Earth had hottest 3-months on record; unprecedented sea temps & extreme weather
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public.wmo.int
Thinking about getting to 1.5 C averaged over the planet is surreal and we are still 30 years out from the promised "net zero". We have some tough times ahead of us.
However, to be clear, it’s unlikely we get to net zero in 27 years. We haven’t reached any of our goals so far and the goals only get more difficult
However, atmospheric CO2 concentration would not stay constant after emissions stop. It would go down slowly, mainly because it would continue to dissolve into the oceans. This effect cancels out the above point. Which is why the IPCC says that "The global temperature will stabilise when carbon dioxide emissions reach net zero."[1]
Unfortunately, stabilizing temperature does not mean that nothing else changes. The stable higher temperature will still mean that glaciers will continue to melt. Sea levels will continue to rise. Oceans will still acidify further.
[1] https://www.ipcc.ch/2022/04/04/ipcc-ar6-wgiii-pressrelease/
That way we can emit a bunch more to rebuild that already-built infrastructure in a different locale!
From the perspective of an individual it is very hard to detect this level of climate change. I can't tell how much warmer any given month was compared to even 20 years ago. We're talking about 28 vs 28.5°C average for a month. (and July and August made news because of pronounced anomalies, other months were probably even murkier stories due to natural monthly variability). This is not perceptible. And no one has an experiential reference point of Average Global Temperature of the 20th Century.
How hot was May of 2003 compared to May of 2023? I could attempt a guess but have zero confidence in it. Do you remember the average temperature of your teenage years summers? "It was hot", "between 25-30..." is all I can give without looking at data.
This is something we should keep in mind when advocating for climate measures, otherwise sceptics have another easy attack - "it feels basically the same, what are you talking about"
Or another example, that I don’t have personal experience with - island nations dealing with a big increase in hurricane severity and/or frequency also have very visceral experiences of climate change.
Proper winter starts much later and is milder than before, it was 10+ degrees Celsius for the past five or so NYE (didn't even need a winter jacket), summer heat waves are more unbearable and last longer, we went from no serious issues with floods in the spring to a number of entire-towns-are-underwater levels of flooding...
Now some of these did happen before, but as an anomaly, definitely not something that happens multiple years in a row.
I think everyone has now fallen into the trap of mixing up weather with climate. We used to deride the deniers who said a cold snap meant global warming was fake, by pointing out that climate and weather are two different things. But more recently we point to every heat wave as evidence of climate change, every cold snap as well -- because 'more energy means more extremes!' Which may be entirely true, but it's hard to deny it looks like trying to have your cake and eat it too.
FWIW, back in 1974, the coldest day of that year was 12F. That would also be considered quite cold today. So that year hit some temperatures in both directions that would be noteworthy today, almost 50 years later.
It's not "doom and gloom because it hit 96F"
It's "doom and gloom because it hit 96F and it's only gonna get hotter"
And it swings the other way in the summer too. Yeah, it's Texas, its hot. Upper 90s most days in the peak summer time. Every now a bad summer with a lot of 100F days. Now every summer has streaks of well over 100F days. This summer alone has been the hardest one for me to experience here in my over thirty years in Texas.
And that's only for a brief window of time before sunrise. It's still in the 90s F at midnight most nights.
The perception of past weather patterns truly is unreliable, but I don't care if I can discern between temperature averages; the more common occurrence of extremes is what matters. I don't know how anyone can look at the reports of fires everywhere and not be certain this wasn't happening at this rate even few years ago.
That used to be a common claim, but it's past its expiration date. Extreme weather events are happening all over.
But we also have to remember that warming is not uniform across the planet, where I live the Berkeley Earth site [1] shows an average 2.5 C warming since the 1850s.
It is especially visible if your regular winter temperatures go below 0 C, but not much. Even 1-2 C warming may be seen as a much smaller snow coverage than before.
Separately, I wonder if a geoengineering megaproject is more likely to be funded than small incremental changes due to politicians perceiving more immediate ROI, peer clout, and poll ratings.
Do you honestly see them changing in the following years? We had Paris 8 years ago and the only thing that caused a small, one-year dip in our emissions was a deadly pandemic...
That's hard to imagine, because Norway exported a huge amount of pollution to the rest of the world in order to finance their current policy of green technology adoption. Not everyone has that nice ratio of oil and tiny population.
That's actually the whole deal, even if policies change drastically in the right direction we're still completely screwed. Not quite as screwed but still not notably less. If we stopped our civilization covid-style on a dime and didn't emit any greenouse gasses at all from now on, we're still mostly screwed in the near term. Delayed effects are a bitch.
And policies will only gradually change at best, only after the effects are plainly seen and when it's laughably beyond too late.
Though obviously subsidizing those technologies would hasten their takeover.
Also curious if the earth maybe has some tricks (last one I can recall was more clouds were causing more cooling than expected in the climate models) that will invalidate the current climate change models.
The US and EU countries get more migrants than they can handle; resentment grows; attempts to solve the problem with bureaucracy and policing fail spectacularly; calls for outright violence grow louder; and the well-meaning citizenry agrees that Something Must Be Done!
