September was the most anomalously hot month ever

There might be some easy, immediate "quick-wins" in change of behaviors or new technology, but they are not that many, or particularly impactful. Take for example coal. In various places they thought that eliminating it is a no brainer. Its dirty, lots of CO2 emissions etc. Well guess what. Many poorer countries only have access to coal and they are not particularly keen to remain energy poor to make up for the historical excesses or others.

I don't actually think it's a fundamental blocker though. People sacraficed quite a bit at home during WWII to support the war effort, we could make similar sacrifices now if we saw our impact on the planet as a similarly existential threat.

To me it seems like the failure is in trying to analyze the problem so specifically that we can define the "right" path then logic people onto it. That will never work, mainly because the problem is so complex that there won't be a complete understanding to share. There will always be assumptions used in modeling and holes in the data allowing for alternative explanations that are then argued over even further.

We all know that using oil at this scale isn't a great idea. And we all know that we could actually use less oil without giving up much at all. If we spent less time arguing over how we got here we could find reasonable next steps that are hard to argue with when it isn't all backed by "science" and "fact" that can be debated endlessly.

Yes and no. I agree that if your approach is to ask people to do this, you aren't going to win the argument.

But instead you can reframe the argument.

Does that $70,000 truck that you have to make payments on while you do back-breaking or soul-crushing work to afford it really make you happy? Do you really get use out of that or are people scamming you with clever marketing?

Do you really enjoy glamping or do you just like the idea and you sit around on your phone posting pictures about how much you like it while not really doing much. Are you honest with yourself?

Etc.

> Cramped trains will rarely win politically but electric cars that go fast and look cool do win.

We don't even have trains, let alone cramped trains. This one is funny though because everyone "loves how walkable XYZ area is" but then they get their mind completely wiped once they leave not realizing they can live like that too if they demanded it or if we had a good market mechanic in place that allows for choice.

For some bewildering reason we don't build more of the most loved homes and neighborhoods and transit experience like we do for every single other product.

Asking people to eat less might never win... But when there is a famine, people have no choice but to eat less. It's not that there is no food available in a famine - it's just that prices go sky high.

Tomorrow the government could shut down the oil wells and say "nobody may emit any CO2 unless they pay $1000/ton of CO2 emitted.".

The population may revolt, like they do during famines. But with those oil wells blocked up, they probably wouldn't get what they were looking for.

I think that's setting the bar very low, and I don't think it's necessarily true.

Most of us learn how to manage a finite resource (our own income) and how to maximize results within those constraints. This is not some sort of alien situation that humans can't identify with. We face questions like "Do we really need this?" and "Can we afford it right now?" all the time.

We need to get better at organizing ourselves in large groups/structures to do this at the global level, and make people feel equity in the decision-making and that they can afford this equity, and I'm quite optimistic we can in principle get there.

Whether we can do it fast enough is the worrying bit.

What needs to be done is cost the damage from unrestricted emissions. You can't just look at the benefits.

Consider the original Clean Air Act. Economists estimate the value of reducing harmful pollution due to that act exceeded the cost of implementing the reductions by a factor of 40. FORTY! It's like picking up free money. And the same is going to be true of CO2 emissions reduction.

Now, it's not true for those personally benefiting, like oil companies. Well, screw them.

That's unfortunate, since trains would surely be the more efficient form of transportation, at least when dealing with regular commute, like going to work and back. Over here, a train ticket costs a few Euros, you don't have to worry about driving or traffic jams, gas/charging, or parking. Of course, if you need to go to a specific rural area or transport some heavy items, then the equation changes, but that's not the majority of the cases.

I'm actually rather sad that they closed down a train route to a city next to my countryside residence, since buses aren't as comfortable in most cases. Either way, public transportation feels like an obvious necessity to me, though many might disagree.

A major economic change sounds impossible, but we've done it in the US at least three times in the last century.

A large number of people with vast influence on all government policy care about the returns of their investments in existing incumbent industries, which in aggregate correlate very strongly with GDP growth, though.

I would rather live in a society with a higher GDP than less (all things considered) and so would most people (as evidenced by population shifts across the world). If the GDP does not grow to at least match the population changes, the society would be poorer and have worse outcomes overall.

that is the foundation of the way economy works. It propagates down to interests and credits and investments and jobs.

Obviously IMO.

Do you have any debt? Or use money? Or pay taxes?do you have a job? Did you know that oil consumption grows at the same rate as GDP? Do you save for retirement, or hold any investments? Do you have a bank account?

