon being emitted nowadays was in the biosphere back in the days. Why couldn't it return back to it without the earth becoming inhabitable?
_aavaa_ 55 minutes ago [-]
The argument isn’t that the whole earth becomes inhospitable. But that certain regions do, and the rest will have their climate differ drastically.
If you live on the coast and the water level rises, your home is inhospitable, even if someone 100mi inland is fine.
If you live in a region that usually was 90F in the summer and is now >110F regularly, that’s going to cause problem.
storus 2 hours ago [-]
I am wondering how much did war in Ukraine contribute to it? On one hand, EU is pushing green agenda, on the other hand there are daily oil storage facility explosions evaporating weeks of oil consumption in a few hours.
cryptoegorophy 3 hours ago [-]
If it is too late to do anything, why should we care? We can’t reverse it, so why should we care about slow down?
wing-_-nuts 2 hours ago [-]
This is like punching a hole in your wall and saying 'there's already a hole, why shouldn't I just demolish my entire house'
kergonath 2 hours ago [-]
We must limit the problem, then adapt and mitigate. Some damage is irreversible, it does not mean that it’s a good idea to stop trying to understand what will happen. You don’t stop weather forecasts when a hurricane touches land just because it’s going to happen anyway.
Reality is not binary. There’s a whole spectrum of situations between "everything gets back to normal and all is well" (which was never on the cards after the 1980s) and "all humans die within a century". And the nuances in between still affect billions of people.
small_model 2 hours ago [-]
"Preprints and early-stage research may not have been peer reviewed yet."
I have a paper that says Global Warming is not real (Also not peer reviewed)
maest 2 hours ago [-]
There is a vast peer reviewed literature that points in the same direction. Getting hung up on how this has not yet been peer reviewed is just bizarre.
jacquesm 2 hours ago [-]
Are you going for a record in bad takes? Your account is a month old and yet I recognize it on sight for the bs takes. Try a bit harder please.
small_model 52 minutes ago [-]
My point is until it's peer reviewed it offers no value. Do you know how many papers are published that don't pass peer review?
jacquesm 7 minutes ago [-]
> My point is until it's peer reviewed it offers no value.
That's just your opinion.
It clearly has some value, whether or not it will have even more remains to be seen.
fvv 2 hours ago [-]
I believe that as soon as nuclear fusion becomes operational (and perhaps AI could be of great help in this regard in the next 5 years),
all the carbon storage methods (efficient and otherwise) studied so far could be immediately put into action.
In addition to the immediate reduction in the use of fossil fuels for energy production, the scenario could be completely changed in 10 years, water could be desalinated, desertification reversed, etc.
Free and unlimited energy would be the solution to everything. The question is whether we will get there before it's too late... and perhaps AI is the answer?
bakies 1 hours ago [-]
Fission is good enough for this.
Rendered at 18:32:33 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
And I don't think it's going to hurt enough in 10 or 20 years.
The pain will come slowly, people won't see it.
It's like going back to the middle age so slowly, that the population don't realize or feel it.
And honestly, wars and trump are making climate concerns so difficult to think about.
Ironic OECD countries actually REDUCED their emissions based on a peak in 2007 and continue to do so. Not reduced as a percentage of GDP or adjusted for population growth, but reduced in absolute levels. It's all China, but I guess it's cool to blame things on developed countries.
There are literally 100k deaths in Europe that can be prevented if they lifted restrictions on AC so that they can feel good about making a negligible effect on carbon emissions. So I think you have it opposite, how much pain do rich countries have to endure before they realize that their efforts are in vain.
And before you say "that's because the West outsources all the dirty production to China", even trade adjusted emissions are down considerably and continue to be down.
Please do some research if you're interested in this topic, it's not hard to do. Just follow the logical steps.
1. What causes global warming
2. Who produces most of these chemicals
3. Are there any global trends over the last 20 years in production of these chemicals
https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions
https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/europes-crusade-against-air-co...
This is just a naive take. You'd obviously expect chinese emissions to be higher (than the US) assuming similar industrialization, because you are counting emissions for like triple the amount of people.
What you conveniently fail to mention: US citizens still emit over 50% more CO2 each, and China basically just caught up to emission levels of developed countries (EU, Japan), while still being significantly below US levels. High income countries combined still emit more than China, too (richest ~15% globally).
If your argument would make any sense, then the obvious solution would be to split China into 3 countries, making the emissions instantly negligible compared to the EU/US. Problem solved?!
There is no reality where we make good progress toward climate change without the "main culprits" (=> nations with highest historical and per-capita emissions) making the first steps.
Why would a country like India pay/sacrifice to reduce emissions while western citizens still pollute at much higher levels after reaping all the spoils from historical pollution?
You could argue that wind/solar is a huge success story in this regard already, with western nations driving lots of the research/development/commercialization efforts (over the previous decades) and now indirectly causing much bigger nations like China to transition onto those very quickly instead of basically fully relying on fossils for decades to come.
To avoid their country having large regions become uninhabitable?
So why would India take more expensive and painful steps than say, the US or EU, or Japan? India both indisputably affects and controls climate change less then the US or EU, so why would they put in completely outsized amounts of effort to fight it?
I have a point and numbers to back it up, I don't see either on your side.
Why do 90% of Americans have AC while only 20% of Europeans do?
Why does US have ~4 heat related deaths per million while Europe has ~235 per million?
Do you think it's just stupidity (Europeans don't know the relationship between heat and AC)? Or poverty? Any other explanation?
https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/08/1152766
Because Rome is further north than New York and Paris is just south of Ottawa/Montreal.
But, if anything, energy efficiency standards for new construction are so strict that heat is becoming less of a problem.
Our economies are built on oil burning somewhere else in the world. You can try to point the blame at China, but the wealth generated in the middle east selling them oil is a major part of the reason why US stock markets keep going up.
If you forced China to use less fossil fuels you would personally feel a much larger hit to your quality of life.
We in the developed world love to outsource the violence and environmental damage we cause. It's one thing to wash your hands, but quite another to then try to point the finger.
America imports more from Mexico, Canada, and the EU than China which ranks as #4 when you consider EU as a single entity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_trading_pa...
Imports from China are a small fraction of GDP and offset by exports to other countries. OECD countries are largely exporting labor not the kind of heavy industry associated with heavy CO2 emissions. Which makes sense as China has relatively cheap labor, but they don’t get a discount on Oil.
Do you want to take a wild guess as to which country is a top 3 importer to all of these countries/regions?
Here's a clue: it's the same country that is a major exporter of oil from GCC countries, and the wealth from those GCC countries is a major contributor of investment to US industry/financial sector.
The correct answer, is of course: China
The global is economy is very tightly interconnected and still very much driven by oil and fossil fuels in general. You can do all the accounting tricks you want, but developed Western lifestyles, especially in the US, are entirely supported and made possible by growing global fossil fuel usage.
Canada imports 377 Billion from America and only 88 Billion from China. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_trading_pa...
So you clearly don’t actually understand global trade if you think being top 3 trading partner somehow drastically changes the equation here. China is a massive economy with 1/6th of the worlds population, so yes it does a lot of trade but economies are a lot more than just trade.
Renewables are cheaper than coal and oil energy, so we will see an increase in quality of life as China electrifies, at least for those of us that import Chinese manufactured goods.
Oil is mostly for people's cars, for an unsustainable transit system that locks us in little boxes and kills all our salmon and is one of the greatest threats to the lives of our children. Getting rid of oil and coal is going to be a loooot easier than getting rid of our car infrastructure.
Please don’t repeat this anti-Europe myth. Anyone applying a bit of common sense should realize how improbable that claim is.
OECD countries' past emissions are causing the warming we see today.
> and continue to do so
China's emissions declined last year. The US's increased.
> It's all China, but I guess it's cool to blame things on developed countries.
China used their emissions to make solar and batteries the cheapest source of electricity today.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/chinas-fuel-demand-m...
And this recent assessment puts emissions from China at "flat or falling" for the past 21 months:
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-ha...
They did, last year.
It's like you're on a boat that sprung a leak and everyone grabs a bucket. But a few people choose to not help because it's not fair for whatever reason.
I'm not an expert, but from what I have read I believe humans do have an effect on climate. However this doesn't mean that any draconian measure that would essentially impose one world government and population control (which is the inevitable outcome of all of this) is preferable. But more importantly I'm anti stupid measures like restricting air-conditioning because they make a negligible impact and literally kill 100k+ people a year.
I'd argue everyone should have an AC if they need one (probably China needs more than they have.) But we shouldn't build any more fossil fuel extraction, people who need AC should figure out how to do it with batteries and renewable energy. (Nuclear is fine, if it makes sense economically.) We don't need population control, we just need to add sufficiently large taxes on things we want less of. AC isn't a thing we want less of, it's carbon emissions.
Chinese emissions have peaked and are now falling.
Any idea what percentage of this reduction is due to offshoring manufacturing?
> https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2
I'm not saying we shouldn't do what we can to make our local environment better and protect and Preserve what we have. We absolutely should. I'm just stating that this is not the first time the Earth has heated or cooled and nothing that we do will ultimately stop it from this cycle from continuing.
What restrictions are there on AC?
The EU's F-Gas Regulation creates significant restrictions on refrigerants used in air conditioning
There's significant red tape when installing AC due to building regulations
90% of US homes have AC while only 20% of European homes have it, I don't think that's by accident.
Fun fact, some EU countries even have laws telling you how much you can open your windows! In the UK, there is a law that in any public building, windows must not open more than 100mm (about 4 inches).
As for PRC, they brrrted out enough solar last year to replace about 40 billion barrels of oil over their life time, or about annual global consumption of oil @100m barrels per day. They have enough renewable manufacturing capacity to displace global oil, lng and good chunk of coal.
PRC is basically manufacturing the largest carbon displacement, i.e. emission avoidance system in the world, and if not for them, global fossil consumption would double+.
It's even more retarded accounting that taxes PRC manufacturing renewables as generation emissions while fossils extractors, i.e. US whose massively increased oil/lng exports do not count towards US emissions.
At the end of the day, PRC's balance of emissions vs how much they displace via renewable manufacturing makes their emission contribution net negative, by a large margin. OCED countries reducing their emissions don't even compare in terms of contribution, it's borderline performative. OCED need to be reducing emissions and generating equivalent displacement to be net negative. It doesn't have to be domestic net negative, simply export/fund enough renewables to developing countries whose power consumption and downstream emissions will increase by magnitudes... you know subsidize them like OECD was suppose to do. Reality is rich countries don't want to do shit about the "global" emission problem, at least PRC selling renewables at commodity pricing to displace velocity of fossil consumption increase. Ultimately, 4 billion developing people going to 10/100x their energy consumption, which like AC is net moral good over net emissions. The real battle is how to keep new power use as emission free as possible, and only PRC is doing that in numbers that matter.
