I recently finished rewatching The Three Body Problem in which (spoilers follow) the world panics and goes into overdrive because an alien invasion is due in... 400 years. If the current climate trends continue, vast areas of the Earth may not be suitable for habitation within half that time, and we still can't seem to convince some people this is real. Granted I was a climate change skeptic myself until about 10 years ago, but right now the data seems indisputable. Even if we can't find a direct causal relationship between CO2 emissions and warming, we know the following very accurately (disclaimer: not a climate scientist): (1) amount of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere per year (2) concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (3) amount of extra energy that would be theoretically retained in the atmosphere via the green house effect, due to a given increment in CO2 concentration, (4) global temperatures within the past, say 30 years. Don't we know for a fact that (1) + (2) + (3) is very well correlated with (4), and that no other potential causes correlate as well with (4), and don't current computational models demonstrate an ability to predict (4) given (3). So, exactly what is the source of skepticism?
yoyohello13 2 hours ago [-]
I’ve come to terms with the fact that there is no stopping human consumption. It is simply not possible to get enough people to reduce to make an impact. The failure of the environment movements over the last 60 years are proof. The only way is ‘up and out’ developing clean, cheap methods of energy generation and lobbying to get that infrastructure built out as quickly as possible. At this point, investing more in Fossil fuels is a joke and anyone claiming “coal” or whatever is the future is simply a conman or a clown.
rwyinuse 33 minutes ago [-]
Yep, all the talk about individual "carbon footprint" is just a distraction designed by the fossil fuel lobby. Universally in the world people who live most environmentally friendly lives are those that are too poor to consume much, not those who are the most aware, or claim to care the most about climate change.
The only way forward is developing as much solar, wind and nuclear as possible, driving down energy prices. Obviously stuff like carbon tax can help accelerate the process, but mostly it's happening because renewables have become the cheapest way of generating energy in most parts of the world.
CalRobert 1 hours ago [-]
The crazy thing is that we have basically everything we need right now.
You can live in a well-insulated fully electric home powered by renewable energy and have most things you need within a walk, bike, or public transport ride away, _OR_ use an electric car for the things that aren't. If you combine that with a mostly-plant based diet (or at _least_ swapping chicken for most of your beef and lamb) and have 2 kids or fewer you're... basically there.
The main reason most people can't do this is because of political choices, not technological limitations.
Granted this doesn't include luxuries like jetting halfway around the world for a 1 week holiday or living in a 4000 square foot house in the desert and driving a studio apartment an hour to work every day, but really, is that a better life?
hypfer 1 hours ago [-]
> have 2 kids or fewer
This is at odds with lots of other relevant topics that go beyond just "consumption".
2 or fewer is below the replacement rate of 2.1
This _has_ already happened, but there are a lot of voices voicing a lot of reasons why they believe that that might actually be not the best situation.
tialaramex 1 hours ago [-]
Below replacement would be terrifying if there were one thousand humans, it would be worrying if there were a million, and at least worthy of consideration if there were a hundred million, but there are almost ten billion simultaneous humans, we're fine.
NoMoreNicksLeft 9 minutes ago [-]
>Below replacement would be terrifying if there were one thousand humans,
The funny part is that it should terrify you whether there are 10 humans or 10 billion. At the current rates, it's over in about 12-13 generations regardless of the number you start with. That's how it works... no matter how big the starting number, it's how many generations you have left.
Think of it this way? You know the dumb story they taught us in school, about the guy whose payment from the king for doing something clever was to have one grain of rice on the first chess square, and 2 on the second, 4 on the third, and so on... and how it bankrupted the king long before the 64th square? That's the same math with fertility rate of 1.0! (The Chinese have a fertility rate of 1.0, famously.) Each generation will be half the size of the previous. But how long before that is effectively zero? Will it be 1 million years, 250,000 years? No, about 300ish. 300 years. But long before you reach that point, your civilization has fallen apart. Those last 4 or 5 generations live life without electricity, anything but muscle power, or metallurgy.
And China's fertility rate isn't even the lowest! South Korea's rate just dropped to around 0.5! That's where each generation is one quarter the size of the previous.
The best part of all is that these rates haven't even bottomed out. We will almost certainly see rates right around 0 long before the century ends.
>but there are almost ten billion simultaneous humans, we're fine.
At least math illiteracy ought to console you guys towards the end.
hypfer 1 hours ago [-]
On a humanity-level: yes.
On an individual state-level: no.
giantg2 31 minutes ago [-]
"On an individual state-level: no."
This might actually be a yes if you believe in the potential impact of automation and AI.
jandrese 1 hours ago [-]
You see a whole lot of panic from industrialists over the birth rate drop in the industrialized world. They claim it is an extinction level event for humanity. This is not quite correct. It is an extinction level event for economic models that assume unbounded growth of the consumer base.
Avicebron 1 hours ago [-]
> You can live in a well-insulated fully electric home powered by renewable energy and have most things you need within a walk, bike, or public transport ride away, _OR_ use an electric car for the things that aren't.
For this to be the most effective it really needs to be deployed somewhere like India. How are they coming along with that?
coryrc 57 minutes ago [-]
They have tons of people using small vehicles, bicycles and public transport. Unfortunately they aren't following China in mass rollout of solar photovoltaic; 90% of their energy consumption is fossil fuels:
All of the Western nations are at 2 kids or fewer but also so are China and India. Most of the 2+ children come from the ME and subsaharan Africa and areas in Oceania/SEAsia, Maybe some parts of South America. One could slow consumption by not importing people from low carbon footprint into high carbon footprint countries -though many countries, except Japan, aren't comfortable adjusting to lower populations.
dmitrygr 1 hours ago [-]
Western nations reducing will DO nothing - it is too small a fraction of greenhouse emissions. The large fraction is coming form india and china. And they do not have electric everything. they don't even have running water in most places.
rwyinuse 47 minutes ago [-]
Your view is outdated. China is building renewable power generation at an extremely high rate, and also exporting cheap solar panels worldwide. China has a higher share of electric vehicles in cities than most of Europe and America does. It appears their emissions are now starting to go down as a result, although the economy keeps growing.
