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:
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
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.
Theres a mistrust of government and the establishment. Not saying fringe is better but the behavior of govts, corruption and influence by rich donors doesn't help
There’s actually research to support the claim you’re making here (Elaboration Likelihood Model).
When forming attitudes in an area where one doesn’t care, one tends to rely more on who is saying it than what is being said. The opposite is true, if you care about [climate change], you listen to the arguments regardless of who is presenting it.
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.
- Climate Warming is happening, but not Man Made and part of larger cycles
- Climate Warming is Man Made, but drastic De-growth strategies cause more harm.
- Climate Warming is Man Made, don't need de-growth strategies because Technology will solve energy efficiency, clean energy growth and carbon capture and humans adapt along the way
- Climate Warming is Man Made and we need drastic de-growth strategies and complete ban of fossil fuels.
For people in the last group, all other groups look like Climate Deniers because they don't agree to their de-growth/ban plans
It says this in bold red at the top - "This is a preprint; it has not been peer reviewed by a journal."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.
For non-specialists, I think the most important view on papers is to not view them as nuggets of truth, but communications of a group of people who are trying to establish truth. No single paper is definitive!
Peer review is an important part of scientific publication, but it's also important for the general public to not view peer review as a full vetting. Peer reviewers look for things like reproducibility of the analysis, suitability of the conclusions given the methods, discussions of the limitations of the data and methods, appropriate statistical tests, correct approval from IRBs if there are humans or animals involved, and things like that. For many journals, the editors are also asking if the results are interesting and significant enough to meet the prestige of the journal.
Peer review misses things like intentional fraud, mistakes in computations, and of course any blind spots that the field has not yet acknowledged (for example, nearly every scientific specialty had to rediscover the important of splitting training and testing datasets for machine learning methods somewhat on their own, as new practitioners adopted new methods quickly and then some papers would slip through at the beginning when reviewers were not yet aware of the necessity of this split...)
Any single paper is not revealed truth, it's a step towards establishing truth, maybe. Science is supposed to be self-correcting, which also necessitates the mistakes that need correction. Climate science is one of the fields that gets the most attention and scrutiny, so a series of papers in that field goes a long ways towards establishing truth, much more so than, say, new MRI technology in psychology.
I'd say that for a non-scientist, you should treat it as a non-event -- a paper that hasn't happened yet.
The climate is not something for which you need daily, weekly, or even monthly updates. Rather, this paper is just one more on top of a gigantic pile of evidence that that climate change is serious, something that we can and should do something about.
If the paper passes muster, you'll hear about it then, though all it'll do is very slightly increase your confidence in something that is already very well confirmed. Or, the paper may not pass review, in which case it doesn't mean anything at all, and you fall back on the existing mountain of evidence.
If the paper had reached the opposite conclusion, that might merit more investigation by you now, since that would potentially be a significant update to your beliefs. And more importantly, it would certainly be presented as if it were a fait accompli, even before peer review.
Instead, you can simply say, "I don't know what this paper means, but I already have a very well-founded understanding of climate change and its significance."
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.
For one thing, some of the places which would publish this kind of thing will authorize authors to provide anybody and everybody pre-prints but not the final copy they published.
In principle you could go (pay to†) read the actual final published copy, maybe it's different, but almost always it's basically the same, the text is enough to qualify.
If you go to https://eel.is/c++draft/ you'll find the "Draft" C++ standard, and it has this text:
Note: this is an early draft. It's known to be incomplet and incorrekt, and it has lots of bad formatting.
Nevertheless, the people who wrote your C++ compiler used that "draft" document, because it isn't reasonable to wait a few years for ISO to publish the "real" document which is identical other than lacking that scary text and having a bunch of verbiage about how ISO owns this document and it mustn't be republished.
And you might be thinking "OK, I'm sure those GNU hippies don't pay for a real published copy, but surely the Microsoft Corporation buys their engineers a real one". Nope. Waste of money.
† If you have a relationship with a research institution it might have this or be willing to help you order it from somewhere else at no personal cost.
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.
"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.
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.
And why would countries adopt this? So that other countries can use this cartel to push their own agenda? If anything it seems like it would be in every country's best interests to make sure such an organization doesn't exist.
In my opinion one of the reasons why European economies have been struggling for a long time is because energy has been much more expensive than elsewhere. Part of it is the excise tax on gasoline because it drives up the price of everything.
Even to this day EU countries where people earn less than a third of what Americans earn still pay more for gasoline.
"The economy is a wholly owner subsidiary of the environment"
Many people use the 'but the economy' argument (including my mother in law, maddeningly) without seeming to have any remote clue as to the truth of the quote above.
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".
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.
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).
No one thinks only corporations have to sacrifice; they do think that it's folly to ask individual members of society, who on average contribute the smallest overall proportion to global warming, to sacrifice while corporations continue to squander away our natural resources. And the pareto principle agrees.
> 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.
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.
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!!
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.
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.
> So what we get depends crucially on the power balance or imbalance between consumers and producers.
Gosh, if only consumers and producers were the same people. What could we call this new economic paradigm?
But no, economic monarchy is the only way to have Freedom (TM)(R), so let's slap on some easily-sidestepped regulations and keep going the same direction! It'll probably turn out fine.
The uncomfortable truth is that that people in affluent countries don’t want to change their lifestyle. Affluent countries are less affected by global warming than countries responsible for a fraction of global emissions. All the emissions from manufacturing follow suit.
It's not primarily a lifestyle issue, and the problem is no longer primarily developed countries. Per-capita carbon emissions in developed countries have decreased 30% in the past 20 years, and energy demand has remained relatively constant, in fact decreasing slightly in some places due to increases in efficiency. Meanwhile, developing countries like China and India are projected to account for 35-40% of total global emissions in the next decade, far outweighing the impact of lifestyles of individuals in the West.
Of course, individuals should do everything they can to reduce their own emissions. But the solution is going to have to be societal, keeping up with energy demand by adding more nuclear, solar, and wind to the grid.
India and China’s contribution to CO2 emissions dwarfs the rest of the world.
The West has cut its emissions, deindustrialised (ie moved its emissions to countries that don’t care about climate action), while the dubious Paris Accord allows China and India to keep building coal-fired power stations.
How much more will the West self-flagellate and destroy its industry before climate activists start directing their ire at the two giant countries that can make a genuine impact on emissions?
That blank will not be filled in with today's technologies, but with technologies we cannot conceive of today and with an energy abundance that we can hardly imagine.
Even in this apparently dire predicament, optimism is warranted.
I have this gut feeling the world had finally got to the point it decided to fix this pesky warming issue among other things, with a nice and cozy nuclear winter.
In a pure world everyone would use DOIs to refer to published literature. This would give two benefits: first, always link to the current version. Second, be a persistent identifier for the content.
But HN isn't a specialist scholarly content platform, so it's practical to link to the landing page.
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”?
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.
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.
The researchgate link has for me a deceptive ad at the bottom: it has a PDF logo and says "download now", suggesting that this will download the paper. It then links to a download page which in the fine print says it will actually download some kind of ebook collection which costs 30 bucks per month. That's a scam.
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
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.
A gas furnace produces at most 1 kWh of heat from 1 kWh of gas. A heat pumps produces 3-4 kWh of heat from 1 kWh of electricity. If electricity is 3x as much as gas per kWh the heat pump should be less expensive to operate.
Plus, it also gives you AC which comes in handy if you live someplace where you want AC.
The way a good heat pump works is that you can get about 3-5kwh of heat out of 1 kwh of electricity. So, they can save money over gas even though electricity is more expensive per kwh. And of course gas prices fluctuate quite a bit. Right now Germany is low on gas and gas prices are going through the roof because of the situation in the middle east.
Here in Germany this issue is lack of policy, financing, and a lot of people are renting. I actually pay about > 100/month for gas. I live in a 20 apartment building with a big furnace in the basement for the whole building. A heat pump would be cheaper to run but you'd have to do a big one for the whole building. This is actually a good thing. Big heat pumps can be quite efficient. It's probably cheaper than having to install 20 heatpumps for 20 apartments.
But buying and installing heat pumps costs money. Technically, it is actually an investment (i.e. it has an ROI). If you do this collectively as a building, you'd do it to lower your monthly bills. This is something that should be possible to finance out of those savings (at least partially). That's literally why private home owners install heat pumps and get their money back in 6-10 years typically. Faster if they also invest in solar. And get an EV that also powers from those panels.
