Global warming has accelerated significantly
researchsquare.com
researchsquare.com
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C39&q=gra...
Not a perfect measure of whether this is a reputable article but at least readers should know this isn't from some randos in a basement somewhere.
I am not a climate scientist - how should I think about this statement? Normally I am looking for some statement that shows a document has been vetted.
There is no benefit in non-expert readers inserting their own subjectivity into an already complex topic. Even for themselves.
What we know: It is an interesting paper. It is going to get attention.
Good to be aware. It is also good to reserve judgement while the community evaluates the results.
> Plain Language Summary The rise in global temperature has been widely considered to be quite steady for several decades since the 1970s. Recently, however, scientists have started to debate whether global warming has accelerated since then. It is difficult to be sure of that because of natural fluctuations in the warming rate, and so far no statistical significance (meaning 95% certainty) of an acceleration (increase in warming rate) has been demonstrated. In this study we subtract the estimated influence of El Niño events, volcanic eruptions and solar variations from the data, which makes the global temperature curve less variable, and it then shows a statistically significant acceleration of global warming since about the year 2015. Warming proceeding faster is not unexpected by climate models, but it is a cause of concern and shows how insufficient the efforts to slow and eventually stop global warming under the Paris Climate Accord have so far been.
Peer review is an important part of scientific publication, but it's also important for the general public to not view peer review as a full vetting. Peer reviewers look for things like reproducibility of the analysis, suitability of the conclusions given the methods, discussions of the limitations of the data and methods, appropriate statistical tests, correct approval from IRBs if there are humans or animals involved, and things like that. For many journals, the editors are also asking if the results are interesting and significant enough to meet the prestige of the journal.
Peer review misses things like intentional fraud, mistakes in computations, and of course any blind spots that the field has not yet acknowledged (for example, nearly every scientific specialty had to rediscover the important of splitting training and testing datasets for machine learning methods somewhat on their own, as new practitioners adopted new methods quickly and then some papers would slip through at the beginning when reviewers were not yet aware of the necessity of this split...)
Any single paper is not revealed truth, it's a step towards establishing truth, maybe. Science is supposed to be self-correcting, which also necessitates the mistakes that need correction. Climate science is one of the fields that gets the most attention and scrutiny, so a series of papers in that field goes a long ways towards establishing truth, much more so than, say, new MRI technology in psychology.
I'm not sure if science has as much corruption as other fields, but it definitely has politics. PIs get to their position without the typical selection process for leadership that happens in most larger orgs, so there's more fragile and explosive personalities than I find in other management/leadership positions.
In principle you could go (pay to†) read the actual final published copy, maybe it's different, but almost always it's basically the same, the text is enough to qualify.
If you go to https://eel.is/c++draft/ you'll find the "Draft" C++ standard, and it has this text:
Note: this is an early draft. It's known to be incomplet and incorrekt, and it has lots of bad formatting.
Nevertheless, the people who wrote your C++ compiler used that "draft" document, because it isn't reasonable to wait a few years for ISO to publish the "real" document which is identical other than lacking that scary text and having a bunch of verbiage about how ISO owns this document and it mustn't be republished.
And you might be thinking "OK, I'm sure those GNU hippies don't pay for a real published copy, but surely the Microsoft Corporation buys their engineers a real one". Nope. Waste of money.
† If you have a relationship with a research institution it might have this or be willing to help you order it from somewhere else at no personal cost.
The climate is not something for which you need daily, weekly, or even monthly updates. Rather, this paper is just one more on top of a gigantic pile of evidence that that climate change is serious, something that we can and should do something about.
If the paper passes muster, you'll hear about it then, though all it'll do is very slightly increase your confidence in something that is already very well confirmed. Or, the paper may not pass review, in which case it doesn't mean anything at all, and you fall back on the existing mountain of evidence.
If the paper had reached the opposite conclusion, that might merit more investigation by you now, since that would potentially be a significant update to your beliefs. And more importantly, it would certainly be presented as if it were a fait accompli, even before peer review.
Instead, you can simply say, "I don't know what this paper means, but I already have a very well-founded understanding of climate change and its significance."
[1] - Actually, there are hoops on pre-print repositories, such as arXiv, so not everyone can post there. I guesstimate that 99% of the public has no means of posting on arXiv.
Peer reviewed does not mean the findings of the paper are established fact or scientific consensus. It does not mean that the findings have been replicated by other scientists. It does not mean that the paper relied on a robust methodology, is free of basic statistical errors, or even free of logical fallacies.
Some of these limitations are due to the limitations of peer review itself. Others are just side effects of the way science works (for example, some ideas start as small, unimpressive experiments that are reported on in papers, and the strength of the findings is gradually developed over time). Obviously sometimes the prestige (or lack thereof) of the journal the paper is in decreases (or increases) some of these issues.
Anyway, peer review is a very noisy channel (IMHO).
We are doomed.
The heliocentric model of our solar system "argument"?
I guess general relativity is only a "theory" in the end, geodude420 on twitter has an awesome thread debunking that Einstein schlub's whole career!
more importantly though, is the fact that there are enough "critics" that consider Global Warming a cycle that "man" merely accelerated by a few decades. most of these "skeptics" are also perfectly capable of discerning between the amount of energy "wasted" in office buildings and lit up skyscrapers as well as anything at the end of luxury supply chains and markets and what the rest of the world "wastes" or expends. to them, the hoax is the "man-made" part ...
it should be "some-man-made climate change"
Unnecessary but moving past that: I understand where you’re coming from but a hallmark of people like that is they are not willing to learn or be swayed no matter how you try to educate them. They have decided what is real and it often dovetails with their social/political views in a way that is very hard to disentangle.
Most climate change denial arguments eventually boil down to social assertions about the change believers having perverse incentives, like being greedy for grants to go on sailing vacations to Antartica or feather their academic nests.
In fact, we have records from not that long ago that at some point climate became colder after it had been warmer for a bit.
It's obvious human civilization has an impact, but the real question is more, can we actually do anything about it that is not just letting go of a comfortable life? Because that option is a pretty stupid proposition, and game theory pretty much guarantees that if you make that choice, you will be the ultimate loser no matter what.
Climate activist make it look like it's a settled issue, but the problem isn't the science; the problem is trying to use the science to enforce decision that are highly political in nature and are not to be left only to the designated god scientist, no matter how hard they cry...
Uh? Ultimate loser? When I read comments like this I'm basically confronted with the following implication "Human civilization isn't worth preserving. If you disagree, then the problem is with you, namely because you believe humanity to be redeemable".
The ultimate loser is the person who thinks that a small or almost nonexistent reduction in quality of life is a small price to pay in comparison to a large and permanent reduction in quality of life.
The ultimate winner is the person who will see his quality of life decline before his eyes.
Crazy.
Yes, no doubt! And actually doing something about it will impact our lives much less than trying to continue as usual. If we would have started 30 years ago, the transitions would have been smooth, but now it is going to be harsher. The problem is that doing something about it will affect the profits of some very big and influential corporations, and they are doing everything they can to sow FUD.
The number of critics of Anthropogenic global warming who actually have expertise on climate change and actively publish on the subject can be counted on one hand. If 99.9% of astrophysicists agreed that a meteor was going to hit your house next Tuesday you wouldn't wait around for the few crackpot holdouts before you to agree to leave.
EDIT did some more searching and have not been able to finding anything supporting you claim. People have not been very alarmist about sea levels.. 7500m by the year 2500 in Waterworld does not count.
> Here we show that the mid-range projection from the Second Assessment Report of the IPCC (1995/1996) was strikingly close to what transpired over the next 30 years, with the magnitude of sea-level rise underestimated by only ∼1 cm.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2025ef00...
I believe people have influenced the climate, but the far left is using it as a political football to get Their Guy elected, not to actually stop it. The idea of a rising sea is a perfect disaster they can sell you the solution for. If they actually cared, 1) the Democrats would be fighting AI tooth and nail, unless it was 100% powered by renewables (not nuclear, remember their version of science denialism is no nukes.). 2) they would be worshipping Elon for bringing us EVs. Instead they take all that silicon valley AI money and tell us to save the ocean. No way San Jose!
And I'm not sure we want to put our heads in the sand and say La-La-La, against the real possibility that everything is actually going to shit.
"The people with the most power and money are hurting the planet, so there's no reason for me to inconvenience myself for the sake of others."
It's a pretty weak justification for a selfish attitude.
Perhaps you have cognitive dissonance because you've fallen for some very low quality propaganda.
Policies are not perfect, and they will be created with input from all parties. What you highlight feels like an artifact of these policies not being hard line enough. You are of course right that it is effective to show natural disasters and explain that these will be more frequent if we do nothing, when you do that people will make the wrong conclusions how that effects their daily lives. We know that we use too much resources, and this is going to have catastrophic consequences in the future if we do not change how we use them.
It is not obvious who you are arguing against, it feels to me that you are against the people who make climate policies weak, and the very same policies.
Lets talk specific, we had a plastic bag ban here in Sweden. It was vilified as not efficient. In the end it was effective according to research after the ban was lifted and an even extreme approach would have been even better.
An actual leftist party would ban private jets before it banned natural gas in homes.
The Democrats are a neoliberal conservative party. They'll always put the interests of Capital first.
I sympathize, I'm not sure what Americans are meant to do about their utterly captured government.
Every single global cooling prediction has failed, so yes, if you're that incompetent you should definitely find a different career.
> the Democrats
You have shown that you don't understand what Leftist politics means. Democrats are center-right. The USA hasn't had a meaningful Leftist party since the first half of the last century.
I’m a Leftist and I want good things for all people. I don’t want to persecute my enemies. I don’t agree with you.
But the tendency is showing: in my country, we're getting records in extreme temperatures, forrest fires and storms.
But a study 1% can be dismissed, some random in a basement 99% off can be believed. This just says: many people are just looking for a confirmation of their beliefs, not evidence. And many companies play this game (supporting the right politicians, spreading disinformation aka lies, etc), because there are billions at stake.
The CO2 hypothesis was made in the 50s, long before there was conclusive evidence, and yet we are right on the predicted trajectory.
Climate change is real. That doesn’t mean we should halt economic growth. Unfortunately this is another area that gets so wrapped up in political power and incentives where: Democrats have factions and groups that want to implement world changing measures and redirect billions of dollars in a way that benefits their interests, and climate scientists seem to weigh the climate costs far higher than the economic devastation a hard switch would bring, so naturally there’s a level of skepticism at the whole affair.
There should be level headedness about it: climate change is real, it’s not world ending yet but we should get ahead of it, we need to make investments in changing our societal behavior to get on a track that balances mitigating the harms while keeping the real economic boon that comes with our current approach.
If you care about solving climate change: instead of yelling at climate change denialist you should direct more effort into advocating for policy and messaging that acknowledges and mitigates the harms while keeping you expect people to endure
But if you want me to, I could, sure.
It doesn't sound to me like you contribute any valuable argument that would improve the "PR" for the goal of protecting environmental living conditions for humans though.
I've never seen "halting economic growth" as a suggestion for dealing with climate change that was being taken seriously. There might be some crackpots out there insisting that we need to being the economy to a halt and move into caves or something, but I think the vast majority understands that it isn't going to happen. That said, there are things that could be done which would hurt the profits of the ~50 companies who are responsible for most of the global CO2 emissions and/or trillions in climate related damages without causing the entire global economy to grind to a stop or collapse (as much as they'd love for us to believe otherwise).
The greatest societal behavior that needs to be changed is the way we allow a very small number of people get away with making insane amounts of money by causing insane levels of harm. Until that changes, the harmful systems that those people have created for themselves to profit under won't change either.
> it’s not world ending yet but we should get ahead of it,
Sure there are fanatics spouting end-of-the-world-is-nigh stuff but fundamentally I think the problem here is it's unknown - both in terms of the physical changes [1], and perhaps more importantly second order effects due to mass migration. It might become a real problem a lot sooner than you think - we simply don't know - but I think it's certainly wrong to view the effects as a gradual rise - that average hides a lot of local/temporal variation.
[1]in terms of potential for positive feedback loops like methane release, or compensating stabilising effects like cloud cover. [2] For a region to become uninhabitable, you don't need it to be uninhabitable every day of the year - just one or two days a year may be enough - enough to kill people or crops. What's important is the occurrence of extremes during the year, not the average gradual rise.
They would have made a lot more headway talking about clean air, clean water, jobs, and a bright prosperous future where we manufacture wind turbines, batteries and solar panels in deep red Missouri. A minority tried that, but most stuck with the catastrophizing for decades and now that they've ruined their social credit no one will listen to the message they should have opened with.
You need people emotionally invested, and it's a lot easier to get them invested in their lives than in the abstract consequences of computer models that are at least 100 years out if they're even accurate. And most people are not independent enough to direct their own lives. If they make the right decisions on abstract concepts, it was more because the incentives/disincentives in their environment were set up correctly than they actually understood the decision they were making. Message accordingly.
The IPCC has consistently DOWNPLAYED the negative consequences of climate change, and reality keeps outpacing their worst case predictions year after year.
Every attempt to message the reality and consequences of climate change, and the possible avenues for blunting it, has been tried. From the sugarcoating "everything will be rosy and great and abundant, look at all the benefits of green industry" to the milquetoast watered-down try-to-please-everyone messaging of the major political parties, to the desperate attempts to communicate the brutal reality of what we're facing (and still failing to match the reality that is consistently worse).
None of it works.
1) People are selfish, myopic, and stupid. They think about their short term personal needs and wants above all else. Large scale coordination on this issue is virtually impossible, see the Prisoner's Dilemma. Human psychology is simply not fit for this task.
The satisficing nature of evolution means we are the dumbest possible animal that could otherwise achieve the technological civilization that we have, and this is another example where it really shows.
2) The wealthiest and most powerful people and corporations on Earth have spent decades pushing propaganda attempting to sow doubt about climate change, because genuine action on it is directly against their interests.
Those poor multi-trillion dollar industries underpinning all modern society and power structures are the altruistic, honest bastions of truth, it's those evil corrupt post docs on minimum wage that are the truly corrupt and greedy ones, twisting the truth for their own financial gain and machiavellian ends!
And they've been far more effective than the cigarette companies of the early 20th century could have ever dreamed.
Except downplaying consequences downplays the upside, i.e. opportunity.
The dire warnings should be dire, but paired with a call to opportunity opportunity opportunity. Instead of focusing on enemies or little inconvenient things we could all do, if only we could all be uniformly focused and high minded enough as uncoordinated individuals.
That fact that virtually every way we can reduce climate damage involves new capabilities and resources with additional economic and health benefits (not to mention political disentanglements) makes positive self-interested calls to profitable action much more sensible.
And political leaders shouldn't be afraid to work with the CFO's of fossil fuel companies to create incentives they want. It might be costly, but CFO's get flexible when there is a clear path to making more money. Any costs of smoothing that path (let's be clear, in a way that would be pure corruption if the size of the problem didn't make that a value creator) are nothing compared to the costs of climate change.
China gets it. (Not uniformly of course, but more, and its paying off for them.)
These are scientists, not the government, and the US government, at least, has long opposed or been ambivalent toward climate research.
I'm not sure how rich donor influence is involved. Rich donors generally have acted to oppose climate research.
When forming attitudes in an area where one doesn’t care, one tends to rely more on who is saying it than what is being said. The opposite is true, if you care about [climate change], you listen to the arguments regardless of who is presenting it.
- Climate Warming is a hoax
- Climate Warming is happening, but not Man Made and part of larger cycles
- Climate Warming is Man Made, but drastic De-growth strategies cause more harm.
- Climate Warming is Man Made, don't need de-growth strategies because Technology will solve energy efficiency, clean energy growth and carbon capture and humans adapt along the way
- Climate Warming is Man Made and we need drastic de-growth strategies and complete ban of fossil fuels.
For people in the last group, all other groups look like Climate Deniers because they don't agree to their de-growth/ban plans
It is a shame that Twitter's algorithm is so damn easy to manipulate that it's basically owned by propaganda firms now. Elon doesn't even care, more outrage == more engagement and that's what feeds the system. It's a feedback loop of crap.
Try to create a brand new twitter account, you'll find that 80+% of the accounts that get suggested to you are right wing propaganda with climate denial being one of their greatest hits.
Not "basically" owned. Manipulation is the explicitly optimized and financed purpose.
The feed is a two-directional manipulation competition, with both directions enhancing each other, with a conflict of interest afterburner, for all parties to maximally control users. Neutrality doesn't exist.
(1) An auction for ads/influence to get your manipulative content in front of the most likely vulnerable users.
(2) A never ending competition to create addictive content, funded in direct proportion to successful impact on users.
(3) And the value in both directions is magnified by the "personalized" leverage manufactured through pervasive logging, beyond service surveillance, dossier collation, psychology hacking and real time feed manipulation.
(4) None of this is impeded by any "standards", neutrality, or a concern about external damage.
Admittedly great things for users and society, except for the four on that list that are not.
Yes, if hysteria and de-growth propaganda wins, it is bleak for the other groups
Even the US military is planning around climate change because they sure as hell believe it’s real: https://www.war.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/375340...
If it’s only about people then y’all better figure out the technology quick, because the gulf coast is not long for this world at the current pace
Question 2: Which species has the potential to prevent such wipeout in the future?
“Researchers found that plants’ protein content will likely decrease significantly if carbon dioxide levels reach 540 to 960 parts per million, which we are projected to reach by 2100. (We are currently at 409 ppm.) Studies show that barley, wheat, potatoes and rice have 6 to 15 percent lower concentrations of protein when grown at those levels of CO2. The protein content of corn and sorghum, however, did not decline significantly.”
Fewer nutrients https://www.climaterealityproject.org/blog/climate-change-an...
"When grown under the CO2 levels expected by 2050, reductions of protein, iron, and zinc in common produce in some parts of the world could be anywhere from 3-17 percent. And if emissions continue at the current rate, in many countries, these nutrient declines could turn dire."
Source:
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/climate-cha...
Climate change is already affecting global food production—unequally https://phys-org.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/phys.org/news/2019-0... roductionunequally.amp?amp_js_v=0.1
“The world's top 10 crops— barley, cassava, maize, oil palm, rapeseed, rice, sorghum, soybean, sugarcane and wheat—supply a combined 83 percent of all calories produced on cropland. Yields have long been projected to decrease in future climate conditions. Now, new research shows climate change has already affected production of these key energy sources—and some regions and countries are faring far worse than others.”
Lower available omega 3 fatty acids https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3090543/ Earth Ozone destruction https://psmag.com/environment/the-most-climate-resilient-cou... In other words, heat-trapping gases contribute to creating the cooling conditions in the atmosphere that lead to ozone depletion. Greenhouse gases absorb heat at relatively low altitudes and warm the surface--but they have the opposite effect in higher altitudes because they prevent heat from rising.
In a cooler stratosphere, ozone loss creates a cooling effect that results in further ozone depletion.
Less atmospheric oxygen https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/12/151201094120.h...
Falling oxygen levels caused by global warming could be a greater threat to the survival of life on planet Earth than flooding, according to new research.
Health Higher suicide rates as temperatures go up https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326558963_Higher_te...
Our calculations suggest that projected changes in suicide rates under future climate change could be as important as other well- studied societal or policy determinants of suicide rates (see Fig. 5a).
In absolute value, the effect of climate change on the suicide rate in the United States and Mexico by 2050 is roughly two to four times the estimated effect of a 1% increase in the unemployment rate in the European Union20, half as large as the immediate effect of a celebrity suicide in Japan45, and roughly one-third as large in absolute magnitude (with opposite sign) as the estimated effect of gun restriction laws in the United States46 or the effect of national suicide prevention programmes in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries47. The large magni- tude of our results adds further impetus to better understand why temperature affects suicide and to implement policies to mitigate future temperature rise. Climate Change Will Expose Half of World’s Population to Disease-Spreading Mosquitoes By 2050 https://e360.yale.edu/digest/climate-change-will-expose-half...