It's all directly connected to the economic system, which is driven by the goal of having steady and predictable rate of growth in GDP.

I'll keep voting against anything that makes me poorer and more miserable.

We don't actually know the extent of impacts from either our oil use or potential cuts. We have modeling data that we extrapolate out, the issue I'm raising is that we get stuck in a loop of people debating whether the modeling data is accurate, complete, or predictive.

There are changes we can easily make without knowing those answers. If we can make simple changes that at a minimum wouldn't hurt the planet and almost certainly would help it, why don't we? My read is that we simply must not care. We don't need to buy as many things as we do, or to expert those costs overseas. We don't need to travel the world by plane. We don't need the latest iPhone made on the other side of the planet. We don't need LLMs. We do it because we like convenience and novelty more that we actually care about our impact on the planet. And we avoid implementing real solutions by first demanding that we have a complete understanding of the cause and blame.

Yes, food is a significant portion of energy consumption, but typical transportation and housing (including heat/cool) easily dominate. Going from a daily mixed meat (chicken/fish/beef/eggs) eating diet to a vegan diet saves ~1 ton CO2 per year. Average is about 4-5 tons per year for a person living in a small apartment in temperate climate, who only uses public transportation, doesn't go on vacation, or buy any unnecessary consumer items. A more typical westerner who can afford meat every meal is about 10-20 tons per year.

Now, if you're eating 150g of beef every meal 3x every day, you could double your footprint (+20tons CO2). Eating only chicken, fish, and eggs gets you below 1ton/year for meat in meals. Vegan is about a third of that.

https://8billiontrees.com/carbon-offsets-credits/carbon-ecol...

I expect we would have a lot of agreement related to fixing that system to better serve the average person. Even if we have different opinions on exact details, that core principle can go very, very far.

Unfortunately, the dustbins of history are full of civilizations that took disruptive events carefully and with grave dignity and solemnity and respected the rights of powerful stake-holders within their society.

That the people who make such arguments generally live in the places best positioned to weather out the situation, is also unfortunate. While people in well-pr tut about whether it's really proper for a government to take action to avoid calamity from befalling its citizens, other people will be literally dying.

It's a rather crass and callous/indifferent position you've staked out, you're kind of not coming off like a very good person here. Like it's literally "I guess you'll have to die, then, not like we're going to unwind the economy just for you" once again.

It is, as someone notes upthread, basically the same as masks during COVID. Some people will stroke their chin and pontificate about utilitarianism and the greater good, but that's not really comfort to anyone whose loved one dies from excess pollution or a transmissible disease. And of course the people taking this position are usually the most protected themselves - we all can WFH here if circumstances dictate, it's different if it's your wife stocking a grocery store, they care a lot less about the GDP impact and more about the direct personal impact than you do.

And the existence of this subgroup - such as yourself - fundamentally forestalls the ability of the other 70% of the society from being able to protect itself. Kind of a problem in general - the american system (and the EU and UN as well, but particularly the US) provides too many brakes on action and biases to inaction (via checks-and-balances) such that even supermajority level political control often is not enough unless it is single-party control of every single branch of government and lever of power.

You don't just need 50%, you don't just need 70%, you need 70% across every possible dimensionality that the US distributes political power over - essentially single-party control is the only way to rule if the minority does not consent, and we are talking about people who openly state that they will never consent.

It'll end in deaths sooner or later, whether that's from inaction, or from those whose deaths would be caused by inaction taking action themselves (which is why almost everyone is forecasting conflict and political instability from climate change to kick up majorly in the second half of the century). Again, the only disappointing part is that this too will be visited on the least-fortunate instead of the responsible parties (who will largely be fine, and we will probably even bail out florida and other affected areas anyway).

What happens when the unstoppable force of climate change meets the immovable object of modern political system's bias-to-inaction? Fireworks, basically - because unlike HN you can't just tone-police the discussion away in the real world, people won't just take "I guess you'll have to die so I can have the new xbox this year" lying down.

I think your point leads down the path of arguing that we have too many people on the planet though. If we can sustainably feed everyone without causing unknown amounts of damage to the environment, we will eventually hit a wall and run out of ways to dodge that fact.

Enforcing regulations requires quite a few steps first, from defining the scope and likely granting new authority to regulators to actually drafting regulations that are complete and not full of loop holes.

Your argument is also based on the premise that consumers aren't able to make the best choices for themselves and must be forced into it by regulators. I simply refuse to believe this, what are we even doing here if we think real reform can only come from all powerful authorities forcing it upon us?

