‘No one wants to be right about this’: climate scientists

Consider El Niño as a sneak preview.

What El Niño events do is bump sea-surface temperatures up by a degree or two. That's equivalent to looking a few decades forward to see what an equivalent whole-globe temperature rise might look like, excepting such issues as general ice-cap melting (Antarctica & Greenland), though including accelerated glacial melting in regions seeing EN warming.

But for at least some weather, wildfire, drought, crop-yield, and species-adaptations (both invasive and extinctive) potential, we're getting an early look at what's already in the pipeline.

It's also a warning that future EN events, on top of further warming, will likely be much worse.

Pieces like this I usually just read and move on, unless I see someone in the comments decrying "alarmism". Messages have been mixed over the decades, I've read that things won't really get bad this century, or that things are already spiraling out of control. I've always known the IPCC underplayed the severity of the situation to fend off claims of "alarmism" but this summer has put what we're really in for into sharp relief. Like the acceptance of my own mortality, I just keep living the way I know how until I can't anymore.

Better than castigating the HN readership, consider this your opportunity to frame and shape the discussion. An otherwise empty thread is an open opportunity.

Draw some item from the piece, or something you find missing from it. It helps as well to have some store of concepts or ideas that you'd like to see thrown into the discussion. Recent example of mine (first comment to the post it was submitted to at the time: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37267188>).

The other element of this story is that climate change is a difficult narrative to convey freshly. That's in part because the story is bog simple: humans have and are spewing far too much CO2 and other greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, the consequences will be absolutely catastrophic, they're showing now, and we must stop doing this as soon as possible. But it's also because the story is diffuse, slow, bound up in myriad details and specifics, and most of all, is a tremendously inconvenient truth to exceedingly powerful and recalcitrant interests.

Somewhere in that should be threads to spin a compelling tale, however. It tends to take time both to develop those and for someone who does have an interesting and insightful take to find and respond to a piece.

"Be the discussion you want to see on the Internet."