India still has a long way to go, but China is doing the right things. Same can't be said about USA under current administration.
budsniffer952 15 minutes ago [-]
>Same can't be said about USA under current administration.
The reason half the population won't take climate alarmists seriously are statements like this.
Saying the West, generally, or the US, specifically "aren't doing anything" is ridiculous.
Agreed. You aren't going to convince people in India that their children should stay poor when there is an option to uplift them. That's an extra billion people of energy and material needs, all by itself.
islandfox100 1 hours ago [-]
''Now, the total population of well-off countries in the world is about 1
billion, while China has more than 1.3 billion people. If we are all to become
modernized, the well-off population must more than double. If we are to
consume as much energy in production and daily lives as the present well-off
people do, all the existing resources in the world would be far from enough for
us! The old path seems to be a dead end. Where is the new road? It lies in
scientific and technological innovation, and in the accelerated transition from
factor-driven and investment-driven growth to innovation-driven growth.''
-Xi Jinping, Governance of China
coryrc 52 minutes ago [-]
The question is whether you use solar PV or build more coal plants to supply them. The latter makes people sicker, but more dependent on the government, so you can guess which one gets the tax breaks and which one gets tariffs and international politics to make it more expensive to acquire.
budsniffer952 13 minutes ago [-]
Coal technology is cheap and wide spread. PV technology is not, yet.
mistrial9 2 hours ago [-]
> The failure of the environment movements over the last 60 years are proof
superficial and incorrect
supertroop 1 hours ago [-]
Explain your reasoning or stop wasting bits.
flyinglizard 52 minutes ago [-]
Environmental movements had a huge impact on public awareness and climate change mitigation. It sure didn’t come from the government themselves. We take many everyday steps to reduce our environmental impact, from energy to transportation to building to recycling. It’s all happening to one degree or another pretty much everywhere.
jackyinger 1 hours ago [-]
The skepticism is from people who are making money emitting CO2 and don’t want to stop making money in the same old way. It is well documented that oil companies have been sewing skepticism for decades, go figure.
Jeff_Brown 1 hours ago [-]
The idea that a producer is at fault and not also the consumer paying them to do that is strange to me.
no_wizard 34 minutes ago [-]
This ignores too much to be a good faith argument like lack of options to choose. Ability to choose in absence of regulation, the fact that industry spends millions to curb any regulation and I know ok missing other factors.
Individual choice is actually a small part of this wheel, almost negligible.
The vast majority of polluting is done by industry, and they also do the most not to make things better and actively often try to make things worse.
giantg2 24 minutes ago [-]
People want the products. Industry wouldn't exist, or not at this scale, without that. The easiest way to see this is air travel. The vast majority of it is unnecessary - business trips that could be a zoom call, vacations, shipping, etc. People got to every place on earth using trains and ships before air travel. Possible exceptions are medical transport and some types of products, which are tiny by comparison. So yeah, pretty much all on the consumer choices.
tialaramex 48 minutes ago [-]
Blaming the consumer is a time-honoured way to ensure nothing is done. The consumer can't pick options which don't exist, so the producer says oh well, you can either burn coal or you can go without light - there's no mention that the producer doesn't have to burn coal to make electricity, just straight to blaming you for wanting light.
giantg2 22 minutes ago [-]
They have renewable only energy plans. So the choices do exist. Not to mention that the choice to go without something is a valid choice. If one believes strongly enough about something, then they will sacrifice for it.
ro_sharp 59 minutes ago [-]
As long as the pollution is a negative externality and the polluting option is (immediately) cheaper, people (especially poorer people) will choose the cheaper option.
JumpCrisscross 27 minutes ago [-]
> If the current climate trends continue, vast areas of the Earth may not be suitable for habitation within half that time, and we still can't seem to convince some people this is real
The areas to be rendered “uninhabitable” in our lifetimes are all poor. Hence the disconnect.
giantg2 34 minutes ago [-]
"and we still can't seem to convince some people this is real."
There will always be outliers who don't believe something. But even for the people who do believe climate change is real, there is a huge variance of how we should address it. Most people have more immediate problems. Many take the same type of argument as the infinite population growth is good crowd - future tech will save us.
satvikpendem 47 minutes ago [-]
> the world panics and goes into overdrive because an alien invasion is due in... 400 years.
It's the difference between Chinese planning philosophy versus the West's.
margalabargala 38 minutes ago [-]
Not really. There are plenty of Western entities that think in centuries (e.g. the Catholic Church) and plenty of.Chinese entities that are chasing the next moment (all the companies who cut standards on product because "to them it is the same").
This is true about the instantaneous state of the governments of the US and China rather than some intrinsic permanent cultural quality.
baq 1 hours ago [-]
We can't slow down burning stuff for energy, this is politically untenable.
...so the answer is to accelerate the burning, but not for the sake of burning more, but to focus on getting to true clean energy sources which will allow us to economically unwind the mess before the whole house of cards collapses, i.e. fusion + global scale solar (maybe even space solar and microwave beam down) + boatloads of batteries.
no_wizard 32 minutes ago [-]
Steady state nuclear power plus wind and solar would. In today’s world, make the grid more reliable and greener than ever.
Nuclear should not be off the table. It’s safe, it’s well understood, it’s reliable and is a very cheap way to create base load capacity that renewables like solos and wind can build out on top of
Tarsul 2 hours ago [-]
In most countries the public "believes" in climate change. But it don't matter: People still consume much more than the planet can bear. Because they like to consume. And because they don't want to change "if no one else does it" (tragedy of the commons). So you're asking the wrong question (maybe not for a US audience, I give you that). The real question would be: How to change the behavior of a population? My best guess would be: by reforming capitalism (and/or democracy), e.g. carbon tax (imo best way would be that there's a second currency next to money for the carbon effect of every good/service). But good luck with that.
