World surpasses key warming threshold across an entire year | Hacker News Reader

World surpasses key warming threshold across an entire year

cnbc.com

95 pointscroes156 comments

> The findings do not represent a break of the landmark Paris Agreement, which aims to “limit global warming to well below 2, preferably to 1.5 degrees Celsius, compared to pre-industrial levels” over the long term.

It seems safe to say we are now locked in to a path that will break the Paris Agreement, unless "long term" includes space sunshades, scattering reflective particles in the upper atmosphere, or other similarly drastic geoengineering solutions.

I guess at some point we will start geoengineering which will either work or kill a lot of people.

We already do massive geoengineering. That's what all that CO2 is doing! We're just doing it incompetently.

For reference: all that CO2 is equal to about 0.04% of human atmosphere. Of which 3% is from human activity.

So 0.0012% of CO2 in atmosphere caused by humans. Nature is responsible for the remaining 0.0388% in atmosphere.

That's a bit dishonest as the CO2 level has risen by almost 50% from pre industrial times so you would need a very narrow definition of human activity.

It's been much lower and higher in the past. In reality, CO2 has little, if any, effect on climate change.

Much more impactful are the sun and clouds.

Sure, all the climate scientist are wrong and some random guy in the internet knows more.

Actually there are various climate and other scientists who have this position. These scientists usually don't depend on grants and such for research.

The thing is, whomever I will link, you will have some accusation that the scientist’s opinion cannot be trusted for whatever reason. So discussion regarding this issue is kinda pointless anyway.

Time will proof these scientists opposing the human induced climate change narrative to be correct however.

- https://twitter.com/CO2Coalition/status/1755024453174542740

- https://twitter.com/robinmonotti/status/1753863552790618203

- https://twitter.com/robinmonotti/status/1753863954638459008

- https://twitter.com/robinmonotti/status/1753861517043208485

- https://twitter.com/TheChiefNerd/status/1752397688526569944

- https://twitter.com/Denachtzuster1/status/174509982623087414...

- https://twitter.com/WimKoning/status/1747299988231577860

It doesn't matter if the sun and the clouds have more effect. It only matters that one variable is changing, slowly but surely pushing the equilibrium.

>So 0.0012% of CO2 in atmosphere caused by humans. Nature is responsible for the remaining 0.0388% in atmosphere.

Unless you're discussing literal "human expelled co2", as in "the measure of peoples exhalations during breathing", then you're out by several orders of magnitude. The pre-industrial co2 concentration in the atmosphere trends between 180ppm - 300ppm. In the last hundred years, the concentration has increased to 420ppm.

https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/carbon-dioxide/

For reference, each 1ppm in the atmosphere is around 7.8 gigatonnes of CO2. Humans currently create around 40gigatonnes of CO2 per year, roughly equating to 5ppm added per year. We add equivalent to 0.8% of the atmospheric CO2 per year.

Kind of silly to compare the amount that actually insulates and traps heat to nitrogen and oxygen that don't.

It's a 50% increase in insulating gases due to human activity that's the problem here .. not the thermally inert gases.

"I don't know what you're complaining about, I only increased the amount of cyanide in your body by 0.002% of your body weight."

Looks like this is already documented: Termination Shock, by Neal Stephenson.

Is there a point to starting geoengineering after the situation is already disastrous? Because that's the only case I see it happening.

The big advantage is that it could be done unilaterally.

Why wouldn’t there be a point?

Maybe it would take too long for it to be worth starting when the situation is already very bad, but at least wikipedia implies the most well know aerosol injection is fast. I'm no climate scientist.

I think it being done unilateral is an even bigger risk.

If China thinks x hast the best outcome for them but it is a desaster for Chile?

Tough luck for them.

Yes it's risky but I feel it might work better with the world of states we have today.

I don't like the word "drastic" here. It's very much less drastic than what we are already doing. In fact, it's much less drastic.

I like to say: There is no longer a choice of playing God or not, only a choice of playing a competent or incompetent God.

You know what would be less drastic? Fucking stop emitting as much carbon. Solutions are there: Less livestock farming, less cars, less flights, less production of unnecessary products. Now, can we convince enough people to change their behavior just by telling them to do it? No, of course not. But what works really well is controlling people's behavior via consumer prices. This means, make animal products more expensive, make gas more expensive, make cities pedestrian and bike-friendly so people can get around without cars, make fast fashion more expensive.

But of course nobody wants this, because the politicans and people voting for them are also fucking babies that start whining if they can't fucking fly across the world just for fun twice a year. God forbid they need to eat one meal without a fucking dead animal in it.

Excuse my language, but FUCK trying to find "maybe" futuristical technological solution to problems we know we can solve right now, right today.

But of course, VCs and other motherfuckers can't make money this way.They can make money if they invest in a direct air capture startups that will never work, but then get the fuck out of there and cash out. They are out there building underground bunkers while they have you believe that technology will solve our problems. IT WILL NOT.

I do so love my dead animals for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

The car one is the most frustrating for me just because global warming is but one of the many problems associated with car-only infrastructure in countries such as the United States.

Your point about bunkers is kind of interesting. If society collapses the bunkers are really pointless. I think deep down the “rich people” building them know that. It’s just the same kind of silly doomsday prepping that regular folks do. 50 guns? Patagonia provisions? Plastic tubs of rice? All the same phenomenon.

What I find so bewildering is that since the early 1900s the “rich people” seem to have lost their minds a bit more or perhaps just hate themselves and society.