Overall health https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311844520_Carbon_di...
Unhealthy blood CO2 concentrations causing stress on the autonomic nervous system have been measured from people in common office environments where reduced thinking ability and health symptoms have been observed at levels of CO2 above 600 ppm for relatively short-term exposures. Although humans and animals are able to deal with elevated levels of CO2 in the short-term due to various compensation mechanisms in the body, the persistent effects of these mechanisms may have severe consequences in a perpetual environment of elevated CO2. These include threats to life such as kidney failure, bone atrophy and loss of brain function. Existing research also indicates that as ambient CO2 increases in the near-future, there will be an associated increase in cancers, neurological disorders and other conditions.
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-...
No. These CO2 measurement levels are at 9,000 feet, not on the surface at sea level. The CO2 concentration at the surface is much higher, and it is becoming very common for CO2 levels to exceed 1,000 ppm at the surface, going up to 4,000 ppm in closed areas, like houses.
The measured CO2 level has seasonal peaks and lows. What is important is the Mean keeps climbing. What is also important is the rise in the mean is starting to go exponential. A decade ago, the mean was increasing about 1 ppm per year. This past year, it is increasing at 3 ppm. All the projections from the 70's have been with the assumption that the CO2 level increase would be a linear ramp up, indicating when the troposphere, the breathable atmosphere, goes into Thermal Runaway, around 2070. If the ramp up is going exponential, then the conditions for Thermal Runaway move closer, possibly around 2040. The commencement of Thermal Runaway is a mass extinction event. This is the reason for all the "sooner than expected" headlines.
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/extreme-heat-climate-cha...
Researchers have linked extreme heat to increased aggression, lower cognitive ability
NOAA Mauna Loa CO2 as of September 2019
Atmospheric CO2 Getting So High That It’s Weakening Human Skeletons
https://futurism.com/health-medicine/carbon-atmosphere-human...
https://www.worldometers.info/demographics/life-expectancy/
https://data.unicef.org/topic/child-survival/under-five-mort...
Apparently civilization is adapting?
We have easy measures of that
- Real GDP.
- Global Life Expectancy
- Global Child Mortality
- Global Poverty
- Global Food Production
If you are really into science and evidence, you should be tracking that for humanity extinction/survival trends (and the effect technology is having in tackling climate change), which is what my position is
Associating action to prevent with 'de-growth' is disinformation from the deniers. Climate change itself is massively de-growth. The question is how to best prevent it.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-gdp-over-the-long-...
The goal is not to generate hysteria; but to avoid it. Hitting one or more tipping points [1] is orders of magnitude more destructive than prioritising phasing out fossil fuels, and impossible to undo.
But I do understand that some people have reasons not to care about impacts that have an outsized effect on future generations, so to your request: a recent example of a list of impact predictions is the UK Government joint intelligence committee's national security assessment [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipping_points_in_the_climate_... [2] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/nature-security-a...
Many factors influence economics; climate change is one part of the equation. There are many examples of climate change's direct impact so far - floods, fires, sea-level rise (requiring investment in massive public works), droughts, etc. I don't think it's debatable that these things have negative economic impact.
Climate change is expected to greatly increase its impact in many ways. Let's not wait until it overcomes all other factors in economic growth and makes our economies shrink.
The planet went through much worse climate change cycles
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/dec/05/climate-...
And remember, climate change is not something that happens and then it is done. What we are seeing now is just a start of much worse to come.
>Climate Warming is Man Made, don't need de-growth strategies because Technology will solve energy efficiency, clean energy growth and carbon capture and humans adapt along the way
Green growth aka energy efficiency doesn't work, so one more category.
Carbon capture doesn't work without government subsidies. Hence you need a group of people who would be willing to pay tax money to solve climate change. One more category.
Human adaptation can mean many things. People accept climate change even if it means mass immigration. One more category.
People accept climate change even if it means armed border conflicts where immigrants get shot (see Poland) due to closed border policies. One more category.
People resign and accept the negative consequences of climate change as the new normal, similar to people living in polluted cities, except globally. One more category.
These people are about to be really surprised when the bees die.
But we didn't start when we had to, and we are still doing only a fraction of what must be done. So, we are screwing ourselves over majorly. And this is not some fringe hysteria, this is the scientific consensus and has been for a long time. You can almost hear screams of frustration and desperation through the lines if you pick ut the latest IPCC report.
Climate data is inherently noisy, and there are multiple interconnected cyclic signals, ranging from the "adjusted" factors to cycles that span decades, which we don't understand at all. "Adjusting" for a few of these, then doing a regression over the subset of the data is classic cherry-picking in search of a pre-determined conclusion. The overall dubious nature of the conclusion is called out in the final paragraph of the text:
> Although the world may not continue warming at such a fast pace, it could likewise continue accelerating to even faster rates.
They're literally just extrapolating from an unknown point value that they synthesized from data massage, and telling you that's a coin toss as to whether the extrapolation will be valid.
I am not a climate scientist so you can ignore me if you like, but I am "a scientist" who believes the earth is warming, and that we are the primary cause. Nonetheless, if I saw this kind of thing in a paper in my own field, it would be immediately tossed in the trash.
[1] You can't actually adjust for these things, which the authors admit in the text. They just dance around it so that lay-readers won't understand:
> Our method of removing El Niño, volcanism, and solar variations is approximate but not perfect, so it is possible that e.g. the effect of El Niño on the 2023 and 2024 temperature is not completely eliminated.
The best example I can think of is the "global warming hiatus" that was discussed in depth in the top climate journals in the mid-2010s. Nature Climate Change even devoted an entire month to it.[1]
5 years later publications were saying "there was no hiatus at all".[2]
And as you said, when you dive into the paper, you realize that temperature measures are not objective at all. And I would ask - If everyone was in agreement that temperature increases paused, then 5 years later everyone agrees they didn't, how much confidence do we really have in the measures themselves.*
As someone who conudcted scientific research, this has a ton of inherent problems. It doesn't matter what I'm measuring, if the data collection is not objective, and there is no consensus (or at least trong evidence for adjustments), then the data itself is very unreliable.
If I tried to publish a chemical paper in a top journal and manually went in and adjusted data (even with a scientific rationale) the paper would be immediately rejected.
[1] https://www.nature.com/collections/sthnxgntvp [2] https://www.sciencenews.org/article/global-warming-pause-cli...
I don't know if I'd go that far. The measurements are as objective as they can be given the limits of technology and time, but what we do with the datasets afterward is usually filled with subjective decisions. In the worst cases, you get motivated actors doing statistically invalid analysis to reach a preferred conclusion.
This happens in every field of science, but it's often worse in fields that touch politics.
And the issue is not so much the research is being done, but rather how it's reported on. Scientists know the limits of rigor in climate science, but the public doesn't. So catastrophic predictions are viewed by the public as a sure thing, versus one particular prediction with wide error bares.
> This happens in every field of science, but it's often worse in fields that touch politics.
Indeed. Nobody plays fast and lose with papers on the structure of some random enzyme for political purposes.
No, it isn’t. You’re just rephrasing what I said with more words: they attempted to adjust for three of the biggest factors that affect temperature, then did a piecewise regression to estimate a 10-year window.
You can’t do it in a statistically valid way. Full stop. The authors admit this, but want you to ignore it.
They use an established methodology (https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-95 9326/6/4/044022 - the methodology retains the average warming rate over the period since 1970 while smoothing fluctuations) to remove predictable temperature variations so they can isolate the effect they are trying to measure.
Just because they don't know exactly what past global temperatures would have been in the absence of El Niño doesn't mean it's statistically invalid to try and account for it.
Besides, temperature data to 2024 already shows accelerated warming with a confidence level that "exceeds 90% in two of the five data sets".
Add another year or two and it's likely we won't even need to smooth the curve to show accelerated warming at 95% confidence.
Even setting aside the dubious nature of the adjustments, doing a regression on a 10-year window of a system that we know has multi-decade cycles -- or longer -- is just blatantly trying to dress up bad point extrapolations as science. Then, when they don't get the results they want to see from that abuse, they start subtracting the annoying little details in the data that are getting in their way.
> Just because they don't know exactly what past global temperatures would have been in the absence of El Niño doesn't mean it's statistically invalid to try and account for it.
You can't go back in time, invent counterfactual histories by subtracting primary signals, and declare the net result to be "significant". This isn't even statistics -- it's just massaging data via statistical tools.
> Besides, temperature data to 2024 already shows accelerated warming with a confidence level that "exceeds 90% in two of the five data sets".
> Add another year or two and it's likely we won't even need to smooth the curve to show accelerated warming at 95% confidence.
I guess we'll find out.
p.s. the cited methodology has >300 citations in peer reviewed publications, ref Web of Science
Just to draw a better analogy to the low quality of the current work, let's say you wanted to compare average daylight last week, globally, to all of recorded history. Then you made a model that had terms for (say) astronomical daylight, longitude, latitude and, I dunno...altitude of the measurement. Then you made a regression, subtracted three terms, and claimed that the residual was still "significantly darker". Then you run around waving your arms and shouting that if we only extrapolate forward N weeks from last week, soon we'll be living in a fully dark world!
You'd be rightfully laughed out of any room you were in.
2) They openly admit that “subtracting E, S and V”, as you say, cannot actually be done.
3) They’re arbitrarily removing sources of variation so that they can claim “significance” in a narrow window. The entire exercise is designed to achieve a predetermined outcome, and statistical significance cannot be calculated in those circumstances.
Is this an oversight (or "oversight") or something that is reasonable for some reason that would be so obvious to experts in the field that it's not worth mentioning?
In 2020, China made a commitment to the world: to peak carbon dioxide emissions before 2030 and strive to achieve carbon neutrality before 2060. Last year, China announced its 2035 Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) for addressing climate change.
"The outline draft clearly emphasizes actively and prudently advancing and achieving carbon peaking, proposing that during the 15th Five-Year Plan period, carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GDP will be reduced by 17%, and a preliminary clean, low-carbon, safe, and efficient new energy system will be established. This clear roadmap will help us achieve high-quality 'dual carbon' phase goals and lay a solid foundation for carbon neutrality," said Wei Yuansong, member of the CPPCC National Committee and Director of the Water Pollution Control Laboratory at the Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences.
from： https://www.news.cn/20260305/7ad8d5ee3a6d4b28b1b62230199f1d0...
this is in china's next 5 year plan
I'm literally in the plane flying back from Shanghai right now, where cars have blue plates for petrol cars and green plates for electric ones.
Easily 70% of the cars on the road are electric, and basically all of the scooters used for deliveries.
The roads are so quiet it's sometimes dangerous because you don't hear the scooters come behind you.
They'll undoubtedly be the world leaders in clean energy.
Remind me of this video
It's also not like China is an overachieving outlier, but western nations actively having been sabotaged by its leadership at least since 1990 and MUCH MUCH more so since occupy wallstreet.
FFS Germany is blowing up its nuclear powerplants on a never before seen record breaking schedule so that a potential successor government cant reactivate them.
Obviously it's not the whole country, but it's setting a trend still, especially when it's always the richest who pollute the most per capita.
Also why does the Tier list keep expanding downwards? Wasn't being called a Tier 4 basically exclusively an insult? Sub culture not being satisfied with just embracing rotting anymore, but now racing for the bottom of the sea?
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-...
Meanwhile the Paris Accord seems to bludgeon Europe and America (who are reducing their CO2 emissions significantly), with the net effect of accelerating the deindustrialisation of the West (thus helping industry grow in China).
The Accord should focus on moving industry away from China to countries where electricity predominantly comes from renewables.
My proposal is thus: create a supranational treaty organization with a EPA like authority(or whatever the European equivalent is) that can inspect and fine companies in member organizations. Then any treaty members agree with the following conditions: The EPA can enter their nation freely, inspect, and are able to fine companies that break rules. Members send delegates to a session to create new rules democratically. And most importantly all members act as a cartel, imposing large tariffs on any country outside of the organization. So if US was in and Mexico was out, you couldn't just pollute in Mexico, without some massive tariff. This creates an economic incentive to be in and clean.
If gasoline in the US cost $20/gallon this would reduce the amount of CO2 emissions because suddenly driving a gasoline-powered car is much more expensive for everyone. This would make a lot of ordinary Americans very upset.
As you note, sudden discontinuous changes just create their own pushback, which works against the change.
It is not equal responsibility.
Or quickly develop to the point where solar, wind, and hydro is cheaper than getting dead fossils out of the ground and processing them.
I am not familiar enough with the economics of this to know whether we are close to that point, but I can imagine once we cross it, combustible fuel burners will be at a disadvantage if they haven't invested in infrastructure needed for renewables.
I think the flaw in this thinking is thinking that burning things is the cheapest way to get energy.
Oil processing and extraction is a complex industry which requires a huge continued investment. Coal requires massive mining operations. Natural gas is probably the least intensive of the burny things, and it still requires a pretty advanced pipeline to be competitive.
Renewables are relatively cheap one time purchases. Save energy storage, the economy that is most competitive at this point is one powered by renewables.
That transition is already happening in the US without a massive government regulation/mandate. In china, it's happening a whole lot faster because the government is pushing it. And the chinese economy is at no risk of being outbid by smaller economies burning fuel.
The main reason burning remains a major source of fuel is that for most nations, the infrastructure to consume it has already been built. It's not because it's cheap.
Who's getting fined, here? Me, because mining the stuff is inherently dirty (without, probably, significant research and capital investment)? You, because you need the stuff to build other stuff? Joe and Jane because they're the ones ultimately driving the production of the stuff? If you fine me into not producing the raw materials, what, ultimately happens to your economy and Joe and Jane's? If I don't sign up, where are you going to get the raw materials, if I'm tariffed into oblivion?
Sorry, I'm not trying to like, doom this away - but there are so many interconnected pieces, that I don't think it's a problem that can even start to be solved from an internet comment. At some point, voters in democratic societies need to decide that they care as much about the world their children will inherit as they do a ten cent difference in gas prices ten minutes from now. It's unclear that they ever will on a long term, consistent basis.
But the source could be the most likely place for corrupt reporting. Or: Maybe the source element is not dangerous but downstream by-products are.
Like you’ve said: It’s a problem.
From a political perspective, I think the problems of global warming and wealth disparity go hand-in-hand. It's difficult to solve one without solving the other. To the extent that the ultra-wealthy own the politicians, or actually become politicians themselves, there is little hope for environmental regulation.
Consumers don't need or necessarily even want unlimited economic growth. That only "helps" consumers if they're relying essentially on trickle-down economics, where we have to allow the ultra-wealthy everything they want in the hope that they'll spare us some change. A more equitable distribution of the current wealth would reduce the pressure to produce ever more, more, more.
Consumers usually want products that they own, not rent, products that last for a long time and don't need to be constantly updated or upgraded. Coincidentally, this is also better for the environment. Producers often want the opposite of that, in order to maximize profit. So what we get depends crucially on the power balance or imbalance between consumers and producers. This is where consolidation and monopolization become a major factor.
A lot of the "convenience economy," dominated by temporary, disposable goods, is predicted on consumers having no free time, because they're constantly working. Despite vast improvements in worker "efficiency," we haven't seen comcomitant reductions in the number of hours worked. The future of leisure facilitated by technological advances, which everyone was imagining 50-60 years ago, never became a reality. The technology did advance, but the leisure did not. The other day (or night) I noticed Amazon delivery drivers arriving for neighbors after 9pm; this is a dystopia.
Gosh, if only consumers and producers were the same people. What could we call this new economic paradigm?
But no, economic monarchy is the only way to have Freedom (TM)(R), so let's slap on some easily-sidestepped regulations and keep going the same direction! It'll probably turn out fine.
That's not to say we won't need treaties and supranational entities for some aspects of decarbonization. Methane emissions outside of agriculture are notably a problem of enforcement.
We're badly in need of a collective update to our priors regarding renewables. In the US, a hostile policy toward renewables is not only shooting ourselves in the foot environmentally, we are now actively impoverishing ourselves due to entrenched economic interests across the fossil fuel industry and the cultural inertia they actively worked to develop.
You totally can fly on biofuel, but it is not cheap compared to fossil fuel without externalized costs.
It's specifically bad faith to say it as if it does somehow matter in the grand conversation, when the actual fallout is extremely small. Pretty much nobody is saying we must remove 100 PER CENT OF ALL FOSSIL FUEL USAGE EVERYWHERE FOREVER, just that we need to move off it.
I'm convinced.
Gas turbines can run on a variety of fuels, natural, synthetic or a mixture of both. It’s actually one of the reasons that a turbine was chosen for the M1.
It is made with from water, carbon dioxide and energy. Use green energy and atmospheric CO2, and it is carbon neutral.
Patriotic red blooded Americans use renewable energy
Then why is my electricity and gasoline both so much more expensive than they used to be?
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257%2Faer.15000001
It's essentially a carbon tax on local production and a corresponding carbon tariff on imports. Countries that already have a carbon tax or equivalent don't get tariffed. IOW, they're part of the club.
Usually a carbon rebate is also included in the plan, although that's not strictly necessary.
Germany was spear-heading an effort to create a carbon club, but it fell apart, unfortunately. At the time a club that didn't include the US seemed infeasible.
In 2026 a club that doesn't include Trump's America is a good thing, not a bad thing IMO.
They need to apply overall, on all goods and services.
And emission limits need to be progressive over time, with a limit for each year, not just "x% at year 2030".
And slowly raising the price on a smooth forward looking schedule lets businesses make rational choices about budgeting for that or for migrating to greener options.
Companies are excellent at adapting to acheive their best interests, to any predictable continuous (as apposed to discontinuous) economic change. Especially when it is a market based change, as that creates a level playing field.
The way our economic systems are set up is inherently anti-human and only benefits a tiny fraction of the population anyways.
It's time for a fundamental rethink.
In my opinion one of the reasons why European economies have been struggling for a long time is because energy has been much more expensive than elsewhere. Part of it is the excise tax on gasoline because it drives up the price of everything.
Even to this day EU countries where people earn less than a third of what Americans earn still pay more for gasoline.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-coal-power-drops-in-chi...
"The economy is a wholly owner subsidiary of the environment"
Many people use the 'but the economy' argument (including my mother in law, maddeningly) without seeming to have any remote clue as to the truth of the quote above.
"But what about <technology/option>?"
No. Full stop. We're not going to do it, and we're not even going to apologize for it either.
All we can do now is prepare, not that I've seen a lot on this front either.
it will be a disaster.
The "obstructionist" greens understand that the system is flawed and needs a structural change. We don't live in capitalist fairyland, there are baseline energy costs that can't be inflated away and our ability to work on the problem degrades after every disaster.
You can’t change the world with plans that last no longer than a presidential term.
And a 'more conservative than conservative' party is getting increased media attention here at the moment, which could do serious damage.
I have this gut feeling the world had finally got to the point it decided to fix this pesky warming issue among other things, with a nice and cozy nuclear winter.
(/s, obviously)
That blank will not be filled in with today's technologies, but with technologies we cannot conceive of today and with an energy abundance that we can hardly imagine.
Even in this apparently dire predicament, optimism is warranted.
Here's the original: https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-6079807/v1
If I am not mistaken we can get documents without an account as well, unlike others.
Like if someone posted a link to an archive.is version of a Wikipedia page, you'd probably prefer to get the canonical link to that content.
ResearchGate is a bit of commercial enclosure of infrastructure that is, and should be, open. Who knows, maybe it has other value. I'm not an academic so I don't know.
In a pure world everyone would use DOIs to refer to published literature. This would give two benefits: first, always link to the current version. Second, be a persistent identifier for the content.
But HN isn't a specialist scholarly content platform, so it's practical to link to the landing page.
Your personal website has an expired certificate.
Seems like it expired end of Feb.
