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Comment by jfengel | Hacker News Reader

The first map is quite remarkable: even in this record-setting year, there is still a big swath of the US that is cooler than the historical average, or only very slightly warmer. This has been a pattern for a while.

It almost feels like a conspiracy: the part of the world that is ideologically predisposed to disbelieve in climate change is also the one that is (partly) avoiding it. And that part is the linchpin: other places are disinclined to do the hard work of fixing the climate while the US prominently denies that the problem even exists.

It's as if the earth wanted to keep warming.

Obviously not, of course, and I don't really know if it really figures into it one way or the other. But it still strikes me as weird. How different would the situation be if the US midwest and south were on the hotter side of the scale, rather than the cooler one?

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Of course the earth wants to keep warming; the current climate is rare. It doesn't fall to the personification of the earth enacting a conspiracy, but things can and will return to [planetary] normal at some point.

"A 'greenhouse Earth' is a period during which no continental glaciers exist anywhere on the planet... Earth has been in a greenhouse state for about 85% of its history... Earth is now in an icehouse state, and ice sheets are present in both poles simultaneously."

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

That's a weird use of "normal". The current ecosystems are fundamentally ice age ecosystems. Whether they count as "normal" to you personally isn't really material. They are the only ecosystems we have.

You don't warm the earth rapidly (which at this point we undeniably are) and then magically get back "normal" fern forests and dinosaurs or whatnot. What you get is a mass extinction.

Yes, but after mass extinction, stuff won't just stop.

Eventually, things will evolve to forests or the equivalent. You'll be unlikely to have the same kinds of dinosaurs as before, but as the old saying goes, nature like carcination. There will probably be new variants of crabs.

No, but the stuff that is here now won't be there anymore. Traditional conservative (small-c) ethics generally says things like "don't throw stuff out or destroy things if we don't know what we'll get instead".

You seem to be saying the equivalent of e.g. "It's OK to kill all the elephants because in a few million years something else will have filled the niche". That seems ridiculous to me.

Does your logic extend to all species? All ecosystems? Our species?

I had never before heard that description of 'traditional conservative ethics'. I thought free market conservatives think individual participants will make their own choices and increase the goods and services available, thus benefitting humanity.

FWIW: the reference to "small C conservatism" was specifically to make clear that I was using the word in its traditional sense ("change is presumed bad absent evidence") and NOT referring to modern political divisions.

In fact what you're describing is exactly the disconnect: libertarianism is very much not "conservative" by traditional standards. The fact that they live in the same party in the modern US is an accident; it doesn't follow from their philosophies at all.

Technically yes, but you know, millions of years is a long time.

That’s interesting because I thought we were in an interglacial period long term

Keep in mind that climate change also means more extremes in many places. Quite a few of those US places that have only gotten a little average warming have been getting getting more extremes and longer heat and cold waves.

I'd guess that for most people in the US they are more likely to notice that than to notice a change in average temperature. Consider someone in a place that normally gets cold enough to require heat for much of the winter and hot enough to require air conditioning for most of the summer.

Someone could easily not notice a 3℃ increase in average temperature that manifests as winter being a little less cold, summer being a little warmer, and winter being a little shorter, and summer a little longer because their HVAC system keeps their would at a fixed temperature all year around.

Their energy bill would go up, but they might think that is just due to inflation.

But if they start getting afternoon brownouts because of everyone's AC dealing with extreme summer heat, and that happens more and more each year, that is something they might notice

> How different would the situation be if the US midwest and south were on the hotter side of the scale, rather than the cooler one?

If the effect of global warming were felt equally in the US and that somehow caused the US to halt 100% of their emissions it would reduce global emissions by about 11% [1].

1: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/06/chinas-greenhouse-gas-emissi...

For the US to halt emissions there would be policy in place to make sure emissions made somewhere else get appropriately priced, hence the effects of emissions reductions in the developed world impact everywhere else.

