US to rewrite its past national climate reports | Hacker News Reader

US to rewrite its past national climate reports

france24.com

251 pointsmdhb190 comments

The study questioned whether heat records are truly increasing and whether extreme weather is worsening.

I thought we were past that. I thought that it was now about questioning whether it was human caused, or the size of the impact.

Apparently we really are going back, and revisiting basic arithmetic.

I would say we are largely past the second threshold too (that the warming is human caused). The last IPCC report had as the first statement in the summary for policymakers (from WG1 - the physical science group)

A.1 It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land. Widespread and rapid changes in the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere and biosphere have occurred.

The previous report (from 2013) only said (and much further in)

Human influence on the climate system is clear. This is evident from the increasing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, positive radiative forcing, observed warming, and understanding of the climate system.

The equivalent statement from AR4 (2007) was

The understanding of anthropogenic warming and cooling influences on climate has improved since the TAR, leading to very high confidence that the global average net effect of human activities since 1750 has been one of warming, ...

You could argue there is more of a question about what to do about it (e.g. try and mitigate climate change or just pay for the damanges). There is pretty good evidence at this point that mitigating the change through reducing CO2 emissions is a lot cheaper and comes with a host of other benefits (energy security, improved public health), but I can see wherer there might be arguments to have about this.

OP is talking about people who reject climate change. If you know many, youll likely note most do not deny climate change but instead deny that it is man made, which is an easier delusion to maintain.

It depends on which subset we're talking about though. Some are quite well educated and (IME) lately have taken the position that sure, it's happening and sure, it's human caused but that mitigation is far too expensive and economically disruptive to justify. Thus that we should simply let things run their course and deal with any fallout as necessary.

.. "as long as that fallout doesn't affect us." might be the unspoken corollary.

If they think mitigation is bad for the economy, why would the uncontrolled fallout be any better?

They are starting from the conclusion of "I'm not going to lift a finger to do anything related to the climate, and the society shouldn't, either," and then they're working backwards to find arguments that justify their position.

See how easily these people switch from "Nothing is happening" to "Oops it's too late to do anything."

Your vehicle is traveling straight and there's debris in the road in front of you. If you swerve left there's an oncoming vehicle. If you swerve right there's a ditch and a power poll. You're going to hit something no matter what you do. Which is the least bad option?

It's entirely possible some of them are merely paying lip service and don't really believe that it will ever affect them personally. But taking them at their word they accept that they will be impacted one way or another.

I don't happen to agree with them but I still think it's worthwhile to understand other's reasoning. The dismissiveness that's all too common drives dogmatic behavior and polarization.

> If you know many, youll likely note most do not deny climate change but instead deny that it is man made, which is an easier delusion to maintain.

This is relatively recent progress. Go back a decade and people were straight-up denying that the climate was warming.

Looking at Europe for the last decade (and a bit more), the questions has only been about what strategy should be used, whom deserve to pay for it and whom should be exempted. The left and right has enough combat ground to fight over those issues that any question around the existence of global change, or if it is human caused, is just unnecessary.

We never moved past that. They always used whatever worked on their audience with no commitment to consistency.

If you are sophisticated then they have quite elaborate, yet factually incorrect, justifications about not hurting the global poor etc. that they'll use.

But if they can get some traction with blaming the Jews for orchestrating an elaborate conspiracy or a Chinese hoax or just blatant denial of reality and recorded fact they'll keep doing that too.

Whatever works. They have the money and the political power to get away with it.

And every day we delay the serious and difficult action that climate change demands, business can go on as normal and the industry foundational to our modern experience, the fossil fuel industry, can continue to dominate the world economy and earn untold billions.

> I thought we were past that. I thought that it was now about questioning whether it was human caused, or the size of the impact.

I thought we were past the question of whether the Earth was round or flat. Yet here we are.

> I thought we were past that.

Honest people are past that.

> I thought we were past that

We are.

Before we had disagreements in the scientific community by respectable agents.

Now these are not a return to old debates, it's just that the current administration is abusing its authority to control information.

It's just a manifestation of the post truth.

This administration is abusing its authority to subvert instruments intended for specific uses in order to apply them to the trumpist agenda. The censorship of universities, sacking of govt agents that disagree with the administration, deportation of students, civilians being sent to El Salvador, the wrongful application of the Magnitsky law...

You don't need to take these threats at face value in order to stand agains them.

I believe in global warming, but the quasi religious responses here are hard to read.

Conserving the environment and taking steps to reduce our impact on the planet is a good thing. To that end, I’m ok with believing in global warming. I believe some of the narrative is used for selfish ends (green energy companies are looking to make a profit, too) and abused, but on the whole it’s a noble cause.

The replies here that are more or less “wow, can you believe these people don’t trust the word of the priests?” are extremely tiring. “Science” in this division is little different from belief. None of us (experts included) have the data nor intellect to holistically evaluate a system as complex as our planet. Our current understanding is likely wrong in some way.

There are plenty of good reasons to preserve the planet. We don’t have to resort to heretic burning and tribal shaming. It’s short sighted and intellectually lazy.

If you don't want to trust the priests, fine. Go do the work yourself. Or take no position at all.

Actively rejecting the work of scientists based solely on ideology, that is religion, in the worst sense of the word. They're not heretics. They're just liars.

You could replace the word “scientist” with “priest” in your post and it would be no different.

Rejecting or accepting based on ideology is wrong. And given we lack the technical ability to fully understand global warming, there is no objective truth here.

We don't fully understand cosmology therefore the universe does not exist?

i mean, does it? we can't answer some really important questions about the nature of the universe, and we literally can't even start to model very important areas of physics that we know must have existed. it's hard to think we can honestly answer what exists versus what doesn't when we can't even comprehend or guess at the enormity of what's being asked.