But this where things break down in Germany. You need consensus. And financing. And there are home owners that can block things and it's their renters that pay the heating bill so the owners don't care. And so on. And if you are renting, you are not going to pay for this either. So, everybody just coughs up the money every month without even questioning it. My apartment doesn't even have a thermostat or a smart meter for electricity. Apparently that's normal in this country. Germany is just deeply bureaucratic and inefficient. For all the talk about environment, they can't be arsed to do what the rest of the world did decades ago: save some energy with smart meters.
Policy could help here. Mainly clearing up bureaucracy. And maybe some more subsidies/incentives (those already exist) or low interest financing. And a clear political goal to vastly reduce expensive gas imports. Even if the electricity for powering these heat pumps would come from gas powered electricity plants, it would still require a lot less gas. And of course Germany has lots of wind power. I think other countries in the EU are a bit further with their thinking than Germany on this front. On paper it having lots of apartment buildings like mine actually means it is fairly straight forward from a technical point of view to upgrade these buildings.
I think there should be a progressive flight tax. The more flights you've taken, the more the next flight should be taxed.
That should allow anyone to do that once-in-a-lifetime trip to a far-away country they've always dreamed of, but discourage people from flying often.
A lot more fuel is needed during take-off and landing than during cruising, making the number and frequency of flights more significant than the distance.
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?
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.
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
> 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.
The ingredients for the Syrian conflict came about because of climate change (dried up farms - farmers moving to cities to find jobs - social tension). The last 10+ years has shown that the relatively well-off Europeans would rather watch the Syrians drown rather than "pollute" their luxury enclaves...
We'd rather kill everyone else rather than give up our luxuries...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> Oh and roughly 65M of sea level rise as the planet shifts to a snow/ice-free mode.
Current rates of sea level rise are still in single digit millimetres per year (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_level_rise), so that would take millennia. If there's even enough ice in the caps to get that far. Pre-historically, vast ice sheets covered broad swaths of regions now considered "temperate" (per the famous XKCD, "Boston [was] buried under almost a mile of ice"); what remains is a tiny portion and it's simply hard to imagine that it could fill the seas to such an extent.
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.
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.
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.
Scaled up nuclear power could be had for $3-4B a gigawatt/h. We waste say $1T a year on basic things, like not having universal healthcare. So a simple policy change would let us build about 300 reactors a years, after some scaling period. The excess energy can be used to turn C02 back into oil.
It’s not technically that difficult, we just chose to waste money on stupid things and rich people toys instead.
Energy abundance is simply the choose to build nuclear power plants at scale
> Oh and roughly 65M of sea level rise as the planet shifts to a snow/ice-free mode
65M seems a lot bigger than the 3.6mm/year rise we are seeing today (with +1.5C in warming already happening). Where did you read that we will get 65M of sea level rise with 1.5-2.5C more warming?
Can't wait until the arctic unwinds and releases massive amounts of methane into the air, then in the hot hell that earth becomes, all the fucking idiots saying "See I told those stupid liberals that the warming process was natural and not from my truck!!!1!1"
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.
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:
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.
We only need solar energy at 1 dollarcent or eurocent (it will get much cheaper still!!) and a little batteries for the convenience of using electricity when the sun does not shine.
In the north and 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 surplus energy in purifying drinking water, melting iron ore or aluminum [5], melting reusable plastics or purifying silicon ingots.
Storing surplus heat or cold in the ground is another luxury, because it is more expensive than 1 dollarcent or eurocent solar running a heatpump.
Wind and hydro are also more costly than solar so they are another luxury with worse environmental costs than pure solar cells.
We need to build Enernet, a peer to peer electricity net 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 neighborhood where it can be stored in car batteries. See my Fiberhood white paper [2].
> Otherwise it doesn't make sense to put CO2 into the air with one hand and take it out with another.
I agree that it doesn't make sense, but I also want to challenge the engineering assumption that an extremely relatively inefficient solution should be ruled out.
If direct air capture worked and simply required absurd amounts of carbon-free power, say from nuclear, it would mean that we no longer have to fight political battles against the entrenched incumbents. They could simply emit whatever our elected politicians let them get away with, and DAC would soak it up.
I completely acknowledge that it seems somehow egregious to do it this way. I am an efficiency-minded person and would hope that we could do it the efficient way. But given all the ugly constraints and lack of progress so far, should we really expect this to be solved the way an efficency-minded engineer might prefer?
If we get to that level of desperation though, I would hope that we could simply pay the emitters to install carbon capture.
What I don't think will work is a politics of rage, righteous or otherwise. I don't recall any incidents in history where a politics of rage led to cool-headed, efficient technocratic solutions. The perennial problem is that the same politics of rage is equally accessible to your opponents, and it spirals down from there towards disorder and violence.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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”?
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.
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.
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
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.
During the Paleogene, the terrestrial plants and animals were very different from those of today.
Now on all continents and islands most of the big animals and plants are humans, domestic animals and cultivated plants. The wild animals and plants, even if they are much more varied, with many thousands times more species than the domestic ones, are much smaller in quantities, with only a few kinds that are non-negligible, e.g. ants, termites, rodents.
So if we will return in a short time to the Paleogene climate, the main question is how this will affect the few dominant animal species, like chicken, humans, pigs, sheep, cattle, dogs and the main cultivated plants, all of which are not adapted to a Paleogene climate and which will not be able to adapt in such a short time.
It is likely that places like Canada, Alaska, Greenland, Siberia, Antarctica might become nicer places where to live and practice agriculture, but the few people who live now there would not welcome invaders coming from places that are no longer habitable.
I don't see that everything except Canada, Alaska, Greenland, Siberia and Antarctica was inhabitable.
For instance in Eocene the climate remained fairly warm and homogeneous (the most uniform in the Cenozoic).
From the equator to the poles, forests grew. Fossilized remains of cypress and sequoia have been found on the Arctic Ellesmere Island, and palms — in Alaska and northern Europe.
Equatorial and tropical forests (with palms, fig trees, and sandalwood trees) persisted in Africa, South America, India, and Australia.
Eucalypts, sequoias spread widely, and new types of broad‑leaved trees appeared.
By the end of the Eocene, rainforests were preserved only in the equatorial parts of South America, Africa, India, and Australia — due to the onset of cooling.
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.
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?
The worst thing you can do when you're actively geoengineering is to abruptly stop doing it. So naturally we found a way we were already doing it and cut it immediately to make sure we fuck ourselves as much as possible :)
I'm almost convinced it's intentional at this point, the rich are busy building their offbrand vault tec bunkers and starting random wars for no real reason. Longtermism nonsense over the today.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
Don't do the AC thing, it is a stupid trope under blogfluencers. There are no restrictions (besides positioning the outer unit in such a way that you 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.
The "Our World in Data" citation cuts off right as China's emissions started to decline. More recent data [1] indicates that China's emissions have been flat or falling since the beginning of 2024, and falling fast in the last quarter of 2025 (1%, which is huge on a quarterly basis).
China's decarbonization & renewable efforts have been paying off in a big way. EVs now have a 51% market share among new vehicles [2], exceeding every single major city in the U.S [3] (though the SF Bay Area comes close). Likewise, renewables are 84.4% of its new power plants in 2025 [4].
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?
> 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.
Which restrictions on AC? I know that Europeans don't use AC as much as the US because of a mixture of historical and cultural reasons, but I wasn't aware of any restrictions. What prevents someone in Europe from buying and installing an AC unit in their own home?
> 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
Where in Europe are ACs restricted because of carbon emissions? Even in France with very strong building codes (you can't just plop an AC on your own, you need approvals), ACs are the standard in the south where they are needed for long periods of the year.
> 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.
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.
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.
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%.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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).
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.
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."
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
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.
> - 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...
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).
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.
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
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.
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.
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...
> 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.
You are correct because it's happening already (massive wildfires burning down cities, 100 year floods every year, mass migration out of hot, dry climates) and the news will state something like "scientists are 85% certain this fire was accelerated by climate change" and then will move onto the next story. Climate change is all around us, but we refuse to see it.
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.
Not even countries, but rich/influential people on them. And they must be hit hard to be concerned enough about it.
If some extreme weather event hits you you may lose your only house, your savings, your health, maybe a good percent of the population of rich countries are vulnerable ot that. In the other hand if someone rich and powerful in those or even somewhat poorer countries, they may buy another house, have more already, lose some money and goods but that's it.
Until those extreme weather events, floods and so on affect enough of the people those people have around, to eventually affect their business and them. But by then it will be far too late.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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)
> 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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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).