Geo-engineering is something, and it will be done.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_European_migrant_crisis
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/10/us/migrant-crisis-massach...
[2]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/immigration-us-mexico-border-cr...
[3]: https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/policies/eu-migration-pol...
- we make an AGI or find a human genius that figures out a way to make it work, in which case we're all good
- we try it with known methods, it fails and we possibly go extinct faster in the worst case scenario
Fun times. No pressure.
On the bright side I suppose it only makes sense to plan for success though, since if we fail then we're dead anyway.
The whole problem is we aren’t capable of doing what we know needs to be done.
So does the CO2 itself. The oceans are getting more acidic already, killing shellfish and throwing off food webs.
Throwing additional geoengineering on top of the geoengineering we're already doing will almost certainly cause as many problems as it solves. It would be so much simpler, cheaper, and more effective to just stop digging carbon out of the ground and putting it in the sky.
It seems much easier to have unintended effects, than to get exactly the effects you want with from a global geoengineering campaign on the first try.
People seem to be accepting "the new normal" very fast. I'm not sure geo-engineering will be popular, since the status quo bias that's currently preventing us from reducing fossil fuels, will also stop any "artificial weather manipulation".
I've been vegan for decades, and I would love to see humanity move on from meat, but the idea is so incredibly offensive to people that I find it far easier to imagine the the Amazon razed and replaced with cattle feeding lots before that will happen.
Corporations are "people", my friend - while being absolved from any social responsibility.
They don't care about meat; they care about defeating liberalism. They will shift their belief in a moment.
How do you get from that to less than 0.1%?
What really sealed our fate was electing Obama. I know a Republican lobbyist who used to work on various environmental issues, which wasn’t as oxymoronic as it sounds: he used to get the coalitions of hunting and fishing groups and sometimes farmers who were in favor of things like clean water and air, and ecosystems which were healthy enough to support game. As he describes it, once Obama was elected the Republican leadership were bitterly determined not to give him any wins and told their members that those old deals were off-limits. Their successors don’t even have a tradition of collaborating like that.
Reason I ask is because strangely we got a very cool summer for the previous 3 months in Eastern Canada. But that's part of earth so I'm asking about the method, how the weight is distributed, etc.
However, we can't just stop using oil. It would lead to the death (by starvation) of most of humanity, mostly in the poorer parts of the world.
We need a well managed transition away from fossil fuel inputs. One of the first things that should be shifted, as much as is possible, is from Industrial Farming which uses massive chemical inputs, and burns up the soil.
Regenerative agriculture can eliminate the need for tilling, capture carbon into the soil, which both then improve water retention, and decrease soil temperatures. These reduce the need for irrigation, increase the ability to absorb rainfall without run-off.
The addition of ruminants to the mix produces fertilizer and meat at the same time.
About 20% of the carbon we've dumped into the atmosphere could be recaptured if widespread adoption of regenerative farming were to happen. It's not a perfect solution, but it's a lot cheaper than trying to use machines to do it.
The single best move we could make would be progressively taxing it: tell everyone that today is the cheapest a gallon of gas will ever be, with guaranteed 20% annual price increases with the tax revenue devoted to assisting low-income households decarbonize. That would tell every business to start investing in alternatives or efficiency improvements, homeowners would shift towards things like heat pumps to save money, and you wouldn’t have as many auto buyers locking in 15-20 years of pollution buying a heavy industrial truck so they can cosplay as a rancher on the way into cubicle land. Toss in credits for carbon sinks and you’d have a good way to support the kind of farming you mention without constantly being underpriced by farmers relying on subsidized cheap oil.
Around the turn of the century, that was a Republican idea but since the fossil fuel industry successfully managed an ideological purge that’s now too politically incorrect to even mention in those circles.
Fertilizer is a major sink of petrochemicals, and there really aren't any substitutes available on a large enough scale.
That would among other things be great for letting us conserve usage for things which are hard to make from other sources. That’s a much better use of a limited resource than someone insecure driving a multi-ton vehicle to pick up a hamburger because it’s been subsidized to seem cheaper.
Better for the suburban guy to become a city guy and walk or bike to the grocery store a few times a week. They get better veggies that way as well.
Guy in the suburb needs to turn their lawn into a full garden and become as self-sufficient as possible
You want to have an impact on the suburban middle class guy/consumer, start with less jet set Davos/Aspen environmentalists.
Coercion or deception by any means will only make them (and others) dig in deeper.
- "By 06:00 UTC on September 8, Lee's maximum sustained winds reached 165 mph (270 km/h), an increase of 85 mph (140 km/h) in 24 hours, making it the third‑fastest intensifying Atlantic hurricane on record, behind only Felix and Wilma.[12]"
It would take a human weeks/months to write a book and days/week to paint a beautiful images. Also consuming at least ~100 watts idle.
But the complex system that is the planet have a lot of tipping points, that once reached things will go increasingly worse with no turning back.
