Oceans May Have Already Seen 1.7°C of Warming | Hacker News Reader

Oceans May Have Already Seen 1.7°C of Warming

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266 pointsBrajeshwar362 comments

There is just no democratic support for fixing global warming since it's too expensive. See the riots in France when they tried to tax gas more heavily. I like Bill Gate's book on the topic. We need technological progress in several areas -> lower the premium on solving climate change -> enable political solutions.

(Don't get me wrong, I wish a political solution was possible. Climate change is a major threat. But in a democracy leaders can't do deeply unpopular things. Lots of people want to fix climate change. The challenge is it currently requires increasing the price of construction, electricity, food, and gas)

Just watch how expensive not fixing it will be.

How is that relevant? The voting public will typically delay expensive cost-saving measures. Because the majority of individuals will do the same.

Also forced public expenditures are a huge money making opportunity for the capital class, so they will tend to encourage delay as well.

We know that, but it doesn't change a thing. Your or my opinion has little influence. Therefore baby steps should be taken which will reduce that cost.

Why baby steps vs radical technological innovation?

We waste our time with virtual signalling nonsense, that hurt the least affluent here, whilst China/India/Africa are going to be outputting vastly more CO2 to make any of our efforts net-irrelevant to climate change.

We need to fix it for the world. That'll require big-impact innovation.

Expensive for folks in the future*

That is what is running through people's heads. And apparently they are not a part of this future either.

If you tell people they have to stop all travel and electricity use and plastics purchases, they won't do a thing.

There are no levers to pull besides technological ones.

The plastics one needs to be done through legislation and collaboration with industry… there are so many products where consumers don’t have a choice - the manufacturers need to take the responsibility for eliminating single-use packaging that doesn’t biodegrade or recycle. Yes it may be painful, but there’s no other way to do it

I feel like this take is dismissive and unhelpful. Expecting people to sacrifice their current wellbeing for the sake of a nebulous, far off reckoning is simply unrealistic and a bit of a dead end in terms of climate progress. We would be better served finding lower impact solutions that are more easily adopted than high impact ones that are never going to be accepted.

We aren't exactly asking people to sacrifice their wellbeing and convenience completely. That's why for example we aren't asking the population to ditch their cars and switch to trains and bikes, but we are offering them electric cars, which are exactly the kind of lower impact solutions you are speaking of.

An electric car isn't really a lower impact solution for a large amount of the US population. From what I'm able to find, the lowest priced EV (Chevy Bolt) starts around $27k currently[0], whereas the cheapest gas car (Nissan Versa) starts at $17k[1]. This is without even accounting for the larger difference in the used car market, cost of installing a level 2 EV charger (which is another $1k-$2.5k[2], which is necessary for anybody who does any significant amount of traveling in a single day), or the 25% higher insurance premiums for EVs[3]. All said the difference between the two options is a pretty significant difference for most of the population who are already struggling because of the significant inflation rates experienced in recent years[4].

[0] https://www.chevrolet.com/electric/bolt-ev

[1] https://www.nissanusa.com/vehicles/cars/versa-sedan.html

[2] https://www.jdpower.com/cars/shopping-guides/how-much-does-i...

[3] https://www.valuepenguin.com/how-having-electric-car-affects...

[4] https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/current-infl...

Electric cars help, but are not the solution. If everyone in Asia and Africa bought electric cars, it would be a disaster.

That's my point. We aren't looking for "the solution" we are looking for something that helps.

We’ve been talking about this problem since the 90’s. If there were lower impact solutions they are either long past the moment they needed to be implemented (back when denial was still the norm) or they just don’t exist and aren’t coming soon. Magical thinking isn’t helpful, we have to fix this problem with the solutions that exist, not the solutions we wish existed.

Go to war with the army you have, no?

Or not, and just decide that future generations are going to have to suck it up, which is the default choice anyway.

Australia is already having a bit of reckoning due to climate change in the way of mega fires and multiple "hundred year" floods per year in populated areas. At the last federal election, a newish political movement of independents took a large number of seats in parliament. This was possible due to preferential voting (like stacked voting in USA). The left party won power and has done very little on addressing climate change.

I'm now convinced that political will just isn't there even if the people are there (Large emitters donate to politicians). So I see an inevitable path where geoengineering will be seriously on the agenda inside 15 years.

> We would be better served finding lower impact solutions

There aren’t any lower impact solutions that will cut carbon emissions by 40% in the next 5 years.

Those in power are counting on the cost having to be paid by future generations. I assume they either don't have children/grand-children, don't like their children/grand-children, or are so narcissistic that it never occurs to them to think about their children/grand-children.

Their children will have enough money to carve out their own missile silo. The poors need not apply.

As expensive as “not staying in our homes for two weeks turned out to be”. Mind you, I was in the camp demanding just that at the beginning of the pandemic.

Which is to say that the technocratic powers that be should tone it down a little when it comes to imposing their top-down decisions, after all they’re just a minority compared to us, the common people, we (the common people) can always bring to power some of our leaders in order to fight (ideologically and not only) said technocrats.

the reality is that the costs will mostly be borne by future generations.

the cost we need to confront climate change is likely larger than the cost in this generation if we let it rip.

How do you define "future generations" anyways? People that aren't born yet? Because that sounds way more optimistic than I am.

If the notion of future generations sounds way too optimistic, you are likely far too pessimistic (if this is about climate change).

There is no realistic scenario for lack of future gens due to climate change in the next 100 years even with absolutely terrible undiscovered positive feedbacks.

I'm not saying there won't be future generations. This is what I was replying to:

> the cost we need to confront climate change is likely larger than the cost in this generation if we let it rip.

I'm saying the cost to confront it will be less than the cost to "let it rip" before some current generations die off from old age.

I think that you are wrong, I am well versed in climate science. The costs to avert now are significant, even more significant than the changes needed for sea level adaptation in our lifetime.

Most of the costs will be borne out by subsequent generations.

Prove that it actually a problem. In the 70's it was global cooling and a new ice age that we were to live on fear of. Do we really expect the climate to remain stable? Something that has never actually happened?

That was all your fault as well. "The Climate Change Saga unfolds as we visit 1978 and Leonard Nimoy explains how the human population is causing The Earth to Freeze".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-ZDnSbNIYs

What's your plan for when the boy cries "Wolf!" and he's actually there?

Check that it is actually there. I have heard doom monger predictions for over 3 decades and none of them have come true to date. I live by the sea and the level hasn't risen by any perceivable amount. 30 years ago I was told that major cities would be underwater by now.

Sure, but isn't the argument that the current situation is akin to a frog in a pot?

There's no hard threshold under this line of thinking and, I imagine, if something terrible were to happen to a vulnerable population abroad, then the west would react in a way which would enable its population to treat the issue as if it were "far away".

Rising authoritarianism would just seem like something related to politics in this hypothetical future. From there, any attempts at top-down mitigation would just seem like "bad guys with power doing things bad guys do".

Perhaps we should have a referendum, so people can show their support in a democratic way...

Nobody is stopping people doing unpopular things to solve climate change. You just have no right to coerce others into that!

It'd be great to see how democratic support might be different were it not for the concerted, expensive effort to deny and downplay the problem by multiple enormous industries that have repeatedly captured governmental institutions in this effort, as well as changing public perception considerably

Concentration of power underlies a staggering amount of the problems of the current age, and if our species is to survive, insane propositions like "limited liability" need to die

I was initially partial to this explanation, but I no longer think that ‘in the absence of interference’ people would vote for the price increases needed.

People would vote for these price increases once they see that the increases are paltry compared to the opportunity cost, or to the externalities.

I disagree. Lots of people are perfectly happy to ignore externalities that happen to others. Just try to get a bike lane put in and you'll see it for yourself.

Or as a lovely neighbor put it: "if you die, why is that my problem?"

I agree. However the key point in climate change messaging is informing people that this affects themselves, their kids, and their grandkids.

Which is often a lie, or at least situational simplification . The costs of climat change and mitigation are not evenly distributed.

In my view, this is largely a lie in terms of the impact on themselves.

I think you deeply overestimate people's ability to make painful near-term decisions to avoid long-term pain that they can't see, have never personally experienced and also nobody they know or have even heard of has personally experienced.

It's human nature; we're extremely bad at making decisions related to seemingly abstract long-term problems.

People can make long term plans and execute them, but the systems that control the levers related to climate change are operated by people who don't habitually operate based on long term planning. Calling it "human nature" is a cop-out.

For themsleves? Some people can, sometimes. For the commons? If humans were so naturally inclined we wouldn't be having this conversation.

Blaming the problem on "people who don't habitually operate based on long term planning" is a likewise a cop-out while also kinda arguing my point.

I think there's a certain cultural movement that has been propagated violently across the world that rewards and requires such behavior. there are many enduring cultural traditions that teach patience and long term planning. "human nature" is complex, we naturally can do both honestly.

How about you be the beacon of change and show us by taking the near term pain e.g. cutting down consumption (eat one meal a day of vegetables, stop traveling, stop taking vacations far away, live in a one room apt, no kids, etc.

Winyarn small minded thinking there.

Makes more sense to recover energy from moving almost a billion tonnes per annum from plateau to sea level.

https://reneweconomy.com.au/fortescue-says-regenerative-infi...

.. but keep up those tiny thoughts, one day they might grow.

There are a lot of people who can't afford these price increases _today_.

Being able to worry about the years to come is actually a privilege.

Having tried to advocate for better societal support for those people who "can't afford those price increases", I've honestly lost a lot of sympathy. I've had people explicitly tell me they want to see welfare benefits for people poorer than them cut so that they face less competition (and therefore less inflation and lower prices) for purchasing food. As if starving the poor to make your grocery bill better is a justifiable option. "why should you be entitled to food and shelter just because you were born as a human and not some ape? if you are useless and die, it's not my problem"

If you have no empathy for anyone poorer than you, sorry, why should I be caring about your misfortune again?

Nobody in the US has to starve with the current social system.

A bizarre claim given that so many are, in practice, starving. Maybe they're just holding it wrong

Please provide evidence that "so many people are starving in the US."

Here's what 10 seconds on a search engine provided from a fairly official source

https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/107703/err-325...

Roughly 10% of households being food insecure, defined as having inconsistent or inadequate access to food. That amounts to roughly 30 million people

Social programs existing is great, but they are in their present form inadequate to make the claim that was made

It's also worth pointing out that most likely "households" excludes all homeless people, which is not an insignificant portion of the population (as many people on HN - especially those living in SF - are quite aware)

That is not what I asked for. I asked for stats specifically on "starvation" -- the claim you made.

Statisticians really like using dry descriptions that often border on euphemistic in their work, not unlike psychologists. I think this reads to them as more objective or serious.