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That is very true, but the issue really is the speed of change not the total amount of it. If we were to raise 2c over 10,000 years, that would be a non issue for the most part, adaption time would be so slow that many civilisations will come and fall between then. That it is happening over a hundred or so years, that is a huge whip lash and thats where the problem lay. We built a large but somewhat fragil industrial system assuming continued stability. Dumping 2 trillion tons of CO2 into an already barely stable system will not go down as the brightest idea we have had.
If you go from the top of a building to the bottom, it isnt the height that is the issue but the speed of change. You take the lift, not jump of the side of the building.
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.
We aren't hunter gather's, mammals have been around for hundreds of millions of years, and
Modern Humans can just use air conditioning tech, most people in india already have a tanki, people will just dig as far as they need to keep their water cool like they already do. Irronically the people most affected are the affluent in places like dubia, if the grid fails and they don't have backups.
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.
It’s a common fossil fuel industry talking point, which hopes that the listener doesn’t realize that the climate changes in the past which weren’t deadly happened on much slower time scales. We have a much larger human population now so if you’re saying “nature will survive” you’re also saying that you’re okay with millions of people dying or becoming refugees.
People like to get worked up about this topic haha. All I'm sayin' is, it might get a lot hotter. Or maybe it will get cooler? I think it's important to put things in context because it's not some monotonically increasing function even if there is a local trend. I'm pro doing what we can to correct our impact on the environment; I'm even pro going beyond and attempting to control for other non-human externalities. My point is actually that nature doesn't care, but I think we should. Although, even if we try our hardest, we still might not like the outcome.
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.
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!?
Adding a lot of weigh in the form of buildings causes land to sink. Apparently 1-2 mm/year on average. How much of "New York has been underwater since 2010" is the land sinking and how much is water rising from climate change?
Most serious people realized decades ago that you just build a bunch of nuclear powered DAC and require oil companies sequester it. What occurred for last 30 years was a bunch of nonsense political BS and signaling that annoys effective people but they largely ignore.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
Well here's hoping they don't decide to take the US approach to 'living nicely': an absolute sense of entitlement to other people's resources all so they can have bigger vehicles and airconditioned forecourts to refuel them in. It's honestly disgusting - especially when you consider how they go about obtaining those resources. War. Fuck war and those that push for it all so that they can 'live big'.
We don't want your disgusting lifestyle. We want you to stop being so bloody infantile and greedy.
Apologies for the strong words but the current state of things has me pissed off.
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
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.
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.
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.
yeah, the audacity is insane China's been manufacturing and deploying more solar than anyone and solar+battery is a clear path forward.
The people making these arguments are mendacious and misanthropic to the point of deep irrationality, so many people have been trained to do nothing, try nothing, and assume the worst, I don't know who trained these people to embody epistemological learned helplessness but it boggles the mind.
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.
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.
From their About:
“Work on Climate quickly built the world’s largest and most successful community of its sort – with tens of thousands of members around the globe, thousands of whom have found climate jobs and started companies”.
Not affiliated but I ran into this initiative recently.
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.
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...
The only extant “X-risk” is, and always has been, economic collapse due to loss of energy. “Climate Change” is science fiction.
/s
It amazes me climate change X-riskers scoff at denialists and then do the exact same denialism with AGI. How many leading AI scientists (like climate science) would it take to convince you?
"Our great religion, their primitive superstition"[0]
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?
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.
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.
I can barely get some people to do a week off eating red meat, imagine going cold turkey completely. If people haven't revolted about other stuff they definitely will for saving their meat consumption.
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".
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.
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.
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.
There's a huge hypocrisy in wanting others to pollute less, yet still have a lifestyle that pollutes, but just less than those polluting the most.
I personally won't criticize people who take flights to go on vacation (I don't but I accept those who do). But I'll be pointing out the hypocrisy of those who take flights to go on vacation and yet want to micro-manage how others should live their lives so that they'd be "polluting less".
Recently some infographic made the round for it showed the act a human can take and the pollution it generates. The reason it circulated a lot is because the first item was highly controversial: "having a kid". And yet there's lots of truth in that.
For example my wife and I we got one kid and my wife is now in her forties and we won't have a second one. And I'll never ever take a single lesson about pollution from anyone who had two kids or more.
I'm the one who don't fly. I'm the one who only had one kid. And I'm not criticizing other people's lifestyle and choices. But if you open your mouth, I'll point out the hypocrite you are if you either fly or had two kids or more.
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.
I’ve heard hints of this same thing, the rates are described as quadratic, not linear. The feedback mechanisms I do not know, but it’s something related to a high degree of released ocean warming that was stored.
Basically this is the slowest train wreck in history that just won't be stopped. By 2050 (only 24 years away), these cities are projected to flood more than 1/3 of the days of every year:
Galveston, Texas
Morgan’s Point, Texas
Annapolis, Maryland
Norfolk, Virginia
Rockport, Texas
Bay St. Louis, Mississippi
Big cities close behind the above:
Miami and Miami Beach, Florida
Charleston, South Carolina
Atlantic City, New Jersey
The gist of several comments is that the paper does not actually demonstrate an accelerated global warming, but instead an acceleration of anthropogenic global warming, when removing the influence of several natural factors. To be clear, they are not discussing the fact that there is global warming, just saying that currently, we cannot say that global warming has been getting faster after 2010 with statistical certainty.
I'd be interested to see what things look like on a longer timescale, say 500, 1000, 2000, 7000 years. 80 years of time feels like a long time on a human lifescale, but on a civilizational timescale it is a lot shorter.
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...
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Unfortunately, I can't accept the climate change narrative because I've been doing my own research.
I've lived in multiple countries and came back to visit after decades. I didn't notice any change of temperature. Some years are slightly warmer, some years are slightly cooler but they all feel within the norm from how I can remember. I remember some very bad heat-waves during my childhood which I've never experienced again.
I know this is anecdotal evidence, but it's MY anecdotal evidence which I gathered first-hand and therefore I can trust. I gathered many data points over several decades.
Also I have many alternative narratives which better fit the data. I've identified some critical flaws in climate models related to simulation complexity and also plant evolution, both backed by professional insights and independent scientific observations.
So unfortunately, I just don't believe current narratives about climate change. The data doesn't fit that narrative, it fits other narratives much better.
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:
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.
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.
Here's the thing: NOTHING we do in the US matters when various Southeast Asian countries are rapidly industrializing. And in the rapid growth phase sustainability and clean energy is not a priority.
Then there's a billion and a half people in Africa, also rapidly growing, that may be next.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
"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."
Surely such a small variable wouldn't change anything about the conclusion. And the method used to calculate global mean surface temperature has never changed either.
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
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.
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.
>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.
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?
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?)
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
What otheer industries are hyping the need for tens of gigawatts, maybe hundreds? On top of that they are hyping the idea of building utterly unrealistic space stations that would cost 10 times what the ISS cost. So maybe people are focusing on the dishonesty instead of the energy use. One or the other I suppose.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is true, but sometimes I wonder if it is the biggest problem. Fortunately, the local environmental organizations explained to me that while it is a big problem it is much more important that we oppose infill housing and embrace sprawl because the former causes shadows to fall on parks used by underserved minorities.
Another thing I have wondered is whether it is ethical to oppose solar power because I don’t like how it looks. Again here the environmentalists have an answer. Yes it is.
Recently I was wondering about geothermal power as well, but I learned that the good people of black rock city believe that we should leave no trace and a geothermal plant would leave a trace so it’s far preferable to drive a large number of ICE vehicles to the desert.
In general, I think that we probably exaggerate climate change a lot. It’s not a big deal, at least when compared to things like sunshine for a park for underserved minorities.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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. "
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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....
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
No. It is like punching a hole in your wall when something else punches the wall daily with increased rate. No matter what you do at this point the wall will be destroyed.
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.
From what I understood we are closer to the “all humans will die within a century” and if this is the case then what’s the point of doing anything? Does it matter if our effort just delays the “all humans will die” by let say 50 years?
Radical change we need to do if we are serious is going back to caves. 0 consumption. I highly doubt anyone will do that.
So some people made up something called ai, made millions of people out of jobs, big scams in market, filled internet with rubbish things, killed people with delusional chatbots, killed the planet, and all to make themselves rich.
If I do this, this would have been a crime. Nothing more.
Literally none of those things you wrote are inherently a crime. Granted, maybe that’s the problem, but no - it’s not illegal to get rich, or to use a lot of energy, or to make low quality products.
>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.
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.
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.
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?
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:
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.
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
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.