Disclaimer: For myself, I do believe in personal changes, e.g. consuming less (red meat, flights, gas etc). Not because it makes a big impact but because that's just my personal morality and it makes me feel better to do it. On a societal level it's tougher because most/many people's brains don't work like that (I think).
yoyohello13 1 hours ago [-]
I’m not sure even the how to change behavior is the correct line either. I think the most successful path is likely to be: how do we make human behavior less destructive?
esafak 1 hours ago [-]
A carbon tax would change behavior in short order. The challenge is introducing then maintaining it; people can always vote it out. I think left-leaning jurisdictions should definitely give it a try.
drc500free 42 minutes ago [-]
Carbon taxes are massively regressive. There is no political coalition that simultaneously wants to act against climate change and doesn’t mind driving further income inequality.
baq 1 hours ago [-]
the challenge in carbon tax isn't the people who vote it out, it's the people who never vote it in in the country next door (or on the other side of the world, it hardly matters)
esafak 13 minutes ago [-]
That's not a challenge; passing it in one place gives people in others an example to point to. Nobody wants to tax themselves while others don't.
anonym29 1 hours ago [-]
>So, exactly what is the source of skepticism?
We should define climate skepticism, to avoid indicting a strawman. I'd start with my definition, as someone with unorthodox views on climate that often place me at odds with progressives.
It may be easier to start with the elements we agree on. Is the climate changing? Yes, obviously, visibly, measurably. Do human activities, including burning of coal and hydrocarbons, likely have a causal, contributory impact? Absolutely. Is the adoption of cleaner sources of energy: solar, hydro, geothermal, wind, nuclear, as well as investment in transmission and storage upgrades, a good thing? Unquestionably. Is climate change causing a growth in a class of threat to human life and prosperity (e.g. heat deaths, coastal flooding, extreme weather events, etc.)? Of course.
As for the areas where I diverge from progressives: Do I expect any amount of reduction in human activity, including reduction of coal and hydrocarbon combustion, reduction of overall energy usage, reduction of living standards and growth targets, to make any difference in the magnitude of the coming climate change at all in the long run? No.
The earth has both heated and cooled by orders of magnitude more than worst-case projections before humans started burning hydrocarbons.
Earth's climate is changing, yes, but historically, over the last 500 million years, the global average temperature has been as low as ~11° C at times; as high as ~34°C at others. You're reading that correctly: strictly natural processes that predate humanity itself have repeatedly changed the global averge temperature by as much as ~23°C. Ice ages occurred with zero human impact, just as the Cretaceous Thermal Maximum and global atmospheric CO2 levels exceeding 1000ppm occurred with zero human impact.
If you were to measure the full range of earth's climate variation over the history of the earth, and attempt to assign and attribute causality to all sources of that climate variation, you'd find that both the presence of all of humanity and the sum impact of all of human activity is an insignificant footnote. If this duration were a football field, humanity itself would be the last centimeter of grass in the distance of that football field; the period in which we've been measuring the climate is a thin slice of a single blade of grass.
The potential and capacity of natural processes to raise global average temperatures by 23° C has always been present, and nothing we can do will eliminate that potential and capacity.
The focus of human climate concern, accordingly, should be preservation of human life and wealth through adaptation to a changing climate, not futile efforts to prevent change itself, or an irrational alarmism that seeks to instill a widespread sense of anxiety over a process that cannot (and never could be) stopped, and for which the sum of humanity is not responsible for.
Build AC in Seattle. Set up better floodgates in New York City. Winterize the grid in Texas. Fix building codes to make houses more safe from hurricanes in Florida, and develop better solutions to stop the destruction of homes from wildfires in Colorado.
And yeah, do invest in alternative sources and production of energy. Energy is good. Energy is prosperity - it's causally linked to GDP, it's a direct requirement for quality of life / comfort / happiness. We need renewable energy. We need dispatchable energy. We need zero-emissions energy. We need energy that works at night, when it's cloudy, when we run out of oil, and when the wind's not blowing. We need better storage, better transmission. More energy, more sources, and lower costs for all of humanity.
We can't stop the world from changing, and trying to is foolish; we should accept that it is changing whether we try to prevent that or not, and focus on protecting and improving quality of life for all of humanity in the face of this always-changing environment on this little blue dot instead.
awjlogan 1 hours ago [-]
Your car can go at 0 kph and 100 kph. It’s the rate of the change that kills you, not the speed.
anonym29 45 minutes ago [-]
Poor analogy. 23° C global average temperature increase, even slowly, will end a lot of life if nothing is done to address impacts. The rate of change isn't what causes those deaths; for 23° C warming, the terminal metric is indeed itself what kills, not the rate of change getting there.
That said, another section I've largely left out above is that it's effectively impossible to coordinate global action to meaningfully reduce human emissions from current levels. Europe and the US have actually already had declining emissions levels for decades now. This isn't a philosophy problem that you can talk your way to a solution on, it's a human psychology and game theory problem.
Trying to voluntarily convince global south nations to not adopt carbon-positive energy sources that solve real problems in the third world, and instead telling them to exclusively adopt your preferred alternatives (which do come with tradeoffs, be them in cost, complexity, availability/reliability) to appease what people facing food scarcity due to a lack of refrigeration due to a lack of electricity would consider "first world concerns" is an exercise in futility, and has some thematic emotional rhymes with colonial pasts where wealthy westerners demanded sacrifice from the global poor for the comfort of the wealthy westerners. It's a very tone-deaf plea.
no_wizard 27 minutes ago [-]
Voluntarily convince? Yes, I agree asking other nations to afford something on top of struggling to afford things is not easy.
However, a global reparation fund would make a difference. Not entirely unheard of for richer nations to fund these things for poorer ones
card_zero 1 hours ago [-]
You seem to be saying the temperature change is mainly natural? But the expected natural change in the present era is slow and downward, I think.
I mean you have two separate points here, one is "adapt" and the other is "nothing can be done", which itself can be picked apart into different specific things that can't be done, such as on the one hand getting everybody to behave themselves conscientiously with one mind, and on the other hand unilateral geoengineering.
anonym29 1 hours ago [-]
I am saying that earth's average temperature has raised by 23° C before with zero human impact, and it will raise by as much as 23° C again, even if you cut all human carbon emissions to zero overnight (itself an effective impossibility for other reasons).
The average global temperature raising by even 2°C has catastrophic and devastating impacts to humanity, to say nothing of it raising by 20°.
We can't stop or prevent global average temperatures from rising, even if we do cut emissions to zero.
What we can prevent is the widespread loss of life (human, plants, and animals) and prosperity. Preventing loss of life and prosperity is good, and it's an achievable goal, so we should pursue that goal.