The main problem with global emissions is with developing countries who are increasing their emissions while at the same time taking up a greater share of global emissions than developed countries.

See: https://www.cgdev.org/media/developing-countries-are-respons...

Yes, environmental parity tariffs.

I don't understand how people make that point in 2023 still

China is the world's factory, 20% of the US imports come from there, of course your own country doesn't pollute much when you gutted half of your industries and relocated them in foreign countries.

edit: don't forget per capita greenhouse emissions too, in that case Americans emit twice as much as Chinese https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-pe...

I don't understand how people can be apologists for China's carbon emissions in 2023 still.

Estimates are that only around 10% of Chinese carbon emissions are for foreign exports: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09596....

And you can't deny that the US and EU has been moving in the right direction, while China is moving in the wrong direction.

US carbon emissions peaked in 2000 and have been moving down ever since. China's carbon emissions have grown by 500% during that time period. https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/carb...

They are uniquely bad in this regard, compared to their peers like India and other developing economies. It's clear that China does not care about climate change in the slightest.

> Estimates are that only around 10% of Chinese carbon emissions are for foreign exports

Here it says 33%: https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14412-33-of-chinas-ca...

> They are uniquely bad in this regard, compared to their peers like India and other developing economies.

Of course India is nowhere close to China, they basically don't exist in term of exports. These countries have almost nothing in common besides having a large population

https://statisticsanddata.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Top...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_exports

> while China is moving in the wrong direction.

You sure about that ?

https://www.statista.com/graphic/1/267233/renewable-energy-c...

Again it's easy to pollute less when you literally shut down all your industries. You can't ask for more and more growth, cheaper and cheaper prices and 0 pollution.

> China does not care about climate change in the slightest.

Not more or less than 99% of countries on this earth, including the US and most of Europe. If they did they'd have stopped their Chinese imports a long time ago, as well as most of their exports and massively reduced their energy usage (daily reminder than the average US household uses 4 times more energy than a German one)

> You sure about that ?

Yes, China built six times the number of coal plants of the entire rest of the world last year. Six times! It's inexcusable.

https://www.npr.org/2023/03/02/1160441919/china-is-building-...

Meanwhile the US has mothballed half of it's coal plants in 10 years:

https://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/html/epa_04_01.html

> Here it says 33%

You're clearly cherry picking very old data (2008) that is not published research to try and make a point here. The references aren't even comparable.

> If they did they'd have stopped their Chinese imports a long time ago

Plenty of people would be delighted to embargo China due to their environmental record. If that's what you're proposing, we agree.

2008 China was way different.

I honestly do not think it would matter much. Most folks in the South and Midwest are already accustomed to hot, humid temperatures. As such, it would be a matter of "hmm the AC is running more than normal" and then back to their normal day-to-day. Places where AC and other hot-weather mitigation tools are not common are the places where a suddenly-warmer environment would be immediately noticed.

Besides, getting folks to recognize the impacts of climate change is one thing, convincing them that the threat is such that any impactful fix would require fundamental and drastic changes to their comfortable lifestyle is a whole different conversation.

It isn't really clear that fundamental and drastic changes to lifestyle is needed. It just needs considerable investment in climate friendly energy technologies. On the order of 100-200 trillion USD. Which is roughly 100-200% of global yearly GDP.

This investment will likely bring in a positive return on investment because it reduces the negative climate impacts.

Instead the neocons running the White House spend our resources on yet another war and more munitions. The Dems will get serious about climate when they put RFKjr on the Presidential ticket. Until then, the warmongers are feeding happily at the government trough.

No it makes a difference. I get up in TX and compared to then so many more people just leave the state in the summer. It used to be that in the evening temps would come down to the mid 80s and now they might hit mid 90s even at midnight. It's fucking miserable to be trapped indoors for months on end. So much worse than cold.