That said, figures I can find about how many starve to death in a year seem to hover around 10-15k, which would make up about half to a third of a percent of deaths per year (though with the COVID-19 pandemic recent numbers of total deaths are still somewhat higher than before it started)

This is a pretty conservative estimator for what we might colloquially consider "starvation", because there are a lot of deaths in which severe malnutrition is a significant factor, but are not attributed to starvation as a cause of death. But even if we treat it as a perfect proxy, it's a lot more than zero. 10k people per year are just holding the perfectly adequate socialist machine we apparently already have fully operational and available to anyone who doesn't simply desire to starve, wrong

The notion that 10k people are starving to death a year in the US is ridiculous. You need to stop living in ideologically driven fantasy land.

Are all people in the US perfectly food secure? No. Is starvation frequent? Absolutely not. The notion that 10k people die every year from “malnutrition” is also bogus. I’m not sure where you got that number from, but it is utterly made up.

I grew up in a place with very intense poverty. I know what social programs are available. Food is much, much less a problem than shelter.

So the figure I got from some simple googling came from an estimate that was claimed to be based on food insecurity statistics. 10K in a country with a population of 330M is pretty low compared to much of the world. But we can probably do better

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/starvatio...

This source cites a figure of .89 PEM deaths, which for that population stacks out to more like 3K. Still low compared to the world, but high compared to many other rich nations.

Either way, not even gonna break the top ten causes of death, but the claim made was "no one has to starve" to which I am simply asking "then why is anyone starving?"

Personally, I'm just looking for this information on the internet, and don't have a vested interest in a particular outcome. You, on the other hand, are arguing from incredulity and just kinda flailing at me with derisive ad-hominem invective, which doesn't fill me with confidence about your command of the facts, but does make me think you must be quite a hit at parties

You haven't even provided a source for the 10k number, so I'm not sure how I'm supposed to argue against it.

> 10K in a country with a population of 330M is pretty low compared to much of the world. But we can probably do better

I agree that would be a mostly low rate, but we aren't even close to that. There are not even 10k people dying of starvation in the US.

> "no one has to starve" to which I am simply asking "then why is anyone starving?"

Most of the PEM number in the US is due to people who have some sort of wasting disease in the hospital. There are also some rare cases of people starving who are elderly and suffering from severe dementia (other rare cases: people with ED who do not receive intervention soon enough). If you want to count those as starvation, sure - but even then it doesn't cover 10k.

> just kinda flailing at me with derisive ad-hominem invective

I called you ideologically driven after your initial content-free mocking reply. You've called my claims bizarre and said I suck at parties. I don't think that this is a case of a one-sided derisive attack.

> Personally, I'm just looking for this information on the internet

A few comments ago you were certain that 'so many' in the US were starving.

bye

Having repeatedly moved the goalposts in your favor (People who are food insecure will frequently describe themselves as "starving", but this was apparently unsatisfying), I produced multiple sources, where you have produced none, and merely argued your incredulity and derision. All you've really expressed is that you're hopping mad about some kind of "ideology" that you've attributed to me. But yes, I used a pretty mild ad-hominem attack in the sentence discussing how you were relying on ad-hominem invective, that was indeed the joke, well done

The truth is, you made a pithy statement that you believed was undeniably true, which omitted significant complexity inherent in the claim. For example, social programs in the United States are seldom if ever implemented on a federal level, the verb "to starve" is not a technical and precise description of a particular phenomenon, etc. When I made an equally pithy and oversimplifying (but I would still argue more true) statement, you and others started making demands for statistical rigor, something which I don't claim to have done here to the standards of a scientific study or a court of law, but at least did any of at all. The pattern of isolated demands for rigor and what appears to be the product of some kind of emotional escalation - vagaries about how you've lived in poorer countries before and thus can speak to the conditions of 330M people simultaneously without sources while demanding sources from others, and the assertion that merely arguing with you about this is indicative of delusion. I guess that you're elevated here specifically because you claim that I must be motivated by "ideology". This statement is on its face tautological: any argument either of us makes is going to be somewhat shaped by our respective worldviews of course. But a common usage of "ideology" as a criticism by political pundits is designed to evoke conspiracies out of cold war spy stories, a rhetorical tactic designed to evoke the visceral reaction that someone following an "ideology" must be part of some sort of well-organized enemy faction, rather than merely an individual who has come to some conclusion on their own

I felt the need to edit this post to spell this out because I find the ease with which people slip into this way of thinking, especially on the internet, pretty disturbing. I would like for you to take a step back from this kind of brinksmanship here, because even if I'm wrong, I don't think that means that we are enemies, and I would like to think that if you thought about it, you would agree with at least that

If I understood you correctly (maybe I didn't), you have decreased empathy for the poorer-than-you because of their lack of empathy for their poorer-than-them?

The thing is, it is only human that when you are poor, your prority shifts more towards todays and one's own problems rather than tomorrow's and other people's problems. In other words, we should feel the privilege of being able to prioritize our future and that of our children.

Hope so! From my lifetime of observing humans though, I don't agree.

If the costs are paltry, and you have a government who even remotely cares about this topic, then why wouldn't they simply pay for the costs? We're $34 trillion in debt, and rapidly growing. We spend hundreds of billions of dollars on ever more inane ventures which are frequently unpopular, and probably making the world a worse place. But the only solution, to pay a "paltry" sum to solve climate change, is to raise taxes?

For instance they could easily print money, in the normal way, by issue special 'climate bonds' with a promise that all revenue from said bonds would be spent on whatever you see as this affordable solution. Those bonds would certainly sell well, people could get their virtue signaling on on social media showing them off, and - best of all - absolutely 0 divisiveness. Even somebody like me who thinks our debt's become catastrophic would just shrug, since we're probably already way past the point of no return.

Your framing is designed to make that outcome inevitable. Of course if the proposal is keeping everything else the same but raising prices people would vote against it. Mitigating the catastrophic biome collapse we are already experiencing requires infrastructural changes, not just tweaking the economy a little

In the absence of interference in the media by rich people. Not the absence of interference in climate change.

> requires infrastructural changes, not just tweaking the economy a little

'Infrastructural changes' -> Seems like it can be subsumed in 'tweaking the economy', did you mean 'structural changes'? And if so, do you think people who are unwilling to pay $10/mo to avert climate change are going to support structural changes to the economy to do so?

what do you mean by infrastructural changes?

An often-cited example is the considerable investment we've made into spread-out living spaces that require that people are doing long, daily car-based commutes. This kind of planning creates a situation where an increase in the price of gas is devastating to people's livelihoods and ability to move through the world, which is a lot of why gas prices going up can be a make-or-break political issue for so many people. The flight to suburbs is a relatively recent phenomenon that could be reversed with different infrastructure choices. We could invest into mass-transit and, probably more importantly, better colocation of the resources people need to live, especially in an era where a lot of job functions can be done remotely (and a considerable segment of the economy clearly want to work remotely if they're allowed to)

Obviously this isn't going to just naturally occur, but we are already pretty artificially supporting the situation as it is: Part of the reason gas prices can stay low is that we already dump considerable subsidies into the already-profitable oil and gas industry

Your solution would involve massively raising the cost of suburban and rural living. If it doesn't involve that, then people won't move.

I'm generally in favor of that - but the people who won't even support $10/mo in electrical bills are not going to support tearing up suburbia.

Restructuring our infrastructure/society is not an easier ask than higher gas prices.

The price increases would have been much more moderate if we had acted decisively forty years ago when the science was basically settled.

I don’t see how that follows. Solar panels and batteries have become massively cheaper in the past few decades and that has all relied on new materials science. I guess you could argue that windmills could have been made cheaper at scale with the right efforts 40 years ago.

Indeed, it may be the case that now is far cheaper than any time in the past, even taking into account co2 release in the past 40 years.

Seventy years ago, when AGW climate change was recognised internationally at the UN in 1970s, during an oil crisis, the largest per capita users of fossil feuls and emmitters of CO2 were the North Americans.

They were open to change in behaviour at the time, it's a matter of public record that Koch Industries started to heavily fund a number of think tanks devoted to changing American perceptions; individual freedom is expressed by wanton consumption, bigger gas guzzlers are better, public transport is bad.

They, and their partners in the petro businesses, sank very nearly every grassroots movement for small, midle, and large city public transport launching, expansion, or improvement. They backed every move for more and more freeways.

What could have been a time that saw greater emphasis on resource efficiency and less fossil fuel consumption was not. What could have been a signal to all the then developing economies about the direction a world leader was taking remained so - and the message was consume, and consume more.

Developing better renewable energy sources was (and still is) only part of a bigger picture of changing behaviour.

Nuclear was around. But the real potential for savings was in reducing consumption by altering infrastructure investments. For example by favoring public transport and walkable cities over cars and sprawl, or requiring better insulation for new buildings. Today we don’t have the time to wait until simple tax incentives nudge people towards better behavior.

If you scroll down to the bottom of this thread you’ll see a ton of flagged and dead posts from people who question this stuff. There are plenty of normal people who doubt the scientific conclusions of climate scientists. It doesn’t help that the solutions to the problem almost always seem to be taking away freedoms and raising taxes.

See: farmers in the Netherlands getting their farms taken away by the government, French folks rioting over increased taxes, ULEZ cameras in London fining people for driving in the wrong neighborhood, etc.

It seems that the solutions are all sticks and there are no carrots.

The majority of people want to fix the problem, myself included. But I also deeply care about the growing authoritarianism that we are seeing across the world.

I want to decouple fixing the climate from authoritarian governance.

This is exactly right. Let's engineer solutions that are technologically based and better than what we currently have, not increase government control over people. Freedom is at least as important as the climate. A solution that is mandated is not the same as a solution that emerges organically as better both for the user AND the environment.

> Freedom is at least as important as the climate.

This is a value judgment, not an absolute statement, and should be addressed as such.

Should you have the absolute freedom to pollute as much as you want if it harms your neighbors? What if a solution exists that is better for you and the environment, should you have the freedom to not take it if you don't care about the harms to those around you? Do you view having to have emissions controls installed on your car as an unjustifiable infringement on your freedom?

People just vote with there feet against this life of monks and hermits offered. And the usual rat catchers take advantage. Which make those insisting on those non working policies of reduction, instead of boosting science, accomplices feeding democracy to the rats.

I've heard the talking point regarding innovation for awhile now. To me it sounds a bit like an alcoholic with a failing liver hoping that medicine will come up with some miracle cure so they can keep drinking as much as they want.

I think it's the opposite. The push for politics to do something is having an impact, we are making progress in lowering emissions. But it's not enough, and there are constraints on democratically elected leaders. Eventually, public sentiment will change, but not soon enough.

We don’t need to wait for technical solutions to make things cheaper. We need a revenue neutral carbon tax with dividend. For most people, especially the poor, they’d come out ahead, and it would allow the market price signals to gently steer everyone toward a lower carbon life.