41 minutes ago [-]
card_zero 51 minutes ago [-]
There's two reasons why temperature increases can't be stopped (without actually sending the heat away somewhere, such as into space): the first one is lag in the system if we cut emissions to zero, and the second is natural change in maybe 300 million years. Why bother mentioning the second of those?
anonym29 40 minutes ago [-]
This is a strawman. The natural change happens orders of magnitude faster than 300 million years.
Also, is there a way to move heat into space that doesn't require adding more heat into the atmosphere than is removed from the expulsion? Or do you just mean this as a hypothetical example?
card_zero 35 minutes ago [-]
Well yeah, I just took the time interlude since the carboniferous and projected it into the future. But what's the real answer to how soon it would naturally get troublesomely hot, when worked out properly, and why is it still not very soon at all?
> If only 1%–2% of the Earth’s surface were instead made to radiate at [~100 W/m2] rather than its current average value, the total heat fluxes into and away from the entire Earth would be balanced and warming would cease.
Which is, you know, a nice fantasy and theoretically works. Like a solar shield, but terrestrial.
Edit for those thinking that even 1% is an unfeasibly large area: yes. It's about 5 million km², which is about one-fifth of North America. Maybe scatter the panels around the ocean?
w4der 40 minutes ago [-]
You are leaving out the rate at which the temperature has fallen and risen in the past and how that compares with the rising seen in recent decades.
pstuart 1 hours ago [-]
> And yeah, do invest in alternative sources and production of energy
This right here, it should be a Manhattan Project level of urgency, but at global "Hail Mary" level of cooperation and effort.
And the best part is that it's not like that investment is wasted -- it's foundational and will allow us to do incredible things with it.
Meanwhile the President of the United States is actively cancelling such work and doubling down on coal. Wheee!
AtlasBarfed 1 hours ago [-]
Here are the positive points, relatively speaking:
- solar/wind/batteries have a fundamental economic advantage already, and there is further runway for gains in efficiency, yield, and cost reductions. All its competitors are, generally speaking, tapped out in terms of economic costs and efficiencies
- population declines are currently an inevitability of urbanization and techno-capitalism, less people, less pollution
- contrary to #2, it is likely that life extension will start to come into play for the billionaire class, and that will mean the rich elites DO need to think about the future
However, I agree, those are glimmers of hope in the grand scheme of the current system
gadders 2 hours ago [-]
What's that scientific saying about correlations and causations? But, yeah, let's all go back to middle ages pre-industrial economy just in case.
Kon5ole 1 hours ago [-]
I don't know if it's too late to stop the worst case scenarios of global warming yet or if there's still time, but it doesn't seem to be happening anyway. The world can't deal with something that requires global concentrated efforts.
However, I do think we have time to prepare for the worst case scenarios, and individual countries and states can do that efficiently on their own.
Improve evacuation routines in floodable areas, build greenhouses to deal with cold snaps, ensure there are air conditioned buildings to deal with heatwaves, have distributed local production of electricity, keep strategic food reserves stocked, and so on.
Edit: Not saying that such efforts are the solution by any means, but they will help.
awongh 53 minutes ago [-]
Since covid I’ve actually become less convinced of this. Yes there were national interests at play and there was a lot of general chaos.
But. The level of international coordination with vaccine rollouts and agreements between countries was way more than I had initially expected. Of course this feeling depends on what your own baseline expectations are.
My takeaway was that if the conditions arise that we all decide to do something about climate change (because of political conditions or because of actual effects) we (humanity) are willing to make big sudden changes
I believe the article says it is uncertain if climate change is responsible for the gradual weakening. It is gradually weakening though. This el nino should be a banger
clort 1 hours ago [-]
Well its funny. I remember reading years ago that the big problems in Europe would start when the Greenland glaciers started melting, adding significant cold water to the Labrador Current, and pushing the AMOC to the south. Never mind the sea level rise, the temperature in Europe would drop significantly.
Now, looking at the image in the article, there is a massive cold blob right there where the Labrador Current joins the Atlantic, but no mention of the theories that I've read about years ago, just that it is mysterious
snovv_crash 1 hours ago [-]
Europe might have a hiccup until warming becomes more widespread and it goes back to 'normal'. The question is how long until Texas and Florida become uninhabitable because the heat isn't being shunted out to Europe, on top of the additional heat from global warming.
camgunz 2 hours ago [-]
I really think people are sleeping on the AMOC. The first season there isn't European wine/cheese/olives because of climate change is the first season European farmers probably literally declare war on their governments, to say nothing of the fact that almost no European homes can handle this level of cold.
And for some perspective, this is only one of many other huge changes that huge populations will react violently to in the next 20-50 years. Good luck to us all.
CalRobert 1 hours ago [-]
The farmers have generally opposed policies meant to address this.
GeoAtreides 1 hours ago [-]
what's your argument? are you actually making one or ... ?
8note 2 hours ago [-]
i get the sense that its probably overblown, sicne we've only got a couple years worth of measured data on it.
we're jumping to a catastrophe when it might just ring, and whatever the environmentalists who prioritize it qant to do about it might change something that doesnt need changing, and result in actual catastrophe when the ringing stops
mort96 1 hours ago [-]
I mean the collapse of the AMOC has been a hypothesized consequence of climate change for at least many decades. I was taught about it as something scientists think could happen in primary school; it's not new (tho it was framed in terms of the gulf stream, since that's the part of it which would affect Europe). Those fears were also founded on data-based climate prediction models.
jeffbee 2 hours ago [-]
I am interested in your implication that European farmers would have someone other than themselves to blame for this outcome. As a whole they are at least as backwards as American farmers. They are largely deniers of climate change either as a thing altogether or as something attributable to man, or are prone to believing it helps them with longer growing seasons, and their main political activity is protesting any changes in their diesel fuel subsidies.
piskov 2 hours ago [-]
Well for one example of such case: German farmers (if there are any) could argue whether all those nuclear plants shutdowns were really for the best.
croes 2 hours ago [-]
I guess that’s what parent meant.
But just because it’s also their fault doesn’t hinder them to blame the government.
