Earth just experienced its hottest 12 months in recorded history
theweathernetwork.com
theweathernetwork.com
Do others here feel similarly? Do you think these trends are reversible? Is technology the solution? Something else?
I guess my real question is: how do you incorporate all of this change into your worldview and outlook?
That's because tribalism entered the chat, instead of a question about sources for the claim
This much is guaranteed, regardless of if the oft-cited apocalypse comes to fruition.
No one really ever wants to discuss this, the issues with the data, the missing data, the statistical techniques used to fill in that data, how the models are derived, the funding situation with climate research and the quality issues with all of it.
It seems like the only acceptable answer is the sky is falling and we're all going to die.
Maybe both things can be true: there is a man made effect on the climate and it's difficult to measure and a lot of the research quality is poor.
Perhaps humans have adapted to difficult climates throughout our entire existence.
Perhaps the models that predict the end of the world are a bit extreme, and there are conflicting interests.
Maybe, just maybe - everything will be ok.
They literally have PR teams that intentionally aligns company objectives towards the popular climate narrative.
The narrative has so much momentum that no individual financial interest could stop it. And big oil isn't half as influential as it were.
I don’t know how “influential” big oil is, but I know they’re collectively quite rich. Collectively substantially richer than whoever you’ve imagined stands to gain from a shift away from carbon and has been willing and able to buy out the world’s scientific community for decades now. They can’t even pay their own scientists to shill for them; they knew about climate change since the 70s [0].
Edit: lol the list of companies I was looking at was by market cap. A list by revenue [1] makes your case even worse: five of the ten richest companies in the world sell oil. Another eight are in the top 50. Somehow no obvious boogeyman bicycle manufacturers to be manipulating the scientific consensus though.
[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-64241994.amp
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_by...
Yep. That's true.
Strange isn't it?
Almost like their livelihood is at risk.
But let's put that aside. Let's put aside the fact that the mechanisms involved are demonstrable and simple enough for children to understand.
Even as laypeople, we can observe that in the past ten years there's been year after year after year of once-in-a-century catastrophic weather events. The odds of these being unrelated anomalies decrease every time. Unprecedented heat waves and forest fires across the North America, all the way up into the arctic, with entire towns burning to the ground. Deadly ice storms in Texas. God-sized hurricanes. In isolation these could be hand-waved away - in aggregate, they clearly point towards catastrophe.
Polls consistently show that people think someone somewhere should do something as long as it doesn't actually cost them any money.
"IPSOS found that just 25 percent of Americans said they’d be willing to pay higher taxes to address climate change. A 2019 Reuters poll asked specifically whether respondents would pay $100 to fight climate change and only a third said yes"
If we were dead serious about this as a civilization threat, we would start building as much nuclear as possible
The whining about "uprooting everything" is such a cheap cop out. The US doesn't suddenly grind to a halt when oil prices are higher, or when production of goods moves back from China to Detroit.
I agree that nuclear would be great but unfortunately it doesn't seem to be cost effective. Even my pet notion, SMRs, seem to be unable to cut it. NuScale has promise but even they seem to be unable to compete with solar and wind.
Geothermal is also waiting for us -- I hear there's a bit of extra heat in the Yellowstone region.
The key thing is that our political leadership is currently owned by the fossil fuel industry and they don't want to let go of their massive profits. They've also managed to politicize the issue to such a degree that a major political party (and its membership) has no interest in addressing this and has convinced the base that it's a hoax. That's as political as I'll get here -- is to note stated positions and policies.
The US has (will) spent $6T on two wars that had no reason or value. We have plenty of money to spend -- it's just a matter of spending it wisely.
One example, is rooftop solar. Rooftop solar is very, very, expensive compared to utility grade solar. A dollar that goes to subsidize residential rooftop solar is a dollar that would go much, much further if it was used to subsidize utility grade solar or wind.
Another example of poor decision making is Germany which decided to start shutting down nuclear power plants while they were still burning coal. So last year hard coal and lignite still produced 35.3 percent in German power production (compared to 35.2% from renewables. (https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/coal-germany). Before the phase out of nuclear, it generated about 25% of the electricity. It is all really hard to believe...
1) Does the extra cost of rooftop solar go to installers doing a lot more manual work per panel?
Installers who need a source of income to live anyway?..
2) As I see it a lot of the pollution in the world is due to fear of people loosing their jobs. One could scale down many sectors, or more aggressively shift to a greener economy, if it wasn't for the fear of people/voters loosing their jobs.
-- So when considering options I think one needs to give smaller weight to salaries ("somone had to feed that person anyway") and more weight to natural resource extraction needed...which is the "real" cost. Basically count further CO2 emissions invested, not work hours.
Money is fungible and not unlimited - a dollar that goes to subsidize residential rooftop solar is a dollar that would go much, much further if it was used to subsidize utility grade solar or wind.
The original poster pointed out:
>...We would rather die and kill most of the biological world than face economic austerity, so we get what we order.
As I pointed out, it is worse than that - we often waste the small amounts of money we are willing to spend. If people know that rooftop solar is an inefficient use of people's money, but justify it because it can be a jobs program for roofers - that won't help convince tax payers that policy makers are committed to fighting climate change.
There is no limit to the numbers in central bank databases. Resources and labor are not unlimited, though.
That article is from January 2023, so the numbers in there are 2022, not last year, and even then it says that nuclear produced only 11.7%. In any case, comparing to the official numbers[0], those seem to be closer to the 2021 numbers than the actual 2022 numbers: 31.3% coal, 6% nuclear, and 44% renewable. For 2023, coal was down to 26.22%, nuclear (which was only phased out in April) was down to 1.5%, and renewables were at 56%. Nuclear has not contributed more than 20% to electricity generation since 2011[2].
[0] https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Economic-Sectors-Enterpris... [1] https://www.smard.de/page/home/topic-article/444/211756 [2] https://ag-energiebilanzen.de/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/STR...
Thanks for the clarification. The numbers are a little different, but unfortunately the main point is still true. Before the phaseout started, nuclear contributed more than 20% to electricity generation. Even now with nuclear basically eliminated, coal is still being used in 2024 to provide electricity in Germany. Earth just experienced its hottest 12 months in recorded history and it was really incredibly poor decision making to start shutting down nuclear power plants while still burning coal.
That's true, but also quite meaningless. Before the nuclear phaseout started, renewables contributed less than 7% to electricity generation, now it's over 56%, so it more than compensates for the missing nuclear generations. Furthermore, replacing coal with nuclear is not easily done, since most coal plants also generate heat, whereas none of the nuclear plants did.
> Earth just experienced its hottest 12 months in recorded history and it was really incredibly poor decision making to start shutting down nuclear power plants while still burning coal.
None of the remaining reactors had usable fuel left, even just acquiring new fuel would already take 12 or more months (besides, all of the remaining reactors were already several years overdue on safety inspections). The decision to phase out nuclear power has been made well in advance of those 12 months: originally in 2002, partially pushed back in 2010, then finalised in 2011, and again pushed back (by 3.5 months) in 2022. The poor decision making is not phasing out nuclear power, the poor decision making is not also phasing out coal and pushing renewables from at least 2011 onwards.
You misunderstood what I was saying. Earth just experienced its hottest 12 months in recorded history and it was really incredibly poor decision making to start shutting down nuclear power plants while still burning coal. If one thinks that climate change is important, it makes zero sense to eliminate nuclear plants while you are still burning coal. Zero sense. Even if someone thinks it is better to pander to the coal industry or doesn't believe climate change is an existential threat to human civilization, burning coal by itself directly kills thousands of people each year. One recent estimate puts that at 1800–2260 deaths in Germany each year. As climate scientist James Hansen has said, “Coal is the single greatest threat to civilization and all life on our planet”.
"Enjoy it while it lasts (at the expense of young people)"
> In this study, we conducted a representative survey across 125 countries, interviewing nearly 130,000 individuals. Our findings reveal widespread support for climate action. Notably, 69% of the global population expresses a willingness to contribute 1% of their personal income, 86% endorse pro-climate social norms and 89% demand intensified political action.
And an interview of the authors [2]
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-024-01925-3
[2] https://www.carbonbrief.org/interview-why-global-support-for...
I know a lot of people who are pretty minimal in their consumption, but just waking up in the morning and turning on their heating in their poorly insulated apartment means they're significantly contributing to climate change.
Of course manufacturing goods is part of it too, but burning coal, gas and oil is what caused climate change. Not buying clothes or eating food.
This year I plan to consume 6 solar panels and self install them on my barn roof. I'd say this is positive consumption?
The problem with this line of reasoning is that the only people who care are the anxious western upper-middle classes. Anyone poorer can't afford to care.