The uncomfortable truth is that that people in affluent countries don’t want to change their lifestyle. Affluent countries are less affected by global warming than countries responsible for a fraction of global emissions. All the emissions from manufacturing follow suit.
Of course, people should do everything they can to reduce or offset their own emissions. But the solution is going to have to be societal, keeping up with energy demand by adding more nuclear, solar, and wind to the grid.
Sure, but that's still mostly driven by Western demand for... Stuff. I'd like to see that share of global emissions if the West was still industrialised and didnt rely on China to be its factory
The USA has uniquely high emissions (matched only by a couple oil states). This is not solely explained with affluency.
-Switch to an electric vehicle -Migrate from gas appliances (range, furnace, water heater) to electric (induction, heat pumps) -If your power grid isn’t clean, add rooftop or balcony solar -Encourage friends and family to do the same
If you have a family of 4, you can think of it as the equivalent of a 15 mpg vehicle for domestic flight and 22 mpg vehicle for international flight. So somewhere in the range of a full-size pickup truck.
But -- when you fly, you go very far. If you go on vacation to Hawaii from San Francisco once a year with your family, that's the equivalent of driving a Ford F-150 for 5000 miles. If you visit India or China that's 15,000 Ford F-150 miles! In a single trip, more than what most people drive in an entire year!
So you can make a big difference just preferring local vacations instead of remote ones.
And don't build things out of concrete
And better get a few room mates
Sure, if we never fly again and reverted to living like a medieval peasant, maybe things will kinda work out.
That should allow anyone to do that once-in-a-lifetime trip to a far-away country they've always dreamed of, but discourage people from flying often.
A lot more fuel is needed during take-off and landing than during cruising, making the number and frequency of flights more significant than the distance.
In Germany, 1 kWh of electricity costs roughly 3x as much as 1 kWh of gas. That doesn't make heat pumps very attractive. Historically the differences were even worse.
Relying on people individually making choices that are better for the environment at a disadvantage for themselves is not going to work.
Plus, it also gives you AC which comes in handy if you live someplace where you want AC.
This would be true if heat pumps were free. But "less expensive to operate" needs to justify cost of installation over some measurable period of time. If electricity is 3x more expensive than gas, and the heat pump is 3-4x (2.5-3.5x realistically) then you're barely squeeking by except on the days when the pump is most efficient (when it's already warm out). That 3.5 - 3 leaves 0.5, amortized over the lifetime of the heat pump...might not even pay for installation.
So, make heat pumps free or energy cheaper, I guess.
Here in Germany this issue is lack of policy, financing, and a lot of people are renting. I actually pay about > 100/month for gas. I live in a 20 apartment building with a big furnace in the basement for the whole building. A heat pump would be cheaper to run but you'd have to do a big one for the whole building. This is actually a good thing. Big heat pumps can be quite efficient. It's probably cheaper than having to install 20 heatpumps for 20 apartments.
But buying and installing heat pumps costs money. Technically, it is actually an investment (i.e. it has an ROI). If you do this collectively as a building, you'd do it to lower your monthly bills. This is something that should be possible to finance out of those savings (at least partially). That's literally why private home owners install heat pumps and get their money back in 6-10 years typically. Faster if they also invest in solar. And get an EV that also powers from those panels.
But this where things break down in Germany. You need consensus. And financing. And there are home owners that can block things and it's their renters that pay the heating bill so the owners don't care. And so on. And if you are renting, you are not going to pay for this either. So, everybody just coughs up the money every month without even questioning it. My apartment doesn't even have a thermostat or a smart meter for electricity. Apparently that's normal in this country. Germany is just deeply bureaucratic and inefficient. For all the talk about environment, they can't be arsed to do what the rest of the world did decades ago: save some energy with smart meters.
Policy could help here. Mainly clearing up bureaucracy. And maybe some more subsidies/incentives (those already exist) or low interest financing. And a clear political goal to vastly reduce expensive gas imports. Even if the electricity for powering these heat pumps would come from gas powered electricity plants, it would still require a lot less gas. And of course Germany has lots of wind power. I think other countries in the EU are a bit further with their thinking than Germany on this front. On paper it having lots of apartment buildings like mine actually means it is fairly straight forward from a technical point of view to upgrade these buildings.
In France, with Nuclear power and renewable it’s 20% lower.
Prices also depends on who you want to give power.
Most people can't afford one
> -Migrate from gas appliances (range, furnace, water heater) to electric (induction, heat pumps)
Electricity is considerably more expensive, people that leave paycheck to paycheck would not be able to afford it
Here are somethings YOU can do personally to help:
- Never fly in an airplane again
- Never use ANY vehicle again, walk everywhere(yes EVs also pollute)
- In the winter, don't turn on the heat.
- Eat only vegetables and things you don't need to cook
- etc
If you are not doing ALL OF THESE you have no right on telling other people how they produce their CO2.
I (unfortunately) just don't think it's pragmatic/reasonable to expect enough people to make personal sacrifices/reduce QOL to make a dent. It's a tragedy of the commons, and we need some form of reasonable regulation to cut down on the worst offenders (probably carbon taxes) while we invest heavily in improving the technology so it makes financial sense to switch.
Renewables have come so far in the past decade and are now competitive with fossil fuels in terms of pricing. As the technology continues to become more efficient and cheaper, we'll likely start to see significant drops in emissions in addition to cheaper energy.*
*Assuming the US elects a rational adult to the presidency in 2028.
Daily commute represents 20% of CO2 emissions, it's an insanely high number, and it has an incredibly easy, already tested thanks to COVID, solution.
People will say "but what about the shops that will close". They won't, they will relocate in residential neighborhoods where people now live AND work.
All the potential issues people might raise actually disappear as WFH becomes the new normal and not a potentially temporary state like it was during COVID.
Even if only 50% of jobs can be done from home, that's an instant 10% reduction JUST from commute. But in reality it'll lead to a much larger decrease, with less spending on fast-fashion, more proximity businesses, etc.
I can't afford it. For context, I paid £500 for my current vehicle back in 2020. My bills have only gone up since, but my salary has not.
> Migrate from gas appliances (range, furnace, water heater) to electric (induction, heat pumps)
I can't afford that either. When I got my home assessed, switching to heat pumps requires replacing all the radiators in my house and extra insulation, etc. My gas boiler does have a built-in electric induction system, but it's only used when the tank is cold.
> If your power grid isn’t clean, add rooftop or balcony solar
I can afford the solar panels, but I can't afford the battery storage, nor the installation, and my area does not allow for an inverter connected to the main grid.
I’m of the opinion that direct air capture is the primary escape hatch we have for not hitting 3 or even 4C warming in the next 100-200 years, which mean major dieoffs in warm latitudes, even for humans, due to exceeding wet bulb limits. Oh and roughly 65M of sea level rise as the planet shifts to a snow/ice-free mode.
The claim that some models didn't take larger systems into account is also because an expert in the arctic wasn't an expert in oceans. And the expert in biodiversity isn't an expert in food supply chains. Expertise isn't the question. Instead it is - do all of us who are non experts (all of us) have enough expert data to have a systemic understanding of an accelerating trend?
The fact is, for all of these other secondary effects etc... we just don't know. It's too complicated of a system.
So as a result, we've got a prediction of something between "somewhat bad" and "catastrophically-is-an-understatement bad" with a maximum likelihood estimate of "really really bad."
No. I believe what you're saying is very likely to be true, but we know there's both positive and negative feedback and we don't really know how they really will interplay and where all the tipping points are.
There may even be significant phase delay in these mechanisms and so we could even get oscillation.
Edit: I'd be happy for you to educate me how I'm wrong btw, since that would mean I've missed something significant, which would make me happy! So please do tell me if you know of such a mechanism.
There are all kinds of things that have time lags from years to centuries, though, that could cause ringing (ocean heat uptake, rates of carbon uptake as the biosphere adapts and shifts, etc).
Indeed, we have evidence of ringing in the geologic climate record-- like Dansgaard-Oeschger events. We also live with ringing in weather systems like El Nino. Warming intensifying or creating new modes of oscillation would not be that surprising.
I wish this comment was higher up.
The big thing under-discussed about climate change is that the deeper we get into it, the harder it is to predict and understand.
I recall Dr. Richard Alley discussing how Thwaites Glacier collapsing wasn't factored into any IPCC reports; but ultimately pointed out it was for good reason because it's simply not possible to model these things and their consequences accurately.
I don't do any climate modeling, but I do a lot of other modeling and forecasting: the biggest assumption we make in all statistical models is that the system itself more or less stays statistically similar to what it currently is and what we have seen in past. As soon as you drop that assumption you're increasingly in the world of wild guessing. If you wanted me to build you a RAM price prediction model 2 years ago, I could have done a pretty good job. Ask for one today and your better off asking someone with industry but no modeling experience what they think might happen.
This is the hidden threat of climate change most people are completely unaware of: we can know it will be bad when certain things happen, we know they will happen in the nearish future, but we can't really say exactly how and when they'll unfold with any meaningful confidence.
If you are still trying to gauge truth before this, you are poisoning your mental heuristics. Thats why propaganda are ao effecfive: you can be told something is either, and it can still be effective.
Humans and LLMs are similar: the separation between input and commands is not a hard barrier.
So, back to GP: CLIMATE CHANGE is reversible. It just depends on whether we are talking about socipecnomics or physical processes.
If they had answered my first question in the affirmative (something like "I am a researcher at X institute on this topic"), ya, I think I would have trusted them.
while i agree its better to go off and prove it to ourselves, there is merit in having a conversation here
No offense, but you sound like an oil shill.
Ridiculous take, and you’d know that the OP was correct if you cared enough to know what researchers were actually saying.
Climate arguments devolve into appeals to impact claimed by authorities rather than any examination of what they’ve said.
Would they really want to risk being basically excommunicated from their area of research for daring to provide ammo to “climate change deniers”?
I also suspect you would find easy funding from existing climate change deniers. There is no shortage of well-heeled folk in that space.
Do you have a chip on your shoulder regarding research? You're begging the question by stating it is conducted in a "practically religious" way. Ask whether that's true before you question the effect it would have on somebody's behaviour.
And grow new trees in their place of course.
So, unless we want to remove a massive amount of fresh water from the ecosystem, we also need to invest energy in drying out the wood well below natural humidity levels (transport to a desert maybe?) on top of electrifying what is currently a diesel and gas heavy industry (cutting and transporting logs with heavy machinery).
There's definitely lower hanging fruit for getting C02 out of the cycle.
They need to go into a deep enough pit where the methane produced from anerobic breakdown won't reach the atmosphere.
The conditions that created the lignite coal and peat simply aren't that easily reproducible, especially with large volume of wood (rather than ferns over thousands and millions of years).
Recreating the lignite era process could be as easy as genetically engineering an alternative,presently indigestable version of lignin.
But my point is that the claim above that sequestering wet wood will somehow take meaningful quantities of water (fresh or otherwise) out of the ecosystem is just plain silly.
Ah yes, so easy. Why on earth have we been treating wood with chemicals to prevent rot in our structures when we could have just engineered them to not rot all along?
If we could actually grow trees to capture carbon equivalent to 250M+ barrel of oil per day, it would be better to just grow trees and burn them for energy.
Still a more viable option than bringing greenhouse gas emissions into the negatives globally, by the way. But that's a low bar. Nuking the ocean floor is probably a better call.
What if we cover the ice caps, and cover parts of the ocean instead of messing with grow cycles of plants on land...
No reduction in solar power, no artificial lights to grow plants. What effects might that have on ocean life? (below a certain depth - probably nothing, so surface ocean life is what we need to look at).
Just my two cents... we got plenty of surface area we can cover and potentially not affect much at all for day to day for animals, plants, and humans.
Preventing 1% of sunlight from hitting Earth is more than enough to offset climate change heating. It's not enough to make agriculture or photovoltaics uneconomical. In many regions, it might make agriculture more viable on the net, not less - by reducing climate risks.
Where is this new figure coming from? It seems about 60X what's being published elsewhere.
https://sealevel.nasa.gov/understanding-sea-level/global-sea...
As they sink down, they grow larger (condensation & coagulation). Once they reach the troposphere, they usually get down via precipitation, which also isn't really affecting a lot of breathing.
They can absolutely have other effects (see SO2/acidification, e.g), but air quality isn't really the main concern. For SO2 specifically, there's actually very little mortality sensitivity: https://www.giss.nasa.gov/pubs/abs/wa01010x.html
You're right that the research isn't there yet to make statements with confidence, but that applies to the air quality claim as well.
We're going to have to resort to geoengineering alright, but it's gonna likely be stratospheric sulfate injection given how cheaply that can be done. Is it ideal? Nope. Better than global warming itself? Time will tell.
my extremely pessimistic position is nothing will happen systemically even after the first few such events, and they'll take tens if not hundreds of thousands of lives.
I hope writing this out jinxes it.
It will take millions, if not close to a billion lives before we get serious
Could you name some?
We'd rather kill everyone else rather than give up our luxuries...
I think it's important to mention the effects we're seeing today are caused by the emissions from decades ago.
Second, not sure if the paper in the OP touches this but we've reduced aerosols in the atmosphere. These previously were masking the effects of climate change by cooling the temperature.
Sulphur particles contained in ships' exhaust fumes had been counteracting
some of the warming coming from greenhouse gases. Lowering the sulfur content
of marine fuel weakened this masking effect, effectively giving a boost to
warming.They're literally mentioned by the first IPCC report already.
Check out the 1.5C special report. Go to section 2.2.1.2, last paragraph says
> The reduced complexity climate models employed in this assessment do not take into account permafrost or non-CO2 Earth system feedbacks, although the MAGICC model has a permafrost module that can be enabled. Taking the current climate and Earth system feedbacks understanding together, there is a possibility that these models would underestimate the longer-term future temperature response to stringent emission pathways
https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/chapter-2/#:~:text=Geophysi...
They admitted limitations of the data/research they had available. Their model explicitly does not attempt to account for it.
In other words, we shouldn't have tipped it over in the first place. We may not have the energy to put things back to a habitable place.
Scaled up nuclear power could be had for $3-4B a gigawatt/h. We waste say $1T a year on basic things, like not having universal healthcare. So a simple policy change would let us build about 300 reactors a years, after some scaling period. The excess energy can be used to turn C02 back into oil.
It’s not technically that difficult, we just chose to waste money on stupid things and rich people toys instead.
Energy abundance is simply the choose to build nuclear power plants at scale
Why is it always never 'burn less fossil fuels'.
Anything but the oil company bottom line huh?
TLDR: We're gonna have to use sulfate injection until we can transition our economy
We MUST MUST MUST stop burning things. Stop it.
- We are still mining and burning coal. This is incomprehensible. US, AU, etc Eg: https://www.nacoal.com/our-operations
- We are still subsidizing oil to around $1T/year, not counting oil wars.
Yes it will take some grid and storage upgrades (US) and continue to embrace renewables. It would be cheaper than the oil subsidy.
Otherwise it doesn't make sense to put CO2 into the air with one hand and take it out with another.
By far the most effective an immediate solution to limiting the damage of climate change is to simply to keep fossil fuels in the ground.
People talk about the economic pain of doing this, but that economic pain is nothing compared to the impact of unmitigated climate change.
Even though this would be painful, it is also by far the easiest and fastest to implement solution. It would take fantastically more time and resources to scale up direct air capture (even if it existed in a scalable format today) to come anywhere near addressing this problem.
> Yes it will take some grid and storage upgrades (US) and continue to embrace renewables
This is not exactly true, we would have to experience global economic collapse in order to reduce our fossil fuel use. 80% of energy is not spent on electricity globally and this is non-electricity usage is where most of the fossil fuels are consumed and this drives most of the global economy. There's a good reason there are multiple wars being fought over for oil.
Is it possible to produce steel on industrial scales without coal?
I know early ironmaking (I live fairly close to Coalbrookdale!) used charcoal, but is that possible at a large scale?
This is one of the stronger arguments for a carbon tax: if you can’t ignore externalities, people have strong incentives to use less (e.g. buying a car instead of an SUV or biking) and all of the alternative fuel and process work is going to be easier if the cost comparison is more even.
Or vote for those who promise to cancel all of this.
It seems like the whole economic system runs on a quarterly time scale - just look at all the times negligent maintenance to improve profits in the short term have caused disasters in the long term.
Not sure what the solution is though, so I won't complain too much.
Honestly, if we made even a step towards the changes necessary to limit the current damage most of HN readership, especially the "green" ones that don't seem to understand global energy usage, would be revolting as well.
The pandemic was a great example of what this would look like as a first step. If we even cared a tiny bit about slowing climate change, there would have been at least some amount of people voicing that we should actually continue to follow early pandemic economic restrictions since it did impact global oil usage.
I pointed this out pretty frequently at the time and was nearly always down voted for it. People want "green" to mean "buying the right thing", they don't want "green" to mean "slicing my annual pay to 1/3, never using Amazon or large retail company to purchase thing, no fruit in the winter, and expensive locally woven clothes".
And more to the point, there is literally no way to make that happen. None. It’s as pointless as suggesting we summon magic fairies to cool the earth.
The totalitarian government required to get humanity to return to the lifestyle you’re suggesting here would itself consume vast amounts of energy and resources.
We can’t go back, and almost none of us even want to. We have to figure this out with the tools we have now.
I don't think they're the only ones to blame. People want what's cheaper/keeps their standard of living the same. Any of these changes temporality upset and outright destroy large portions of the economy. You would be kicking the silent majority right in the wallet, who doesn't care all that much about any of this.
To be fair, CN is known for exploring all avenues and are deploying a ton of solar and nuclear. http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2022/ph241/patel2/images/f...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...
Yes, we must. It is so rare to see someone saying this in public. Thank you for this simple clarity.
Stop burning everything! Fossil fuel, wood, plastic, garbage, paper. Stop making methane.
We only need solar energy at 1 dollarcent or eurocent (it will get much cheaper still!!) and a little batteries for the convenience of using electricity when the sun does not shine.
In the north and south you need more solar panels in the winter than in the summer by a factor of 50. But that pays it back in summer when you have a squanderable abundance of free and clean energy. We can store that surplus energy in purifying drinking water, melting iron ore or aluminum [5], melting reusable plastics or purifying silicon ingots.
Storing surplus heat or cold in the ground is another luxury, because it is more expensive than 1 dollarcent or eurocent solar running a heatpump.
Wind and hydro are also more costly than solar so they are another luxury with worse environmental costs than pure solar cells.
We need to build Enernet, a peer to peer electricity net and internet between all buildings with power routers. for around 100 dollar per building. You buy and sell your house surplus solar electricity to the neighborhood where it can be stored in car batteries. See my Fiberhood white paper [2].
[1] Enernet: Squanderable abundance of free and clean energy - Bob Metcalfe https://youtu.be/axfsqdpHVFU?t=1565
[2] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Merik-Voswinkel/publica...
[3] Amory Lovins https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v02BNSUxxEA
[4] Saul Griffith on the one billion machines that will electrify America https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEOPx2X-EtE
[5] 101 million machines away from a zero emission Australia https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQ8-uAhG-zs
I don't understand the wood argument. Isn't it widely accepted we need to do burns to manage forests? Wood is a short-term cycle of carbon. It releases when it burns but frees up space to capture it right after. When people live on rural plots and trees fall, should they burn for heat (and lessen needing other energy sources) or let it decompose and cause the same thing? It's not the same as extracting deeply embedded carbon sources that won't make it to the atmosphere if untouched (fossil fuels)
Same with clearing the underbush of Meditaranian and hotter climate forest to prevent forest fires. If humanity had not managed those forest (grazing animals, building roads, harvesting) in the first place than there would have been no buildup of excess material that sustain wildfires past its natural rate.
If enough energy is produced by other means than burning fossil fuel, nobody will return to the past.
