A graph that should be front-page news
lyrebirddreaming.com
lyrebirddreaming.com
Anyway, I scrolled down to the graph and skipped the text. We are currently 4 std deviations above the mean with respect to El Niño temperature.
But there's also a historical line -4 std deviations from the mean. Was that an eventful year too? I can't tell and the graph is at such low resolution that the source URL isn't visible. If the graph and data is so important, shouldn't we care more about presentation? This is either super sloppy or deliberate obfuscation.
Look, I'm all for good reporting on climate. This just doesn't feel like it.
A 3.5-sigma event is a 1-in-1000 chance. Yet we have 2 of them in our data set that goes back only 40ish years? Something is suspect. Maybe I'm not accounting for the likelihood of a random walk excursion probability, but if a 3.5 sigma event isn't a 1-in-1000 event I have difficulty interpreting.
The appearance of two 3.5-sigma events suggests that the data is no longer being randomly generated around that mean, but is instead drifting away from that mean.
More concretely, if all the data were within 2-sigma, then you could invoke the null-hypothesis and refute climate change. Beyond 2-sigma (and even worse two 3.5-sigma events) refuting climate change becomes (much) less reasonable.
Not if the two 3.5-sigma events are in opposite directions, as in this case.
Yes, I'd forgotten that detail. Still, though, chaotic bifurcation could be present with Il Niño and La Niña driving high & low extremes. Same mean, maybe, but with a bimodal distribution?
they gradually swapped in biased thermometers, or the thermometers were always biased to start showing temperature rise around 2026? what motivates thermometers to commit confirmation bias?
can you identify cherry-picked "retired thermometers" from this dataset and earlier ones by the same source(s)?
Fwiw, I am not backing them up, since I do not know what other data they might be referring to (and I am not very knowledgeable in topics within climate science).
Does anyone besides you expect them to demonstrate global warming but please without mentioning temperature - that's obviously cherry-picked of course... /s
Imagine someone else cherry picks the line that is really low and highlights it. Or they pick a different area which shows cooling. Now you have some idiot claiming global cooling.
The thing about cherry picking is that it works so well. When someone pointed out the cherry picked data, you couldn't even come to the conclusion it was cherry picked. And you are on hacker news. Imagine the really really silly people.
Alternatively, since the link that was posted is just an AI copyright theft site, use the original instead: https://climatecasino.substack.com/p/some-monsters-are-real
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48890533
The NextDNS (and others) blocking of archive.today goes back far beyond 2026 and this specific DDOS event. Perhaps that contributed to the hostility behind it, I don't know. But citing that event for other examples does not apply well.
Please do not misinterpret this as an excuse or pardon of anything. I love archive.today and all their subdomains. I use it regularly and have been having problems for years, especially with NextDNS. I am seriously disappointed to learn of the DDOS event, but there remain other angles on the topic in general. I am still struggling to process WTF they would do what you reported -- how could they think that would be worth the consequences, accomplish anything? Almost seems suspicious in itself.
Thanks for the info. But ever a shill for archive.is
Disclaimer: I'm not sponsored by them, nor am I their customer. They just seem cool.
"The human cancer is destructive to every living thing, as humans continue to eat the planet into oblivion. As someone who values “everything else,” I would be one of the first to rally behind the NTHE philosophy if it had any scientific basis at all. I want the human cancer gone from this planet."
https://climatecasino.substack.com/p/unfortunately-the-end-o...
You cannot deduce factual correctness from how "holy" the messenger is.
Probably a desire for a peaceful fading out of the human species rather than a violent one, but it's still far beyond PR naivety.
Now, the author's position is both more and less nihilistic. The author also seems to think that human extinction is unavoidable, but he thinks the timeline is much more dragged out. He also seems to think that this is actually the preferable outcome at this point, given that global warming is our own fault, and that the only thing we should do is try to make it so that the planet is as well as it can be after we are finally gone.
It's on the same topic, possibly spurred by the CC. Yes it uses the same graph (which I presume CC also didn't make), but otherwise the content and writing is very different. It's less detailed, possibly LLM written, but also more approachable.
I guess re-posting about a salient topic is now just "AI copyright theft".
Life (especially sentient animals), on the other hand…
That's a kind of caring, but probably not the sort you were trying to imply.
“Let's be clear. The planet is not in jeopardy. We are in jeopardy. We haven't got the power to destroy the planet - or to save it. But we might have the power to save ourselves.”
But I don't think it's all that interesting of an argument. When people say save/destroy the Earth, they mean humanity. Call that arrogance, but it's true.
He will learn the regret the day he dared say "hey, this graph means we're all gonna die if we don't do something! Look at it!" because we outsmarted him by refusing to look.
Adding heuristics trades accuracy for speed. It's fine to be overloaded and rely on heuristics, but let's call them what they are, shortcuts.
Not saying that the data is not concerning, or that climate warming isn't real, BTW. I'm just saying this particular graph feels fishy.
The Kaibab Plateau deer disaster from 1906 to 1939 also demonstrated boom and bust cycles.
There was a spike in 2021, of course, but the world death rate has been edging up slightly every year since then.
Complexity resists reduction, yet fundamentals that affect change over time exist.
That said, growth seeks to shed restrictions upon it, but unrestricted growth has many suboptimal effects on the area it grows in.
If you propose a system growth effect thesis (established example: the iron law of oligarchy), it's not possible to show its influence both accurately, and in such a way that agrees with most observers. It may not even be useful; it might exist as a concept better in a group relation with other concepts, and focusing on the group might be most useful.
And responses to actions to display a system's properties tend to be about those actions, not about the system.
Some of the most popular responses re: growth are "the area doesn't have a beneficial significance equal to the beneficial significance of the growth", but one is measured essentially to support propaganda, and other is barely measured and poorly understood.
Once you narrow the framing, people criticize the framing as the reality, not its usefulness as a paradidm for the reality of the issue. The map is not the territory; we cannot "describe" reality. We can create interfaces to that reality, we can measure, discuss, theorize about cause and effect, attempt to emulate or simulate to better understand, but responses tend to focus on the interface instead of the reality, and then devolve to epistimelogical "statements about statements" type activity.
Calcium carbonate has the benefit of de acidifying the ocean.
And in the end, all solutions we can attempt are technical and in some aspect untested. We just assume that the consequences of some of those solutions are small enough, but none have really been tested at scale.
That seems to be the case politically. Technically it could be done with the only variable being the time to do so.
One of them requires the entire global population cooperate to burn fewer hydrocarbons. The examples you mentioned were handled in the US by regulating power plant operators and chemical manufacturers.
It's likely / probably unsolvable at this point as we're hitting tipping points for which there is no effective return such as permafrost melting and releasing more co2, causing more heating, melting more co2, etc and partial shutdowns of critical ocean currents. But yeah I know...MUH FREEDOM.