Objective truth doesn’t have to be a stark black and white dichotomy. You don’t have to have 100% understanding or knowledge to observe that the probability of evidence is pointing to a certain end result (in this case, humanity is causing rapid changes to earths environment). To state that there is no objective truth is nihilism.

> And given we lack the technical ability to fully understand global warming

I'm sorry, what?

We have total understanding of global warming: 1) CO2 traps heat, we know that from basic lab experiments, and 2) we're pumping massive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, which we know from countless data points, both historical and contemporary.

When it comes to the basic fact of global warming, that's all you need to know.

Everything after that is forecasting impacts and associated trend lines.

Some objective truths we know:

• We know the effects of CO2 on the transmission of electromagnetic radiation and how this varies by frequency. Same for the other gases in the atmosphere.

• We know how much energy is coming into the system from solar radiation, which we also know accounts for almost all incoming energy. We know the frequency distribution of this energy.

• We can measure the outgoing energy, and see that there is an imbalance with incoming higher than outgoing.

• We can measure incoming and outgoing at the surface, and at various levels in the atmosphere, to track down where that net energy increase is ending up. Infrared is in the frequency range that CO2 blocks.

• We can measure incoming and outgoing energy at various levels in the atmosphere and measure temperature and see that blocking the outgoing infrared heats the atmosphere.

• We can see that this heating effect is a function of CO2 concentration, which he can observe is going up over time, and we can see that the amount of heating increase over time closely matches the amount of heating we would expect from the increasing CO2.

The above just takes lab work (e.g., characterizing how various gases affect radiation transmission), measurements of incoming and outgoing energy flow, spectrum, and temperature of the system as a whole (satellites can do this) and at the surface and at various layers of the atmosphere.

That shows that warming is occurring, and it is almost all due to increasing greenhouse gases.

That doesn't show that humans are responsible for this increasing gases. For that we have:

• Carbon comes in different isotopes. There is an isotope with a half-life of about 5700 years that is created in the upper atmosphere from cosmic rays and then spreads throughout the atmosphere. The other two isotopes common in the atmosphere are stable. By looking at the ratios of carbon isotopes in atmospheric CO2 we can determine that the large increases in atmospheric CO2 come from sources that have little or none of the radioactive carbon.

Living things and dead things that have not been dead for a very long time do have significant amounts of the radioactive isotope because living (this is the basis for carbon dating). That lets us rule out things like wildfires as a significant contribution to the increases CO2.

The major ways to get excess stable carbon isotopes in the atmosphere are volcanoes and digging up and burning fossil fuels. We know that most of the increase comes from fossil fuels rather than volcanoes or other geological activity because:

• We know how much fossil fuels are burned each year and so can calculate how much carbon that will release into the atmosphere and that accounts for almost all of the observed excess stable carbon.

• We can monitor volcanic activity and see that it is not high enough to be a major contributor. Maybe we've missed a lot of volcanoes or other geological sources, but if we have we know that they can't be omitting much because the ones we do know about plus the amount from our known fossil fuel use accounts for almost all of the observed excess.

> You could replace the word “scientist” with “priest” in your post and it would be no different.

No. Scientist seek to understand and change their beliefs as the facts become clear - the scientific method. Science is self correcting. Some people attack science for self-correcting, but that's literally the point of science.

Priests OTOH do not look to self-correct. Religion is built on myths, and without those myths it will no longer exist. The only ones relying on myths are those still denying climate change.

The debates get complicated but if you take the simplest model that the atmosphere absorbs more reflected sun due to the increased CO2, not worrying about all the other factors, and run the numbers the predicted warming matches the observed warming pretty well.

I think all the stuff in the above sentence is objectively true and observable.

unfortunately it's really common in humans to find ways to belong, and lots of people find this in politics. there are lies everywhere from everyone, there's a reason politicians have a reputation first and foremost as liars. and to pretend climate change isn't a political topic is burying one's head in the sand - people are going to lie about, which we factually see all the time.

however when you start to identify with a group, you start to reject anything that doesn't reinforce your existing stance and group think. this is a really human trait and goes back to humans needing to be able to feel things like guilt and shame and desiring things like acceptance and validation, because these traits were what allowed us to live as groups and in small societies, when being in these groups vs ostracized was the difference between life and death.

mansplaining aside, i agree. i do wish there was more honest and interesting discourse around many topics, rather than things devolving into "everything this sexual predator says is fake and wrong". which isn't to defend them, but rather to share the exhaustion that discussion that isnt focused around science and data and instead is mostly talking points from our overlords.

No we never moved past that because the weather isn't getting more extreme. What happened is the left repeat this claim over and over, so people came to believe it. But where's the evidence?

Are storms getting worse? No. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ace-north-atlantic-hurric...

Is drought getting worse? No. https://www.drought.gov/historical-information?dataset=1&sel...

For people who don't Fucking Love Science!™ and think climatologists are corrupted by profit, what's the killer argument that weather is getting more extreme.

> Are storms getting worse? No. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ace-north-atlantic-hurric...

The graph you link to does not support your claim.

Trend line has a slope of 0.2845587086 / year increase.

Noisy graph, correlation coefficient is 0.3003115118, but still, it does not support your claim.

> Is drought getting worse? No. https://www.drought.gov/historical-information?dataset=1&sel...

Correct. This shows decreased droughts and increased flooding. Do you expect increased droughts from increased global temperatures? If so, why? Most of the world's surface is water, more heat means more water in the air.

