There is unequivocal evidence that Earth is warming (2024)
science.nasa.gov
science.nasa.gov
Some people just naturally resist hyperbole or sensationalist rhetoric, and I find it very helpful to reframe the argument from doom and gloom and fire and brimstone to something more realistic and grounded:
"The longer we put off doing something, the harder and more expensive it will be in the future. In a Pascal's Wager sort of way, many of the changes we are talking about don't even really cost us anything, and the potential that C02 is not a real culprit is more than made up by danger that it is. Making changes now is the prudent and financially sound decision."
In a large part, this is what the brief ESG trend on the stock market was briefly about before it got co-opted by a dozen different competing messages.
Pascal's wager is generally agreed to be logically unsound, so it's somewhat insane that we've revived it in all these modern contexts. If you believe in it, at least be consistent and sacrifice a goat to Zeus every couple years.
Sacrificing a goat, after all, does sound like a lot of work. But maybe I will wear a lucky hat to a baseball game?
I haven’t watched it back but from what I remember the main point of the video is that kind of situation happens when the probability involved is vanishingly small, and all the events you listed don’t have a vanishingly small probability, so they are not Pascal’s wager situations, just a normal rational safety concerns with particularly high consequences
So it seems a mischaracterization to present the essence of the wager as going out of your way to perform random and costly rites in the hope of lifting any ill omen.
The wager is only interesting on those rites where the expected-value is uncertain or unknowable.
It does, in this life and the next.
If you have a cheap source of solar panels and batteries, the only downside to installing them all over the country is up-front cost (which pays itself off quickly). The upside you gain is a substantially more robust, less centralized power grid that can continue to operate if something happens to impede your supply of fossil fuels or part of the grid gets cut off.
Looking at how things have played out elsewhere in the world the past few years, that's powerful.
They’re made out of rocks. Yes, you have to take steps to acquire and refine the materials, then turn them into batteries. However, the process for doing that is not mysterious.
Across the world, according to BNEF, the cost of grid scale battery packs has fallen another 45 per cent in 2025 following a 40 per cent fall in 2024. The UK-based energy think tank Ember has now also reached the same conclusion, underlying its unexpected impact on solar power.
citing: https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/global-electricity-... and similar reports.
Resource prices for batteries did spike at various times in the past, this had more to do with opening and then closing a lot of production sites by mining companies than with any real meaningful supply issue.
Urban grid scal battery parks are on the rise globally, industrial parks have always had special status and can still concentrate modern efficient peaker turbines and buffer storage to bridge, if applicable, and use any general daytime excess.
https://theconversation.com/big-batteries-are-now-outcompeti...
I think it's real and potentially catastrophic. But I see very little chance of (sufficient) coordinated action to mitigate it.
I.e., I think there's too much temptation for individual countries to pursue a competitive economic or military advantage by letting everyone but themselves make sacrifices.
I hope I'm wrong.
Not saying they're above reproach, but their energy policy certainly trumps ours.
How are they doing that, you ask? Switching to coal ... India's adding 80GW of coal, and China having 95GW planned and building.
They're getting most of their new power from solar and running coal only at night.
China's coal usage is relatively flat. They've increased their capacity, but they've been decreasing their capacity factor (aka what percentage of the time the plants are running) at approximately the same rate. They used to run their plants 24/7. Now they run only at night. They've started adding batteries to the grid so in the future the coal plants will only run after a stretch of cloudy days.
Claim is that it's about strategic safety for both countries. Coal is easy, and they have plenty of it (unlike oil, which neither have in any quantity).
Trump, a democrat himself, is simply using the multi-front strategy he already knew.
I hear that often, but it's never followed by details about any of the actual changes that are being talked about. The ones I actually hear (especially politicians) advocate for are catastrophically expensive and dubious in their effectiveness. Banning coal or gas-powered cards might (might) be a good idea in the long run, but it definitely does cost us something.
It's already to the point where the ridiculous coal fans who infest our government are forcing coal power plants to remain open when their operators want to close them because they're no longer profitable to operate.
My family is fundamentalist protestant, very midwestern, and I think about half of them believe that the earth is warming. Not trying to "win", just trying to say that a lot of this depends on the crowd you interact with. I don't know the percentage, but certainly there are still way too many people that don't even believe it. The very tired response is "well i wish it would warm up here slaps knee". Using the phrase 'Climate Change' at least reduces that objection.
Something can said to change from a certain standard even if it wasn't perfectly constant to begin with. For example, if I always kept my house at 65-75 degrees for the past year, and now it's 85 degrees inside, I could certainly say that the temperature in my house recently changed and gotten warmer. That might lead me to check whether my AC's working, rather than say "well I guess the temperature has never really been constant, and 85 is within the range of possible non-constant temperatures, so everything's perfectly normal and nothing has changed."
The problem is not that the earth is warming, it is that it is warming at an artificially increased rate.