If by "all snow would disappear forever from Earth" you meant "the Arctic could be seasonal-ice-free in the summer" by 2013, then, sure.
"Ignorance is the fundamental lack of knowledge, information, or awareness about a particular subject."
Its not even an evaluation of my side.
I'm fine with accepting that people have to work, are busy with other things, struggle in live etc.
But the sentence in itself is not bad? And it directly references op.
It would be much better to think about novel ways of overcoming the issue and sharing that in the spirit of curious conversation, which is the primary ethos of HN.
After all i didn't create an original comment, i leveraged a response instead.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
And expressing a number as some percentage more or less than another number is a great way to make it meaningless.
I must have confused it with another article, sorry.
we should be pushing for backend changes that are invisible but actually make things better. that means massive subsidies to build out clean power and electrify everything. politicians right now are either doing "think of the corporations we need to leave it up to the market" or insane degrowth proposals or straight climate denial.
the only reason people hate some environmental policies is because they are the wrong ones. we need a wave of green populism thats been missing for decades to scrap unpopular things like ulez, combustion engine bans or individual carbon tax and focus on positive changes people want.
that could be: give away solar panels and two way heat pumps to low-income families, tax the profits of oil and gas companies, enforce right to repair, remove tariffs on chinese car makers if they create jobs in europe, fund train networks to get tickets cheaper than flying, invest in renewable energy to make electricity cheap. theres a lot of options. all of them will lead to some inflation and public debt but there are easy ways to offload that to the rich.
the point is changes that are good for the climate and good for (ordinary, working and middle class) people are better than changes that hurt or just appear to hurt people, even if they are a bit less effective.
As for the "obscenely regulations", I had read this before, but nobody can tell me what are they referring to. Because not to long ago France had a massive problem of corrosion in half their nuclear plants, and currently is having a second one (https://balkangreenenergynews.com/french-power-prices-jump-a...). It seems that "obscenely overcautious regulations" still not enough to catch leaks on time, defects that now threat with a energy crisis in France (and secondarily in Europe).
Nuclear benefits the politicians' vested supporters, major corporations. Renewables are smaller and not vested interests.
> Just let the engineers make the call.
That dangerously assumes that engineers don't have their own biases and corruption. It's hard to fathom that perspective given what everyone can see happening in Silicon Valley for years.
Oh? Do tell.
We have plenty of centi-millionaire individuals in the world. Over ten thousand in the USA alone.
How is ulez unpopular? Its geographical, age or class axis. In some places: like the cities, its extremely popular and extremely unpopular in other places: just outside the cities, especially for people who can't afford electric vehicles. Just cos some people vandalise the cameras, don't make it inherently popular or not. Its just that a very few _really_ don't like it, to the extent they're willing to smash stuff up.
> give away solar panels and two way heat pumps to low-income families, tax the profits of oil and gas companies, enforce right to repair, remove tariffs on chinese car makers if they create jobs in europe, fund train networks to get tickets cheaper than flying, invest in renewable energy to make electricity cheap... there are easy ways to offload that to the rich.
The basic issue remains that if we don't punish people relative to their burning of carbon then we're never gonna deal with climate change. One human can undo the hard work of many in one casual or selfish act. By the sound of international debate on the subject we should probably be investing in geo-engineering instead if we care for outcomes.
For all the presumed benefits of a populist green movement, I doubt it would actually care enough about the root issue and easily yield to self-interest. Every electorate-level conversation about climate change always starts and ends with talking about someone _else's_ carbon usage, never our own. As a species we're simply not mature enough to note what habits we've deeply embedded in our culture that are inherently problematic, like supermarkets.
As a rule most people with a ~10 year old car which runs fine at low cost are going to be frustrated at an extra tax on their vehicle. (It is not like the manufacture of a new electric car is green.)
Ordinary People always were going to have to suffer to migrate off fossil fuels. Expecting them to like it is somewhat hopeful!
It's not just a talking point (see ded comment below), every time we try to publicly survey to implement traffic calming ideas in our city (UK) its a stalemate between in towners and out of towners. Usually the crowds turn up to alternating ballots which is fun. Only thing that upsets me is out of towners talking like literally nobody wants it, which clearly isn't true.
I mean if your commitment to climate change or air quality in cities ends at charging people with vehicles that pollute more to enter the city: then did you have any in the first place?
I am fine with ulez, but it is really important to be clear that people do suffer for it. Not out of towners. Real Londoners - especially with the extension to the outer boroughs.
- Use car less; walk, cycle, or use public transport more - Eat meat & air-freighted food less; eat local/seasonal produce more - Treat household items as disposable less; repair what breaks and buy for longevity more
I am sure there are plenty more, but how to incentivise these things is a hard problem. One exception being food, where you could easily shift agricultural subsidies away from intensive factory farming and towards local/seasonal food (details may be more complex, but it's do-able!)
Europe cannot fix climate change on its own, and we already represent an increasingly small share of total emissions.
The question now is how we get other countries onboard fast, and if they continue to build out cheap coal-fired power stations what are we going to do about it? Something or nothing?
Unless we can get every nation onboard, we should switch strategies to one of managing the inevitable rather than hopeless trying to prevent it. Costly energy policies that reduce global emissions by roughly 0.5% (basically what will happen if the UK ever achieves net-zero) are a total waste of money and time.
Those who care about this issue need to get real and need to stop pretending that the solution is for a few more people in the UK putting solar panels on their roofs. Climate change is a global problem. If your solutions are domestic then they're not serious.
The UK (where I live) emits something like 0.5% of global CO2, but we're one of the largest economies in the world.
If we're going to do anything it seems we should really be doing everything we can to use our economic might to try to do something about that other 99.5%. Where as at the moment we're wasting our time obsessing about how we bring down that 0.5%, and providing an economic horror story for why no other country should replicate what we're doing.
Europe dismantled their own nuclear plants and are actively trying to ban electric vehicles from China.
Getting the rest of the world on board would be much easier when you (presumably are in Europe) are getting your domestic policies right.
There's no need to caveat benefits like this by income - the most popular social programs are almost always universal. Also the added bureaucracy of validating that someone lands in a category isn't worth the overhead. Why wouldn't we want everyone to install more solar panels and two way heat pumps?
Personally rather than giving someone benefits to pay for electricity I'd rather install solar on their roof.
So for a government, this needs not cost more than what they are doing now.
That would have a bunch of advantages such as sounding familiar to leaders whose heyday was in the 1970s, of not making us feel bad about the state of the world, and occasionally giving financial kickbacks to government leaders.
Or... if you don't like this approach, maybe making changes in political leadership is the single most important thing to do.