You absolutely cannot solve the problem through voluntary change of behaviour, and thinking that you can is a sign that you need to step out of your ivory tower. Instead you have to change the economy so that the most environmentally friendly alternative is the cheapest, and so that environmentally disastrous activities are prohibitively expensive.
This is an amount of money we could just create by monetary policy or Quantitative Easing as the like to say. Nobody needs to get poor when money is spend.
If you're using gas it'll never be net zero.
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."
Surely tax car prices, but also set tax for private jet fuel to a 10000%. While electricity is not far from becoming clean, it makes no sense that the rich and the poor paid the same price for it. As total consumption increases, a region has to turn on dirtier and more inefficient plants. So high consumption users should pay a lot more, instead of doing a general price increase. Etc.
If we turned off the fossil fuel tap today, I think life on earth would get markedly worse for humans, with negligible/no impact on fauna.
Ask people born in a former soviet union country who they thought "won" WW2. It is not likely in any scenario that the US would be in the middle of a Nazi world order if Pearl Harbor wasn't attacked, calling it a miracle is disgusting.
Fwiw I have direct family that fought in WW2 in the Pacific.
We should be doing more about wetlands restoration. I think it's a no brainer that a substantial part of the problem is the eradication of 85 percent of global wetlands since the 1700s but it largely goes unnoticed because, I don't know, not enough hopelessness and sense of personal guilt to relate to?
I don't get it. But my life sucks and refuses to stop sucking and I am unlikely to live too much longer, so whatevs. Y'all run around screaming and flailing your arms like Kermit the frog if that's what floats your boat.
Only if mosquitoes are eradicated.
A sad outlook is that we are all rich people living charmed lives that are not at risk so we can bury our heads in the sand. We aren’t the people who will die from our mistakes.
Well my bills will be glad to know this, although it's news to me.
>the world's average salary - in PPP dollars - of $1,480 a month, or almost $18,000 a year
Here is one poll, fwiw, of where HN members live:
Also the poll you linked would seem to agree with my position that much of HN is probably significantly above that wage point and might be thought of as rich.
Finally if you believe something is representative of a population and you are correct in that belief then statistics tells us that it is probably a good idea to assume that a specific person drawn from that group is most likely to possess that representative property. However to be polite you should probably start off with some words like "probably" to catch the outliers who do not possess the representative quality.
Erring on the side of betting that a specific individual is whatever you feel is "the norm" helps keep social problems alive.
In the US and many other countries, that amount of money doesn't constitute "rich." It will not pay your rent, make sure you eat etc. Acting like poor people in the US have it overall better than someone in some other country because they are American is a really lousy argument. It's a subtle way to dismiss the very real problems of a lot of people in developed countries.
The poll I linked to shows that HN has people from all over the world. People seem to think it's mostly programmers in California and New York and there are certainly plenty of people that fit that demographic. There are also lots of others who do not.
And every comment that asserts that if you are on HN, you must be a well-heeled programmer only makes it that much harder to everyone here who isn't such to express themselves effectively and feel comfortable representing a different point of view.
Your comment essentially is a personal attack on someone based on your opinions of the "averages" of this forum with no real data. And the more comments like that get to stand, the more likely it is that people who aren't well-heeled programmers from developed countries will feel silenced and unwelcome here. It doesn't make your assumptions true but it does make it more likely that they will appear to be true and that harms meaningful, constructive discussion.
Given the "scientific" framing of the guidelines and search for truth -- for something meaningful and real and how to have useful conversations about that -- which shapes discussion here, I think this is a really problematic thing to do.
Almost all of the people self-reporting locations in the poll you linked to were from places where the average wage is significantly higher than $1488 PPP per month. When you count up how many people are coming from those places where the average wage is significantly higher than the average global PPP wage it is pretty highly concentrated people earning more than the global average.
Are there people who don't match that, sure, which is why I said probably. Probably evidently isn't a good enough word for you.
You also get lots of people on this site making significantly more than poor people the world over make who complain about their finances. To anyone making the average global wage I am unimaginably rich but I'm doing quite poorly from my own viewpoint.
Your high moral stature essentially means that kind of thing can't be discussed either.
I certainly would feel weird if people described me as rich, but on the other hand in comparison to a lot of people I probably am.
My only advice is that we need to fix the monetary system first or else we'll never be able to escape the cycle of deception. We'll never know what is real or not real or who we can trust or not trust.
Once we have a functioning monetary system based on hard money, only then will we be able to see what problems are real and come up with innovations that solve humanity's real problems... Who knows, that might include climate change...
Our current political reality is fake and we can never get to the truth while our monetary policies distort incentives. Almost all narratives nowadays are founded on deception and they compete against each other for mindshare... Once they cross a certain threshold, it's too easy for certain narratives to use monetary incentives to reinforce their own propagation; a powerful ecosystem of government organizations develops around the narrative and then private companies follow suit to get their contracts.
There are literally no honest narratives even in the running at this point. Once honest people see how the sausage gets made in the centers of power, they lose the heart to push their honest agendas. Only deceptive agendas remain.
Today, I'm not even in a position to answer the question of whether or not climate change is real and caused by humans because I cannot trust the current system or the 'experts' in relevant fields to provide me with that information. For all I know, the promoted experts could be 'incentivized' to the eyeballs to lean in a certain direction.
I cannot trust them because I cannot trust the system which selected them. I'm an expert in my own field and I've seen how the sausage is made there. If that's how it works in my field, why wouldn't it work the same way in other fields?
If I am to go by my own experiences of modern political organizations, I should believe the opposite of what the experts say.
I think the pressure for drastic, technical solutions will mount sharply and ideas like that solar shade will be seriously considered.
One of the crackpot ideas will be that an earlier civilisation managed to mess up the entire planet, but that's so ludicrous that they will conclude it was most likely a weird asteroid impact or something like that.
Also, note the last section of your linked graph is a vertical line on that scale. It still would be if you zoom in to 50 million years rather than 500 million. Anthropomorphic climate change is a vertical line even if you zoomed in to 5 thousand years.
I am quite worried about the world we are leaving them and when they are about 80 in 2080 the world is predicted to be hell. I would not be surprised if they decided not to have children themselves.
I read that in France the number of vasectomies among 25-ish is exploding. This may not be a good indication, though, because vasectomy was not popular in France in the first place (and still requires z 4 month cool down time, by law)
I would prefer, though, they my children are not forced to go through this. It is to late now, though (sorry boys)
I do not understand your point about killing and raping in the context of not having children. You must live in the writing neighborhood of this is the correlation you see attend you.
Imagine humans during previous ice ages, no space heaters and The North Face jackets still having babies. We're so coddled in comparison.
Also, when too cold, kill a sheep, take it's coat. When too hot, what are we (and our animals, food and pets) going to do? Undress our own skin?
Look at the warming forecasts and how accurate they’ve been (they haven’t).
Then look at the error bars on predicting the impact to weather (they are all over the place).
A reaction like not having kids because the world will end places way to much confidence in predictions that little probability of being correct.
Everyone is free to have children (sometimes - unfortunately) so it is a personal choice, even if it seems hysterical to some.
Even some of the more basic predictions about the rise and fall of countries have been comically wrong.
But to feel so confident that you know what the future holds that you make major life choices based on it is rather… odd.
I'm pretty sure you can apply this logic to any human decision. Honestly, I've come around to thinking that children are mostly status symbols within some communities (religiosity correlates about as highly as anything), and most reasons are post-hoc rationalizations of that.
That said, I'm pretty scared of climate change, and I'm probably not quite halfway through my lifespan. I can't imaging being a young child and facing down decades of this stuff. No thanks.
My ~recent ancestors endured hardship that would push me to my limits but it was their daily existence. They fought in the American Revolution, they fired the first shots at the Whiskey Rebellion, they were directly involved in the Civil War, and on it goes, up to my father and his brothers and my brother and myself. I hope that my own children can find resiliency. I'm not sure what the point is otherwise.
Even American conservatives, for example, appear to acknowledge that climate change is occurring. Their current spin is that no major economic changes are required now (inaction is fine!) because they believe that technology will find a way to address an even warming globe. I think a lot of people choose to believe that to avoid doomerism.
That and preparing them for it is exactly what I'm capable of. Kids from religious fundamentalists will come on their own, whether the worlds needs them or not.
We will see how they'll will feel about it after they'll grow older and they will need help from other people and those people won't exist.
I've accepted it though. I don't doomer at people unless they ask. I can't do anything about the situation. I've voted for green parties and politics my whole life. If I have blame it's not for denialists, it's for all those politicians who know and accept the science but did nothing, they didn't have the guts, being voted in again was more important.