That was tried in Ontario (cap and trade), but there was enough misinformation going around that the general populace thought it was just a standard tax on individuals.

Did the people there start getting money every month into their bank account (the “dividend” part)? If not, I imagine that that would’ve cleared that misinformation up rather quickly.

Washington State does cap and trade on industry. And yes, it has just become a 'standard tax' on individuals passed from industry to the pump to the tune of 40-50 cents/gal. While I agree that it is important to reduce consumption of fossil fuels, the infrastructure isn't there to enable people to commute from lower-cost areas of living to higher-cost areas of working.

This will likely be repealed by voters via initiative[0] this fall.

[0] https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/environment/initia...

More fun reading on our defacto gas tax:

https://www.king5.com/article/news/investigations/former-wsd...

How do you get people to vote for this given that it will increase prices/lower their standard of living today?

It's revenue-neutral, so all money collected gets redistributed out evenly, per-capita (the "dividend" part). The way that then works out is that if you're responsible for less carbon emission than average in your country, then you end up ahead, potentially well ahead. Since carbon emission maps pretty well to material consumption, and things like flying a lot, that means that most people will end up ahead, and this mainly costs more for people on the richer end of the spectrum. Likely the breakeven point is well above the median, given how wealth and income are distributed in a bit of a power law distribution. An extremely rich person gets the same amount back as anyone else, but his yacht and private jet become a hell of a lot more expensive to run.

This also has the benefit of making local manufacturing more competitive with overseas, since transportation becomes a larger part of the cost of goods. This would give blue collar workers back some of the leverage they've lost over the past decades.

So most people voting in just their short-term self-interest would do well to vote for this. And everyone gets the long-term benefit of civilization being less likely to collapse with massive resource shortages.

The challenge is explaining it well enough that people understand well that it's in their benefit. But I think "all the money from the tax goes into your bank accounts every month" would help a lot.

There's strong popular support to fix climate change. We know this from polls.

We also know that there are well-organized foreign propaganda teams attacking democracies around the world. The fact that some ill-informed right-wing radicals in France rioted doesn't mean there is no popular support for having a habitable planet in twenty years.

There is strong democratic support so long as someone else pays for it.

> The fact that some ill-informed right-wing radicals in France rioted doesn't mean there is no popular support for having a habitable planet in twenty years.

and alarmism does not help the cause.

And yet every single proposed policy to fix climate change is deeply unpopular.

People support "fixing climate change", but when they are asked to deal with a rising gas tax, or traveling less, etc, suddenly climate change isn't worth fixing.

You cannot poll on things without tradeoffs if you want a real answer.

Most Americans have been polled as unwilling to pay $10/mo more in electrical bills if it meant that climate change were completely averted.

I think comments about 20 years uninhabitibility are unproductive as most people see it for the lie that it is.

What car do you have?

It isn’t a political problem, it’s a messaging problem. The fact we allow a large group of folks to outright lie about the problem on public airwaves results in the “division”. I’m all for freedom of speech, but when public figures are knowingly telling lies, whoever is broadcasting it should be FORCED to follow it up with the facts of the situation.

In other words, at least in the US, the fairness doctrine needs to be re-instated. The number of things this country has killed off “because it worked so well we don’t need it any more” is mind numbing.

Many of the countries we are discussing have much less significant influence of money on media and still - raising prices is very unpopular.

The left needs to come to terms with the fact that sometimes the things they are proposing are unpopular independent of some “dark money influence scheme.”

> Many of the countries we are discussing have much less significant influence of money on media

In absolute terms you are correct, but in relative? Is there really a country where the media isn't strongly influenced by the rich and powerful of said country and the world?

This is a theory of the world that seems pretty non-falsifiable. "The real, uninfluenced people agree with my policy priorities and the only reason they don't is due to money at play." Any example of people disagreeing just proves that there is monetary influence that we haven't yet identified.

But I actually think it is somewhat falsifiable. Most people, when polled, are in favor of solving climate change - especially in nordic countries. But when you poll people with imposed costs, ie. $10/mo extra to completely solve climate change - the vast majority are opposed. [0]

This seems like people organically responding negatively to costs, not being brainwashed by media - otherwise they wouldn't support solving it in the first place.

[0]: https://www.cato.org/blog/68-americans-wouldnt-pay-10-month-...

I didn't state a theory, I wrote a simple counter-argument to your position. If you're correct, you should be able to produce evidence that proves your position correct. I don't think you are correct, but I'm happy to be proven wrong.

the original commentator indicated that the reason people are against it is due to the influence of money in politics.

i feel like i provided evidence against that theory, ball is not in my court

The good news: the renewables explosion is going to make a big difference. Thanks to the plummeting cost (and rapid deployment, particularly in China) of solar and wind, we are almost certainly going to see better emissions pathways than the bad ones we're currently projecting. None of this happened by accident: it was engineered.

The bad news is that we seem to be much closer to some really bad climate outcomes than scientists realized. Sensitivity may be higher, warming seems to be further advanced than we thought, and there are many scary tipping points that we could easily trigger. My guess is that we're going to need some sort of (relatively near-term) geoengineering solution to keep things from spiraling, which means we really have no room left for climate denial. (And to be clear, this isn't going to be an alternative to decarbonizing, it's going to be in addition.)

The lithium bubble burst is an indicator that the renewables push is losing strength.

The pandemic and later the yemen-gaza-ukraine combo shifted priorities.

Meanwhile Europe is no longer inching but running towards an ecological disaster with the ever increasing drought-deluge cycles.

I don't think so. Right now the renewables push is 90% about China: they're the biggest global emitter and also (previously) had the biggest rate of emissions growth. They're now expected to plateau this year and enter a structural decline. And China is still deploying renewables at an unbelievable rate [1] as of last month.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/chinas-wind-solar-ca...

We are lucky that the real estate bubble finally burst in China, that was one of the key drivers of pollution there.

> The good news: the renewables explosion is going to make a big difference

Sorry but I've been hearing this for 15 years now. It's only resulted in widespread greenwashing and misplaced climate optimism. Now, even if everyone went carbon neutral overnight with renewables the situation is so dire that we may still be in a very bad spot (as you mention in the rest of your post). And, while I'm at it, let me mention that part briefly:

> The bad news is that we seem to be much closer to some really bad climate outcomes than scientists realized.

They realized it for a long, long time. No one listened, and people/media latched on to the most absurdly optimistic models as a sign that everything was fine and we could continue to procrastinate on this problem. Any "pessimistic" models were thrown out as bunk science. stuff like this is even now still referred to as "doomerism."

> Sorry but I've been hearing this for 15 years now.

Really? Care to share the cost per KWh of batteries numbers from 15 years ago? What about $/Watt for PV modules?

Or maybe just deployment numbers of solar/wind?

I mean maybe, just maybe, we can have progress on the renewables front without people crying about "greenwashing"?

> No one listened, and people/media latched on to the most absurdly optimistic models as a sign that everything was fine and we could continue to procrastinate on this problem.

Many areas in the US will be fine. Rich people ignore it because they have the money to move away from affected areas, and poor people don't really have a media voice. But that's typical USA for you, so nothing surprising there.

I don't really know how you can square this supposed "tremendous success" of renewables when statistics like this are out there:

https://statista.com/statistics/282716/oil-consumption-in-th...

Oil consumption is still increasing year over year. People like you have been saying the same things about renewables for a long, long time. I suppose it'll come any day now!

There are more sources of carbon than oil.

Now do coal. Consumption is down 50% from peak, and back to 1970's levels.

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=44155

Why beat around the bush when we can just look at actual US CO2 emissions which are down 20% since 2005 (see figure 5).

https://www.eia.gov/environment/emissions/carbon/

Edit: I always find it fascinating how negatively people respond to any mention of progress.

Renewables affect electricity production, not oil consumption. The renewable share is up to 41% in 2022.

Oil consumption in 2022 is below 2005. It is increasing since the dip for the pandemic but it is below 2019. The population has grown since 2005 so the per capita usage has dropped significantly since 2005.

> we are almost certainly going to see better emissions pathways than the bad ones we're currently projecting

I hope you are right. But when I am looking at ourworldindata chart about energy sources I still do not see this picture. While renewables are increasing, fossil fuels are not decreasing. It just seams that renewables are starting to cover ever increasing demand - not replacing all demand.

the good news is that

1. in most of the world energy usage is steady or decreasing

2. renewable energy production is accelerating

3. while renewable energy hasn't killed fossil fuel use, it has shifted it dramatically. coal is basically dead in most of the world because it has been priced out by renewables.

> There is just no democratic support for fixing global warming since it's too expensive.

There is no democratic support for fixing global warming in a capitalist system geared towards extracting value. If you ask people if they think global warming should be tackled in principle you will find many in support. The problem is that most people know that the way in which a fix for global warming would be implemented today would result in them bearing the costs while some shareholders somewhere get just a little richer.

If we want to stop humanity from extinction we have to step off the gas pedal and disincentivize those who keep wanting to step on it.

It is understandable if the riches and powerful people are flying around the world in private jets. Maybe they don't generate the most as a whole but a lot as individuals. It is very difficult to convince anyone to lower their standards of life (eating other food / shower less / drive a smaller car) which will make a big impact while the riches just do lip services.

I don't see a future for that. Humans only turn around when they hit a wall multiple times -- we are not the exceptions.

not a popular opinion, but I agree completely - if you are trying to sell a message of sacrifice to the common person, being preached to, by people who own and travel in private jets , while they return to one of their many 20 bedroom mansions located just feet above the sea that is supposed to have a devastating rise any day now - it is very, very easy to see why people just shrug it all off as scare tactics when they are asked to give up their tiny little gas lawn mover or gas stove.

May not be fair, and may not be scientific - but the message delivery matters - ignore it at your own peril.

>There is just no democratic support for fixing global warming since it's too expensive.

There's plenty of support, the US has lowered its carbon emissions quite a bit. There's one big problem though: what do we do about China and India? Are you prepared to get drafted and go to war to get China to stop burning coal?

Which country should go convince China, the one that has twice the CO2 emissions per capita?

If 3 people are releasing chlorine gas in a large room and only one of them slows down, it doesn't make a huge difference what the per capita emissions rate is, does it?

2023 made it very clear that China knows the stakes and also sees an opportunity with owning the clean tech future. They built more renewable energy just last year than has been installed in all of the United States in its history. BYD just passed Tesla as the biggest producer of EVs. The opportunity is there and with China's faltering economy that was propped up by housing, I expect Xi to do all he can to be the provider of the world with renewables.

>2023 made it very clear that China knows the stakes

What happened in 2023?

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/CHN/china/carbon-co2-e...

You have to burn carbon to build renewable energy components if you don't have enough energy from existing solar + wind; I don't know what you expect. But now they have ~500GW of energy to build next year's >>500GW [1]. It's an investment and every year it pays off.