Besides 'kickbacks' I don't think those reasons have much to do with it. The policy benefits the fossil fuel industries' investors / owners, and follows the rent-seeking, anti-free market theory and practice of many current capitalists (specifically, that's not about capitalism but a current powerful group of capitalists). Those capitalists strongly influence government.
The other effects you mention persuade the public.
EDIT: We might ask, if the above theory is true, why the same rent-seeking capitalists do use that strategy for renewable energy? Maybe those industries, dominated by many non-American companies, are hard to monopolize? But I'm wandering far into speculation.
So maybe just blaming this on a political viewpoint you don't like doesn't actually help anything?
https://www.reddit.com/r/charts/comments/1t5ud20/texas_vs_ca...
Their point is that unpopular climate policies are exactly what is pushing the general populace towards this sort of regressive climate policy you're describing. "Maybe we should make a change in political leadership" is not a productive contribution when the current leadership is the result of bad policy messaging. GP isn't opposing leadership change, they're explaining how to move towards it.
(As much as I'd like to believe that people will just gain an educated understanding of the issues and choose correctly, the unfortunate fact is that real-world politics doesn't work like that, and has to contend with the fact that populism is what wins elections)
You think that won't do anything?
> scrap unpopular things like ulez
> remove tariffs on chinese car makers if they create jobs in europe
> fund train networks to get tickets cheaper than flying
The problem is that most of these (and potentially all of these) ideas sound good, but achieve very little. Some (e.g. right to repair, sadly) will achieve almost nothing at all. This would be a scatter-gun approach at best; at worst, it creates the impression of doing something while actually doing very little.
I don't know what the best solution is. Arguably a genuine carbon tax (one that taxes large producers for the previously-externalised costs of greenhouse gas production, while providing tax cuts to the general population) is the single most effect means of enacting real change. However, Australia demonstrated that even a scheme that results in real, substantial income tax cuts while generating measurable, real reductions in emissions is vulnerable to a scare campaign by a committed, ultra-right attack dog politician.
I strongly suspect that our only potential way out of this now is via geoengineering, and that's fraught with dangers. I am also worried that a lack of government interest in climate change will eventually induce a highly wealthy individual to undertake geoengineering privately, without oversight, scientific input or regulation. But I cannot see the world stopping this any other way, other than by reversing the effects of climate change via nuclear winter.
I'd be curious as to why you say that. I feel that, right now, you would be correct. But if we could move society to a new paradigm where right-to-repair were the default, then cheap non-OEM parts manufacturers would bloom and repairing something would become much cheaper than replacing. Imagine if every object sold had to come with a manual describing how to repair common failures, and a support department to answer for other components.
Personal anecdote: My $700 oven has a microswitch that broke. The oven wouldn't work without it but the replacement part was all of $5. However the vast majority wouldn't know how to repair it.
Expand this to cellphones, computers, tables, wardrobes, cars, tractors and I feel it would have an impact. And... I suppose... my gut feeling is the biggest part of the problem is psychological. People are overwhelmed and don't know what they can do to help. Raising awareness is crucial, but just raising awareness obviously does nothing to reduce CO2 emissions - it's in second order effects when people start thinking harder about what they can do.
Another anecdote: I gave a seminar recently about energy to a small local environmental conference in a nearby town. My starting point was that nobody knows how to talk about energy - we can talk about length, size, weight, cost, speed, age, price, longevity and so, because we know the units - feet or meters, pounds or kilograms, dollars/euros/yen/etc, mph/kph/mps/etc and so on. But ask someone what is a "Joule" or what can you do with a "kilowatt-hour" and you get blank stares. The outcome? I learned of an attendee who drew lines on his kettle for 1-cup, 2-cups, and so on, and now boils only the necessary amount of water. That won't really move the needle on CO2, but it will raise awareness.
That's the reason why. That's just too big of an "if".
Any premise that is predicated on an artificially-induced complete paradigm (counter to the interests of capital, no less) shift to bear significant fruit is pretty much a non-starter. You need incredible buy in for that (which right-to-repair is just too niche to have), and established interests will still push against it every step of the way.
Maybe the EU could do it, but even then I'm skeptical.
How much would this change Niño surface temperatures, you reckon?
Republicans are an anti-tax and to some extent anti-debt constituency. Liberals are also fairly anti-tax, unless it’s limited to taxing the rich. There’s opposition now to all forms of new energy infrastructure: to oil/gas/nuclear from the left and many liberals, to wind/solar from the right.
There are no “easy ways.” Only hard fights, against both sometime allies and longtime political opponents.
Then, the increase from 1.5° to 2° looks much, much larger than the increase from 0° to 0.5°.
So it's misleading in terms of making recent warming seem even worse than it is. Now, of course, you might argue that is justified in spirit because the negative consequences from warming grow faster than linear... but that doesn't make it any less misleading in terms of the temperature change it is communicating.
This is measuring change in degrees from a baseline.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/tompickerell_this-graph-shoul...
The ones steering society choose to crash and ruin everything rather than to jeopardize their positions in power.
That obvious failure in morals and ethics, basic principles of adult responsibility really, is made possible by a lack of rational reflection in the populace.
Objective truth has to take precedence over subjective desires when it comes to existential questions. Currently it does not.
However, the constraints that most people have to contend with do not allow them to be more radical in their calls for change. You saw it in the Gilets Jaunes/Yellow Vests uprising in France, that was motivated not by the passion for IC engines but by the inability to weather the costs of taxation on older vehicles.
The real culprit is far and away corporations that benefit from activities that carry with them extreme effects on the climate, and who can influence both politics and media. The research (sorry for lack of link) that shows that political direction is largely controlled by moneyed interests is not ambiguous.
I do agree that the populace also deserves some of the blame however: regular renewals of electronic devices, and especially the continuing consumption of animal products, is a moral failure justified only by pleasure.
When you paint people as being "disallowed" from more radical actions, the same question of true importance arises? The current trajectory leads to Armageddon, plain and simple.
My point here thus is about the proper scale on which people place the topic.
It's not a "lifestyle choice" to doom humanity's children to ruin.
Placing responsibility with the irresponsible is a cop-out.
I don't have data on the West specifically, but I'd be surprised if it's not 99%. "Free range" animals are largely a fiction.
Animals being used for pasture grazing, for the benefit of the climate, could be understandable, but I think enslavement and torture of 200+ billion animals annually is a moral failure that goes far beyond its effects on CO2 ppm.
The economic reality is perfectly compatible with finite reality, because growth is not a function of resources.
An email is more economically valuable than a paper mail despite requiring much less resources (and leading to a much less CO2 emission)
I don't. Perpetual growth is incompatible with finite resources. Fortunately, human flourishing does not depend on infinite economic growth; there is, for example, enough food for everyone on the planet. Capitalism is just bad at allocating resources by any metric other than its own. (Yes yes, it's better that feudalism was. I think we can hold ourselves to a higher bar than that.)