Wanking over OCED reducing their emissions is overlooking OCED was suppose to help developing countries minimize (not reduce) as they grow. All OCED has to do is give PRC renewables the 100b they once pledged on to help developing countries transition for PRC to run renewables manufacturing at 100% utilization (or even expand) so significant % of new power generation is renewables. 100b at current PRC prices of $0.1O/watt buys about 1000GW of panels (enough to power all of Africa & India and more). Or OECD can manufacture at sell at/below cost themselves.
For example, destabilization of equatorial countries due to wet bulb temperatures, through multiple causal paths: worse education outcomes (many days off school during hot months), worse economy (can't work outside), worse life satisfaction -> more autocracies, more water scarcity.
Then you get more emigration to the colder north, more conflict and more suffering. But not much of it is easily and directly attributable to temperatures.
Much of it is foregone upside, like GDP growth that's 3% instead of 5%.
Severe enough to be noticeable, but not severe enough to warrant radical climate action. Not an extinction threat. A "slow trickle of economic damage, some amount of otherwise preventable death and suffering, diffused across the entire world, applied unevenly, and spread thin across many decades" threat.
And stopping the GHG emissions demands radical, coordinated global action. Major emitters would have to pay local costs now - for the sake of global benefits many decades down the line. And those emitters are not the countries that face the worst climate risks. Global superpowers can tolerate climate change - it's countries that already struggle as it is, that don't have the resources to adapt or mitigate damage, that can face a significant uptick in death and suffering rather than damage in the realm of economics.
That makes climate action a very hard sell for the politicians. Thus the tepid response.
By now, I'm convinced that the only viable approaches to climate change lie in the realm of geoengineering. Which does not require multilateral coordinated action against a "tragedy of commons" scenario, and is cheaper than forcing local GHG emissions into negatives.
Even non-permanent geoengineering solutions offset impacts here and now - thus buying time for fossil fuel energy to succumb to the economic advantage of renewables. And geoengineering measures can be enacted unilaterally by many powers - as long as the political will is there to absorb a few strongly worded condemnation letters.
The world just eats the climate costs and keeps going.
There's no global catastrophe. No single moment when the magnitude of your folly is revealed to you a blinding flash. Just a slow trickle of "2% worse".
There are many mechanisms of positive feedback that can accelerate global warming instead of just reaching an equilibrium at a higher average temperature than now.
If some of those mechanisms of positive feedback would be triggered, a global catastrophe would be possible, due to the excessive speed of the climate change, which does not give enough time for the biosphere to adapt to it.
Instead of hoping that we will be lucky, it would have been much better to avoid such risks and prevent further increases in CO2 concentration and average temperature.
I am old enough to have seen a dramatic change in climate from the time when I was a child, when the seasons were still exactly as they had been described for centuries and millennia at that location in Europe, to the present time, when winters are no colder than autumns were before and I have never used again my winter clothes and boots for about 15 years.
I find such a radical change during my lifetime quite scary and I see no evidence for claims that "the world will keep going". The truth is that nobody knows whether this will be true and hoping that this will happen without doing anything to guarantee such an outcome is reckless.
Plenty of feedback mechanisms were proposed, investigated, and found lacking. It's a "makes climate change 10% worse than it would otherwise have been" kind of thing, not a "makes climate change 1000% worse than it would otherwise have been" kind of thing.
Nuclear superpowers are among the least likely countries to actually collapse from climate damage.
US isn't Syria, and it's Syria that's at risk.
First world countries like France can absorb a +30% spike to food prices. Countries where the same food price spike would come with a major death toll don't have the tools to kick off WW3.
Not the only reason, no. But their nuclear ambitions certainly did contribute to their current predicament.
Nuclear weapons take time, expertize, resources and sustained political will to develop and deploy. If you have all of that, you might be able to put all of that towards climate adaptation instead. Or: go for the nukes and bet hard that you aren't going to get bombed to shit for it. Worked out for NK, but doesn't seem to have worked for Iran.
Not to mention that merely having a nuclear bomb doesn't automatically allow one to cause WW3. Nuclear weapons were used in a world war already, and that didn't even destroy a single country - let alone the world. It takes a lot of nukes, and a lot of delivery mechanisms, to actually move the needle on the matter of human civilization existing.
Invade? No. Bomb? Probably. Same if for India if e.g. Sri Lanka decides it wants nuclear weapons.
Global warming will unfortunately disproportionately hit poor, equatorial countries. (Also, starving countries can’t afford a nuclear programme. There is no breakout risk in Sudan.)
If that is not linkable to global warming I am not sure what is. And that is a huge event. In Europe we are struggling with accomodating perhaps 10M people. What happens when 1.5B come knocking because if they stay they die?
https://books.rockslide.ca/read/780/epub#epubcfi(/6/14!/4/2/...
We sink the boats.
Or am I misunderstanding your comment?
More taxes go to ammunition for autonomous border guard systems.
You think that’s bad... Up here in Canada we’ll have to deal with Murican immigrants as things heat up. Talk about killing the vibe.
Just look here in the USA -- the Democrats tried to do some forward thinking things like subsidizing solar and wind, and they were rewarded by losing at the ballot box (of course that isn't the only reason, but it's one of many).
There are no rewards for long term thinking, so it's hard to get anyone to do it.
This is disingenuous. It's one of many in that it may have contributed 0.0001%. If they wouldn't have done that, would they currently have more power? Absolutely not, believing otherwise means being clueless about what has motivated people to vote in certain ways.
The topics have different purposes. Fossil fuels vs renewables in particular hasn't won the reps a single race, I repeat. Every race they've won, they would've won without it. And every race they've lost, they would've lost without it. The purpose of bringing up that particular topic for them isn't to help win close races.
How can you possibly know this? How could you know what is in the mind of every voter and why they make the choice they do?
They bring it up for a reason -- because their research says talking about helps them win elections.
It's not obvious what we can do (individual actions taken within the context of a system are dwarfed by structural forces of the system), but we're the only ones who are going to do it. So, let's assume we did fix things, and we're looking back from 2050, doing a retrospective. What things did we end up doing, that got us to that point?
Almost all emissions come from factories. There are only two ways to reduce that -- a global set of rules that increases costs to reduce emissions, and an overall reduction in consumption, via a carbon tax.
industry, electricity and home use (heating & A/C mostly) are all roughly 30% of emissions.
But I agree with you about solutions. The market will quickly bankrupt any companies that induce extra costs to decarbonify. It's the governments job to ensure that externalized costs like CO2 emissions are internalized via carbon taxes.
I'm sure there are people who've specced out detailed proposals for this sort of thing. There might even be previous cases where they've succeeded, which we can learn from. Neither of those "two ways" you mentioned are things that I can do, but I may be able to slightly reduce the intensity of the opposition. (Companies tend to like when regulations require their competitors to do things they're already doing, after all.)
Like let them build few of those sci-fi domes and let them keep buying disposable bottled oxygen? I don't get the pessimism. India makes its own rockets. Pakistan has nukes. Why are they supposed to be incapable of holding the nation together on Mars-like Earth?
Tokyo is already hitting 40C/100F at >90% RH during summers. It's already mildly unsurvivable. Nobody cares. Maybe in 10-20 years we'd be wearing spacesuits, but do anyone seriously think the equatorial regions will be uninhabitable and land prices on northern Europe is going to skyrocket???
Maybe that's why the Trump regime wants so badly to invade Canada and the Groenland?
One local drought can't be attributed to or be proof of global warming.
It's like smoking causing lung cancer; (the following numbers are made up) 5 in 100 non-smokers might get lung cancer but 20 in 100 smokers do. 5 of those smokers would have gotten lung cancer anyway and 15 wouldn't have but there's no way to know which individuals are in which cohort.
Nothing will change until many of the global electorate stop burying their heads in the sand. These people don't change their minds until things affect them specifically. Then they change their mind, and all their former fellows tell them they're brainwashed.
This doesn't change until nearly everyone is affected, and by then we're so far into the catastrophe that the consequences don't even bear thinking about.
"Drill baby drill" will be echoed so long as petroleum companies and petroleum rich nations dump billions into propaganda outlets, politician campaigns, and in the US, PAC groups to support "drill baby drill" friendly politicians.
So long as that dynamic exists, it doesn't matter if 80% of the electorate screams for change. So long as the incumbent advantage exists forcing people to vote mostly on social issues, these sorts of economic and world affecting issues will simply be ignored.
There's a reason, to this day, you'll find Democrats talk about the wonders of fracking, clean coal, and carbon capture.
IDK how to change this other than first identifying the issue. Our politicians are mostly captured by their donors. That's the only will they really care about enacting.
But also, I'd point out that even in the Democrat party where this is more of an 80:20 issue with their constituents, the democrats are still far too friendly to fossil fuels (Biden, for example, specifically campaigned on how much he loves natural gas, fracking, and carbon capture).
This isn't the only 80:20 issue where democrat politicians are out of alignment with their base. That's also what informs my pessimism.
No it's not. There's a large group of people whose pockets are being lined by it. A large group of billionaires.
Virtually all economic activity consumes resources and energy, directly or indirectly, and in the process creates ghg emissions.
If we want to curb climate change and our emissions, it necessarily means we're going to take an economic hit.
We either do that willingly with some degree of ability to exercise control along the way, or be forced by physics to take an even worse economic hit and face vastly more death and suffering without our hands on the wheel.
There's no option where we don't get our pockets hurt.
- still drive old cars with lots of CO2 emissions
- live far away from their workplace
- probably have a poorly isolated home with oil or gas heating
will be the ones with higher than average emissions. And the rich people who do will just shrug at this minor extra expense. I feel like this is not mentioned enough in discussions (probably because wealth disparity is such a touchy subject) but your ability to reduce your carbon footprint is also directly tied to your wealth.
You imprison the current administration for treason, seize their ill-gotten gains and there you go, hundreds of billions of dollars.
It's absolutely trivial. There's just a group of people that doesn't want it.
Simultaneously institute an inheritance tax as well as an exit tax of 90% of assets above $1+ billion, at time of death or leaving. That's a cool $1+ trillion in revenue for the next few decades. Both exit taxes and inheritance taxes are very established and work fine in plenty of countries, FYI. Not like yearly wealth taxes that are always criticized as not working or untested.