I'm not sure if we didn't reach that stage already, or if this kind of events will give us the extra push to cross the border. That is why is dangerous to keep emitting even if they are not predicted to reach some milestone for some years still, the system becomes fragile and ready to break down with small changes.
The wilful ignorance, even among some of my own relatives, is legitimately terrifying. I tried to explain the concept of a tipping point and got chastised for buying into fake news.
For a while I thought maybe a lot of people just think it’s exaggerated or something. Nope. They fully think the entire concept is a work of fiction, despite the overwhelming (and increasing) mountain of evidence.
It’s legitimately crazy out there.
Climate tipping points are poorly understood and are cumulative. We really don’t know if melting the glaciers is going to be enough by itself to raise the temperature enough to trigger the next domino to fall without further emissions which are also still increasing.
It’s not been over-dramatised. If anything, I believe the consensus view is too reserved in how it views the limits of impacts at 1.5 degrees.
Like maybe not believing a climate change model that says that by 2050 half of California will be underwater due to rising sea levels, I understand - it's a prediction about the future, likely to be wrong the way predictions about the future of the market are often wrong.
But like... we've been recording temperatures for over 100 years now, and it keeps going up. How can you argue with that.
It's like keeping a record of your child's height but refusing to admit that they're growing.
Thank you, as a software engineer I have to say this made me laugh lol. We make a lot of money yet are usually far behind real world engineering.
If we used this language with any other subject, HN would be up in arms about how sensationalist the headline is.
Even assuming that HN readers may feel the word is emotive it's pointless to quibble about it when realistically any discussion about the details of climate change are going to be more emotive with such clinically correct terms as "climate refugees", "ocean acidification", "deadly heatwaves", "longest cyclone season", "3rd once in a century storm in the last decade".
A world wide one-child policy like it used to exist in China [1] would be a real solution in keeping earth a pleasant place to live.
https://news.berkeley.edu/2022/02/01/global-elimination-of-m...
Either have less kids or power the world nuclear and all eat vegan (no methane producing animals), or accept the new climate reality and deal with the heat or whatever. Just don't pretend we are doing a good job at the moment because we don't.
But I don’t see how that will make it a better place to live for us. We know that birth rates already fall with higher standards of living, so if you want fewer kids just develop those countries where the birth rate is still high.
USA emits almost 8 times more emission per capita when compared to India. Rather India is so poor, that it must increase it's energy generation by any means possible.
So an Indian on average consumes just 1/8 of a USA citizen.
"we feel the pain from losses about twice as much as we feel the joy of equivalent gains" https://insidebe.com/articles/loss-aversion/ (link to original "prospect theory" paper - the most cited in economics by some measures - where that text appears)
Loss aversion is usually discussed as part of behavioral economics, but it appears all over the place. For example, many casual games have a "start paying real money or you'll start losing" dark pattern that's based on loss aversion.
With respect to the current question, it's clearly very hard to make people give up a high-emissions lifestyle once they've experienced it. Getting people to maintain a lower-emissions lifestyle is much easier. Again, it's not fair. Absolutely not, and I'm not really suggesting it as The Solution. However, understanding loss aversion might help to understand why people keep bringing it up.
'Global Energy Monitor and the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air finds the country quadrupled the amount of new coal power approvals in 2022 compared to 2021.'
Chinese scientists are hardly backward in understanding climate science. So what's the logic here? Presumably if they could maintain energy supplies without coal, they would.
https://ourworldindata.org/annual-co2-emissions https://energyandcleanair.org/publication/china-permits-two-...
Could be war. War over food, war over water, war over water for growing food, war over living space as coasts get flooded or obliterated by storms, etc.
Could be disease. There's plenty of evidence that climate change is causing diseases to spread (along with their animal hosts) where they hadn't before. If anyone thinks COVID was the last or worst pandemic we'll have to endure this century, they're fooling themselves. The true worst might not cause civilization to collapse entirely, but it sure will increase a lot of the tension already present.
Most likely, it will be a combination of all of these. The four horsemen are all enjoying the race.
Taking climate change as an example, a large fraction of the population in some countries is growing more skeptical of aggressive climate change policy, not less. Thats not going to shift policy acceptability even if the public's opinion shifts the opposite direction on average.
>In order to relate global mean temperature derived from the C3S dataset (ERA5) to the pre-industrial era, we use the estimate that the 1981-2010 reference period is approximately 0.69°C and that the 1991-2020 reference period is approximately 0.88°C warmer than the period 1850-1900, the time period typically referred to as the pre-industrial level for temperatures by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
>Note that these estimates were updated during Autumn 2021, due to new findings published in AR6 WGI report “Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis”. See more here under “Reference periods and anomalies”.
I’m sure this is all fine and valid, but they really need to work on their messaging. To a skeptic, this is gonna sound a lot like “oh yeah we pretty much just made the numbers up.”
I'm done with trying to convince people who have made it extremely adamant that they aren't willing to be convinced.
Bad faith actors will act in bad faith, we all know that. But yes, you should go out of your way as a scientific body to explain your conclusions to good faith skeptics and people who want to understand your material. And I think that bar goes higher the more bad faith actors you have in your field.