Who do you think will MAGA blame for the consequences of climate change?
bryanrasmussen 2 hours ago [-]
Woke black people who sleep with members of their own gender!!
snickerbockers 1 hours ago [-]
I don't see any point in blaming individuals and small businesses when wealthy investors and politicians aren't even pretending not to be giddy about all the new trade routes that open as sea ice melts.
Nobody should ever adopt sustainable practices from which you only benefit when everybody else does, in which case a minority of people who didn't adopt sustainable practices also benefit. That's just bad economics.
And then there's all the wealthy hypocrites who criticize the middle class while they make weekly flights with private jets. And dont forget the coal powered data centers, I wouldn't be surprised if there's some hypocrisy there from the epstein class too.
Zababa 1 hours ago [-]
I do kinda wish the european farmers would "declare war on the governments" so the governments can win and end this way too powerful lobby once and for all.
giantg2 2 hours ago [-]
"The first season there isn't European wine/cheese/olives because of climate change is the first season European farmers probably literally declare war on their governments,"
Unlikely. The government will be the only one who can bail them out.
NDlurker 1 hours ago [-]
Put a massive underwater data center there. Free cooling for the computers. Free heating for Europe. Everyone wins.
AndrewKemendo 2 hours ago [-]
This world, despite a century of warning, is truly not ready to pay the debt of industrialization
> At South Carolina’s Fort Sumter National Monument, a sign that included details on the looming impacts of climate change, including information on how “rising seas could inundate most of the fort’s walls and flood the historic parade ground” was removed in its entirety.
Any talk of the various climactic theorys is
very³ very³ likely to be wrong³.These systems are huge, interconected, and NOT UNDERSTOOD.
What we do have is some data that strongly suggests that the climate is changing, possibly at an unprecidented rate.Right now.
Record territory in fact.
The sad thing about humans is that under capitalism, capital consumes public goods like nature. Then, when those public goods degrade and harm the human species, the capital class that actively consumed those public goods refuses to help restore them and instead cries that it's all a lie
tgv 52 seconds ago [-]
It isn't simply capitalism. What system could handle this with grace? The only solution is world-wide care, which can only be achieved through civilization, education. Using an old-fashioned word: Bildung (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bildung). That could lead to the moderation required, but social-democracy is dead, and other political ideologies can't deliver. Hedonism triggered by material well-being in the last decades will kill us.
deadbabe 2 hours ago [-]
Could we put underwater data centers there to reheat the waters?
hurtigioll 1 hours ago [-]
is fascinating that a software developer can have such a lack of awareness of the relative size of things
fooqux 2 hours ago [-]
Probably makes more sense than putting them in a friggen vacuum.
Avicebron 1 hours ago [-]
ah the "boil the oceans" strat. Interesting play.
voidfunc 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
skeledrew 2 hours ago [-]
If you walk in the middle of a highway then you "could" be hit by a truck. "Might" be left at the side of the road as a hit-and-run. Don't take it seriously though; go walk on that highway like it's yours.
gadders 2 hours ago [-]
You act as if reacting to global warming is cost-free. It would have a drastic impact on the economy and people's standard of living, especially in the 3rd world.
skeledrew 11 minutes ago [-]
You act as if NOT reacting to global warming is cost-free. It WILL have a drastic impact on the economy and people's standard of living, especially in the 3rd world.
Yes I literally copied your comment, added a single word and modified another; it's that easy to rebut.
pingou 2 hours ago [-]
Would it be more scientific to say it is sure it will happen?
I suspect the opposite is happening, too many times an environmental catastrophe has been predicted in too certain terms and has not happened, which is why many people lost trust.
And if you think that we shouldn't try to predict but only inform about what has already happened that seems even stranger to me.
moritzwarhier 2 hours ago [-]
It's a refusal to engage with the reported information, not an argument.
Note that the general sentiment on HN when it comes to other topics is that every slight simplification in reporting on science is unforgivable, Gell-Mann-amnesia-effect, bla bla...
For example, it is clickbait to say "cancer" instead of "some types of cancer which we further need to specify" in headline.
But it is of course impossible to take scientists seriously when their results are reported as "they observed X, and are there are indications that it could mean Y".
Who says "could"? It's way too risky to engage with people who don't tell me exactly what to think!
_HMCB_ 2 hours ago [-]
This ^
_HMCB_ 2 hours ago [-]
All is good. until it’s not.
2 hours ago [-]
gadders 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
david-gpu 2 hours ago [-]
Oversimplifying: If global temperatures went down when greenhouse gases went up, it would falsify our current climate models.
But we don't see that, do we?
Denying climate change for decades is what brought us to the immense challenge we are facing now.
8note 2 hours ago [-]
it wouldnt necessarily. there are also cycles of cooling and warming between the earth and sun.
we are however, warming when were supposed to be on an overall cooling trend
GolfPopper 2 hours ago [-]
And once it has indisputably happened, and the destructive consequences are impossible to ignore, the same people and institutions who spent decades complaining about "could" and "might" will immediately pivot to "there was nothing we could have done".
wpm 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah better to let an irreversible catastrophe happen than do anything about it before hand because we might be working to prevent something that wasn't going to happen.
sigmar 2 hours ago [-]
All science-based conclusions come with uncertainty. Only ideologues (and siths) write in absolute terms.
albumen 2 hours ago [-]
And yet millions of people still play the lottery.
I don’t think it’s as simple as uncertainty. Nobody wants to change their lifestyle to avert climate change. People prefer carrots to sticks.
tocs3 2 hours ago [-]
People prefer carrots to sticks.
I sometimes think those in the environmental movement have made a mistake with their messaging. It is too often "we need to suffer to save the planet". It could also be things like:
"Why do you want to pay more to drive a giant expensive gas guzzling vehicle to work so that you can pay for a giant expensive gas guzzling vehicle to go to work in".
"Why do you want to pay for extra electricity when conservation and efficiency will help save money for other things"
"Single use items are thing you pay for time and time again. Durable maintainable items you pay for once."