We went from a notable history of great public works to satisfy the ego, libraries to the glory of mankind, beautiful commissioned artwork and sculptures, and more to… well… “my name on a hospital/university”, effective altruism, bigger yachts and doomsday bunkers, and sprawling McMansions filled with boring bowling lanes for boring people.

Of course this is a generalization and, I think a lot of good work is going in to funding research projects and things like space exploration (making fun of wealthy people trying to launch rockets is way too nihilistic for my taste). But on the whole it really seems like our civilization hates itself and the actions of the wealthy seem to reflect that quite clearly.

To be fair to space exploration, Elon has by far the best bunker plan. He knows there are a couple decades left until shit really hits the fan. As you say bunkers on earth aren't all that promising, but what if you could make a self-sustaining colony on another planet, far away from societal collapse.

You know what's even less promising than a bunker on Earth? A bunker literally anywhere else in the observable universe. In fact, we could nuke the entire surface of the earth and it would probably still be easier to establish a self-sustaining colony on the resulting radioactive wasteland then on the Moon/Mars/Venus.

There is a very good reason why Earth is, and will continue to, sustain a great diversity of life and the rest of space is sterile.

Building a nice place on Earth to ride out climate change would be a lot simpler. But it also puts a massive target on your back. If society collapses, everyone will want in on your little Garden Eden, and no amount of fortification will be able to keep millions of people out. Nuking the entire surface of the Earth would solve that issue, but is generally frowned upon. Better to just build your bunker far, far away where most people can't get to it.

You see self-sustaining colonies outside of Earth in our lifetime? Wouldn't they need a massive industrial base, a variety of resources, large populations, etc to not need Earth?

Aren't you exactly describing Elon's proclaimed plans for a mars colony? Not a tiny lab like NASA would build, but an industrial base with thousands of inhabitants.

Is his plan realistic? Hard to tell. It's far beyond anything we have ever done, and financing such a plan is going to be challenging to say the least. And technologically we are also decades out. So I guess he better hurry up. But that's a different goal post that the one I set, a plan doesn't have to be easy or have probable success in order to be better than the other bunker plans.

Don't we need millions of people for a viable industrial Martian civilization? Honest question don't know.

Also, we haven't even been to Mars, unless SpaceX has some single-state to orbit spaceplane plus some fancy interplanetary engines in the works I'm not that optimistic. And who is going to finance this?

Honestly building a Fallout vault to wait the worst out seems easier.

The current idea of how to get there depends on launching Starships to earth orbit, refueling them completely using a bunch more Starships, and then going to Mars. In terms of energy required it should work out, but I have no clue how he is planning to pay for it beyond a small NASA colony.

On the other hand Mars hasn't been stripped of easily accessible resources in the same way Earth has been over the last couple thousand years. As an obvious example, Mars's surface is covered in so much iron ore that it dominates the color of the landscape. Iron isn't worth enough per pound to bring it back to earth, but if they find deposits of more valuable materials there might well be a mining opportunity that pays for the whole endeavour. Nothing brings in money, people and resources like a gold rush.

I don't know anything about Martian geology but wouldn't you need a large amount of travel around the planet to acquire everything an industrial civilization needs like resources for solar or nuclear power because it's lacking the easily accessible fossil fuels Earth had. And is it cost effective to mine on Mars and export? I thought using asteroids for that was easier.

And honestly, I don't think Musk is planning to do it, my opinion it's 60% marketing strategy 20% wishing for government funding for a small science mission 20% wishing the Mars colony happens somehow.

Calling Mars our back-up planet is beyond foolish. If humans cannot manage Earth, they certainly cannot manage the airless, frozen radioactive desert that is Mars. Do you think that these Martian colonist will be substantially wiser than Earthicans? Consider Mr. Musk's recent behavior before you answer that question!

I didn't call it our back-up planet, I called it Elon's back up planet.

Humanity will survive climate change. Our society may not, and that's what people try to insure against with bunkers or space colonies. To achieve that goal, the bunker or colony only has to be stable for a couple decades, maybe a century if you include the wish for a better life for their children.

The bunkers are in New Zealand in the hopes that a rich island stable democracy will not undergo complete societal collapse even if much of the world does.

Although, if society doesn't collapse I'm not sure if the bunkers are all that useful, maybe for the stockpile of tradable goods? Or as a castle?

> We went from a notable history of great public works to satisfy the ego, libraries to the glory of mankind, beautiful commissioned artwork and sculptures, and more to… well… “my name on a hospital/university”, effective altruism, bigger yachts and doomsday bunkers, and sprawling McMansions filled with boring bowling lanes for boring people.

I'm not all that convinced we aren't just remembering the nicer parts of turn of the century wealthy philanthropy instead of their gold toilets. And effective altruism is at least supposed to be helpful in a different way.

> Of course this is a generalization and, I think a lot of good work is going in to funding research projects and things like space exploration (making fun of wealthy people trying to launch rockets is way too nihilistic for my taste). But on the whole it really seems like our civilization hates itself and the actions of the wealthy seem to reflect that quite clearly.

Oh yes. But the "I want to run away from this doomed planet" is way too obvious. But aren't a bunch of the tech billionaires at least somewhat techno-optimists?

Sure, let’s lower everyone’s standards of living - except for the richest people who won’t change their behavior at all. That’s so politically toxic that its effectively a fantasy.

That’s the problem with these tax and prices based economic nudges. They’re effectively punishments, and everyone fucking hates unjust punishments. Think about the person who has to fly to visit a sick family member. Now they’re still flying the same amount, but they’re just a lot poorer. Well that’s an edge case! Of course, it’s also going to be the lead story on conservative media for a news cycle, followed by another and another and another story just like it.