My claim is correct! A trend line calculated for any natural dataset will never be exactly zero. This doesn't mean humans need to speak in scientific notation as if we are robots. You are well aware of that, so please stop playing silly word games that don't advance the discussion. "Is it getting worse? No" is a perfectly reasonable way to describe storm data, which is why governments say the same thing:

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/climate/understanding-...

"The UK State of the Climate report states that there are no compelling trends in storminess when considering maximum gust speeds over the last four decades. More comprehensive studies across the North Atlantic region have reached similar conclusions."

If you're going to try and argue that "no trend" isn't the same as "no compelling trend".... please, just don't. Life is short.

You've mis-interpreted the second graph. It doesn't show any increased flooding. It shows a very minor and unimportant trend in wetness. The trend is unimportant because increases in wetness don't imply increases in flooding, as the relationship is non-linear. Flooding has not increased so although I didn't mention flooding I could have added it to the list. See "Floods and Heavy Precipitation at the Global Scale: 100-Year Analysis and 180-Year Reconstruction" in JGR Atmospheres, Renard et al.

> My claim is correct!

No, it is not.

More precisely: it is not justified by the evidence you chose to provide.

> A trend line calculated for any natural dataset will never be exactly zero. This doesn't mean humans need to speak in scientific notation as if we are robots. You are well aware of that, so please stop playing silly word games that don't advance the discussion. The phrase "No trend" is a perfectly reasonable way to describe storm data, which is why governments say the same thing:

You cannot say the opposite of what words mean, expect to not get called out on this (especially on a place like Hacker News), then when you are called out expect to get a positive reaction to saying "boo, stop playing word games".

The average for the first 50 years is 79.24 units. The average for the most recent 50 years is 106.64.

Now do from 1900-2025. Remember, if climate change makes storms worse, then storms should have got clearly worse over that period because CO2 emissions have been continuous. That's not compatible with the story told by the data and I think you do know that.

1900-2025 has an average of 93.6.

So, between the values of the first and last 50 years. So it backs my point and still denies yours.

This time, do you want to cherry-pick a specific date range that actually fits the results you expect from your apparently pre-existing belief there's no trend, or are you going to accept that line go up?

Save you some time, here's the rolling averages with 10, 20, and 50 year horizons: https://pasteboard.co/rQ49kvY8YeBU.png

Average is forward from any given date on the chart and standard spreadsheet use of "average" function, which is why (if you look closely) you'll see the right side is spiky and they all line up perfectly when that's clearly silly.

But you're not addressing my point, so you cannot be denying it.

You can obviously compute a trend line on this data set, as with any. That doesn't mean the trend matters or can be described in normal English as "storms getting worse", which is why even people like the British government who are fully on board with Net Zero don't try the argument you're trying here. They explicitly say the trend line isn't compelling, even.

So what point are you trying to make, exactly? That they're wrong and it is compelling? Or that on HN there's a rule against describing data in normal ways?

Let's boil this down to the only thing that matters: do you think people should be alarmed by this data? If so, why, when others who have studied it don't?

The new regime wants to deny and erase history. We know better. Their core 25% or so of the population will always believe that Science is bad and "unGodly", there is nothing we can do about that. Luckily the internet is forever and we can undo it relatively quickly after the Orange Man is gone from influencing anyone other than his 20% or so. They will always worship him and follow the antiscience, antilogic, ego and emotionally driven philosophy he holds.

Facts will be adjusted for power and profit until met with the brute force of reality. But that may take a long, long time.

Behold the power of fascism!

Ironically climate will also rewrite the US and the rest of the world in return. More so that we are losing several important years because the US as a big contributor is now governed by complete climate deniers. Currently having the hottest summer so far, but coolest summer we will see at the same time is something I hoped to never experience.

I’m not sure the US matters as much as other economies. And our emissions peaked around 2005 and continues to decline. We will still continue to reduce emissions in the next few years because old energy sources just are losing economic viability.

The US is just choosing to make a huge mistake and not participate in growth markets like clean energy, etc.

The US matters, it has a big influence and could force companies around the globe to hurry up the transition. Just because the emissions may have peaked a lot of it is just outsourced. Also just reducing is not enough. We already missed important goals.

Fossil fuels losing economic viability is a small light at the end of the tunnel. But even that may not help if politic is making bad enough laws.

We don't emit as much as China and India now, but we're not small potatoes either. As bad as we consider ourselves, those two countries are worse and due to only increase it for the next 30 years or so. So that may be the only point the climate deniers really have, that any changes we make maybe be irrelevant since we're probably already over the point of criticality and it may become a self-driving cycle of wiping out the environment for the next couple hundred years.

Now do China. Four times the emissions of Europe and USA combined with no end in sight. Building 1000 coal power plants over the next two years. But do go on with your usa bashing because that's your actual motivation

Somebody doing worse is not an excuse. Everyone has to cut their emissions. The story is about the US so that’s what I wrote about.

Chinese emissions look like they peaked last year, even despite the economy growing (previous reductions have happened but came with caveats): https://web.archive.org/web/20250529112216/https://www.carbo...

Coal plants may still be getting installed, but relatively(!) little coal gets burned in them, because PV is just so much cheaper these days.

EV transition is also a big deal there. For all that the American (and European) car industry complains about dumping, the Chinese just buy those same EVs without any of the tariffs adding to the prices.

Practical issues remain with emissions due to metal refining, but those seem tractable, and solutions are already getting deployed outside research labs.

Still, big unsolved issues remain with emissions from concrete (IIRC the work there is currently lab research), and the scale of change needed is ~"everything everywhere except *grassland*" or ~"everything everywhere except North Korea".

“Those who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future.” — George Orwell, 1984

Now testify!