We (humanity) have gotten comfortable with the way things are, and a change in that is going to mean that things are going to change for us, and we don't like change. Most of our biggest cities are all close to the coast and will be subject to massive flooding in the next 100 years (if not sooner). Much of those same large population centers are also fairly close to being too hot for general survival (without aggressive AC). Our agriculture is all setup for the temperatures we have now, and the rain patterns we are used to. So we are going to have to change both where we live, and how we grow our food (location and probably strains as well).
Global warming is (almost) definitely not going to destroy all life on earth, but many of the forecasts are in extinction-level for most of the large animals. So life in general will continue, and probably humanity (since we are so good at making environment for ourselves), but the (eventual) changes are going to make the world very different, in ways that we are not going to like.
Oh, hogwash. It's not the change as such; rather, lack of control of the change, that causes the blowback.
Thus, the overarching question is: "Who drives the bus?"
Many different groups of large animals have lived and died off over the ages. It will happen again many times after humans are gone.
I personally welcome nuclear war and anything else which will help wipe out the human race. In a few million years the earth will move on to its next rulers and we will be a distant memory.
If you hate humanity, you hate yourself, and that is a miserable way to live. Reprogram your brain, by repetition, it works, and you can find joy.
Not everything has to be doom and gloom. Your life and the planet is what you make of it.
If I pick up your house and drop it two streets over, that could be accurately described as a "location change" of your house. This is still true despite the fact that your house naturally moves some centimeters per year due to tectonic plates shifting around.
Similarly, when global average temperatures saw long term trends of a fraction of a degree of change per millennium, then suddenly started changing at multiple degrees per century, it's pretty reasonable to call that "climate change" despite the fact that it was not completely constant before.
No the pushback is because of money. The words don't matter when so much money is at stake.
Aliens visiting and walking amongst us, building the pyramids etc? I guess the reason is just money /s
And in any case, I assume that conspiracy theory was lucrative for whoever wrote the book or made the film about it.
He called out an arborist, and the arborist clearly explained that there wasn't enough rain anymore to support the number of trees on his land, and that the forest was slowly receding as the older/bigger trees took all the water from the other trees.
It finally dawned on him that a place where trees used to happily live to hundreds of years old could no longer support trees.
Still, he thinks CO2 is a con job cooked up by China and that global warming is divine punishment. But it's a good reminder that a lot of denialists are waiting for a personal, practical reason to care.
Four out of five denialists agree!
This is the part that seems to vary widely based on which warming alarmist you're talking to. Many of them are not saying there are things we could do that "don't even really cost us anything" that would deal with the problem--they're saying we need to devote a significant fraction of global GDP to CO2 mitigation.
Things that "don't really cost us anything" are probably happening already anyway, because, well, they don't really cost us anything.
Building a lot more nuclear power plants is the key thing that doesn't really seem to be happening right now, that would be an obvious way to eliminate a lot of CO2 emissions. But of course that does really cost us something. But it's probably the most cost effective thing we could do on a large scale.
I mean, this is the clear and obvious one. Nuclear theoretically should be much, much cheaper than it is if it were not for the regulatory costs thrust upon it.
It also harrows out people who are legitimately concerned from "moralist concern junkies". You'd think climate change being a global existential crisis would make people open to nuclear energy or more drastic measures like geo-engineering, but the frequency with which people refuse to compromise undercuts the their legitimacy.
Solar and wind theoretically would also be much, much cheaper if not for the regulatory costs. [1]
Everything is regulated and all regulations have costs. I'm not morally opposed to nuclear energy. Is there a comprehensive study on which specific safety regulations are unnecessary and the LCOE if they were removed?
1. https://www.volts.wtf/p/how-to-make-rooftop-solar-power-as
A coal plant costs $5B/GW to build, vs the > $20B/GW a nuclear plant costs.
Those massive turbines are really expensive.
OTOH solar + batteries is well under $1B / GW.
> in the time available.
Which also eliminates nuclear as an option; Ontario is building new nuclear power that is projected to become available in the late 2040's. After the inevitable delays that'll be the 2050's. Way too late.
The solution is simple & cheap, though nobody wants to admit it. Use paid-for existing zero-carbon generation first (aka existing nuclear, hydro, etc), then add solar & wind to cover ~60% of needs, then add batteries to cover ~95% of needs, and then use natgas peakers to cover the last ~5%.
Environmentalists don't like it because it's not 100% carbon free. Anti-environmentalists don't like it because it's 95% solar/wind/batteries.
Economists and pragmatists should love it because it's the cheapest.
What I can't wrap my head around is the conspiracy thinking around environmentalism.
What's so nefarious about clean air and water? I'll never forget when my grandmother walked out of WALL-E because she said it was government propaganda. She is a regular person, not a coal magnate or anything.
This conspiracy thinking has been pushed by Republicans, right-wing think tanks, coal, oil, manufacturing and like industries attempting to undermine public trust in climate science since at least the 1970s.