China's emissions peak wasn't supposed to happen this decade but that has been revised [2]

1: https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinas-solar-capacity-ex...

2: https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinas-carbon-emissions-...

What happened in France was not just "because they tried to tax gas more heavily".

What the government did was textbook "let them eat cake". They suddenly decided to significantly increase taxes on diesel "for the environment" when people, especially trades people and people outside big cities, had no choice.

Therefore, predictably, the people rebelled.

As long as governments refuse to understand that, we won't get anywhere, indeed.

As long as people refuse to understand that reducing carbon emissions will mean substantial reductions in their standard of living then we wont get anywhere either.

Are you volunteering to lose your livelihood?

You haven't been following the recent developments in renewable energy and the deployment of clean tech then. We don't need new technological advancements. We just need to continue to produce more solar, batteries, wind and keeping existing nuclear plants afloat.

We have all we need. It is just a matter of upgrading the grid and building enough to transition.

> in a democracy leaders can't do deeply unpopular things.

Oh, you sweet summer child.

>There is just no democratic support for fixing global warming since it's too expensive. See the riots in France when they tried to tax gas more heavily.

It's not that simple. Gas is used primarily to work. People can't afford to live close to their jobs, so they pay money and take their time to get to their work, making them pay even more for gas with the absolute shitfest the housing market is means kicking someone while they are down.

Not to mention, if anyone is actually serious about reducing carbon emissions from commute? Penalize every single work that can be done remotely if it's not done so. It's an evident solution and there are A LOT of office workers, but some people don't like that idea, so instead of that poor people get screwed. Again.

The idea that it's about democratic support itself is something corporations have lobbied for, it's really not, the most evident example was covid, where consumption dropped like a rock, what was the first thing any government did to bounce back? Promote consumerism as much as possible, essentially throwing money at people. Our economic system is not equipped to deal with climate change, it's that simple. Not only are we on a train with no brakes, we are in that train, rocky terrain made us slow down and we shoved as much coal into the engine as possible to get back to speed because we can't have it any other way.

For Christ's sake, democratic support is the only reason there is any consideration for the environment at all. No corporation would ever give one single solitary shit about climate if it wasn't for "democratic support".

> For Christ's sake, democratic support is the only reason there is any consideration for the environment at all. No corporation would ever give one single solitary shit about climate if it wasn't for "democratic support".

Let's give this little gem the highlight it deserves.

I’ve always thought a carbon tax where the revenue is distributed directly to citizens in the form of a monthly check or bank deposit could be popular, or at least accepted by the public. Especially if it starts small and then ramps up over time.

Yes, I wish more things were paired like that.

Another one: land/property tax increases paired with income tax decreases.

There are a lot of factors at work here at the same time.

It's far off (or perceived that way) and people naturally seek relief of immediate pain. It's human nature. You tell somebody that they'll save $X over the next 10 years by spending a fraction of it now, most won't bother. On the other hand, if you're currently spending $X on something and you need to invest in something to get that cost down, they'll do it almost immediately.

Because it's far off, there's not a sense of urgency to it.

Additionally, there are some fairly strong factors that call a lot of climate change activism into question, like wide spread opposition to nuclear power by many of the same activists. Examples like Germany shuttering nuclear facilities only to turn around and turn to coal power certainly doesn't help.

Other factors such as the need for change across the entire world complicate matters when numerous businesses will just send their pollution to countries that don't impose the same requirements.

Separating hyperbole from practical application in pursuit of pre-existing goals is another huge factor. We've heard about methane emissions from cattle ranches for years. It seems like we have a great solution for this by adding an ingredient to the feed:

https://www.dcceew.gov.au/climate-change/publications/from-b...

But rather than pursuing this, activists are more interested in continuing to attack the industry and pushing vegan diets when a potential solution seems readily available.

Factor that in with alarmism over temperature increases as if every potential increase is man made while other factors are ignored by most outlets...

https://climate.nasa.gov/news/3204/tonga-eruption-blasted-un...

https://eos.org/articles/tonga-eruption-may-temporarily-push...

There's just a great deal of inconsistency and alarmism that undermines credibility when ignored.

Why does it need to be fixed? What's wrong with it getting a little warmer?

All that is required to solve climate change is the elimination of the Military Industrial Complex, the largest polluter on earth by far and the most useless thing on earth by far.

Got any sources on that? I'd like to learn more.

> I like Bill Gate's book on the topic.

So what's the book?

I think if the deal presented to voters was warming is a big problem because of evidence... If you vote to spend an extra 3k a year we can fix it then people would maybe be ok.

The current deal we have in the UK say is we'll do stuff that costs thousands, is not very effective, will reduce CO2 output far less than the amount Russia, China and India will raise theirs. You will suffer while CO2 output keeps going up as always.

Which is sort of a hard sell. I mean we are doing that in the UK with hardship and no global results. Not sure it's the answer.

Personally I'd favour a global solution like a carbon tax and counties that don't play ball can have their trade sanctioned. Also money into research into solar etc which I think is the real answer.

My own father, who is in his 60s, has said blatantly to me that he will be dead before the real problems hit, so he would rather not give up his cruises, large cars and international flights - he just doesn’t even care that his grandchildren will suffer, since he personally won’t be around for it. Completely dispicable, but ultimately, asking people to do the right thing out of altruism is never going to work. Democracy will not work either because these people vote.

At least he can admit he’s being selfish I guess. I think most climate deniers, especially the older ones, simply can’t face the idea they might be responsible for terrible things happening, and don’t want to change now, so the brain latches on to any explanation that spares them that psychological pain. Thus arguing facts is pointless with these people because it’s about feelings not actual truth (as many things are with our species). The solution is to hack peoples psyche to make them “feel good” about climate change, somehow…

Democracy will work, it's the only thing that's ever worked. Mass movements achieved pretty much anything you can think of, like better working hours, better rights for women, civil rights, end of slavery ...

Literally every (correct) example you gave is a case of people voting in their own short-term self interests, a dynamic which does not exist with global warming.

In the case of slavery, democracy didn't end this. Southern states literally seceded, and we had the bloodiest war in American history, to end slavery. And the dynamics there were that the economic systems of Northern states didn't rely on slavery, so they had little problem opposing it on moral grounds. The entire economic system of the South was built around the plantation system and slavery and so it's not surprising democracy didn't end slavery there.

The end of slavery in the United States was achieved by killing enough people who politically supported slavery in a war, that they surrendered and accepted the _de jure_ end of slavery. However, they then spent a century in a a low intensity conflict / rebellion (Reconstruction, Jim Crow, etc) against it, with significant success (unfortunately).

Democracy is not the cure all that you make it out to be.

Well, those things all directly benifitted the people who were currently alive campaigning for them. It doesn't go against op's point.

There's that 'me' generation for you. My parents say the same shit.

I see literally no issues whatsoever with that outlook unless he's the CEO of a multinational company.

Personal responsibility is pointless for climate change. The only thing that you can do - that actually impacts the climate - is to not have children. Everything else isn't even going to be a rounding error. Even if aggregated with thousands of other people abstaining as well.

The whole thing is just purely virtue signaling so people can tell themselves that they're doing something and it's the other people's fault that it keeps getting worse.

>Everything else isn't even going to be a rounding error. Even if aggregated with thousands of other people abstaining as well.

I truly dont understand this mindset. The total is always the sum of the components.

You actions make the same difference if you do them alone or with 7 billion other people. Both actions are the same tiny marginal impact.

The alternative just comes off as an excuse to do nothing. As if car manufactureres will just keep building cars that nobody buys.

Even if everyone in your city stopped doing $whatever you're taking issue with, the climate will not be impacted.

Climate change is a global problem, nothing besides global regulation that's actually enforced will have a meaningful impact. It's just too profitable to ignore climate impact for this to change.

What you're doing is just lying to yourself if you honestly think your actions (even if aggregated to hundreds of thousands of people doing the same), will be a meaningful contribution on the issue.

And just to be clear, pollution is another story entirely. That's primarily a local issue and can be significantly improved (not solved!) through personal responsibility.

Most people don't apply your reasoning to any other moral question. Nobody thinks that killing a child is OK because it has little impact on the grand total of child deaths. They don't rationalize that some warlord in Africa will keep killing, even if they don't.

How is this any different? You are either part of the solution or part of the problem, and accountable for your actions.

My point is that the contribution to climate change is exactly proportional to your personal emissions devised by the the total.

You talk about policy Solutions, but how is that any different than personal action?

Killing is heinous act giving unparalleled suffering to others, that starts right at the moment, to many related person. Not same as one person doing nothing to reduce climate change. You are comparing apples to sky.

That firmly establishes that killing is very bad and faster. What it doesn't do is make an argument it is moral to emit large amounts of carbon that will also hurt people (but more slowly) just because other people are doing it too.

But that was the point: a person flying around the globe every week will not impact the climate significantly, even if thousands of people did the same. You're not going to achieve anything without global regulation, so trying to shame individuals is just pointless.

Wherever they're boomers or not.

Agreed, though for children there’s an argument that you could have a descendent that solves climate change with some technical achievement or discovery. Seems like a long-shot though, so I wouldn’t take that bet.

To reiterate, there’s “no one simple trick” you can personally do to affect climate change. No mainstream action is worth a damn. That’s kind of the definition of a systemic issue.

There’s something to be said about doing the right thing simply for the sake of doing the right thing.

Beyond that personal choice, setting an example for others is a powerful tool to promote change.

100% Democracies are accountable to the interests of people as they understand them. Nobody wants to be told what's good for them.

The graphs of water temperature over the last 2 years have been off the charts - literally; required adjusting the y-axis:

https://twitter.com/LeonSimons8/status/1754540413350732180

But why is that? Why a sudden jump this year?

One component is that El Nino started. Until 2023 we were in La Nina that was suppressing ocean temperatures.

The reduction of sulfur dioxide pollution from shipping in 2020 has had a pro-warming effect.

Change in the fuels cargo ships use. Previous fuels where high in sulfur which is all kinds of nasty, but has the benefit if seeding clouds. More warming this year is due to fewer clouds, at least partially.

Another component besides el ninõ could be pollution from shipping emissions: https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2022-10-06-new-analysis-shipping-e...

If I remember correctly: Ships were using a particular type of gas that was outlawed recently. Turns out it was also acting as a coolant for the atmosphere. The bad news is that global warming is further along than we expected. The good news is that we now have evidence that a global campaign for cooling the atmosphere can actually work.

Can’t find sources right now, but it was very interesting when it came out ~6 months ago.

> it was very interesting when it came out ~6 months ago.

It was also underreported. Hank Green made a great video about it.[1] It lists some sources in the description.

[1]: https://youtu.be/dk8pwE3IByg?si=aiOv-7MGZRa6D9lS

https://www.science.org/content/article/changing-clouds-unfo...