What's funny is that any time I've suggested increasing taxes on the rich, I hear how I'm jealous and really I should be thankful for the incredible standard of living that I have as a modern human (as I struggle to maintain employment, housing, and health insurance while nursing some health issues). And yet any time I see suggestions of collective sacrifice to literally save the world, I'm told it's impossible because people are too jealous of how rich people will bend the rules for themselves (as though they don't already live beyond any kind of rules in our current arrangement anyway).

It really seems like heads the planet is fucked, tails the planet is fucked. And for some reason it's a mystery why people have stopped having children.

Eating meat, flying a lot and driving a car does not equal a high standard of living. I'm not doing any of these things, but I would say that I have a very high standard of living - probably even higher than people who are stuck in a car in traffic for 2 hours a day and eat cheap meat until they get a heart attack.

Also, stop fossil fuel subsidies. Fossil fuels have many externalities in addition to climate change. Air pollution kills 10 million/year.

Global Fossil Fuel Subsidies Reached $7 Trillion in 2022, an All-Time High: https://e360.yale.edu/digest/fossil-fuel-subsidies-2022

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-10-16/climat...

Air Pollution Kills 10 Million People a Year. Why Do We Accept That as Normal? https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/08/opinion/environment/air-p...

People won't. They just won't.

Now what are you going to do? If your plan won't work with the humans we have, do you have a realistic plan to change the humans? No, you don't. So your plan won't work. It will not work.

So, are you going to stand on your soapbox blazing out your righteous indignation at the folly of humanity, or are you going to try to figure out something that will work with the humans that we have?

Revolutions have traditionally been how we achieve major societal change, and standing on soapboxes yelling is one way to help that along. How else do you engage the humans that we have? Hope that they silently come up with the same plan you have? No, like any politician you yell at them from a soapbox to get enough support for you to act.

Stopping all CO2 emissions tomorrow magically won't bring back the 1+ degrees of warming we already caused though.

But yea, I agree, we really really need to cut CO2 emissions. BADLY. Even if we can compensate for the warming we still need to fix the ocean acidification.

You want to solve the problem of "slowing warming", period. Most people want to solve the problem of "slowing warming without harm to standards of living, as defined by them".

So you think people who babies and stupid, etc. They're not - they just care about something you don't.

They might be wrong to care about it, but they do.

> It seems safe to say we are now locked in to a path that will break the Paris Agreement

I've been of the opinion that this was obvious from the day the Paris agreement was signed, and should be absolutely no surprise to anyone.

Not saying we shouldn't try, more energy makes for more extreme weather which is not great.

Like most media coverage, the article omits the primary cause of the recent acceleration in warming - desulphurization of ship fuel

“ the IMO2020 fuel change cut cloud tracks in key shipping lanes by half...this has a substantial effect on warming, concentrated in areas with heavy shipping activity like the North Atlantic. The reduction in reflective cloud cover over this region, plus an unrelated reduction in reflective airborne dust levels, can account for most of the warming observed in the North Atlantic”

https://www.maritime-executive.com/article/low-sulfur-fuel-r...

While that does have an effect, the record temperatures are not only located on the northern Atlantic, but on the whole planet

It's questionable how much the Tonga eruption which sent an 'Unprecedented Amount of Water Into Stratosphere' has had on the climate. Some temporary warming was certainly predicted and this would be global.

Does this change anything? It is the warming that is harmful, not the cause of it.

Yes, this change is reversible

https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2023/06/06/we-should-not-...

“How do we keep the world cool for the next few decades while we upgrade our industry to a post-carbon world and scale up CO2 removal? It does us no good to be stable at 350 ppm by 2060 if we’ve already lost Greenland, the West Antarctic ice sheet, and 7 m + 4 m of coastline respectively”

Yes, and we need to start putting that sulfur or something equivalent up there again as soon as possible.

This is textbook geoengineering and people are wary of it because once you start with it, the environment becomes dependent on it to maintain balance. And like with someone addicted to a drug, there will be withdrawal symptoms if you stop abruptly. It's really funny that we've been doing it all along but never realized it.

Partial cause but not primary.

The largest kick to recent activity has been the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) swing.

Expect high temps for a few years and then some slight relief before things rachet up again.

I'm a technological accelerationist simply because I'm certain, with the 30 years of warming baked in from this point + the impossibility of carbon emissions lowering on average anytime soon, the only way to save the world's species, our state and growth of civilization and such is through technological advances, AI, terraforming, etc. There's no hope simply through austerity, things are too screwed already.

Can you connect the dots a bit more than that? To me this just sounds like self-serving hand-waving.

Technological innovation allows the same amount of consumption with far less collateral impact. For example, before AC, electrification required 1000x more wire than it does now. Streets were covered in poles and electrical wire. Cars produced far more and worse pollution. Every technological innovation in the aim of efficiency reduces the negative collateral impact of human civilization. Likewise, more recently, the lowered cost of solar, EV's, etc are all made possible through forward-thinking innovation.

Technological innovation improved our lives and reduced negative impact on humans, without improving the long term prospect environment wise.

Plastics are an example of this: it helps us first and formost, and the rest of the ecosystem is worse for it.

Acceleratibg that trend doesn't help IMHO.

> For example, before AC, electrification required 1000x more wire than it does now. Streets were covered in poles and electrical wire.

What do you mean "before AC"? AC was invented more than 100 years ago.

The wires are still there. The power companies just tend to bury them underground nowadays. Out of sight, out of mind.

In any case, what does this have to do with global warming?

> Cars produced far more and worse pollution.

The change is due to government regulation of emissions. Good luck getting the auto manufacturers to give a crap on their own.