So a green energy revolution sounds exciting to me, but to my grandma it would be a green energy _revolution_, the scary and unstable connotation.
Nothing, but what puts me off is the sale of emission rights etc. Is it a problem or not? I care more about deforestation than a warming climate. There is always some product to buy behind the headlines and it drives me crazy.
The same people asking me to pay climate taxes are trying to tell me infinite growth can exist. I already live like a hermit and if everyone lived like me we wouldn't have a problem. We can't pay our way out of the problem and anyone who tells me we can is only out to make money.
I'm not against a clean planet, I'm against the politicians and businesses finding another way to extract money from their worker bees.
The main point people disagree on is: how much are humans contributing to this global warming trend?
Same. Empirical evidence is just too hard to ignore.
It's quite amazing watching the "climate change isn't real" folks transition to "climate change is no big deal", then to "climate change is too hard/expensive to deal with".
That didn't happen.
And if it did, it wasn't that bad.
And if it was, that's not a big deal.
And if it is, that's not my fault.
And if it was, I didn't mean it.
And if I did, you deserved it.That didn't happen. And if it did, it wasn't that bad. And if it was, that's not a big deal. And if it is, that's not my fault. And if it was, I didn't mean it. And if I did, you deserved it.
At the top level (of government and corporate entities) those people always knew it was real, the messaging just changed as it became harder to keep a straight face while parroting the previous message in the face of overwhelming empirical evidence.
Exxon's (internal) research in the 1970s has been very accurate to the observed reality since then.
They just didn't care that it was real because they valued profits/power/etc in the moment over some difficult to quantify (but certainly not good) future calamity.
You would think they would care at least in the cases where they had children and grandchildren who will someday have to really reckon with the outcome, but you'd be wrong, they (still) don't give a shit.
Except it's the opposite - empirical evidence is very easy to ignore. Between herding, the replication crisis, and the overall insularity of academia, trust in "studies" has never been lower.
But people still respond very well to demonstrative or pragmatic evidence. Empirically there's nothing special about a keto diet. But demonstratively the effects are very convincing.
[0] https://metro.co.uk/2020/07/23/health-officials-recommend-gl...
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/06/04/public-hea...
And for very specific reasons, too.
One reason is unwillingness to feel like they have to take responsibility.
Another is conceding that would mean they might have to make changes, and laziness is powerful.
The worst reason is that to acknowledge it would be to grant that an alternative political perspective is right about something, and one's own political identity is tied to that other political perspective being always wrong.
"It is easier to con a man than to convince him he has been conned." Too much emotional investment in being right and too much fear of social repercussions simply for changing one's mind. The reality is changing one's mind to new data is the hallmark of integrity.
POTUS tweeted "WHATEVER HAPPENED TO GLOBAL WARMING???" a few weeks ago when a record cold wave came in. I suppose you were talking about people you personally know, but it seems like there's a good chance many who voted for him would say it too.
Anyway, I guess there is a growing collective admission that the climate is changing even if the crotchety ones will still quip about it not being warmer at some given time and place. It's unfortunate that "global warming" caught on instead of "climate change."
Rather than a collective admission, I feel what's happening is the crotchety people are dying off, leaving us millennials and GenZ to clean up the mess. Thinks won't change until a critical mass of them are dead and gone.
What is generally not understood is that our current icehouse phase is rare.
'A "greenhouse Earth" is a period during which no continental glaciers exist anywhere on the planet... Earth has been in a greenhouse state for about 85% of its history.
'Earth is now in an icehouse state, and ice sheets are present in both poles simultaneously... Earth's current icehouse state is known as the Quaternary Ice Age and began approximately 2.58 million years ago.'
Modern humans have existed for 60k years, all of which have been in this current icehouse.
To cast a different shade on the meaning, this climate period is rare, easily disturbed, and difficult to restore even with vastly more powerful technology. The more common greenhouse state is unlikely to lead to a Venus runaway, but it will be hostile to us.
We might very well require the rare climate, and perish in the common.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_and_icehouse_Earthh...
It's the speed, not the magnitude that matters. Change faster than evolution and migration will destroy ecosystems.
The earth survived and evolved another set of new large animal masters. The beauty and diversity of nature we see around us has all evolved after several extinction level events which have all very rapidly killed ecosystems and changed the earths climate.
It will do the same again after all humans are gone. This is the outcome I am hoping comes sooner rather than later.
> "the period of global darkness following the Chicxulub impact would have persisted in the Hell Creek Formation nearly 2 years"
I personally think that humans are a blot on the earths history, and soon should be wiped out to let nature and evolution retake its course. From this perspective we are just following the natural course of the earth, and will be made extinct just like other various groups of large animals on this planet in the past.
We may require the rare climate, but other species certainly dont and more will evolve to take the place of humans when we cannot survive on these planets conditions any longer.
This document was last updated in October 2024, but I am a little surprised to see this still available on a .gov site.
it looks like this one slipped through the cracks
Thank you for the date! When viewing in my default javascript-disabled mode, I couldn't find the publication date.