You mean denier. We're way past skepticism, the overwhelming evidence shows climate change is real.
Hmmm, "any casual reasonable observer" - that would be a scientist perhaps, and "casual reasonable observation" would be "science"?
Of course the data would be different with 60-70 years of improved collection techniques, analysis tools, and theoretical knowledge about the climate.
http://www.climate.gov/media/11332
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/whats-hotte...
We are still technically getting out of the last ice age.
Warmer climates mean more places are warm enough to grow food. More CO2 means plants grow faster (also more food). Yea, some low lands might get flooded - either build protections or don’t buy / build houses there. But overall for humanity warmer Earth temperatures are good thing. Much better than another ice age.
Our civilization was built for the climate as it has been for 10,000 years. Do we just toss out much of that capital? Who will pay for it?
I strongly recommend it to watch and then think about what solutions we can have.
The Cretaceous period was over ten degrees warmer than our current period [3,4,5]. It supported a lot (though much different) biodiversity. How long would it take us to push into these temperature ranges? And how long to exceed them?
How much species diversity will we lose at each half degree increment from this point forward? Will we see some species better equipped (increased as opposed to decreased fitness) by temperature increases? Will we see any quick evolution to support climage changes?
When will temperatures be incompatible with ranges necessary to sustain society? When will they be incompatible with human life? And all terrestrial and aquatic animal life? Will runaway heating (clatrate gun [6], etc.) be capable of achieving any of these?
--
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_age "Earth is currently in the ice age called Quaternary glaciation."
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternary_glaciation "To geologists, an ice age is defined by the presence of large amounts of land-based ice." (So my question in terms of heating and time - how long until we exit the ice age?)
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous "Mean annual temperatures at the poles during the MKH exceeded 14 °C.", "deep ocean temperatures were as much as 15 to 20 °C (27 to 36 °F) warmer than today's"
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous_Thermal_Maximum "Late Cenomanian sea surface temperatures (SSTs) in the equatorial Atlantic Ocean were substantially warmer than today (~27-29°C). Turonian equatorial SSTs are conservatively estimated based on δ18O and high pCO2 estimates to have been ~32°C, but may have been as high as 36°C."
[5] https://www.nature.com/articles/ngeo1081 "During this period, we find sea-surface temperatures exceeding 32 °C at 15°–20° N and averaging 26 °C at ∼53° S. These temperatures substantially exceed modern temperatures at equivalent latitudes,"
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis (truly horrifying)
What they don’t tell each other is that “Little” is an understatement and we shot way past the prior “Medieval Warm Period” long ago and are only accelerating.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age#/media/File%3...
Their current messaging is back to:
“Climate change is a hoax for science grants and political power”
Insane that these idiots picked the one time a problem is actually really real as the time they decided to call out the tactic.
https://www.space.com/climate-change-termination-event-end-i...
Can you please elaborate?
Either way, I’ve seen the Little Ice Age come up enough lately to be extremely irritating. So, I knee-jerked the rebuttal.
Now I think eschelon was actually asking if we are overriding the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternary_glaciation which would normally take millions of years to happen.
This means they deny climate is changing.
The more you know…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#/m...
As you can see, we are indeed coming out of one of the coldest periods ever in Earth's history.
Humans didn't exist. I suspect most current plant/animal species are "devolved" by such swings.
The planet will probably be fine in a few hundred thousand years, it's just us humans that are not going to be here.
The earth is getting greener, rapidly. The maximum human carrying capacity is probably higher than ever and populations are shrinking at the same time.
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fer...
https://skepticalscience.com/co2-plant-food-basic.htm
https://skepticalscience.com/co2-plant-food-advanced.htm
> The maximum human carrying capacity is probably higher than ever
https://www.mdpi.com/2673-4060/4/3/32
The Human Ecology of Overshoot: Why a Major ‘Population Correction’ Is Inevitable
Our current biodiversity evolved to fit cooler temperatures, obviously, so the quick change is a huge fitness gradient challenge that many species will not overcome. And in certain food webs, it may result in much larger scale collapse.
That’s not quite what the evidence shows. The Cretaceous shows evidence for forest near the poles and it’s missing evidence for multiple mile thick ice sheets such as those that recently covered Manhattan Island etc. However currently there’s a glacier 170 km from the equator as altitude drops the temperature, such glaciers likely existed in the Cretaceous.
Humans don’t evolve very fast, it’s going to be very very uncomfortable to be part of that “much different” biodiversity and kill a lot of people
Apologize to your children. They will be rightly angry.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/202...
We need a constellation of methane tracking satellites.
(Alas, that's not true. Next summer will likely be cooler, and the usual suspects will claim that proves climate change is a hoax.)
Western rich countries have too many really spoiled consumers.
It's weird to say, but we should crash the economy if it can slow down climate change. I mean there are plenty people in other parts of the world who don't have such a high standard of living, and it's not that big of a problem.
And yes, I don't believe it's only rich people, it's also middle class people who generate a lot of emissions, and I'm a leftist.