This is not necessary at all for economic growth to be infinite. Food prices can "inflate" and so stay at, let's say 20%, of the economy while the amount of physical food being produced remains flat year after year. That's sort of what's happening with housing, education, and healthcare already.
I think seeing prices go up like this makes people unhappy, but what really matters is what portion of a person's income this stuff occupies.
This is a bold claim: I do not believe that if all remaining fossil fuels had vanished overnight that growth would remain identical.
„Infinite growth is impossible on planet with finite resources” is nice buzzphrase, but upon closer inspection it makes literally zero sense. Fortunately people will never accept degrowthers’ postulates.
You again say "it's absurd" and provide no argument. I think the case is not as clear cut as you would like it to be. Solar energy is not an infinite resource.
Yes, if you actually mean infinite growth it’s true. And that’s what I find absurd - why would you care about infinite growth? If you actually care about infinity, then even if you degrowth you will run out of resources because guess what - resources are finite, so the use of resources will have to also be arbitrarily small and asymptotically approach zero!
An economic system based on perpetual growth can never reach a steady state, unless you believe that physical goods can become an arbitrarily small portion of the economy.
That's an absurd argument, though. The problem we have right here, right now, is capitalism destroying the habitability of our planet because its hunger for resources must always grow, so it's unable to handle the problem of fossil fuel use, or stop depleting soil, etc.
You're arguing against jumping out of the way of a moving train because we're not immortal.
Yes, exactly! Talking about infinite growth or infinite existence is really stupid and that’s my point!
But let's grant "both systems eventually run out of resources" for the sake of argument. The rate at which that happens then becomes clearly relevant, and if staying alive is good (I hope we can at least agree on that), using resources slower is better. Capitalism is depleting resources on a human timescale (as, again, we are currently experiencing with climate change), so instead depleting them on longer-than-human timescales is clearly the better option.
> But let's grant "both systems eventually run out of resources" for the sake of argument. The rate at which that happens then becomes clearly relevant, and if staying alive is good (I hope we can at least agree on that), using resources slower is better. Capitalism is depleting resources on a human timescale (as, again, we are currently experiencing with climate change), so instead depleting them on longer-than-human timescales is clearly the better option.
But you were talking about INFINITE growth, not exponential and those are two completely different things! Exponential growth will become infinite only if you have infinite time frame! So can we agree than "infinite growth is impossible on a planet with finite resources" is really dumb argument, because capitalism does not require infinite growth at all? Then we'll be able to move on to exponential growth.
China ostensibly cares, their five year plans drawn up by committees of Engineers (Civil, Mechanical, Electrical) and Scientists are on an arc to minimise reliance on fossil fuels and transition to renewables (wind, solar), and nuclear.
There are strategic reasons for this, of course.
> Isnt China far worse thsn the US?
"It's complicated"
* Historically the US is responsible for a greater mass of the CO2 humans have added to the atmosphere.
* Currently, China is adding more per annum (and India is in the bleeding edge mix also, as is Australia) in absolute terms, but still less(?) in per capita terms (having a much much larger population).
* China is still using coal (although they are on the cusp of peaking their use) - that gets thrown at them a lot, the caveats are
-- China shut down a lot of badly polluting inefficient coal power plants.
-- China opened up a lot of more up to date less polluting but still coal power plants.
-- China is using these to power all manner of stuff including the build out of the largest renewable power components production line in the world.
-- Coal is set to be phased out "soon" (and it seems to be slowly going that way, see peaked comment above).
* A lot of China's CO2 emissions are a direct result of their mineral processing, production, and assembly of the rest of the world's consumption.
( eg: The case can be argued that the fall in US per capita CO2 emissions is a result of US consumption now being met by manufacturing that has moved from the US to China)
There are literal books and stacks of research papers arguing about each point mentioned above - and that's just skimming the surface.
That’s a really nice way of saying “their usage is currently at an all time high and will go up further”.
They don’t get to take credit for a potential future action.
So no, their usage is not at an all time high. It is below the high and on trend to continue falling.
They can take credit for past and current actions that are part of a long term plan that includes future action.
Carbon declining from car usage switching to electric and moving to more efficient fuel plants is the decrease you’re thinking of.
Coal is still growing there, but the upside is it’s growing slightly slower than renewables so at least as a percentage it’s declining.
Unfortunately that just means their demand increased YoY so they had to build both dirty and clean energy.
This view makes it obvious because coal is at the bottom of the stack: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:China-electricity-pr...
"In 2025, China's coal-fired power generation dropped by 1.9%, the first decrease since 2015, despite its energy demands has increased by 5% during that same year. According to Wood Mackenzie, the drop was attributed to a rapid increase in new non-fossil generation that has "finally outpaced demand growth", while coal plants had been operating at lower utilisation rates and being used more for grid flexibility and peak demand rather than baseload generation."
The graph you linked to conveniently ends right at peak coal consumption. If you go find the data for the last two years that are missing from that graph, coal consumption has been reduced.
You are all over this thread shitting on China unconditionally. We get it, you don't like China. But when your own sources disprove the point you are trying to make, it might be time to re-evaluate your position and probably the news sources that dictated that position to you. What was correct a decade ago, is very much false today, and the trend line is accelerating away from your feelings.
China actively built coal and continues to build coal fired generation far beyond the rest of the world.
The fact that the public charts are missing the recent decline is my mistake.
I don’t hate China, I hate people that pretend to care about the environment that glaze China when it’s very clear China optimized for its own citizens in the face of the west trying to grapple with climate change and is only now showing some signs of pivot with solar being cheap enough.
>What was correct a decade ago, is very much false today, and the trend line is accelerating away from your feelings.
I’m the one that gave a trend line. Your response was that it has slightly declined at the very end and the chart isn’t up to date. I don’t think you know what a trend line is.
Put your additional year or two on the end and it will just look like every other slight reprieve. Draw an actual, you know, moving average or anything else that establishes a “trend” and you’ll see China is not reacting to climate change very quickly.
Largest country in the world is the largest emitter. Quelle surprise. Does Vatican City get a prize for being the smallest emitter?
> long after the west realized how bad climate change was and was trying to correct them.
The West led by the US whose adminstration currently denies the existence of climate change? Whose emissions drop was due to the fracking boom and natural gas becoming cheaper than coal? Let's not break our arms patting ourselves on the back. If fracking hadn't been invented how much coal would the US be burning today?
China burns coal because they have coal. If they had natural gas their emissions would be lower too. They know coal is bad and as you've admitted yourself, their coal use is down in 2025. It's projected to decrease even further by 2035.
They're deploying solar and wind and nuclear at a never-seen-before pace. Their factories produce plentiful cheap panels and batteries and EVs that the rest of the world can use to decarbonize - so at least there's a point to "the highest emissions in the world". The US is approving data centers with on-site gas turbines, and paying off windmill operators to shut down.