Tyty I tried looking for the link and couldn’t find any information. Felt like I was going crazy

The next self reply to that tweet (xeet?) hypothesizes it is reduction in aerosols (massive reduction in sulfur in global shipping):

https://twitter.com/LeonSimons8/status/1754541230774419929

I heard that ships have cleaner fuel so their exhaust don't block as much solar radiation.[1]

[1] https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2023/ea/d2ea0...!

There are lots of forces, and the feedback loops are starting to hit.

- Warming has been going on for 200 years, so we are deep into it.

- The polar ice sheet has been shrinking because it is warmer. So instead of the long summer days reflecting off the ice, they are absorbed by the ocean.

- Shipping has been eliminating sulphur from bunker fuel to reduce acid rain and smog (2020 change), and the lack of smog allows more sun to reach the earth.

The recent shock of cleaner shipping exhaust has combined with the historical warming and the feedback loops of falling ice albedo (and others) shows up in warmer water.

https://www.nasa.gov/missions/aqua/nasa-study-finds-evidence...

https://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-...

My wife is taking a course in environmental architecture, and the information she's been sharing is nothing short for terrifying. Worse, the messaging about "doing your part" seems embarrassingly naive now.

One way or the other, people will be doing their part. Might as well get used to consuming less now before contraction forces the issue.

It’s more about building your life to maximize self sufficiency with the understanding that you will still need to rely on society for some needs. Also living somewhere with low climate risk and high confidence of access to fresh water for the remainder of your life (and that of loved ones, if applicable).

When contraction occurs, if you’ve planned properly, it’ll be news you read about, not impact on your life.

TLDR Optimize for the expectation of persistent volatility.

Where are these places?

Well, there are plenty of maps that show which areas will be impacted more than others.

Climate havens, near the great lakes in the US.

FEMA has a list somewhere, but IIRC, the top of it included places like Buffalo, a few cities in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Ann Arbor. Established cities along the great lakes are supposedly best positioned, but I've seen reports indicating that the age of the cities' infrastructure was a weakness for basically every one of the supposed climate havens

This site is pretty good for checking out the various risks by county or census tract for about 15 different climate risks.

https://hazards.fema.gov/nri/map

Jurisdiction is crucial too.

The chances that a Western government will leave you alone during all of this are virtually zero.

The chances you'll do better elsewhere are worse, unless you're a warlord. I have looked at places off the map for the next 100 years for this purpose. Maybe I'm wrong, where would you go to be self sufficient and ungovernable outside the Western world?

Ideally, but I wonder if that's how the psychology will play out. People faced with an uncertain future may just as likely throw caution to the wind instead? https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/tiktok-young-worker...

Why? Why it's not better to enjoy why it lasts?

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

"The agenda includes values of nonviolence, compassion, curiosity and respect, with a framework for constructive action."

We're still talking about Humans, right?

We are so screwed.

"Doing your part" always seemed like a nice way for the rich to put their heads in the sand.

Meanwhile at least 95% of the world population lives from paycheck to paycheck (immediate existential threat versus long term threat) and doesn't have the financial means to buy solar panels, EVs, etc., but also more durable items instead of cheap stuff from China.

No snowflake is single-handedly responsible for the avalanche, plus rich people pollute the most anyway, especially those who live in the west.

But this is why avalanche safety doesn't involve asking individual snowflakes to change their behavior.

> "doing your part" seems embarrassingly naive now.

Yes and no.

I would even go as far as to say that nihilism of no value in doing the right thing has been one reason we have reach this point -- we have lost a lot of collective action because of the sentiment that nothing you will do will matter. Collective action requires individual action.

The major industries don't just pollute for the sake of it, they respond to demand for which we individually share a part of the blame.

I can choose to eat steak from pastures made from burned Amazon rainforest, or I can choose more local, less carbon-heavy food. I can choose bottled spring water, or use my tap.

I can choose to take shorter showers.

I can choose to buy a smaller car and rent when I only really need the horse-power to drag a trailer.

I can choose to take public transport a bit more often.

I can choose to buy fast-fashion and replace my clothes often, or I can repair or buy repair services from a local vendor.

And so on.

Not all options are open to everyone, but like no raindrop is responsible for a flood, no person is responsible for anthropogenic climate change.

> they respond to demand for which we individually share a part of the blame.

I believe a large part of the blame should go to advertising.

Advertising works or it wouldn't exist. And it stimulates consumerism by definition.

Personal opinion, but kill advertising and you solve a lot of problems.

> The major industries don't just pollute for the sake of it, they respond to demand for which we individually share a part of the blame.

It seems to me like one could use the same argument regarding slave labor, but somehow we manage to force companies to comply there.

In many places across the world it took herculean effort to force that change. But it did not happen because some abstract group of something did cause it to happen. It required major concerted actions, sometimes violent, of many individuals willing to take personal responsibility to change the situation.

You might be surprised that the entire slavery abolitionist movement was driven by people who refused consume goods from slavery, and partake in the institution.

Local food makes basically no difference unless you're talking about crops that have a shelf life of a day or so. For everything else, distribution is well under 10% of the carbon footprint.

Shorter showers make basically no difference to carbon footprint unless your water is heated by an antique. Our electric water heater is less than 10% our power bill, and most of that goes into standby mode.

Smaller cars matter more than the above, but are basically just pissing into the wind. Halving transportation CO2 per mile won't be anywhere close enough to keep us under 2.5C.

Taking public transit a bit more often also doesn't matter. What percentage of your CO2 footprint is it reducing?

Avoiding fast-fashion mostly matters for microplastics (the clothing industry's carbon footprint isn't that big), but I doubt clothes were ever a significant fraction of the plastic you throw away.

Summarizing, if everyone did everything you said, we'd still be completely screwed. We need infrastructure level fixes instead:

- ban power plants that emit CO2

- set up international protections for timberland, and sanction / bomb any country that ignores them (cutting down rainforests should be treated in the same way as terrorist attacks)

- add a $2 per gallon atmospheric carbon capture tax to gasoline. This means that, for every gallon of gas sold, we'd sequester the emissions of two gallons worth of gas. It also means EVs and hybrids, hydrogen fuel cell, and other technologies will rapidly become more popular

- fund public transit (busses and trains) at the same level as the road network

- tax the crap out of plastic so that natural fibers (and paper bags) are economically viable. This'd less than double the price of stuff.

No individual can pull any of those levers except via political means or via technological innovation.

Choice is a privilege.

That's obvious to everyone. And I am one of those who have lots of choices, and I have an ethical obligation to use it correctly against those who have less leeway to adjust their lives.

- I can choose to buy a smaller car and rent when I only really need the horse-power to drag a trailer.

Rising average weight of cars around proofs that people do not care about saving environment. Safety first?

But I wouldn't blame consumers for buying what manufacturers make. Individual never has significant impact on environment as corporations does.

So first we need to stop with hypocrisy to make people believe in narration of helping our future.

I agree with all of this. Much regulatory action amounts to forcing people to make different choices. If they just made those choices, we would need less regulation. There are cases where individual choice alone is inadequate, such as when we need to pool our resources to achieve something or we need a central organizer to make collective action possible, but a vast portion of the legislation proposed is aimed squarely at changing individual choices.

On top of that, making a choice oneself inspires hope and commitment. If you make the hard choice, sacrifices near-term comfort for the common good, cognitive dissonance rewards you. Likewise, if you make a morally lazy choice, cognitive dissonance soothes your conscience and makes it harder to choose otherwise in the future.

Ultimately even the behaviour of big polluters is driven by consumer demands. Consumers make financial choices that are incongruent with their values, all the time.

If consumers didn't demand so much cheap energy we would have less coal burning power stations, for example.

People fund corporations, we have to pay for alternatives which are usually a significantly higher cost that we refuse to accept.

Narratives that corporations that are responsible for a majority of pollution are BS. The corporations are at the mercy of our individual wallets.

I do think it's a government's role to unify and lead people through this. Provide quality alternatives, support offramping, etc. Without this essential cultural contract it just won't work.

Individual effort is only meaningful if it's coordinated and a majority of people buy into it. But we can't get that leadership behind the effort if we, the people, just keep voting it out.

So while it's admirable to individually "do your part" we know for a fact the overwhelming majority of people don't actually give a flip enough to prioritize the planet and work together.

Raindrops do contribute to floods, but you need coordination to get there.

> Collective action requires individual action.

This is demonstrably false. I'd posit that basically no lasting societal changes have been implemented by large scale individual sacrifices.

In a similar vein, as this has recently been in the news and on HN a lot lately, when it comes to the obesity epidemic, we've been talking about "individual responsibility" and "diet and exercise" for literally many decades and we've only seen global waistlines expand year after year. The technological advancement of semaglutide is literally the first advancement that many obesity researchers believe will actually make a dent in overall obesity.

I think you are misunderstanding me. When I say say "collective action requires individual action" I mean things like this:

- A union is not a piece of paper, it is a group of people who individually joined, and then as individuals participated in the collective strikes for improved labour conditions. Early movements included significant violence against these individuals who often kept on fighting.

- An abolitionist movement is not an abstract concept, it contained multitudes of individuals willing to fight for a cause and route slaves to safety and lasting change. Many died doing the right thing.

- Women's suffrage was not just an idea, it required many individual women and men to stand up and take action. Narges Mohammadi chose individual responsibility for her cause and so do many others, and they are paying a heavy price.

- Marriage equality for LGBTQ+ is currently happening around the world because individuals take collective action, often with significant sacrifices and death brought on these minorities.

The power of collective action comes from the multiplication of individuals, not just the sum of them.

What terrifying information is she sharing with you?

A couple more threads:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39268387 -- flagged (why?)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39272301 -- no traction

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39272405 -- no traction

>flagged (why?)

Some user flag posts that have a good chance of ending up with subpar discussion.

In this case, it's more likely to be flagged by the recurring contingent of climate denialists that always show up in these threads.

I make no judgement of which users or if the discussion will objectively be bad. Just answering GeoA's question.

Brigade, the post gets flagged, and discussion disappears. Victory. It so easy with the HN mod system that it is almost embarrassing.

I said it before, I'll say it again: where there are rules there's a game, where there's a game, there are players and the players will play the game.

In another thread today one mentioned Hypercanes

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

And I so, haha, 12°C higher ocean temperatures needed, I will not live long enough to see this.

Not so sure anymore.

On the one hand, it’s incredibly cool that this method (measuring via sponges) even works. On the other hand, what a depressing result.

I had the same thought - really cool that they calibrated it against modern measurements and were then able to find known historic anomalies in the data. On the other hand, it would be nice to get one or two stories where things are going better than expected, wouldn't it? Of course, then the deniers will just use them as evidence that everything is going to be OK, so we don't need to do anything.