After living extensively overseas in Latin America & South-east Asia and seeing how its part of everyday life for most people in the rest of the world to openly burn trash, plastics, car tyres.. litter everywhere, cutting the cat converters off their trucks, dumping construction waste straight into rivers.. it's been eye opening. Nobody in Asia is dropping plastic bags or single use plastic straws unless its a cafe for hippy white tourists.
Meanwhile, educated people in western countries are incredibly eco-conscious, have excellent modern waste management, have amazing huge national parks and conservation areas, clean waterways or have nets to prevent plastics entering the oceans.. are 'banning' gasoline cars by 2030.. and the air quality! Amazing.
The truth is 85% of the worlds population just doesn't care enough at all about the environment and no amount of western policy making will fix the problem. And only an ignorant college educated person from the first would assume that their 'solutions' will be exported globally. sorry to break it to you but the rest of the world doesn’t have any interest in that.
The middle/upper class whites you seem to deride so much are actually participating in one of the most eco friendly societies on earth
There are dozens and dozens of studies all reaching this same conclusion, if the International Energy Agency isn't good enough for you: https://www.google.com/search?q=greenhouse+gas+emissions+by+...
OP's point was that the global rich (most US citizens included) have lifestyles and patterns of consumption which produce an outsized amount of greenhouse gasses, and any attempts to alter those behaviors are routinely met with anger and political backlash
The fact is "emmisions per capita" is heavily correlated with "gdp per capita": https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-emissions-vs-gdp
The "educated people in western countries [who] are incredibly eco-conscious" emit way more co2 than "85% of the worlds population".
The moment you think an individual is going to make any sort of a difference through minor changes in behavior, you have already lost the plot.
So either you are a realist about this problem, and you admit that either it’s war with many countries to solve this issue, or it won’t be solved (because they won’t stop economic growth for carbon emissions). Possible alternatives are technology.
But guilt tripping the west and stopping people eating steak will. Not. Make. A. Difference.
Go live like that for 6 months and get back to us: food insecurity, inadequate healthcare, and few civil services or safety net.
Those other countries are not net zero pollution either. You wanna crash the economy? How then will we develop the innovations to fix this problem?
Can't believe this comment is top rated.
- private cars and their usage are too cheap
- air travel is too cheap
- producing garbage is to cheap
- politics is top centered around providing infinte fuel for "growth" instead of distributing resources rationally
Yes, this is a political opinion.
The stunt many people do is pretending that climate denialism and politics centered on fueling growth are not a political opinion but "rational" and sustainable.
Why do so many people eat insects or are pure vegetarian in India? Because many are simply too poor to afford meat. You know what's one of the first major things Indians change when their wealth increases? Adding more meat to their diets.
Same. I think it's just helplessness, they feel something bad is coming, and they can't do anything about it, so they try to propose radical solutions that will not fix anything but just make things worse.
And yet it is the largest economy that is objectively slowing its share of contributed emissions. And it’s the largest exhibit that is helping to drive the innovation needed to solve this problem, alongside incredible people from all parts of the globe.
I wish we weren’t dealing with this. I wish there had been a better, more cost effective way to grow. Maybe if you or I hadn’t been born, our emissions might lower enough to make the difference.
But I’d suggest now isn’t the time to count scores. We need to stay focused and continue the work. Despite our flaws we are all worth saving.
>And yet it is the largest economy that is objectively slowing its share of contributed emissions.
These largest economy's also contributed the most over their history, which seems reasonable grounds for contributing more and helping other economies come up to that standard of living w/o making the same contributions
The irony of this comment.
Even in a stagnant economy, people are still commuting to and from work in their gas-guzzling cars, and heating their homes in the winter. CO2 emissions aren't going to change a ton.
But what a stagnant economy does is prevent any kind of investment in renewable energy and electrification, because there's no excess money to use for investment. A stagnant economy is not installing solar panels, replacing ICE cars with electric and installing new charging stations nationwide, or replacing boilers with heat pumps.
And if we want to hasten the changes to renewable energy and electrification, that's what government policy is for -- via subsidies for desired technologies, heavier taxation for undesired ones, and regulation.
"Crashing the economy" to slow down climate change is like cutting university faculty by half in order to combat grade inflation. It doesn't make any sense.
You absolutely still need private investment in a growing economy to produce and invent these technologies.
What the government incentives then can do is speed up their rates of adoption and installation. But you need both sides -- public and private.
You may also ask Argentine.
That's a direct path to armed conflict. Those aren't great in the reduce CO2 emissions and cut down on resource consumption departments.
And while we have made renewable energy investments to some degree - it’s at a dilettante level for show instead of being serious about it. Renewable infrastructure investments should be made highly favored financial investments to accelerate its manufacture and installation. Even with large government financing it would save money and lives.
And energy production is only a part of it, investments also need to be favored for restructuring our economy to alter high energy habits like individual commutes in cars vs bikes buses and trains.