I'm assuming it will be more than run AC longer. E.g With more extreme weather events tornadoes will be potentially more frequent and destructive. Or rain more heavy and out of normal patterns which can create serious issues with farming, especially staples like wheat or rice. Or fires which we seem to already see more of.

With recognising climate change, I feel the issue is many people, focus on the short term for what is a long term issue. In the way people say the climate change isn't happening, to them it's not. Individuals will see fairly limited change over a single lifespan, but what we do today will likely have a huge impact to people 100+ years from now. Often media/activists presents climate change as this imminent threat year after year, which isn't true as the climate is a slow ship, and while actions is absolutely needed for the future, I think many people see these endless imminent threat predictions not occuring, so to them this seems over dramatic and therefore untrue.

> the part of the world that is ideologically predisposed to disbelieve in climate change

There is more nonsense in this statement than in the headline. Parts of the world don't have ideology and these highly judgmental and superficial analysis certainly don't help.

> other places are disinclined to do the hard work of fixing the climate while the US prominently denies that the problem even exists.

So, China's inability to manage pollution is somehow down to the imputed attitudes of a few areas of the US?

> It's as if the earth wanted to keep warming.

It's as if human beings exist and continue to multiply. It's as if third world countries don't care about our ideology if it means they never get a chance to develop themselves the way every other country had an opportunity to. It's as if a few rich people half way around the world expect the difference to be made up elsewhere.

> But it still strikes me as weird.

It's purely anecdotal.

> How different would the situation be if the US midwest and south were on the hotter side of the scale, rather than the cooler one?

Texas had the hottest summer in recent history. California had one of the mildest. Minnesota had one of the hottest and they're getting Canadian wildfire smoke.

Perhaps we shouldn't view this through the lens of "how miserable do we have to make people to get change to happen" and instead through the lens of "how incompetent are our politicians that they can't find an honest solution to this problem?"

This _desire_ for self-inflicted austerity is what is _weird_.

What does an honest solution positions could come up with that would be accepted by a large majority of the voting public look like? In your opinion what should they be doing?

Edit: because another way to view the lens you dismiss is “how miserable do people need to get before they accept that something real is happening here?”

> In your opinion what should they be doing?

The largest voting block could stop war emissions by replacing Biden with RFKjr or even Trump. Huge carbon savings there.

New Mexico and Arizona (Phoenix in particular) actually had a record-breaking heatwave this year, a full month of daily peak temperatures above 110 degrees Fahrenheit.

Got your point, still a bit intrigued by OP's.

I often have similar thoughts: if you expand the scope a bit and don't limit yourself to the metrics that are the topic du jour - this is not meant to diminish the severity of heatwaves, to the contrary -

it seems like a natural law that the people who do the most damage to common goods (such as humane shelter and food, clean water, clean air, healthy environment, bearable noise pollution, bearable working conditions if you want to go there) - they are the people who profit and stand exactly on the other side, experiencing the absolute minimum of the damage they cause.

This is a prisoners's dilemma or market failure that has infested all of our global society, to a point that we can't even start to imagine.

Every species tries to maximize its use of available resources. Humans are the only ones that even think about the consequences (emphasis on think, actually doing something is more rare).

I think we will continue to live as we do until we cannot. Then there will be a natural correction. It will probably be ugly for a while, then we will adapt. This is the history of the planet.

> Every species tries to maximize its use of available resources

Do you think humans use oil, soil etc as efficiently as ants do?

Or do you mean "consumption" when you say "use"? The way you put it sounds like you mean

  use ~= utility

Claiming that our "bad conscience" does any good (speaking and writing, to be precise), increasingly proves wrong.

There are just so many speakers and writers and thinkers with their own side of the prisoner's dilemma in mind

I mean "exploit everything available to maximize one's chance for survival"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37122796

Texas too, which tbh is probably the most egregious of all. It's 112° as I write this in Dallas.

Meh, Texas is famous for being super conservative and has also been hotter than fuck this summer, and we're very used to hot AF summers.

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