It does make me sad to see so many HN comments rolling out the same stupid "I don't trust the data" arguments that were pretty thoroughly debunked within the scientific community 10 years ago, yet still feel the need to jump on every thread about it because the whole thing makes them so angry.
Isn't this how democracy is supposed to work? Isn't it, as a general rule, preferable that politicians fear being voted out, and so do the things that the voters want, so they get reelected? The alternative seems to me for a politician to say one thing in the campaign - what the people want to hear, and then do something else when elected - what he thinks is best. Some do that, but they're not loved for it.
I am pretty sure that even when or if politicians do not care about the voters, they still do not do the right thing, but some other wrong thing, like enriching themselves.
What you are in fact complaining about is that politicians elected by other people did what those people wanted, instead of what you wanted. While not laying the same complaint on those you voted for - greens. They obviously did right to listen to their voters - you and people you agree with.
It's not about the guts of a chosen few. It's about humanity overall. If we do not care about the environment, billions of us, a handful who care will not, can not change much.
If you think democracy is a system for getting the government to do what the people want, then it's working as designed in many places.
The problem is not politicians, the problem is not democracy. We are the problem, we the people who want more more, and do not accept the consequences of our actions. We vote for cheap gas, then shift the blame wherever we can: to politicians, to democracy, to other countries etc.
If a politician doesn’t think global warming is true, at least be open to the fact they might be wrong and be careful with their choices. The environment is a fragile balance, better to be careful and limit things that might impact this fragile balance.
Ask why. Consider why it is that people do that. Is it really human nature? Can't we imagine a world, or even a country, where the cultural zeitgeist is different?
We certainly can have smaller communities where people accept the consequences of their actions, where people will hear about what else happens besides "more" when you ask for more. It's not that the human brain floating in a vacuum is incapable of understanding that actions have consequences. We develop that skill pretty early!
I think it's interesting to look at what separates these smaller groups from the bigger groups. I don't think it's people themselves being built of a different stuff. It's the inputs and the norms that differ.
I can certainly think of norms for a group that result in worse outcomes. I also don't think we're necessarily at an optimum in epistemics, looking around me. So optimistically, candidly, there's room to do somewhat better.
If we all voted together it might be different. Though I doubt it, to be honest.
Under the assumption of perfect information, yes. Politicians should be afraid of doing unpopular things that will not get them re-elected.
A problem that exists down there, outside the internet bubble of information overload, is that people _aren't_ reliably informed. A human in a vacuum without access to accurate information will never spontaneously guess that they should care about the environment.
A politician's decisions are informed by voter preferences. That's good.
But the voters, themselves, how should they know whether to care or not care about any particular subject they're not experts in? Who do you trust? Where does information come from?
Well, there isn't a widespread decentralized information effort. It's not billions of us independently doing investigatory work. It is a handful of us, a small relative percentage. Voters can't all be experts. They have to trust some smaller group.
It seems to me, Greta Thunberg is(was?) in the spotlight because her mothers celebrity status in Sweden, granting her easy access to free PR.
it tells me people will let you do anything to them, if only you add enough emotions, otherwise they don't care.
Frankly a question to ask is why you feel a person like her isn't encouraged to speak out on these issues, and isn't worth listening to? Is she saying things that aren't true? If so it seems like the thing to do would be to speak to those misstatements.
Much more likely though, systemic sexism and ageism make it difficult for folks to accept young women in leadership roles, particularly when their message asks for change from the status quo.
So the reasons you should care about what this person is saying are 1) she is speaking truths about climate change 2) the truths are about existential threats to humanity and she is able to communicate the seriousness of those threats 3) she is able to rally groups of like minded people with a common vision of those threats and their seriousness 4) paying attention to her and uplifting her leadership role helps erode systemic sexism and ageism.
I think it very much depends on your situation. I personally look to her as a role model who's demonstrated the value of strikes and collective action in influencing climate legislation.
Others might take inspiration in her criticisms of air transportation (something that seems to be growing in popularity these days) but I'm not able to give up seeing my aging parents across the country a few more times so that point hasn't reached me quite yet.
Her wikipedia page is worth 5 minutes if you can spare them and maybe go from there.
I also find the aversion to nuclear somewhat problematic as well. Especially in the interior of Europe and the US.
As I said in another part of this post, I still think there are more pressing issues with far more imminent problems and implications for life.
idk maybe it’s not the job of literal teenagers to come up with solutioning that meets the arbitrary whims and constrains you’ll doubtlessly impose on them? They live within the system that you have built for them.
There have always been very obvious solutions: heavy taxation on carbon emissions, with economic sanctions and perhaps eventually military action for willful and deliberate violations. The problem is that you as adults don’t consider that feasible for your own arbitrary political reasons, and so you’ll push us down the path of collapsing the climate rather than rock the boat.
Just like those Chinese fishing boats cleaning out fisheries etc: really you are only a 50 pound dumb-bomb from a solution if it came down to it. China can’t project force, they certainly can’t defend every fishing boat spread across every coastline on the globe, and if they rattle back then you retaliate in some other way. They need us too, for now. They would quickly see the light on keeping their boats in check. But you can’t solve the problem within the arbitrary political constraints set up by the current regimes.
We know the status quo doesn’t work and will collapse the climate within decades, and all anyone can do is ask why solutioning can’t be oriented around maintaining and upholding that same status quo. If you don’t change the game we all lose in the long run. But muh stock market will go down if we tax carbon!!!
The laws of the sea say one thing and china obviously won’t sign a new one that removes their right to strip-mine Greenland fisheries or whatever. And no nation will sign a treaty which truly penalizes them for collapsing the climate. And so the question is what next? You assume the answer is “nothing”, but it doesn’t have to be. And it in fact climate change itself is going to have a say too - political and military instability is already identified as a prime outcome from climate change for precisely this reason. You’re whistling past the graveyard.
What happens when some smaller nation (or group) decides drones look like a pretty good way to enforce some of this? We already see them effective with small state sponsors. Can you keep shipping safe around the entire coast of Africa, and every part of the southeast Asian region? Especially when we have absolutely democratized the means of warfare and driven the cost down to zero.
That’s the world she’s growing up and reacting to. You have truly given her and her generation nothing except a world on fire and you laugh at her for even recognizing or acknowledging this let alone attempting to reverse it, and I think that’s not going to work out as “politely” as you think.
But if you’re too shortsighted and intransigent to solve your own maze that you’ve built for yourself… why would you ever expect a literal child to be able to do it? Of course there are solutions, it just can’t be solved within your self-contradictory system. And as with anything - it’s difficult to get someone to acknowledge something when their paycheck (or quality of life, retirement fund, etc) depends on them not acknowledging it.
But ultimately, I think the people who die of climate change aren't just going to go quietly into the good night like you hope. and they get a vote too - they get all of the "boxes of democracy" in fact.
https://beta.ctvnews.ca/national/sci-tech/2019/9/27/1_461325...
> Fly less or not at all, Cut down on meat consumption or go vegan, Join an activist movement, Vote
Two of those are immediately actionable and have significant impact, and the latter two are really important for building political will to overcome the efforts by a rich but minority group who profit from the status quo and whose money will insulate them from many downsides.
https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/davos-2023-keep...
> The 20-year-old Swedish activist stuck to her stance against all new oil, gas and coal developments during the fringe event, that was not part of the official conference agenda.
This letter is stronger but calls for things which could be done immediately with no technological breakthroughs needed like removing subsidies for fossil fuels and not expanding usage:
https://climateemergencydeclaration.org/open-letter-from-gre...
What I feel from your contribution is simply interference and pulling the conversation in an unproductive direction. There’s enough of that I think.
What I’m more curious about is - what are some leverage points to shift toward solutions. Denialism is not an acceptable solution from where I stand.
Green party in Germany forced the country to close down its nuclear reactors and use coal instead, increasing the emissions.
The green party wasn't able to make this happen or not happen, as they had no governing power. The governing parties were able to make this happen or not happen. They chose to adopt part of the opposition policy to gain political power, but doing this also means they have to accept the responsibility for those decisions.
Sounds pretty evil, huh?
Closing down all nuclear plants was first decided on in the year 2000, 24 years ago. It were the Liberals (FDP) and Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) who rescinded that decision in 2010, only to later reinstitute it in panic after the Fukushima meltdown happened.
Those reactors that got shuttered hadn't had any safety inspections in years, they had no viable fuel left and not even the owning energy companies wanted to operate them any longer than absolutely necessary, so they would have been shut down even without the Green party in the current government.
That the now missing nuclear baseload had to have been replaced with coal, well.. Thank the Christian Democrats for that. They're the ones that favoured building out coal, slowing down the build-out of renewables as much as possible, at every chance they got.