The thing is, we have no reason to believe halting climate will do anything other than boost the economy. The reason for inaction despite the fact that it’ll make tons of new jobs, and remove major consumer costs and widespread reductions to health & quality of life caused by cars, is that certain specific sectors of the economy will shrink. The fossil fuel industry has spent half a century funding science deniers and consolidating their political power to prevent action on climate change or their pollution. They’re not acting on behalf of the entire economy, just their shareholders.
A simple example: beef is a solid order of magnitude worse than other common protein sources (with the possible exception of lamb in some countries). We could see huge reductions in our food-related emissions simply by eating pork or chicken instead, and almost nobody would say that’s an intolerable lifestyle hit but the beef industry isn’t going to let that happen easily because it’s bad for their revenue even if it’d mean most people save money.
that would be great, if only more than 2.5 billion people did not eat pork for various religious or cultural restrictions.
food restrictions are among some of the most difficult habits to overcome, proven by the fact that they resisted for thousands of years.
we could also eat insects or worms, but we don't it, what makes you think that 1.8 billion Muslims would suddenly start eating pork like it's not a big deal?
In my opinion Paracelsus said it right: it's the dose that makes the poisons.
Americans who eat the most red meat per capita (a lot more than anyone else), could eat less meat in general.
How?
Simple: by making it a lot more expensive.
Between 2020 to 2022, Europeans consumed 32.4 kilos of pork, while the per capita consumption of beef was significantly lower, at 10.3 kilos in total.
How Much Beef Does the Average American Eat? The average U.S. consumer eats 25.9 kilograms (57.1 pounds) of beef per year.
For the last 60 years, U.S. meat consumption has risen steadily. In 1961, the average was 93.7 kilograms (206.5 pounds) of meat per year. By 2020, that number had risen to 126.73 kilograms (279.4 pounds) per year.
The most notable period bucking this trend of growth is from 2008 to 2013, a decrease that likely resulted from the 2008 recession.
proving that the economic angle is effective in reducing the consumption of meat in the US.
But still you have a partial point: health/life expectancy and happiness have already started to decorrelate with the economy in the US, and US people consume more resources than other western economies with obviously better material outcome but no better quality of life outcome. This point to solutions were conversely it should then be possible to maintain standard of living with a decrease in the energy consumption. Red meat and leisure only air travel are indeed good candidates because you can live a very happy, healthy and fulfilled life without them. Same with cars weighting 1000 pounds less, putting a sweater in winter at home, having denser city centers with public transportation, etc…
This is not about left or right, this is about having an open look at some ideologies with data. It’s always hard to accept when people make economical theories a part of their identity and values, this a religious crisis for them not a simple discussion.
First and foremost, there's no way to transition our complex society through such an energy bottleneck of this nature without massive unrest. You will literally be killing people and causing mass starvation, so the very first thing that happens is everyone who loses someone or otherwise is hurt by the new regime instantly rebels and you have the largest energy war in history.
Seven billion people? That's just an abstract number to you, I suppose, and of course you will be one of the people who figures things out, why you're a "leftist!" as you told us so being on the right side of history will save you :) but in Reallandistan, the amount of human suffering you just released, the amount of ancient ills which we have finally, as a species , put to bed which you casually reawakened instantly flare up. But what are several billion dead people? We're saving the planet here! Do you honestly, really, in the deep quiet parts of your mind, think that it would be better to kill billions than to solve environmental and other problems, as we have been, better and better with technology? I fundamentally disagree with this inhumane approach and want nothing to do with those who might advocate it.
You can do this exactly once. Afterwards the cause will be severely discredited and no candidate doing even moderate climate change policies will be able to be elected.
In short this is stupid.
Yes.
It can't. I did the numbers some time ago [1], and they are bad. If you take electricity as a proxy, western countries consume something like 5 times as much as the global average per capita. So if we are willing to let the poorest to get to the global average while not cutting global consumption at all, the west should reduce their consumption by something like 80%. That's not crashing the economy. Thats... destroying the society most likely.
There are two solutions: 1. We force the global poor to stay poor. 2. We figure out how to make lots more stuff sustainably than we currently do.
Feel free to make your choise. Reducing consumption in the west is not going to make a dent anywhere and should be not on your list of worries if you choose 2.
Edit, add [1]: I don't habe the numbers now but you can replicate it pretty easly by taking population and electricity consumption data by country from wikipedia.
But how exactly would any country succeed in deliberately destroying their own economy? They would face revolts, civil unrest, and the economic vacuum left behind would simply open the door for any country that doesn't play along to gain a monopoly on forbidden economic growth, and potentially establish their own global hegemony.
No economic system has ever had "fair" or equal distributions of wealth, and no system will ever have a fair distribution of carbon emissions either.
If global warming is in fact a conspiracy made up by foreign actors to destabilize the west, man, have they got you.
I don’t think we need to make everyone’s lives worse. It’s not politically viable. We don’t need to give up computers and well insulated homes and medicine. Technology will help us reduce pollution and emissions. It’s just going to take time.
To save humanity we should destroy humanity.
No thanks.
This really shouldn’t be the top comment on this thread without some sort of reference to cost/benefit analysis to back it up.
Otherwise this appears to be an overly extreme solution to give climate deniers fuel to not listen to more reasonable solutions.