It's trivial to come up with policies that don't hurt the lower nor the middle class. Laughably easy. There's however a group of people that are blocking them. Those people are the problem and their blocks need to be removed to get closer to preventing then oncoming extinction event (which has complete scientific consesus). These policies work, and what needa to be done is removing of their blockers.
Come on now everyone, at least give an argument before you downvote. Warren Buffet is set to give away 99% of his wealth, so it's clearly possible. Humanity can no longer depend on the others to have the same basic decency as he does - clearly he's the exception, the others don't have it.
People might feel benevolent one day and do something good, but the next day when they are faced with a problem and the environment is a convenient trash can or resource bin, they'll go right back to those bad habits.
The only way things will change is if everyone's life gets made miserable by the effects.
Not sure how we fix that either.
Not only climate change, but aggressive firefighting over the past 50 or more years has caused a lot of material low in the fire ladder to accumulate, which in natural or at least pre-Columbian forests would be cleared out by routine fires. Brush and deadfall for example. The larger trees in healthy forests don't succumb to fire, but these fires have been decimating whole stands of trees. Pair that with almost zero snowpack this year, the only positive thing I can say is that I'm glad I can enjoy spring a bit earlier this year.
We need some mechanism that penalizes polluters, benefits low emitters, and stops/limits/taxes/... worldwide shipping when local alternatives are available to avoid these [1] abominations.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/1e4zl...
I think the truth is we won’t really take this seriously globally until the changes are so severe that it’ll take generations to undo if ever.
Blame fully the people who saw all this and voted for him twice. At least if you care about root of the problems and not just venting off. I am not offering a solution to educating half of US population which clearly doesn't care about facts, or lacks any basic moral compass... I don't have a practical solution.
US 'special' form of voted democracy failed and failed hard, lets see how far this gets in next 3 years and if any actual lessons learned happen afterwards (I don't hold my breath since reality doesn't behave just because it would be nice and viable time to act is gone I think).
Thrice actually
All the recycling, solar panels, electric cars, whatever don't come close to making up for the fact that each family of 4 living on a 0.1+ acre lot with all the various setbacks and whatnot, commuting many miles to work and school and grocery stores and the gym, moving all that mass of people, students, workers, food, water, sewage, trash, gas, etc is orders more consumption than if people were living in dense arrangements such as apartments in 4 and 5 story buildings.
Energy = Force * distance
From what I can tell, none of it means anything as long as detached single family homes are still the expected lifestyle, at current populations. Might as well consume as much as we can while we ride into the sunset, or cull the population quickly.
It's obviously someone else's problem if that someone refuses to accept there's a climate catastrophe.
Made a shitload of sacrifices, how about you?
Compare this to China, where the government is aggressively promoting green energy and electric car tech.
Furthermore, because carbon emissions stay trapped in the atmosphere for hundreds or thousands of years, one should also note that the US is responsible for more than a quarter of cumulative emissions, twice as much as China.
I'm more interested in solving the problem than assigning blame, but it baffles me when people argue that we shouldn't need to focus on this because it's really China's fault.
I asked Gemini, "How long have wildfires across North America happened and are they truly any worse now?"
"Wildfires have occurred across North America for millions of years, predating humans entirely." It also had some very detailed information backing that up.
I then asked, "Were any of those fires in the past 20 years started by arsonists?"
"Yes, arson is a significant factor in North American wildfires, though it is often overshadowed by accidental human causes (like downed power lines or unattended campfires) and natural causes like lightning."
- Your children and younger family members will have to deal with this
- Climate change is causing increasingly worse turbulence for airplanes
- It will disproportionately affect your favorite vacation spots
- Probably something about stock markets and pensions - a world constantly wracked with increasingly severe natural disasters isn't the most economically productive one
If my 50 years on the planet has taught me anything, it's that this is not a sufficient motivation the current generation in power.
Related, home insurance cost increases (and, in places, unavailability) from wildfires & worsening storms hits the pocketbook directly.
Cutting out air travel is the single most accessible and impactful thing an individual can do with respect to climate change. You can stop turbulence from getting worse, but since you won't be flying in the first place...
A little higher up the economic pole is who stands to lose the most. Those are the people who will see actual quality of life reductions and not be able to afford to return to old norms.
There are a certain number of people who just cannot change. There are large numbers of diabetics who die despite an enormous number of warnings.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2023gl10...
BBC reporting:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240524-severe-turbulenc...
There are two clear parallel points to this:
Disclaimer: none of the above is saying we should or shouldn't take a particular course of action about warming, just to speak to the way people deal with very slow-moving issues.Even different parts of a city would likely be affected very differently, where the edges near the fire risks crash, and the even mildly safer areas boom with high demand
What rich countries do is they just export their factories to other countries and say: look we do not pollute.
China has also been deploying lots of renewable and nuclear energy, and their carbon emissions actually falling.
Solar and wind have gotten so cheap we should be able to forgo more fossil fuel deployment in developing nations.
Also why wouldn't it come from other US states? Seems easier
China are the reason solar has become so affordable for the rest of the world
The base then started demanding this from their reps and Trump almost picked up on this himself. It took years to undo that damage and even now we're barely back at a pro-clean air, pro-solar and pro nuclear position...
[1] https://www.iea.org/reports/global-energy-review-2025/co2-em...
It's just not enough and it's very hard to convince the public to accelerate when the US not only gave up but it actively reversing to fossil fuels.
They've also pivoted their industrial strategy so that basically the entire green energy sector depends on Chinese supply chains. This is significantly contributing to their economic growth [3].
I don't know to what extent taxation in Europe contributed to China's decision making here, but it presumably created an market for green energy and therefore helped solidify the economics.
This is of course not to say that there's nothing to criticize in China's environmental policies; there certainly is. But the trope of "why should we do anything because China won't" turns out to be spectacularly ill-informed. Indeed I think it makes more sense to ask the opposite: what are the likely consequences now that China has positioned itself as the global centre of green energy, and what should other countries be doing to ensure that they're not left behind?
[1] https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-ha... [2] https://www.carbonbrief.org/g7-falling-behind-china-as-world... [3] https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-clean-energy-drove-more...
I'd argue that many lower and middle class folks already feel the effects of GW, even if they may not be able to articulate it. The flip side is that developed rich countries will hurt because of this but the people in power won't care because it probably only (visibly) affects the lower class, and they can always take their jets and rockets to countries (and eventually planets!) that haven't been fucked.
And they'll spin it to blame it on immigrants somehow.
This particular point is remarkably optimistic on the part of our ruling elites who genuinely seem to think they'll be abandoning Earth like the Titanic and running off to Mars or whatever. I wonder if it's just wishful thinking or if they genuinely believe living off-terra would be a luxury experience, and not what it far more likely would be, which is hurtling through a void separated from instant death by nothing more than sheet metal, and after months of that, living inside a specially pressurized biosphere on an alien world that is, at all times, trying to kill them. And is almost guaranteed to succeed if nothing else by attrition.
I wonder if any will think as they prepare to die whichever death comes to them first that maybe just paying taxes and not having a private jet wasn't that steep of an ask after all.
Sure, blame developed nations for getting us here, but the path forward isn't solely in the hands of those developed nations.
The power company is now preemptively shutting off our power. Which is really fun in the winter.
I’m honestly not sure about the future of my hometown Boulder. The odds of it fully burning to the ground seem to increase significantly every year.
Now every summer day is 30c+.
Also, a comment I hear often is that people didn't really need air conditioners back then. You definitely cannot get away with living in Tokyo without an air conditioners these days!
By the 1990s, you didn't need AC, but your home/rental was more appealing if it had one, because there were a few hot days a year that were pretty uncomfortable otherwise.
Now, you can't not have it. There are far too many hot days to live without it.
The EU reduced their emissions by over a third from their peak. Their emissions per capita is less than that of China (not meant to be a dig at China who is the leader the development of renewables). Even Americans reduced their CO2 emissions by 15% in absolute terms and by about 30% per capita as well.
Why is it so hard to understand that individual people, let alone hundreds of millions of people in aggregate, can have multiple priorities? This whole doomerist attitude doesn't help anyone. If anything, it contributes to the erosion of the good things we already have. Nobody gave a damn about USAID saving millions of people until it could be weaponized against Trump/Elon for taking it away.
Well Spain, 12th largest by nominal GDP and the fourth-largest in Europe, isn't exactly poor and yet seems to hurt quite a bit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_in_Spain#Impact... ... but I bet the wealthiest Spaniards have air conditioning, heating, bottled water delivered at home by staff, etc to isolate themselves. That does include politicians.
So... IMHO until the richest of the rich countries hurt, then nothing will change. They (we?) are very sheltered precisely by leveraging their wealth to abstract away from the lowly difficulties of life, like the weather.
TL;DR : yes, but the more insulated feel it less and consequently, rationally, think they have more time thus postponing the process.
More specifically, nothing will change until the politicians and billionaires personally get hurt.
The negative effects of climate change need to come for them personally for them to care.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/05/26/key-findi...
It's also why I've sort of resigned myself to a cynical optimism that the worst won't come to pass. The rich are not going to tolerate losing money. They will force through geoengineering stopgap measures that will save us from catastrophic warming, at the cost of unknown consequences.
This is why I vehemently disagree with those who say we shouldn't be conducting research on geoengineering. It will be done. The only question is, will we have done enough research to understand the potential consequences, or not?
I’m with you in the billionaires. Research has shown again and again that people do care about climate change and want it to be stopped - but only if they have the socioeconomic status to actually care.
If, as so many people on this planet, you are living paycheck to paycheck, and the social security nets are being dismantled by the uber rich, you instead switch into a „protect what’s mine“ mindset. This further exacerbates the tragedy of the commons.
So I am of the following opinion: fix wealth inequality; which will give people their actual lives back; and will reduce the political power of the sociopathic billionaire class.
Then, the rest almost takes care of itself.
The problem is human, not society, I don't any any -ism can fix human.
They already are. China does whatever it wants en mass meanwhile.
Things have already changed!
I expect "change" when people form unions or union like organisations and withhold or redistribute their labour, both waged and in more subtle forms, such as attention, and unwaged but socially important labour (e.g. women refusing to be servile homemakers and instead get guns and start soup kitchens).
These are all related. All of them are connected to humans pushing the planetary resource limits from various directions. We're attacking Iran now in part because climate change has dramatically increased the water stress conditions making the population more susceptible to political collapse. It's also happening because it puts energy stress on our geopolitical adversaries (same with Venezuela). Trump emerged in the first place because declining American prosperity (despite GPD numbers) drove a large portion of the population to nihilism.