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Theres a mistrust of government and the establishment. Not saying fringe is better but the behavior of govts, corruption and influence by rich donors doesn't help
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There’s actually research to support the claim you’re making here (Elaboration Likelihood Model).
When forming attitudes in an area where one doesn’t care, one tends to rely more on who is saying it than what is being said. The opposite is true, if you care about [climate change], you listen to the arguments regardless of who is presenting it.
It depends if they can agree with what they are saying.
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.
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“reputable scientists” = tax plundered research for purposes of political power. Regardless of human effect it is china doing it.
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There are various levels of perspectives
- Climate Warming is a hoax
- Climate Warming is happening, but not Man Made and part of larger cycles
- Climate Warming is Man Made, but drastic De-growth strategies cause more harm.
- Climate Warming is Man Made, don't need de-growth strategies because Technology will solve energy efficiency, clean energy growth and carbon capture and humans adapt along the way
- Climate Warming is Man Made and we need drastic de-growth strategies and complete ban of fossil fuels.
For people in the last group, all other groups look like Climate Deniers because they don't agree to their de-growth/ban plans
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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.
For non-specialists, I think the most important view on papers is to not view them as nuggets of truth, but communications of a group of people who are trying to establish truth. No single paper is definitive!
Peer review is an important part of scientific publication, but it's also important for the general public to not view peer review as a full vetting. Peer reviewers look for things like reproducibility of the analysis, suitability of the conclusions given the methods, discussions of the limitations of the data and methods, appropriate statistical tests, correct approval from IRBs if there are humans or animals involved, and things like that. For many journals, the editors are also asking if the results are interesting and significant enough to meet the prestige of the journal.
Peer review misses things like intentional fraud, mistakes in computations, and of course any blind spots that the field has not yet acknowledged (for example, nearly every scientific specialty had to rediscover the important of splitting training and testing datasets for machine learning methods somewhat on their own, as new practitioners adopted new methods quickly and then some papers would slip through at the beginning when reviewers were not yet aware of the necessity of this split...)
Any single paper is not revealed truth, it's a step towards establishing truth, maybe. Science is supposed to be self-correcting, which also necessitates the mistakes that need correction. Climate science is one of the fields that gets the most attention and scrutiny, so a series of papers in that field goes a long ways towards establishing truth, much more so than, say, new MRI technology in psychology.
Are you? How many preprints are posted here every day?
I'd say that for a non-scientist, you should treat it as a non-event -- a paper that hasn't happened yet.
The climate is not something for which you need daily, weekly, or even monthly updates. Rather, this paper is just one more on top of a gigantic pile of evidence that that climate change is serious, something that we can and should do something about.
If the paper passes muster, you'll hear about it then, though all it'll do is very slightly increase your confidence in something that is already very well confirmed. Or, the paper may not pass review, in which case it doesn't mean anything at all, and you fall back on the existing mountain of evidence.
If the paper had reached the opposite conclusion, that might merit more investigation by you now, since that would potentially be a significant update to your beliefs. And more importantly, it would certainly be presented as if it were a fait accompli, even before peer review.
Instead, you can simply say, "I don't know what this paper means, but I already have a very well-founded understanding of climate change and its significance."
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.
It is already published at Geophysical Research Letters, a highly (if not the most) reputable source in the area. But that journal is behind a paywall: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/202...
For one thing, some of the places which would publish this kind of thing will authorize authors to provide anybody and everybody pre-prints but not the final copy they published.
In principle you could go (pay to†) read the actual final published copy, maybe it's different, but almost always it's basically the same, the text is enough to qualify.
If you go to https://eel.is/c++draft/ you'll find the "Draft" C++ standard, and it has this text:
Note: this is an early draft. It's known to be incomplet and incorrekt, and it has lots of bad formatting.
Nevertheless, the people who wrote your C++ compiler used that "draft" document, because it isn't reasonable to wait a few years for ISO to publish the "real" document which is identical other than lacking that scary text and having a bunch of verbiage about how ISO owns this document and it mustn't be republished.
And you might be thinking "OK, I'm sure those GNU hippies don't pay for a real published copy, but surely the Microsoft Corporation buys their engineers a real one". Nope. Waste of money.
† If you have a relationship with a research institution it might have this or be willing to help you order it from somewhere else at no personal cost.
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No, it really does not work like that, for reasons that should be obvious.
Yes, credibility is one component of evaluating conclusions from evidence.
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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.
"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.
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.
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In principle, you are right. Cheaper than coal renewables are winning. Don't forget though, that fighter jets can't operate on batteries.
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>"But the economy" is an out-of-date framing.
Then why is my electricity and gasoline both so much more expensive than they used to be?
And why would countries adopt this? So that other countries can use this cartel to push their own agenda? If anything it seems like it would be in every country's best interests to make sure such an organization doesn't exist.
In my opinion one of the reasons why European economies have been struggling for a long time is because energy has been much more expensive than elsewhere. Part of it is the excise tax on gasoline because it drives up the price of everything.
Even to this day EU countries where people earn less than a third of what Americans earn still pay more for gasoline.
All while India and China build coal power plants at record pace
Recycling someone else's quote:
"The economy is a wholly owner subsidiary of the environment"
Many people use the 'but the economy' argument (including my mother in law, maddeningly) without seeming to have any remote clue as to the truth of the quote above.
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".
There is a Nobel memorial prize winning plan to do something like this in a more elegant, voluntary fashion. Nordhaus' Climate Club.
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.
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).
No one thinks only corporations have to sacrifice; they do think that it's folly to ask individual members of society, who on average contribute the smallest overall proportion to global warming, to sacrifice while corporations continue to squander away our natural resources. And the pareto principle agrees.
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One rule which always holds true in life: people who ask for sacrifice will never sacrifice an inch themselves. No matter what cause.
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> 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.
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.
Solar plus batteries is the cheapest form of energy now as of 2025
The technical term for what you're broadly describing is Jevons Paradox.
And what exactly would prevent a country like the United States to use its outsize resources to moot this org?
Ideally I would want the US to be a leader and cheerleader of such an organization.
If the US refuses to participate in the energy revolution, then it'll be a Russia-tier power within a generation.
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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.
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!!
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.
Nobel memorial prize winning solution: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257%2Faer.15000001
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.
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.
> So what we get depends crucially on the power balance or imbalance between consumers and producers.
Gosh, if only consumers and producers were the same people. What could we call this new economic paradigm?
But no, economic monarchy is the only way to have Freedom (TM)(R), so let's slap on some easily-sidestepped regulations and keep going the same direction! It'll probably turn out fine.
Let’s not pretend anymore.
The uncomfortable truth is that that people in affluent countries don’t want to change their lifestyle. Affluent countries are less affected by global warming than countries responsible for a fraction of global emissions. All the emissions from manufacturing follow suit.
As a nomad, can confirm. Coming back to America, the scale and quality of materials is remarkable.
It's not primarily a lifestyle issue, and the problem is no longer primarily developed countries. Per-capita carbon emissions in developed countries have decreased 30% in the past 20 years, and energy demand has remained relatively constant, in fact decreasing slightly in some places due to increases in efficiency. Meanwhile, developing countries like China and India are projected to account for 35-40% of total global emissions in the next decade, far outweighing the impact of lifestyles of individuals in the West.
Of course, individuals should do everything they can to reduce their own emissions. But the solution is going to have to be societal, keeping up with energy demand by adding more nuclear, solar, and wind to the grid.
India and China’s contribution to CO2 emissions dwarfs the rest of the world.
The West has cut its emissions, deindustrialised (ie moved its emissions to countries that don’t care about climate action), while the dubious Paris Accord allows China and India to keep building coal-fired power stations.
How much more will the West self-flagellate and destroy its industry before climate activists start directing their ire at the two giant countries that can make a genuine impact on emissions?
Is China often moved by western ire?
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.
"But what about <technology/option>?"
That blank will not be filled in with today's technologies, but with technologies we cannot conceive of today and with an energy abundance that we can hardly imagine.
Even in this apparently dire predicament, optimism is warranted.
Worse, even if we’re going to do it, the next idiot in power is going to roll it back and declare to big fanfare and applause that coal is back.
You can’t change the world with plans that last no longer than a presidential term.
Thankfully most of the world ignores America and does their own thing.
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the chinese can
Don’t give up!
I have this gut feeling the world had finally got to the point it decided to fix this pesky warming issue among other things, with a nice and cozy nuclear winter.
(/s, obviously)
We'll fix it if it become cost effective. It might, but probably won't because if the scale.
we're going to chose the most convenient path. if climate disaster becomes inconvenient, we'll attempt to do something about it.
it will be a disaster.