That's because I live in a market economy and I have no desire to live in your planned economy without any democratic process in place to represent me.
> but we should crash the economy if it can slow down climate change.
"We should make decisions that will kill people and shorten their life expectancy, because I believe there aren't any other compromises that can be made to impact pollution."
Yea.. it's is weird to say, it's also demented and inhumane.
> And yes, I don't believe it's only rich people, it's also middle class people who generate a lot of emissions, and I'm a leftist.
And the rest of the world that hasn't developed yet? We still just don't spare any thoughts for them at all.
That this is the most upvoted comment shows just how far most people wander from reality.
As someone from Bangladesh—average CO2 emissions under 1 ton per person—I can confirm that it sucks and conservation is a stupid way of mitigating climate change.
The anti-development people are just evil. When my dad was a kid in Bangladesh, 1 out of 5 kids died before age 5. Capitalism and development brought us up to similar levels to where the US was in the 1970s in just one generation.
The West has become really good at reducing emissions and environmental impact. Yes, a fair portion of that reduction is consuming CO2 intensive products made in China rather than locally, but even taking that into account the developed world is probably still less CO2 producing than the developing world.
it actually is and it's really big.
Not to say that we shouldn't reduce our consumerism, but not by lowering our living standards. It would immediately harm if not kill the weakest/poorer segments of every Country's population.
Politician A) The one that promises you more economic comfort in the short term
Politician B) The one that promises you sustainability (i.e.: not necessarily growth)
Most people will vote for Politician A. Because most families in this culture want prosperity so they have more income to have a "better lifestyle" (consume more). The problem is that a better lifestyle means a higher environmental footprint.
That brings us to the realization that at some point in time we became an ecocidal invasive species, and having good historians and a good public relations team won't change that in the actually true and objective historic record: the geological and fossil record, which will be the only one that will remain after we starve ourselves to death. In that record we will see how after the arrival of the behaviorally modern human, especially after the industrial revolution, all species above certain weight started dying.
We look down at tribal peoples with dumb narratives such as "they are not making an efficient use of the land". Well, 200 years after the industrial revolution we are learning that the industrial mindset is collective suicide, and perhaps there was something that the tribal peoples were doing correctly, measured in terms of KPIs such as carbon emissions, topsoil, biodiversity, etc.
And the solution is a) reducing our environmental footprint (which is impossible with a growth-oriented industrial mindset) or b) resist growth or c) reduce our population. b) and c) will never be supported by the population.
We will have to rewrite history and rethink the way we educate people, accepting that the industrial revolution was progress in terms of consumption but it was a massive setback in terms of sustainability. i.e.: it is a progress trap, or in simpler terms, it doesn't fucking work.
We are just immature people playing with a credit card and thinking we can afford everything. But everything you spend you'll have to pay later, with interest, and that time is arriving at an increasingly faster rate. We are living lavish lifestyles at the expense of the future generations.
Political leadership doesn't have an answer, neither do corporations. The media serves those groups, so the solution won't come from them either.
I predict that once strong AI is here, elites will not have a reason to collaborate and share resources with the masses, and will have no incentive to share political representation. Plus, the agriculture supply chain is highly centralized and corporations can cause a famine any time they want.
you have proof that it can and will?
this is the same "it's worth anything" arguments where "maybe" is treated as "it will happen" while ignoring the negative aspects (IE: human suffering, facts that poor people are worse for the economy, green tech is made from worse than carbon and is creating megatons of unrecyclable stuff like windmill blades and solar panels, etc.
Nothing like putting the lives of people on the chopping block for an "if" in response to a religious belief that "carbon is evil".
No kidding.
Maybe because they understand the immediate consequences of such an action and you don't. That's why 0 leaders around the world are proposing that kind of solutions because everyone that knows how world works, how supply chains work and what kind of environment is needed for people to elect leaders like Hitler. You want WWIII? The best way to do it is crashing the world economy.
> I mean there are plenty people in other parts of the world who don't have such a high standard of living, and it's not that big of a problem.
Good luck with that, people didn't work so hard in the west to now switching to 3rd world country standards. Climate change is a common knowledge, there are green parties in almost every country, if people really wanted to change their way of living they would vote for them but they don't. Clearly they are waiting for a technical miracle to happen or just don't care.
So what does it mean? It means that winter is coming and you should prepare for it. None of the newest models show that we can avoid first level of catastrophe even if we stop all the emissions. Millions or tens of millions of people will die, hundreds of millions will try to migrate. At this stage it's not a question of if but when. Life is not a Hollywood movie.
So... we're fucked.
Now I'm not anti-capitalist, because capitalism is social darwinism and is a description of how resources get distributed under contention due to scarcity. It doesn't need defending. It also can't be stopped. So it doesn't care if you believe in it or not.
But the rampant corruption and crony/late-stage capitalism we live under today has metastasized. And most people don't know it. I'm sure that 50% of the people reading this are just fine with the status quo. They have high incomes and can take care of their families and that's great.