Also true or false: an immigrant from a third world country will have a higher carbon footprint if they emigrate to a developed country.
Maybe they are part of the problem.
On the plus side, I think we'll solve global warming, with technology, in a few generations.
Capitalism will actually save the day, because a bunch of capitalists advanced renewable technology to the point where it was cheap.
The biggest impediment to change right now is actually political interference in deployment of cheaper renewables. You see this all across the US both in intentional and unintentional ways. Trump explicitly cancels permits for wind, tries to ban solar on federal lands, and forces coal plants to keep running even when they are super expensive and raise the cost electricity.
Unintentional political impediments are also endemic in the US; permitting and interconnection of residential solar makes it 5x-6x more expensive than places like Australia, even in places like California that should be accelerating residential solar and storage.
There's a lot to be hopeful about when it comes to climate change, in addition a lot to be scared about.
That "bunch of capitalists"... why are you avoiding the true word: "China"?
Fixed
Do you want to go to war with China to enforce an environmentalist agenda?
China is in the middle of a massive expansion in wind, solar, and electric vehicles. The US is burning even more coal to support AI, and has gutted much of its federal emission reduction efforts.
Of course, China has 5 times more people than the US, so they get a little bit of leeway. But they are close, and their emissions are growing.
That said, yes, they are investing more than anybody else. And they are improving the technology we need more than anybody else. People talking about military intervention are full of shit, but we could use some diplomatic collaboration.
I know nothing about it. I have read comments on this very comments section, with references, that say China's emissions are not growing. This is what makes this subject so hard for the average numbskull like me, so much misinformation.
Edit: Individuals do not build coal power plants, utilities (and therefore, governments) do. India and China are continuing to build fossil fuel power generation. Global warming does not care about 'fairness', global warming cares about co2 PPM in the atmosphere. When we address climate change, we have to do so at the government level, or we mine as well not bother.
The whole idea that we should look at 'emissions per capita' or 'historical emissions' in the interest of fairness is simply giving a license to governments to kill genuinely poor people in the third world.
How much of a problem any individuals CO2 emissions are is completely decoupled from what nation they live in, or how many people live in that nation specifically.
If you hypothetically split up Asia or the US into 100 smaller countries then local emissions are not suddenly more (or less) of a problem than the are now (duh).
And of course more people have more of an influence on global outcomes.
This whole argument makes about as much sense as demanding that black people in Europe should not pay any income tax, because the total tax income from black people in Europe is very low, and "national budget does not care about per capita".
The whole idea that we should look at 'emissions per capita' or 'historical emissions' in the interest of fairness is simply giving a license to governments to kill genuinely poor people in the third world.
Power plants are not built for specific national governments, they are built because individual people need and use the energy. More people => more powerplants (number of governments is completely irrelevant, this is purely a per-capita thing).
> When we address climate change, we have to do so at the government level
Yes. For example by setting somewhat coherent CO2/capita emission targets.
> Global warming does not care about 'fairness'
Irrelevant, because anyone affected does.
If you want a global reduction in emissions, how would you ever convince a poorer nation (like India) to change anything while your own citizens are jet-travelling around the globe multiple times per year?
It is obviously much easier and more effective to reduce emissions by limiting a family to a single cruise vacation per year (or only two cars) than to convince 10 rice farmers to stop firing their oven for heat during winter...
If rich nations can not get their emissions even close to a sustainable level, why would any developing nation sacrifice growth, wealth or anything, really, to make the attempt?
All of a sudden, you'd have the world's short term self interest aligned with solving the long term problem.
The fairest system would be for each human being to have an equal amount of pollution they are allowed to emit.
Here's the original: https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-6079807/v1
Like if someone posted a link to an archive.is version of a Wikipedia page, you'd probably prefer to get the canonical link to that content.
ResearchGate is a bit of commercial enclosure of infrastructure that is, and should be, open. Who knows, maybe it has other value. I'm not an academic so I don't know.
If I am not mistaken we can get documents without an account as well, unlike others.
I’m of the opinion that direct air capture is the primary escape hatch we have for not hitting 3 or even 4C warming in the next 100-200 years, which mean major dieoffs in warm latitudes, even for humans, due to exceeding wet bulb limits. Oh and roughly 65M of sea level rise as the planet shifts to a snow/ice-free mode.
We MUST MUST MUST stop burning things. Stop it.
- We are still mining and burning coal. This is incomprehensible. US, AU, etc Eg: https://www.nacoal.com/our-operations
- We are still subsidizing oil to around $1T/year, not counting oil wars.
Yes it will take some grid and storage upgrades (US) and continue to embrace renewables. It would be cheaper than the oil subsidy.
Otherwise it doesn't make sense to put CO2 into the air with one hand and take it out with another.
Yes, we must. It is so rare to see someone saying this in public. Thank you for this simple clarity.
Stop burning everything! Fossil fuel, wood, plastic, garbage.
We only need solar energy at 1 dollarcent or eurocent and a little batteries for the convienience of using electricity when the sun does not shine.
In the north snd south you need more solar panels in the winter than in the summer by a factor of 50. But that pays it back in summer when you have a squanderable abundance of free and clean energy. We can store that surpless energy in purifying drinking water, melting iron ore or aluminum, melting plastics or silicon ingots.
Storing surplus heat or cold in the ground is another luxery, because it is more rxpensive than 1 dollarcent or eurocent solar.
Wind and hydro are also more vostlyvthan solar so they are another luxery with worse enviremental costs than pure solar cells.
We need to build Enernet, a peer to peer electricitynet and internet between all buildings with power routers. for around 100 dollar per building. You buy and sell your house surplus solar electricity to the neighbourhood where it can be stored in car batteries. See my Fiberhood white paper.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Merik-Voswinkel/publica...
I don't understand the wood argument. Isn't it widely accepted we need to do burns to manage forests? Wood is a short-term cycle of carbon. It releases when it burns but frees up space to capture it right after. When people live on rural plots and trees fall, should they burn for heat (and lessen needing other energy sources) or let it decompose and cause the same thing? It's not the same as extracting deeply embedded carbon sources that won't make it to the atmosphere if untouched (fossil fuels)
By far the most effective an immediate solution to limiting the damage of climate change is to simply to keep fossil fuels in the ground.
People talk about the economic pain of doing this, but that economic pain is nothing compared to the impact of unmitigated climate change.
Even though this would be painful, it is also by far the easiest and fastest to implement solution. It would take fantastically more time and resources to scale up direct air capture (even if it existed in a scalable format today) to come anywhere near addressing this problem.
> Yes it will take some grid and storage upgrades (US) and continue to embrace renewables
This is not exactly true, we would have to experience global economic collapse in order to reduce our fossil fuel use. 80% of energy is not spent on electricity globally and this is non-electricity usage is where most of the fossil fuels are consumed and this drives most of the global economy. There's a good reason there are multiple wars being fought over for oil.
It seems like the whole economic system runs on a quarterly time scale - just look at all the times negligent maintenance to improve profits in the short term have caused disasters in the long term.
Not sure what the solution is though, so I won't complain too much.
Is it possible to produce steel on industrial scales without coal?
I know early ironmaking (I live fairly close to Coalbrookdale!) used charcoal, but is that possible at a large scale?
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/coal-consumption-by-count...
To be fair, CN is known for exploring all avenues and are deploying a ton of solar and nuclear. http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2022/ph241/patel2/images/f...
If enough energy is produced by other means than burning fossil fuel, nobody will return to the past.
I happen to be one of those who does not use directly any kind of energy, except electrical. Despite the fact that I am still connected to methane gas distribution, I have never burned it for already around a decade. (And unlike most, I cook myself from raw ingredients everything that I eat, but I stopped using flames for that many years ago.)
If burning fossil fuel would stop completely right now, that would not affect me at all, much less would return me centuries in the past, as long as the electrical energy supplier has enough sources in its hydroelectric, solar, wind and nuclear plants, all of which are abundant where I live.
For aircraft and spacecraft, hydrocarbon fuel will remain the best solution, but synthesizing hydrocarbons was already possible at large scale before WWII and it could solve easily this problem in a CO2-neutral manner, if a fraction of the money wasted for various useless or harmful things would be invested in improving the efficiency of such critical technologies.
They're literally mentioned by the first IPCC report already.
Check out the 1.5C special report. Go to section 2.2.1.2, last paragraph says
> The reduced complexity climate models employed in this assessment do not take into account permafrost or non-CO2 Earth system feedbacks, although the MAGICC model has a permafrost module that can be enabled. Taking the current climate and Earth system feedbacks understanding together, there is a possibility that these models would underestimate the longer-term future temperature response to stringent emission pathways
https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/chapter-2/#:~:text=Geophysi...
They admitted limitations of the data/research they had available. Their model explicitly does not attempt to account for it.
my extremely pessimistic position is nothing will happen systemically even after the first few such events, and they'll take tens if not hundreds of thousands of lives.
I hope writing this out jinxes it.
It will take millions, if not close to a billion lives before we get serious
I think it's important to mention the effects we're seeing today are caused by the emissions from decades ago.
Second, not sure if the paper in the OP touches this but we've reduced aerosols in the atmosphere. These previously were masking the effects of climate change by cooling the temperature.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VW66EX75jIY
As they sink down, they grow larger (condensation & coagulation). Once they reach the troposphere, they usually get down via precipitation, which also isn't really affecting a lot of breathing.
They can absolutely have other effects (see SO2/acidification, e.g), but air quality isn't really the main concern. For SO2 specifically, there's actually very little mortality sensitivity: https://www.giss.nasa.gov/pubs/abs/wa01010x.html
You're right that the research isn't there yet to make statements with confidence, but that applies to the air quality claim as well.
And grow new trees in their place of course.
If we could actually grow trees to capture carbon equivalent to 250M+ barrel of oil per day, it would be better to just grow trees and burn them for energy.
So, unless we want to remove a massive amount of fresh water from the ecosystem, we also need to invest energy in drying out the wood well below natural humidity levels (transport to a desert maybe?) on top of electrifying what is currently a diesel and gas heavy industry (cutting and transporting logs with heavy machinery).
There's definitely lower hanging fruit for getting C02 out of the cycle.
They need to go into a deep enough pit where the methane produced from anerobic breakdown won't reach the atmosphere.
The conditions that created the lignite coal and peat simply aren't that easily reproducible, especially with large volume of wood (rather than ferns over thousands and millions of years).
Still a more viable option than bringing greenhouse gas emissions into the negatives globally, by the way. But that's a low bar. Nuking the ocean floor is probably a better call.