Even EVs are heavily subsidized by government funds.

Besides, the primary cause of global warming is manufacturing, not auto emissions, which is why global warming hasn't stopped despite an improved emissions situation. And it's also why accelerationism is not a solution.

And before electricity we required 0 wires. Before cars 0 petrol

It was all brought by "technology". We live better than before but not in a sustainable way, replacing every gas car by an EV won't do much, it'll buy us a couple of decades at best, you still need batteries, plastic, steel, energy

How on earth is AI going to help?

AGI will make the economy far more efficient, increase the rate of scientific innovation, etc. For example, some ancestor of alphafold could spark a revolution in genetic engineering, creating crops which are far more efficient and resilient, etc.

how, be specific & based in objective reality, without VC hype words & cultist like language

Technology won't save us.

Hoping that someday soon^tm someone will come up with something that makes all the current mess go away is a dangerous path.

In germany they call it 'Technologieoffen' - and even some political parties have written it on their flags. 'No need to implement changes now - someday God will decent and absolve us from all of our sins - until then party hard! #yolo'

I'm all for accelerating research/tech. But it can't be an excuse to just let sh*t happen. Yet most people will do this - it's expected human behavior.

Well put.

I want to accelerate good stuff (fusion, mRNA cancer vaccines, solar power learning curve, LLMs that help programmers be more productive, housing construction) and decel bad stuff (proof-of-work crypto, deepfakes, new coal mines, microplastics). If we accel/decel the right things, I think we have a shot.

We're more likely to get Deus Ex than a Deus Ex Machina

The difficult and limiting part of scienctific work isn't coming up with ideas (which is, at best, all a glorified Montecarlo chain autocorrect can do) but actually designing and performing good experiments.

Add to that the amount of junk papers that will be generated and published - through which all future scientists will have to sift - and AI in it's current form is much more likely to be a concrete block dragging scientific progress down.

I believe that AGI is capable of all of this. Eventually. If it doesn't kill us at that point. If we don't get enslaved by the corporations who control AGI first.

Expecting it to happen just in time to save us from ourselves? That sounds more like religious belief to me. We're burning down the garden in the hope we will find a yellow brick road under the ashes.

Either that or the second coming of jesus, I give it 50/50 given the available data

It will deliver great shareholder value.

>“Thank you. Since we decided a few weeks ago to adopt the leaf as legal tender, we have, of course, all become immensely rich.” Ford stared in disbelief at the crowd who were murmuring appreciatively at this and greedily fingering the wads of leaves with which their track suits were stuffed. “But we have also,” continued the management consultant, “run into a small inflation problem on account of the high level of leaf availability, which means that, I gather, the current going rate has something like three deciduous forests buying one ship’s peanut." Murmurs of alarm came from the crowd. The management consultant waved them down. “So in order to obviate this problem,” he continued, “and effectively revalue the leaf, we are about to embark on a massive defoliation campaign, and. . .er, burn down all the forests. I think you'll all agree that's a sensible move under the circumstances." The crowd seemed a little uncertain about this for a second or two until someone pointed out how much this would increase the value of the leaves in their pockets whereupon they let out whoops of delight and gave the management consultant a standing ovation. The accountants among them looked forward to a profitable autumn aloft and it got an appreciative round from the crowd.

- The Restaurant at the end of the universe, Douglas Adams

[Deleted the comment. Seems like I unwittingly answered a rhetorical question.]

… which is accomplished by … building lots of new data centres with each with thousands upon thousands of GPU:s drawing megawatts day and night. The maths checks out.

A race of machines doesn't need to eat food, drink water, breathe clean air, and doesn't die from wet bulb temperatures. I bet it's a lot easier to build nuclear reactors when radiation poisoning doesn't matter. The perfect candidate for carrying our cultural torch forward.

> doesn't die from wet bulb temperatures

AI, which is data-centers have been first-class citizens on this planet. All DCs have air conditioning, which most humans don't have. Without AC, these race of machines will fail often.

Also, this race of machines is refreshed every 3 years.

> refreshed every 3 years.

That's not been my experience. I've got plenty of 7+ year old machines and DC infrastructure components that are even older than that. Power and compute density improvements are no longer fast enough to have full turnovers in 3 years.

Big companies refresh based on their depreciation and not if they are still usable, these are usually fully depreciated in 3 - 5 companies, depending on their accountants. Also, there is going to be massive growth in DCs with AI, companies aren't going to compete on 7+ year old hardware just because it runs ok.

Just gonna leave this here: https://news.microsoft.com/source/features/sustainability/pr...

There are much more efficient ways of doing datacenters than we're doing right now.

this is how we got into this mess in the first place!

The IPCC models require both, so use a lot less energy to get to get to net zero by 2050 and then a period of some decades where we emit net negative CO2 through tech, to keep the planet somewhat liveable.

Tech alone takes too long to develop, if it is feasible at all.

Yeah doing more of the thing that screwed everything up is usually the best solution. /s

This is magical thinking

New technologies have not helped yet. Just covered part of increased demand. So it doesn't seem like technology is going to save us.

It is all just distraction. Only way is one that will never happen: de-growth.

I agree, except I am pretty sure de-growth will happen, it just will not be under voluntary or controlled conditions.

It's happening bit by bit: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/02/09/green-energies-shatte...

Degrowth does seem like a tough sell to general populations, when you say not voluntary or controlled you mean like economic collapse and/or ecoauthoritarianism or something else?

(6 days later...)

I meant that the natural outcome will happen, and likely that will negatively affect the planet's carrying capacity, which will have a negative affect on population and economics.