They are not the same.
> it’s very clear China optimized for its own citizens
Every country is supposed to do that. The current US administration is acting against its citizens' interests with its crusade against solar and wind energy.
> in the face of the west trying to grapple with climate change
How is the west doing that? All I see are more SUVs and people protesting solar generation facilities in the country and calling renewable energy and bike lanes "woke" or some nonsense.
> [China] is only now showing some signs of pivot with solar being cheap enough.
Who made solar so cheap, I wonder? Was it an accident or part of multiple 5-year plans that anyone can read?
And "some signs" is possibly the biggest understatement I've seen all year. They install more solar than the rest of the world combined.
Please, please re-examine your biases. Stop repeating the same conservative media lies. Start looking at the data objectively.
Nope, because they are irrelevant in the scheme of sources of CO2. Tons emitted is all that matters.
>The West led by the US whose adminstration currently denies the existence of climate change? Whose emissions drop was due to the fracking boom and natural gas becoming cheaper than coal? Let's not break our arms patting ourselves on the back. If fracking hadn't been invented how much coal would the US be burning?
The west, as in Europe (and the US before Trump) who began all of the initiatives to track CO2, the impacts of global warming, clean energy alternatives, etc. All of the solar tech that China is deploying today is paid for by the hundreds of failed startups pushing the technology forward in the 2000-2012 era.
>China burns coal because they have coal.
That’s not an excuse. Australia gets a middle finger as well for because they have a shitload of coal and also take the attitude of “we might as well burn it since we have it”. That’s literally the opposite of being proactive.
If you only build renewable to deal with a shortage of fossil fuels, then you’re not addressing global warming. You’re just doing the very normal economic incentive thing.
>Their factories produce panels and batteries and EVs that the rest of the world can use to decarbonize - so at least there's a point to "the highest emissions in the world".
Depends on how dirty the energy is for those. If more emissions come from manufacture and transport than are saved by the panel+storage, it would have been better for the recipient to burn fossil fuels.
>The US is approving data centers with on-site gas turbines, and paying off windmill operators to shut down.
Yes, it’s disgusting and everyone in the Bay Area that used to pretend about global warming who is now working for companies expanding for AI can get fucked.
>They are not the same.
They are not, but holy shit China is also terrible. The difference is that China has a track record of destruction over the last 25 years while climatologists screamed from the rooftops. It’s going to take 15 years even at their ambitious pace to unwind the expansion of emissions in the last 15. That’s the problem with climate change, it doesn’t matter if you increase solar production until you actually get rid of the coal burning.
So if China split up into 200 countries, they are irrelevant? The US and Europe are ahead in cumulative emissions even today. If "tons emitted is all that matters" then that's who is the most responsible. All the carbon is still in the atmosphere.
> If you only build renewable to deal with a shortage of fossil fuels, then you’re not addressing global warming.
Why the heck not? Whatever happened to "tons emitted is all that matters"? Who cares why you build renewables as long as you build them?
> You’re just doing the very normal economic incentive thing.
The US reduces emissions because natural gas is cheaper - "The West took steps to fight climate change". China goes solar because it's cheaper - "Well they're just looking out for #1, they don't really care about the environment".
Bit of a double standard there, no?
> All of the solar tech that China is deploying today is paid for by the hundreds of failed startups pushing the technology forward in the 2000-2012 era.
Really they produced panels that cheap in 2012? I didn't see them. And China has produced zero innovations in solar tech or battery tech?
> Australia gets a middle finger as well for because they have a shitload of coal
You mean the highest per-capita deployer of solar energy today? In your worldview it seems countries are only allowed economic development on your terms that you've set because they make you look better than everyone else.
> If more emissions come from manufacture and transport than are saved by the panel+storage, it would have been better for the recipient to burn fossil fuels.
Fortunately fictional hypotheticals don't happen, so it's all good. You speak as though producing and transporting fossil fuels is emissions-free.
> China is also terrible. The difference is that China has a track record of destruction over the last 25 years
And "The West" has a much longer track record than that. Again we see your bias. No one is without blame but you seem eager to assign disproportionate blame to one country because of this bias.
> while climatologists screamed from the rooftops
And US voters gleefully voted in multiple climate change denying administrations.
> That’s the problem with climate change, it doesn’t matter if you increase solar production until you actually get rid of the coal burning.
The difference is that China is realistically on a path to end coal burning. The US is not currently on track to stop burning natural gas and gasoline, given its refusal to consider, indeed its active sabotage of, alternatives.
I don’t know how China could possibly be considered worse except that they historically used coal, and are rapidly transitioning away.
The only framework that makes sense in is one that allows global warming as long as we all do it equally.
Has the US done either of those things? Now that would've been a worthy use of tariffs.
That's fossil fuel industry funded psyops.
We have to kill this thing before it kills us. There have to be better things to base an economy on (consent? reciprocity? Foresight?).
It feels like we are at the point where we should be talking a lot more about how live decent lives assuming that prevention and mitigation are unlikely.
I live in the PNW on the Canadian side of the border (PSW?) where people have argued that we might be a climate change safe haven due to plentiful water and a temperate climate. That hasn’t stopped us from having extreme weather events. In the past five years we have seen a heat wave that killed hundreds, floods that cut us off from the rest of Canada for weeks, concerns about water supply since our summer water supply relies on snowmelt, and we are getting less snow and more rain in the winter. Fire and dangerous smoke over huge parts of the province is now a given from mid July onwards.
The list goes on, but the point is that there is no avoiding its effects.
Then a hurricane went where it had never gone before and wrecked their entire neighborhood.
It’s hard to know exactly how a complex chaotic system is going to react when inputs change. And it only takes one outlier to cause a lot of harm on a local human scale.
This is why so much effort goes into computer modeling of the climate BTW. We know our emissions are changing the climate. But predicting local effects is damn hard.
> It's not a forecast. It's not a simulation of what might happen decades from now. These are...
It doesn't do a good job of establishing trends and its sample size is too low to discern how significant of an outlier this is.
Actually there is a similar outlier on the bottom of the graph, which suggests the current outlier might not actually be that significant. And that's definitely not the story intended by the author.
https://www.lyrebirddreaming.com/post/el-ni%C3%B1o-isn-t-an-...
It’s not easy right now because of the funding and political climate, but you can find work where success is measured by metrics like “gallons of diesel not burned.”
Start here: https://climatebase.org
You point at the actual problem yourself: political obstruction and funding going to the opposite.
The relevant issues here are ironically precisely those you can solve by discussing them on the internet.
They are caused by people not thinking right and having their emotions cross-wired.
They can be solved by correcting those errors in reasoning and setting evaluations right. Via discussion.