Rage Against the Machine[0] delivers it best & very fitting

so many quotes in this thread (and thanks for the 90/00 playlist for the day)

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3dvbM6Pias

> Rage Against the Machine[0] delivers it best & very fitting

Not really: this false equivalence between Democrats and GOP (especially their recent incarnation) is absolutely delusional. Contrast Obama, Trump 1.0, Biden, Trump 2.0 (so far). Like really?

> [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3dvbM6Pias

With a few decades worth of hind sight, does anyone actually think that Gore would have handled 9/11 (leading into Afghanistan and Iraq) the same was as Bush (and Cheney/Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz)? Even at the time (I'm a GenXer) it was strange thinking.

> Not really: this false equivalence between Democrats and GOP (especially their recent incarnation) is absolutely delusional.

You may be more interested in reading the lyrics than watching the video, the song is not about "equivalence between Democrats and GOP".

It's about the powerful who control the media and how the media is used to control the narrative. (some much worse than others) It's not only about <media bad>, but also how the American people (already with an insatiable searching for satisfaction in movies, glamour and tabloids) have become slaves to it [all media/types]; glaringly obvious today vs the 2000s as media heads have gained cult status in parts, to the point of earning government appointments only this cohort would be able to appoint and not get laughed out of office.

Those who control the narrative controls the present, who controls the past -- controls the future. To bring it full circle, fitting in that rewritting reports is controlling the narrative; similar to firing a messenger of statistics

I fully agree with you, it was strange thinking; and if we're drawing parallels -- interesting how real election scandals led to GOP presidents. [scotus/hanging chads & Mueller report]

Oh, and the "delivers it best" part is biased as I like Rage; they deliver the line better than reading it imo

I was about to post the exact same quote. Along with the firing of the statistics chief, this kind of stuff is literally what the protagonist of 1984 did as his day job under the fictional regime.

I largely ignore this and just look around the world at the remarkable, sudden success of green energy and electric vehicles. We may solve the root of the problem while Republicans still call it a hoax.

(It’s mostly a sad statement now about US ceding a huge growth area for its industrial base here.)

I'm not in America anymore. But my general feeling jn America would be a sense of dread at being left behind.

Yes except for Silicon Valley and finance, we are giving up any chance of market leadership in these areas. Ironically if we wanted manufacturing jobs we’d focus on growth areas.

Our energy and automobile companies will suffer longer term by being able to hold onto old, not economically viable ways of doing things until the bitter end.

People will drive Chinese electric cars, while the US pulls up an Iron Curtain, people drive 30 year old diesel trucks and closes the universities down. What's next, a down to the countryside movement, everyone has to do five years of hard farm labor in Iowa?

Yes it’s horrible for US economic leadership and IMO is less about climate change and more about US willful ignorance sacrificing market leadership.

Probably the only way crops will be picked,after the wall goes up

> undermine the scientific consensus on human-caused global warming.

Perhaps they should write "wide", "100%" or "unquestionable" concensus. I feel not using proper adjectives is undermining this consensus!

Consensus is not a scientific thing, it’s a political thing

Well, that's evil? It's deliberate so it can't be stupid. What else is there to say.

They're not stupid. They're evil. We can't rely on them failing because they're stupid, we need to fight against them because they're evil.

> They're evil.

Malignant/Malicious/Malevolent yes -- absolutely; not evil -- not yet.

?? Why not, where are you drawing that line? You say "yet" as if you at least recognise they're headed that way but the definition issue is still a formality.

Looking closely, they are pushing and testing the bounds of the system*. Our system works slowly enough (a design feature) that we only hear the actions of the testing and boundaries and they make sure thats all we hear all the time (by design, they want people in fear and anger so they can harness that and use it to fuel their support in manipulative ways; +sleight of hand, grifting etc).

What we don't hear being shouted from the same people are the parts being reverted; for example, they say they can't and won't bring back people they illegally deported to a 3rd county prison. Yet people are being brought back; things are working/making their way through the system.

Thats the line. We still have a system and it is working as intended. Evil is getting rid of the system, complete shattering so that the institutions of our republic cease to exist -- not by cohesion [I meant coercion but cohesion/falling in line too] or party politics/domination, but complete cessation. Where there are no non-violent options to course correct by the people. We still have that. For now.

This is not the first time this country has gone through these types of challenges. It is the first in which so many people are aware of it and being used to fuel it and fuel fear at such a large scale (a method of control). They (current people causing the commotion) want the people who do not support them to be so angry and emotionally exhausted that they will stop resisting administrations efforts. As a lover of history [edit to help the unhinged llm bot that has blessed my comment: love of reading history], I still believe in this country and that we will get through it together. Like we have many, many times before.

*It's like a caricature of a teenager that harms small animals. Not all of them turn into serial killers, sometimes that's all it is. Right now they are the teenagers harming small animals phase.

Does anybody know where I can find a copy of the new report? I'd be interested to read what arguments they came up with.

I think this is the one

https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2025-07/DOE_Criti...

It is really just a collection of 'skeptic' arguments form the last 20 years or so. Science magazie had an article about it

https://www.science.org/content/article/contrarian-climate-a...

Last sentence in the executive summary, which I think really does sum up the report:

“U.S. policy actions are expected to have undetectably small direct impacts on the global climate and any effects will emerge only with long delays.”

This is part of the trend of "there needs to be room for opposing views". Similar to when JD Vance visited Europe in February and scolded the EU on not suppressing views from elements such as AfD, which is essentially East Germany in every demographic.

When asked about the Indian Removal Act, President Andrew Jackson stated that if he had not taken the action, the native peoples would have been wiped out. Effectively he was saving them from genocide.