I'm also thankful to the NASA IT team that made this article, including images and formatting, viewable with javascript disabled.
> I am a little surprised to see this still available on a .gov site.
This was also my main reaction. In agreement with several other replies to your comment, this one must have slipped through the cracks.
After the HN affect raises awareness of this article, I wouldn't be surprised if it disappears too.
The article has great formatting for lay readers: the points are listed in a straightforward manner, photos illustrate each point, footnoted references are provided, and the conclusion is stated clearly at the top "There is unequivocal evidence that Earth is warming at an unprecedented rate. Human activity is the principal cause.".
The refusal to support electrification across the board, in order to support the revenue streams of legacy petro-centric corporations, is the largest physical infrastructure damage being done to the US by the so called "conservative" demographic. IMHO this will form the central cause of the demise of the US empire.
Basically amounting to, "well, you say you're doing X to combat climate change, but is X actually a competent solution (I don't trust your competence), and are you doing it to actually help or just to line pockets (I don't trust your intent)".
The other challenge is that we as individual humans are loathe to give up our comfortable lifestyle if such turns out to be necessary.
https://davidsuzuki.org/story/is-it-too-late-to-escape-clima...
And 7 of 9 boundaries have been crossed?
https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-bound...
This is starting to look more like the movie _Don't Look Up_.
I remember someone saying another form of denial is the denial that "we" will be affected badly. A friend said "Well, I'll turn on my AC, I'll be fine!". Or "I'm sure some technological Deus ex Machina will save us! Any day now!".
>Novel entities: Technological developments introduce novel synthetic chemicals into the environment, mobilize materials in wholly new ways, modify the genetics of living organisms...
which I'm not sure is really a climate catastrophe thing.
Erosion is a significant aspect of what I have witnessed however the ying always has a yang. Just as significant archeological discoveries are being made around melting glaciers so too are such discoveries also being made along eroding shorelines. The known history of the Chesapeake Bay is extensive and the items washing out of its shoreline are too, both known and unknown. Many of the paleolithic/native artifacts I have found can be explained by experts while some I have discovered cannot.
Change is the only thing guaranteed in this life until your life too forces change at its end. Change requires change and that means you but as a species we are wired into our daily pattern and nearly all hate forced change. As the old saying goes: "Nothing stays the same forever."
Stay Healthy!
Trying to keep the planet exactly the same just because we want it to for the benefit of our delicately balanced societies is a futile task which will always end in catasrophe.
Definitely not a big single disaster scenario. More like a "wait, we don't fix things anymore" or "wait, we have way less food variety than before" realization when it hits.
Reminds me of that advice about depression more generally. Something like
"If you can't be optimistic, settle for being curious about the way it all unfolds"
> We need a brand-new socioeconomic system that outcompete liberal democracies while reducing CO2 emissions.
I presume you'd agree that isn't likely? So saying "We need x infeasible thing" seems about as helpful as those pushing climate change denialism?
Except that today's denialists, and the politicians/governments who enact their policies, are much much stupider, and dangerously so, because 1) we have much more evidence than the Church had, and 2) while there was relatively little harm in believing the Earth was the center of the solar system, there is great harm in believing that burning more fossil fuels doesn't accelerate global warming.
Intelligence is a scarcity and it cannot overcome the majority of people that are incredibly stupid or ignorant. So accepting that we are doomed relieves some of the stress. I won't have children to worry about their future, either.
I still live my life in such a way that minimizes my impact on the world as much as possible. I still surround myself with folks that want a better world. But there is no stopping the impending doom and I'm trying not to be miserable with the time I have.
If in 3000 years we discover humans were completely wiped out to the last person I would be pretty surprised.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youngest_Toba_eruption#Toba_ca...
I do think there's a decent chance of civilizational collapse in the near to medium term. It seems like everything is getting very fragile. So much economic activity revolves around extremely sophisticated machines with many critical components that are manufactured in just a few locations, sometimes a single location. A major war could shatter that, or climate change could push us over a tipping point where those capabilities can no longer be maintained, or it might just be a cascading random breakdown due to the modern economy being so complicated.
If it happens, then I'm very pessimistic about the ability to ever come back from it. With all the easily accessible fossil fuels gone, getting industry going again is going to be a really tall order. So humanity might survive a long time, but it may consist of life the way it was in prehistory.
Oh yeah, we'd all die.
Maybe we shouldn't cause that to happen.
Why are people trying to keep the earth the same as what they think it should be forever? We are a blot on the history of the earth, The human race will perish when considtions on the planet no longer suit us, just like many other large species before us. The planet will warm and cool over millions of years long after we are gone, and nature will continue to evolve many more wierd and wonderful things.
Humans need to hurry up and accept that they really dont matter at all to the planet.
There is zero hope I will even be remembered years after death.
thats a start.
I only hope I can have a decent life until it ends, and I hope it takes slightly longer than I think it will.