I happen to be one of those who does not use directly any kind of energy, except electrical. Despite the fact that I am still connected to methane gas distribution, I have never burned it for already around a decade. (And unlike most, I cook myself from raw ingredients everything that I eat, but I stopped using flames for that many years ago.)
If burning fossil fuel would stop completely right now, that would not affect me at all, much less would return me centuries in the past, as long as the electrical energy supplier has enough sources in its hydroelectric, solar, wind and nuclear plants, all of which are abundant where I live.
For aircraft and spacecraft, hydrocarbon fuel will remain the best solution, but synthesizing hydrocarbons was already possible at large scale before WWII and it could solve easily this problem in a CO2-neutral manner, if a fraction of the money wasted for various useless or harmful things would be invested in improving the efficiency of such critical technologies.
Many of them are already sacrificing health care to afford food and shelter.
It’s not even particularly expensive relative to GDP.
I agree that it doesn't make sense, but I also want to challenge the engineering assumption that an extremely relatively inefficient solution should be ruled out.
If direct air capture worked and simply required absurd amounts of carbon-free power, say from nuclear, it would mean that we no longer have to fight political battles against the entrenched incumbents. They could simply emit whatever our elected politicians let them get away with, and DAC would soak it up.
I completely acknowledge that it seems somehow egregious to do it this way. I am an efficiency-minded person and would hope that we could do it the efficient way. But given all the ugly constraints and lack of progress so far, should we really expect this to be solved the way an efficency-minded engineer might prefer?
If we get to that level of desperation though, I would hope that we could simply pay the emitters to install carbon capture.
What I don't think will work is a politics of rage, righteous or otherwise. I don't recall any incidents in history where a politics of rage led to cool-headed, efficient technocratic solutions. The perennial problem is that the same politics of rage is equally accessible to your opponents, and it spirals down from there towards disorder and violence.
65M seems a lot bigger than the 3.6mm/year rise we are seeing today (with +1.5C in warming already happening). Where did you read that we will get 65M of sea level rise with 1.5-2.5C more warming?
Great! That means we dont need to reduce emissions, cuz the magic bullet will just take care of everything. No need to change anything.
Current rates of sea level rise are still in single digit millimetres per year (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_level_rise), so that would take millennia. If there's even enough ice in the caps to get that far. Pre-historically, vast ice sheets covered broad swaths of regions now considered "temperate" (per the famous XKCD, "Boston [was] buried under almost a mile of ice"); what remains is a tiny portion and it's simply hard to imagine that it could fill the seas to such an extent.
If you have detailed calculations, please feel free to cite them. But my back-of-the-envelope reasoning: NOAA gives an average sea depth (https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/oceandepth.html) of 3,682 meters. You propose that this could increase by nearly 2%. But the density of water only exceeds that of ice by about 9% (via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice); the thickness of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctic_ice_sheet is only about half that average sea depth; and it covers only about 4% of the water-covered area of the planet (14 million km^2 vs. 361 million km^2, per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth) which is not even all oceanic.
Now on all continents and islands most of the big animals and plants are humans, domestic animals and cultivated plants. The wild animals and plants, even if they are much more varied, with many thousands times more species than the domestic ones, are much smaller in quantities, with only a few kinds that are non-negligible, e.g. ants, termites, rodents.
So if we will return in a short time to the Paleogene climate, the main question is how this will affect the few dominant animal species, like chicken, humans, pigs, sheep, cattle, dogs and the main cultivated plants, all of which are not adapted to a Paleogene climate and which will not be able to adapt in such a short time.
It is likely that places like Canada, Alaska, Greenland, Siberia, Antarctica might become nicer places where to live and practice agriculture, but the few people who live now there would not welcome invaders coming from places that are no longer habitable.
From the equator to the poles, forests grew. Fossilized remains of cypress and sequoia have been found on the Arctic Ellesmere Island, and palms — in Alaska and northern Europe.
Equatorial and tropical forests (with palms, fig trees, and sandalwood trees) persisted in Africa, South America, India, and Australia.
Eucalypts, sequoias spread widely, and new types of broad‑leaved trees appeared.
By the end of the Eocene, rainforests were preserved only in the equatorial parts of South America, Africa, India, and Australia — due to the onset of cooling.
I didn't see it mentioned in the article, though I did do a very brief read through. And it has been a while since I looked at the shipping lanes thing.
I hasten to add this is not to claim we should not have cleaned the shipping lanes. I don't know enough to say on that front. My gut would be that it was still the correct move.
I'm almost convinced it's intentional at this point, the rich are busy building their offbrand vault tec bunkers and starting random wars for no real reason. Longtermism nonsense over the today.
I mean hell, piston engined airplanes use leaded fuel and crop dust it over everyone daily, but nobody cares as long as they get to fly them and that's a just minor money saving measure that causes a lot environmental consequences.
The entire EU produces only about half of the USA's total emissions, despite having a population of over 100 million more people.
Why aren't we?
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/11/china-co2-emis...
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-...
Which is why, unless you can come up with a good argument that some people have some kind of divine or natural right to a bigger share of whatever global emissions budget we decide we need to stick to, per capita is the correct way to compare countries.
"Average" Canadian. A lot of the population lives in a climate where half the year more energy is required to survive the climate. And the population is exponentially smaller than the United States, India, or China.
That's like calling out the guy in the mountains burning a campfire to stay warm at night when the guy sleeping on the beach in Hawaii requires none.
Point being, brand new account, if we want solutions it needs to be done without such angling or it all reduces to absurdities and jabs instead of cooperation. It needs to be realistic in terms of where people are being absurdly wasteful, but also sympathetic that we do not all face the same circumstances.
It's a hole and we don't get out by digging downward.
Nobody who understands the subject claims that it is reversible on a human life scale. In the realistic best cases, it’d stabilise in a couple of decades and slowly decrease from there.
The real question is not whether it is reversible, but how high it will go and how we are going to deal with it.
Warming is here and will continue.
Our decisions from here on could vary the outcomes between massive disruption and movement of people to a wholly uninhabitable planet.
we don't need to adopt this form of thinking at all, no one is owed anything.
The people making these arguments are mendacious and misanthropic to the point of deep irrationality, so many people have been trained to do nothing, try nothing, and assume the worst, I don't know who trained these people to embody epistemological learned helplessness but it boggles the mind.
They do not have to repeat our mistakes. We can help them build out renewable energy instead.
We don't want your disgusting lifestyle. We want you to stop being so bloody infantile and greedy.
Apologies for the strong words but the current state of things has me pissed off.
It's in no nation's interest, from a game theory perspective, to stunt their own growth to reduce emissions. If the US stops, Russia and China will destroy the west. If China stops, they'll never catch up technologically. Ditto for India. Smaller nations have even less incentive (they'll easily be conquered by neighbours), except for the ones surrounded entirely by friendly nations...
I personally won't criticize people who take flights to go on vacation (I don't but I accept those who do). But I'll be pointing out the hypocrisy of those who take flights to go on vacation and yet want to micro-manage how others should live their lives so that they'd be "polluting less".
Recently some infographic made the round for it showed the act a human can take and the pollution it generates. The reason it circulated a lot is because the first item was highly controversial: "having a kid". And yet there's lots of truth in that.
For example my wife and I we got one kid and my wife is now in her forties and we won't have a second one. And I'll never ever take a single lesson about pollution from anyone who had two kids or more.
I'm the one who don't fly. I'm the one who only had one kid. And I'm not criticizing other people's lifestyle and choices. But if you open your mouth, I'll point out the hypocrite you are if you either fly or had two kids or more.
> And I'll never ever take a single lesson about pollution from anyone who had two kids or more.
And I don't think it's going to hurt enough in 10 or 20 years.
The pain will come slowly, people won't see it.
It's like going back to the middle age so slowly, that the population don't realize or feel it.
And honestly, wars and trump are making climate concerns so difficult to think about.
Even different parts of a city would likely be affected very differently, where the edges near the fire risks crash, and the even mildly safer areas boom with high demand
Do you want to go to war with China to enforce an environmentalist agenda?
The EU has applied tariffs for climate reasons with the carbon border adjustment. The idea is for a country to have domestic climate standards, and then apply tariffs on importers who import from countries that don't meet those standards. It's a straightforward application of tariffs to ensure domestic manufacturers aren't undercut by foreign rivals that aren't required to meet the same standards and redirect importers to sources that do meet standards or at least come closer.
Carbon tax at home and carbon tariffs abroad is the only real economically sound strategy to nudge the economy towards emitting less.
And yes, that does likely mean taxing Chinese imports in the short term. The Chinese leadership does understand the risks of climate change as well or better than many other countries and is already pursuing enormous amounts of clean energy and emission standards, so I'd not expect the tariffs on Chinese imports to last long on an environmental or carbon basis.
Edit: Individuals do not build coal power plants, utilities (and therefore, governments) do. India and China are continuing to build fossil fuel power generation. Global warming does not care about 'fairness', global warming cares about co2 PPM in the atmosphere. When we address climate change, we have to do so at the government level, or we mine as well not bother.
The whole idea that we should look at 'emissions per capita' or 'historical emissions' in the interest of fairness is simply giving a license to governments to kill genuinely poor people in the third world.
The fairest system would be for each human being to have an equal amount of pollution they are allowed to emit.
How much of a problem any individuals CO2 emissions are is completely decoupled from what nation they live in, or how many people live in that nation specifically.
If you hypothetically split up Asia or the US into 100 smaller countries then local emissions are not suddenly more (or less) of a problem than the are now (duh).
And of course more people have more of an influence on global outcomes.
This whole argument makes about as much sense as demanding that black people in Europe should not pay any income tax, because the total tax income from black people in Europe is very low, and "national budget does not care about per capita".
The whole idea that we should look at 'emissions per capita' or 'historical emissions' in the interest of fairness is simply giving a license to governments to kill genuinely poor people in the third world.
Power plants are not built for specific national governments, they are built because individual people need and use the energy. More people => more powerplants (number of governments is completely irrelevant, this is purely a per-capita thing).
> When we address climate change, we have to do so at the government level
Yes. For example by setting somewhat coherent CO2/capita emission targets.
> Global warming does not care about 'fairness'
Irrelevant, because anyone affected does.
If you want a global reduction in emissions, how would you ever convince a poorer nation (like India) to change anything while your own citizens are jet-travelling around the globe multiple times per year?
It is obviously much easier and more effective to reduce emissions by limiting a family to a single cruise vacation per year (or only two cars) than to convince 10 rice farmers to stop firing their oven for heat during winter...
If rich nations can not get their emissions even close to a sustainable level, why would any developing nation sacrifice growth, wealth or anything, really, to make the attempt?
All of a sudden, you'd have the world's short term self interest aligned with solving the long term problem.
You simply can't point fingers at them.
India, fine. But it's the US driving the planet off a cliff first and foremost
That is why per capita is the correct measure.
The atmosphere is very good at mixing CO2 so a given amount of emissions anywhere has the same impact anywhere as the same amount of emissions from anywhere else.
Whatever we decide the limit on atmospheric CO2 needs to be to address warming needs to be converted into a quota for each country, since enforcement has to be done at the country level.
We can't just take the total and divide it by the number of countries. That would mean that Vatican City would have the same quota as the US. Regionally it would mean that the EU would have 27 times the quota of the US.
The only sensible initial allocation is to divide the total allowed by the world population, and assign each individuals share to whatever country has the power to regulate them.
And yet you say "historical emissions" is bullshit. How do you think we got to the current co2 PPM level?
China is in the middle of a massive expansion in wind, solar, and electric vehicles. The US is burning even more coal to support AI, and has gutted much of its federal emission reduction efforts.
Of course, China has 5 times more people than the US, so they get a little bit of leeway. But they are close, and their emissions are growing.
That said, yes, they are investing more than anybody else. And they are improving the technology we need more than anybody else. People talking about military intervention are full of shit, but we could use some diplomatic collaboration.
I know nothing about it. I have read comments on this very comments section, with references, that say China's emissions are not growing. This is what makes this subject so hard for the average numbskull like me, so much misinformation.
The discussion is about what happened last year. We don't have the last year's data assembled yet.
There's a real possibility it changed.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co2-emissions-...
- Your children and younger family members will have to deal with this
- Climate change is causing increasingly worse turbulence for airplanes
- It will disproportionately affect your favorite vacation spots
- Probably something about stock markets and pensions - a world constantly wracked with increasingly severe natural disasters isn't the most economically productive one
There are a certain number of people who just cannot change. There are large numbers of diabetics who die despite an enormous number of warnings.
"why wont they listen? cities are worse for your health!"
this kind of argument is insane. If a new food was made that tasted absolutely horrific, but let you live 1 year longer. Would you switch to it exclusively?
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2023gl10...
BBC reporting:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240524-severe-turbulenc...
Related, home insurance cost increases (and, in places, unavailability) from wildfires & worsening storms hits the pocketbook directly.
A little higher up the economic pole is who stands to lose the most. Those are the people who will see actual quality of life reductions and not be able to afford to return to old norms.
If my 50 years on the planet has taught me anything, it's that this is not a sufficient motivation the current generation in power.
Cutting out air travel is the single most accessible and impactful thing an individual can do with respect to climate change. You can stop turbulence from getting worse, but since you won't be flying in the first place...
Nothing will change until many of the global electorate stop burying their heads in the sand. These people don't change their minds until things affect them specifically. Then they change their mind, and all their former fellows tell them they're brainwashed.
This doesn't change until nearly everyone is affected, and by then we're so far into the catastrophe that the consequences don't even bear thinking about.
All the recycling, solar panels, electric cars, whatever don't come close to making up for the fact that each family of 4 living on a 0.1+ acre lot with all the various setbacks and whatnot, commuting many miles to work and school and grocery stores and the gym, moving all that mass of people, students, workers, food, water, sewage, trash, gas, etc is orders more consumption than if people were living in dense arrangements such as apartments in 4 and 5 story buildings.
Energy = Force * distance
From what I can tell, none of it means anything as long as detached single family homes are still the expected lifestyle, at current populations. Might as well consume as much as we can while we ride into the sunset, or cull the population quickly.
Compare this to China, where the government is aggressively promoting green energy and electric car tech.
Furthermore, because carbon emissions stay trapped in the atmosphere for hundreds or thousands of years, one should also note that the US is responsible for more than a quarter of cumulative emissions, twice as much as China.
I'm more interested in solving the problem than assigning blame, but it baffles me when people argue that we shouldn't need to focus on this because it's really China's fault.
This is wrong. It isn't burning more coal.
Haha you uh believe the Chinese reporting over fatality imagery.
Dude. Get real
This is deflecting the problem. All of those are in response to demand. People live in suburbs instead of centrally so they need all their own personal transportation and product transportation. They want all their clothing, toys, BBQs, lawn chairs, smokers, jacuzzis, tents, gadgets, etc so both demand for industry and demand for transportation to bring that stuff to them from all over the world. And, they want all the electricity for their large 2200 sq houses (double the size of many other countries).
It's obviously someone else's problem if that someone refuses to accept there's a climate catastrophe.
Voting is literally the only way to solve this. Nothing will happen without legislation to force the hand of greedy corps.
Maybe spend your energy trying to convince climate deniers to vote differently.
Corps aren't the problm. They only respond to demands of their customers.
Instead, they just blame the electorate. The electorate just responds to demand. Same as industry. Stop buying beef there will be no beef industry. Stop buying cars there will be no car industry. Stop buying things from the other side of the world there will be no shipping industry.
People keep expecting politicians to somehow magically do something but are usually unwilling to do anything more than separate their trash or once in a while, bring a bag to the grocery store they just drove too.
Yea, all of that is hard. But if you're not willing to do it, what makes you think the electorate could possibly pass anything no of their constituents is willing to do?
I somehow very much doubt that
Made a shitload of sacrifices, how about you?
We need some mechanism that penalizes polluters, benefits low emitters, and stops/limits/taxes/... worldwide shipping when local alternatives are available to avoid these [1] abominations.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/1e4zl...
No it's not. There's a large group of people whose pockets are being lined by it. A large group of billionaires.
Virtually all economic activity consumes resources and energy, directly or indirectly, and in the process creates ghg emissions.
If we want to curb climate change and our emissions, it necessarily means we're going to take an economic hit.
We either do that willingly with some degree of ability to exercise control along the way, or be forced by physics to take an even worse economic hit and face vastly more death and suffering without our hands on the wheel.
There's no option where we don't get our pockets hurt.
- still drive old cars with lots of CO2 emissions
- live far away from their workplace
- probably have a poorly isolated home with oil or gas heating
will be the ones with higher than average emissions. And the rich people who do will just shrug at this minor extra expense. I feel like this is not mentioned enough in discussions (probably because wealth disparity is such a touchy subject) but your ability to reduce your carbon footprint is also directly tied to your wealth.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/this-study-calculated-t...
You imprison the current administration for treason, seize their ill-gotten gains and there you go, hundreds of billions of dollars.
It's absolutely trivial. There's just a group of people that doesn't want it.
Simultaneously institute an inheritance tax as well as an exit tax of 90% of assets above $1+ billion, at time of death or leaving. That's a cool $1+ trillion in revenue for the next few decades. Both exit taxes and inheritance taxes are very established and work fine in plenty of countries, FYI. Not like yearly wealth taxes that are always criticized as not working or untested.
It's trivial to come up with policies that don't hurt the lower nor the middle class. Laughably easy. There's however a group of people that are blocking them. Those people are the problem and their blocks need to be removed to get closer to preventing then oncoming extinction event (which has complete scientific consesus). These policies work, and what needa to be done is removing of their blockers.
Come on now everyone, at least give an argument before you downvote. Warren Buffet is set to give away 99% of his wealth, so it's clearly possible. Humanity can no longer depend on the others to have the same basic decency as he does - clearly he's the exception, the others don't have it.
"Drill baby drill" will be echoed so long as petroleum companies and petroleum rich nations dump billions into propaganda outlets, politician campaigns, and in the US, PAC groups to support "drill baby drill" friendly politicians.
So long as that dynamic exists, it doesn't matter if 80% of the electorate screams for change. So long as the incumbent advantage exists forcing people to vote mostly on social issues, these sorts of economic and world affecting issues will simply be ignored.
There's a reason, to this day, you'll find Democrats talk about the wonders of fracking, clean coal, and carbon capture.
IDK how to change this other than first identifying the issue. Our politicians are mostly captured by their donors. That's the only will they really care about enacting.
But also, I'd point out that even in the Democrat party where this is more of an 80:20 issue with their constituents, the democrats are still far too friendly to fossil fuels (Biden, for example, specifically campaigned on how much he loves natural gas, fracking, and carbon capture).
This isn't the only 80:20 issue where democrat politicians are out of alignment with their base. That's also what informs my pessimism.
Can't win elections when gas is expensive. I still remember the "I did that" stickers at gas pumps.
Biden also signed the largest climate change bill in history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_Reduction_Act#Energy...
When voters are heavily propagandized it's an uphill battle to keep fossil fuels cheap, so you can win elections and phase out those same cheap fuels.
Not sure how we fix that either.
People might feel benevolent one day and do something good, but the next day when they are faced with a problem and the environment is a convenient trash can or resource bin, they'll go right back to those bad habits.
The only way things will change is if everyone's life gets made miserable by the effects.
Not only climate change, but aggressive firefighting over the past 50 or more years has caused a lot of material low in the fire ladder to accumulate, which in natural or at least pre-Columbian forests would be cleared out by routine fires. Brush and deadfall for example. The larger trees in healthy forests don't succumb to fire, but these fires have been decimating whole stands of trees. Pair that with almost zero snowpack this year, the only positive thing I can say is that I'm glad I can enjoy spring a bit earlier this year.
I think the truth is we won’t really take this seriously globally until the changes are so severe that it’ll take generations to undo if ever.