"According to historian H. W. Brands, Jackson sincerely believed that his population transfer was a "wise and humane policy" that would save the Native Americans from "utter annihilation". Jackson portrayed the removal as a paternalistic act of mercy."

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

https://www.npr.org/2025/02/15/nx-s1-5298683/jd-vance-afd-ge...

Another take from a climate researcher on how the DOE report misrepresents (their) science: https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/how-the-doe-and-epa-used-a...

A coordinated response is being prepared by climate researchers debunking the whole thing, but the news story has already passed so I don’t know whether it will matter.

A few new facts we'll see pop up:

1. There has always been town-destroying wildfires every summer. It's always been like that.

2. It has always been the case that AC units were necessary for a human to survive an american summer. I mean, look at native americans, they always had AC units!

3. Los Angeles always flash flooded 10 feet up across every summer.

4. America has always been at war with Canada.

5. Wildfire smoke across the sky for the whole damn summer? Always been thus. What do you mean, blue?

Meanwhile, according to the IEA, renewables investments exceed those in fossil fuels since +/- 2022 [1], and are expected to be the top electric power generator by 2026 [2].

The Trump administration is basically following Kodak's strategy from the early 00s.

[1] https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-investment-2025/exe...

[2] https://www.eco-business.com/news/iea-renewables-will-be-wor...

Kodak in the early 2010s, maybe?

Eastman Kodak (the spun-off film business) in the 2020s has been more or less stable. They even brought a discontinued film (E100) back. Production and pricing are now in line with the limited demand from film studios and hobbyists.

Made a typo, I meant 00s. I edited it, thanks :)

That can be fixed with absurd tarriffs on PVs

At least they don't follow Kodak's strategy from the late 10s, with KodakCoin.

Oh, wait.

The sad part is it’s not only the US. In many countries this kind of denial brings more votes than reality and science

I'm thankful for the US administration to truly give other countries a chance to come forward and something good, and take the center stage.

But, as good as that opportunity is, I'm afraid the 3 years this administration has left wouldn't be enough to fully disassemble the US advantage. :)

It seems you might be too optimistic here. I doubt Trumpism will end with Trump.

In general, hard climate change denial as an ideology is only _really_ a thing in states that produce a lot of oil (or, specifically in the case of Australia, coal), and not all of them (notably it never caught on to any great degree in Norway). It's really very much motivated reasoning, and even Trump-esque movements outside the US generally don't push it too hard.

A fair assessment but then it didn't start with Trump either, really. He just exploited a renewable resource the most efficiently so far.

Charles Coughlin and before him the Know Nothings did the same. Anti-intellectual illiberalism is a fundamental strain of US political belief.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."

  Feynman

In this case, nature will not just not be fooled, it will extract retribution, unfortunately also on those that weren't fooled in the first place.

Nature has no feelings, there will be no retribution, things will work out just fine, it will just be tough for us, maybe even wiped out, but nature will prevail. life will find a way, look at places where humans get excluded, everything regenerates.

It is not a crises of nature, it is a crises of habitat for us as species, and a bunch of other like us.

"Save the planet? The planet's fine - it's us that are fucked."

-- George Carlin

Yes, I always found environmental protection kind of funny, nature does not need protection, it will survive until Earth becomes finally uninhabitable [0], it's us that might not make it that long if we don't take enough care.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future

What we call environmentalism is actually 5 different concerns:

- human health, pollution

- preservation of natural resources useful for humans

- preservation of biodiversity, nature in its original state

- concern for animal suffering

- aesthetic concern for human habitat

These things typically overlap, but sometimes they even contradict.

And how many other species will we take down with us?

Most probably, but nature doesn't care. We will probably destabilize many eco systems with our behavior and make them collapse.

George Carlin is a comedian. That line is a joke, not an actual serious retort to somebody using the phrase "save the planet" to talk about stopping climate change.

This is a pretty pointless nitpick. It's akin to saying that a large meteor strike is not the end of the world because the planet will still be here.

I think there is also a reality in which our scope of what we care about is widened beyond just the human species. As a species that has such a powerful impact on other beings, it would be nice to try and reduce the amount of unnecessary suffering and pain that we place on them. While we cannot eliminate it, life takes life yadayada, we can reduce it and try to curb the mass extinction that we are actively causing.

From another angle, it's taken a really long time for evolution to get to this point, what can be experienced from the myriad life forms is quite wide and widening, it would be a shame to return to only the level of a microbe.

Must we take everything else down with us?

You think the scope of what humans can do will surpass the impact of various ice ages? the various volcanism/anoxic events?

Lizzies love high temperatures - it will be the second coming of the Dinosaurs!

"Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Those who do learn from history are doomed to watch everyone around them repeat it."

The only thing that we learn from history is that no-one learns from history.

Let’s not get carried away with hubris. Nature wrote our genes. Nature made us the way we are.

All this nonsense you see going on is ultimately a result of cognitive biased thinking, especially confirmation bias. The fact that we differ so deeply from these biases was not our decision, it was thrust upon us by nature and it helped us survive in an environment very different from the one we found ourselves in now.

No, most people believe in climate change. In a fundamentally anti-human move, oligarchs have put a climate denier in office so he would push against doing anything about it, as it goes against their short-term interests.

My pet theory, if we indulge in a bit of conspiracy theory about the oligarchs, is that they're in fact benevolent and that the final outcome with be a net good for humanity in relation to the climate challenge.