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Just need a map for all the bunkers. It's gonna be the future version of open-world video games.
This is open access. No need to post a researchgate link.
Here's the original: https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-6079807/v1
Ok, we've changed the URL from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/389855619_Global_Wa... to what that doi.org link redirects to. Is it better now?
Cool, thanks. I approve!
In a pure world everyone would use DOIs to refer to published literature. This would give two benefits: first, always link to the current version. Second, be a persistent identifier for the content.
But HN isn't a specialist scholarly content platform, so it's practical to link to the landing page.
Hi, unrelated:
Your personal website has an expired certificate.
Seems like it expired end of Feb.
Thanks! Certbot did renew it but looks like something went wrong.
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”?
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.
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.
They're a user hostile attempt to extract money from people. They make their website hard to use.
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If the original is available, posting anything else is by definition less desirable.
ResearchGate isn't open access.
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As far as I understand this is a pre-print under CC-BY license, if this answers your question?
The researchgate link has for me a deceptive ad at the bottom: it has a PDF logo and says "download now", suggesting that this will download the paper. It then links to a download page which in the fine print says it will actually download some kind of ebook collection which costs 30 bucks per month. That's a scam.
The clue is in the name, research "gate"
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
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.
A gas furnace produces at most 1 kWh of heat from 1 kWh of gas. A heat pumps produces 3-4 kWh of heat from 1 kWh of electricity. If electricity is 3x as much as gas per kWh the heat pump should be less expensive to operate.
Plus, it also gives you AC which comes in handy if you live someplace where you want AC.
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The way a good heat pump works is that you can get about 3-5kwh of heat out of 1 kwh of electricity. So, they can save money over gas even though electricity is more expensive per kwh. And of course gas prices fluctuate quite a bit. Right now Germany is low on gas and gas prices are going through the roof because of the situation in the middle east.
Here in Germany this issue is lack of policy, financing, and a lot of people are renting. I actually pay about > 100/month for gas. I live in a 20 apartment building with a big furnace in the basement for the whole building. A heat pump would be cheaper to run but you'd have to do a big one for the whole building. This is actually a good thing. Big heat pumps can be quite efficient. It's probably cheaper than having to install 20 heatpumps for 20 apartments.
But buying and installing heat pumps costs money. Technically, it is actually an investment (i.e. it has an ROI). If you do this collectively as a building, you'd do it to lower your monthly bills. This is something that should be possible to finance out of those savings (at least partially). That's literally why private home owners install heat pumps and get their money back in 6-10 years typically. Faster if they also invest in solar. And get an EV that also powers from those panels.
But this where things break down in Germany. You need consensus. And financing. And there are home owners that can block things and it's their renters that pay the heating bill so the owners don't care. And so on. And if you are renting, you are not going to pay for this either. So, everybody just coughs up the money every month without even questioning it. My apartment doesn't even have a thermostat or a smart meter for electricity. Apparently that's normal in this country. Germany is just deeply bureaucratic and inefficient. For all the talk about environment, they can't be arsed to do what the rest of the world did decades ago: save some energy with smart meters.
Policy could help here. Mainly clearing up bureaucracy. And maybe some more subsidies/incentives (those already exist) or low interest financing. And a clear political goal to vastly reduce expensive gas imports. Even if the electricity for powering these heat pumps would come from gas powered electricity plants, it would still require a lot less gas. And of course Germany has lots of wind power. I think other countries in the EU are a bit further with their thinking than Germany on this front. On paper it having lots of apartment buildings like mine actually means it is fairly straight forward from a technical point of view to upgrade these buildings.
If only the German infrastructure hadn’t been built for Nordstream…
In France, with Nuclear power and renewable it’s 20% lower.
Prices also depends on who you want to give power.
What we should do is make gas four times more expensive through taxes to guarantee the poor never vote for the progressives again. Unironically.
Reduce consumption of farmed animal products to zero.
And don't fly
I think there should be a progressive flight tax. The more flights you've taken, the more the next flight should be taxed.
That should allow anyone to do that once-in-a-lifetime trip to a far-away country they've always dreamed of, but discourage people from flying often.
A lot more fuel is needed during take-off and landing than during cruising, making the number and frequency of flights more significant than the distance.
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.
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And eat vegan and regional produce
And don't build things out of concrete
And better get a few room mates
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?
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> Switch to EV
Most people can't afford one
> -Migrate from gas appliances (range, furnace, water heater) to electric (induction, heat pumps)
Electricity is considerably more expensive, people that leave paycheck to paycheck would not be able to afford it
Here are somethings YOU can do personally to help:
- Never fly in an airplane again
- Never use ANY vehicle again, walk everywhere(yes EVs also pollute)
- In the winter, don't turn on the heat.
- Eat only vegetables and things you don't need to cook
- etc
If you are not doing ALL OF THESE you have no right on telling other people how they produce their CO2.
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.
> Models in the past did not attempt to account for non-anthropogenic carbon emissions
They're literally mentioned by the first IPCC report already.
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
https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/chapter-2/#:~:text=Geophysi...
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> 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.
You saw our reaction to covid. Millions. It will take millions of deaths in a nuclear armed country. See 'The ministry for the future'
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The ingredients for the Syrian conflict came about because of climate change (dried up farms - farmers moving to cities to find jobs - social tension). The last 10+ years has shown that the relatively well-off Europeans would rather watch the Syrians drown rather than "pollute" their luxury enclaves...
We'd rather kill everyone else rather than give up our luxuries...
Are you kidding? It will be Millions easily. It will just take 1 or two blackouts in wet bulb conditions to cause that
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
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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.
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Albedo modification (stratospheric aerosols) seems much cheaper than direct air capture, as a stopgap.
That unfortunately doesn’t help with ocean acidification.
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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.
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.
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It’s difficult to scale this to the levels we would need to make a difference.
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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.
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.
> Oh and roughly 65M of sea level rise as the planet shifts to a snow/ice-free mode.
Current rates of sea level rise are still in single digit millimetres per year (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_level_rise), so that would take millennia. If there's even enough ice in the caps to get that far. Pre-historically, vast ice sheets covered broad swaths of regions now considered "temperate" (per the famous XKCD, "Boston [was] buried under almost a mile of ice"); what remains is a tiny portion and it's simply hard to imagine that it could fill the seas to such an extent.
If you have detailed calculations, please feel free to cite them. But my back-of-the-envelope reasoning: NOAA gives an average sea depth (https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/oceandepth.html) of 3,682 meters. You propose that this could increase by nearly 2%. But the density of water only exceeds that of ice by about 9% (via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice); the thickness of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctic_ice_sheet is only about half that average sea depth; and it covers only about 4% of the water-covered area of the planet (14 million km^2 vs. 361 million km^2, per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth) which is not even all oceanic.
This is a very common figure you can find much support for. Here’s one legitimate source: Ice Melt | Global Sea Level – NASA Sea Level Change Portal — https://sealevel.nasa.gov/understanding-sea-level/global-sea...
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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.
How long would a single cargo-load of shades have to be operational just to offset the amount of CO2 emitted by its launch?
What percentage of the 128-million-square-km cross-sectional area of the earth are you proposing to shade?
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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.
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Reducing sunlight to the surface means we lose solar power effectiveness and we need to use more power for artificial lighting to grow plants.
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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.
Physically that’s not the case.
Scaled up nuclear power could be had for $3-4B a gigawatt/h. We waste say $1T a year on basic things, like not having universal healthcare. So a simple policy change would let us build about 300 reactors a years, after some scaling period. The excess energy can be used to turn C02 back into oil.
It’s not technically that difficult, we just chose to waste money on stupid things and rich people toys instead.
Energy abundance is simply the choose to build nuclear power plants at scale
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What if global warming is beneficial to keep the next ice age at bay?
> Oh and roughly 65M of sea level rise as the planet shifts to a snow/ice-free mode
65M seems a lot bigger than the 3.6mm/year rise we are seeing today (with +1.5C in warming already happening). Where did you read that we will get 65M of sea level rise with 1.5-2.5C more warming?
Can't wait until the arctic unwinds and releases massive amounts of methane into the air, then in the hot hell that earth becomes, all the fucking idiots saying "See I told those stupid liberals that the warming process was natural and not from my truck!!!1!1"
> 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.
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.
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:
https://sealevel.nasa.gov/understanding-sea-level/global-sea...
> direct air capture is the primary escape hatch
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.
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.
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> We MUST MUST stop burning things.