"Throwing things in the garbage is like paying to store things forever (landfills are not free)"
It is true that there are, at times, good reason to do things that are not at the extreme of conservationism and environmentalism. If the messaging was a little more carrot than stick we might see more progress.
awjlogan 1 hours ago [-]
It’s also been tried (endlessly), but society is too enamoured with consumption and GDP as the principle guiding metric for it to have had much effect. Some large number of people, wilfully or otherwise, reject intellectualism as a whole.
pfdietz 2 hours ago [-]
It's that the marginal benefit of individual action accrues mostly to other people, or (on a national scale) to other nations. The fraction of benefit that accrues locally isn't enough to justify the cost (unlike, say, the ban on CFCs, or control of local pollution.)
So absent something enforcing prohibition of defection from a collective action, the collective action doesn't happen.
You want to actually solve the problem? Find such an enforcement mechanism (CO2 tariffs, perhaps), reduce the cost of solution (sufficiently cheap non-fossil energy), or find another solution that doesn't require global cooperation (albedo modification, say).
A solution that just requires everyone to get along and cooperate to their marginal net detriment doesn't seem like it will work.
croes 2 hours ago [-]
Every look into the future is could and might.
So you prefer just to ignore it and deal with the disaster afterwards?
_HMCB_ 2 hours ago [-]
A read a good quote this week but I can’t remember the exact saying. Something like: the check gets cashed eventually.
tomrod 2 hours ago [-]
I take it seriously, as do many others. Careful of the bandwagon fallacy or, even worse, the mind projection fallacy.
camgunz 2 hours ago [-]
No it's the frog boil effect. It's a staggering amount of change, it's just over a whole human lifetime so most people don't really clock it. Elites are supposed to do something about it, but mostly because of corruption and ideology they aren't.
TheOtherHobbes 2 hours ago [-]
Classic normalcy bias. AMOC collapse catastrophe is literally unimaginable for at least 80% of the population.
functionmouse 2 hours ago [-]
Thank you. HN should not allow any headlines containing "could", "might", or a question mark at the end. Conjecture is not news.
croes 2 hours ago [-]
This has none of it
xgulfie 2 hours ago [-]
Many many HN posts are not news
mikert89 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
baq 58 minutes ago [-]
stop listening to politicians, start listening to scientists maybe, 15 minutes of thinking isn't good enough for anything
mzi 2 hours ago [-]
You should.
pvaldes 16 minutes ago [-]
Your faith stopped the climate change, congratulations! And all that we needed was a pure soul to wake up the princess of snow!
Ehm... nope. Another yearly record of heat, directly to the sink. Damned real world.
At this moment trolling people that for some reason still keeps playing the "virtuous climate denial" card is not even funny.
skeledrew 2 hours ago [-]
Meh who cares? Let it all burn and flood. Earth gets a fresh start, and hopefully whatever "intelligent" species evolves to be dominant in the next 5-10 million years is a better custodian. Rinse and repeat until that's the case. Heck, who knows if this is actually the 1st or 100th iteration...
Y-bar 2 hours ago [-]
The rich, who have disproportionately contributed to the current crisis can buy and relocate to safety, while the poor will be hit the hardest.
y-c-o-m-b 2 hours ago [-]
I've seen a lot of stories about this in the last year, but I truly wonder how effective they will be. What's to stop people from acquiring equipment like large machinery to dig them out of their bunker or bombing it with bunker busters?
Y-bar 2 hours ago [-]
If you look at both past and modern-day equivalents you will see that the rich do buy enough people to work as safety troops.
The reason why Putin or Kim Jong Un is not dead a long time ago is that enough of the ruling upper middle class has been made dependent on their leaders and will work to ensure the safety of said leader.
ArtemZ 2 hours ago [-]
But ultimately, isn't it the complacency of poor people, their disinterest in politics, in standing for each other, in learning and pushing for change is what allowed the existence and conduct of the rich?
Y-bar 1 hours ago [-]
I have seen this line of thinking before.
”Your honour, but the girl didn’t resist very much, so she must bear part of the blame for what I did to her”.
Hmm nah, I'm thinking beyond that, like a full wipe and reset back to primordial ooze stage. Although that's pretty unlikely as humans will be fully wiped out as a species before conditions get to the point of triggering a full reset, and cockroaches at least are notorious for surviving the most inhospitable conditions ever. Theoretically, a device could be built that triggers it though.
Rendered at 17:34:09 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
The only way forward is developing as much solar, wind and nuclear as possible, driving down energy prices. Obviously stuff like carbon tax can help accelerate the process, but mostly it's happening because renewables have become the cheapest way of generating energy in most parts of the world.
You can live in a well-insulated fully electric home powered by renewable energy and have most things you need within a walk, bike, or public transport ride away, _OR_ use an electric car for the things that aren't. If you combine that with a mostly-plant based diet (or at _least_ swapping chicken for most of your beef and lamb) and have 2 kids or fewer you're... basically there.
The main reason most people can't do this is because of political choices, not technological limitations.
Granted this doesn't include luxuries like jetting halfway around the world for a 1 week holiday or living in a 4000 square foot house in the desert and driving a studio apartment an hour to work every day, but really, is that a better life?
This is at odds with lots of other relevant topics that go beyond just "consumption".
2 or fewer is below the replacement rate of 2.1 This _has_ already happened, but there are a lot of voices voicing a lot of reasons why they believe that that might actually be not the best situation.
The funny part is that it should terrify you whether there are 10 humans or 10 billion. At the current rates, it's over in about 12-13 generations regardless of the number you start with. That's how it works... no matter how big the starting number, it's how many generations you have left.
Think of it this way? You know the dumb story they taught us in school, about the guy whose payment from the king for doing something clever was to have one grain of rice on the first chess square, and 2 on the second, 4 on the third, and so on... and how it bankrupted the king long before the 64th square? That's the same math with fertility rate of 1.0! (The Chinese have a fertility rate of 1.0, famously.) Each generation will be half the size of the previous. But how long before that is effectively zero? Will it be 1 million years, 250,000 years? No, about 300ish. 300 years. But long before you reach that point, your civilization has fallen apart. Those last 4 or 5 generations live life without electricity, anything but muscle power, or metallurgy.
And China's fertility rate isn't even the lowest! South Korea's rate just dropped to around 0.5! That's where each generation is one quarter the size of the previous.
The best part of all is that these rates haven't even bottomed out. We will almost certainly see rates right around 0 long before the century ends.
>but there are almost ten billion simultaneous humans, we're fine.
At least math illiteracy ought to console you guys towards the end.