I mean, Trump is so blatantly destroying american influence that it would be hilarious if it wasn't so tragic. When you think about the alternative, that is, a "regular" american elite saying that climate action is important with their regular hypocrisy, pretending to be doing anything at all, but in fact going the other way, then things don't look so bad in the medium term. Sure, a bit of short term pain, but otherwise, might end up being better off.

I mean, try to put yourself in the shoes of one of those oligarchs a few years ago and ask yourself how you'd actually solve the climate problem, given current cultures around the world. Maybe you'd come up with the "let's prop up Trump".

That being said, it's just a pet theory. I actually have doubts that such smart oligarchs exist.

However those biases are supposed to favour our survival and, more importantly our children's survival. That's how we got this far.

It says something when we act against that.

All it says to me is that the modern world is far more complex than our simple biases (heuristics) can deal with.

You're getting downvoted, but you have pointed to a possibly important factor. We're intelligent, but definitely have primate intelligence, and we're closest to the murderous bastards known as chimpanzees.

That said, nothing about this has been inevitable. So many accidents along the way. There are many other results that have been possible. Our social/political setting may be related with technology but it's wholly unclear how deterministic each step has been.

The path we’ve taken was definitely not inevitable, just like the path a ball takes down a long bumpy hill. Yet the broad strokes of where that ball ends up are reasonably foreseeable: at some local minimum but not necessarily a global minimum.

So what are the broad strokes of humanity that could have reasonably been foreseen? A trend towards greater societal social complexity, increased resource consumption, increased energy use, economic efficiency, and wealth concentration.

The old reports were somehow protecting us?

Carbon emissions can only be reduced by engineering and manufacturing advances

The impression I get from the extreme right (trump and his fans) is that they don't want to reduce carbon emissions at all and are working for the opposite. Denying the reality of climate change is one tool in their chest to get others to ignore it as well.

In a way, yes, they were: they forced us to contemplate the long term consequences of our short term actions. Denying that is the opposite of protecting us (and, eventually, our offspring, who will deal with the consequences in a way that we never will).

Carbon emissions can first and foremost be reduced by reducing the combustion of fossil fuels.

Everything else is just bookkeeping and icing on the cake.

> Carbon emissions can first and foremost be reduced by reducing the combustion of fossil fuels.

Exactly! It can’t be reduced or increased by edits to federal PDF files that nobody reads

Commercial efforts are the only solution, and will happen because new energy is cheaper and better. Photovoltaic and battery improvements are our best path forward. Industrial policy can help but we’ve never really had that in the US

If nobody reads them and they have no effect, why are they being rewritten?

Because politics is hopelessly dysfunctional

Carbon emissions can also be reduced by our extinction.

No you see, carbon emissions can also be reduced by moving production to china and not looking too hard how they do it. Yay for climate champion Europe!

World in Data has carbon stats including imports and exports.

It makes a difference but basically doesn't change the big picture.

https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2

In 2020, China had 253GW of total solar capacity. In 2024, China installed 277GW of additional solar capacity. In June, they were up to 1,100GW of total solar capacity. In 2023, 60% of the global solar installation happened in China.

China is so far ahead of the world in green energy it's ridiculous. We can't pretend that it's still 1995 and China still gets most of its energy from coal anymore.

Top four coal consumers as of 2023 (last year for which this data set is available):

China 91.9 exajoules

India 22 exajoules

United States 8.2 exajoules

Japan 4.54 exajoules

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/coal-cons...

China uses a shitload of coal. The US uses far less because we moved to other fossil fuel sources. It turns out that coal is not the only ghg emitter. China is installing way more zero-emission power generation. Looking only at coal and ignoring gas is very odd.

https://www.iea.org/countries/china/energy-mix

Their green energy line _is_ on the increase, but it's effectively flat compared to the growth lines on coal and oil.

Despite a significant number of up votes in a short amount of time (174 in 1 hour as of this comment a comment to time ratio higher than anything on the front page) this got moved off the front page. Suspicious.

Don't Look Up!

Also, Birds Aren't Real!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birds_Aren't_Real

"If we stopped testing right now, we'd have very few cases, if any"

"All new numbers".

Honestly I think this stuff goes very under-reported. The world has become so used to anti-intellectualism that simple ignorance in the highest office(s) is now excusable, and criticising it is implicitly cast as political. Which is a state of affairs that can be weaponised.

(Lest people think I am sniping at the USA from the UK, I'd observe that we as a nation were bounced into a monumental decision by a series of politicians who flatly refused to make their numbers add up when challenged)

> Honestly I think this stuff goes very under-reported.

It's not under-reported generally, it's that a large portion of the population only watches certain news channels that do not report what's going on. That's why the Epstein case is such a big issue for Trump, because it's been pushed so hard by the news his supporters watch. They don't care about the blatant corruption on a scale never seen because they don't know about it. But Epstein is a foundational MAGA conspiracy.

By underreported, I don't mean "nobody mentions it when it happens" in the sense of news reporting.

What I mean is, there is no really deep reporting on what it means in terms of long-form journalism.

And I mean this internationally and apolitically. There is very little serious discussion about what scientific, technological and economic illiteracy means when it is found in positions of power, and why it is that the new orthodoxy is simply to resist correction.

We have these discussions (belatedly) about judges and lawyers, especially in the light of the Post Office scandal in the UK (and in relation to the Lucy Letby trial, where there appears to have been a simple, astonishing agreement between the prosecution and the defence to not use statistics).

But we do not talk enough about how leaders on all sides are content to keep pushing the same uncorrected points, again and again, and it's not disqualifying. Politicians can simply choose not to "recognise" the correction, to use the parliamentary term, and that is sort of where it stops.

I do think the Epstein story is interesting because it is one of those things where perhaps the base understands that someone in office has lied to them, regardless, because the story directly contradicts itself now.