Like you, I do not see how the collection of world governments will align on all scaling back their economies together.

Per-capita emissions of most developed nations like the US and Germany peaked in the 1970s and 80s. Some of the "improvement" has been the outsourcing of polluting industries, but we are also more efficient today than we were back then. Agriculture evolved a lot, buildings became a lot more energy efficient, waste management improved, etc.

Of course for decades this has been offset by population growth even in those nations. And that's not accounting for the parts of the world where populations exploded due to better agriculture, medicine and trade. If we had time to let it play out for another 200 years without climate issues we might be fine. Sadly we don't.

Is degrowth even enough to save the planet from warming? Imagine 95% of people on earth magically disappeared. Have we already emitted enough co2 that the atmosphere will continue to warm for a long time even without those people’s new emissions?

CO2's half life is 120 years. So, yes, a long time, in human lifetimes. But not all that long in civilization timelines.

> New technologies have not helped yet. Just covered part of increased demand. So it doesn't seem like technology is going to save us.

Those two statements are in direct conflict. Look at these two graphs, one for UK CO2 emissions [0] and the other for England's population [1] (Sorry I couldn't get a UK population graph, but to the best of my understanding they're proportional). Population is up 20%, CO2 emissions are down 50%. If that's not technology helping, I don't know what it is.

> It is all just distraction. Only way is one that will never happen: de-growth.

Disagree. We have plenty of resources, we're just incredibly, incredibly wasteful with them.

Here in the UK, there is a group trying to advocate for insulating houses who are being met with "it's too hard, it's too expensive, insulation doesn't work, causes damp, heat pumps don't work in -24c, it's a ploy from the government to limit our resource usage", but the reality of the situation is that slapping up insulated plasterboard on the inside of half of the UK's homes and putting a trickle vent on the window would save an enormous amout of CO2 and make people more comfortable. There are loans and grants available for those who can't quite afford it, and for those who absolutely can't afford it it's often done for free (yes there's a gap in the middle, but honestly we can deal with them when we've dealt with the other two categories), and yet still people won't do it.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/449503/co2-emissions-uni... [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/975956/population-of-eng...

> If that's not technology helping, I don't know what it is.

That's called deindustrialisation and delocalisation

How much of that reduction is because we outsourced our production to different places on earth?

> reality of the situation is that slapping up insulated plasterboard on the inside of half of the UK's homes and putting a trickle vent on the window would save an enormous amout of CO2 and make people more comfortable

And meanwhile require a complete redoing of all interior finishes, including the finish carpentry, in the home. IMO, that's the real barrier (no pun intended) here.

Near Boston, I live in a 1920s structural brick house (I think what the UK would call cavity wall construction). The house was built without any explicit "this material is insulation" and has been retrofitted with attic fiberglass, attic floor cellulose, and I spray foamed one room we renovated. Some of my rooms are painted, which would be manageable cost-wise, but still would have a 20+ year payback period if money had no cost to borrow. Other rooms have intricate wallpaper or decorative wood paneling which would be much more expensive to recreate (pushing the payback period much farther out).

With interest rates above 5%, a 20-year-at-0-interest project literally never pays to do. Even grant programs will often cover the direct insulation work but don't (and frankly, probably shouldn't) pay for intricate finish carpentry work or wallcoverings.

The UK needed to regulate its way to being one of the greenest countries on the planet, forcing everyone to make the necessary sacrifices.

You might want to read up on Jevons Paradox [1].

Also, be warned that the term "accelerationism" is being used by different parties, with quite opposing intentions.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Why can't humanity survive an increase in 10 degrees? I understand polar bears or other animals that need specific levels of Ice or vegetation in specific areas, but humans are an extremely adaptive species.

Edit: I'm getting a lot of responses. It seems like there is a general misunderstanding of what happened during the previous ice age. Humans existed during the previous ice age and humanity survived a major increase in temperature. Obviously any tribe or culture that needed to be able to walk across the bearing straight didn't survive, but humanity did. And without any modern technology.

I get that an unknown future is scary, but just giving into the gloom and doom isn't productive. We need to increase out technologies for many reasons, not just climate change and we can survive and thrive, even if the world will be different that doesn't mean it will be terrible.

If humans can survive in Australia, Humanity surely will survive the climate change.

The world isn't just a collection of independent climates.

Surviving in one of today's extreme climates doesn't necessarily provide proof of surviving when the previous extreme is now the mildest climate.

Even if the human body can take the heat, it still needs to be fed and watered. Those systems currently aren't in your climate, in many cases.

Humans live anywhere in the world with a average temperature range from -20 to 30 degrees. This is a range of 50 degrees. 10 degrees increase wont kill us.

Surely you understand that the danger that climate change poses is not "heat exhaustion"?

We had it 14 degrees warmer 50 million years ago and earth is still hospitable.

Burning all the fossil fuels is (at worst) just going to put us back into a Cambrian/Devonian greenhouse earth configuration.

floods, droughts and that kind of stuff. I'll will not die on a 40c heat, but some may, and the consequences on other systems will also affect me.

The panama canal, the lake more specifically, is drying up because of this stuff. And ~40% of US cargo ships use it.

> I'll will not die on a 40c heat

That will really depend on how humidity changes. A earth with 10C more energy can hold a whole lot more water in the air, and that drops the wet bulb temperature. "Ah, but it's a dry heat" in the future could mean the difference between life or death.

Human beings as a species surviving seems possible. The modern world economy surviving seems much less likely. And without a modern economy then much of the population will die.