I got into emotionally charged arguments for even asking, "Will Germany produce enough electrical power after shutting down nuclear power stations?" People told me base load was an outdated way of looking at the energy market and a conservative talking point to justify cutbacks in subsidies for renewables. An often repeated argument was that Germany has been a net exporter of electrical power for many years, so reducing capacity should not be a problem.
Personally, I feel that neither side engaged in an honest public debate. I remember very well a leading Green politician, Jürgen Trittin, declaring that the transition towards renewables would cost each German citizen as much as an ice cream cone. Yes, politics must create positive momentum, but being off by orders of magnitude signals fundamental incompetence. The usual counter is, "Had everything gone according to plan, it totally would have worked out." That is childish and not a way to do serious politics.
As the world gets hotter, some people will benefit. Those people will try to stop any serious attempts to reverse course, especially when the next generation comes (to them, the current climate is normal - why would we want to spend lots of money to revert it to the way it was hundreds of years ago).
A 2/3/4 C rise in global temperature is going to happen, and humans might put the brakes on, but they will never put it back the way it was.
I think CO2 emissions are going to decline – not fast enough to prevent a 2/3/4 C rise in global temperatures – but I think that rise could well be just a temporary thing for a few centuries, after which the climate goes back to what it used to be.
People are trying to limit CO2 emissions – not hard enough, but they are trying – and renewable electricity, electric vehicles, etc, are in the long-run going to win out because even if you don't care about CO2 emissions at all, they have other advantages.
What does society look like to you on the other end of this?
Q: If you look back a few centuries, what does society look like to you?
Reduced or even zero emissions are not negative emissions. By what processes and at what time scales will 100% of the surplus accumulated CO2 go away? I am not so sure this can happen in just a few centuries.
"According to the IPCC's 2021 projections of global temperature under different emissions scenarios, peak temperature could be anything from 1.6 ºC in around 2050 (if the globe hits net zero emissions by then), dropping to 1.4 ºC by 2100; to, with emissions still climbing, 4.4 ºC at 2100, with the peak still to come."
The IPCC's own predictions are that temperatures will peak and thereafter fall due to reductions in anthropogenic CO2 emissions. The question is when it will peak and how big the peak will be, which all depends on how quickly emissions are cut.
Yes, but it's important to understand why. I believe it's because the oceans and atmosphere would not be in equilibrium when we reach zero emissions, and so the oceans would continue to absorb CO2 for a while. This reduces atmospheric CO2 concentration and temperature in the short term (at the cost of further ocean acidification).
But what happens after the oceans and atmosphere reach equilibrium? Where does the excess CO2 go?
I think it can only go away through the very slow process of bicarbonate formation. And I'm not convinced this can completely remove the excess CO2 in just a few centuries.
I don’t know who is right, but I think for someone who isn’t an expert at this, there is an argument for preferring the mainstream consensus to the views of a single controversial researcher-especially if one hasn’t spent the time to understand the details of that researchers’ work (I haven’t)
When people grew up in a 4C warmed world, that is the way they'll want to keep it.
I've heard scenarios put as mild as a reduction in real GDP growth, which is just a non-issue compared to the risks people want to shoulder to mitigate climate change.
> I've voted for green parties and politics my whole life
These people tend to be anti-nuclear in my experience; so I'm not sure from your comment if that strategy is a good idea. Environmentalists have been some of the more effective lobby groups for locking in fossil fuel use through 1980-2020 when we really should have been transitioning to nuclear power.
First time I've heard that, everyone else says "this will kill anyone experiencing it for more than a brief period, meaning hours or minutes depending on the details".
Solution is only easy on a scale of one person, "move elsewhere", or rich societies, "stop working outside and install aircon inside", which isn't so easy for anyone working in agriculture or much of Africa and India.
India's real growth rate is >5% p.a. They're going to be a rich society pretty soon, because they are behaving like a clever country and building lots of power plants.
And while horrific things are likely to happen in Africa, horrific things have been happening in Africa every year for my entire lifetime. So yeah, it is terrible but not going to make me depressed by the future so much as the present. They need to figure out economic growth like Asia did. It is their only hope.
> stop working outside and install aircon inside
I dunno, sounds scalable to me. Repurpose office buildings with air conditioning for crisis use sometimes. People with air conditioners help those without.
Order of magnitude it sounds pretty doable. I don't see where the scale issue comes from to the point where I'd consider anyone I know "doomed".
EDIT If you described snowstorms, earthquakes, bushfires or tropical cyclones in the abstract they sound civilisation ending too. They are bad but people cope.
Even in places like Tokyo, they have to limit their use of A/C because it' so energy intensive due to the crazy amount of heat from the urban heat island effect.
I was in Singapore on Friday, for one day.
There's air-conditioning in the MRT (metro) stations, but (at least from what I experienced during my brief stay) the stations are not typically closed off from the outside.
You approach a station at street level and it's perhaps 33°C (91F) w/ humidity outside. Around midday my phone reported the weather as '33°C feels like 38°C (104F)'.
You go down an open set of stairs/escalators, and it gets progressively cooler and then you're in the metro and it's pleasantly cool. I was very quickly wondering whether this wasn't a mind-blowingly wasteful use of energy.
Anyone care to comment?
the subways themselves put off a substantial amount of heat (from friction, motor loss, etc - all inefficiency eventually becomes heat) and for example in london they have problems with heat buildup in the tube system. so air-conditioning the platforms is generally desirable and probably necessary (especially in a more equatorial climate than england).
Your "solution" is an example of what I meant by "easy on a scale of one person […] or rich societies", and no, they won't work for India. Not yet, anyway, as their power grid can't supply enough to run AC for everyone at the same time[0] in the event of a sufficiently wide and hot heatwave — and possibly never, as even the UK has measurable excess deaths during heatwaves (although caveat the UK has approximately no AC installed). On the plus side, India has completed the electrification of all the villages.
Remember, it's not just the national average that matters, if the bottom 15% can't afford it, they can't survive those events — 15% of India is earning no more than 125k INR/year[1], which at current rates is $1,508/year[2]. A few low income people might choose to get AC and have their friends over, but I think[3] it is sadly unreasonable to suggest that even a significant fraction of low income people could find a high income person with AC who will let them stay over for a bit.
Also, 45.6% are currently working in agriculture[4], and when these events happen, approximately all of that sector (in any specific location) has to stop working even if they have access to a building with AC and aren't just killed by such an event in their area. So do all the builders, though that's a much smaller sector. And when that happens, they earn less, so they have less money to spend on AC.
[0] http://www.indiaenvironmentportal.org.in/files/file/Growth%2...
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/482584/india-households-...
[2] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=125000+INR+to+USD
[3] On the basis of western culture, which may be an incorrect framing… https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/5317-when-asked-what-he-tho...
[4] https://www.niti.gov.in/sites/default/files/2023-02/Discussi...
Using those figures, you seem to be making an argument that 15% of Indians are at risk. That is pretty bad. But the upside of business as usual is much bigger than the downside. At a 5% real growth rate, income doubles in about 15 years. That is a lot of wealth that they can use to solve this problem. And approximately 80-90% of living Indians seem to be due to the fossil fuel economy that people are blaming for global warming; so by raw numbers most people are still coming out ahead. The obvious path is to keep going with coal until it runs out.
And the doom case hinges on 85% of the population sitting there and doing literally nothing while 15% fall over and die on the street. You m might believe that is likely, but I think it is implausible. And if it does happen that way, that doesn't seem like it'd sit on my conscience.
> Also, 45.6% are currently working in agriculture
Now that is a horrific stat. I would encourage Indian's to do whatever is necessary to get those poor people out of farm jobs and into something more comfortable. That sort of agricultural sector is a path of poverty, the people can't be productive enough to sustain a comfortably materialist society.
The path to doing that probably involves a lot of power stations. Likely coal fired. This point dovetails nicely with:
> Not yet, anyway, as their power grid can't supply enough to run AC for everyone at the same time
They'll need to beef up their grid, or they will be poor and probably die horribly. More electricity fixes a lot of problems simultaneously.
The 15% number was being used to demonstrate that wages are not equal — that number is not my free choice, it is not due to me thinking an income of US$1508/year is a magic number below which one cannot have AC, but rather it comes from how that specific income distribution graph was broken down. The underlying reality is (unless all the UBI proponents have missed a huge example), not constant income in each of those boxes; and a separate point that not everyone in any given income category will be able to choose to buy AC simultaneously even if it is available for purchase.
I am going to say that when such events happen today[0], people already die. The question is how often, and how many are impacted at any given time. And given that temperature is a continuum, what implications this has for close-to-threshold conditions where people can live through it just so long as they don't move or stand up, or the even earlier broad transition zone where they can do decreasing levels of labour before being forced to rest (answer: sub-threshold events are more frequent).