What if we cover the ice caps, and cover parts of the ocean instead of messing with grow cycles of plants on land...
No reduction in solar power, no artificial lights to grow plants. What effects might that have on ocean life? (below a certain depth - probably nothing, so surface ocean life is what we need to look at).
Just my two cents... we got plenty of surface area we can cover and potentially not affect much at all for day to day for animals, plants, and humans.
In other words, we shouldn't have tipped it over in the first place. We may not have the energy to put things back to a habitable place.
We're going to have to resort to geoengineering alright, but it's gonna likely be stratospheric sulfate injection given how cheaply that can be done. Is it ideal? Nope. Better than global warming itself? Time will tell.
Where is this new figure coming from? It seems about 60X what's being published elsewhere.
https://sealevel.nasa.gov/understanding-sea-level/global-sea...
The claim that some models didn't take larger systems into account is also because an expert in the arctic wasn't an expert in oceans. And the expert in biodiversity isn't an expert in food supply chains. Expertise isn't the question. Instead it is - do all of us who are non experts (all of us) have enough expert data to have a systemic understanding of an accelerating trend?
The fact is, for all of these other secondary effects etc... we just don't know. It's too complicated of a system.
So as a result, we've got a prediction of something between "somewhat bad" and "catastrophically-is-an-understatement bad" with a maximum likelihood estimate of "really really bad."
I wish this comment was higher up.
The big thing under-discussed about climate change is that the deeper we get into it, the harder it is to predict and understand.
I recall Dr. Richard Alley discussing how Thwaites Glacier collapsing wasn't factored into any IPCC reports; but ultimately pointed out it was for good reason because it's simply not possible to model these things and their consequences accurately.
I don't do any climate modeling, but I do a lot of other modeling and forecasting: the biggest assumption we make in all statistical models is that the system itself more or less stays statistically similar to what it currently is and what we have seen in past. As soon as you drop that assumption you're increasingly in the world of wild guessing. If you wanted me to build you a RAM price prediction model 2 years ago, I could have done a pretty good job. Ask for one today and your better off asking someone with industry but no modeling experience what they think might happen.
This is the hidden threat of climate change most people are completely unaware of: we can know it will be bad when certain things happen, we know they will happen in the nearish future, but we can't really say exactly how and when they'll unfold with any meaningful confidence.
No. I believe what you're saying is very likely to be true, but we know there's both positive and negative feedback and we don't really know how they really will interplay and where all the tipping points are.
There may even be significant phase delay in these mechanisms and so we could even get oscillation.
If you are still trying to gauge truth before this, you are poisoning your mental heuristics. Thats why propaganda are ao effecfive: you can be told something is either, and it can still be effective.
Humans and LLMs are similar: the separation between input and commands is not a hard barrier.
So, back to GP: CLIMATE CHANGE is reversible. It just depends on whether we are talking about socipecnomics or physical processes.
while i agree its better to go off and prove it to ourselves, there is merit in having a conversation here
If they had answered my first question in the affirmative (something like "I am a researcher at X institute on this topic"), ya, I think I would have trusted them.
No offense, but you sound like an oil shill.
Ridiculous take, and you’d know that the OP was correct if you cared enough to know what researchers were actually saying.
Climate arguments devolve into appeals to impact claimed by authorities rather than any examination of what they’ve said.
Would they really want to risk being basically excommunicated from their area of research for daring to provide ammo to “climate change deniers”?
Why is it always never 'burn less fossil fuels'.
Anything but the oil company bottom line huh?
TLDR: We're gonna have to use sulfate injection until we can transition our economy
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C39&q=gra...
Not a perfect measure of whether this is a reputable article but at least readers should know this isn't from some randos in a basement somewhere.
We are doomed.
I am not a climate scientist - how should I think about this statement? Normally I am looking for some statement that shows a document has been vetted.
Do you want to tell us to trust the authority instead of the presented data and arguments?
Usually, insisting on references, citations, and author status is a sign that the study doesn't hold on its own merit.
Tomorrow: trillions invested in new technology for simulating human torture accurately at the molecular level, requiring twice the level of all consumer electricity use on the planet. Advocates claim "all use is valid".
A reasonable explanation is that a few neurons probably don't have conscience so they can't really experience anything.
I think once they're able to put 15 million such neurons on a single device that puts them in the range of more relatable animals like mice and Syrian hamsters, and I also expect that relatability is also what will drive most opinions about consciousness.
Given our piss poor understanding of consciousness, I have to ask: on what grounds do you make this claim?
Doom. (Obviously.)
What mechanism are you imagining that would allow a LLM built of neurons to describe what it's like to be made of neurons, when a LLM built of GPUs cannot describe what it's like to be organised sand? The LLM in the GPU cluster is evaluated by performing the same calculations that could be performed by intricate clockwork, or very very slowly by generations of monks using pencil and paper. Just as the monks have thoughts and feelings, it is conceivable (though perhaps impossible) that the brain tissue implementing a LLM has conscious experience; but if so, that experience would not be reflected in the LLM's output.
We can't assume that a computer based neural network will have the same emergent behaviours as a biological one or vice versa.
The interesting point for me is in the neuroplasticity, because it implies that the networks which are specialised for language could start forming synapses which connect them to the parts which are more specialised to play doom giving rise to the possibility that this could be used for introspection
Meanwhile, three-time Billionaire claims he's solved the problem using soylent green while fifty thousand people react in awe at the live presentation.
My proposal is thus: create a supranational treaty organization with a EPA like authority(or whatever the European equivalent is) that can inspect and fine companies in member organizations. Then any treaty members agree with the following conditions: The EPA can enter their nation freely, inspect, and are able to fine companies that break rules. Members send delegates to a session to create new rules democratically. And most importantly all members act as a cartel, imposing large tariffs on any country outside of the organization. So if US was in and Mexico was out, you couldn't just pollute in Mexico, without some massive tariff. This creates an economic incentive to be in and clean.
That's not to say we won't need treaties and supranational entities for some aspects of decarbonization. Methane emissions outside of agriculture are notably a problem of enforcement.
We're badly in need of a collective update to our priors regarding renewables. In the US, a hostile policy toward renewables is not only shooting ourselves in the foot environmentally, we are now actively impoverishing ourselves due to entrenched economic interests across the fossil fuel industry and the cultural inertia they actively worked to develop.
They need to apply overall, on all goods and services.
And emission limits need to be progressive over time, with a limit for each year, not just "x% at year 2030".
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257%2Faer.15000001
It's essentially a carbon tax on local production and a corresponding carbon tariff on imports. Countries that already have a carbon tax or equivalent don't get tariffed. IOW, they're part of the club.
Usually a carbon rebate is also included in the plan, although that's not strictly necessary.
Germany was spear-heading an effort to create a carbon club, but it fell apart, unfortunately. At the time a club that didn't include the US seemed infeasible.
In 2026 a club that doesn't include Trump's America is a good thing, not a bad thing IMO.
I think the flaw in this thinking is thinking that burning things is the cheapest way to get energy.
Oil processing and extraction is a complex industry which requires a huge continued investment. Coal requires massive mining operations. Natural gas is probably the least intensive of the burny things, and it still requires a pretty advanced pipeline to be competitive.
Renewables are relatively cheap one time purchases. Save energy storage, the economy that is most competitive at this point is one powered by renewables.
That transition is already happening in the US without a massive government regulation/mandate. In china, it's happening a whole lot faster because the government is pushing it. And the chinese economy is at no risk of being outbid by smaller economies burning fuel.
The main reason burning remains a major source of fuel is that for most nations, the infrastructure to consume it has already been built. It's not because it's cheap.
Or quickly develop to the point where solar, wind, and hydro is cheaper than getting dead fossils out of the ground and processing them.
I am not familiar enough with the economics of this to know whether we are close to that point, but I can imagine once we cross it, combustible fuel burners will be at a disadvantage if they haven't invested in infrastructure needed for renewables.
The way our economic systems are set up is inherently anti-human and only benefits a tiny fraction of the population anyways.
It's time for a fundamental rethink.
Who's getting fined, here? Me, because mining the stuff is inherently dirty (without, probably, significant research and capital investment)? You, because you need the stuff to build other stuff? Joe and Jane because they're the ones ultimately driving the production of the stuff? If you fine me into not producing the raw materials, what, ultimately happens to your economy and Joe and Jane's? If I don't sign up, where are you going to get the raw materials, if I'm tariffed into oblivion?
Sorry, I'm not trying to like, doom this away - but there are so many interconnected pieces, that I don't think it's a problem that can even start to be solved from an internet comment. At some point, voters in democratic societies need to decide that they care as much about the world their children will inherit as they do a ten cent difference in gas prices ten minutes from now. It's unclear that they ever will on a long term, consistent basis.
But the source could be the most likely place for corrupt reporting. Or: Maybe the source element is not dangerous but downstream by-products are.
Like you’ve said: It’s a problem.
From a political perspective, I think the problems of global warming and wealth disparity go hand-in-hand. It's difficult to solve one without solving the other. To the extent that the ultra-wealthy own the politicians, or actually become politicians themselves, there is little hope for environmental regulation.
Consumers don't need or necessarily even want unlimited economic growth. That only "helps" consumers if they're relying essentially on trickle-down economics, where we have to allow the ultra-wealthy everything they want in the hope that they'll spare us some change. A more equitable distribution of the current wealth would reduce the pressure to produce ever more, more, more.
Consumers usually want products that they own, not rent, products that last for a long time and don't need to be constantly updated or upgraded. Coincidentally, this is also better for the environment. Producers often want the opposite of that, in order to maximize profit. So what we get depends crucially on the power balance or imbalance between consumers and producers. This is where consolidation and monopolization become a major factor.
A lot of the "convenience economy," dominated by temporary, disposable goods, is predicted on consumers having no free time, because they're constantly working. Despite vast improvements in worker "efficiency," we haven't seen comcomitant reductions in the number of hours worked. The future of leisure facilitated by technological advances, which everyone was imagining 50-60 years ago, never became a reality. The technology did advance, but the leisure did not. The other day (or night) I noticed Amazon delivery drivers arriving for neighbors after 9pm; this is a dystopia.
I didn't see it mentioned in the article, though I did do a very brief read through. And it has been a while since I looked at the shipping lanes thing.
I hasten to add this is not to claim we should not have cleaned the shipping lanes. I don't know enough to say on that front. My gut would be that it was still the correct move.
So when people are focusing on AI above all other energy uses, it doesn't really paint an accurate picture of what's going on.
Guess what happens when you add them up...
I'll guess, they add up to 100%?
I don't see what's the insight here.