Blame fully the people who saw all this and voted for him twice. At least if you care about root of the problems and not just venting off. I am not offering a solution to educating half of US population which clearly doesn't care about facts, or lacks any basic moral compass... I don't have a practical solution.
US 'special' form of voted democracy failed and failed hard, lets see how far this gets in next 3 years and if any actual lessons learned happen afterwards (I don't hold my breath since reality doesn't behave just because it would be nice and viable time to act is gone I think).
Thrice actually
I asked Gemini, "How long have wildfires across North America happened and are they truly any worse now?"
"Wildfires have occurred across North America for millions of years, predating humans entirely." It also had some very detailed information backing that up.
I then asked, "Were any of those fires in the past 20 years started by arsonists?"
"Yes, arson is a significant factor in North American wildfires, though it is often overshadowed by accidental human causes (like downed power lines or unattended campfires) and natural causes like lightning."
For example, destabilization of equatorial countries due to wet bulb temperatures, through multiple causal paths: worse education outcomes (many days off school during hot months), worse economy (can't work outside), worse life satisfaction -> more autocracies, more water scarcity.
Then you get more emigration to the colder north, more conflict and more suffering. But not much of it is easily and directly attributable to temperatures.
Much of it is foregone upside, like GDP growth that's 3% instead of 5%.
If that is not linkable to global warming I am not sure what is. And that is a huge event. In Europe we are struggling with accomodating perhaps 10M people. What happens when 1.5B come knocking because if they stay they die?
More taxes go to ammunition for autonomous border guard systems.
Just look here in the USA -- the Democrats tried to do some forward thinking things like subsidizing solar and wind, and they were rewarded by losing at the ballot box (of course that isn't the only reason, but it's one of many).
There are no rewards for long term thinking, so it's hard to get anyone to do it.
It's not obvious what we can do (individual actions taken within the context of a system are dwarfed by structural forces of the system), but we're the only ones who are going to do it. So, let's assume we did fix things, and we're looking back from 2050, doing a retrospective. What things did we end up doing, that got us to that point?
Almost all emissions come from factories. There are only two ways to reduce that -- a global set of rules that increases costs to reduce emissions, and an overall reduction in consumption, via a carbon tax.
I'm sure there are people who've specced out detailed proposals for this sort of thing. There might even be previous cases where they've succeeded, which we can learn from. Neither of those "two ways" you mentioned are things that I can do, but I may be able to slightly reduce the intensity of the opposition. (Companies tend to like when regulations require their competitors to do things they're already doing, after all.)
industry, transport and home use (heating & A/C mostly) are all roughly 30% of emissions.
(another way of splitting it says electricity, industry, heating, and transport are roughly almost 25% each. It depends whether you count electricity on its own or bundle it with how its used)
But I agree with you about solutions. The market will quickly bankrupt any companies that induce extra costs to decarbonify. It's the governments job to ensure that externalized costs like CO2 emissions are internalized via carbon taxes. (or alternatives to carbon taxes, which are worse)
This is disingenuous. It's one of many in that it may have contributed 0.0001%. If they wouldn't have done that, would they currently have more power? Absolutely not, believing otherwise means being clueless about what has motivated people to vote in certain ways.
The topics have different purposes. Fossil fuels vs renewables in particular hasn't won the reps a single race, I repeat. Every race they've won, they would've won without it. And every race they've lost, they would've lost without it. The purpose of bringing up that particular topic for them isn't to help win close races.
How can you possibly know this? How could you know what is in the mind of every voter and why they make the choice they do?
They bring it up for a reason -- because their research says talking about helps them win elections.
You think that’s bad... Up here in Canada we’ll have to deal with Murican immigrants as things heat up. Talk about killing the vibe.
As it turns out the most abhorrent things can come out with those Epstein files and it doesn't seem to hurt Trumps support among his base any. Doesn't seem to be threatening any legal action for him or implicated parties. Once again only Maxwell is in jail, somehow, with dozens and dozens of witnesses stepping forward. Democrats have been grandstanding on this man for 10 years now and haven't been able to stop him. I think by this point it is clear he is going to get away with everything even if people want to write about him "flailing." Him flailing is literally him achieving all his domestic and foreign policy goals right now and his base couldn't be more pleased...
I guess I’m not someone, because I’m still open on whether Trump is a pedophile. (I don’t think he is. I’m open to being proven wrong.)
> the most abhorrent things can come out with those Epstein files and it doesn't seem to hurt Trumps support among his base any
We don’t know this. And we don’t know how those outside his base on whose votes he and his Congress depend would react.
From his own FBI department a few days ago. Federal court already found him liable for rape of Jean Carrol. Why are you giving this man any benefit of the doubt when he quacks like a rapist pedophile?
We sink the boats.
Or am I misunderstanding your comment?
https://books.rockslide.ca/read/780/epub#epubcfi(/6/14!/4/2/...
Like let them build few of those sci-fi domes and let them keep buying disposable bottled oxygen? I don't get the pessimism. India makes its own rockets. Pakistan has nukes. Why are they supposed to be incapable of holding the nation together on Mars-like Earth?
Tokyo is already hitting 40C/100F at >90% RH during summers. It's already mildly unsurvivable. Nobody cares. Maybe in 10-20 years we'd be wearing spacesuits, but do anyone seriously think the equatorial regions will be uninhabitable and land prices on northern Europe is going to skyrocket???
> Humans may also experience lethal hyperthermia when the wet bulb temperature is sustained above 35 °C (95 °F) for six hours.
About 9 times higher.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254251962...
One local drought can't be attributed to or be proof of global warming.
It's like smoking causing lung cancer; (the following numbers are made up) 5 in 100 non-smokers might get lung cancer but 20 in 100 smokers do. 5 of those smokers would have gotten lung cancer anyway and 15 wouldn't have but there's no way to know which individuals are in which cohort.
You're drawing (or seem to be) a causal link from climate change to this specific drought/war.
Climate change is a statistical anomaly that cannot be seen in individual events.
Severe enough to be noticeable, but not severe enough to warrant radical climate action. Not an extinction threat. A "slow trickle of economic damage, some amount of otherwise preventable death and suffering, diffused across the entire world, applied unevenly, and spread thin across many decades" threat.
And stopping the GHG emissions demands radical, coordinated global action. Major emitters would have to pay local costs now - for the sake of global benefits many decades down the line. And those emitters are not the countries that face the worst climate risks. Global superpowers can tolerate climate change - it's countries that already struggle as it is, that don't have the resources to adapt or mitigate damage, that can face a significant uptick in death and suffering rather than damage in the realm of economics.
That makes climate action a very hard sell for the politicians. Thus the tepid response.
By now, I'm convinced that the only viable approaches to climate change lie in the realm of geoengineering. Which does not require multilateral coordinated action against a "tragedy of commons" scenario, and is cheaper than forcing local GHG emissions into negatives.
Even non-permanent geoengineering solutions offset impacts here and now - thus buying time for fossil fuel energy to succumb to the economic advantage of renewables. And geoengineering measures can be enacted unilaterally by many powers - as long as the political will is there to absorb a few strongly worded condemnation letters.
The world just eats the climate costs and keeps going.
There's no global catastrophe. No single moment when the magnitude of your folly is revealed to you a blinding flash. Just a slow trickle of "2% worse". A loss of what could have been.
Nuclear superpowers are among the least likely countries to actually collapse from climate damage.
US isn't Syria, and it's Syria that's at risk.
First world countries like France can absorb a +30% spike to food prices. Countries where the same food price spike would come with a major death toll don't have the tools to kick off WW3.
Invade? No. Bomb? Probably. Same if for India if e.g. Sri Lanka decides it wants nuclear weapons.
Global warming will unfortunately disproportionately hit poor, equatorial countries. (Also, starving countries can’t afford a nuclear programme. There is no breakout risk in Sudan.)
Not the only reason, no. But their nuclear ambitions certainly did contribute to their current predicament.
Nuclear weapons take time, expertize, resources and sustained political will to develop and deploy. If you have all of that, you might be able to put all of that towards climate adaptation instead. Or: go for the nukes and bet hard that you aren't going to get bombed to shit for it. Worked out for NK, but doesn't seem to have worked for Iran.
I think the level of tolerance US has for marginally stable autocracies with nuclear weapons has receded permanently.
Not to mention that merely having a nuclear bomb doesn't automatically allow one to cause WW3. Nuclear weapons were used in a world war already, and that didn't even destroy a single country - let alone the world. It takes a lot of nukes, and a lot of delivery mechanisms, to actually move the needle on the matter of human civilization existing.
And you think a second, much larger Syrian refugee migration will have 0 impact on France?
Nothing happens in a vacuum. Everything and everyone is connected.
There are many mechanisms of positive feedback that can accelerate global warming instead of just reaching an equilibrium at a higher average temperature than now.
If some of those mechanisms of positive feedback would be triggered, a global catastrophe would be possible, due to the excessive speed of the climate change, which does not give enough time for the biosphere to adapt to it.
Instead of hoping that we will be lucky, it would have been much better to avoid such risks and prevent further increases in CO2 concentration and average temperature.
I am old enough to have seen a dramatic change in climate from the time when I was a child, when the seasons were still exactly as they had been described for centuries and millennia at that location in Europe, to the present time, when winters are no colder than autumns were before and I have never used again my winter clothes and boots for about 15 years.
I find such a radical change during my lifetime quite scary and I see no evidence for claims that "the world will keep going". The truth is that nobody knows whether this will be true and hoping that this will happen without doing anything to guarantee such an outcome is reckless.
Plenty of feedback mechanisms were proposed, investigated, and found lacking. It's a "makes climate change 10% worse than it would otherwise have been" kind of thing, not a "makes climate change 1000% worse than it would otherwise have been" kind of thing.
Maybe that's why the Trump regime wants so badly to invade Canada and the Groenland?
It's also why I've sort of resigned myself to a cynical optimism that the worst won't come to pass. The rich are not going to tolerate losing money. They will force through geoengineering stopgap measures that will save us from catastrophic warming, at the cost of unknown consequences.
This is why I vehemently disagree with those who say we shouldn't be conducting research on geoengineering. It will be done. The only question is, will we have done enough research to understand the potential consequences, or not?
I’m with you in the billionaires. Research has shown again and again that people do care about climate change and want it to be stopped - but only if they have the socioeconomic status to actually care.
If, as so many people on this planet, you are living paycheck to paycheck, and the social security nets are being dismantled by the uber rich, you instead switch into a „protect what’s mine“ mindset. This further exacerbates the tragedy of the commons.
So I am of the following opinion: fix wealth inequality; which will give people their actual lives back; and will reduce the political power of the sociopathic billionaire class.
Then, the rest almost takes care of itself.
The problem is human, not society, I don't any any -ism can fix human.
Also true or false: an immigrant from a third world country will have a higher carbon footprint if they emigrate to a developed country.
Maybe they are part of the problem.
Fixed
It's just not enough and it's very hard to convince the public to accelerate when the US not only gave up but it actively reversing to fossil fuels.
They've also pivoted their industrial strategy so that basically the entire green energy sector depends on Chinese supply chains. This is significantly contributing to their economic growth [3].
I don't know to what extent taxation in Europe contributed to China's decision making here, but it presumably created an market for green energy and therefore helped solidify the economics.
This is of course not to say that there's nothing to criticize in China's environmental policies; there certainly is. But the trope of "why should we do anything because China won't" turns out to be spectacularly ill-informed. Indeed I think it makes more sense to ask the opposite: what are the likely consequences now that China has positioned itself as the global centre of green energy, and what should other countries be doing to ensure that they're not left behind?
[1] https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-ha... [2] https://www.carbonbrief.org/g7-falling-behind-china-as-world... [3] https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-clean-energy-drove-more...
I expect "change" when people form unions or union like organisations and withhold or redistribute their labour, both waged and in more subtle forms, such as attention, and unwaged but socially important labour (e.g. women refusing to be servile homemakers and instead get guns and start soup kitchens).
Well Spain, 12th largest by nominal GDP and the fourth-largest in Europe, isn't exactly poor and yet seems to hurt quite a bit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_in_Spain#Impact... ... but I bet the wealthiest Spaniards have air conditioning, heating, bottled water delivered at home by staff, etc to isolate themselves. That does include politicians.
So... IMHO until the richest of the rich countries hurt, then nothing will change. They (we?) are very sheltered precisely by leveraging their wealth to abstract away from the lowly difficulties of life, like the weather.
TL;DR : yes, but the more insulated feel it less and consequently, rationally, think they have more time thus postponing the process.
What rich countries do is they just export their factories to other countries and say: look we do not pollute.
China are the reason solar has become so affordable for the rest of the world
On the other hand U.S. CO₂ emissions decreased slightly between 2022 and 2023. About 2–3% (from 4.79 to 4.68 Gt)
I just do not understand how we can claim any kind of progress here.
Also why wouldn't it come from other US states? Seems easier
Yes, California is a little cleaner because we have fewer refineries and gas is more expensive, but globally we are probably about even.
[1] https://www.iea.org/reports/global-energy-review-2025/co2-em...
https://ourworldindata.org/contributed-most-global-co2
> the United States has emitted more CO2 than any other country to date: at around 400 billion tonnes since 1751, it is responsible for 25% of historical emissions; this is twice more than China – the world’s second-largest national contributor
The base then started demanding this from their reps and Trump almost picked up on this himself. It took years to undo that damage and even now we're barely back at a pro-clean air, pro-solar and pro nuclear position...
China has also been deploying lots of renewable and nuclear energy, and their carbon emissions actually falling.
Solar and wind have gotten so cheap we should be able to forgo more fossil fuel deployment in developing nations.
On the other hand U.S. CO₂ emissions decreased slightly between 2022 and 2023. About 2–3% (from 4.79 to 4.68 Gt)
The power company is now preemptively shutting off our power. Which is really fun in the winter.
I’m honestly not sure about the future of my hometown Boulder. The odds of it fully burning to the ground seem to increase significantly every year.
Things have already changed!
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/05/26/key-findi...
The EU reduced their emissions by over a third from their peak. Their emissions per capita is less than that of China (not meant to be a dig at China who is the leader the development of renewables). Even Americans reduced their CO2 emissions by 15% in absolute terms and by about 30% per capita as well.
Why is it so hard to understand that individual people, let alone hundreds of millions of people in aggregate, can have multiple priorities? This whole doomerist attitude doesn't help anyone. If anything, it contributes to the erosion of the good things we already have. Nobody gave a damn about USAID saving millions of people until it could be weaponized against Trump/Elon for taking it away.
On the plus side, I think we'll solve global warming, with technology, in a few generations.
Now every summer day is 30c+.
Also, a comment I hear often is that people didn't really need air conditioners back then. You definitely cannot get away with living in Tokyo without an air conditioners these days!
By the 1990s, you didn't need AC, but your home/rental was more appealing if it had one, because there were a few hot days a year that were pretty uncomfortable otherwise.
Now, you can't not have it. There are far too many hot days to live without it.
- cherry blossoms have been consistently blooming earlier each year
- some areas have been breaking historic high temperatures over the past 3 years (e.g. 伊勢崎市)
- even this year, there were several 20C days in Tokyo where the climate felt more like spring than winter
- 気象庁 is surveying for a new word to describe days with temperature exceeding 40C, since they are now becoming common in some areas.
Lastly, one joke my friends say is "In Japan there are four seasons: rainy season, summer, midsummer, and winter."
Sure, blame developed nations for getting us here, but the path forward isn't solely in the hands of those developed nations.
Ironic OECD countries actually REDUCED their emissions based on a peak in 2007 and continue to do so. Not reduced as a percentage of GDP or adjusted for population growth, but reduced in absolute levels. It's all China, but I guess it's cool to blame things on developed countries.
There are literally 100k deaths in Europe that can be prevented if they lifted restrictions on AC so that they can feel good about making a negligible effect on carbon emissions. So I think you have it opposite, how much pain do rich countries have to endure before they realize that their efforts are in vain.
And before you say "that's because the West outsources all the dirty production to China", even trade adjusted emissions are down considerably and continue to be down.
Please do some research if you're interested in this topic, it's not hard to do. Just follow the logical steps.
1. What causes global warming
2. Who produces most of these chemicals
3. Are there any global trends over the last 20 years in production of these chemicals
https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions
https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/europes-crusade-against-air-co...
It's like you're on a boat that sprung a leak and everyone grabs a bucket. But a few people choose to not help because it's not fair for whatever reason.
Chinese emissions have peaked and are now falling.
Please stop lying. It hasn't cumulatively emitted as much as the OECD [1], and cumulative emissions are the cause of our current predicament.
It's also doing the opposite of growing.
1. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co2-emissions-...
I'm not an expert, but from what I have read I believe humans do have an effect on climate. However this doesn't mean that any draconian measure that would essentially impose one world government and population control (which is the inevitable outcome of all of this) is preferable. But more importantly I'm anti stupid measures like restricting air-conditioning because they make a negligible impact and literally kill 100k+ people a year.
I'd argue everyone should have an AC if they need one (probably China needs more than they have.) But we shouldn't build any more fossil fuel extraction, people who need AC should figure out how to do it with batteries and renewable energy. (Nuclear is fine, if it makes sense economically.) We don't need population control, we just need to add sufficiently large taxes on things we want less of. AC isn't a thing we want less of, it's carbon emissions.
It's not. Many/most people who live in developed countries live lifestyles which use outsized amounts of resources and put lots of carbon into the atmosphere. They're also well-positioned to use their wealth to stop doing that.
>A weird anti-west sentiment from people who almost exclusively live a wealthy life in the west.
Not exactly from people who live a wealthy life in the west. More educated people in general are more likely to understand the complicated issue of climate change. Wealth and education have a close relationship.
>I'm not an expert, but from what I have read I believe humans do have an effect on climate. However this doesn't mean that any draconian measure that would essentially impose one world government and population control (which is the inevitable outcome of all of this) is preferable.
If multiple nations collaborating is your definition of one world government then okay, but no it wouldn't lead to that lol. What?
>But more importantly I'm anti stupid measures like restricting air-conditioning because they make a negligible impact and literally kill 100k+ people a year.
I sorta agree that that's the wrong approach. The issue here is generally large industrial producers and corporations who produce most of the carbon. That said, they are responding to demand from consumers, so attacking demand is a valid way to approach the problem.
Im not sure what is this type of debate good for.
And yes, the objective is to stop using fossil fuels. That's not exactly a secret agenda, it's the whole fucking point.
Seriously, there is no debate with this rethoric.
You didn't answer either of my questions. Even though I asked first.
Yawn. "Both sides are equally valid" is a tired argument. Truth and lies are not the same.
Two Americans and ten Chinese are on a lifeboat. The Americans are each eating two sandwiches a day and the Chinese are eating one. Supplies are low. You do the math and note that the Chinese sure are eating a lot of sandwiches.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/chinas-fuel-demand-m...
And this recent assessment puts emissions from China at "flat or falling" for the past 21 months:
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-ha...
They did, last year.
Any idea what percentage of this reduction is due to offshoring manufacturing?
I'm not saying we shouldn't do what we can to make our local environment better and protect and Preserve what we have. We absolutely should. I'm just stating that this is not the first time the Earth has heated or cooled and nothing that we do will ultimately stop it from this cycle from continuing.
What restrictions are there on AC?
The EU's F-Gas Regulation creates significant restrictions on refrigerants used in air conditioning
There's significant red tape when installing AC due to building regulations
90% of US homes have AC while only 20% of European homes have it, I don't think that's by accident.
Fun fact, some EU countries even have laws telling you how much you can open your windows! In the UK, there is a law that in any public building, windows must not open more than 100mm (about 4 inches).
And 27C is a completely normal temperature. When it's 35C outside, you're better off with a minimised thermal shock with a small difference, instead of going at it the US South or Dubai style where inside it's 18C, so all everyone does is move from one air conditioned place to another (home to car to office to car to mall to home).
Your mentions PUBLIC building policies are irrelevant
So?
