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Comment by rtutz | Hacker News Reader

Climate change already feels chaotic in a sense that earth is heading towards so many tipping points that it is impossible to keep track. In addition, each aspect resides in a niche of a complex system, difficult to grasp. AMOC collapse, melting permafrost methane release, species extinction, intense El Niño, ... All of them are not easily to follow, let alone understand. It's getting wild.

To my surprise, media coverage nowadays is mostly about heat waves as a phenomenon, leaving human impact on it aside.

A couple years ago, I would have expected some kind of awakening with global efforts, but the opposite is the case.

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It's beyond disheartening. In a sick way, we totally deserve getting hit now because it seemed like a lot of climate "reasoning" was "this is going to be bad for future generations, we don't have to worry about it now".

> A couple years ago, I would have expected some kind of awakening with global efforts, but the opposite is the case.

I'm a literal greybeard who has lived in liberal bubbles on the Left Coast my entire life, and the past ten years or so has rudely educated me at how horrible a large segment of humanity is. We have the resources, science, technology and people to live in an approximation of utopia, but instead we have.... this.

> We have the resources, science, technology and people to live in an approximation of utopia, but instead we have.... this.

I've argued this exact thing (and been ridiculed as "naive" and "tree-hugging hippie" for it) most of my adult life (until recently where I no longer care because humanity has already made the choice now and nothing I can say or do will change it). We've had the technology, and we've been adding to it for decades now, but still we choose to use it in the worst possible ways, to (further) enrich the worst possible people and burn the world to the ground.

I'm too stupid to stop caring -- but it's a delicate dance because it's so easy to have one's hopes crushed these days.

A small bright spot is that solar and battery tech is improving at a rate far greater than was forecast earlier. The economics of that can only be denied for so long.

> how horrible a large segment of humanity is.

The well-off don't want to give up even an inch of luxury. Climate refugees from South America, Africa, Middle East (1)? Why not view them as people who are trying to steal jobs, live off of social benefits, and eat our cats and dogs, if we manage to dehumanize them, then we don't have to see their human suffering...

(1) The Syrian conflict happened after prolonged drought drove farmers to the cities to find work, creating a lot of social friction, the larger Arab Spring happened because of food price hikes after 2010 forest fires in Russia made the country reduce wheat exports.

The middle east is refrigerating entire cities. They are obviously capable of fixing the climate for their entire population, they just choose not to, while using incredible amounts of fossil fuels on extreme comfort for the rich.

https://www.treehugger.com/largest-air-conditioned-city-to-b...

The bitter irony is that every locale that requires extensive air conditioning has ample sun exposure that should be able to power all of that air conditioning.

In a different timeline, the US would be investing in zero/low-interest loans to anybody who wants to install solar/battery power, as well as a smart grid that can better leverage that.

Given what is actually wrong with the world's finances that would actually be a good solution. I mean you'd have to match China's solar panel production first, then issue the loans, neither which is going to provide much profit in the short term. But that would solve a whole number of issues, not just energy.

But somehow I think that requires a lot more cohones than are currently found anywhere near the white house.

>A couple years ago, I would have expected some kind of awakening with global efforts, but the opposite is the case.

The only thing we can do is slightly tweak the exponential adoption curve of solar, it's already here, already the cheapest option, already growing exponentially. We're right in the meaty part of the growth phase of solar and "moral" adoption pushes really don't have much to do with growth any more.

And also there are positives, CO2 is a potent fertilizer and there is plenty of land area which is uninhabitable and unsuitable for farmland which is going to boom with population and agriculture.

We're up for a century of change and migration and people need to change their tune from "oh no!" to "what's next?"

What's next is a lot of migration to the likes of Canada and Siberia and perhaps some active geoengineering building up the new locations around the globe for rainforests.

You have to let go of the past and embrace the future because crying about losing the Earth as it was 200 years ago will get you exactly nowhere.

That new land has thin, acidic, waterlogged soil with few nutrients, is unstable and prone to collapse (see thermokarst), with photoperiods not suited for what those crops need. What's next is a world of hurt, especially if approached with techno-optimist myopia.

It's fine. We can just add fertilizer -- made from petroleum extraction of course then fire up some coal power plants for artificial grow lights.

Thus solving the problem once and for all.

Thanks Gemini for your reply.

It is not worth discussing anything with a doomer that has no knowledge besides what an LLM can tell them.

That's a cheap dismissal - if you had any good counters, you would have attacked the reasoning instead of reaching for that.