There's too much currently unknown for any honest person to speak with the confidence the other poster is and that makes many people (myself included) distrustful.

If you disagree, then be the change you want to see in the world... Setup a website, pull the data, build your own model and publish it. Once you've got it going, I'd guess that Tamino would be more than willing to correct all your mistakes in your model.

I'm curious if the changes we see can be explained by the sun activity yes. I'm not qualified to assess which of the scientists are right and which aren't, and to what extent CO2 gases cause global warming. Instead of just asking me to take it for a fact when asking a question please use your expertise and explain it in a sense that I can understand and verify.

I'm asking out of curiosity and because I want to understand, to me this could all be because of the sun and an elaborate cash-grab, just as plausible. Because it's not about stopping it at all costs, some people can apparently buy the right to produce more? With these kind of hand-wavy responses from those who claim to have the knowledge where do you think me and other like me are turning for information?

I don't know if it's easier to build a giant sunscreen than to get the worlds population eating bugs because apparently cows fart too much? But we still keep exploiting the amazon, and doing everything we can to keep the endless growth economy we've built going. So how pressing can it really be? We're fighting wars over more resources, when maybe we should be fighting to stop consumerism?

I don't know. But I'm not taking anyones word for it, help me understand or move on. Don't tell me what to think.

TBF I'm growing more and more apathetic to this whole "economy" thing. Unbounded growth is what led us to the present problem in the first place. What about we try to optimize for quality of life instead of quantity of made-up number?

Solar systems are not an exception.

It’s funny how something considered racist is now considered necessary now that the migrants are being dumped in their front yards.

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/05/politics/biden-administration...

Anyway, it's very likely that the younger dryas had a much sharper shift in temperature.

This is complete speculation. And the annual variation in temperature of ~50 degrees C many places on earth, does not really support it.

If we can maintain the status quo with better technology, it will be adopted. It's just not there yet. Hence, we stick to what we have.

The liberal position on these societal problems is "take things away until the problem is fixed" which I find incredibly ironic, while the other's is "free market drives innovation when it's overwhelmingly necessary."

Millions of people may have to adapt. Fortunately, people are good at that.

It's way more difficult to convince someone of something if they already see you as "their ideological opposite". It's a chasm too wide to cross for most of us humans.

The "gaining weight" conversation is something that they understand, probably have experienced themselves, or have seen their spouse try. It's not something that can be perceived as coming from the "scientist caste" (this is a real term I have heard used). You are less of an opponent and more of a next-door-guy trying to explain something.

It's a bridge that you lay over the chasm. They still need to walk over it, though.

I'm sure there's some sports argument that can be laid out in a similar fashion.

I think it's all 3. The problem is that, like anything remotely political in our current environment, one side says it's 100% one source, and the other says it's 0%.

The transition is going to be very expensive, and normal people (hardly getting by) aren't willing to get even poorer when they can't be sure it will help in the grand scheme. Our leaders are doing nothing but talk, they're the worst individual offenders. And globally, there's a "tragedy of the commons issue" at the Nation level, where those who continue to burn fossil fuels are going to get ahead.

Until these things are addressed, telling us repeatedly that it's getting warmer falls on deaf ears.

and

b. The only way for X to reach his workplace is to consume a more and more expensive resource.

"Change job", " work more", "live somewhere else" are not good advices because X is often unqualified, works already a lot and cannot afford a place inside the town where he works.

What should X do ?

The necessity of consumption is a bigger problem than "we consume to much hydrocarbon energy". People don't value cheap hydrocarbon energy over the future of earth, but they value their own life, and no solution exists, for a lot of regions in france, to allow you to cease using your car.

In some places solutions are implemented in a weird manner, I personally had to take the bus at 5 am to go to " Lycée", where most of my courses began around 9-10am (if there were courses the morning) and then at 8pm to go back home (I was home at 9h30pm approximately, depending on the traffic). Lycée was great, now if I had to do this before and after a day of work, it would highly resemble what I call "a boring life". But still, while 3 hours or more in my life were dedicated to " transit" and a lot of time in the morning was dedicated to "wait", other people living in the city were just sleeping in the morning and probably reading their lessons or socializing.

Bus was taking a lot more time than cars to commute is these regions because there's a lot of villages to connect to the town. (My village was the last of the line). As of today, there is still only two bus that connects the village to the town, one in the morning at 5am, and one in the night, at 8pm.

1. Jan 1 - June 1, 2023

2. Yes.