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, paper. Stop making methane.
We only need solar energy at 1 dollarcent or eurocent (it will get much cheaper still!!) and a little batteries for the convenience of using electricity when the sun does not shine.
In the north and 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 surplus energy in purifying drinking water, melting iron ore or aluminum [5], melting reusable plastics or purifying silicon ingots.
Storing surplus heat or cold in the ground is another luxury, because it is more expensive than 1 dollarcent or eurocent solar running a heatpump.
Wind and hydro are also more costly than solar so they are another luxury with worse environmental costs than pure solar cells.
We need to build Enernet, a peer to peer electricity net 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 neighborhood where it can be stored in car batteries. See my Fiberhood white paper [2].
[1] Enernet: Squanderable abundance of free and clean energy - Bob Metcalfe https://youtu.be/axfsqdpHVFU?t=1565
[2] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Merik-Voswinkel/publica...
[3] Amory Lovins https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v02BNSUxxEA
[4] Saul Griffith on the one billion machines that will electrify America https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEOPx2X-EtE
[5] 101 million machines away from a zero emission Australia https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQ8-uAhG-zs
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US, AU?
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/coal-consumption-by-count...
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> Otherwise it doesn't make sense to put CO2 into the air with one hand and take it out with another.
I agree that it doesn't make sense, but I also want to challenge the engineering assumption that an extremely relatively inefficient solution should be ruled out.
If direct air capture worked and simply required absurd amounts of carbon-free power, say from nuclear, it would mean that we no longer have to fight political battles against the entrenched incumbents. They could simply emit whatever our elected politicians let them get away with, and DAC would soak it up.
I completely acknowledge that it seems somehow egregious to do it this way. I am an efficiency-minded person and would hope that we could do it the efficient way. But given all the ugly constraints and lack of progress so far, should we really expect this to be solved the way an efficency-minded engineer might prefer?
If we get to that level of desperation though, I would hope that we could simply pay the emitters to install carbon capture.
What I don't think will work is a politics of rage, righteous or otherwise. I don't recall any incidents in history where a politics of rage led to cool-headed, efficient technocratic solutions. The perennial problem is that the same politics of rage is equally accessible to your opponents, and it spirals down from there towards disorder and violence.
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.
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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.
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?
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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.
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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.
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”?
> I’m of the opinion that direct air capture is the primary escape hatch
Great! That means we dont need to reduce emissions, cuz the magic bullet will just take care of everything. No need to change anything.
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.
It's going to have to be a mixture of approaches. Stratospheric injection buys time for more holistic solutions.
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.
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> 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?
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
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nobody will champion degrowth because it means less profits
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.
During the Paleogene, the terrestrial plants and animals were very different from those of today.
Now on all continents and islands most of the big animals and plants are humans, domestic animals and cultivated plants. The wild animals and plants, even if they are much more varied, with many thousands times more species than the domestic ones, are much smaller in quantities, with only a few kinds that are non-negligible, e.g. ants, termites, rodents.
So if we will return in a short time to the Paleogene climate, the main question is how this will affect the few dominant animal species, like chicken, humans, pigs, sheep, cattle, dogs and the main cultivated plants, all of which are not adapted to a Paleogene climate and which will not be able to adapt in such a short time.
It is likely that places like Canada, Alaska, Greenland, Siberia, Antarctica might become nicer places where to live and practice agriculture, but the few people who live now there would not welcome invaders coming from places that are no longer habitable.
I don't see that everything except Canada, Alaska, Greenland, Siberia and Antarctica was inhabitable. For instance in Eocene the climate remained fairly warm and homogeneous (the most uniform in the Cenozoic).
From the equator to the poles, forests grew. Fossilized remains of cypress and sequoia have been found on the Arctic Ellesmere Island, and palms — in Alaska and northern Europe.
Equatorial and tropical forests (with palms, fig trees, and sandalwood trees) persisted in Africa, South America, India, and Australia.
Eucalypts, sequoias spread widely, and new types of broad‑leaved trees appeared.
By the end of the Eocene, rainforests were preserved only in the equatorial parts of South America, Africa, India, and Australia — due to the onset of cooling.
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.
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?
The worst thing you can do when you're actively geoengineering is to abruptly stop doing it. So naturally we found a way we were already doing it and cut it immediately to make sure we fuck ourselves as much as possible :)
I'm almost convinced it's intentional at this point, the rich are busy building their offbrand vault tec bunkers and starting random wars for no real reason. Longtermism nonsense over the today.
Airborne sulfur comes with its own negative environmental consequences, though.
Companies are setting up constantly running gas turbines for powering AI datacenters - insanity.
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.
> 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.
What did we even try? We did talk a lot though.
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.
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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.
> 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
https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions
https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/europes-crusade-against-air-co...
> 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.
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> 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.
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> 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.
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> 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.
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Don't do the AC thing, it is a stupid trope under blogfluencers. There are no restrictions (besides positioning the outer unit in such a way that you 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.
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The "Our World in Data" citation cuts off right as China's emissions started to decline. More recent data [1] indicates that China's emissions have been flat or falling since the beginning of 2024, and falling fast in the last quarter of 2025 (1%, which is huge on a quarterly basis).
China's decarbonization & renewable efforts have been paying off in a big way. EVs now have a 51% market share among new vehicles [2], exceeding every single major city in the U.S [3] (though the SF Bay Area comes close). Likewise, renewables are 84.4% of its new power plants in 2025 [4].
[1] https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-ha...
[2] https://electrek.co/2025/08/29/electric-vehicles-reach-tippi...
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/03/06/climate/hybri...
[4] https://en.cnesa.org/latest-news/2025/11/4/chinas-newly-inst...
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?
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> 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.
Which restrictions on AC? I know that Europeans don't use AC as much as the US because of a mixture of historical and cultural reasons, but I wasn't aware of any restrictions. What prevents someone in Europe from buying and installing an AC unit in their own home?
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> Ironic OECD countries actually REDUCED their emissions based on a peak in 2007 and continue to do so
Any idea what percentage of this reduction is due to offshoring manufacturing?
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The IEA says China’s CO₂ emissions rose by 565 Mt in 2023 to 12.6 Gt, which it states was a 4.7% increase from 2022.
So any emission reduction done by developed countries is offset by China.
> 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
Where in Europe are ACs restricted because of carbon emissions? Even in France with very strong building codes (you can't just plop an AC on your own, you need approvals), ACs are the standard in the south where they are needed for long periods of the year.
> 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?
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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.
A reminder that reducing emissions isn't enough. We actually need them to be net-negative.
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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.
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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%.
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.
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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?
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"Migration to the colder north..."
Maybe that's why the Trump regime wants so badly to invade Canada and the Groenland?
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/1e4zl...
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.
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?
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).
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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.
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What have you done? Why is it someone else’s problem?
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> 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."
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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
"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.
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- The availability of food that you use often to get through your day, such as Arabica coffee and chocolate.
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.
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.
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> - 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...
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.
Climate change is not the main cause for turbulence.
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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).
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.
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
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.
This isn't a powerful motivator to people who think they will win those wars.
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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.
CA buying gasoline from Bermuda, shipped via the Panama Canal, because it refuses to allow new refineries is the perfect demonstration of this.
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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.
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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.
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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...
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US is the largest historical emitter… responsible for something like 25% of all man made CO2 emissions
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> Nothing will change until developed rich countries are starting to hurt.
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.
The bottle is half full: https://youtu.be/CFyOw9IgtjY?list=PL3A647D3FD57E0F96&t=205
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.
At what European tax rate will China and India work on reducing their CO2 emissions?
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>people won't see it.
You are correct because it's happening already (massive wildfires burning down cities, 100 year floods every year, mass migration out of hot, dry climates) and the news will state something like "scientists are 85% certain this fire was accelerated by climate change" and then will move onto the next story. Climate change is all around us, but we refuse to see it.
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.
Not even countries, but rich/influential people on them. And they must be hit hard to be concerned enough about it.
If some extreme weather event hits you you may lose your only house, your savings, your health, maybe a good percent of the population of rich countries are vulnerable ot that. In the other hand if someone rich and powerful in those or even somewhat poorer countries, they may buy another house, have more already, lose some money and goods but that's it.
Until those extreme weather events, floods and so on affect enough of the people those people have around, to eventually affect their business and them. But by then it will be far too late.
> The pain will come slowly, people won't see it.
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.
> (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.
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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.
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!