No it's not, I'm perfectly willing to discuss the sibling comment. I'm not willing to discuss with an LLM with a human intermediary. Your answer parrots what Google (gemini) says when you search with a question targeted as disagreeing with me. (I tried, out of curiosity)

I already had the topsoil argument in mind before involving an LLM but your argument is that I shouldn't adopt more precise language or add claims I didn't originally think of because of the source? How is information from a search engine different? Should people purposely have shallower debates whereby they pretend not to know new information simply to appear organic / avoid LLM allegations? You would put an expert into the same bucket for having a comprehensive argument.

If you start with a doomer mentality it is already very unlikely that you have any wish to discuss anything, you just want to create a list of arguments that all end with some variation of "we're doomed".

Paired with an LLM which regardless will generally be ~80% agreeable with you, the conversation will literally be unending. After each point there will be a rebuttal of doom and very little reason involved on the human side in the middle. Unable to be convinced of anything and paraphrasing LLMs all along the way, the conversation is pointless.

If I wanted an endless disagreement with an LLM I could set that up in my own time, I don't have to do it in public. Or I could find a friendly toddler in their "Why?" phase.

If you'd like we can prime a couple of LLMs with our opinions and watch them go back and forth without us.

That's okay, hope you enjoyed your petty digs - the world is a simple closed system that just needs some sulfur pixie dust to patch up and all the scientists are doomers. Thanks for your contributions.

On the flipside, if you suffer from positivity bias you'd probably be able to ignore an existential threat if it spit in your face.

does not-ignoring an existential threat look like wailing THE END IS NEAR at every opportunity and coming up with no remotely viable suggestions besides a vague idea of shutting down the global economy and/or just endlessly saying we're not doing enough?

No, it doesn't look like a strawman. Your poor and vague characterization of the enormous amount of effective action we can take shows how motivated you are to ignore the reality of the situation in favor of the reality you prefer, which is the one where you can feel okay with doing nothing. Please fuck off and stop actively hindering people who give enough of a shit to do anything. Thanks.

In the global share of primary energy solar is this very small player (less the hydro, much less then coal, or natural gas, or oil), data from 2024.

https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption

How much does the increase solar production decrease world-wide CO2 emmisions? Because CO2 emissions in 2025 were still increasing. I see that in many growing countries solar power is not seen as a replacement for fossil power, but as an addition to fossil power.

https://www.iea.org/reports/global-energy-review-2026/co2-em...

There are many places where the photosynthesis is not limited in CO2 amounts, but in amounts of other elements, like iron (about one third of the surface ocean), phosphorus (tropical rainforests).

https://www.us-ocb.org/microbial-iron-limitation-otz/

https://www.jircas.go.jp/en/release/2022/press202218

Warming of Siberia could increase methane leakage, which could increase global warming and then increase in methane leakage, the “methane time bomb”

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/ticking-timebomb-s...

In the Earths history, we know of periods of emission of large magnitudes of CO2. One of them is Permian–Triassic extinction event (level of atmospheric carbon dioxide rose from around 400 ppm to 2,500 ppm), extinction of 57% of biological families, 62% of genera, 81% of marine species, and 70% of terrestrial vertebrate species.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic_extin...

Lets hope we don't reproduce the PT event.

Solar energy production has increased 20-30% year over year every year for the last decade. If this continues peak oil production will occur in the next five years, if not 2026 itself. The wars in Iran and Ukraine are added global motivation for this change.

The velocity and acceleration of CO2 and energy production are the far more important metrics.

>Lets hope we don't reproduce the PT event.

When/if we really need to we can spend tens of billions to fertilize ocean deserts and trigger thousand mile scale algae/jellyfish blooms and maybe nuke a few mountain ranges in the right places to hard accelerate biological and chemical capture of CO2.

If the ice caps actually melt we can replicate the Azolla event when, to simplify, the arctic ocean became much less salty and freshwater essentially duckweed covered the ocean causing global climate change.

Enacting forced major climate change in a restorative direction is entirely within our grasp to prevent mass extinction events, they just have their own caveats which have to make it worth it before we go for it.

"LNG exports from the U.S. have grown dramatically and steadily since 2016. The rate of increase is a stunning 38% year-over-year."

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ianpalmer/2026/05/27/exports-of...

The wars in Iran and Ukraine will increase US fossil fuel exports.

We need global carbon tax, to cause decrease in CO2 emissions, solar energy is not enough.

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