Our economies are built on oil burning somewhere else in the world. You can try to point the blame at China, but the wealth generated in the middle east selling them oil is a major part of the reason why US stock markets keep going up.
If you forced China to use less fossil fuels you would personally feel a much larger hit to your quality of life.
We in the developed world love to outsource the violence and environmental damage we cause. It's one thing to wash your hands, but quite another to then try to point the finger.
America imports more from Mexico, Canada, and the EU than China which ranks as #4 when you consider EU as a single entity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_trading_pa...
Imports from China are a small fraction of GDP and offset by exports to other countries. OECD countries are largely exporting labor not the kind of heavy industry associated with heavy CO2 emissions. Which makes sense as China has relatively cheap labor, but they don’t get a discount on Oil.
Do you want to take a wild guess as to which country is a top 3 importer to all of these countries/regions?
Here's a clue: it's the same country that is a major exporter of oil from GCC countries, and the wealth from those GCC countries is a major contributor of investment to US industry/financial sector.
The correct answer, is of course: China
The global is economy is very tightly interconnected and still very much driven by oil and fossil fuels in general. You can do all the accounting tricks you want, but developed Western lifestyles, especially in the US, are entirely supported and made possible by growing global fossil fuel usage.
Canada imports 377 Billion from America and only 88 Billion from China. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_trading_pa...
So you clearly don’t actually understand global trade if you think being top 3 trading partner somehow drastically changes the equation here. China is a massive economy with 1/6th of the worlds population and a top 3 economy, so yes it does a lot of trade but economies are a lot more than just trade.
For example the US's top product imported from Mexico are vehicles, electrical equipment and machinery. But those things are assembled from parts produced in China. So if you reduce China's use of energy you not only impact the direct trade that we benefit from but also the indirect trade.
And you still haven't addressed the way the global financial system is so tightly interconnected. GCC countries invest an estimated $1 trillion in the US, but a large chunk of that wealth comes from oil being sold to Asia, with China being one of the major purchasers.
The point stands that you can't meaningfully disconnect US energy usage from Chinese energy usage. If, for example, we were to stop GCC export to China (and not sell that oil in order to fight climate change) the US economy would ultimately collapse (this is in fact one of the major strategic levers that Iran has right now).
Consumption-based accounting of CO2 emissions is harder than production-based accounting, but it allows us to see more clearly what the CO2 cost of our lifestyle is. It's been ~5 years since I looked at one of those in detail, but I don't think it's changed much since then. The big takeaway for me was that for the US, which has massive emissions compared to Europe countries, urban/suburban design and land use was by far the biggest determinant of CO2 consumption, followed by income/wealth. Despite their higher wealth and ability to spend more, residents of urban areas have for lower emissions than suburban residents.
See, for example, https://coolclimate.org/maps
There's a tendency to think of consumption in zero-sum terms, but it turns out that energy efficiency has a massive impact on emissions, and also that intuition about quantities of emissions is really hard to gain without a lot of study.
88B can’t be a particularly large part of 377B even before you consider that 88B is largely used domestically not for exports to the US and Canada also exports to China.
Fundamentally something that costs 1$ can’t require more than 1$ of fossil fuels to produce without someone losing money on the transaction. Most goods do embody some carbon, but US agricultural goods being exported actually embody a much larger fraction of CO2 than most goods due to the nature of farming and the vast agricultural subsidies. This alone offsets the trade imbalance rendering US trade very close to carbon neutral.
As to your specific point, product from Canada, Mexico etc, may have parts from China. But Canada isn’t simply redirecting 100% of its Chinese imports to the US. Further Canada, Mexico, and the EU and the US are also exporting goods to China directly and indirectly.
Again, calculate the actual CO2 involved trade with China is basically irrelevant from a CO2 perspective relative to domestic emissions.
> global financial system is so tightly interconnected
We’re talking actual emissions which sums to 100% of global emissions. The environment doesn’t somehow double count pollution because it’s the result of the financial system. Thus the impact of the global financial system and everything else is already being accounted for.
Renewables are cheaper than coal and oil energy, so we will see an increase in quality of life as China electrifies, at least for those of us that import Chinese manufactured goods.
Oil is mostly for people's cars, for an unsustainable transit system that locks us in little boxes and kills all our salmon and is one of the greatest threats to the lives of our children. Getting rid of oil and coal is going to be a loooot easier than getting rid of our car infrastructure.
But, if anything, energy efficiency standards for new construction are so strict that heat is becoming less of a problem.
Why do 90% of Americans have AC while only 20% of Europeans do?
Why does US have ~4 heat related deaths per million while Europe has ~235 per million?
Do you think it's just stupidity (Europeans don't know the relationship between heat and AC)? Or poverty? Any other explanation?
Because Rome is further north than New York and Paris is just south of Ottawa/Montreal.
Maybe because the majority of Europe is closer to Canada, latitude-wise, than to Phoenix, AZ, and there is simply less demand? Less wealth is certainly a factor, too, especially considering how the warmest nations in Europe all tend to be weaker economically.
> Why does US have ~4 heat related deaths per million while Europe has ~235 per million?
Maybe its just the higher life expectancy increasing susceptibility? Everyone has to die of something at some point.
Ah yes, heat death, essentially "natural causes". Never mind what's obviously in front of your face.
Should be simple
Doesn't that mean that they would need AC, then? At least for those specific buildings.
However, as a European living in Paris, one of the densest cities in the world, I only feel the need for AC like 2-3 weeks a year. I think the issue is that most people dying of heath are already very old and much more sensitive to it.
But if you live in any kind of share building, you can't just go and set up a split. If it is outside the building, you need permits, both from the architects, so that you don't deface your ugly concrete building, and from your fellow residents, who usually vote "no" by default.
No healthy person all of a sudden dies from heat, I am sorry to tell. If that would be the case, everyone would be as panicked as you are. Europe has comparatively older demographics. Heat risk mainly affects infants and the elderly.
Most EU countries have free health care, so even people not caring enough for themselves will have a comparatively higher chance to survive into an old age. But also those who didn't die because of a bad lifestyle are part of this demographic. Like I said, treacherous, because you should look at this demographic and start to ask how many hours of life expectancy is lost. Healthcare keeps finding that the elder people just don't drink enough during these warm days.
I guess that if you want to win back these hours, you have to convince those elderly people to install AC or get them to drink enough during hot days. At this age people have a certain flexibility of mind, complicated by the fact that heat waves these days are really more severe than in their lived past.
Let me assure you: if people think it is too hot for them at home and they don't see an alternative, they will install AC. It is affordable enough. But there might be a cultural difference, people don't think of AC as the first line of defense against the hot days. Environmental awareness is higher; AC's contribute to global warming. Anecdotally, looking around I see there is a preference for sun protection over AC's.
This is just a naive take. You'd obviously expect chinese emissions to be higher (than the US) assuming similar industrialization, because you are counting emissions for like triple the amount of people.
What you conveniently fail to mention: US citizens still emit over 50% more CO2 each, and China basically just caught up to emission levels of developed countries (EU, Japan), while still being significantly below US levels. High income countries combined still emit more than China, too (richest ~15% globally).
If your argument would make any sense, then the obvious solution would be to split China into 3 countries, making the emissions instantly negligible compared to the EU/US. Problem solved?!
There is no reality where we make good progress toward climate change without the "main culprits" (=> nations with highest historical and per-capita emissions) making the first steps.
Why would a country like India pay/sacrifice to reduce emissions while western citizens still pollute at much higher levels after reaping all the spoils from historical pollution?
You could argue that wind/solar is a huge success story in this regard already, with western nations driving lots of the research/development/commercialization efforts (over the previous decades) and now indirectly causing much bigger nations like China to transition onto those very quickly instead of basically fully relying on fossils for decades to come.
To avoid their country having large regions become uninhabitable?
So why would India take more expensive and painful steps than say, the US or EU, or Japan? India both indisputably affects and controls climate change less then the US or EU, so why would they put in completely outsized amounts of effort to fight it?
And also we should be helping them.
And besides, what do you think they’re going to do? Give up their highly efficient motor bikes? Destroy their personal businesses and starve? How far do you think we could push them? Maybe we could convince them all to just die to make room for our pollution and their nuclear-backed army will agree happily.
I swear half the arguments I see are just completely lacking in regard for the fact that this is happening in the real world, and not a vacuum.
India is working hard to get that down. It's a much more tangible and immediate problem there than the thought some parts of the country may become so hot as to be unliveable. Addressing thst, in India, is a side effect / a benefit of cleaning up the air, as much as energy autarky via Solar PV has the benefit of becoming independent of oil imports. India has coal. Lots of it. It's cheap to them. It doesn't particularly want to use more of it because of the associated air pollution and also because cooling water for thermal power plants competes with drinking water for people in some places.
Personally I think India is rather pragmatic here. Battery banks for scooters in the cities? tick. Buildout of PV? tick. Electric car charging stations? tick. Replacing wood, coal and other dirty cooking fuel by gas? Also tick. India just doesn't bother fighting some internal culture wars about how great fossil fuels or renewables are. They just move ahead more or less silently.
The problem the US has per-capita is lower population density. The majority of the US population lives in suburban or rural areas without mass transit and changing that on the relevant timescale is not feasible. It also has major population centers in areas that experience winter and thereby have higher energy costs for heating, exacerbated by the lower population density (more square feet of indoor space to heat per capita), with the same infeasible timescale for changing that.
As a result, the only way to fix it is to switch to other forms of energy rather than having any real hope of significantly reducing consumption in terms of GWh. Use more electric cars and hybrids, generate electricity using solar, wind and nuclear, switch from fossil fuels to electric heat pumps for heating, etc. But that's largely what's happening. The percentage of hybrid vehicles goes up, despite Trump's posturing nobody actually wants coal, ~100% of net new generation capacity in recent years is solar and wind and even when new natural gas plants are built, they're displacing old coal fired ones, which results in a net reduction in CO2. It would be nice if this would happen faster, but at least the number is going in the right direction.
The problem China has is that they've been building brand new coal fired power plants at scale. WTF.
Now an assignment - you are Chinese and you have 1.5bn people in your country, lets hear it? You think you can't reasonably list 100x "excuses" for their "issues" and "reasons" for CO2 consumption?
They are working a lot harder than pretty much all other countries combined to usher in renewables and many other things while we elect people who don't know what wind is/does and stare at the Sun during the eclipse.
Just that they're still 'developing' and aren't even close to the historical contributions of the US?
Assuming you're American, it's a bit rich to have contributed more in absolute terms and then tell other countries what they can't do.
Explain me why the average car in the US is a tank with horrible fuel economy? In rural I can sorta see it. But in cities, why drive a truck? These are all choices that America makes.
This is a sham excuse. Building coal power plants before solar or nuclear were viable or even existed is not the same as choosing to do it in modern day.
> Explain me why the average car in the US is a tank with horrible fuel economy?
The "best selling" light vehicles in the US are pickup trucks because the sales numbers aren't divided out into personal and business purchases and businesses buy a lot of trucks. The best selling non-pickup is the Toyota RAV4, which gets better than 30 MPG in the non-hybrid version and better than 40 MPG in the hybrid version.
This is not because most of those trucks are used by some business, this is because people like to drive around in them.
My friend, they're building the most nuclear and solar in the world... And yes, coal too. The US right now is actively trying to block renewables (at the federal level at least)
As to fuel economy, the US is the only country where 40 MPG for a hybrid might be brought up as a win. It's just all big inefficient cars over there. You can look up how much the car industry in the US fights increasing fuel economy standards.
I agree that new coal sucks but it's a very easy talking point for westerners like us to latch onto when our own contributions to emissions remain way over 50% higher per capita - despite much of the manufacturing and such not happening in our countries.
"Basically flat" only after running up an exponential curve so that coal consumption is now higher per capita in China than it is in the US and China is generating ~60% of its electricity from coal compared to ~16% in the US.
> I agree that new coal sucks but it's a very easy talking point for westerners like us to latch onto when our own contributions to emissions remain way over 50% higher per capita
You don't even get to say "westerners" anymore. CO2 emissions are higher per capita in China than they are in Europe because they burn such a disproportionate amount of coal, and are only lower than the US and Canada because the US and Canada burn more oil per capita from being so spread out.
Despite higher carbon intensity (for now), they still emit less Co2 per person on electricity than the US (because they need/use less).
All the more reason they have no excuse for building coal. Yet they're also burning more coal than the rest of the world combined.
> most of the new coal plants are there for days when there’s neither sun or wind.
If that was actually the case they wouldn't need to build new coal plants because renewable generation at 40% of normal plus the existing traditional power plants that used to be enough to supply 100% of power by themselves would be more than sufficient. More to the point, if that was actually the case then their emissions would be way down because they'd only be burning coal for something like one week every two years.
It's the same reason it was the dominant fossil fuel for electricity in the US until the shale revolution made natural gas cheap and abundant.
The reasons Trump is a schmuck for pushing coal are (1) he wants it instead of renewals rather than as a way to help fill the gap between renewables and what we need until we can build enough renewables and storage, and (2) in the US that makes no sense because because natural gas can fulfill that role and is better in pretty much every way that coal.
Compare to China which is putting vast amounts of resources into building renewables, storage, and also a nationwide UHV distribution network (currently 40-50000 km compared to ~0 in the US) which means local variations in solar/wind can increasingly be covered by non-local renewables, which should reduce the need to fire up those new local coal plants.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...
The US grid is 18% nuclear, 10% wind and 6% solar. China is 5% nuclear, 9% wind and 6% solar.
The UK is 34% wind+solar. Uruguay Greece, Spain and Germany are all >=40% wind+solar. Lithuania and Denmark are >50% wind+solar.
How is it that nuclear, wind and solar can handle a higher percentage of the grid in all of these other countries?
> he wants it instead of renewals rather than as a way to help fill the gap between renewables and what we need until we can build enough renewables and storage
The only thing Trump wants is to shore up votes in coal-producing swing states for the midterms. He's going to slightly delay the shuttering of some coal fired power plants that are just going to close anyway for a ridiculous and purely political reason and the real-world consequences of it are going to be negligible, because this:
> in the US that makes no sense because because natural gas can fulfill that role and is better in pretty much every way that coal.
And not only that, renewables are now the cheapest form of new generation until the grid gets above something like 40% renewables and you have to start actually doing something about the intermittency. Neither the US nor China have that much yet and in neither case do they need the percentage of fossil fuels that they currently have.
But the argument for continuing to operate existing plants is that you still need electricity while building new renewables. The argument for replacing coal plants with natural gas is that conversions are cheaper than new plants and natural gas is better than coal. There is no argument for building new coal when your grid is <40% renewables -- just build new renewables.
> Compare to China which is putting vast amounts of resources into building renewables, storage
Then why is their number lower than the US one, never mind countries in Europe?
> and also a nationwide UHV distribution network (currently 40-50000 km compared to ~0 in the US) which means local variations in solar/wind can increasingly be covered by non-local renewables, which should reduce the need to fire up those new local coal plants.
The US is covered in 100+kV transmission lines. Even higher voltage transmission lines have lower losses, but you're talking about going from a single digit percentage to a lower single digit percentage. It's basically a cost trade off between building all new transmission towers or using the same money to build slightly more renewable generation capacity -- and the latter benefits you more on the normal days when you're not trying to supply power to someone hundreds of miles away and can just use the extra power locally.
If you want a fair comparison, I would suggest looking at countries in similar economical positions (good growth, but still playing catch-up with wealthy nations) and with big coal reserves (France never really had enough in the first place, which is why going "full coal" instead of full nuclear was not even an option).
Two very good examples would be pre-1980 Germany or Poland a few decades ago, and both of those were very reliant on coal for electricity as well (even Spain was at ~40% coal for power up into the 1990s).
If you want a country with less than China's GDP per capita, how about Ukraine?
Moreover, you keep talking dispatchable power, but nothing needs that to be 60% of total generation. Daytime load is generally around twice nighttime load. That implies something like two thirds of total generation is baseload (i.e. 50% of peak load for 100% of the day), and can use nuclear for anything up to that entire amount. Only one third needs to be dispatchable/intermittent, for which you can use renewables on most days and cover the large majority of that. You should only need coal/gas/hydro/storage on days when renewable generation is low -- which should be less than half of that one third, not 60% of all generation. China has enough for that in just hydro already, but then they're burning coal anyway.
Looking at CO2 per kWh (a much better metric if you want to boil country comparisons down to a single number) you will find that they are not doing significantly worse than most nations in their weight-class (GDP wise), and in fact doing better than quite a few.
Australia, South Africa, Poland, India, Indonesia and basically all of the middle east is doing worse than them. Even rich nations with heavy renewable commitments like Germany are barely 40% lower, and this is frequently negated by higher per-capita electricity use (like it is with the US).
In my view, not many wealthy western nations are actually in a position where they can demand significant improvements from China in this metric without getting laughed at (except France, Scandinavia, Spain). If you look at nations with more than twice the GDP per capita (and a headstart in development) it is more than reasonable to demand that they be at least below 50% of (current) Chinese CO2 intensity (in my view).
I strongly believe that we see so few actual demands in this regard (and so little progress in more direct CO2 taxation schemes) because most nations realize that they live in a figurative glass house. E.g. if the whole EU was at french emission levels, we'd be much more likely to see import tariffs linked to metrics like this, effecting improvement all over the world. Pointing the fingers at China on the other hand is neither accurate nor effective.
3 cents per kwh
> more nuclear or renewable generation
20 cents per kwh
> What excuse actually is there
A sevenfold price difference is a pretty significant excuse, don't you think?
On the plus side, we're going to have many fewer people in 50 years, which will lead to correspondingly less CO2 emissions.
The impossible part of "problem solved in 50+ years" is the 50+ years when you need it to be solved sooner than that, and it can be solved sooner than that by doing something else, namely electrifying heating and transportation and using renewables and nuclear to generate electricity.
I'm not sure exactly how this sounds like a good argument to you, but I can assure you most certainly that less wealthy persons will not find it convincing.
The EU-27 is 17% to blame.
The US is 24% to blame.
Yesterday's CO2 emissions cause today's problems. Today's CO2 emissions will cause tomorrow's problems.
As for PRC, they brrrted out enough solar last year to replace about 40 billion barrels of oil over their life time, or about annual global consumption of oil @100m barrels per day. They have enough renewable manufacturing capacity to displace global oil, lng and good chunk of coal.
PRC is basically manufacturing the largest carbon displacement, i.e. emission avoidance system in the world, and if not for them, global fossil consumption would double+.
It's even more retarded accounting that taxes PRC manufacturing renewables as generation emissions while fossils extractors, i.e. US whose massively increased oil/lng exports do not count towards US emissions.
At the end of the day, PRC's balance of emissions vs how much they displace via renewable manufacturing makes their emission contribution net negative, by a large margin. OCED countries reducing their emissions don't even compare in terms of contribution, it's borderline performative. OCED need to be reducing emissions and generating equivalent displacement to be net negative. It doesn't have to be domestic net negative, simply export/fund enough renewables to developing countries whose power consumption and downstream emissions will increase by magnitudes... you know subsidize them like OECD was suppose to do. Reality is rich countries don't want to do shit about the "global" emission problem, at least PRC selling renewables at commodity pricing to displace velocity of fossil consumption increase. Ultimately, 4 billion developing people going to 10/100x their energy consumption, which like AC is net moral good over net emissions. The real battle is how to keep new power use as emission free as possible, and only PRC is doing that in numbers that matter.
Wanking over OCED reducing their emissions is overlooking OCED was suppose to help developing countries minimize (not reduce) as they grow. All OCED has to do is give PRC renewables the 100b they once pledged on to help developing countries transition for PRC to run renewables manufacturing at 100% utilization (or even expand) so significant % of new power generation is renewables. 100b at current PRC prices of $0.1O/watt buys about 1000GW of panels (enough to power all of Africa & India and more). Or OECD can manufacture at sell at/below cost themselves.