But I think it's survivable. If he doesn't complete this term it won't be the reason given, at any rate; his very obvious cognitive and physical decline will be.

Damn, I forgot about that one. There should be a page with a collection of the most egregious stupidities he said, that you could just link to whenever someone is still arguing in his favor.

We really should have understood what was going to happen in the world when someone else tweeted:

"Based on current trends, probably close to zero new cases in US too by end of April"

Many things make me think Elon Musk uniquely benefits from Gell-Mann amnesia but the idea that anyone should have listened to him about anything other than rockets or cars should have been jettisoned right then and there. Because what he was saying was unsupportable by evidence right at the moment he said it.

Instead, here we are.

He also tweeted about making cars with sub 10 micron accuracy for all parts, so I wouldn't trust him with cars or rockets either.

Clearly his money employs a lot of smart people, some of whom are not actively doing evil.

Coming up next: US to rewrite its past laws of physics.

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

As am environmentalist, I've talked to many people not living in the US who are losing hope on humanity because of this kind of constant stream of news coming out of the US.

I understand how it happens, but I'd hope people understood that Trump's USA is not the world. Just like people in general know not to extrapolate what Putin's administration is doing in Russia, they need to be able to do the same for the USA. At the moment, in my opinion, both administrations are lost causes, and you can just choose to follow, support and advocate many other positive signals around the world.

Social media is overwhelming and dominated by the U.S.

A lot of people in countries that are making positive steps are losing hope unnecessarily because of this.

The U.S. is 25% of the world economy and declining.

Growing economies are ripe for growing with more climate friendly policies, not just because of the environmental impact (both from an AGW and local environmental perspective) but because of energy security and sovereignty perspectives, but also to reduce dependence on the petro-dollar.

Even absent US involvement, getting China and India away from oil and coal is critical.

https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/china#what-sources...

https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/india#what-sources...

China is decreasing the percentage of fossil fuels in its total mix over the last 15 years (while still growing total energy generation).

India... less so.

Without US involvement we lose a lot of our ability to pressure others to do it.

It might be in China and India's national interests to do so unilaterally.

China at least seems to have come to the conclusion that (a) they need to continue to expand total electrical production for economic reasons, (b) decreasing dependence on external fossil fuel producing countries is preferred, (c) there are cost advantages to generation from renewables, and (d) there's geopolitical mileage with other countries to be seen as ecologically forward.

> Just like people in general know not to extrapolate what Putin's administration is doing in Russia, they need to be able to do the same for the USA.

One is in a box and can't really reach anything else without nukes. The other has his nukes in everybody's backyard, and the entire world economy depends on the world order that has him at the top.

The USA got to the top quickly, and might fall just as quickly. China is taking a wide lead already on many areas. The USA is still definitely controlling world order, but the system that put them at the top is already being challenged by the "global south" and you can see how the USA has noted that and is already actively trying to interfere with it (which just validates the effort as it shows they're taking it seriously).

I think this is a good video to share to that end https://youtu.be/242pqLSFzh4

The real story is the US ceding economic leadership in emerging markets like green energy, and instead encouraging its energy and automobile companies to pursue strategies not actually aligned with long term growth.

Even in the US the vast majority of new power generation is clean energy. EVs and Hybrids are about 20% of new car sales and climbing. Even if there’s a short term road bump with oBBB, battery innovation and costs continue to drive cost down.

The US economy will suffer by not trying to compete in these markets, and will need to depend on other economies more and more.

  With rewritten histories and a fictional past
  - "Master Race", New Model Army, 1986

Doctored Epstein vid. Inflation data full of estimates. Firing the guy that delivered bad job data. Shutting down monitoring satellites. Releasing modified constitutions. Now this

…US really is going all in on detaching from reality

In the normal world, once you hitch yourself to a single implausible claim, you're bound by circumstance to try to keep it in line with reality, by making a series of supporting claims that inevitably build on weaker and weaker ground.

One of the problems honest people have understanding habitual liars is that they think liars are always incentivised to try to keep their lies plausible within a world of shared truth -- that they will always ultimately be caught out.

Hence the idea that the coverup is always worse than the crime. Everyone thinks the domino run of implausible claims ends with the liar being caught out when one lie does not move things on for the liar.

But in systems of power, in fact, there comes a point where it doesn't really matter whether something you're saying is true, it just matters that you say enough things that people get caught up trying to make them make sense and are distracted from what you are doing.

The dominos just keep falling forever.

This isn't new at all: one of the most influential men in Russian politics, Vladislav Surkov, absolutely learned to weaponise theatrical untruth in this way:

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

And there have long been fears that Surkov's techniques were infecting the West (through Hungary, Turkey etc.)

The problem is people simply don't want to believe, at any deep level, that these people lie for the sake of it, when in fact they clearly do. And they get caught up on the idea that since decent people think being caught lying is shameful, liars will always feel shame when caught out.

Once you understand that they do not, you can understand that any given lie may not be told to hide a specific misdeed; it may simply be told to add to the haze of untruth that allows the liar to go about their business.

Ex falso quodlibet.

On a similar note, does anyone notice the issue of most official temperature readings in different climates often reading 5+C lower than what is actually observed locally?

If an official reading is an average over an area or over a time period then it'll always be lower than the peak observed temperature. It doesn't matter so long as it is consistent.

“I seek not to know the answers, but to understand the questions.”

— Confucius

> Asked by CNN's Kaitlan Collins why previous editions of the National Climate Assessment were no longer available online, former fracking company CEO Wright responded [..]

lol

And scientists who need the actual data will ignore the revised versions and just read the originals with the data they need

While "rewrite" usually means source deletion, let us hope in material world originals will remain. )

Who controls the past now controls the future, who controls the present now control the past...