> At a 5% real growth rate, income doubles in about 15 years. That is a lot of wealth that they can use to solve this problem.
The average income doubles in 15 years, but no, it's not a lot of wealth — it's starting at a moderately low level, and there's a lot of things that are also important to spend money on, and even if everyone picks AC first and then the rest, a fixed percentage growth for all groups puts most of the numerical growth in the already rich; if you want to argue around this issue, you would need a model that shows different growth rates for different income levels[1] or that the culture is significantly different from how the west demonstrably does things[4][5].
> And approximately 80-90% of living Indians seem to be due to the fossil fuel economy that people are blaming for global warming; so by raw numbers most people are still coming out ahead. The obvious path is to keep going with coal until it runs out.
Er, what? No. Even from the pure energy argument, the obvious answer is "use the cheapest power". That's not coal, and hasn't been for a while now. At least, it is everywhere else, when I tried searching for the Indian prices the pages I was given were clearly written by ChatGPT…
Also for the specific example you picked, "until the coal runs out" would put out enough CO2 to cause measurable cognitive impacts worldwide as humans, unlike plants, do not thrive with more CO2. Nuclear power would also be "green" in this sense, though given the geopolitics of India and Pakistan specifically, I'd hope both would move away from nuclear for reasons entirely out of scope of this discussion and regardless of any optimism about the price of future reactors.
> And the doom case hinges on 85% of the population sitting there and doing literally nothing while 15% fall over and die on the street. You m might believe that is likely, but I think it is implausible. And if it does happen that way, that doesn't seem like it'd sit on my conscience.
It won't sit on my conscience either, just as the grounds for my belief already don't sit on my conscience, though my beliefs are anchored on European culture rather than Indian culture which may well be different.
Specifically with regard to heat issues: "Despite the fact that many European countries activated heat prevention plans during the summer of 2022, the estimation of over 60,000 heat-related deaths suggests that prevention plans were only partially effective."[2] (Also note that Europe has a GDP/capita about fifteen times higher than India[3], which would take 55.5 years of 5% growth to match).
And with regard to "do rich people really help poor people?", using homelessness as a proxy: "The data shows that more than one million properties across England in 2022 were unoccupied (4.01 per cent of all dwellings), an increase of nearly 60,000 homes since 2018."[4] vs "New research from Shelter shows at least 309,000 people in England will spend Christmas without a home, including almost 140,000 children. This is a stark increase of 14%, 38,100 people, in one year."[5]
Now, if you're like me, at this point you're thinking "why isn't Ben giving evidence about specifically Indian heat deaths?": I wanted to, but it seems they don't actually exist in a good quality form, and it's politically divisive within the country: "The Indian Express newspaper reported that one hospital superintendent who’d publicly linked deaths to heatstroke was later removed from his position for giving “a careless statement.” It then quoted a doctor who’d visited the same clinic as saying the causes were unclear. […] Beyond that, though, it’s symptomatic of the parlous state of health services and public data in a country that lacks the means to even know for certain how many people its broiling climate is killing, let alone take measures to help them. […] A common solution to that problem is looking at excess deaths — comparing recorded fatalities with the number you’d expect in a typical year to iron out the effects of reporting bias. […] Even that approach may be inadequate in India, however, because the most basic data on mortality is too patchy. Nationwide, roughly 8% of estimated deaths in 2019 went unrecorded, according to an annual government survey, and only 19% of the total were certified by a medical professional, a step considered routine in most countries."[6]
(Also, "fall over and die on the street" is more likely to be "go home and lie down out of the sun, and still die", as the 'wet bulb' condition is that you can't even survive in a breeze in the shade, and I'd expect people to seek shade and a breeze before the temperature reached true deadly 'wet bulb' levels over the course of any given day. This also means the AC has to be actual AC and not just a fan).
> More electricity fixes a lot of problems simultaneously.
On this we agree.
[0] and they do happen, with increasing frequency, which is why they are in the meme-sphere at all, though caveat the language in the meme sphere often conflates "hot bulb" with all heat-related deaths and that's not actually what the term means.
[1] Like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Global_changes_in_real_in...
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-023-02419-z
[3] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28Europe+GDP%2Fcapita%...
[4] https://www.local.gov.uk/about/news/empty-homes-england-rise....
[5] https://england.shelter.org.uk/media/press_release/at_least_...
[6] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/06/21/heat-wave...
In fact, it might literally be like someone in the UK in 17xx worrying about the early industrial revolution because of climate change. The cost benefit calculation favours the industrial revolution by a heavy margin. If energy gets cheap enough, climate change happens and nobody needs to care.
Not so — the person you're responding to was demonstrating that important things had not in fact been invented, while your example only worked out because we did actually invent stuff.
Indeed, even today electricity is only about 10% of humanity's total power usage, and that's with batteries cheap enough to make electric cars viable. (Bit of a shame that the alternative to batteries, hydrogen, still isn't cheap enough to be a great contender today, even despite the strong incentive to replace gasoline during the height of pro-nuclear attitudes and the OPEC-induced fuel crisis).
If environmentalists are so effective, climate change would have been a higher priority over those decades. It seems likelier to me that there's other, more convincing reasons we haven't rolled out nuclear at a huge scale. For example the following are typically more convincing and applicable to nuclear as well: high costs, high political risk, fossil fuel lobbying.
The hypothesis of doom that I subscribe to is that it'll cause cascading effects that destroy parts of the existing ecology (this is already happening) and then the same to our food supply faster than we can react to. I don't worry it's going to mass cause temperatures that kill me directly if that's your implication. It'll be social collapse far away from where I live that will spread.
I live in a safe country that gets about 80% of its power from renewables. But we don't build those wind turbines here and we certainly don't mine for their materials, if the supply of stuff goes awry we'll be just as buggered as everywhere else.
Failed crops on a global scale may result in widespread famine and war. Crops can fail as a result of not enough rain, too much rain, not enough insects, too many inspects, all kinds of climate related things.
I remember reading during covid that there is not some massive food cache somewhere with the government ready to bail us out if they need to. That we are basically living season to season.
By changing a few things in your own behaviour and taking pride in it you can improve your own life. Not consuming so much actually improves a lot of other areas in your own life like physical and mental health, finances etc.
By working on things in your local area, raising awareness, getting involved with local government(at your town) you can make a difference with a few hours per week. Or be imaginative, do some research, get interested in some specific area and then try to apply it around you.
These are the easiest things you can do. And then you can do more, if you are ambitious. What you are describing is a viewpoint of somebody either lazy, resigned, or not really interested in these things.
Our ancestors survived ice ages.
>> I've voted for green parties and politics my whole life.
You are part of the problem why we are burning coal instead of using nuclear power.
I’m not sure if you are actually serious. They did not have billions of people relying on a very brittle global economy back in the day. They did not have cities with millions of people and an enormous infrastructure to keep these people alive.
I'm not the one implying impending doom if the climate is getting slowly warmer.
>> They did not have billions of people relying on a very brittle global economy back in the day.
Compared to freezing in an ice desert, not knowing when you'll eat next time.
>> They did not have cities with millions of people and an enormous infrastructure to keep these people alive.
Funny, I see our infrastructure as a strength and not a liability.
I think the panic will come soon though then it will just be too hard to ignore. Might be too late to do much about it by then.
EDIT: We also can't really seem to get our act together and collaborate across the planet.
The hope is that we don't get to a place where positive feedback really pummels us and find some sort of equilibrium. It's hard to say and these are the sorts of games we should not play. If the earth completely changes into a human or life unfriendly place our technology won't save us.
Another bit of hope is that the planet has been warmer in the more distant past. I think we're technically still in an ice age.
A huge part of the economy has been voluntarily stopped, which is insane to think about, nobody would have thought that was possible before the pandemics happened.
> A huge part of the economy has been voluntarily stopped
Huh? Covid was tearing up northern Italy before it landed in the US and we did nothing to prevent it. Our politicians were telling people not to buy masks.
Trump sent shit tons of ventilators to Florida for no reason.
We allowed people from places that had confirmed cases of Covid to come into the US, they just had to make a layover.
The WHO refused to call Covid a pandemic until it was way too late.
Nursing homes were decimated. Schools decided that stay 6-feet apart meant "do nothing, its fine".
People were eating horse deworming paste instead of getting the vaccine. People lost their fucking shit over mask mandates.
Maybe you weren't in the US?
Maybe I have very low expectations for that type of things…
In my opinion, the only country that acted rationally was NZ.
China hid the outbreak until it was already endemic in many countries.
Brazil shit the bed. Every other country seems to have let the virus in and then done very little to prevent spread.
I would say individually we did pretty well generally, but as a collective pretty much every institution failed to adequately address the situation.