Additionally:
- cherry blossoms have been consistently blooming earlier each year
- some areas have been breaking historic high temperatures over the past 3 years (e.g. 伊勢崎市)
- even this year, there were several 20C days in Tokyo where the climate felt more like spring than winter
- 気象庁 is surveying for a new word to describe days with temperature exceeding 40C, since they are now becoming common in some areas.
Lastly, one joke my friends say is "In Japan there are four seasons: rainy season, summer, midsummer, and winter."
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.
Same thing here in Vancouver. I took a picture of my car's dash display reading 43*C during the heat dome in 2021!
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.
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.
Get your own solar and batteries.
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)
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/05/26/key-findi...
> 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.
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?
> 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.
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.
It's going to cause slow, constant refugee crises, which will affect everyone.
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.
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?
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.
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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).
> 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.
>Nothing will change until developed rich countries are starting to hurt.
They already are. China does whatever it wants en mass meanwhile.
> Nothing will change
Things have already changed!
They are already in pain but are blaming immigrants instead of trusting science.
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.
Chaos is extactly where fascism thrives. Expect to see more trumps, not less.
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.
> 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.
Well, most deforestation happens in poor underdeveloped countries. Yes, they hurt, but keep doing it.
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.
> Nothing will change.
Fixed
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.
> 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"?
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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?
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.
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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.
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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.
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China produces a lot less carbon per capita than we do
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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.
That is very true, but the issue really is the speed of change not the total amount of it. If we were to raise 2c over 10,000 years, that would be a non issue for the most part, adaption time would be so slow that many civilisations will come and fall between then. That it is happening over a hundred or so years, that is a huge whip lash and thats where the problem lay. We built a large but somewhat fragil industrial system assuming continued stability. Dumping 2 trillion tons of CO2 into an already barely stable system will not go down as the brightest idea we have had.
If you go from the top of a building to the bottom, it isnt the height that is the issue but the speed of change. You take the lift, not jump of the side of the building.
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.
We aren't hunter gather's, mammals have been around for hundreds of millions of years, and
Modern Humans can just use air conditioning tech, most people in india already have a tanki, people will just dig as far as they need to keep their water cool like they already do. Irronically the people most affected are the affluent in places like dubia, if the grid fails and they don't have backups.
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.
I don't know why you are getting downvoted, you are absolutely correct: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/09/1...
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.
It’s a common fossil fuel industry talking point, which hopes that the listener doesn’t realize that the climate changes in the past which weren’t deadly happened on much slower time scales. We have a much larger human population now so if you’re saying “nature will survive” you’re also saying that you’re okay with millions of people dying or becoming refugees.
People like to get worked up about this topic haha. All I'm sayin' is, it might get a lot hotter. Or maybe it will get cooler? I think it's important to put things in context because it's not some monotonically increasing function even if there is a local trend. I'm pro doing what we can to correct our impact on the environment; I'm even pro going beyond and attempting to control for other non-human externalities. My point is actually that nature doesn't care, but I think we should. Although, even if we try our hardest, we still might not like the outcome.
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This is terrifying, and those fighting against stopping or reducing global warming should at this point be regarded as hostis humani generis
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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.
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Instead of this lazy deflection, you should suggest what you believe would be an appropriate attitude towards these people.
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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!?
Adding a lot of weigh in the form of buildings causes land to sink. Apparently 1-2 mm/year on average. How much of "New York has been underwater since 2010" is the land sinking and how much is water rising from climate change?
How are people handling this... mentally? and preparedness wise? I can't imagine what the next generation may have to live through.
Most serious people realized decades ago that you just build a bunch of nuclear powered DAC and require oil companies sequester it. What occurred for last 30 years was a bunch of nonsense political BS and signaling that annoys effective people but they largely ignore.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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> 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.
Well here's hoping they don't decide to take the US approach to 'living nicely': an absolute sense of entitlement to other people's resources all so they can have bigger vehicles and airconditioned forecourts to refuel them in. It's honestly disgusting - especially when you consider how they go about obtaining those resources. War. Fuck war and those that push for it all so that they can 'live big'.
We don't want your disgusting lifestyle. We want you to stop being so bloody infantile and greedy.
Apologies for the strong words but the current state of things has me pissed off.
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
This perspective is so important. The wealthy in western society are responsible for a massively disproportionate amount of emissions.
We can still limit the amount of the global warming. It does not run by itself, but it could start doing so.
> Nobody can remove this right from them.
They do not have to repeat our mistakes. We can help them build out renewable energy instead.
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.
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.
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.
At least when the USA did it they only had 75-100 million citizens doing the polluting.
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.
yeah, the audacity is insane China's been manufacturing and deploying more solar than anyone and solar+battery is a clear path forward.
The people making these arguments are mendacious and misanthropic to the point of deep irrationality, so many people have been trained to do nothing, try nothing, and assume the worst, I don't know who trained these people to embody epistemological learned helplessness but it boggles the mind.
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.
Isn't this like a frog in a pot saying, ah the water was cold but now it's warm!, moments before getting cooked?
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.
To work on this problem check out https://workonclimate.org/ Founded by two ex-Google employees.
From their About: “Work on Climate quickly built the world’s largest and most successful community of its sort – with tens of thousands of members around the globe, thousands of whom have found climate jobs and started companies”.
Not affiliated but I ran into this initiative recently.
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.
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.
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.
I'm not sure about AGI as in human level intelligence being sci-fi. We seem rather close. I've never been much of a doomer though re AI X-risk.
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...
The only extant “X-risk” is, and always has been, economic collapse due to loss of energy. “Climate Change” is science fiction.
/s
It amazes me climate change X-riskers scoff at denialists and then do the exact same denialism with AGI. How many leading AI scientists (like climate science) would it take to convince you?
"Our great religion, their primitive superstition"[0]
[0] https://imgur.com/EELDM6m
“AGI” was literally made up by a Harry Potter fan fiction community
We might actually hit the jackpot from The Peripheral.
It really does seem to be the goal.
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?
> 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".
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.
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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.
I can barely get some people to do a week off eating red meat, imagine going cold turkey completely. If people haven't revolted about other stuff they definitely will for saving their meat consumption.
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.
Don't Look Up
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.
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.
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.
There's a huge hypocrisy in wanting others to pollute less, yet still have a lifestyle that pollutes, but just less than those polluting the most.
I personally won't criticize people who take flights to go on vacation (I don't but I accept those who do). But I'll be pointing out the hypocrisy of those who take flights to go on vacation and yet want to micro-manage how others should live their lives so that they'd be "polluting less".
Recently some infographic made the round for it showed the act a human can take and the pollution it generates. The reason it circulated a lot is because the first item was highly controversial: "having a kid". And yet there's lots of truth in that.
For example my wife and I we got one kid and my wife is now in her forties and we won't have a second one. And I'll never ever take a single lesson about pollution from anyone who had two kids or more.
I'm the one who don't fly. I'm the one who only had one kid. And I'm not criticizing other people's lifestyle and choices. But if you open your mouth, I'll point out the hypocrite you are if you either fly or had two kids or more.
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.
I’ve heard hints of this same thing, the rates are described as quadratic, not linear. The feedback mechanisms I do not know, but it’s something related to a high degree of released ocean warming that was stored.
Basically this is the slowest train wreck in history that just won't be stopped. By 2050 (only 24 years away), these cities are projected to flood more than 1/3 of the days of every year:
Big cities close behind the above:
The article has comments on pubpeer (below) and comments on the pre-print page. https://pubpeer.com/publications/973ABFB81F504E8CB1B50E941CF...
The gist of several comments is that the paper does not actually demonstrate an accelerated global warming, but instead an acceleration of anthropogenic global warming, when removing the influence of several natural factors. To be clear, they are not discussing the fact that there is global warming, just saying that currently, we cannot say that global warming has been getting faster after 2010 with statistical certainty.
I'd be interested to see what things look like on a longer timescale, say 500, 1000, 2000, 7000 years. 80 years of time feels like a long time on a human lifescale, but on a civilizational timescale it is a lot shorter.
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...
We need the government to release the alien technology to the public now.
Only good news these days eh
Can we hope that the Strait of Hormuz remains essentially blocked to oil exports for an extended amount of time...?
the good news is that nuclear power is coming soon
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)
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.
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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.
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.
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?
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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.
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.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita
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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?
[1] https://www.iea.org/reports/global-energy-review-2025/co2-em...
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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.
Unfortunately, I can't accept the climate change narrative because I've been doing my own research.
I've lived in multiple countries and came back to visit after decades. I didn't notice any change of temperature. Some years are slightly warmer, some years are slightly cooler but they all feel within the norm from how I can remember. I remember some very bad heat-waves during my childhood which I've never experienced again.