Because it wouldn't be just a 10 degree (not sure where this number is coming from) average increase. It's a 10 degree average as calculated across an entire world full of extremes.

A 10 degree average is a huge increase in energy in the system, and that energy will be expressed in all sorts of ways. It'll be colder in winter due to an erratic jetstream pulling cold air down further than ever before, hurricanes will be bigger because of all that extra energy, summer storms will have that much more potential and the clouds will be able to hold way more water before bursting. But also because the atmosphere can hold more water it'll rain less, leading to drought.

The whole system will be energized, and the energy won't be evenly distributed. Our natural disasters will be massive.

The previous ice age was 4 degrees below preindustrial. Just for scale.

Humans require other animals or vegetation to consume for energy

There’s going to be more moisture in the air, wet bulb temperature is gets deadly at much lower temperatures than dry, https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/jul/31/why-you-need...

Have you seen what 10 degrees difference did to the world some 20k years ago? Now double the change from the last ice age to today. 60% of the Earth will be desert. The polar caps will be gone. It will be impossible to sustain 8 billion people. Billions will die. Humanity survives, but at what cost?

Such an event would render swaths of the planet truly uninhabitable and much more land un-farmable. Humanity must abandon the tropics entirely. Every costal city is now 300 feet underwater. Billions die in mass migrations and wars on a scale hitherto unseen. The ecosystem of the planet is ravaged by this rapid change, being unable to evolve quickly enough to adapt. The life that remains is agriculture that directly sustains the few human survivors. Scientific progress halts entirely. The ultra-rich retreat into their enclaves while what remains of humanity regresses into Morlocks.

In short, 10 degrees should be regarded as apocalyptic. It would turn back human progress by millennia, and the state of planet would not return to "normal" for several millennia more, if ever. Perhaps for a century or two some outposts in greenland cling to survival but over the longest term, it's not clear if humanity can survive such conditions. Perhaps we can adapt to this terrible "new normal" but our ancestors will tell myths about "The Earth that Was". Their children will marvel at the idea that Earth once had "wildlife". They will tell cautionary tales about their foolish and near-sighted predecessors who had inherited a garden of eden and but destroyed it to fuel their insatiable appetites.

Where the hell are your comments above getting a 10 degree increase from and on what basis? Even the supposedly likely worst scenarios from the IPCC mention an increase of roughly 3 degrees.

If you're going to talk about the dangers of climate change it would be nice to stick to evidence-based scenarios, not just the scariest unsubstantiated things that can be pulled out of one's ass for the sake of doom fetishism.

https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2020/10/IPCC_SR15_Wo...

Its not like we won't survive, it's more like moving from your New York 100k/month penthouse to a tent under an LA highway ramp. You can still live/eat/sleep/&c. it's just a bit less nice

The temperature is a metric of energy in the system. 10 degrees means a significantly more energy in the system. This energy manifests as weather events. No infrastructure in any climate will be left standing with that change. We already see extreme events increasing.

And, lookup wet bulb temperature.

Humans usually regulate their internal body temperature by sweating, but above the wet-bulb temperature, we can no longer cool down this way, leading our body temperature to rise steadily. This essentially marks a limit to human adaptability to extreme heat – if we cannot escape the conditions, our body’s core can rise beyond the survivable range and organs can start failing: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/jul/31/why-you-need...

Dealing with very complex and large systems is hard, probably harder than our knowledge will be capable of this century, even if we keep accelerating.

That is the world system, climate, life, cycles, feedback loops, and many other things that we probably are not aware yet (just check the number of recent discoveries to have a hint) as a very complex and interrelated system. Trying to have an "engineering" there and not just messing with it to see what happens is beyond our capabilities. And our side of messing with it so far has not been preservation or austerity or whatever, just is making profits, and avoid putting a finger on that.

Then you have the human system, that is also complex, interrelated and fragile in ways that the many big powers that mess with it doesn't understand. That is not something that you can control in a directed way neither.

So you have an accelerating car, a cliff, and a lot of inertia you are not trying to register, and a lot of fragile things inside packed in unsafe ways. No matter the damage that does to start to stop right now, it won't be anything similar to what it will cause to crash, or to try to manoeuvre desperately when you are close enough. With all the consequences on a very complex system that something as dramatic will cause (that, as complex is it, can't be put a safe upper bound)

But somewhat you suggest that we keep accelerating that surely that cliff can be jumped over because we will be so fast that we will be flying, or it is not so deep and we will keep going safely on the other side. Is a nice bet for a basically suicidal individual, but not for a civilization with a lot of people that want to have a meaning for their life.

> Trying to have an "engineering" there and not just messing with it to see what happens is beyond our capabilities.

That's what we're doing with the CO2 emissions though. So it's not beyond us, we just do it badly.

But do you have a better idea? If you want meaning for people’s lives that rules out mass death and dictator demanded planet-wide austerity and reduction in lifestyle down to subsistence - even if anyone could enforce that, which is something people would go to war to defend themselves against. If you individually choose to consume less and own less that’s not enough to make a difference. Has there ever been a time in history where the world has deliberately returned to an earlier state in a positive and successful way (not war or disease setbacks) to model such a thing on, and in a way more planned than your “messing with it to see what happens”?

If we don’t pursue the same as we have now but less damaging and trying to reverse the damage, what else could we do that’s possible and not awful?

We are wired to try to solve by addition, not by subtraction, for a complex system that we destabilized by adding something, adding even more things is the road to even more destabilization and emergent (usually very destructive) behaviours. That is a useful heuristic on how to deal with things we don't understand fully, it won't go back to the old normal, but have better odds to not worsen a lot things by our new actions. So, to keep pressing the pedal till somewhat, magically, it solves itself is probably the wrong approach.