Masking was never mandated in public spaces. Business owners could refuse you service but there was no "radicle measure" that made that possible. The vast majority of restaurants were open for sit in dining.
The "radicle measures" that spring to mind when someone mentions Covid are the bad ones. Like the fact that restaurants were allowed to serve food on the sidewalk (good) but then a bunch of restaurants in NY built walls and put up plastic to keep the people dining outside warm, thus negating the effects of being in open air.
But yeah, I agree with OP. Watching covid nuts attack children just for existing in public with a mask on was not a shining example of our humanity.
More concretely, though, I do think there's some technological levers that can be applied towards CO2 reduction & capture, bioremediation, and adaptation. I don't think they're the optimal answer - the optimal answer was us recognizing we're spending on credit a hundred years ago - but I think they're the answers we're going to use, so that's where most of my effort is.
I've mentioned this elsewhere, but - I got a job a while back that I think helps move the world in the right direction, and my god has it made a difference in my ability to handle all this. It's still not easy to look at, but it's easier when you're not burning all your energy on something orthogonal to what you actually care about. If you can live with the lower pay, I promise it's worth it for the improved ability to sleep at night.
We will find ways to adapt and survive.
Where does someone get the courage to just lie like this?
"Recorded history" and "records of average temperature taken in real time" are two very different things to say only go back 150 years.
"Recorded history" only going back 150 years implies that the US was basically the start of recorded history.
"real time temperature measurements" only go back 150 years means you don't trust the science that allows us to make estimates of climate based on things like ice core samples.
What will happen, and what is in fact already happening : food gets more expensive, people have to migrate because their current location is no longer viable, more disasters, and more conflict resulting all of that.
Humanity is not going extinct any time soon. But what sort of world do you want to leave to our kids? Should our objectives be not a tad higher than “oh well, life will be worse but at least as a species well still exist”?
Also note that while we have only started “writing” since a couple of thousand years, and indeed keeping track for less than that, we do have the natural record. That may not be as precise as the written record, but there is a lot of it over a very long time. That natural record puts boundaries on previous temperatures.
You’re entitled to feel that you don’t want to change your ways for the benefit for others. That is not ideal but it’s the rules. Don’t deny and invent false narratives to prevent feeling guilty though.
People have migrated all throughout history. Humans walked across Siberia wearing animal skins to get to North America. I think they'll be fine if they have to take a bus or a plane to a new country.
There has been conflict all throughout human history. Currently it is at a historic low. Likewise, there have been disasters. Floods, volcanoes, earthquakes. This is not new.
Yes, you should strive to leave your kids in the best situation possible, but you do that by locally improving your situation to be as good as possible. You cannot control the global food production or natural disasters or the climate. Nobody can do that. Everyone will have to work on setting themselves up in the best situation possible, which, incidentally, is all we have ever been able to do.
I just can't be bothered with this kind of fear-mongering. Guys, you'll never guess what happened! We collected a bunch of measurements and one of them was the biggest! Oh, no!
It might be two degrees warmer this century. Life will go on just fine. Possibly better in some ways and places. No problem, relatively speaking, compared to the hazards our ancestors face.
If it warms 5C, we might have a real problem on our hands. I don’t think we can predict that, and I don’t think it will happen over 100-200 year timescales.
Many people seem to think there will be mass die offs, the ocean will become unsurvivable acidic, and crops won’t grow. I don’t think any of that will happen anytime soon. I think there is a very strong “doom” instinct in humans to think this is the last generation, the end of times. This is just the latest manifestation.
If we bumped to 1000ppm carbon, would the earth warm 5C? That’s a technical question. We don’t know exactly how sensitive the climate is or what feedback mechanisms are at play. I don’t lose sleep over it. But I’m just trying to give my perspective to counter some of the doom, since the doomers are very active online.
Humans have already caused many mass die offs. Go into a forest today and try to catch dinner with your bare hands and you'll find it is near impossible. Yet it used to be possible - that's how our ancestors lived.
Us inventing aids like the bow and arrow has depleted the wild animal population enough that we now couldn't survive without such aids.
FWIW, quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_longbow : "The trade of yew wood to England for longbows was such that it depleted the stocks of yew over a huge area."
My proof is that they're the oldest surviving civilization on earth and lived mostly a hunter gatherer lifestyle without running out of food and requiring mass scale agriculture to survive.
Did you know that just a couple of thousand of years ago there were more elephants than humans in sub Saharan Africa? Feeding yourself with hunting then is really easy, there are meat giants to eat everywhere, that is what earth was like when humans were still hunters. Then humans hunted most of the largest animals to extinction and the remaining got turned to cattle.
This does not appear surprising. Elephants were perfectly adapted to that environment and able to fend off dangerous predators. Humans - several thousand years ago - were not as dangerous. And thus used to be the prey of necessity for older, limping lions in the past. The old big cats could no longer catch a fleeting gazelle but the slow, clumsy humans made an acceptable substitute - even if the meat tasted like bad pig. Even in the last millennium, thousands of humans were devoured by man-eating cats.
The humans that made thorn bush corrals and teamed up with spears when one yelled lion?
They're not as easy for big cats as many might think, even today you can see barefoot humans with spears facing down cats and cats shying away from the sound of humans.
Only old slightly mad cats gave humans a go, and they rarely lasted long until people teamed up and took out the man eaters.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJZR68KSIgY
> Even in the last millennium, thousands of humans were devoured by man-eating cats.
That's, like, one or two a year ... comparable to drowning and other accidental fatalities.
In reality, outside the drama of Rudyard Kipling story, it's a rare bit of drama for big game hunters to have an actual man eater to go after.
Big cats don't face groups - they are ambush predators. Some man-eaters have murder counts reaching several hundred just by their lone selves. Even late as the early 1900's, a tigress in India stalked and killed 436 people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_attack#The_Champawat_Tig...
People are getting involved and putting their ass on the line to stop this madness. At a great cost, given that cops regularly maim and sometimes murder ecological activists trying to stop ecocidal projects (see NDDL / Sivens / Sainte Soline).
We have a choice to make: destroy capitalism and its consumption lifestyle, or let it destroy humanity and millions of other species. I strongly recommend watching END:CIV, a 20-year-old documentary that hasn't aged a bit.
Ecological problems are not coming for us in the 2100s. They're here now and keep getting worse.
And it isn't so expensive to turn things around. An estimated 100-200% in global GDP is needed to reach carbon net zero by 2050. Annually we need to spend 2-6% of GDP to get there.
Remember every bit of Co2 not emitted counts
If US Congress wasn't red, we would be moving considerable faster in the right direction.
The worst projections, at least, are off the table: we're not headed for 6 degrees of warming, we're on track for 3, and I strongly suspect we'll end up closer to 2 degrees of warming.
That is going to be terrible. People will die, wars will be fought, and we'll see the largest migrations in human history with all the attendant political upheaval and barbarity, but we'll still be here. Humans as a species are going to make it.
For me, I found it helpful to go and work in climate. So long as I wasn't actively working to solve the problem, I was driven mad by the knowledge that we were heading for disaster.
Curious, can you say what you switched from and to?
There will still be permanent changes to the biosphere, but there is no reason to feel doomed.
The water is missing in other places, Italy's north heavily depends on mountain water for their farming. This is going to be a very dry year. Either forcing them to lower the quality of real Italian pasta or again increasing the prices. Also wine from the whole region will not do well this year.
In french the fragil botanical environment is changing so much that their cheese doesn't reach the usual quality anymore.
This sounds like little things maybe, but those are huge traditional markets dying in front of our eyes.
Things are changing very rapidly. I don't know how or why there would be any optimism about this.
They explained the moisture in the air was at record levels this year because the sea surface temperature was 1.5 C above normal. We all knew the moisture was at record levels because Brisbane (in a temperate zone) was getting sustained levels of humidity that exceeded the levels experiences in the far northern tropics, 3000 km away. Even on a relatively mild day at say 30C, you could not walk up a hill without being drenched in your own sweat. Since their weather models had never see humidity like this sustained for weeks and weeks (it was an all-time record yesterday), they were wrong. It's doubly surprising because were in a El Nino, which should bring dry spells.
The result of all that rain was continuous storms lasting for week, at the peak bring category 3 cyclone winds (exceeding 130 km/hr), concrete power pylons being blown over (never happened before), power outages for weeks in some areas, flooding and deaths in metropolitan areas. Most of came without much warning because the aforementioned models were wrong. It's been a wild ride.
What blows me away is in West Asia the sea surface temperature was 5 C above normal this year, over three times what we are experiencing. I can't imagine what that is like.
The issue we really face is that the needed change is fundamentally incompatible with the way wealth is accumulated on the top today, how growth is expected and required at every step.