* Electricity: 27%
* Industry: 24%
* Transportation: 15%
* Agriculture & land use: 11%
* Buildings: 7%
Then within electricity, data centers use about 1.5% of global electricity. Within data centers, AI accounts for somewhere between 15-20% of energy use.
So if you take 27% × 1.5% × ~17%, you find that AI is currently responsible for something like 0.07% of global fossil fuel emissions.
It definitely matters in the "every bit matters" sense, but also the numbers paint a really different picture than you'd get from statement like the one we started with.
It uses a bunch of energy, but not so much compared to moving yourself around in a car of plane.
Of course, animals are carbon neutral, and methane only has a 7-12 year life, so that can be fixed in nearly an instant.
0: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/15/elon-musk...
1: https://www.texastribune.org/2025/10/09/texas-hood-county-cr...
When the oil in your frying pan is smoking, adding a tiny bit more heat may be unwise.
Seriously adapting our diets around being more sustainable. I'm not advocating for veganism or such, but at least to understand that eating a burger pollutes as much as driving a large vehicle for 50 miles and that maybe we can substitute that with poultry or eggs or cheese many times.
-Switch to an electric vehicle -Migrate from gas appliances (range, furnace, water heater) to electric (induction, heat pumps) -If your power grid isn’t clean, add rooftop or balcony solar -Encourage friends and family to do the same
In Germany, 1 kWh of electricity costs roughly 3x as much as 1 kWh of gas. That doesn't make heat pumps very attractive. Historically the differences were even worse.
Relying on people individually making choices that are better for the environment at a disadvantage for themselves is not going to work.
Sure, if we never fly again and reverted to living like a medieval peasant, maybe things will kinda work out.
If you have a family of 4, you can think of it as the equivalent of a 15 mpg vehicle for domestic flight and 22 mpg vehicle for international flight. So somewhere in the range of a full-size pickup truck.
But -- when you fly, you go very far. If you go on vacation to Hawaii from San Francisco once a year with your family, that's the equivalent of driving a Ford F-150 for 5000 miles. If you visit India or China that's 15,000 Ford F-150 miles! In a single trip, more than what most people drive in an entire year!
So you can make a big difference just preferring local vacations instead of remote ones.
And don't build things out of concrete
And better get a few room mates
Serious engineers need to stop whatever they’re doing and work on this problem.
Also, if you’re hiring: I’m an expert on the U.S. regulated utility industry, demand management, and solar & battery system design, fabrication and deployment.
AI could lead to massive savings and improvements in terms of emissions and climate change. AI could possibly help us out of this.
Beef and dairy have no chance of helping us. They'll kill us and the beef nuts will say how they saved 4% of emissions by moving some cows around. Problem solved.
There's a reason bird populations are down 30% in my parents' lifetimes (https://www.audubon.org/press-room/us-bird-populations-conti...) and I don't think my generation is going to do much better.
The entire EU produces only about half of the USA's total emissions, despite having a population of over 100 million more people.
Why aren't we?
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/11/china-co2-emis...
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-...
"Average" Canadian. A lot of the population lives in a climate where half the year more energy is required to survive the climate. And the population is exponentially smaller than the United States, India, or China.
That's like calling out the guy in the mountains burning a campfire to stay warm at night when the guy sleeping on the beach in Hawaii requires none.
Point being, brand new account, if we want solutions it needs to be done without such angling or it all reduces to absurdities and jabs instead of cooperation. It needs to be realistic in terms of where people are being absurdly wasteful, but also sympathetic that we do not all face the same circumstances.
It's a hole and we don't get out by digging downward.
Nobody who understands the subject claims that it is reversible on a human life scale. In the realistic best cases, it’d stabilise in a couple of decades and slowly decrease from there.
The real question is not whether it is reversible, but how high it will go and how we are going to deal with it.
Warming is here and will continue.
Our decisions from here on could vary the outcomes between massive disruption and movement of people to a wholly uninhabitable planet.
we don't need to adopt this form of thinking at all, no one is owed anything.
"But what about <technology/option>?"
No. Full stop. We're not going to do it, and we're not even going to apologize for it either.
All we can do now is prepare, not that I've seen a lot on this front either.
We need to adjust strategies here. The "zero emission" strategy failed; it is not practical. Politicians love them because they are in the media, but everyone sees that this strategy is not working. Same with carbon tax - it drove prices up but didn't really help much at all otherwise. We need to stop pursuing strategies that do not work here.
We tried top down. Didn't work.
We tried bottom up. Didn't work.
Right now, climate change is an undeniable fact, its causes well-known, and the evidence for it now part of everyday life. If anything, its effects have been underestimated to date, and 'non-believers' in it are either fools or acting based on morally repugnant principles.
Given the other tech in the novel, that seems highly likely. It includes nanobot "assemblers".
The planet as a whole will do just fine. We're not going to break the planet. The reason that people bring up the huge anthropogenic spike in temperature is because us anthropoids evolved in the context of a narrow band, and it would seem as though we're moving the global climate out of that band.
Another quarter from the top 5 percent emissions that have practically nothing to do with the wellbeing, but only social comparison mechanisms (envy, herd mentality).
But for that humanity would need leaders that are not either idiots, corrupt or spineless and toothless.
But hey, I guess that's too much to ask, after all we're talking about unconscious reactive species that's only rumored to have brains or morals.
I have friends shoving sausages and burgers into them while ordering countless things on Amazon every day, yet they think they help by buying a hybrid car, couldn't even be bothered by using public transport even though it's faster and cheaper where they live, because "too many people, dirty".
Go figure.
First, the West and particularly the US are still well ahead of China regarding both historical total emissions and per-capita annual emissions. And regardless of what China does in the future we still need to get our acts together domestically.
Also, China is aggressively pushing low-carbon energy sources on all fronts. Where they are now is not necessarily an indication of where they will be in a decade or two.
A large part of their emissions is the result of stuff they make for us. If we are serious about climate policy, we have to set up trade barriers proportional to greenhouse gases emissions to limit this effect. These policies must be informed by climate science.
Finally, regardless of what the rest of the world does, mitigation depends only on us and how well prepared we are.
Really, there is absolutely no scenario in which it is not a good idea to understand what the hell is going on with our climate.
Consumption economies can incentivize production economies to emit less.
The reality is that China is aggressively pushing solar and electric vehicles, and the West is complaining about it. Meanwhile the current US president's maxim is "drill baby drill".
I mean, if we don't need to stick to facts, let's discuss the hypothetical scenario where I am a powerful wizard, and when I say a magic word and I can halve the total amount of CO2 in the atmosphere?
OK, now where's my Nobel peace prize dammit??
At the same time, the US is the main force fighting against carbon neutrality, renewable energy and pretty much anything reasonable. By directly burning a lot of fossil fuels and by lobbying and poisoning discourse in other countries.
Meanwhile China is by far the biggest producer of anything related to renewable energies and installing more renewable energy than the rest of the world, by far.
If anything, the work done worldwide does no matter (it still does though) because USA is doing their best to destroy the planet.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita
So if developed countries completely eliminate all pollution we will reduce it by 30%. Good. Then what is the next step? War with China? Attack India?
[1] https://www.iea.org/reports/global-energy-review-2025/co2-em...
Nnobody is going to follow a hypocrite, and no one in east asia is gonna cut back on consumption/growth/lifestyle if rich westerners can't even pretend to put in some token effort for the same cause.
Solr and wind power is arguably a huge success story (looking at china specifically) because it was arguably enabled and triggered by western efforts in research, development and commercialization.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles
It's in no nation's interest, from a game theory perspective, to stunt their own growth to reduce emissions. If the US stops, Russia and China will destroy the west. If China stops, they'll never catch up technologically. Ditto for India. Smaller nations have even less incentive (they'll easily be conquered by neighbours), except for the ones surrounded entirely by friendly nations...
(only europeans will understand)
There's more than one aspect to the environment. Plastic pollution and global warming are two separate concerns with separate ways of dealing with them.
We're going to have to figure out how to adapt to it. Expect many of the things you love now (seafood, coffee, etc) to be gone within your lifetime.
And if the voters were just a bit smarter and not bought into the “China bad” narrative, we might even get proper, nice, affordable EVs in the US.
The content of the paper is summed up as “everyone felt like the climate changed after 2015, the data up to 2023 was inconclusive; we finally have enough to prove it with 95% confidence.”
EDIT: The title is weird because it’s generic to the point of being unsearchable. I’m not disputing the facts of the paper.
Since manuscripts are written for those working in the field, and need to be, it's one of the big challenges of science communication. In the past these articles would be in a library and mailed out to the subscribing specialists, which minimized the confusion. In the age of the internet, even our dogs can read highly specialized scientific pre-prints that haven't even been peer reviewed yet.
"This 58 indicates that the warming trend has been accelerating from a rate of 0.15 – 0.2 ◦C 59 per decade during 1980-2000, to more than twice that rate [0.4°C] most recently."
The actual abstract reads: "Recent record-hot years have caused a discussion whether global warming has accelerated, but previous analysis found that acceleration has not yet reached a 95% confidence level given the natural temperature variability. Here we account for the influence of three main natural variability factors: El Niño, volcanism, and solar variation. The resulting adjusted data show that after 2015, global temperature rose significantly faster than in any previous 10-year period since 1945."
1. For now, we can cool Earth artificially. 1 gram of SO₂ in the stratosphere offsets the warming effect of 1 ton of CO₂. It's known to be safe and effective. This company is already doing it: https://makesunsets.com
2. Fossil fuels will be phased out over the next few decades, but CO₂ stays in the atmosphere for several centuries. The practical solution will probably have to be "carbon sequestration", where you capture CO₂ from the air and pump it underground where it stays forever. Such storage is mature tech in the natural gas industry, but the capturing CO₂ tech needs a lot of work.
> On 1 January 2020, a new limit on the sulphur content in the fuel oil used on board ships came into force, marking a significant milestone to improve air quality, preserve the environment and protect human health.
- creating a new addictive form of entertainment we can use to brainwash people
- Creating expensive data centers that MAY end up being extremely useful in the long run
and never for saving the lives of the people on our planet.
Humanity is doomed. We deserve it.
Guess what a lot of plastic is made from? And how planes fly, and boats move?
And there's lots of countries that aren't at 'Western' living standards. So we have decades of those countries building and emissions to come.
Plus of course there's a lag in CO2 emissions to climate change. The next couple of decades are going to get a lot worse, before they get better, if at all.
https://www.wri.org/insights/4-charts-explain-greenhouse-gas...