On an individual state-level: no.
This might actually be a yes if you believe in the potential impact of automation and AI.
For this to be the most effective it really needs to be deployed somewhere like India. How are they coming along with that?
https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/india
USA is at 80%, which isn't much better, but at least trending down:
https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/united-states
China is also at 80%, but trending down far steeper:
https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/china
India still has a long way to go, but China is doing the right things. Same can't be said about USA under current administration.
The reason half the population won't take climate alarmists seriously are statements like this.
Saying the West, generally, or the US, specifically "aren't doing anything" is ridiculous.
https://ourworldindata.org/profile/co2/united-states
superficial and incorrect
Individual choice is actually a small part of this wheel, almost negligible.
The vast majority of polluting is done by industry, and they also do the most not to make things better and actively often try to make things worse.
The areas to be rendered “uninhabitable” in our lifetimes are all poor. Hence the disconnect.
There will always be outliers who don't believe something. But even for the people who do believe climate change is real, there is a huge variance of how we should address it. Most people have more immediate problems. Many take the same type of argument as the infinite population growth is good crowd - future tech will save us.
It's the difference between Chinese planning philosophy versus the West's.
This is true about the instantaneous state of the governments of the US and China rather than some intrinsic permanent cultural quality.
...so the answer is to accelerate the burning, but not for the sake of burning more, but to focus on getting to true clean energy sources which will allow us to economically unwind the mess before the whole house of cards collapses, i.e. fusion + global scale solar (maybe even space solar and microwave beam down) + boatloads of batteries.
Nuclear should not be off the table. It’s safe, it’s well understood, it’s reliable and is a very cheap way to create base load capacity that renewables like solos and wind can build out on top of
Disclaimer: For myself, I do believe in personal changes, e.g. consuming less (red meat, flights, gas etc). Not because it makes a big impact but because that's just my personal morality and it makes me feel better to do it. On a societal level it's tougher because most/many people's brains don't work like that (I think).
We should define climate skepticism, to avoid indicting a strawman. I'd start with my definition, as someone with unorthodox views on climate that often place me at odds with progressives.
It may be easier to start with the elements we agree on. Is the climate changing? Yes, obviously, visibly, measurably. Do human activities, including burning of coal and hydrocarbons, likely have a causal, contributory impact? Absolutely. Is the adoption of cleaner sources of energy: solar, hydro, geothermal, wind, nuclear, as well as investment in transmission and storage upgrades, a good thing? Unquestionably. Is climate change causing a growth in a class of threat to human life and prosperity (e.g. heat deaths, coastal flooding, extreme weather events, etc.)? Of course.
As for the areas where I diverge from progressives: Do I expect any amount of reduction in human activity, including reduction of coal and hydrocarbon combustion, reduction of overall energy usage, reduction of living standards and growth targets, to make any difference in the magnitude of the coming climate change at all in the long run? No.
The earth has both heated and cooled by orders of magnitude more than worst-case projections before humans started burning hydrocarbons.
Earth's climate is changing, yes, but historically, over the last 500 million years, the global average temperature has been as low as ~11° C at times; as high as ~34°C at others. You're reading that correctly: strictly natural processes that predate humanity itself have repeatedly changed the global averge temperature by as much as ~23°C. Ice ages occurred with zero human impact, just as the Cretaceous Thermal Maximum and global atmospheric CO2 levels exceeding 1000ppm occurred with zero human impact.
If you were to measure the full range of earth's climate variation over the history of the earth, and attempt to assign and attribute causality to all sources of that climate variation, you'd find that both the presence of all of humanity and the sum impact of all of human activity is an insignificant footnote. If this duration were a football field, humanity itself would be the last centimeter of grass in the distance of that football field; the period in which we've been measuring the climate is a thin slice of a single blade of grass.
The potential and capacity of natural processes to raise global average temperatures by 23° C has always been present, and nothing we can do will eliminate that potential and capacity.
The focus of human climate concern, accordingly, should be preservation of human life and wealth through adaptation to a changing climate, not futile efforts to prevent change itself, or an irrational alarmism that seeks to instill a widespread sense of anxiety over a process that cannot (and never could be) stopped, and for which the sum of humanity is not responsible for.
Build AC in Seattle. Set up better floodgates in New York City. Winterize the grid in Texas. Fix building codes to make houses more safe from hurricanes in Florida, and develop better solutions to stop the destruction of homes from wildfires in Colorado.
And yeah, do invest in alternative sources and production of energy. Energy is good. Energy is prosperity - it's causally linked to GDP, it's a direct requirement for quality of life / comfort / happiness. We need renewable energy. We need dispatchable energy. We need zero-emissions energy. We need energy that works at night, when it's cloudy, when we run out of oil, and when the wind's not blowing. We need better storage, better transmission. More energy, more sources, and lower costs for all of humanity.
We can't stop the world from changing, and trying to is foolish; we should accept that it is changing whether we try to prevent that or not, and focus on protecting and improving quality of life for all of humanity in the face of this always-changing environment on this little blue dot instead.
That said, another section I've largely left out above is that it's effectively impossible to coordinate global action to meaningfully reduce human emissions from current levels. Europe and the US have actually already had declining emissions levels for decades now. This isn't a philosophy problem that you can talk your way to a solution on, it's a human psychology and game theory problem.
Trying to voluntarily convince global south nations to not adopt carbon-positive energy sources that solve real problems in the third world, and instead telling them to exclusively adopt your preferred alternatives (which do come with tradeoffs, be them in cost, complexity, availability/reliability) to appease what people facing food scarcity due to a lack of refrigeration due to a lack of electricity would consider "first world concerns" is an exercise in futility, and has some thematic emotional rhymes with colonial pasts where wealthy westerners demanded sacrifice from the global poor for the comfort of the wealthy westerners. It's a very tone-deaf plea.
However, a global reparation fund would make a difference. Not entirely unheard of for richer nations to fund these things for poorer ones
I mean you have two separate points here, one is "adapt" and the other is "nothing can be done", which itself can be picked apart into different specific things that can't be done, such as on the one hand getting everybody to behave themselves conscientiously with one mind, and on the other hand unilateral geoengineering.