That means the first change that needs to happen is purely mental: Either we march into doom to make a bit more money for the richest or we restructure our system so it doesn't need growth to provide wealth. And once we have that mental change the next harder step will be convincing the powers that be to implement it.
We are now farther in terms of the mental question than in say 2010, but things move too slow and many people have not fully realized the existential nature of the problem.
The previous, continuous trend upwards for decades was already bad enough, with extreme events becoming increasingly common and extremer. You have a complex system, you apply a continuous big enough pressure to it, and you get global average that is slowly rising up even if some days look normal, and, somewhere, somewhat, some days, weird things are happening. And the very concept of positive feedback loops causing that this problem is not worsening in a linear way. That is a very bad trend, that it would just take time to hit around me.
But the doomerism part doesn't come from just there. It comes from the human world. Not doing anything about it, big money making big disinformation campaings to avoid normal people to take action, big capital and top industrialized countries not doing anything about that, and adding even more disruptive activity (along with some token measures that are not in the same order than the others), official global climate organizations being taken over in front of everyone, smaller countries are being sued for taking measures to minimize impact. There is no will to fix this, to stop worsening the situation.
So you have a system that is being disrupted in big scale for decades, that is taken out of its inertia and balance by that continuous and increasing push, you start to see that it is slowly getting out of control. And there is no will to take out that push, at most you get some Newspeak way of ensuring people that something is being done. And when things really becomes desperate, we won't have decades to wait for a slow, orderly unwinding to have some effect. So some desperate extra push on a system that we still don't understand will be sold as idea of geoengineering, moving the system towards a new, even more unstable situation.
There is where my doomerism lies, not in the symptom of a string of broken records.
Two questions:
1. Is climate change averted, and a non-issue? Or has it just been pushed back for a little while?
2. What does life on earth look like, when 90% of the people you know and depend on today are just gone?
Also would be very helpful to look at the worst case predictions and what that would entail hundred years down the line.
Its not cool but it really not that bad. Definitely not apocalyptic.
Its also worth it to consider whats the alternative because every version of an alternative is exponentially worse (communism and/or luddite primitive feudalism).
How do you even know what is normal weather? Can you specify an exact time when you think the weather was normal?
>> Do others here feel similarly?
No.
>> Do you think these trends are reversible?
Reversible to what? Like it was 50 years ago or 5000 years ago or 50 million years ago?
>> Is technology the solution? Something else?
People have been living anywhere from freezing arctic to hot arid deserts. We seem to be good at adapting to our environment.
Sure, humans can survive without agriculture but not billions of them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#/m...
If on average the Earth is getting greener, this doesn't mean everywhere on Earth is getting greener the same amount. Some places may become less green, some may stay the same and some may become much greener. But on average more places are getting greener than not. Therefore global output is increasing!
>> Unless you have serious research on contrary? How can you be so sure there's not going to be heatwaves, floods, etc. that cause havoc in enough locales to affect world food security?
Historical data shows Earth was greener and had larger animal mass when it was warmer. If you think this time things will be different, you should present evidence confirming your position.
Which historical data? For example the hottest period ever was during time of Pangaea supercontinent, which was largely desert.
It was almost the hottest period, but not the hottest. Pangaea was dry because of its unique geography which prevented moist air from coasts to move around the continent. You picked up a bad example.
>> Which historical data?
Mostly geological data. Btw. historical temperature data also comes from geological data. You can search Wikipedia for specific information.
Neither is good for crops.
This is going to be a cynical take by HN's standard. It actually reinforce some of the fundamentals of humans beings that our ancestors has somehow understood far better than we do today.
It is that "Interest" matters. Needs are driven by interest. You cant just say the world is going to end in 100 years time and we need to stop eating meat and turn off all heaters etc etc. You also cant tell company to stop earning money or lower profits margin just because of "Good". What technology do however is that we innovate so others cant say NO.
We are now at a time where non-fossil fuels, or Wind and Solar is cheaper, and will continue to get cheaper in the future. The economy of scale is there. To the point unless the Government TAX on non-fossil fuels, the pure force of this momentum meant it is only a matter of time. I use the term non-fossil fuels because renewable doesn't include nuclear, personally I am a big fan of GE BWRX-300.
All in all in am actually quite optimistic. We are slowly solving it.
Both of these events were rare and they were AMAZING and everyone was either taking out their sleds or spending the day at the beach.
We have also always had floods at the Rhine river.
> As Freymann details, these efforts include “constructing the largest water transfer system in human history; expanding and raising nearly 6,000 miles of sea walls along its coasts; building a strategic grain reserve larger than the rest of the world’s combined; carving wetland flood basins in the centers of its largest cities; restoring coastal wetlands to act as buffers against storms; and relocating hundreds of thousands of ‘ecological migrants’ in low-lying areas.”
Reading your question made me think of this article.
It seems like a lot of time was wasted decades ago in the US on not transitioning away from fossil fuels or trying to become carbon neutral, but that's crying over spilled milk. I'm not going to doom about the effects of something that mostly happened before I was born; that's almost like becoming an alternate history theorist.
> I guess my real question is: how do you incorporate all of this change into your worldview and outlook?
To answer your question directly, I just hope more of my generation (generation Z) does less climate change denial or doomerism, and does more voting and climate change activism. And not just for feel-good policy like planting trees, but climate change adaptation, like China.
[0]: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/unpacking-chinas-climate-...
Anthropogenic climate change is real. It sucks, and we’re experiencing the results of it today. If you do not believe this, please consider who the experts on this very complex topic would be (climatologists, meteorologists, etc), and listen to what 99% of them are saying.
Most of the companies that HN looks up to are fueled by consumerism.
For example, 30% of Americans believe in astrology, but I would expect very few hackers on here do.
There's broad disagreement about the role humans play in this process, and our ability to influence it one way or another in any meaningful way.
There's also broad disagreement about the efficacy and implementation of policies aimed at tackling climate change.
If 90% of the human population on earth would just disappear tomorrow morning, would climate change just stop and become a non-issue? Or would it just be pushed back for a little while?
Please re-read my original comment.
I'm saying that there's disagreement about the degree to which humans are contributing to global warming, and can influence climate change, one way or another, in any meaningful way.
With that out of the way, the obvious next step is to prepare for the changes that’ll come and learn to live with it, instead of pretending like it can be stopped or even reversed by enacting more bullshit taxes on stuff, or by never eating steak.
As Richard Feynman said, science is the belief in the ignorance of experts. When there is a medially and politically forced consensus, it leads to "intellectual tyranny in the name of science".
One single scientist who disagrees with the notion that humans are primarily responsible for climate change would already show that there is no consensus, strictly speaking (Science is about questioning the majority belief). And there are hundreds of very reputable scientists who have disagreed with this over the years, and there is a lifely discussion around this, but those who control the political narratives make it appear there is none. Belief in the majority is not scientific, it's political.
The fact that you mention that contrary opinions regarding climate change are associated with a political group should be alarming to you.
A minority of scientists believe in a flat earth. Should we assume then that the world is flat? Or should we accept the incredibly strong consensus that the world is round?
So you can't solve the problem yourself, you need the help of people who are uninterested in helping you or catastrophe awaits. There's no more perfect rationale as precursor to authoritarianism today.
Why cry over spilt milk? Go outside, enjoy life, the weather is nice. You can show me a million graphs from authoritative sources that demand respect in academic circles, so long as me and my lover can prance through a meadow picking wildflowers I'm not worried about it. I'd like to live in the real world for as much time as I have on this earth as I can. I can't save the world, I'd rather not get my blood pressure up looking at pie charts telling me I'm doomed, all I can do is accept that I live in a changing environment and enjoy the beauty of the world. It is still really beautiful out there you know.
Your passive attitude, which equates to plugging your ears, closing your eyes, and shutting off your mind, is the same attitude that allows genocides to be committed while you "prance through a meadow".
To be clear, I go outside and enjoy life daily. The difference is that I accept the mountains of evidence that say we must, individually and collectively, adjust our way of living to preserve this benefit for our children. And no, the weather isn't always nice; the last several summers have been choked with wildfire smoke.
If you look at the charts again you'll see the temp. has been rising more and more in response since the industrial revolution.
As a peer comment noted, you can ignore the 0 degree line, the article uses two different epoch markers, these are just arbitary convention.
I believe there was also a noticeable effect from the pollution decrease when global shipping dropped during covid, you had less cloud cover from ship trails, and more solar radiation reaching the surface.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05122-0
2022 Nature article on the phenomena.
Eventually, many of these processes become depleted and global average temperature starts to rise.
The red portion of the graph starts later because of the arbitrary temperature they decided to use as the 0 point.