I basically see it as a moral wrong and a grave ethical failure to use fossil fuels at this point. Except for home heating, I am now close to directly powering my entire life with clean, renewable energy. It was not hard. It was expensive, but only in the short term; I have effectively prepaid for my power needs for at least the next 25 years, and over than span it is very inexpensive.
A modern EV is about the same price as any other car, goes about the same distance, and is only slightly more time to fuel in the worst case. In the typical case, you don’t think about charging at all. The fact that I can’t get my supposedly environmentally conscious family of scientists and engineers to care continues to stun me. Somehow saving money while improving the world is “a waste of money” while buying an expensive hobby vehicle or vacation home is not. Frustrating.
Climate control is something more people will be on board with compared to trying to have a conversation about climate science to a person who didn’t graduate high school.
So: atmospheric climate science directly falls under NASA's responsibilities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Aeronautics_and_Space...
My old comment on the subject:
"If you want to know what it'll be like living on Mars, bury a cargo container in your back yard, and live in it for a year."
If you run out of something, you'll certainly be closer to the grocery store.
This form of 12 year old pubescent boy SciFi fantasy, taking priority over the many actual problems that need to be solved in the world today, is a poster child for the phenomenon of "the idiot wealthy".
Not everyone participating in the phenomenon are part of the idiot wealthy, most of them aren't rich.
- it's not warming, or not significantly
- if it's warming, it's not because of humans, (or)
- if it's warming, it's beneficial
- if it's warming because of humans and that's bad, there's nothing we can do about it
ETA: honorary mention for "what about China?"
People I've argued about this with will switch interchangeably between these. Press them hard enough on one issue, and they'll just switch to another. It's a game of whack-a-mole.
Because when were 4 degrees cooler, NYC was under 1000 feet of ice. We really don't want to find out what 4 degrees hotter is like.
Basically, anyone capable of thinking about it logically has at this point reached the conclusion that it's real. Anyone arguing otherwise is therefore necessarily not thinking about it logically, and you have to expect things like shifting claims.
The merchants of doubt ran out the clock and what I hear from the former deniers I know is that it is too expensive and too late to do anything now, being warmer will be nicer, and CO2 is a fertilizer.
"If you look back years ago in the 1920s and the 1930s, they said global cooling will kill the world. We have to do something. Then they said global warming will kill the world, but then it started getting cooler. So now they just call it climate change because that way they can't miss. Climate change because if it goes higher or lower, whatever the hell happens, there's climate change. It's the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion. Climate change, no matter what happens, you're involved in that. No more global warming, no more global cooling. All of these predictions made by the United Nations and many others, often for bad reasons, were wrong. They were made by stupid people that have cost their country's fortunes and given those same countries no chance for success."
https://rollcall.com/factbase/trump/transcript/donald-trump-...
This is a weird statement coming from Trump. I wouldn't think his base would care for improving the lives and economies of other countries, specially undeveloped countries.
Doesn't seem weird to say that if you want to do nothing.
I fall in that category. My suspicion is that water vapor from air travel is by far the biggest contributor. I saw the blue skys after 9/11. I read the NASA guys that said daily temperature range increased measurably. I saw the blue skys again during Covid19.
I'm also of the opinion that anyone looking at historical data only going back 200,000 years or less is missing the larger picture. Sea levels are NOT at historic highs, we should expect them to rise further before receeding. We should expect glaciation again if we don't do anything, but speeding up warming IMHO is more likely to trigger glaciation that to "push through" whatever causes it and break the cycle (which would be a good thing).
So as a long-term thinker all this hype is just that. If you don't have a plan to end the glacier cycle you're just making a big deal out of a small change in time-scale due to reasons (CO2 vs H2O) that may well be the wrong ones.
It's not even worth it to say why or how, since not even doing rudimentary research means that you aren't interested in developing a well-informed opinion.
That's just false. You might try to rule it out yourself to see. My comments here and the responses demonstrate that it's a waste of time to argue against people in the purity cycle of global warming. My position is one of moderation not denial - and I'm downvoted, told I don't care, and I haven't done even the minimum of research. Pffft. HN is not what it used to be.
Do you have any reason to believe otherwise besides a couple of anecdotes about looking at the sky and short-term temperature variations?
You've heard of the saying that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence? Holding a hypothesis of water-vapor from air travel being the primary driver of warming trends is extraordinary.
Invoking the oft-repeated "do your own research" rhetorical crutch and referring to scientific consensus as "hype" doesn't help your case.
Have you calculated the water vapor generated from air travel, and compared that to the water vapor already generated by the water cycle? (just normal evaporation from lakes/rivers/oceans/plants)
Even as back-of-napkin math, this should be a pretty easy sanity check.
I think you're off by a few orders of magnitude here, but I also don't want to discourage you from adopting a "check for yourself" mindset.