Rather than using reason to get people to surmount their "emotions" and to "think right", I'd argue we rather need to frame the issue in terms of their self-interest, and to try to persuade and convince not them but rather their tribal leaders.
We shouldn’t HAVE to do this, our politicians should represent our desires and our long term necessities. But that’s clearly not an easy problem to solve, and it sure doesn’t seem to be going in the right direction.
So RND to push the economy makes perfect sense to me as a way to fight this from the other direction.
Making electricity more 'green' is of course necessary but on the backdrop of the current capitalistic system, it will simply lead to more electricity being consumed. See current uptake by LLM data centers.
The good news: there’s a lot to build, a lot to invent, and a lot of work to do, and the solutions to these problems are not present in the training data. If you’re worried about how you’re going to pay the bills now that AI ate your job writing glue code for some niche subscription SaaS product, here’s your answer.
standard deviation is a measure that informs about the distribution. A high standard deviation means a "wide bell curve". A low standard deviation means that all values are closely clustered around the middle of the curve.
So if your value is 2 x standard deviation (for example) that means it is a relatively rare outlier, since 2 x standard deviation covers 95% of the bell curve. In particle physics I believe they require 5 standard deviations to confirm an observation.
The baseline of 0.0 represents the average of all years. Anything above / below the baseline is a (standard) deviation from the average. The blue lines are the individual years since 1991 [1] while the red line is the year 2026.
If a line is above the baseline, then the sea-surface temperature was hotter on that day than average. If below, it was cooler than average.
The year 2026 is an outlier, dwarfing all the others starting around June / July. The Nino 3.4 sea-surface temperature is significantly hotter than any previous year during that time. New record, I guess?
[1]: I'm confused about the two date ranges given: 1982-2026 and 1991-2020. I'm assuming this graph is based on measurements from 1982-2026 to calculate the average, but the lines shown are only from 1991-2020, for some statistical reason I don't understand.
There's is an interactive chart that's easier to understand
That's what El Niño is about: instead of declining after a peak in June, temperature plateaus and then rise again later in the year.
So the fact that the Pacific is much hotter than it was in 2015 is particularly scary, because it leads us to believe that it will also be this hotter than 2015 in November.
The graph has a key on the right hand side that clearly labels each colour of line, and the horizontal axis is scaled in months of each year. Scrolling down gets you notes and links to data sources.
In answer to another poster in this thread, the dataset only reaches back to 1983, I'm assuming because that is when they started monitoring these temperatures?
Heh.. Maybe in future we'll see wars being fought not over access to fossil fuels, but over attempts to stop other countries from pumping more fossils out of the ground.
"What the planet is going to experience over the next 12 months is just a preview of the movie that’s coming. Godzilla is going to return, and return, and return and return … and as bad as the movie gets, we won’t be able to walk out of the theater."
That's the scary bit: no escape hatch. We're all in this together.
That's why international co-operation on climate change should NOT be opt-in. Your countries' freedom to emit greenhouse gasses ends where my countries' (future) safety is at stake.
In fact, any scheme like this will almost certainly be used to forcibly prevent development in already impoverished nations.
According to one comment on the site, the 3.5 means "3.5 times the SD", which makes much more sense to me.
I initially tried to make sense of "SD being 3.5 on that day of the year", which seems to be a wrong interpretation.
3.5 what, according to you?
You're reading this graph wrong: we're currently 3.63 standard deviation above the mean.
It's clearer on the original article[1] that this AI-generated blog is taking the graph from, the average temperature on the period at this time of the year is around 27.5°, the ocean is almost at 29.5°, just short of 2°C above average, and the standard deviation is 0.55°C.
[1]: https://climatecasino.substack.com/p/some-monsters-are-real
Edit: note that the original article is 6 days old, and we've unfortunately crossed the 2°C threshold right after it was posted, so the situation of even direr than described: https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/?dm_id=nino3.4
The title of the figure is ambiguous about what "SD" really means but I guess it is plotting the number of standard deviations of the 1991-2020 data measured from the mean of that data and plotted per day for the 1982-2026 data.
Here's the link that I read off the figure.
https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/json_2clim/oiss...
Going up the URL path I get redirected to here:
https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/?dm_id=world2
That shows measured temperature and 2026 as very hot (surprise) and in fact is the hottest to date for June+July. The standard deviation of that data is not 3.5 C but something less than 1.0 C. It is plausible that current temperature is about 3.5 sigma from the selected mean.
It's worth recognizing that the analysis is applying a biased conclusion prior to making the plot. It singles out post 2020 data to compare to pre-2020 data. and then concluding the held out data is a significant deviation with a cause. It almost certainly is but this is not a proper way to analyze data (unless one is pushing an agenda, be that for good or bad).
I think the sst_daily plot stands on its own without crafting this SD plot to emphasize the point. Especially when the accompanying text doesn't even explain it. It's a disingenuous message.
I think this kind of writing is low quality.
The language is too strong for the context. Author uses religious imagery, prognosticates about an Armageddon scenario, and does so based on a relatively short time series.
This substack article also comes with additional graphs, a much better story flow (data is progressively introduced and explained before reaching the final plot), and was posted 2 days before the OP. I agree with GP that it is significantly superior to the OP (which is likely AI slop). Thanks for posting it.
Way, way, way, way overstated. The graph shows a comparison to an average over a few decades. Human civilization is thousands of years old. Does anyone have a graph of what all the El Ninos since the last Ice Age ended have looked like? Of course not. Nobody has that kind of temperature data.
This Wikipedia article has a graph of the last 2000 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_surface_temperature
And yes, I am aware that earth has possibly been covered in ice/slush and also that the avg global temp has been 10C (or more) higher than it is now, but humans were not around for either scenario.
Reconstructed from proxies. Not all experts in the field agree on how reliable the proxies actually are, especially over such long time periods.
I'm embarrassed for my industry. I'm shocked how many climate denialists there are among engineers and programmers.
We migrate to renewables (solar, wind, geothermal, hydro) and less-polluting baseload (nuclear).
We run desalination plants with the energy.
We quit running farms in deserts (California almond farmers).
We take energy load and run CO2 scrubbers with leftover energy.
We put quotas on how much CO2 you can emit. None of this goofy selling CO2 credits. If you make more CO2, you buy local scrubbers and run them.
The problems aren't climate healing rules. The problem is governments and incumbent companies, and the idea we can't change things rapidly. Or the fact that a company might lose money (or make, GASP, less profit)
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-16/nsw-bureau-of-meterol...
Not that it lead to any particular action or recognition.
From: https://climatecasino.substack.com/p/some-monsters-are-real
[instrumental intro]
[bridge]
[VERSE 1: judges] Sanction the judges War crimes didn’t happen That’s all you need to know In this controversial matter.