So yea, no way is oil stopping or even dipping slightly any time soon.
The intention of the United States and the world is divided.
We love our money too much to care about the Next generation, In my view.
What do you mean?
The intention of the United States is maximizing oil use.
The intention of the World is maximizing oil use. Even EU countries are panicking over maybe being forced to use just a little less oil.
So where do you see this difference? Clearly, the entire world agrees: global warming is less serious than higher prices on oil. Much less important.
USA is about to have another El Nino summer which will be scorching from overheating oceans
But don't worry, USA is solving the problem by Biden banning cheap electric cars and Trump ending electric subsidies entirely, forcing coal plants to restart
Switching from ICE to electric is a much smaller ask than switching from personal cars to... bicycles?
Bikes are awesome. I do 95% of my trips by bike. It's healthy, cheap, and has very low amortized emissions. Everybody can repair a bike with a small amount of training.
More countries/cities have to do bike-centric road design.
Looking at American commute distances however, cycling, even with an e-bike, is likely not a reasonable option.
A lot of Americans probably won't be able to commute on a bicycle, but could easily use one for shorter trips like visiting friends, doing groceries, getting a burger, etc.
Even with commutes, there are lots that could be done on a bicycle. I briefly lived in the US and had a 6-mile (~10 km) commute. It was an unpleasant experience because there was exactly zero cycling infrastructure along the way, but otherwise it was a brief 25-minute trip, shorter than any of the commutes I've had in Europe. Not a single one of my American colleagues, all of whom lived locally, cycled or took a bus.
- 2 live less than 5 minutes from a metro that literally takes them to the office, they never take the metro
- 2 live easily within a biking distance to work, 1 has a bike, another has e-bike, they never bike to work
- 1 lives literally walking distance to work, she never walks to work
Public transportation where I live is vast, you can easily commute with the public transportation to just about everywhere but only low(er) income people will take public transportation.
Two most-frequently cited reasons I hear why not bike/walk/...
1. Dangerous - every female friend I have lists this as #1 reason they always drive. Regardless of the fact that I live in the area where I often forget to close my garage overnight and leave the front door open (very very low crime rates) the women feel unsafe. A lot of sensationalism in the news regarding every minor thing happening might be to blame but I have a wife and a daughter and am godfather to several girls so I understand
2. Inconvenient - what if after work I want to go to ____ and ____ and ____. Now I got to track back home and then perhaps change clothes, clean the house... and then get into the car to go to _____.
Sarcasm aside, I think this is why people have generally stopped caring as much. What we are being asked to do (buy new shiny things for some estimated small percentage decrease in lifecycle CO2 output) does not match the messaging.
FWIW I cycle almost everywhere.
Good, working and efficient public transit still means having significantly less comfort compared to having your private vehicle. Pretty much the only exception is using the metro in a congested downtown area at peak traffic (still, your metro experience will also be degraded by the peak traffic), or perhaps if parking your vehicle will be very difficult. And i say this as someone in a rather big city in Europe who is currently only using public transit. And there is a lot of stuff that i'd like to do but i can't do since i currently don't have access to a car or motorbike.
People don't just want "useful", at least the majority of people in developed countries also want "comfortable", and "nice", and "easy", and "enjoyable". A peak-hour metro ride or missing your tram by one minute is none of that.
there are things you can't do with transit. However nearly everyone is living in a family - so keep the truck to tow the boat, but get rid of the other cars that you won't need if transit is good. That is a much more reasonably goal that transit can aim for. A few like you won't own a car/truck at all, but most won't need to go that far
But hey, at least you get to keep 99% of your comfort while making 50% less emissions! (if it really is that much).
People really think if they just buy the right products we'll solve this problem. People are really fundamentally unable to solve global warming issues. There are a few fundamental problems:
- Broad, collective action is not possible in just any direction. People can broadly get behind causes that are related to some fundamental human motivation, but generally cannot be guided towards nuanced political topics except via general tribalism and coalitions. (eg: you can go to the moon, but there's only broad support for this in the sense that it has consequences for national pride. You didn't have a whole nation helping the the logistics; you just had broad coalitional support.)
- People think that merely buying the right product will help, but major impacts to climate would require a serious modification in quality of life and material wealth. This will never have broad support. People will always scrape out the most comfort and most material wealth that is possible, and will only allow themselves to be constrained by hard limits. Technology can help here to a degree, but once technology helps, people just advance to the next hard limit. For instance the use of insecticides, industrial fertilizer, and large-scale factory farming just allowed for more population boom. Rather than arriving at a place where where had near infinite abundance, we just ate up the gains with expanded population and luxury products. (sort of how computers don't get faster; once the computer is made faster, the software does more and the actual UI responsiveness just stays in the same place.)
- People would need to intentionally decrease population and find healthy limits with the environment. No living thing does this. If you watch population curves in predators and prey, they occur because the hard limits force starvation and population decline. (ie, if the wolves eat too many deer, then the wolf pups starve, the wolf population declines, and then the deer can rebound.) In other words, nature is not "wise and balanced" but instead the balance is a mere fact of competition and death. The moment we produce an abundance, we use up that abundance. This may not be true in the case of some individuals, but broadly this is true for any population.
- No political body, even an authoritarian regime could force these things. People would revolt. Authoritarians themselves often get into power by promising abundance they can never actually deliver on. No authoritarian has gained power by promising to reduce abundance and material wealth.
How do you hold this dispassionately? How do you get to a point of wanting to reproduce, or even wanting to continue, as an act of radical hope? Absurdism? Pure interest in watching it all unfold? I'm pretty aware that we are going to have constraints forced on us as like, a thermodynamic function, but ... how to cope? Go back to the tragedy?
-confused, interested, fascinatedly dreading
"And remember, now that I'm gone, every problem that occurs is my fault. So stop looking for the culprit, find a solution"
The Republicans are even more protectionist and sinophobic, however. Nobody ever had the option to vote for importing Chinese EVs.
The US accounts for significantly higher emissions than India[1], despite having only a quarter the population.
> and they aren't going to slow down
There's a pretty good case to be made that China is slowing down[2], albeit not as fast as any of us need to be.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
[2]: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-ha...
They don't, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
> and they aren't going to slow down.
China already did, according to https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/11/china-co2-emis...
https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/fossil-fuels-are-th...
Not only is it factually wrong (US emissions are much higher than Indian ones despite India being like 4x as many people), it also ignores second order effects of sane environmental policy completely:
By demonstrating that emission reduction is feasible, smaller wealthy western nations can have giant effects on billions of people living in poorer states. Not only does this demonstrate that wealth and environmental concerns are compatible, it also allows "follower-nations" to emulate such efforts cost effectively by picking proven technologies and avoiding technological dead-ends.
Just consider wind/solar in China: I would argue that the whole industry and growth rates only got to the current point so quickly is thanks to research, development and investment done in western nations in the decades prior.
Countries like Germany (<100M) had a huge effect on energy development in China (>1b people). If they had just kept using fossils until now, Chinese electricity might well be >90% coal power as well.
Geoengineering is a naive pipedream in my view because all proposals are either the height of recklessness and/or completely financial lunacy: CO2 capture for small individual emitters like cars is never gonna be even close to cost competitive with just reducing those emissions in the first place (but I'm always curious about any novel approaches).
As consummer we are responsible for the whole world emissions in the end. Changing those habbits, can impact things far beyond borders. But that's a political choice which goes against a constant growth based economy and it seems that not many people in our countries are ready to accept this. We want to buy and travel as much as we always did but bear no reponsibilities for the impact it has.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_China
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_the_United...
I have no idea however if they're just exporting this to other countries or if they're also pushing renewable energy domestically.
From what little I've read on this topic in recent years though they seem to realize that all of that smog is coming from somewhere and are taking meaningful action to remedy it, which is in stark contrast to what we're doing in the states these days with stifling clean energy and promoting coal.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/katharinabuchholz/2026/02/27/ch...
If you compare numbers, you will also find that lower per-capita consumption more than compensates for currently still higher CO2 intensity of chinese electricity (3000kWh/person * 0.5kgCo2/kWh for China vs 5500kWh/person * 0.35kgCo2/kWh, i.e. 1.5 vs 1.9 tons of Co2/year/person from electricity for China vs the US).
Their new coal plants either replace older ones. Or they are left idle. Close to 90% of all their generation growth comes from solar and wind.
They use coal because they have coal. Just like the US uses natural gas and then pats itself on the back for "reducing emissions" by switching from coal to gas. But their current trajectory will see them going to burning very little coal. It's a national security issue for them.
In an ideal world I think they'd prefer to be powered by 100% clean energy but not at the cost of losing the AI race.
It's also somewhat easy to shift that viewpoint a little, too, right now: China's emissions numbers have started a rapid deceleration downward. They are doing more about their emissions faster than the US. Does the US want to lose to China that badly that we shouldn't even try to align US policy to more of the emissions reductions that China is already succeeding at today? (Much less their robust plans for future emissions reductions?)
In this case, there is no ceiling on global emissions. If one country reduces to zero there would absolutely be less emissions than if they hadn't. There's no incentive for China and India to pick up the slack and create more pollution just to cover what the US stopped making.
https://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/report_2025
China now has 51% electric vehicles, they are switching the whole country to electric
USA won't do that for many decades
https://electrek.co/2025/08/29/electric-vehicles-reach-tippi...
Canada is now allowing Chinese cheap electric car imports which will be a fascinating experiment
What small-scale geoengineering are you referring to?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Spanish_floods#Environmen...
> Here we account for the influence of three main natural variability factors: El Niño, volcanism, and solar variation.
Whoops! Whoopsies! Oopsy doodles!
> Here we account for the influence of three main natural variability factors: El Niño, volcanism, and solar variation.
All of these events are decades-long (or longer) cycles that don't have a substantial amount of data points... Sure, solar cycles seem to be 11 years, but we don't have a lot of scientifically usable (for forecasting) data points on that -- maybe 8 cycles? less? And the cycles are not consistent. It's not like Year 4 of one cycle is like year 4 of another cycle, we just determined there's a period of about 11 that looks significant.
Same with El Niño -- it's not like its 'true' or 'false', there's degrees of it.. and when it starts, and if other conditions are right to make additional hurricanes that year, and how much cloud cover that generates, etc. etc. a lot of which we don't have data on past 1960 when we launched our first weather satellite ...
As for volcanos... there's lots of them, and we are not great at predicting the high-impact events... we certainly don't have sufficient data to accurately predict what happens if we had a huge eruption on an El Niño strong year during the height of a solar cycle.