I'm scared the best case scenario will end up being "the world gets so hot it kills enough people to stop getting hotter." I don't know a lot about climate change but I don't thing the Earth will simply reset when enough people die, considering the melting ice caps won't just unmelt because of that.
(and dozens if not millions other things, neither of which is harder than depopulation)
Overall most of the population growth now is younger, larger generations replacing older ones, with the demographic pyramid looking like a sausage being filled with meat.
World population will peak by 2086 at ~10.4bln.
The previous estimate put the population in 2100 at 11bln and growing, but then China had its census, which revealed a very different demographic situation than anticipated and the pandemic happened, upending those projections.
Recently also India went below replacement fertility rate - that now makes the two most populous nations having crossed that threshold - also way ahead of previous projections.
Estimates of populations of African countries are most likely overstated, just like fertility rates.
Looking at past projections the population was typically slightly below the estimated figure, so the most likely scenario is that this will be the case here as well.
In any case I don't think that devastation will come to pass, as China's emissions pretty much plateaued already and India's are looking like they did as well. The west has been in decline in that regard for years now.
It's going to get worse - that's a given - but with the recent estimates giving a more precise number for emissions connected with land use change, global CO2 emissions might have plateaued, or even peaked a few years ago already.
There is no way of organising an economy that will allow it to support having the demographic of net producers significantly outnumbered by the demographic of net consumers. This is an economic problem, but only in the sense that if you want people to have access to good and service then you need people willing and able to produce those goods and services is economic problem. If you have a demographic collapse, then you don’t have that any more, no matter what system of economic management you’re using.
The idea that we need depopulation is also about as intellectually and scientifically valid as the voluntary extinction movement is, yet somehow a lot more people seem to think it has some credibility.
We just need the working age populace to produce more than everyone can consume. Automation was supposed to achieve that. In fact, I think it has already achieved that long ago?
I'll reword it in a depressing, pragmatic way. We can already produce enough to satisfy the NEEDS of the entire population. So if you only need X jobs to produce for everyone, but extra people are getting born because nobody can just set a limit to how many people are born, then what do these extra people do in their lives? What is going to be their job?
If they produced things, it would be a waste of resources, because the needs of the entire world are already satisfied. But that's exactly what they do. Do we really need fancy clothes, and fancy houses, and fancy food, and TV shows and music? Do we need art? We don't really "need" them, but we already produce enough that we can afford to have people whose jobs is just making these things. But by this logic we don't really need computers either, you can't eat them, so I guess I'm superfluous as well.
I guess the point is, how many of these "superfluous" things we should produce? If population goes down, some jobs won't get as many workers as before. I can't really say "artists are unnecessary, we should just get rid of the entire profession and replace it with Dall-E because it's more productive." In fact, I'm not sure there is any job we can just get rid off to state "we will birth no more people to do that job. It will have 0 workers assigned to it."
And this is of course just speaking theoretically, assuming you could control births and professions with precision, which we can not in practice. People are going to get born and they will do jobs that aren't as productive as other jobs and there is nothing we can do about it. But to say we can't produce enough doesn't make sense if we can't even define how much is "enough."
The majority of society’s basic needs have been catered for since ancient Mesopotamia. The only significant innovation we’ve had since then is modern medicine. In regards to needs, everything else since then has just been fine tuning and improving access.
The majority of human development since that period has primarily been delivering for wants. The basic premise of your argument here is “how about you do without _everything_ that you want”.
This also ignores the fact that no, we cannot make “enough” of only the needs, and just remove all of the wants, because they have the same supply chain. You might argue that I don’t need the spark plugs in my car, but a farmer would certainly need the spark plugs in their tractor.
Imagine this wasn’t deviation from average, but absolute values and ignore the blue/red colors. Then notice the trend — it is getting warmer through all the 20th century. I think, I can easily see a trend line already from 1910.
edit - good example, Toyota. Right around the 70s/80s they became a massive multinational exporter. This is enabled by pax Americana and neo-liberal free trade policies which, for example, allowed Toyota to import to the US in large numbers and also build factories inside the US itself, multiply by several other companies in several other countries, massive growth. Before this time global trade was far more limited.
https://www.toyota-global.com/company/history_of_toyota/75ye...
If we take the stock market as an analogy for energy (and hence pollution) there is just a massive explosion starting around 1980. people forget that the stock market used to be kind of boring and went down alot. https://www.macrotrends.net/1319/dow-jones-100-year-historic...
edit - another good one. The US trade balance. I.e. the rise of the foreign nations who had "interesting" currency policies and manufacturing exports designed for the US, in order to get USD so they could participate in globalism, buy oil (sold mostly in USD), and modernize. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globalization#/media/File:U.S....
Also GDP of the Asian Tigers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Asian_Tigers
I really find it hard to believe you can compare temperature measurements “globally” before 1950s with any sort of consistency or accuracy. Today’s infrared thermometers for fevers have a 2F accuracy. You’re telling me that you can calculate temperatures from around the world pre-1950s and trust that it’s consistent and accurate?
And 2F spread ain't right, doctors use rather precise instruments that need some experience to be used correctly though, we have one at home too for kids since wife is a doctor (not a pediatrician but its manageable).
Consistent and within an envelope of accuracy, sure.
Today we can even compare high resolution, many measurement point global tempreture distributions against what would be projected if we only had the same stations from the 1850s - 1950s.
Recall that pre GPS navigation was highly reliant on accurate time pieces which were highly reliant on accurate tempreture, humidity, air pressure readings. From the 1850s onward there are highly reliable records from scientific grade instruments at trading ports about the globe.
You're right to be skeptical and we can't. There isn't even a single "global temperature" today. There is, for example, a global surface temperature measured by satellites and ground stations, except where there is cloud cover and no ground stations. It is extrapolated in such places based on mathematical models. Also a satellite passes only so often across certain area (or takes low resolutions photos if at geostationary orbit) so data is further extrapolated in time. And that is only the surface. What about the depths of the oceans and the thickness of the atmosphere? Is this what is meant when they make claims like "hottest 12 months" on record? If yes, it tells you nothing about true "global temperature".
"Global temperature" today is a mathematical construct, a model based on limited sensor data. A LOT is extrapolated in that model. How exactly you do that affects the results you get.
We don't have consistent measurements across the thickness of the atmosphere and depth of the oceans. There are sporadic measurements, like satellite measurement of cloud cover temperature and knowing how high this cloud cover is, but what's going on below and above? It's all filled in by "the models". Models people wrote to behave how they expect they should behave.
Based on the laws of thermodynamics, the heat equations, understanding of heat flow, yes.
Yes. Believe it or not, the average of multiple calibrated measurements is more accurate than some random off the shelf consumer electronics. My laptop display has a delta E of about 20 out of the box. If someone calibrates it they could bring it down to 5, most likely. I have no trouble believing an actually decent panel can achieve less than 3.
I can probably finagle a way of measuring haemoglobin with my kitchen equipment and some reagents I order off eBay. I might even get one sig fig out of that. That doesn't mean the literal bottom shelf crap I use is going to be the absolute limit of possible precision.
I mean, what kind of argument even is that? "I can't make similar measurements using the equipment I have at home, therefore climate scientists must have either no idea what error bars are or are lying"?
It is not clear for how long this pattern will persist. There is the issue of tipping points in what is a very complex dynamic system (atmosphere, oceans, permafrost, polar regions etc.)
The everyday analogy is boiling water in a pot. As we slowly inject heat at the bottom of the pot, the patterns of water motion change a lot as the temperature rises. First some occasional air bubble, then some visible currents, eventually just a chaotic, unstable, mess.
Now if only the frogs inside the pot would stop gazing at the gently rising air bubbles and realise that this is not all there is to it, future frogs might be very deeply inconvenienced...
Not to mention desertification and a lack of regenerative farming practices.
There's also pollution in general.
While climate change is concerning, recorded history is a pretty narrow window and there's evidence to support warmer periods in Earth history.
The effects of proposed measures are also very concerning and are pretty warped to outright insane. Especially the bits intertwined with the cult of vegan.
A result of the foods or a result of obesity facilitated by them? What is the evidence basis for there being clinically significant changes in hormone levels in the population at large?
I myself am on testosterone replacement therapy, though my low levels were probably from a brain injury. I’m a very different man when my levels are correct, and have straight up embarrassed myself when they haven’t been with how I’ve acted.
I agree with the person above, it’s a much bigger problem for the human race itself than global warming and nobody seems to give a damn.
I know you didn't mean it that way but...lots of people will die and it is not funny.
Don't despair: we can fix this! Hackers and engineers are in a good position to help here. There's lots to do in decarbonization that will directly help, while also working on interesting problems.
This Noah Smith article has a great overview of the situation, the progress, and the next steps: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/a-bunch-of-handy-charts-about-...