Maybe there is no right approach, maybe there is no solution if you factor not just the planet but the human system that made things this way and keep worsening it. But even as token measure try to move in the right direction is more meaningful than doing it in the wrong one, you are not isolated, more people may follow what you do in either direction.

And about the cost/damage of trying the "right" approach in the short term, it probably will be far cheaper than taking the wrong one in a bit longer term. Not caring about the long term is to make sure to have a near enough time limit, essentially a suicidal approach.

This won't work simply due to induced demand.

We spend something like 2000x less energy per unit of light now than we did burning whale fat in the 1800s and all the energy saved energy simply goes into producing more light.

Hoping for technology to solve this mess is the same as hoping that adding an additional lane to a congested highway will solve traffic. It won't.

That's just wrong on so many levels. First of all, creating light is irrelevant to the problem at hand. Secondly, LEDs have made your statement outright false as there's no one who lives in a house that packs their home with light enough to spend that energy budget AND KEEPS THEM ON AT NIGHT. Because they would GO BLIND.

So that's just the light thing. 100% wrong.

Saying technology can't solve the problem is speculative, as technology is a moving target. You just can't know what problems it can solve until it's too late and the problems are already solved.

The point, which I can only assume that you intentionally missed, is the following:

- Light is only a standin for any economic activity. The same argument holds for manufacturing, steel smelting, and basically any other economic activity you can think of.

- We spend ~2000x less per unit of light but create much more than 2000x the amount of total artificial light now compared to the 1800s. Hence greater overall energy consumption.

Now read my initial comment again and I will have the utmost - probably misplaced - faith that you'll understand it.

> Light is only a standin for any economic activity

And yet for exactly light the entire premise is falsified. It's a hilarious own goal.

It's not which I just explained to you.

If you are going to keep pretending to be the human embodiment of a brick wall, I won't engage any further.

Have a nice day!

You might want to read about the rebound effect. If your toaster is 10% more efficient but you have twice as many toasters in the world you're still fucked, this is what we're doing right now.

This new faith in technology as the great redeemer is closer to religion than science. At best it's wishful thinking at worst it's delusional

Yea, except if the toasters get a million times more efficient people won't in fact run ten toasters per person around the clock to make the rebound effect possible. This is the type of gains LEDs have made.

I've seen left leaning people make claims like LEDs just mean people have their lights on more so the total consumption goes up. But that's absolutely not true, because LEDs are so much more important that if everyone kept all their lights on in their house 24/7 and also bought 5 times more light bulbs they STILL would use less electricity.

That's why the specific example given was such an own goal. If the tech is good enough it can't be overcome by the rebound effect.

> If the tech is good enough it can't be overcome by the rebound effect.

Yeah: ifs, whens, maybes and "trust me bro"s

On one side you have wishful thinking and on the other-side you have 200 years of technological progress that brought literally everything besides an energy or pollution reduction

The entire history of technological progress is a rebound effect, if it wasn't we wouldn't be talking about it here and now.. so yes you're free to believe that in some hypothetical future the trend will automagically invert itself, but it isn't backed by anything at all.

> people won't in fact run ten toasters per person around the clock to make the rebound effect possible.

Asia + Africa's population will double by 2050, and they pollute way less than the average westerner by capita. Do you think they won't want their part of the cake ?

AI is power hungry, AI will accelerate carbon emissions. Expected ICT projects by 2030, energy demand will be 20%. This paper was before AI. If this is revised with the AI demand growth projections, its quite possibly a lot more. If Sam Altman starts on his $7T chip plan, that alone will add 10 - 20%.

[1] Chasing Carbon: The Elusive Environmental Footprint of Computing: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2011.02839.pdf

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39310563

There's no hope simply through technology either. No technology in sight can address this issue, and certainly not in this time frame. And climate change is only one symptom, and maybe not the most worrying on. The root cause is constant growth in a finite world. It can't work.

We already have the solutions. We need to act. We can't pin our hopes on future options when the crisis is now and we're not using current options.

We need to stop using fossil fuels. Full stop. Nuclear and renewables. Trains and EVs.

We need to sequester carbon. Reforest the US east of the Mississippi. Make Ohio look like Vermont. Do the same in all other previously deforested areas. Dense cities and towns, great natural expanses, farms, and nothing else. Sprawl is killing us.

Sure but for a brief period we created an awful lot of shareholder value.

In all seriousness, I expect the next century to be devastating. We will start to see massive climate-related migration and the resulting genocide and death as a result. Famine, war, natural disasters, that sort of thing.

Here's how I think the ultra-wealthy will shape the world: massive depopulation with people essentially reduced to indentured serfdom with employment largely being maintenance of massive estates. Any kind of class mobility will essentially be gone. That is the future so many are (unwittingly or not) working towards.

Related/Dupe yesterday:

First year-long breach of key 1.5C warming limit

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39297490

We are the worst stewards of this planet.

We aren't the stewards by any means. We are an invasive species existing in a bubble. Climate change is the planet healing itself of us.

We're the only stewards of this planet, learning in real time, with imperfect or completely absent communication among individuals.

I'd say things are going pretty well, considering the pace of change.

We're doomed. News like this drains my motivation to do anything at all, because it might all be for nothing anyway.

What is it exactly for?

I truly agree. What's the point of learning JS when the Internet might collapse in the next 3 years?

Not sci-fi. Center of Spain is in severe drought at this early point of the year. People can't take showers. What will next year be?