Please don’t repeat this anti-Europe myth. Anyone applying a bit of common sense should realize how improbable that claim is.
OECD countries' past emissions are causing the warming we see today.
> and continue to do so
China's emissions declined last year. The US's increased.
> It's all China, but I guess it's cool to blame things on developed countries.
China used their emissions to make solar and batteries the cheapest source of electricity today.
China passed EU's cumulative emissions in 2014, if I remember correctly. It's totally fair to blame industrialised countries for their share in causing global warming, irrespective if that happened in the early days of industrialisation and was propped up by dirty energy sources. Though, it's morally much harder to give a pass to countries polluting now using the same sources.
Not yet according to https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co2-emissions-....
> it's morally much harder to give a pass to countries polluting now using the same sources
Developed countries should subsidize their use of cleaner energy sources. That balances things out, morally speaking.
Where in Europe are ACs restricted because of carbon emissions? Even in France with very strong building codes (you can't just plop an AC on your own, you need approvals), ACs are the standard in the south where they are needed for long periods of the year.
Which restrictions on AC? I know that Europeans don't use AC as much as the US because of a mixture of historical and cultural reasons, but I wasn't aware of any restrictions. What prevents someone in Europe from buying and installing an AC unit in their own home?
What usually happens, is that most people live in cities. And in cities, they have to get a permit from the HOA and from the city, lest the outside unit deface some historically significant square concrete building (yeah, I know there are actually historically significant buildings, ugly concrete ones built after 1950 aren't among them, though they're where the majority of the people live).
China's decarbonization & renewable efforts have been paying off in a big way. EVs now have a 51% market share among new vehicles [2], exceeding every single major city in the U.S [3] (though the SF Bay Area comes close). Likewise, renewables are 84.4% of its new power plants in 2025 [4].
[1] https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-ha...
[2] https://electrek.co/2025/08/29/electric-vehicles-reach-tippi...
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/03/06/climate/hybri...
[4] https://en.cnesa.org/latest-news/2025/11/4/chinas-newly-inst...
So any emission reduction done by developed countries is offset by China.
The quote from your link:
> China’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions fell by 1% in the final quarter of 2025, likely securing a decline of 0.3% for the full year as a whole
So, increase of 4.7% and then (likely) decrease of 0.3% is a great progress?
I would rather wait for official IEA data before claiming victory: https://www.iea.org/countries/china/emissions
They already are. China does whatever it wants en mass meanwhile.
I'd argue that many lower and middle class folks already feel the effects of GW, even if they may not be able to articulate it. The flip side is that developed rich countries will hurt because of this but the people in power won't care because it probably only (visibly) affects the lower class, and they can always take their jets and rockets to countries (and eventually planets!) that haven't been fucked.
And they'll spin it to blame it on immigrants somehow.
This particular point is remarkably optimistic on the part of our ruling elites who genuinely seem to think they'll be abandoning Earth like the Titanic and running off to Mars or whatever. I wonder if it's just wishful thinking or if they genuinely believe living off-terra would be a luxury experience, and not what it far more likely would be, which is hurtling through a void separated from instant death by nothing more than sheet metal, and after months of that, living inside a specially pressurized biosphere on an alien world that is, at all times, trying to kill them. And is almost guaranteed to succeed if nothing else by attrition.
I wonder if any will think as they prepare to die whichever death comes to them first that maybe just paying taxes and not having a private jet wasn't that steep of an ask after all.
These are all related. All of them are connected to humans pushing the planetary resource limits from various directions. We're attacking Iran now in part because climate change has dramatically increased the water stress conditions making the population more susceptible to political collapse. It's also happening because it puts energy stress on our geopolitical adversaries (same with Venezuela). Trump emerged in the first place because declining American prosperity (despite GPD numbers) drove a large portion of the population to nihilism.
There are two clear parallel points to this:
1. Over the time frames we're discussing (even the next 50 years) how many "poor" countries will there be left? We're seeing substantial progress on economic, educational, and other fronts over the past 50 years.
2. Will there ever be a time when the change occurring is direct and over a short enough time frame to matter to "rich" countries? Yes, it will suck if most of Florida is underwater, but this process has already started, and has been going on for 20, 30, 50 years? And most people care very little. If it takes a century for the state to completely submerge, that apathy will continue.
More specifically, nothing will change until the politicians and billionaires personally get hurt.
The negative effects of climate change need to come for them personally for them to care.
Capitalism will actually save the day, because a bunch of capitalists advanced renewable technology to the point where it was cheap.
The biggest impediment to change right now is actually political interference in deployment of cheaper renewables. You see this all across the US both in intentional and unintentional ways. Trump explicitly cancels permits for wind, tries to ban solar on federal lands, and forces coal plants to keep running even when they are super expensive and raise the cost electricity.
Unintentional political impediments are also endemic in the US; permitting and interconnection of residential solar makes it 5x-6x more expensive than places like Australia, even in places like California that should be accelerating residential solar and storage.
There's a lot to be hopeful about when it comes to climate change, in addition a lot to be scared about.
That "bunch of capitalists"... why are you avoiding the true word: "China"?
If some extreme weather event hits you you may lose your only house, your savings, your health, maybe a good percent of the population of rich countries are vulnerable ot that. In the other hand if someone rich and powerful in those or even somewhat poorer countries, they may buy another house, have more already, lose some money and goods but that's it.
Until those extreme weather events, floods and so on affect enough of the people those people have around, to eventually affect their business and them. But by then it will be far too late.
You are correct because it's happening already (massive wildfires burning down cities, 100 year floods every year, mass migration out of hot, dry climates) and the news will state something like "scientists are 85% certain this fire was accelerated by climate change" and then will move onto the next story. Climate change is all around us, but we refuse to see it.
I've lived in multiple countries and came back to visit after decades. I didn't notice any change of temperature. Some years are slightly warmer, some years are slightly cooler but they all feel within the norm from how I can remember. I remember some very bad heat-waves during my childhood which I've never experienced again.
I know this is anecdotal evidence, but it's MY anecdotal evidence which I gathered first-hand and therefore I can trust. I gathered many data points over several decades.
Also I have many alternative narratives which better fit the data. I've identified some critical flaws in climate models related to simulation complexity and also plant evolution, both backed by professional insights and independent scientific observations.
So unfortunately, I just don't believe current narratives about climate change. The data doesn't fit that narrative, it fits other narratives much better.
I have friends shoving sausages and burgers into them while ordering countless things on Amazon every day, yet they think they help by buying a hybrid car, couldn't even be bothered by using public transport even though it's faster and cheaper where they live, because "too many people, dirty".
Go figure.
1. For now, we can cool Earth artificially. 1 gram of SO₂ in the stratosphere offsets the warming effect of 1 ton of CO₂. It's known to be safe and effective. This company is already doing it: https://makesunsets.com
2. Fossil fuels will be phased out over the next few decades, but CO₂ stays in the atmosphere for several centuries. The practical solution will probably have to be "carbon sequestration", where you capture CO₂ from the air and pump it underground where it stays forever. Such storage is mature tech in the natural gas industry, but the capturing CO₂ tech needs a lot of work.
> and there can be "no longer any doubt".
Who has written this?
The planet as a whole will do just fine. We're not going to break the planet. The reason that people bring up the huge anthropogenic spike in temperature is because us anthropoids evolved in the context of a narrow band, and it would seem as though we're moving the global climate out of that band.
Modern Humans can just use air conditioning tech, most people in india already have a tanki, people will just dig as far as they need to keep their water cool like they already do. Irronically the people most affected are the affluent in places like dubia, if the grid fails and they don't have backups.
> the people most affected are the affluent in places like dubia, if the grid fails
Just use that noodle a little more. Connect the dots.
Their point is very valid. Geologic scales are extremely long and the planet does not care.
Humans, on the other hand would physically not be able to survive in most climates going back 100 million years or more. Too little or too much oxygen. Temperatures too high or too low, etc.
We cannot compare this event, which is much, much, much faster than any natural warming, to natural warming events. Those generally take tens to hundreds of thousands of years to shift as much as we're moving things in under 200 years.
Hundreds of thousands of years ago we were basically apes living in caves that could barely speak.
If you go from the top of a building to the bottom, it isnt the height that is the issue but the speed of change. You take the lift, not jump of the side of the building.
Not during our civilization's existence.
Given the other tech in the novel, that seems highly likely. It includes nanobot "assemblers".
The gist of several comments is that the paper does not actually demonstrate an accelerated global warming, but instead an acceleration of anthropogenic global warming, when removing the influence of several natural factors. To be clear, they are not discussing the fact that there is global warming, just saying that currently, we cannot say that global warming has been getting faster after 2010 with statistical certainty.
We need to adjust strategies here. The "zero emission" strategy failed; it is not practical. Politicians love them because they are in the media, but everyone sees that this strategy is not working. Same with carbon tax - it drove prices up but didn't really help much at all otherwise. We need to stop pursuing strategies that do not work here.
We tried top down. Didn't work.
We tried bottom up. Didn't work.
The birth rates are declining in large part because of the expenses and time required to raise a kid these days. If life was perfectly easy for anyone to have a child, then the population increases. So, what - you’re going to kill extra children? Forcibly sterilize most? Purposely make life difficult so people lose interest?
This makes no sense at all.
(only europeans will understand)
There's more than one aspect to the environment. Plastic pollution and global warming are two separate concerns with separate ways of dealing with them.
So yea, no way is oil stopping or even dipping slightly any time soon.
The intention of the United States and the world is divided.
We love our money too much to care about the Next generation, In my view.
What do you mean?
The intention of the United States is maximizing oil use.
The intention of the World is maximizing oil use. Even EU countries are panicking over maybe being forced to use just a little less oil.
So where do you see this difference? Clearly, the entire world agrees: global warming is less serious than higher prices on oil. Much less important.
Guess what a lot of plastic is made from? And how planes fly, and boats move?
And there's lots of countries that aren't at 'Western' living standards. So we have decades of those countries building and emissions to come.
Plus of course there's a lag in CO2 emissions to climate change. The next couple of decades are going to get a lot worse, before they get better, if at all.
https://www.wri.org/insights/4-charts-explain-greenhouse-gas...
Serious engineers need to stop whatever they’re doing and work on this problem.
Also, if you’re hiring: I’m an expert on the U.S. regulated utility industry, demand management, and solar & battery system design, fabrication and deployment.
AI could lead to massive savings and improvements in terms of emissions and climate change. AI could possibly help us out of this.
Beef and dairy have no chance of helping us. They'll kill us and the beef nuts will say how they saved 4% of emissions by moving some cows around. Problem solved.
There's a reason bird populations are down 30% in my parents' lifetimes (https://www.audubon.org/press-room/us-bird-populations-conti...) and I don't think my generation is going to do much better.
/s
It amazes me climate change X-riskers scoff at denialists and then do the exact same denialism with AGI. How many leading AI scientists (like climate science) would it take to convince you?
"Our great religion, their primitive superstition"[0]
From their About: “Work on Climate quickly built the world’s largest and most successful community of its sort – with tens of thousands of members around the globe, thousands of whom have found climate jobs and started companies”.
Not affiliated but I ran into this initiative recently.
Another quarter from the top 5 percent emissions that have practically nothing to do with the wellbeing, but only social comparison mechanisms (envy, herd mentality).
But for that humanity would need leaders that are not either idiots, corrupt or spineless and toothless.
But hey, I guess that's too much to ask, after all we're talking about unconscious reactive species that's only rumored to have brains or morals.
So not a conscious one.
Vietnam war shows us what's possible in terms of collective change.
During the Vietnam War, heroin usage among U.S. enlisted men was high, with estimates indicating that 34% to 43% of service members tried the drug, and roughly 10% to 20% were addicted.
Nixon was in panic about bringing heroin addicted killers back home.
Which they did. And nothing happened. The ones who had issues before leaving to Nam continued using but almost everyone who started there quit and perhaps tried again.
With conscious design of the society I don't think there's any habit we can't change should we decide.
Just remove the AG subsidies and this will be mostly fixed in no time.
We just need to collectively make a connection with the future outcome and Bob's your uncle.
Do you know how can fertilizer be produced without animals ? Oil
> On 1 January 2020, a new limit on the sulphur content in the fuel oil used on board ships came into force, marking a significant milestone to improve air quality, preserve the environment and protect human health.
The content of the paper is summed up as “everyone felt like the climate changed after 2015, the data up to 2023 was inconclusive; we finally have enough to prove it with 95% confidence.”
EDIT: The title is weird because it’s generic to the point of being unsearchable. I’m not disputing the facts of the paper.
Since manuscripts are written for those working in the field, and need to be, it's one of the big challenges of science communication. In the past these articles would be in a library and mailed out to the subscribing specialists, which minimized the confusion. In the age of the internet, even our dogs can read highly specialized scientific pre-prints that haven't even been peer reviewed yet.
The actual abstract reads: "Recent record-hot years have caused a discussion whether global warming has accelerated, but previous analysis found that acceleration has not yet reached a 95% confidence level given the natural temperature variability. Here we account for the influence of three main natural variability factors: El Niño, volcanism, and solar variation. The resulting adjusted data show that after 2015, global temperature rose significantly faster than in any previous 10-year period since 1945."
"This 58 indicates that the warming trend has been accelerating from a rate of 0.15 – 0.2 ◦C 59 per decade during 1980-2000, to more than twice that rate [0.4°C] most recently."
We're going to have to figure out how to adapt to it. Expect many of the things you love now (seafood, coffee, etc) to be gone within your lifetime.
And if the voters were just a bit smarter and not bought into the “China bad” narrative, we might even get proper, nice, affordable EVs in the US.
Then there's a billion and a half people in Africa, also rapidly growing, that may be next.
Although I'm surprised China doesn't just build nuke plants.
USA is about to have another El Nino summer which will be scorching from overheating oceans
But don't worry, USA is solving the problem by Biden banning cheap electric cars and Trump ending electric subsidies entirely, forcing coal plants to restart
The Republicans are even more protectionist and sinophobic, however. Nobody ever had the option to vote for importing Chinese EVs.
"And remember, now that I'm gone, every problem that occurs is my fault. So stop looking for the culprit, find a solution"
Switching from ICE to electric is a much smaller ask than switching from personal cars to... bicycles?
Good, working and efficient public transit still means having significantly less comfort compared to having your private vehicle. Pretty much the only exception is using the metro in a congested downtown area at peak traffic (still, your metro experience will also be degraded by the peak traffic), or perhaps if parking your vehicle will be very difficult. And i say this as someone in a rather big city in Europe who is currently only using public transit. And there is a lot of stuff that i'd like to do but i can't do since i currently don't have access to a car or motorbike.
People don't just want "useful", at least the majority of people in developed countries also want "comfortable", and "nice", and "easy", and "enjoyable". A peak-hour metro ride or missing your tram by one minute is none of that.
there are things you can't do with transit. However nearly everyone is living in a family - so keep the truck to tow the boat, but get rid of the other cars that you won't need if transit is good. That is a much more reasonably goal that transit can aim for. A few like you won't own a car/truck at all, but most won't need to go that far
When i bought my house, i looked into public transportation options. Instead of a 40 minute car ride, i could drive for 5 minutes and then take 3 hours (and 2 bus transfers) to get to my office by bus.
I would love to get some reading done on my commute, and would be willing to spend an hour on a bus or train instead of 40 minutes fighting traffic in my car, but it's just not really feasable. I think this situation is extremely common.
though your 40 minute by car commute is something that is unlikely something any invsetment will ever make reasonable.
Being outside the city you'll have fewer vectors with less frequency (more than 30mins in between), which will get you in the city somewhere, and from that you'll take city-local public transport to your final destination.
I'd say in this case the 40 min car commute turns into 1h 20, with some luck too.
But hey, at least you get to keep 99% of your comfort while making 50% less emissions! (if it really is that much).
Sarcasm aside, I think this is why people have generally stopped caring as much. What we are being asked to do (buy new shiny things for some estimated small percentage decrease in lifecycle CO2 output) does not match the messaging.
FWIW I cycle almost everywhere.
Bikes are awesome. I do 95% of my trips by bike. It's healthy, cheap, and has very low amortized emissions. Everybody can repair a bike with a small amount of training.
More countries/cities have to do bike-centric road design.
Looking at American commute distances however, cycling, even with an e-bike, is likely not a reasonable option.
- 2 live less than 5 minutes from a metro that literally takes them to the office, they never take the metro
- 2 live easily within a biking distance to work, 1 has a bike, another has e-bike, they never bike to work
- 1 lives literally walking distance to work, she never walks to work
Public transportation where I live is vast, you can easily commute with the public transportation to just about everywhere but only low(er) income people will take public transportation.
Two most-frequently cited reasons I hear why not bike/walk/...
1. Dangerous - every female friend I have lists this as #1 reason they always drive. Regardless of the fact that I live in the area where I often forget to close my garage overnight and leave the front door open (very very low crime rates) the women feel unsafe. A lot of sensationalism in the news regarding every minor thing happening might be to blame but I have a wife and a daughter and am godfather to several girls so I understand
2. Inconvenient - what if after work I want to go to ____ and ____ and ____. Now I got to track back home and then perhaps change clothes, clean the house... and then get into the car to go to _____.
A lot of Americans probably won't be able to commute on a bicycle, but could easily use one for shorter trips like visiting friends, doing groceries, getting a burger, etc.
Even with commutes, there are lots that could be done on a bicycle. I briefly lived in the US and had a 6-mile (~10 km) commute. It was an unpleasant experience because there was exactly zero cycling infrastructure along the way, but otherwise it was a brief 25-minute trip, shorter than any of the commutes I've had in Europe. Not a single one of my American colleagues, all of whom lived locally, cycled or took a bus.
I get that a change in lifestyle is more difficult for the individual than a change in what we are buying. My point, though, was that only the former is going to have a much greater impact.
People really think if they just buy the right products we'll solve this problem. People are really fundamentally unable to solve global warming issues. There are a few fundamental problems:
- Broad, collective action is not possible in just any direction. People can broadly get behind causes that are related to some fundamental human motivation, but generally cannot be guided towards nuanced political topics except via general tribalism and coalitions. (eg: you can go to the moon, but there's only broad support for this in the sense that it has consequences for national pride. You didn't have a whole nation helping the the logistics; you just had broad coalitional support.)
- People think that merely buying the right product will help, but major impacts to climate would require a serious modification in quality of life and material wealth. This will never have broad support. People will always scrape out the most comfort and most material wealth that is possible, and will only allow themselves to be constrained by hard limits. Technology can help here to a degree, but once technology helps, people just advance to the next hard limit. For instance the use of insecticides, industrial fertilizer, and large-scale factory farming just allowed for more population boom. Rather than arriving at a place where where had near infinite abundance, we just ate up the gains with expanded population and luxury products. (sort of how computers don't get faster; once the computer is made faster, the software does more and the actual UI responsiveness just stays in the same place.)
- People would need to intentionally decrease population and find healthy limits with the environment. No living thing does this. If you watch population curves in predators and prey, they occur because the hard limits force starvation and population decline. (ie, if the wolves eat too many deer, then the wolf pups starve, the wolf population declines, and then the deer can rebound.) In other words, nature is not "wise and balanced" but instead the balance is a mere fact of competition and death. The moment we produce an abundance, we use up that abundance. This may not be true in the case of some individuals, but broadly this is true for any population.
- No political body, even an authoritarian regime could force these things. People would revolt. Authoritarians themselves often get into power by promising abundance they can never actually deliver on. No authoritarian has gained power by promising to reduce abundance and material wealth.
How do you hold this dispassionately? How do you get to a point of wanting to reproduce, or even wanting to continue, as an act of radical hope? Absurdism? Pure interest in watching it all unfold? I'm pretty aware that we are going to have constraints forced on us as like, a thermodynamic function, but ... how to cope? Go back to the tragedy?