But if true presumably it’s one of the usual reasons for observing data with low likelihood according to a model: misspecification or statistical bias/variance.
When they say worst case, it means it’s possible. And only worst case within a percentage (like 95%) certainly, and based on known effects.
Worst cases are not some obligatory pessimism to scare people into accepting the mean probability case. They are serious warnings.
Given we are playing roulette with our planet’s climate stability, any major unaccounted for factors that reveal themselves are most likely to result in worse outcomes.
There have been people trying to bring attention to this sober information since the 80’s. Welcome to 2026. There will still be people complaining predictions are too dire.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_models_are_wrong
It's especially depressing for me when it comes to younger folks. In Seattle where I live (not the suburbs, actual Seattle) some teenagers drive to school in 6 seater SUVs and spend their lunch time in there, with the engine on. A minority of students of course but that's still a mindfuck... in Europe they would get so much shit from other kids and neighbors. Drop in the bucket in terms of actual emissions but a very strong symbol of the lack of awareness/motivation.
There's a "top of stack" effect in that there can be only a certain number of issues which are most important in discourse, and the Israel/Iran situation has taken over the top of discourse as has the US President.
A vital part of good governance is caring about things which aren't in today's newspaper.
https://ember-energy.org/countries-and-regions/united-states...
https://ember-energy.org/countries-and-regions/european-unio...
In the EU I hear of new climate initiatives all the time. From the US every bit of news I know about is how they’re making it worse.
This is an art that has been refined with every election cycle and every major political event since the early 2010s, and it had already gotten dang bad 5-6 years ago[1], and definitely did not get an ounce better once LLMs came along and drove the down the cost of this type of op.
The result is that it's very hard to get any sort of coherent message across.
[1] 'member the absolute clown fiesta surrounding COVID?
(the Iran collapse that led to mass protests and then mass murder of the mass protests is itself a climate driven issue https://www.unicef.org/iran/en/climate-change )
https://www.gatesnotes.com/home/home-page-topic/reader/three...
with gems like "Although climate change will hurt poor people more than anyone else, for the vast majority of them it will not be the only or even the biggest threat to their lives and welfare. "
Also another group of people have realized they are not willing to forgo all their petty and unnecessary comforts nor are they willing to pay any price increases that would be required to adopt less economical but more sustainable services or production methods.
I don't think there's been any big change in climate change believers/deniers, but i do think some people have started accepting that we're doomed and that there is no "practical" solution. And if you think you're doomed, you might as well skip the sacrifices and enjoy your last days (decades) to the fullest.
Basically, on the average, people don't have ability to think rationally into the future. Most people think only 1 level of cause and effect.
Right now, for the vast majority of people, global warming isn't a problem when your house has AC, your car has AC, your workplace has AC. When you are forced to do things that you see no direct effect of, it makes it seem less important, and its a self reinforcing cycle where you see other people not doing it and you wonder why you have to make your life harder.
People will start caring only when their direct lives are affected. So unfortunately, the only way to fix global warming is to let it get bad enough to where there is enough death and destruction for people to start paying attention.
I think you're referring to inflation with that? I wouldn't necessarily say that inflation is the result of a "decision", certainly not a direct decision of any single person nor any collective group. Economies can move around in weird and unpredictable ways, and they are also quite intertwined at the global level making policy decisions even more complicated and unpredictable.
The "money printing" decision wasn't made by asking the public: "would you like to help our economy and businesses and our essential public services in this tragic event? Oh btw you'll be paying for all of this with inflation, are you still sure?". Politicians tend to conveniently leave the second part out, and also, this questions wasn't asked to the public at all. I believe a sizeable amount of the public would've responded "no, let the people die, let the businesses die, i'm not paying for them".
Which is why for example, in many democracies with tools of direct democracy, such tools cannot affect fiscal policy, because people are dumb and they would just say "i want all of the welfare and zero of the taxes", bringing the country to ruin.
LLMs hit the market and you never hear anyone talk about carbon at all. At all. Maybe Apple will mention it a little bit but they're not in the big datacenter game
The costs of LLMs are just being completely paved over. We don't let manufacturers dump cadmium into the rivers in the US anymore, even if it would enable cheap or magic products, it's insane that we're just ignoring all the external impacts in this particular area
Every f'ing time it snows someone has to snide in with "BuT I ThOuGhT GlObAl WaRmInG WaS ReAl!?!?!?!?!" And i have to take a breath.
Part of the problem seems to be that many countries won't do shit, so all the improvements that have been made are just completely negated by other poluting more.
People are way more alarmed by Rapid Local Temperature Rises By Mechanism of Thermonuclear Energy Being Suddenly Released.
https://xkcd.com/2275/
Eventually we'll have to deal with the Giant Spider Downtown, it's just that the to-do list is growing from the top.
Consider for a moment that there ARE people this straight-up evil....
Attempts to minimize the danger of climate change, as you have just done, are usually politically motivated.
https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/visualizations-data/yc...
Imagine being so in love with a reality TV clown that you end up talking and thinking like a toddler for the rest of your life just to imitate him.
The US is checking a new box every day in the quest to parallel Nazi Germany.
Immigrant Concentration camps? Check
Elimination of public education in favor of religious private school? Check
Remove all free press in the government? Check
Remove all free press in the military? Check
Embrace "Unitary Executive Theory"? (Sure sounds a lot like when Hitler removed the legislature to me) Check.
Create an army of brown-shirts? Sorry i mean ICE Agents... Check
Fuck literal children and suppress all evidence? Check
Like... what EXACTLY is normal about this??????
Have you been reading the news lately? Things are not going well.
Weasel words. How many? Who, specifically? Which problems have actually been solved and aren't just "solved" via people metaphorically standing on an aircraft carrier with a "Mission Accomplished" sign pretending they've been solved?
Climate change has been known for decades now, and despite the alarms and concerns, the current administration is cheerfully, maliciously removing all initiatives in the US to combat it. Attempting to destroy the solar industry and wind power. Rolling back the most common sense environmental controls for public health.
Meanwhile our country has had its place in the world destroyed irrevocably (for at least a generation) and is turning further and further away from a country that cares for its citizens and its freedoms.
People are losing hope, not interest, because climate change and fascism are are more alarming than ever and our government is complicit.
Long standing problems are not being solved.
Imagine what could be accomplished if Americans used their global influence to affect global change on climate issues with the same zeal that they pursue manipulative trade deals.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1118464/transportation-c... shows the American trend, then look at which other countries that’s similar to assuming we electrify a given fraction of the transportation sector:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
This is even more wrong when you look at how Africa is electrifying. Unlike the United States, China continued to invest in solar panel production and so they’re now the cheapest option for electrical power for millions of people since solar panels run for decades and don’t require trucking diesel fuel around or building out power grids. Investments in batteries are having the same cycle: richer countries have the research universities and product development but then anyone can buy the product.
https://apnews.com/article/solar-energy-china-imports-batter...
That’s why the fossil fuels spend so much money spreading messages like yours: they grew fat on government subsidies and they need those subsidies to continue or even expand as the basic economics increasingly favor renewables. Trump has to force coal plants to stay open because otherwise the operators would switch to cheaper options.
Why care when we're already over the edge and there isn't anything we can do about it?
Power companies in the US are already deploying renewables pretty quickly without incentive. If the tariffs are dropped that'd further incentivize build out.
What should be done is carbon taxes and subsidies, but that's not likely to be done. And since that's not going to happen, economics is what will drive transition.
If you think China is developing renewables out of some kind of green future plan, well there is a whole lot of geography and geopolitical information that you are out of the loop on.
China started construction on an estimated 95 GW of new coal power capacity in 2024 it accounted for 93% of new global coal-power construction BUT, importantly, Coal power's share in the electricity mix has steadily declined, dropping from around 73% in 2016 to 51% in June 2025 heavily driven by renewables push in China
China's average utilisation rate of coal power plants in 2024 was around 50% meaning there's already spare capacity. The continued building is driven largely by energy security concerns, financial incentives for coal-mining conglomerates, and institutional momentum. The most immediate trigger was power shortages of 2021, when factories had to cut production due to blackouts. That was politically embarrassing, so provincial governments and energy companies rushed to approve new coal capacity as an insurance policy. More than 100 billion yuan in capacity payments were made to coal plants in 2024 essentially the government paying plants just to exist after all half the capacity isn't being used.
Chinese policy makers have plans to "strictly control" coal use during the current period and start phasing down coal use during the 15th Five-Year Plan period covering 2026–2030. China also has a long-stated goal of peaking carbon emissions before 2030 and reaching carbon neutrality by 2060. which probably explains the apparent paradox of being world leaders in renewables but investing more in Coal than anyone else. usual caveats notwithstanding
That may seem extreme, but the Chinese culture is more collectivist than its Western counterparts and (perhaps unlike the US culture) can recognize a threat as complicated as "This entire nation's set of rules they treat the universe by threatens humanity existentially" even when said nation can't recognize it in themselves. Plus, India is hit hard and fast by climate change in the short run so China already has an ally in their backyard who would support them doing something about polluters.
China currently emits per-capita co2 about half that of the US.
it's not about us guys, relax.
>We remove the estimated influence of three main natural variability factors: El Niño, volcanism, and solar variation. The resulting adjusted and thus less “noisy” data show that there has been acceleration with over 98% confidence, with faster warming over the last 10+ years than during any previous decade.
Those are factors in this analysis that weren’t in all prior analyses, and the confidence levels in this analysis have improved greatly and we know much more certainly that global temps are rising faster now than earlier decades.
I think there are more effects to account for when extrapolating measured temperatures, mostly made on the ground with cataclismic effects. After all, all the carbon being emitted nowadays was in the biosphere back in the days. Why couldn't it return back to it without the earth becoming inhabitable?
If you live on the coast and the water level rises, your home is inhospitable, even if someone 100mi inland is fine.
If you live in a region that usually was 90F in the summer and is now >110F regularly, that’s going to cause problem.
Reality is not binary. There’s a whole spectrum of situations between "everything gets back to normal and all is well" (which was never on the cards after the 1980s) and "all humans die within a century". And the nuances in between still affect billions of people.
I have a paper that says Global Warming is not real (Also not peer reviewed)
That's just your opinion.
It clearly has some value, whether or not it will have even more remains to be seen.
all the carbon storage methods (efficient and otherwise) studied so far could be immediately put into action.
In addition to the immediate reduction in the use of fossil fuels for energy production, the scenario could be completely changed in 10 years, water could be desalinated, desertification reversed, etc.
Free and unlimited energy would be the solution to everything. The question is whether we will get there before it's too late... and perhaps AI is the answer?