Sanction the judges War crimes disappear Livestreamed in 4K Still don't see clear
[bridge] [instrumental]
[REFRAIN] That was a verse Now this is refrain Follow the narrative From truth refrain.
[bridge] [instrumental]
[VERSE 2: reality] Sanction reality It’s easier that way Moral clarity Concerns go away
Sanction reality Money will follow Don’t follow the money Morality hollow
[bridge] [instrumental]
[REFRAIN] That was a verse Now this is refrain Follow the narrative From truth refrain.
[bridge] [instrumental]
[VERSE 3: Albanese]
Sanction Albanese Her weapon is a pen Research and legalese Her reports contain
Sanction Albanese Political tool Rubio by Chinese He is sanctioned too
[bridge] [instrumental]
[REFRAIN] That was a verse Now this is refrain Follow the narrative From truth refrain.
[bridge] [instrumental]
[VERSE 4: Climate]
Sanction the climate But climate doesn’t care No speech, no objections It just comes in waves
Sanction the climate NASA is wrong Moon sixty nine Now facts are gone
[bridge] [instrumental]
[REFRAIN] That was a verse Now this is refrain Follow the narrative From truth refrain.
[bridge] [instrumental]
[Final verse]
The system was broke Sanctions were a joke Reality arrives Humanity thrives Your heart knows the truth It's beyond the proof
[bridge] [instrumental]
Your heart knows the truth It's beyond the proof
[bridge] [instrumental]
[instrumental drum and bass]
[outro]
It takes the form of a super El Nino the likes of what is happening right now.
https://www.agriculture.com/weather/news/dust-bowl-coming-in...
But I tend to dismiss findings like this that don't explain why they chose a very specific dates as the baseline.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48891223
…as it looks pretty innocuous to me. And more importantly, your other comments aren’t obnoxious. :-) I’d love to know the heuristic that flipped that bit on that one comment.
https://www.whoi.edu/science/B/people/kamaral/1982-1983ElNin...
So maybe the data starts there in order to distort it, or to balance it, or maybe we started recording data properly in that year because El Niño got alarming. Seems relevant somehow anyway.
> The City of Cape Town began experiencing a drought in 2015, the first of three consecutive years of dry winters brought on possibly by the El Niño weather pattern and perhaps by climate change
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Town_water_crisis
It's quite possible that this one could worse.
It's going to be a good summer, I can't wait.
I think I can guess the answer to this. It's an easy extrapolation of the past.
Stopped asking this question a long time ago.
It’s over.
The key problem is that AI have no “idea” of how to build an argument, so it just rephrases the same ideas over and over in different forms. There's no direction, no structure, it's just rambling.
And the band played on.
No AC is going to save European from that. In fact, it is American AC which is the main cause of it. They dumped all that energy and greenhouse gases and Europeans are the one impacted by these externalities.
For some context: the conversation about climate change in general, and the recent heatwaves in particular, has been (quite cynically, but cleverly) reframed by far-right parties to be all about "we need to put AC in France to survive heatwaves".
This is smart because it addresses on the physical sensations of people (it's the third heatwave since end of may, and counting), it has an element of truth (AC is critically lacking in schools), it seems much more "down to earth" than the grand plans of "decarbonization", and it makes other political parties look out of touch (the left and greens have been criticizing AC because of the energy impact.)
Of course, this is both "smart" and incredibly cynical, given that the far right has been on the edge (or not so much on the edge) of climate denial for years. So year, "climate changes is not real" turned into "why didn't they put AC everywhere ?" then "vote for us, we'll put AC everywhere !"
This is also very short sighted.
But I guess no one has found a way to ask our future president (Marine Le Pen, twice convicted of embezzlement, waiting to know if she will have to run for President with a "jail from home" tracker, etc...) what exact amount of "putting AC and kicking immigrants out" is going to avoid Fontainebleau forest from burning.
(Also, since those people are incredibly "lucky", I can only imagine what will happen if we learn that the fire was volontary, and the arsonist was an immigrant... )
The only "consolation" is that El Nino is coming back, and she takes office on the 15th of may, so _she_ will have to deal with at least a couple heatwaves between 2027 and 2037...
Back in the day, everyone used fossil fuels to heat their homes. Back in those days, AC was frowned upon as inefficient, wasteful and decadent. Something only Americans did. The greens despised them for ecological reasons. The right despised them for moral reasons.
Then the public came to know about climate change and it was decided that people should transition to using heat pumps for heating their homes. Because heat pumps are efficient, green and a necessary sacrifice of money you have to do to combat climate change.
Now with this year's heat wave, suddenly there was a discussion even among the greens about having AC in buildings as a necessary adaptation to rising temperatures. And demands by the right to get rid of the AC stigma and deploy AC everywhere. And back in the corner, there were experts laughing out loud, because a heat pump is just an "evil" AC running in reverse. Has been all along. The only problem is that usually heat pumps were deployed in such a way that you couldn't use them to cool in the summer...
Which imho goes to show that the public urgently needs more scientific and technical literacy.
I keep hearing that, and then I keep hearing people tell me that you can't just put an heat pump, run it in "reverse" and "pretend" to have AC. That seems to be a case where the theory is here, but in practice the applicances are just optimized for one part, or the other.
(Also, heating is often done by heating water in radiators, and cooling by cooling the air.
It may seems stupid, but I still can fathom whether the same applicance can do both ! Or, if I want to do the right thing, and replace both my no-very-old gas boiler AND my pretty-old AC, can I put a single heat pump ?)
In Australia we have had reverse cycle air conditioning for decades. These are heat pumps that both heat and cool. I have 15kW of installed heat pump tech at home and run my whole house off grid, despite mainta8ning a grid connection. The systems run as heaters in winter, and air conditioning in summer. They are very efficient, enough so that I dont worry about our solar and battery being able to keep up.
The appliances are very common, and Ive seen them throughout much of Asia, too. Its like Europe and the US are just discovering this tech, yet its been reachable by half the world's population for 30+ years, and continues to improve.
It's almost as if the climate is warming in accordance to what physicist have been saying for 30 years.
"Qui aurait pu prévoir ?", as the other one would have said (sorry for the franco-french reference. And I know we'll "regret" the guy next year...)
What's more, most heating techs only know about water heating and are unable to solder a refrigerant pipe. So it is hard to find someone to install a split AC or split heatpump, and your average heating tech won't even mention anything about cooling because he can't install it and your existing setup might have to be redone anyways.
It's almost as if the Australian and Asian climate are different from the European one...
Fontainebleau forest, vs. the Australian Outback, what's the difference, really?