I've SEEN the effects with my own eyes. You can also see contrails seeding cloud formation on some days. Then there's the fact that these extra clouds are formed and dissipate on a 24 hour cycle, so part of the day they let in sunlight and part of the night they trap heat. These effects are significant and there is little research on the bigger picture effects of this (that I've seen).
The link to greenhouse gases is not hard to prove. We've got satellites that can measure global radiation inflow and outflow and see what the difference is. We can also measure this at various levels within the atmosphere, and at the surface of the land and oceans. We can see where outgoing radiation is getting caught and we can see what frequency bands of outgoing radiation is getting caught.
We know the frequency bands that get reflected, absorbed, or pass through for all the gases in the atmosphere and can see that the gases causing the problem are the greenhouse gases.
We can also see that the increase in greenhouse gases is mostly from burning fossil fuels. We can see this by looking at the isotope ratios in the C in greenhouse gases.
Cosmic ray bombardment in the upper atmosphere produces carbon 14, which is radioactive with a half live of 5730 years. It disperses throughout the atmosphere and becomes part of anything that regularly incorporates atmospheric carbon or exchanges its carbon with atmospheric carbon, including all living things.
Everything humans do in significant amounts that puts greenhouse gases in the atmosphere other than burning fossil fuels has carbon with about the same isotope ratio as that of the carbon in living things. Even when we burn a dead forest to clear it out the isotope ratio is close to that of living things, because of that 5730 year half life for carbon 14.
It is only when we burn fossil fuels that we put carbon into the atmosphere with almost no carbon 14. They came from living things but have been dead long enough for hundreds of half lives to pass.
The isotope ratios in the excess greenhouse gases show that it is mostly carbon 14 free. There are natural processes that can dump carbon 14 free carbon into the atmosphere such as volcanoes and other geological processes. However, (1) the increases in carbon 14 free greenhouse gases matches very closely with the amount of carbon we've been emitting from fossil fuels, and (2) and monitoring of volcanoes and other natural sources doesn't find nearly enough to account for more than a small amount of the increase.
a) china is unwilling to do anything, and if that's the case, America shouldn't empty its pocket books on this issue.
b) this climate change alarmist stuff has caused a climate disaster in the US because all the migration to Electric Only is causing us to use generators all over the place, which is crazy. We should instead focus on making clean nuclear and expanding solar. PG&E (in CA) has decided to cancel this migration because CPUC (or whatever their called) is in Newsome's pocket who is in PG&Es pocket.
c) climate change extremists are unwilling to both hear yes it's happening and no we're not going to do anything about it, so the people responding are simply saying, no it's not happening.
They are also the leader in producing and exporting solar and wind equipment, and in driving the prices down, to make it easier for other countries to address climate change.
They are also the biggest producer of EVs in the world, and the biggest exporter of EVs.
They are doing better at doing something about climate change than any other country, both due to what they are currently doing for themselves and for the countries they export to and in their ability to make long term plans and reasonably stick to them.
It's logical to start with the king of greenhouse emissions if you want to stop global warming.
China's emissions were 10 billion tons CO2 in 2017 and have increased every single year to 12.29 billion tons CO2 in 2024. Meanwhile, US decreased from 5.22 to 4.9 in the same time
China has only produced significant CO2/capita in the last decade. The US and Europe are responsible for the accumulated GHG that have gotten us into the current mess. We blew nearly the entire CO2 "budget" for keeping us under 2C of warming, just by ourselves, so it's kinda odd to be pointing fingers at the foreigners who are just now halfway catching up to what we're emitting now.
US emissions icreased by 2.5% https://rhg.com/research/us-greenhouse-gas-emissions-2025/
China's emmisions have decreased by <1% https://e360.yale.edu/digest/china-emissions-decline
Also, you don’t want all the low-population countries to each start contributing as much to global warming as the US.
If China were to split into 10 countries each emitting 10% of what they do now it'd be the exact same emissions, but according to you it would be much better.
Similarly if the EU would become one country, that country would be high up on the list, much higher than member countries now! Oh no!
Looking at per capita emissions is much more fair.
Anyway, China's emissions are falling since last year ( https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-ha... ). What's the US doing?
But policy is where real change needs to be made, and the effects of policy still scale with population in most cases.
But per capita is more informative when thinking about policy for curbing emissions, which is how we actually change our effect on the climate.
The climate "cares" about cumulative emissions. On that score the US is by far the leader. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co-emissions It's not even close.
Pretend China is 20 countries. Each country now has lower emissions than the US. Anyone can play that stupid game. Give up the games, think about solutions. China is working hard. Are we?
That’s a real problem, because China, and all the poor countries in Asia and Africa aren’t going to stop increasing their CO2 output per capita until they reach western standards of living.
Edit: Ah ok an IP ban. I guess time to use a proxy. Moderation has rules. Censorship does not.
Censorship is bad dang mmmkay?
Editing again to post later cause you nuked replies for some reason:
Sorry I don't conduct in personal attacks. I think you're confused. Feel free to list whom I attacked and where.