The average global temperature raising by even 2°C has catastrophic and devastating impacts to humanity, to say nothing of it raising by 20°.
We can't stop or prevent global average temperatures from rising, even if we do cut emissions to zero.
What we can prevent is the widespread loss of life (human, plants, and animals) and prosperity. Preventing loss of life and prosperity is good, and it's an achievable goal, so we should pursue that goal.
Also, is there a way to move heat into space that doesn't require adding more heat into the atmosphere than is removed from the expulsion? Or do you just mean this as a hypothetical example?
Heat into space: I was thinking of "PDRC":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_daytime_radiative_cool...
> If only 1%–2% of the Earth’s surface were instead made to radiate at [~100 W/m2] rather than its current average value, the total heat fluxes into and away from the entire Earth would be balanced and warming would cease.
Which is, you know, a nice fantasy and theoretically works. Like a solar shield, but terrestrial.
Edit for those thinking that even 1% is an unfeasibly large area: yes. It's about 5 million km², which is about one-fifth of North America. Maybe scatter the panels around the ocean?
This right here, it should be a Manhattan Project level of urgency, but at global "Hail Mary" level of cooperation and effort.
And the best part is that it's not like that investment is wasted -- it's foundational and will allow us to do incredible things with it.
Meanwhile the President of the United States is actively cancelling such work and doubling down on coal. Wheee!
- solar/wind/batteries have a fundamental economic advantage already, and there is further runway for gains in efficiency, yield, and cost reductions. All its competitors are, generally speaking, tapped out in terms of economic costs and efficiencies
- population declines are currently an inevitability of urbanization and techno-capitalism, less people, less pollution
- contrary to #2, it is likely that life extension will start to come into play for the billionaire class, and that will mean the rich elites DO need to think about the future
However, I agree, those are glimmers of hope in the grand scheme of the current system
However, I do think we have time to prepare for the worst case scenarios, and individual countries and states can do that efficiently on their own.
Improve evacuation routines in floodable areas, build greenhouses to deal with cold snaps, ensure there are air conditioned buildings to deal with heatwaves, have distributed local production of electricity, keep strategic food reserves stocked, and so on.
Edit: Not saying that such efforts are the solution by any means, but they will help.
But. The level of international coordination with vaccine rollouts and agreements between countries was way more than I had initially expected. Of course this feeling depends on what your own baseline expectations are.
My takeaway was that if the conditions arise that we all decide to do something about climate change (because of political conditions or because of actual effects) we (humanity) are willing to make big sudden changes
PSA: the is (as well as pp) parameter is for tracking. If possible try to trim it.
Now, looking at the image in the article, there is a massive cold blob right there where the Labrador Current joins the Atlantic, but no mention of the theories that I've read about years ago, just that it is mysterious
And for some perspective, this is only one of many other huge changes that huge populations will react violently to in the next 20-50 years. Good luck to us all.
we're jumping to a catastrophe when it might just ring, and whatever the environmentalists who prioritize it qant to do about it might change something that doesnt need changing, and result in actual catastrophe when the ringing stops
But just because it’s also their fault doesn’t hinder them to blame the government.
Who do you think will MAGA blame for the consequences of climate change?
Nobody should ever adopt sustainable practices from which you only benefit when everybody else does, in which case a minority of people who didn't adopt sustainable practices also benefit. That's just bad economics.
And then there's all the wealthy hypocrites who criticize the middle class while they make weekly flights with private jets. And dont forget the coal powered data centers, I wouldn't be surprised if there's some hypocrisy there from the epstein class too.
Unlikely. The government will be the only one who can bail them out.
https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/13/politics/judge-ruling-nationa...
> At South Carolina’s Fort Sumter National Monument, a sign that included details on the looming impacts of climate change, including information on how “rising seas could inundate most of the fort’s walls and flood the historic parade ground” was removed in its entirety.
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/06/03/climate/ocean-monitoring-...
https://www.ospo.noaa.gov/data/sst/contour/global_small.cf.g...
https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/seaice_daily/?nhsh=nh
https://nsidc.org/sea-ice-today
Yes I literally copied your comment, added a single word and modified another; it's that easy to rebut.
I suspect the opposite is happening, too many times an environmental catastrophe has been predicted in too certain terms and has not happened, which is why many people lost trust.
And if you think that we shouldn't try to predict but only inform about what has already happened that seems even stranger to me.
Note that the general sentiment on HN when it comes to other topics is that every slight simplification in reporting on science is unforgivable, Gell-Mann-amnesia-effect, bla bla...
For example, it is clickbait to say "cancer" instead of "some types of cancer which we further need to specify" in headline.
But it is of course impossible to take scientists seriously when their results are reported as "they observed X, and are there are indications that it could mean Y".
Who says "could"? It's way too risky to engage with people who don't tell me exactly what to think!
But we don't see that, do we?
Denying climate change for decades is what brought us to the immense challenge we are facing now.
we are however, warming when were supposed to be on an overall cooling trend
I don’t think it’s as simple as uncertainty. Nobody wants to change their lifestyle to avert climate change. People prefer carrots to sticks.
I sometimes think those in the environmental movement have made a mistake with their messaging. It is too often "we need to suffer to save the planet". It could also be things like:
It is true that there are, at times, good reason to do things that are not at the extreme of conservationism and environmentalism. If the messaging was a little more carrot than stick we might see more progress.So absent something enforcing prohibition of defection from a collective action, the collective action doesn't happen.
You want to actually solve the problem? Find such an enforcement mechanism (CO2 tariffs, perhaps), reduce the cost of solution (sufficiently cheap non-fossil energy), or find another solution that doesn't require global cooperation (albedo modification, say).
A solution that just requires everyone to get along and cooperate to their marginal net detriment doesn't seem like it will work.
So you prefer just to ignore it and deal with the disaster afterwards?
Ehm... nope. Another yearly record of heat, directly to the sink. Damned real world.
At this moment trolling people that for some reason still keeps playing the "virtuous climate denial" card is not even funny.
The reason why Putin or Kim Jong Un is not dead a long time ago is that enough of the ruling upper middle class has been made dependent on their leaders and will work to ensure the safety of said leader.
”Your honour, but the girl didn’t resist very much, so she must bear part of the blame for what I did to her”.