> On the other hand, it would be nice to get one or two stories where things are going better than expected

This is that story! The change in temperature is the result of outlawing a particular chemical used in ship fuel. That means that we were subconsciously geo-engineering the atmosphere with positive results.

https://www.science.org/content/article/changing-clouds-unfo...

https://youtu.be/dk8pwE3IByg?si=lqt2E9Q3GMExhLZ-

Almost seems too-good-to-be-true right? Such a tight margin-of-error...

We need more rapid cooling and SO2 right now — https://makesunsets.com is leading the way but we need as many companies in the rapid cooling space as possible. We need to address the heatstroke in an emergency-room-medicine style before going into the proverbial ICU of carbon sequestration and nuclear power buildout.

Sure there will be many moving parts to any successful recovery, but we should be careful. The cure for heat stroke isn't a freedive in arctic waters. Be wary of anyone who makes singular arguments.

The immediate cure for heatstroke is LITERALLY an "arctic dive" in the form of immersion in an ice bath https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/heat-stroke/d....

I didn't say ice bath, I said freedive, precisely for the reason that one is much more easily reversible than the other once you reach a sustainable temperature. If it was as easy to remove SO2 from the atmosphere as it would be to step out of an ice bath, then I would have said ice bath.

I think doing a small amount of aerosol injection right now is an appropriate way to confirm that we understand how they work/what the effects will be. I hope that the work this company is doing is being adequately studied.

Yes, SO2 falls out of the atmosphere after about one year. We already have proof of this in the form of volcanic eruptions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injectio....

SO2 is a short-term, fast-acting, and reversible cooling option. That is why we need to massively adopt it ASAP.

Conveniently in such conversations people never bring up where these compounds go when they "fall out". In fact they precipitate or are deposited on surfaces in the form of sulfuric acid. This harms plants and causes all manner of respiratory issues. There's a reason the EPA has fought so hard to reduce SO2 emissions.

I get the impulse for unilateral techno-optimist solutions but continually releasing sulfur dioxide into the air is not a sustainable option in any respect. Sustainability and "more, faster" ideologies are not compatible. You will be imposing health risks on plants and animals that many simply will not be able to mitigate for themselves. It is always apparent very quickly in conversations like this that the people proposing such "solutions" spend most of their time indoors in filtered air.

As a co-founder of Make Sunsets, I'd like to clarify the role of SO2 in climate control. SO2 is considered "easily removable" because, when combined with water, it forms sulfuric acid and precipitates out. This mechanism partially explains why 2023 was the hottest year on record; the EPA's stringent regulations on SOx emissions have significantly reduced the aerosols in our troposphere, removing critical reflective materials.

The impact of SO2, including its effectiveness and atmospheric residence time, varies based on its deployment location (latitude, longitude, altitude), concentration, and particle size.

For instance, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) 2020 regulations have reduced SO2 emissions from cargo ships in the troposphere, leading to decreased respiratory illnesses near ports and less acid rain. However, this reduction in SO2 has also warmed ocean shipping lanes, prompting discussions about reintroducing sulfur into the troposphere. [1]

Deploying SO2 in the stratosphere, above most of the atmospheric water vapor and where winds reach speeds of 200kph, allows it to spread globally and remain airborne longer (1 to 3 years). This higher placement necessitates less frequent applications for the desired reflective effect. The 1991 eruption of Mt. Pinatubo demonstrated this, injecting 20 million tons of SO2 into the stratosphere [2], cooling the Earth by 0.5°C and, according to some models, temporarily reversing decades of warming.

Stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) is likened to Earth's sunscreen, [3] a temporary measure to reflect the Sun's energy and mitigate warming while we address the larger challenge of removing over a trillion tons of greenhouse gases emitted since the 1850s and transitioning away from fossil fuels.

Climate change demands immediate action, and SAI offers us the critical time needed to live in a world with fewer catastrophic climate events.

[1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vGEDuEn6uikvGZpR9oZplPPh...

[2] For reference, estimates suggest that global SO2 emissions were around 131 million tons in 1970 and continued to rise, peaking at approximately 150 million tons by the late 1980s in the troposphere.

[3] https://twitter.com/MakeSunsets/status/1741336520366444822

It is absolutely unbelievable that we now just dump SO2 in the ocean...

Pinatubo had effects on ozone too and not good ones, just like the recent Australian wildfires.

> Dr. David W. Fahey, Director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Chemical Sciences Laboratory revealed that studies show sulfur aerosols from stratospheric aerosol injection could impact the ozone layer, but not catastrophically. The 1991 Mount Pinatubo volcanic eruption demonstrated the ozone layer's resilience after temporarily cooling the planet by 0.5°C. Despite uncertainties, these findings suggest geoengineering methods like SAI could be explored without causing irreversible damage to the ozone layer.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/09/climate/ozone-hole-restor...

Thanks for the link. I was going off some Susan Solomon papers about Australian wildfires citing Pinatubo.

I suspect we will end up resorting to large-scale geoengineering, certainly once people in wealthy countries start dying in high enough numbers, and I don't oppose it. But once we go down that road I am highly skeptical that humanity will ever wean ourselves off it.

As per the website: "Just one gram of our clouds offsets the warming effect of one ton of CO₂ for a year."

I would wager that politicians and business leaders who read such a statement would be relieved to hear that they no longer have to worry about a cure because the symptoms are treatable.

Point taken and that is certainly a risk, but the other risk is a massive anthropogenic extinction. We need fast-acting cooling solutions so that we have time to scale up long-term sustainable ones.

Agreed that it is a smaller risk. That's why I do not oppose geoengineering despite being reasonably confident that once we start that path we will be wholly incapable of quitting it.

What will kill people in wealthy countries?

COVID, but that apparently wasn't enough to change their mind to go vaccinate. Why would climate change deaths be any different?

A combination of stronger storms, more frequent coastal flooding, larger wildfires, and more severe heat waves.

Of course these sorts of things have always killed people and right now the statistical increases are small enough that it's not unreasonable to believe that they're just fluctuations within normal historical bounds. It would take significantly larger increases in severity and intensity for many people to accept climate change as a contributing factor.

So it's not just that we have to wait for people in wealthy countries to die, it's that we have to have to wait for them to die in high enough numbers that the average citizen acknowledges that there is a problem.

Stratospheric Aerosol Injection is, unfortunately, a third rail in the climate community right now. The perception is that it's very dangerous due to the unknown knock-on effects. Plus, the way it's depicted in sci-fi (e.g., Snowpiercer) doesn't help.

We actually have a good understanding of what SO2 does in the atmosphere thanks to both volcanic eruptions and (until recently) the large amounts of particulate sulfur emitted from oceangoing ships. I think the more interesting question is how much risk we're willing to tolerate versus doing nothing at all. The risk of letting sea level rise continue unabated seems much worse to me than a (temporary!) intervention while we figure out full decarbonization.

I agree that we need a "quick fix" before things get too far out of control. I'm really concerned about things like the Gulf Stream weakening and the resulting rapid climate change.

It turns out that we've been accidentally doing geoengineering like this for years, and we've suddenly stopped due to regulations: RhodesianHunter posted this link in a different thread: (https://www.thedailybeast.com/weve-been-accidentally-geoengi...)

No we don't. It's nice it being a little warmer. Anything else is unjustified fearmongering.Historically good times coincided with warmer temperatures.

man, the climate apathy on this website discourages me. i thought HN users were smart? yall are blinded by your desire to be a contrarian and skeptic.

HN users are just like most people: smart in their area of expertise and wildly optimistic about how smart they are outside of it.

Maybe. Or we know junk science and fake data when we see it. I guess the 'replication crisis' doesn't apply to the holy climate science.

What do you mean by "replication crisis" in relation to this data?

> Sponges from the Caribbean retain a record of ocean temperatures stretching back hundreds of years.

That's not data. That's method. Probably cannot be replicated.

I still remember the big group of climate change deniers on Slashdot in the early 00s. The consensus was that it was not real.

I'm not optimistic honestly. We have politicians throughout the world whose political platform revolves around denying that the global warming(climate change) even exists. With this level of irrationality it's hard to see the world collaborating towards a solution for something that in the best scenario is going to change the world as we know it and in the worst scenario represents an existential threat.

We thought that with the internet and the acessibility of scientific content we would have a global society of conscious people with a high degree of scientific literacy and instead of that what we got is the ressurgence of the flat earth theory, fakenews about vaccination and a growing general hostility to science.

I think at some point in the future we will get "used" to progressively catastrophic climatic events, and the people who created this state of things will either be dead or will just adapt their discourse as "it's sad but it was a necessary step to avoid a global green dictatorship".

Agree - it's also extremely concerning that otherwise intelligent and educated people I know that have never been climate deniers have shifted into this absurd climate "optimism" which borders on delusional that's approximately like "well, eventually things will get so bad that capitalism will save us and we'll plant a bunch of trees or capture carbon or pump coolants into the atmosphere" and is generally unbothered by it otherwise. It's astounding to me, no matter how much you try to reason and give examples of why these approaches can't/haven't been working, it's like trying to get through a brick wall.

I understand why - to have any kids right now would be terrifying. Hell, to be under 50 right now is terrifying. But just because the truth is scary does not mean we should retreat to delusion.

It's astounding to me, no matter how much you try to reason and give examples of why these approaches can't/haven't been working, it's like trying to get through a brick wall.

Do you think trying to force everyone to radically alter their lifestyles is going to work any better?

Once again I find myself confused when so-called environmentalists seamlessly shift between "renewables will soon be so cheap and abundant that there's no need for nuclear power" to "we're all doomed unless we strictly ration energy and abolish capitalism".

> Do you think trying to force everyone to radically alter their lifestyles is going to work any better?

I don't know where you think I said that. However, climate change is going to force radically altered lifestyles, and if you disagree with this, you simply aren't paying any attention.

> Once again I find myself confused when so-called environmentalists seamlessly shift between "renewables will soon be so cheap and abundant that there's no need for nuclear power" to "we're all doomed unless we strictly ration energy and abolish capitalism".

It seems like you're creating an argument that I did not present out of thin air. Have fun arguing with your strawman.

I heard interesting tidbit on Sabine's YouTube channel.

That climate scientist have actually 'toned' down the doom outlooks. Because it turns people off to much. Like there will be no action if people knew how bad it was.

So they take 'averages', that kind of show warming, but 'not that bad'.

When really, it is 'really bad'.

So the 'right' is saying all the climate scientist are 'doomer's and causing sensational hype to promote their theories to sell books.

When really, they are toning it down. To be as reasonable as possible. To be 'as sure' as possible.

When they tone it down, they look like idiots because their most pessimistic predictions from one era become the most optimistic ones from the next.

But of course, politics.

> That climate scientist have actually 'toned' down the doom outlooks. Because it turns people off to much. Like there will be no action if people knew how bad it was.