No, censorship doesn't change definitions based on who uses it. Unless you want to pretend like you're not censoring. You seem to have convinced yourself that your censorship is a form of moderation, very sad. You're free to censor whom and what you want, it's your site. Don't pretend it's moderation though.
Your guidelines are meaningless if censorship is so heavy handed and moderation non-existant. It's hard to moderate. It's easy to censor.
Anyway you have curated, through censorship, a place where people are afraid to share valid opinions that break no guidelines (except those magical ones you can produce in order to censor). You can congratulate yourself on that if you want. You've got a ghost town, whether you like it or not.
> Censorship is bad dang mmmkay?
It's one of those words that mean different things depending on how people want to use it. I wouldn't personally use that word as opposed to moderation, curation, etc., but then I would say that wouldn't I. In any case, HN isn't an anything-goes site and never has been. If we didn't do some version of moderation/curation/censorship/befugioning, it would be an entirely different place. Probably not one even you would enjoy—I don't suppose you like ghost towns or scorched earth any more than the rest of us.
Your guidelines are meaningless if censorship is so heavy handed and moderation non-existant. It's hard to moderate. It's easy to censor.
Anyway you have curated, through censorship, a place where people are afraid to share valid opinions that break no guidelines (except those magical ones you can produce in order to censor). You can congratulate yourself on that if you want. You've got a ghost town, whether you like it or not.
As of today, solar and batteries are the cheapest source of electricity. All the "poor countries in Asia and Africa", except the ones that have oil and gas, will leapfrog straight to renewables. It just makes good sense, unless your politicians are paid off by the fossil fuel lobby.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj4y159190go
https://www.carbonbrief.org/chinas-construction-of-new-coal-...
While China is still very reliant on fossil-fuels, and particularly dirty coal, they're at the same time working on dominating the post-fossil age at astonishing speed. After they already dominate solar and batteries, they're working on doing the same for a number of other future green industries. They are already dominating future technologies like Green Methanol that most people in Europe or the US have never heard of.
I hope we steal their playbook.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-ha...
China is building clean energy for a good chunk of the world, including itself.
A better question may be: What is the US going to do to make up for its historical emissions? The US got wealthy by creating far more emissions than China, and all those historical emissions are now a problem for the rest of the world.
If people in the US try to turn climate action into a blame game, it will end very very poorly for the US.
Pure fantasy. What will happen to the US and who will do it to us?
If the US starts trying to force other countries into climate action without taking into account its own contributions, the US will likely cut out of the global economy, and become far poorer as the rest of the world surpasses its wealth through vigorous trade.
The US was the sole remaining superpower, but has recently decided to only occupy a much weaker position with a mere "sphere of influence" and ceding leadership in other parts of the world to others. The US is signalling to allies in Europe that it will no longer lead, that the prior world is over and the US is bugging out, meaning Europe will gain far more influence.
The more that the US attacks others without providing any leadership, the less that the US will be able to take from the world. Up until recently, the US's position of massive economic strength was largely due to it's dominant position among nations and the goodwill that others had towards it. Turning the climate problem into a blame game on other countries would further weaken the US's position and options.
You seem to think these solid critiques about the inherent weakness of Trump are somehow mere partisanship, rather than the actual unwinding of US leadership around the world.
I'm not part of global academia, I'm just a consumer of news that is willing to listen to things outside of a partisan bubble. The world is shifting away from the US, to the US's detriment. We have an exceptionally weak president who acts like what a weak person imagines a strong person is like, and it's scaring off all our allies.
> In a way it’s understandable because you all seem to believe in your “right” to pick winners and losers. The world doesn’t actually work that way.
I do not know whatyou mean by this, you think I'm picking winners and losers? The US is picking winners and losers? Global academia is picking?Picking either antecedent does not allow me to find any meaning in your sentence.
TDS inspires people to blurt out the types of statements you’re making.
The clear facts are that the US has cheapened its word and made itself an embarrassment around the globe. China has completely dog walked Trump on tariffs and trade, devastating US farmers, and leading to far stronger ties between China and the rest of the world, not just with our former tight trading partner Canada, but with all the emerging economies around the world. The US is cutting itself out of the new economic order that is emerging from the energy transition to cheaper renewable energy, which will leave the US with sky-high energy prices while the rest of the world runs their economies cheaper, and with less inflation-inducing price shocks, on solar and grid storage.
I respond with these basic facts not because I think that you will believe anything, but because the obvious falsehoods that you are repeating should not stand unanswered by the reality that we can all see in the world.
> There may be some politicians that want to choose the US as “the loser”. But that’s just not really an option given the size of our economy and the size of our military.