This is weird, it will cement climate change skepticism as crazy fascist thing unless it's followed by high-quality convincing body of work that discredit the current climate change work done globally. I wonder if that part will follow because it is possible to follow to some extent as it is very likely that there are plenty of low quality works done on the matter.

They need to be right about fraud in climate change research only once and the climate change research needs to be right %100 of the time and they need to have had communicated that correctly %100 of the time. They will have some worst case scenarios or oversimplifications and predictions that did not come to be true in obviously demonstrable way. It will be tough.

Regardless, this wouldn't mean much for EU, China, Japan and other fossil energy importing countries as with the Russian invasion of Ukraine this has become a matter of national security and not just some hippie ideal. It doesn't make sense anymore to drop clean and renewable energy even if the Trump administration proves that releasing smoke is the healthiest thing ever and helps with increasing the penis size.

So they are going to re-write history to fuel some ideology, as the fossils were to be extracted anyway.

I actually suspect once China moves to full electrification, they will become more demanding to other countries about climate goals. Geographically, they're in a tight spot so they have a big stake in mitigating climate change.

EU is also somewhat pushing with more aggressive carbon pricing.

> So they are going to re-write history to fuel some ideology, as the fossils were to be extracted anyway.

There's no ideology, you have it reversed, it's always about money.

The oil industry is a huge donor of funds and spend 8-10x more on lobbying conservative politicians. The ideology is tacked on top of the money to justify the donations, and for their voters to gobble it up and repeat the lines as if rolling coal would be an ode to freedom.

Reminds me of King Arnulf when Hy-Brasil was sinking in Eric the Viking

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

Can't wait for the re-rewrite in a few years

Has this data has been archived elsewhere?

Probably. But it is important to understand that this will matter to fewer and fewer people over time.

Because they don't edit the data to make a new objective truth that survives scrutiny, they edit the data to demonstrate their power over data.

People referring to the archived data will simply be denied access to the conversation moving forward; "our opponents keep fighting old battles when the world has moved on".

It works. And it will continue to work shockingly well even when the underlying phenomenon asserts itself in ways that are predicted by the archive data. Look at how Florida is torn between climate change denial and the actual reality of sea-level rises affecting the Keys.

"Then they went back to the barn, and there, sure enough, painted on the wall, it said: 'No animal shall sleep in a bed with sheets.' And underneath, in slightly smaller letters, it said: 'Sheets are a human invention.'"

"I'm invisible and you can't see me!"

Pair with the rewriting of Bureau of Labor Statistics data to fit his desired narrative / alternative reality: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/07/us/politics/trump-new-eco...

"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past."

War is peace

Freedom is slavery

Ignorance is strength

"We are at war with EastAsia. We have always been at war with EastAsia."

Sorry for not being more eloquent about it but:

You can't make this shit up.

You don't have to, you're living it.

Well, now that they can rewrite the constitution (although symbolically), rewriting previous reports isn't such a big deal by comparison.

The instruction manual called "1984" arrived forty years late.

But the insurance companies are in the know. House insurance rates are raising a lot in many at risk states and areas. Just heard Texas joined that fun.

So seems capitalists involved with insurance and finance know the real facts.

We've seen this before with climategate - people seem to be endlessly editing the historical records.

Historical records, especially pre-record keeping are revised when new techniques and sciences discover better, more reliable ways of interpreting the physical geological evidence left in the world behind us.

What is the basis of these revisions?

> What is the basis of these revisions?

Ideology

Money.

Stupidity

A good example of this is revisions EDIT: of the interpretations :ENDEDIT of historical data:

https://www.science.org/content/article/world-1-3%C2%B0c-or-...

Apparently the Japanese continued using wooden buckets longer than other navies, resulting in Pacific data being skewed.

Closer reading should tell you that no one, no data scientist at least, is rewriting raw historical data - the temperatures recorded in ships logs by various ships are preserved unaltered.

What is discussed there is part of all data interpretation, the transfer functions between raw measures of <something> and the inferred values of <interest>.

Thank you for that, I have edited my (hasty/poorly-worded) comment.

No drama, as first worded it irked my experience in multichannel geophysical processing; every data source has potential biases, tweaks, scaling, shifts and normalizing applied to get them to best fit and reveal a larger picture.

eg: https://www.ga.gov.au/bigobj/GA13928.pdf as an example of stitching 40 years of survey data collected with a range of different instruments and procedures.

In the climate domain the same care is taken to preserve raw data from historic methods, the challenge is syncing data streams that have covariant features (such as matching years against tree patterns from differing logs from a variety of species), in this case logs from a variety of ways of sampling sea water temperature.

Glad you took my comment well, no offense was intended :)

This is an excellent example too -- all too often science reporting will just put in the headline "Updated historical temperatures make threat of global warming (less|more) serious!" -- and folks latch on to "how can history change?!?!" and immediatly go to conspiracy theories, rather than trying to understand the subtlty of what's actually going on

revision based on new findings is how science works revision based on ideology is how fascism works

And the best part is that you can tell which is which by whether you agree or not.

Records should never be edited.

They can be reinterpreted, but we must never edit or delete the original records.

Right, and we're not:

> Historical records, especially pre-record keeping are revised

Here "historical records" means "the best-known interpretation of historical evidence": it's not talking about modifying records made pre-record keeping. Of course we still have access to previous interpretations: people have gone to pains to ensure they're preserved (despite certain former stewards trying to erase them), and those people are building more resilient systems to avoid this happening again.

Are you referring to "The Trick"?

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