I don't want this to sound dismissive, but aren't we all "doomed" in the end anyway? How long does anything we do have an impact anyway? A generation? Two? Five? How many individual people have had an impact on the world five or more generations after they've died, as a percentage of the total population?

Were all those other people's lives meaningless?

I think you're grappling with a fundamental aspect of being mortal, not just one related to the climate.

The hardest part for me to accept is that there are so many people who just don't care. Not about the disasters, the climate refugees, the death toll, the extinction of thousands of species, respiratory diseases, etc.

How can people just accept all that as a fact of life when it's all man-made horrors?

I'm not sure that you're being fair to (many) people.

There are many people to whom this is all doomerism. The world is ending because of ozone depletion. The world is ending because of the oil shortage. The world is ending because of nuclear war. The world is ending because of resource depletion. The world is ending because of topsoil depletion. The world is ending because of aquafer depletion. And now, the world is ending because of climate change. (Yes, climate change figures in several of the other issues...)

People hear all this. And they look around and they see not much actually changing. It's not that they don't care about millions of deaths; they don't believe that the millions of deaths are coming. They think that, yeah, the climate's going to change a bit, and it's going to disrupt things a bit, just like oil got kind of scarce for a while and gasoline got expensive, and that was painful, but we got through it.

It's not that they don't care. It's that they don't believe (and therefore don't care about an outcome that they don't believe in). For many people, slow motion decades-in-the-making doom is not something that feels real, even when it starts to happen.

I don't think we humans were made to think like that. Almost everyone mostly wants to live their lives and has just enough mental energy to care about problems in front of them.

To add to that, for the huge numbers of people who wouldn't be able to ride out a $1,000 emergency without going into debt, who feel like they're not even the primary causal agents in their own lives, the prospect of being able to have any sort of impact on the whole planet is absurd, even if they do have the bandwidth to think about it. They don't have an experience of, "When I decide something should be different, I have the ability to do anything that could actually bring that difference about."

Not the previous poster but it could feel meaningless if you really sincerely think civilization is doomed. At least with optimism for the future you can feel like you mattered to the people close to you, or you were a good cog in a great machine, or you lived a happy life and so will your successors.

Even with daily life, if you think your own life is going to worsen in the future no matter what you do, won't that demotivate you today?

But your own life is going to worsen in the future. To whatever extent you continue to have a future (stay alive), your mind and body will deteriorate. Your relationships will slowly end as the other people die. If you're lucky, you'll build some new ones, but that doesn't reduce the grief of the lost ones.

You might be able to make it happen very slightly slower by making lifestyle changes of varying degrees. But you can make lifestyle changes that will have similar impact on your experience of a warmer world too, if your own life is your concern.

So if you're concerned about everybody's experience, your influence is negligible no matter what. And if you're concerned about your own experience, your influence is slight but diminishing no matter what.

This is still a mortality issue, not a climate change issue.

There is no such thing as "doomed". Humanity is not going to disappear. We can either do better or worse, and there really is no limit to the "worse" side.

If predictions of 8 to 10 degrees Celsius warming by the end of the century are true, then humanity is absolutely doomed.

I think hunter-gatherers in Antarctica might be fine eventually.

Maybe I'm optimistic (for a certain value of optimistic) but I feel we would do mass geoengineering and/or start serious international emission control, enforced by war if necessary, before we get to that.

My very pessimistic view is that things will get very bad first. Which means that humanity will have to deal with mass refugee movements, wars, natural disasters from climate change, and trying to mitigate the effects.

One of those by itself would be difficult to deal with, but all at once would be impossible. In my opinion.

My optimist is that it when it gets real bad governments will do something before it gets catastrophic. Who knows, not a climate scientist, maybe it will be too late.

So tell me how they actually measured global mean temp back in 1850?

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

There are things called 'proxies'. The same way you can assess the crime rate of a certain area by the amount of littering by the side of the road.

>The same way you can assess the crime rate of a certain area by the amount of littering by the side of the road.

You mean incorrectly?

Also, if I had to guess, proxies that show global warming to be bad are widely publicised, whilst proxies that show global warming not to occur are ignored.

"I don't know if this sign about a cliff ahead was right, so I'm gonna keep going pedal to the metal. Just in case..."

> Also, if I had to guess, proxies that show global warming to be bad are widely publicised, whilst proxies that show global warming not to occur are ignored.

You are mixing categories. One is about the observable universe, ie. "does global warming happen"? The other one is a value judgement, ie. "is global warming bad?"

I mean, if you want to go down that route, why assume that the expansion of mercury in a glass tube is a good proxy for atmospheric temperature?

Sometimes it feels hotter or colder than the mercury would indicate, after all.

QED, it is impossible to determine if the climate is changing.

With help from sea sponges as recently discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39268387

More discussion on the sponges and ocean warming: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39275272

With instrumentation across the globe at naval timekeeping stations of the various European empires - much of which persisted for a hundred years and thus overlapped with later instruments and broader coverage which allowed for levelling and blending.

It's essentially a "construct your baseline" problem faced in many domains, the Fifth and other IPCC reports:

    This IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C uses the reference period 1850–1900 to represent pre-industrial temperature.

    This is the earliest period with near-global observations and is the reference period used as an approximation of preindustrial temperatures in the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report.

 ~ IPCC FAQ: https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2018/12/SR15_FAQ_Low_Res.pdf

and naturally there are many papers that consider alternate baselines, data quality, proxies, etc. eg:

Estimating Changes in Global Temperature since the Preindustrial Period (2017)

https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/98/9/bams-d-...

^^ Discussed in brief: https://www.climate-lab-book.ac.uk/2017/defining-pre-industr...

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