The only politicians that wants to choose the US as the loser are those following the dictates of Trump, by weakening our gloabl position. The size of our economy and military are not enough of a draw to keep us as the leader through sheer domination. And in fact pretending that "domination" is what made the US strong is the exact sort of weak person's idea of a strong man. The US is handing away all its leadership and power by trying to force what it does not have the ability to force, trying to force what would instead be freely given! It's utter insane behavior of a nation, and indicates just how little the Trump administration understands of US power around the world. The US is not a mob boss, we are (were?) a leader that attracted support because we were a shining example of what a country could be. When we act like bullies we throw away all that power, because we can not fight the entire world with our military, and our economy is not nearly big enough to overcome bullying behavior.
Edit: an as for an example just this morning of how Trump is making the US weaker, the UK is not allowing the US to use bases for attacks on Iran, which is leading to other threats from Trump that further push the UK away and make the US weaker on the global stage. Nearly every single day the US is becoming weaker because of this sort of weak behavior. https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/trump-chagos-is...
PRC solar power production last year conservatively will diplace ~45 billion barrels of oil, or 10%-20% more than total global consumption per year. It's just retarded eco accounting that attributes emissions to renewable manufacturers while fossil exporters don't get any penalties for extracting emissions.
Every year of PRC solar prevents doubling of oil, basically they're like the only significant country whose net contribution is negative for how much carbon sinks they manufacture. So the answer for US+co is obviously stop exporting oil and lng, and start exporting renewables.
January 2026 was the 5th warmest January since records began in 1850, with an anomaly of +1.12°C above the C20th baseline: https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/news/global-climate-202601
The anomaly for the first two weeks of February 2026 was greater still, at +1.69°C. Perhaps the last few days have been incredibly cold, but until then we were on course for it to be the third warmest February in recorded history.
Variations in regional weather are something else entirely.
We’ve known about the mechanisms of CO2 leading to atmospheric warming since the 19th century.
We know humans are adding CO2 to the atmosphere.
We observe higher CO2 and warmer temps
The evidence isn’t that complicated.
The science behind it really got going in the 1890s, with Arrhenius' paper predicting climate sensitivity to CO2. That was bounced back and forth with rebuttals and counter-rebuttals until about 1950. Major debate points were how much role water vapor played, how this varied with temperature/altitude/pressure. (You can trace each part of the argument if you're so inclined; there's lots of neat science in there. The concept of "pressure broadening" was my favorite; it explores how spectral bands change with pressure).
Around 1950, the science started settling out. Spectrometers had improved, we had clearer view that CO2 and H2O don't fully overlap in their spectra bands through the atmosphere, and we had the computing to do better calculations. By the 1970s, we were getting ice core data showing that the world had gone through huge temperature swings, and how this changed with CO2. Enough data had accumulated that a consensus was forming. In the 1980s, scientists were now concerned enough to form a large body to inform policymakers on this issue (IPCC; 1988). And in the 40 years since then, we've mostly sat on our hands, even as the science just gets clearer and clearer.
I share all this long history to explain that the science went through nearly a century of rigorous debate even before politicians got involved. This a scientific issue, not a political one. And I'm glossing over 99.9999% of the detail here. There was an extensive literature debate between the scientists, hashing out any point you can think of. You just have to go to your local uni library and start reading.
TL;DR: saying that global warming is debunked is about as incorrect as saying that the Earth is flat. We have extensive evidence showing otherwise.
You are welcome to read.. any paper on the subject and educate yourself.
I agree it's warming but unequivocally at an unprecedented rate is iffy. For the article they cherry picked a stable period but if you look at the full temperature history as shown here https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2014/05/05/can-make-b...
there has been loads of instability and heating and cooling.
Also while CO2 levels are up from about 280 ppm in 1600 to about 430 now, for most of the history of life on earth they were more in the 500 to 5000 range https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_the_atmosphe...
I don't believe climate denial as in saying its not warming but I'm also skeptical of exaggerating the problem by ignoring most climate history. I guess the idea is to panic people into changing behaviour but it doesn't seem to work very well - co2 emissions are higher than ever and a lot of the population think we are doomed when we are not. Unbiased science is better in my opinion.
Simply on a factual basis, the data we have from previous extinction events does not have the temporal resolution needed for us to determine how quickly the temperature increased/decreased. E.g., "how quickly did the atmospheric temperature change after the Chicxulub event?" We don't know. Decent-quality global paleoclimate proxies only extend back ~15k years or so. It's possible that there was rapid global climate change in the past outside of major extinction events; we genuinely don't have the data to tell.
This also doesn't really tell us much about how the modern Earth and its ecosystems would handle those old climate shifts, because there is much much less wild lands (and so, less resilience within natural ecosystems). It's true from a climate science perspective, but not useful for assessing the damage that climate change can cause to modern society.
And: to the best of our knowledge, the current rate of warming is fast enough to cause major issues. Civilization only arose once we had relatively stable and moderate temperatures, and stable temperatures may be needed to maintain civilization under present technology. Ecological and glaciological studies back this up. And no, scientists are not looking to just scare us into action; the evidence itself should be alarming.
Link to a hot bit https://youtu.be/rbznPZHCqVw?t=2269