That sounds wrong. They should be giving people the most accurate estimates and the error range, not toning it down (or going the other way).

> So the 'right' is saying all the climate scientist are 'doomer's and causing sensational hype to promote their theories to sell books.

So now it is a partisan political issue? No chance of sensible discussion at all then.

Maybe I shouldn't have said 'scientist'.

Scientist have 100's of studies, and create 100's of models. The results are a range.

Then various agencies release 'reports' that are summaries of the models. But, like in a lot of fields, you can toss outliers like the top 5 extremes hot and cold. And of course, it's a report, so the language can be as 'toned down', or 'hyped' as you want to make it, or judge it. I'm sure if it was over-hyped, many would complain that way too.

What this video was then explaining, was that some of the 'hot' models might actually have been more accurate. So the entire report is even more skewed 'cold', the emergency is actually greater.

> Because it turns people off to much.

No, that's not what she said at all! Her main point was that the "hot models" were not being considered as very reliable because they showed poor power predicting past climate when compared to other models, but when applied to predicting the weather within shorter periods (e.g. a few days) they were actually better, so that gives weight to the hypothesis that the "hot models" are actually more accurate than previously thought, so they may need to adjust the currently accepted rates of warming to be higher... scientists didn't downplay the "hot models" because they were trying to make people more comfortable - that would be doing terrible science! Science doesn't care about feelings.

You are correct.

I was referring to start of the video when referring to the reporting bodies that aggregate the model data.

Of course science doesn't have 'feelings' but the people that report it do. And, you can take the same words' and some people call it 'hype' and others call it 'downplayed'.

Maybe I shouldn't have said 'scientist'.

Scientist have 100's of studies, and create 100's of models. The results are a range.

What this video was then explaining, was that some of the 'hot' models might actually have been more accurate. So the entire report is even more skewed 'cold', the emergency is actually greater.

You are correct. The Video was all about the 'hot' models and how they might actually be the most correct. Thus the reports are skewed in wrong direction overall.

I've been saying this for years: climate science isn't science (in the falsifiable sense), climate is nonlinear and humans don't like to rock the boat. This is especially true with a big, cross-disciplinary project like the IPCC report.

(Yes, I understand parts of climate science are falsifiable... I'm at least semi-educated as a former meteorologist and former PDE guy. But the conclusions of the IPCC report are not testable.)

Kind of like how biology isn't a science? Because observations doesn't count, since they are not testable?

This is just playing with words. That 'science' must be 'testable' or it is not science, and all other fields that either have observations, or theory, is not 'science'.

Theoretical Physics? Not science?

What word should we use?

If you look at successive IPCC reports you can see that many of the worst case scenarios have been dropped or relegated to footnotes and appendices.

How much do wars cost and what's their contribution to global warming? That could totally be fixed in a short order had there been a genuine concern of the politicians.

A lot. They're extremely environmentally destructive of course, and the defense force operates 100% on fossil fuels.

Are you saying that world peace could be fixed in short order?

Yes, that's what I am saying. Are you fighting with your neighbour right this moment and can't stop the fighting and talk?

Does this matter? If these results show that the ocean was cooler earlier than we thought, why is that important to our climate change goals? Aren't the absolute temperature level goals more important than the relative temperature goals? And the absolute temperature goals arent affected by this finding.

I am not an ecologist or earth scientist, so please let me know if I am missing something.

High base effect. If you measure growth from erronously high starting point and then base your estimates on that mistakenly low growth rate - you'll significantly underestimate the future values.

I'm not sure what you mean by absolute temperature level vs relative temperature. The reason that these finding are important is because

1. The climate goals set in the Paris Agreement are looking realistically more impossible by the day. If this is finding is correct 1.5C is literally impossible and 2C looks implausible given current trajectories

2. This means we've been underestimating the amount of change that has already occurred which means we might be closer to climate tipping points

3. We've been finding that Climate Sensitivity, that is how likely a tipping point like glacier collapses or losing the Amazon Rainforest, is MORE sensitive than we thought. This means lower levels of warming will have bigger impacts. So coupled with already being passed. For example 1.5C is considered the cut off point for which we'll see a global extinction of coral reef ecosystems. Meaning it's likely to late to save 25% of marine ecosystems

No it doesn't, just Don't Look Up.

There's been some talk about ship emissions changing and created more global warming because some of the chemicals they pumped actually had a cooling effect. I can't remember the specifics, but was there ever a reason why we couldn't just pump out cooling agents into the atmosphere?

Since it is actually a nasty, acid rain causing, Sulfur Oxide.

Given the choice - and I'm sincerely asking this, because I don't know enough about the subject - what'd be worse here, the disease or the cure? Could we live with acid rain if it staved off cataclysmic global warming?

Acid rain kills trees and other plant-life long term. This is bad for global warming... it's not an "either or".

If the goal is to conduct intentional geoengineering to reduce global warming, there are better things to inject into the atmosphere than sulfur dioxide. Basically just reflective dust.

Had to look this up, very interesting: https://www.thedailybeast.com/weve-been-accidentally-geoengi...

There was measurable temperature change in the days after 9/11.

Here is a decent explanation as to why not: https://youtu.be/CHJKKsOHtAk?si=FYd1FawD-_GN_Cex

explain flat soft drinks... Your beer, champaign, and all carbonated drinks contain CO2 that is dissolved in solution and as the temperature increases as it sits in your glass the CO2 comes out of solution.

This isn't an IQ test: now think of the oceans, as temperature changes the solubility of CO2 changes inversely proportional to temperature just like your soda pop becomes flat when it warms up. Additionally this is why soft drinks are served cold.

Flat earth theory confirmed?

Soft drinks are served cold because people enjoy drinking cold drinks.

> Your beer, champaign, and all carbonated drinks contain CO2 that is dissolved in solution and as the temperature increases as it sits in your glass the CO2 comes out of solution.

That’s mostly due to pressure, carbonated drinks are stored at 30-50 psi. Even a warm carbonated drink will produce bubbles.

I simply don't understand this result - it takes ~4,000x as much energy to raise 1kg of water 1 degree compared to air. And how could this trend have started in 1850 (a clear trend from 1850-1900 is observed in the data in Figure 5b)? The sponges were collected at 30-100 m depth too, so this isn't just a surface effect.

You are correct, it couldn't and in fact 1850 has traditionally been referred to in climatology as "pre industrial", but this site is really the wrong place to try and actually talk about science. The intellectual curiosity fans here don't like it at all.

Thank you - I was surprised by the down votes, although I could have added more detail to make my objection even more clear, e.g:

Using the Stefan Boltzmann law, 1 extra degree corresponds to about an extra 3 W/m2 of greenhouse radiation (using an emissivity of 0.6 for the atmosphere.) To raise 1 m2, 1 cm thick water (10 kg) by 1 C would require (4 J/g/K)*(10,000 g) ~ 40,000 J, or about 4 hours. So 100 m would take 4 years, 3 km (the average depth of the ocean) ~100 years, assuming perfect mixing. So the ocean temperature would lag by decades, possibly centuries, even if the atmosphere ramped up by 1 degree from 1850-1900, which it didn't.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_layer#Oceanic_mixed_la...

Just curious, is there any implementation of infrastructures that actually harvest greenhouse gases for whatever profit? I assume we would need a LOT of them, but is it possible to build something close to the poles, assuming a lot of gases are leaking from there due to ice melting?

The problem is that all the CO2 is in the air from extracting usable energy from chemical bonds. Due to thermodynamics we need to expend more than the energy that was extracted to recreate these bonds. And the useful work is just addressing prior harm. You aren't getting widgets or food from this process. Maybe someday we'll be producing graphene sheets or carbon nanotubes as a useful resource, but that's not currently on offer.

We don't necessarily need to recreate the bonds to sequester CO2. My understanding is that CO2 can be pumped underground in locations that used to hold natural gas. It does take lots of energy to pull the 400 ppm of CO2 out of the air. It is possible there are better sequestration methods than direct capture from the air.

If want to make green fuel from the CO2, that takes the same amount of energy as the fuel contains. Using green fuel in existing cars, trucks, and trains won't work. It only makes sense for things like shipping or airplanes that go long distances. And other fuels like hydrogen, methane, or methanol that are easier to produce might work for those.

> It is possible there are better sequestration methods than direct capture from the air.

There are yes. Rock weathering is probably the most feasible and simple.

How does that work if it's the atmosphere that is heating from man made global warming?

Just because a lot of people are too delicate for the conversation, we are experiencing a human apocalypse. It's really the end for us, but the oil execs have to pay down the yacht bill and we can't have people angry at the diner counter in Peoria over gas prices.

This happens all the time in the natural world, it would be funny if it wasn't tragic. We developed tools that let us transition from a S to J population type, without time for cultural adaptation to that new reality. People here don't know enough about the topic, and are swayed by "LOL look at Malthus" type gotcha discourse due to the normalcy cognitive bias.

The ideas here about 'democratic support' are absolutely laughable. Who cares what various locusts think or feel when they have swarmed and eaten all the available plant matter? They just starve and die because they overshot their environment's carrying capacity.

Mars is entirely unviable and thinking otherwise is deluding yourself with science fiction.

This will be the defining realization of the next 1-10 years.

It impresses me how many global warming skeptics are in this forum as opposed to, say, the scientific community.

Is this due to the level of deluded optimism that I always hear is a prerequisite for one’s startup succeeding?

Not all startup bros are primarily scientifically curious, some are just driven by profit. Or, as a wise man once said: "nature decays! But Latinum lasts forever."

Understanding something often means asking basic questions. This forum has many folks who value questioning like a skeptic, something like a Socratic dialog. Kind of unfair to call people deluded just because you and many others have reached a conclusion long ago.

I'm exercising skepticism to be skeptical of the people who exercise skepticism over this topic given the preponderance of evidence. If one were being skeptical, one might wonder if skepticism over climate change was irrational and emotional rather than rooted in the pursuit of truth.

Absolutely man!! I've been trying to tell my neighbor this for ages. I keep taking shits on his lawn and he's getting all upset about it saying that it's ruining his lawn. I tell him I value questioning like a skeptic, something like a Socratic dialog. Kind of unfair to call me deluded just because he and many others have reached a conclusion long ago.

> Skepticism, also spelled scepticism in British English, is a questioning attitude or doubt toward knowledge claims that are seen as mere belief or dogma.

Questioning anthropogenic climate change is not skepticism.

deniers do believe climate acceptance is dogmatic, that our modern epistemology is a deviation and largely a political ideology.

They don’t have anything like that. Just like flat earth believers don’t have anything like that. They specifically don’t care what is reality. They pretend to care, but even if they themselves prove otherwise, even then they won’t change their mind, because it’s not about truth, or what is dogmatic. We just create these explanations, because we try to make it logical. The answer is probably way closer to “try to belong to a group”, and “being alone”, than anything like thinking about what is dogmatic, or whether the current concept of knowledge is all right or not.