I know this is anecdotal evidence, but it's MY anecdotal evidence which I gathered first-hand and therefore I can trust. I gathered many data points over several decades.
Also I have many alternative narratives which better fit the data. I've identified some critical flaws in climate models related to simulation complexity and also plant evolution, both backed by professional insights and independent scientific observations.
So unfortunately, I just don't believe current narratives about climate change. The data doesn't fit that narrative, it fits other narratives much better.
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:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles
Oh no!!! The Earth is Earthing!
Dropping bombs has accelerated significantly. The last one to leave, turn the light off.
We already mined enough uranium for 500+ years of energy but people want to bury it in a mountain instead.
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.
Until they ban private jets, why take this seriously?
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.
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.
Here's the thing: NOTHING we do in the US matters when various Southeast Asian countries are rapidly industrializing. And in the rapid growth phase sustainability and clean energy is not a priority.
Then there's a billion and a half people in Africa, also rapidly growing, that may be next.
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.
This entire thread is a demonstration in how doomed we are.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.wri.org/insights/4-charts-explain-greenhouse-gas...
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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."
"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."
Man, I get definition-lawyered a lot on HN but this is something special.
capitalism is going just great
"since 1945"
Surely such a small variable wouldn't change anything about the conclusion. And the method used to calculate global mean surface temperature has never changed either.
And yet yesterday people were gushing about more toxic waste from Apple!
See also from yesterday, "Rising carbon dioxide levels now detected in human blood" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47261968
This is good! Better to be numb and stupid when we die of hunger on the streets
It’s these dang seltzer waters I can’t quit them!
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
Maybe we can nuke a handful of countries and try to go for just a light nuclear winter to get everything cooled down again.
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.
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?
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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.
That explains the 300 IQ attempt on claiming Greenland.
Soil is generally garbage though. Just saying.
I really wanna know the kind of person you are that thinks that Trump makes logical decisions.
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>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.
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
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Biden?!
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"
They’re referring to this: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/bidens...
The Republicans are even more protectionist and sinophobic, however. Nobody ever had the option to vote for importing Chinese EVs.
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Remember when Republicans blamed 9/11 on Obama, not remembering that it happened when Bush was president?
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> India and China burn orders of magnitude more
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...
> India and China burn orders of magnitude more
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...
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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).
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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_China
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_the_United...
Right on schedule folks, it's a climate topic and we will now have the traditional recitation of the lies.
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.
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.
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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.
USA burns orders of magnitude more per capita. And if you take historical emission (and you should!) then the disproportion is absolutely absurd.
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?)
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.
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Orders of magnitude more? Do you have a citation for that tremendous claim?
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.
Thankfully none of the serious solutions are nation-specific. Also they do not emit "orders of magnitude more"
https://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/report_2025
That an often repeated old lie even if out of ignorance
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
not per capita though
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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".
Is this a reference to "Torment Nexus"?
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.
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I prefer to think of it as a reference in the Torment Nexus.
It would also work as a jab at Roko's basilisk
Actually “last year: this”. It was published in early 2025.
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.
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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.
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.
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...
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Wasn't crypto a significant percentage as well? And that was before the AI buildout started.
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It will normalize though once everyone is out of a job
I've heard many different groups tell me their small fraction is not the small fraction that matters.
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What otheer industries are hyping the need for tens of gigawatts, maybe hundreds? On top of that they are hyping the idea of building utterly unrealistic space stations that would cost 10 times what the ISS cost. So maybe people are focusing on the dishonesty instead of the energy use. One or the other I suppose.
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.
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.
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A bunch of energy, water and Earth rare materials, nothing really to care about.
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.
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.
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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)
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> 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.
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As we all know, global warming wasn't happening until AI data centers started being built. They are honestly a drop in the bucket
All those RTO commuters /s
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Oops you forgot this part:
> Here we account for the influence of three main natural variability factors: El Niño, volcanism, and solar variation.
Whoops! Whoopsies! Oopsy doodles!
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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.
Your comment seems to assume that this is somehow counter to the modeling; what models in particular do you think this contradicts?
Go ahead and read the first sentence of the paper. It explains why.
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.
Modeling is hard. Some did, some didn’t. Generally we have historically underestimated climate change.
You should educate yourself on the phrase: "All models are wrong, but some are useful".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_models_are_wrong
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.
SV_BubbleTime is being sarcastic.
They did. The ensemble had confidence intervals.
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.
I don't know what bothers me more, the guy trolling or you calling people "a danger" for posting literally a single question.
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Chill. People need to cope, and humor, sarcasm, etc.. are ok
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solar variability? Hard to model, as we don't understand it well enough to model it.
Seems like a reasonable answer compared to all the foot stomping above. Of course you are the downvoted one :)
absolutely nothing can be done about this
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.
Yeah but now you can ask a question instead of providing a search term!
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.
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"
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This is true, but sometimes I wonder if it is the biggest problem. Fortunately, the local environmental organizations explained to me that while it is a big problem it is much more important that we oppose infill housing and embrace sprawl because the former causes shadows to fall on parks used by underserved minorities.
Another thing I have wondered is whether it is ethical to oppose solar power because I don’t like how it looks. Again here the environmentalists have an answer. Yes it is.
Recently I was wondering about geothermal power as well, but I learned that the good people of black rock city believe that we should leave no trace and a geothermal plant would leave a trace so it’s far preferable to drive a large number of ICE vehicles to the desert.
In general, I think that we probably exaggerate climate change a lot. It’s not a big deal, at least when compared to things like sunshine for a park for underserved minorities.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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?
Well, yes, due to systematic propaganda efforts and the general shift from being against mass death to being in favor of it.
(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 )
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.
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
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.
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
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. "
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.
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.
"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.
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Well, this did hit #1 on HN. A bunch of us might actually still be worried about it.
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.
> 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.
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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?
Someone needs to set the example and be the model?
So pay for developing countries to go green. If they can get free solar energy they won't spend their money on gas.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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....
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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.
https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/visualizations-data/yc...
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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.
Nothing like fascism and war to take your mind off the environment.
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.
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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?
let me guess we only have 10 more years, again?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
And this? https://ourworldindata.org/profile/co2/china
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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.
This is All on the US
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-...
American here, you're correct.
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?
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.
There isn't enough fossil fuels in the ground for us to burn to cause a 20F+ increase in annual summer temperatures globally...
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It's gonna be great, when it's warmer.
For a 1000 points: For the turkey, what is Thanksgiving? What is a Black swan?
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?
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'
No. It is like punching a hole in your wall when something else punches the wall daily with increased rate. No matter what you do at this point the wall will be destroyed.
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.
From what I understood we are closer to the “all humans will die within a century” and if this is the case then what’s the point of doing anything? Does it matter if our effort just delays the “all humans will die” by let say 50 years? Radical change we need to do if we are serious is going back to caves. 0 consumption. I highly doubt anyone will do that.
Isn't it an irony that much of this is in the name of resolving World Problems, such as Global Warming
So some people made up something called ai, made millions of people out of jobs, big scams in market, filled internet with rubbish things, killed people with delusional chatbots, killed the planet, and all to make themselves rich.
If I do this, this would have been a crime. Nothing more.
Literally none of those things you wrote are inherently a crime. Granted, maybe that’s the problem, but no - it’s not illegal to get rich, or to use a lot of energy, or to make low quality products.
El Niño, volcanism, and solar variation.
it's not about us guys, relax.
Interstingly a paper was published today which confirms accelerated warming whislt accounting for the effects of natural fluctations (el nino, volcanism and solar radiation etc) https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2025...
>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.
You're getting downvoted because you didn't read the article.
It is specifically about cleaning up the data by removing these 3 and showing a clearer picture of acceleration without these 3 factors.
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.
Any excuse to pretend we aren't contributing.
Good! Won't change a thing in how I live my life!
You must be American.
Where i live, we had the coldest winter on record in 30 years. I’m going with that.
The jetstream which prevents the polar vortex from migrating south is getting weaker.
Sure.
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Dismissing thousands of years of global temperature averages because you had a cold winter, very smart.
Im not dismissing anything. I’m just saying, when a measurement was taken in my region in 1925 it was warmer then than it was 100 years later in 2025.
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"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)
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.
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.
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?
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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?
> The question is whether we will get there before it's too late... and perhaps AI is the answer?
I won't touch "free and unlimited energy", but is there even evidence that AI produces more energy than it uses? Produces any at all?
Fission is good enough for this.