-confused, interested, fascinatedly dreading
Sustainable meaning: if everyone does this we need 5 planets...
The good news is that with technology there will be fewer and fewer of those...
But if you really wanna minimize / lead by example you could live in a small appartment in a big city... It's the most sustainable way to live. Besides that help improve / maintain the common infrastructure... Libraries Swimming pools Toolsheds / Makerspaces Schools Etc etc
A tiny garden at your home < a big park and shared city vegetable plots Electric bicycle for 80℅ of your commutes and share / rental car when needed. Getting rid of stuff you no longer need (helps with living in a small place as well)
Countless little big things.
Also: - buying second hand phones - investing in solar projects -...
Galveston, Texas
Morgan’s Point, Texas
Annapolis, Maryland
Norfolk, Virginia
Rockport, Texas
Bay St. Louis, Mississippi
Miami and Miami Beach, Florida
Charleston, South Carolina
Atlantic City, New JerseyThat may seem extreme, but the Chinese culture is more collectivist than its Western counterparts and (perhaps unlike the US culture) can recognize a threat as complicated as "This entire nation's set of rules they treat the universe by threatens humanity existentially" even when said nation can't recognize it in themselves. Plus, India is hit hard and fast by climate change in the short run so China already has an ally in their backyard who would support them doing something about polluters.
China currently emits per-capita co2 about half that of the US.
Power companies in the US are already deploying renewables pretty quickly without incentive. If the tariffs are dropped that'd further incentivize build out.
What should be done is carbon taxes and subsidies, but that's not likely to be done. And since that's not going to happen, economics is what will drive transition.
If you think China is developing renewables out of some kind of green future plan, well there is a whole lot of geography and geopolitical information that you are out of the loop on.
China started construction on an estimated 95 GW of new coal power capacity in 2024 it accounted for 93% of new global coal-power construction BUT, importantly, Coal power's share in the electricity mix has steadily declined, dropping from around 73% in 2016 to 51% in June 2025 heavily driven by renewables push in China
China's average utilisation rate of coal power plants in 2024 was around 50% meaning there's already spare capacity. The continued building is driven largely by energy security concerns, financial incentives for coal-mining conglomerates, and institutional momentum. The most immediate trigger was power shortages of 2021, when factories had to cut production due to blackouts. That was politically embarrassing, so provincial governments and energy companies rushed to approve new coal capacity as an insurance policy. More than 100 billion yuan in capacity payments were made to coal plants in 2024 essentially the government paying plants just to exist after all half the capacity isn't being used.
Chinese policy makers have plans to "strictly control" coal use during the current period and start phasing down coal use during the 15th Five-Year Plan period covering 2026–2030. China also has a long-stated goal of peaking carbon emissions before 2030 and reaching carbon neutrality by 2060. which probably explains the apparent paradox of being world leaders in renewables but investing more in Coal than anyone else. usual caveats notwithstanding
If I do this, this would have been a crime. Nothing more.
Also killing peple with chatbots; what crime are you looking for?
And “creating fake cycles”? What does that even mean?
Tomorrow: trillions invested in new technology for simulating human torture accurately at the molecular level, requiring twice the level of all consumer electricity use on the planet. Advocates claim "all use is valid".
Meanwhile, three-time Billionaire claims he's solved the problem using soylent green while fifty thousand people react in awe at the live presentation.
Doom. (Obviously.)
A reasonable explanation is that a few neurons probably don't have conscience so they can't really experience anything.
I think once they're able to put 15 million such neurons on a single device that puts them in the range of more relatable animals like mice and Syrian hamsters, and I also expect that relatability is also what will drive most opinions about consciousness.
Given our piss poor understanding of consciousness, I have to ask: on what grounds do you make this claim?
What mechanism are you imagining that would allow a LLM built of neurons to describe what it's like to be made of neurons, when a LLM built of GPUs cannot describe what it's like to be organised sand? The LLM in the GPU cluster is evaluated by performing the same calculations that could be performed by intricate clockwork, or very very slowly by generations of monks using pencil and paper. Just as the monks have thoughts and feelings, it is conceivable (though perhaps impossible) that the brain tissue implementing a LLM has conscious experience; but if so, that experience would not be reflected in the LLM's output.
We can't assume that a computer based neural network will have the same emergent behaviours as a biological one or vice versa.
The interesting point for me is in the neuroplasticity, because it implies that the networks which are specialised for language could start forming synapses which connect them to the parts which are more specialised to play doom giving rise to the possibility that this could be used for introspection
It uses a bunch of energy, but not so much compared to moving yourself around in a car of plane.
0: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/15/elon-musk...
1: https://www.texastribune.org/2025/10/09/texas-hood-county-cr...
Why bring the vegans into that when they are the ones consuming the fewest resources?
The majority of which is methane, which only has a 7-12 year life. Which means — unless for some reason you started eating way more animals than you did yesterday — that your emissions today simply replace your emissions from 12 years ago. In other words, it is a stable system, unlike carbon, which basically sticks around forever.
Methane has a shorter shelf life, but is far more potent, meaning that any increase is worrying, and decreases could have a dramatic impact.
When the oil in your frying pan is smoking, adding a tiny bit more heat may be unwise.
So, no you don't have to freeze to death to easily compensate your llm use.
Seriously adapting our diets around being more sustainable. I'm not advocating for veganism or such, but at least to understand that eating a burger pollutes as much as driving a large vehicle for 50 miles and that maybe we can substitute that with poultry or eggs or cheese many times.
> Globally, 77% of soya is produced for animal feed, 19.2% for direct human consumption and 3.8% for industry (biodiesel, lubricants, etc.).
https://www.deforestationimportee.ecologie.gouv.fr/en/affect...
Poultry protein efficiency is 21% and beef 3%
> We find that reallocating the agricultural land used for beef feed to poultry feed production can meet the caloric and protein demands of ≈120 and ≈140 million additional people consuming the mean American diet, respectively, roughly 40% of current US population.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/10/1...
Edit:
Note the soy usage vary around regions. The first link is from a French gov page, after the previous citation it gives the world repartition:
> In animal feed, the largest consumer of soybeans is chicken (37% of world production), followed by pork (20.2%), aquaculture products (5.6%), dairy products (1.4%) and beef (0.5%).
Which is quite different than the French reparation :
> flesh and egg poultry account for 44% of total [imported] soy, then diary/mixed cows (36%) then flesh cow (8%) and pigs (6%)
(fr) https://chaire-bea.vetagro-sup.fr/en-france-les-animaux-dele...
Soy protein are 97.9% as digestible as beef
> protein qualify can be scored in terms of its Protein Digestibility-Corrected Amino Acid Score (PDCAAS). Soy achieves a PDCAAS of 0.92, comparable to beef at 0.94.
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
The DIAAS is sensibly worse (soy 0.898 - beef 1.116) but still far from the beef protein efficiency cited above (3%)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digestible_Indispensable_Amino...
Let's stop building homes to live in and use motor vehicles for travel. Smartphone with LLM access will fulfill all our needs.
So when people are focusing on AI above all other energy uses, it doesn't really paint an accurate picture of what's going on.
* Electricity: 27%
* Industry: 24%
* Transportation: 15%
* Agriculture & land use: 11%
* Buildings: 7%
Then within electricity, data centers use about 1.5% of global electricity. Within data centers, AI accounts for somewhere between 15-20% of energy use.
So if you take 27% × 1.5% × ~17%, you find that AI is currently responsible for something like 0.07% of global fossil fuel emissions.
It definitely matters in the "every bit matters" sense, but also the numbers paint a really different picture than you'd get from statement like the one we started with.
Guess what happens when you add them up...
Aviation is 2.5%: https://ourworldindata.org/global-aviation-emissions
Shipping industry is 3%: https://www.transportenvironment.org/topics/ships
Large truck freight is 3%: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1414750/carbon-dioxide-e...
Medium truck freight is 1%
The single biggest non divisible sector you can realistically come up with is "personal transportation", but even that is only 10% of global co2. You can look at other sectors like "industry" and "energy" and I can guarantee you will be able to easily split things down into sub categories which have <5% impact on global co2 emissions.
Also, I think it's worth pointing out that the sectors you list are like 1.5 to 2x larger than the one he gave and the largest nondivisble sector, you listed is literally 10x, which I think does more to prove his point than yours.
Also, by your logic, literally any new sector of the economy that uses any amount of energy, basically at all, should be banned, because it "all contributes." that's a consistent position to take and there are certainly people that hold that position, but that at that point seems like a fundamental axiological difference that I and probably OP are simply not going to agree with you on.
I'll guess, they add up to 100%?
I don't see what's the insight here.
AI on the other hand cannot, and still needs thousands of wasteful data centers.
> Here we account for the influence of three main natural variability factors: El Niño, volcanism, and solar variation.
Whoops! Whoopsies! Oopsy doodles!
https://www.gatesnotes.com/home/home-page-topic/reader/three...
with gems like "Although climate change will hurt poor people more than anyone else, for the vast majority of them it will not be the only or even the biggest threat to their lives and welfare. "
People are way more alarmed by Rapid Local Temperature Rises By Mechanism of Thermonuclear Energy Being Suddenly Released.
There's a "top of stack" effect in that there can be only a certain number of issues which are most important in discourse, and the Israel/Iran situation has taken over the top of discourse as has the US President.
A vital part of good governance is caring about things which aren't in today's newspaper.
https://ember-energy.org/countries-and-regions/united-states...
https://ember-energy.org/countries-and-regions/european-unio...
In the EU I hear of new climate initiatives all the time. From the US every bit of news I know about is how they’re making it worse.
It's especially depressing for me when it comes to younger folks. In Seattle where I live (not the suburbs, actual Seattle) some teenagers drive to school in 6 seater SUVs and spend their lunch time in there, with the engine on. A minority of students of course but that's still a mindfuck... in Europe they would get so much shit from other kids and neighbors. Drop in the bucket in terms of actual emissions but a very strong symbol of the lack of awareness/motivation.
Imagine what could be accomplished if Americans used their global influence to affect global change on climate issues with the same zeal that they pursue manipulative trade deals.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1118464/transportation-c... shows the American trend, then look at which other countries that’s similar to assuming we electrify a given fraction of the transportation sector:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
This is even more wrong when you look at how Africa is electrifying. Unlike the United States, China continued to invest in solar panel production and so they’re now the cheapest option for electrical power for millions of people since solar panels run for decades and don’t require trucking diesel fuel around or building out power grids. Investments in batteries are having the same cycle: richer countries have the research universities and product development but then anyone can buy the product.
https://apnews.com/article/solar-energy-china-imports-batter...
That’s why the fossil fuels spend so much money spreading messages like yours: they grew fat on government subsidies and they need those subsidies to continue or even expand as the basic economics increasingly favor renewables. Trump has to force coal plants to stay open because otherwise the operators would switch to cheaper options.
Struggling to see how one could look at such a chart and think it's futile for the US to take meaningful action.
This is an art that has been refined with every election cycle and every major political event since the early 2010s, and it had already gotten dang bad 5-6 years ago[1], and definitely did not get an ounce better once LLMs came along and drove the down the cost of this type of op.
The result is that it's very hard to get any sort of coherent message across.
[1] 'member the absolute clown fiesta surrounding COVID?
(the Iran collapse that led to mass protests and then mass murder of the mass protests is itself a climate driven issue https://www.unicef.org/iran/en/climate-change )
Why care when we're already over the edge and there isn't anything we can do about it?
Every f'ing time it snows someone has to snide in with "BuT I ThOuGhT GlObAl WaRmInG WaS ReAl!?!?!?!?!" And i have to take a breath.
Eventually we'll have to deal with the Giant Spider Downtown, it's just that the to-do list is growing from the top.
Consider for a moment that there ARE people this straight-up evil....
LLMs hit the market and you never hear anyone talk about carbon at all. At all. Maybe Apple will mention it a little bit but they're not in the big datacenter game
The costs of LLMs are just being completely paved over. We don't let manufacturers dump cadmium into the rivers in the US anymore, even if it would enable cheap or magic products, it's insane that we're just ignoring all the external impacts in this particular area
Also another group of people have realized they are not willing to forgo all their petty and unnecessary comforts nor are they willing to pay any price increases that would be required to adopt less economical but more sustainable services or production methods.
I don't think there's been any big change in climate change believers/deniers, but i do think some people have started accepting that we're doomed and that there is no "practical" solution. And if you think you're doomed, you might as well skip the sacrifices and enjoy your last days (decades) to the fullest.
I think you're referring to inflation with that? I wouldn't necessarily say that inflation is the result of a "decision", certainly not a direct decision of any single person nor any collective group. Economies can move around in weird and unpredictable ways, and they are also quite intertwined at the global level making policy decisions even more complicated and unpredictable.
The "money printing" decision wasn't made by asking the public: "would you like to help our economy and businesses and our essential public services in this tragic event? Oh btw you'll be paying for all of this with inflation, are you still sure?". Politicians tend to conveniently leave the second part out, and also, this questions wasn't asked to the public at all. I believe a sizeable amount of the public would've responded "no, let the people die, let the businesses die, i'm not paying for them".
Which is why for example, in many democracies with tools of direct democracy, such tools cannot affect fiscal policy, because people are dumb and they would just say "i want all of the welfare and zero of the taxes", bringing the country to ruin.
It's not really a collective decision, it's the decision of governments, but also it was a temporary decision (basically every pandemic in history lasted a maximum of about 3 years), not a permanent one.
With a longer time-frame, there is time for people to elect new governments, and guess what would happen when a new politician comes along pitching: "hey i will stop all this green stuff which costs money and i'll give it to you curing poverty and making you richer, the other countries are still polluting who cares anyway". Meanwhile the other politicians pitch is: "No we have to make sacrifices to reduce our emissions, we can give up some comforts or pay more for them".
Guess who would win that election...
Basically, on the average, people don't have ability to think rationally into the future. Most people think only 1 level of cause and effect.
Right now, for the vast majority of people, global warming isn't a problem when your house has AC, your car has AC, your workplace has AC. When you are forced to do things that you see no direct effect of, it makes it seem less important, and its a self reinforcing cycle where you see other people not doing it and you wonder why you have to make your life harder.
People will start caring only when their direct lives are affected. So unfortunately, the only way to fix global warming is to let it get bad enough to where there is enough death and destruction for people to start paying attention.
Part of the problem seems to be that many countries won't do shit, so all the improvements that have been made are just completely negated by other poluting more.
I think there are more effects to account for when extrapolating measured temperatures, mostly made on the ground with cataclismic effects. After all, all the carbon being emitted nowadays was in the biosphere back in the days. Why couldn't it return back to it without the earth becoming inhabitable?
If you live on the coast and the water level rises, your home is inhospitable, even if someone 100mi inland is fine.
If you live in a region that usually was 90F in the summer and is now >110F regularly, that’s going to cause problem.
Somewhere on the order of 1-2C if you start from the 1850s.
- Andora (5C/9F)
- Montenegro (5C/9F)
- Japan (4C/7F)
- Italy (4C/7F)
- Spain (3C/5.4F)
Even with current rates I think we'll easily hit a 20F increase in several regions.
- creating a new addictive form of entertainment we can use to brainwash people
- Creating expensive data centers that MAY end up being extremely useful in the long run
and never for saving the lives of the people on our planet.
Humanity is doomed. We deserve it.
Reality is not binary. There’s a whole spectrum of situations between "everything gets back to normal and all is well" (which was never on the cards after the 1980s) and "all humans die within a century". And the nuances in between still affect billions of people.
it's not about us guys, relax.
Those are factors in this analysis that weren’t in all prior analyses, and the confidence levels in this analysis have improved greatly and we know much more certainly that global temps are rising faster now than earlier decades.
>We remove the estimated influence of three main natural variability factors: El Niño, volcanism, and solar variation. The resulting adjusted and thus less “noisy” data show that there has been acceleration with over 98% confidence, with faster warming over the last 10+ years than during any previous decade.
It is specifically about cleaning up the data by removing these 3 and showing a clearer picture of acceleration without these 3 factors.
So out of 365 days per year * 100 years * 510 million square kilometers, you're basing your beliefs on... 2 data points? 100 years ago, and today? Really?
First, the West and particularly the US are still well ahead of China regarding both historical total emissions and per-capita annual emissions. And regardless of what China does in the future we still need to get our acts together domestically.
Also, China is aggressively pushing low-carbon energy sources on all fronts. Where they are now is not necessarily an indication of where they will be in a decade or two.
A large part of their emissions is the result of stuff they make for us. If we are serious about climate policy, we have to set up trade barriers proportional to greenhouse gases emissions to limit this effect. These policies must be informed by climate science.
Finally, regardless of what the rest of the world does, mitigation depends only on us and how well prepared we are.
Really, there is absolutely no scenario in which it is not a good idea to understand what the hell is going on with our climate.
The reality is that China is aggressively pushing solar and electric vehicles, and the West is complaining about it. Meanwhile the current US president's maxim is "drill baby drill".
I mean, if we don't need to stick to facts, let's discuss the hypothetical scenario where I am a powerful wizard, and when I say a magic word and I can halve the total amount of CO2 in the atmosphere?
OK, now where's my Nobel peace prize dammit??
From 2022 to 2023 (lates report), China increased their emission from 11.9 Gt to 12.6 Gt. The US decreased from 4.79 to 4.68 Gt. So we (US and China) increased emission by 0.6 Gt.
So we (the world) are polluting more and more and you are telling me that we are on a great trajectory.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/gallery/2026/mar/05/pict...
Consumption economies can incentivize production economies to emit less.
Nnobody is going to follow a hypocrite, and no one in east asia is gonna cut back on consumption/growth/lifestyle if rich westerners can't even pretend to put in some token effort for the same cause.
Solr and wind power is arguably a huge success story (looking at china specifically) because it was arguably enabled and triggered by western efforts in research, development and commercialization.
At the same time, the US is the main force fighting against carbon neutrality, renewable energy and pretty much anything reasonable. By directly burning a lot of fossil fuels and by lobbying and poisoning discourse in other countries.
Meanwhile China is by far the biggest producer of anything related to renewable energies and installing more renewable energy than the rest of the world, by far.
If anything, the work done worldwide does no matter (it still does though) because USA is doing their best to destroy the planet.
So if developed countries completely eliminate all pollution we will reduce it by 30%. Good. Then what is the next step? War with China? Attack India?
[1] https://www.iea.org/reports/global-energy-review-2025/co2-em...
To the extent that they need a nudge, a carbon tax would be very effective for correcting export market incentives, too.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-ha...
This isn’t a video game where you buy “clean factories IV” and everything stops polluting on the next turn, it takes time to change industrial plans which are years in the making and involve non-trivial supply chains.
China is far, far from perfect but their emissions are going down at a time when the President of the United States is lying about fake emergencies and forcing utilities to run at a loss just to keep emissions up, so China is not the nation most deserving of pressure.
Another thing I have wondered is whether it is ethical to oppose solar power because I don’t like how it looks. Again here the environmentalists have an answer. Yes it is.
Recently I was wondering about geothermal power as well, but I learned that the good people of black rock city believe that we should leave no trace and a geothermal plant would leave a trace so it’s far preferable to drive a large number of ICE vehicles to the desert.
In general, I think that we probably exaggerate climate change a lot. It’s not a big deal, at least when compared to things like sunshine for a park for underserved minorities.
all the carbon storage methods (efficient and otherwise) studied so far could be immediately put into action.
In addition to the immediate reduction in the use of fossil fuels for energy production, the scenario could be completely changed in 10 years, water could be desalinated, desertification reversed, etc.
Free and unlimited energy would be the solution to everything. The question is whether we will get there before it's too late... and perhaps AI is the answer?
I won't touch "free and unlimited energy", but is there even evidence that AI produces more energy than it uses? Produces any at all?