What they probably aren't thinking about on a conscious level is that the median income for individuals globally is right at $10,000 annually. An American making $36,000 is already standing on 3 other people's backs. HN viewers making $100,000-$250,000 are standing on about 10-25 people. A billionaire making $100 million stands on 10,000 people. Our uber-rich stand on 1 million people or more.
So what we think of as buying a $30,000 automobile and spending that again on fuel and maintenance steals 6 years of someone's life, not to mention the life lost by the owner working to make payments. A $300,000 home ($600,000 with mortgage interest) steals 60 years of life. A house is someone else's lifetime. You can see where I'm going with this.
It's not so much that we can't imagine a life without fossil fuels. That's actually pretty easy: solar panels on our roofs and electric cars, home hydroponic robotic gardens, recycling of all things (even landfills), off-grid living. Solarpunk.
It's that we can't imagine ourselves at the bottom of the capitalist pyramid, toiling our lives away so that someone somewhere can be wealthy at our expense, forever separated from financial stability and self-actualization like the 7 billion people propping up the billion people in "developed" countries. So we project our generational trauma onto the people we depend on most.
That's what the Russia-Ukraine war is about. That's why the Middle East can't seem to get left alone. That's why the Global South struggles to eat. That's why we're seeing continuous decline in all things from economics to health to the environment. That's why we won't solve global climate change. And that's why the most likely future currently is a dystopian one.
We can't change the world, but we can change ourselves. As we each pull ourselves up by our bootstraps since the wealthy do nothing about any of this, we begin to manifest a viable future.
Personally I have stopped fantasizing about disruption and winning the internet lottery. Now I meditate on how to bring $10,000 of resources to every single person in the world through automation to free humanity from forced labor and enter the New Age.
Let's call it what it is: feudalism. The active income era of capitalism has largely subsided. When economic growth comes from active income all classes can see their wealth increase. When passive income dominates you get the opposite: certain sections of the owner class with the most powerful monopolies[0] cannibalize everyone else. And while "feudalism" is a historically complicated term, one common feature was economies dominated by passive income. In that era, wealth went to those who owned the land - a natural chokepoint to economic activity. Today the chokepoints are different but the effect is the same.
I would also disagree that half of HN is "just fine with the status quo" given that this community also likes to talk a lot about right to repair, abuse of copyright and patent ownership, DMCA 1201, platform capitalism, etc.
[0] e.g. copyright ownership over culturally relevant creative works, patent ownership over the most economically relevant inventions, etc
2. Crashing the economy may make things worse as people may move to cheaper more polluting options.
3. Also any crashing has to be global if implemented. If the West implements this, will China implement it too? Otherwise, it is useless.
4. We have to get out of the outdated/silly notion that the economy is inversely proportional to a clean planet. E.g., cleaner cars cost more than older polluting cars. So if more cleaner cars are bought, that implies economic growth as well as less pollution. Same for building mass transit. There will be a ton of upfront pollution.
Once we haven't heard from you for an extended period we'll assume you were successful. Best of luck.
There's always assumptions and interpolation
Re the chart - did temperature recording start in 1980? Can't we have the temperature that is on record (ie back to 1880 or whatever), if you are going to claim this is the hottest on record... Stuff like that is suspicious.
At the other poster mentioned, records began around 1880.
Hank Green pointing out that we could just spray water into the air to get the same effect (and avoid the whole "sulfur" thing in general) gives me a modicum of hope. But If it's all true I just have so many doubts in being able to act on this nicely. How would you even police giant ships to make sure they keep the "water spraying gun" running all the time?
Like that one time China decided sparrows are a problem then discovered what they exactly eat aside from grain...
Dismissing SRM technology, Prof Joeri Rogelj of Imperial College, London, called it “irresponsible, dangerous and a threat to the manageability” of our survival, saying: “It is not a solution but an extremely dangerous band-aid that covers up the global warming problem without healing it, creating a false and unwarranted sense of climate safety while the core of the problem continues to fester.”
https://phys.org/news/2023-08-viewpoint-guardrails-geoengine...
While theoretically capable of cooling the planet, solar radiation management could have drastic side effects by shifting patterns of global atmospheric circulation that can lead to more extreme weather events. It also does nothing to reduce harms of excess greenhouse gases, including ocean acidification.
It is important not to start direct confrontation when someone is showing signs of listening at all.. simple minded responses are ordinary. That is exactly why nation-level Science is being applied, right?. It should not be shocking that ordinary people reply with simplistic responses. The situation is too extreme for the pleasures of ordinary quarralling -- disciplined discourse is called for, even if most people are not willing or able.
Someone needs to figure out large scale injection of SO2 to the stratosphere. Don't wait for permission, just do it!
I wonder if a hundred years ago someone said "Someone needs to introduce the cane toad to Australia to reduce the beetle population! Don't wait for permission, just do it!".
Not the exact same thing, sure, but we are terrible at predicting side effects.
If you're trying to breathe there, you have much bigger problems than inhaling SO2 :)
It's a good book, I enjoyed it. But,it's just a story. Geo engineering should probably be done pretty carefully