Skepticism: Taking a look at the available evidence and following it to the result.

Denial: Taking a look at the available evidence and then arguing against the it ad nauseam because you don't like what you see.

If you've never heard anything about global warming before (no idea how that should have happened, but let's give you the benefit of the doubt here) you can be skeptical. Then you look at the available evidence and well, that's that. The conclusion is clear. From then on it's denial to run around "sorry, I haven't reached the conclusion yet, please convince me".

Hi, sorry I've got an effect on some folks. I'm not a climate change denier, and that climate change is real and that we've caused it are things I consider uncontroversial. I've not seen people like that in this thread nor on HN. They were likely flagged in this thread before I've seen it, and I can't see them.

I had the skeptics of imminent climate catastrophes in mind, or in general, folks who don't straight up deny climate change but still question some of the literature. It bothers me that these are lumped in with fringe deniers, and what's with the "deluded optimism" jab anyway? I don't agree with them either but cmon, that I'm sure have rubbed some the wrong way.

Also known as sealioning.

I mean, you have good heuristics, rereading what I wrote.

I ask dumb questions to tease out useful responses all the time, I don't think you're wrong in the general case, and an exhortation not to rush to judgement can only be good. But these guys have been at it at least twenty years. Every time they pop up with "what about the Mediaeval Warm Period/Little Ice Age/Roman Climatic Optimum?" someone explains that they're comparing local phenomena with a global phenomenon and they go quiet until the next time. There has to come a point where you are forced to assume bad faith.

I see Little Ice Age I assume bad faith and as much as possible politely reply to point out the irrelevance - not so much as to give them a response but to reply for the sake of young minds wandering by who might wonder about that sink hole.

I'd encourage all the genuinely curious to ponder all the angles, is it

* sun fluctuating,

* heat from below,

* can a gas in parts per million (PPM) really insulate enough to make a difference,

* biased data from urban heat islands,

* .. etc, etc, etc.

and for them to realise that all these things have been given honest consideration and found wanting .. decades ago in most cases.

I wasn't aware of the Little Ice Age being much of a denier talking point. It actually does seem fairly relevant to this story since these sponges lived through that time period. But I'm mostly just looking at the XKCD temperature timeline https://xkcd.com/1732/

It waxes and wanes I'm sure, but I've seen far too much raising of the Medieval Warm Period and the The Little Ice Age as "Aha, Gotcha!"'s over the past three decades to push it down the list of denier "but what abouts".

They're valid subjects in their own right, to be sure, but rarely raised in public forums for the interesting details in context, mostly for the "<something> <something> AGW must be wrong! ('cause climate has changed before fossil fuel usage!)"

The actual variation was small in comparison to what we are seeing now and the effect more localised than truly global - it tends to be lobbed in as a hand grenade along with "what about higher C02 levels many hundreds of thousands of years ago".

"Ice Age" itself is another awful phrase for generating confusion - there are multiple meanings and usages, for some professionals we are still in an Ice Age as we still have glaciers (free, not polar, ice) and this Ice Age experiences advances and retreats of large glaciers .. sometimes almost to the equator, othertimes back to the mountaintops. For most people "Ice Age" is when ice covers the UK and when it doesn't it's not.

Back to these sponges:

The surface waters above these sponges absolutely saw a small decrease in mean tempretures during the Little Ice Age.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02727...

No argument there.

I freely admit I haven't read enough here nor dug into the details to find out whether these sponges that lived deeper than surface waters saw a small decrease in mean tempreture at that time or not.

Is that in the paper at all?

I didn’t read the paper but did read the article and one of the cool aspects of it was that they did go back in the timeline to find known historical temperature anomalies after calibrating the sponges against a modern period with good temperature measurements, so I would assume so.

I just wonder if this actually does change the “baseline” Earth temperature as the article implies rather than just adds a bit more detail to known historical temperatures.

As far as the temperature variation thing and deniers, I’ve always thought Munroe did an excellent job with the visualization I linked above in showing why the current change is so unprecedented when compared with previous ones.

In the 1800s it was widely believed that humans could not cause animals to become extinct. As the thinking went, God created the world, and man is less than God, so to believe that man could destroy God's creation was heresy.

Oops! That sure was wrong, huh? But the same underlying beliefs persist to this day, with resolve tempered by the knowledge that actually doing something about the current situation would require a meagre amount of discomfort, and is thus unimaginable to the relatively wealthy people you'll find here.

HN is heavily male, and many men listen to media that promotes a kind of package deal of beliefs. In comparison, the scientific community is just relatively small.

Why this is gender specific: https://www.americansurveycenter.org/featured_data/the-growi...

What part of that source supports the claim that "men listen to media that promotes a kind of package deal of beliefs"?

Is it mostly Americans that are skeptic? I don't hear of global warming skepticism from forums elsewhere.

Global warming skepticism is everywhere but since we are on US site bias is natural.

In every topic here about energy in Europe there are always comments how Germany is pro-coal etc etc. In every topic about US car-culture there is critical mass of comments explaining how it is necessary.

Per capita CO₂ emissions, 2022 [0]

- France: 4.6t

- 'coal-driven' Germany: 8t

- USA: 14.9t

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?t...

I think there are so many cultural pathways that lead to anti climate science today (and anti-vaxx, etc.) that it's impossible to list them all.

Generally they feed narcissism, and they must: in order to believe the anti-climate change rhetoric, you must first believe that you have hidden knowledge that makes you smarter than climate scientists (and more knowledgeable than them in something they have been studying for decades), or have some hidden knowledge that they are all lying, basically mind reading. You have to avoid the empathy and reflection that might make you understand their position, or cause you too question your own. Nowadays you even have to commit "doctrine over person" and deny the warming you see out your own window.

I think that is a bit common in programmer circles, and I have guesses as to why, but I would love to see a study in the space as to why.

The Galileo Fallacy...

Maybe you should read your message first before talking about narcissism. God forbid someone question something these days or even have the slightest need for a conversation, that you automatically become a whatever denier and a non believer in science. Comments like yours and others similar attitude turned all of this into a new cult or religion in which anyone who doesn’t 100% align with whatever views you have is dismissed and considered an idiot and the enemy. What do you want people to do, should we all live whatever lives we have in doom and gloom waiting for the apocalypse. Read the comments here, it reads like some doomsday cult of people proclaiming their superiority to the filthy peasants that don’t believe in science. Yeah, I’ll ride my bike and be a vegan so that half the people on this forum that work in companies that pollute and destroy this planet in one day more than I would do in 100 lifetimes can feel good about themselves living in their condescending bubbles.

There's a bunch of reasons. To throw one onto the pile: because carbon emissions are an externality that the Invisible Hand seems to be having a real hard time suppressing, it sure seems like - and this is how it's gone so far, and there's a kind of cultural consensus around this - that the only way out of this could be be pretty heavy-handed government intervention.

For, similarly, a bunch of reasons (see "The Californian Ideology" for a start) there's a strong inclination in tech circles towards anti-regulation, anti-government, neoliberalism and/or libertarianism. So those two things are colliding head-on: when their ideology encounters a problem it can't solve, people often care more about their ideology than solving the problem. It's easier to deny the problem exists than to restructure their views.

Smart people tend to always think they are correct even on things they know literally nothing about.

Climate change is one of those things. You will hear the "just asking questions" or "skeptical" but climate change is finished science though tech bros tend to think it is not because of the TV they watch.

Because it's nonsense. All based on models with no history of being accurate. It's pseudo science as the Nobel Laurette for physics pointed out last year.

In that case seems like nothing that big happened, hasn’t it? No known apocalypse or anything similar.

In the same sense that an ongoing game of Russian Roulette does, sure.

And we’re back to scare-mongering, because that’s the only thing that still works on (a smaller and smaller) part of the population.

What happened to science and facts-based science? What happened to the “if climate heats up by just two degrees then very bad things will happen” that were uttered all throughout the 2000s, even going into the early 2010s? Where are those very bad things?

Is it genuinely inconcievable to you that a bad thing can take some time to occur? Especially on a planetary scale?

CO2 is 0.04% of the earth's atmosphere, amazing!

79% Nitrogen

21% Oxygen

0.9% Argon

0.1% Other (includes CO2)

"Small things can't ever hurt anyone" is a... tough theory to support scientifically.

Starting at the bottom with basic facts helps build understanding.

30 ng of botulinum toxin can kill you. What's your point?

Amazing how precise we can get these number with what appears to be a very tight margin of error.

The temperature estimating margin-of-error for sponges must be super tight! ;)

Life on earth has adapted to climate change for billions of years.

> billions of years

Unfortunately this is bit quicker.

Indeed. The planet has endured multiple mass extinction events and life has continued to exist. Life will continue even after this wave of extinctions, which may or may not include humans.

What's your point?

Adapt now is my point.

yes, but have humans?

1.7C degrees of warming later and the Maldives will not. be. submerged. LETS GO!

The Maledives may more likely be submerged if the Poles heat up by 1.7C, for a time frame of 50 years. The ice in the poles doesn't all melt immediately.

Fair enough but I can’t do anything about that. Letting go of these concerns has made my life way better. And thankfully, environmentalists support my viewpoint. It’s not my fault. It’s because of corporations.

I used to think the way forward was that we’d use less fossil fuels but it seems like that’s not on us individually. Most environmentalists today support large homes on country lots over polluted cities and prefer cars to virtue-signaling bikes.

Given that it’s actually better to live in this way I just decided to lean in. After all, they’re environmentalists. This is what they do. So nuclear and geothermal stuff is probably bad and gasoline in the truck we use as a second car is fine. Besides, I look around me and see green. How can I be wrong?

/s ?

I'd like to know what environmentalists you follow who support driving around in a second car as opposed to public transit or cycling.

Sierra Club SF opposes local housing. California Environmental Quality Act advocates use it to block bike lanes. And in general, California environmentalists talk about visions for "green space" over such use. POSIWID, right? If CEQA has been most effectively used against bike lanes and housing, then CEQA's purpose is to oppose bike lanes and housing.

But it's their job to know this, so I stay in my lane for the most part and cancelled my Terrapass etc. Only thing I kind of oppose is $4b/mi subway projects. I think we could use that more effectively.

But otherwise, I'm happy to support the mainstream environmentalist view that geothermal and nuclear power is evil and that living stacked on top of each other like sardines is a bad thing for the environment. The second car is just a consequence of that. You can't expect my wife and me to live far away and bike 50 mi in independent directions. Listen, I'm in STEM, so I could not possibly comprehend or understand the nuances of the climate. I've got to trust the local experts and the Sierra Club et al. are local experts.

You should get a private jet too, that is how all the truly committed environmentalists travel these days. </sarc>

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