The easiest and cheapest way to get such a device is to get an air-air AC unit. More than 90% do have a reverting valve and can heat and cool. All of them will be efficient in both functions. Just look at the SEER and COOP values or the A+/A++/A+++/A+++++++ ridiculousness/efficiency scales ;)
Those air-air heatpumps/AC units can do both because they basically have the same radiator on both sides, and the same condensation removal system. Sometimes the cooling is a little more efficient, sometimes the heating is. This basically depends on the refrigerant used and on the local climate you are using the unit in.
Condensate is the reason that at least in Germany, you sometimes cannot do both. The usual heatpump you buy around here is an air-water heatpump. Meaning the outdoor unit is coupled via outdoor air. The indoor unit distributes it's energy through water, usually in water radiators or in-floor heating. Problem with that is that those water radiators are not suited to be run with cold water for cooling, and those in-floor heating systems usually aren't as well. Why? Because water will condense on those cold surfaces during summer, run off into your flooring and cause rot there. If you paid attention to make your flooring condensate-proof or have even more cooling surfaces from in-wall or in-ceiling loops, you can also run cooling this way. But most people can't.
So yes, you could do both if you put in a single air-air heatpump / AC. In certain rare circumstances you might also do it with an air-water heatpump.
Oh, and there is the theoretical option to do air-air and air-water with the same single outdoor unit and multiple air-based indoor units and one or two water-based indoor units that create warm water for heating and piping. Look for multi-split systems. But for the usual small single-family homes, those aren't cost efficient. They are therefore usually only offered for commercial applications such as hotels. But they have nice advantages like using the heat produced from the AC to heat the water used for the showers and stuff.
Europeans dumped plenty of greenhouse gases themselves.
Yeah we are on track to get to a point where Earth heating up is irreversible before Artificial super intelligence can come to aid to solve it. In fact, our datacenter buildout using gas and coal as primary energy makes this worse.
I think about Fermi Paradox a lot. The tragedy of commons when it comes to capitalism may very well one of the reasons why Dinosaurs may have a longer species lifespan than Homosapiens.
The change happens too slowly, but reversal takes global coordination which humans as a species aren't great at. Especially when anyone not coordinating may be economically advantaged.
So being in New Orleans is a mixed bag for me.
Btw, Can you tell me how ancient temperature is measured from ice cores? My lookup only says we can detect atmospheric composition, and not temperatures from the ice cores.
I only reject using them for certain things that require vastly more reliable data. And I am not making the mistake of relying on unreliable data just because it is the best we can manage.
Also why don't you answer my question about ice cores?
This is fairly 1:1 linkage, and the Earth-heating effect of atmospheric CO2 was established in what, early 20th century or so?
But this seems to imply that global temperatures are only dependent on CO2 levels. That is a pretty flawed assumption...
It's called science for a reason... (not back-of-a-napkin stuff)
See, since it seems that you are convinced yourselves, can you tell me how accurately the past temperature can be assessed by using this method? I mean +/- how many degrees?
Can you tell me how many research papers on this specific subject you have read, before coming to that conclusion?
Hint: chances are you're correct (!). Size of the error bars, timeframe(s) talked about, how data was gathered, how results were processed etc, that is what such papers are about. Educate yourself! (Wikipedia is usually a good start)
Not to things occurring when your great-great-great-great... (repeat a couple 1000x) ...great-great-great-grandparents were around.
Maybe you'd be so kind & at least check part of a Wikipedia article?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleoclimatology#Reconstructin...
10min to go from clueless to "I've read something about how this knowledge came about".
That we cannot accurately look into the past unless we explicitly record it, is something that I experience on a daily basis.
Seriously, if you are so convinced, then why don't you just give me an accuracy measure and reasons to support it? I am not interested in anymore articles that does not contain an explicit accuracy claims and reasons to support the same.
So please understand this. It is not that I am questioning the existence of such techniques. I am questioning their accuracy/reliability..
That is fine. Scientists do the same, all the time.
> we cannot accurately look into the past unless we explicitly record it
Please allow me an opportunity to enlighten you:
We cannot look into the past unless it is recorded somehow.
Note the absence of "we" in the recording part. Also note "somehow" may happen in many different ways.
Sensor data, satellite measurements, ice cores, fossilized creatures captured in stone, slices of tree trunks, samples of minerals whose radioactivity decayed over millenia, history books or landscape features, are just different types of records. Each with their own set of properties (accuracy being 1 of them).
So I am aware. The "we" is important because I said "accurately". When "we" set up the recording, we can make it to record with the required precision. Inferring measurements from incidental things can give the required precision, but it should be justified.
https://www.antarcticglaciers.org/glaciers-and-climate/ice-c...
I think this is also flawed, because this computation requires the ratio of the isotopes in the atmosphere at the period of interest, which we don't have. And the people making this measurement just seem to assume it would certain value derived from the present, which is also unreliable...
So yea, all things considered, pretty unreliable..
Also share if this accuracy requires any implicit assumptions. For example, "If we assume that X today is true then it is true back then as well" where X is not a physical constant...
There are no proxies that record monthly water temperature. Only second order effects that are at best weakly correlated with water temperature.
Under what circumstances would 29 years be an insufficient mean to compare to the last few years? Precisely those circumstances in which the climate had changed.
> This isn't climate, it's weather.
- How independent are measurements of different years?
- Has there been a systematic change in the distribution mean?
- Has there been a systematic change in the distribution variance?
- Was there a good reason to assume that the temperature distribution would be normally distributed to begin with? (Maybe there are strong non-additive effects.)
In any case, it's clear that assuming the observed temperatures in the 1991-2020 range follow a normal distribution and temperatures outside that date range will follow the same distribution is a bad model of reality.
Why care for current iterations of nature, when we will all get to experience infinite varities of it as immortal digital consciousnesses?
The /s tag weakens the post. Glad to see I got downvotes--hopefully a few of these incredibly wealthy people in positions of power had to, for even a brief moment, consider their beliefs.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/01/climate/ocean-observatori...
That there are deviations from the median is a normal statistical thing. Even deviations beyond 3 sigma. It happens. That's statistics. Those deviations might even be frequent more or less frequent than your statistics table says, because the data might not follow a gaussian normal distribution. See the graph, there is a -3.5 deviation in there...
What would be an interesting graph is: From 1982 to 2026 on the x-axis, plot the yearly maximum and minimum daily sigma and the median. Or just plot all the overlapping segments from the original graph as a continuous sequence. That way one could see periodicity, rising and falling of those values and the overall change over time. (Edit: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48890590 for much better graphs)
But that graph is useless to convey any information beyond "well this year the line goes up". The article also does nothing to really explain the statistical background. Quite the contrary.
The article shows things that the graph doesn't illustrate at all: Like "This is why graphs like this matter [...] What they show is that Earth is moving beyond the range within which modern human civilisation developed.". Like fucking hell it doesn't! The graph starts in 1982! Modern human civilization started in 1982?
Like "The tropical Pacific is thus no longer oscillating around a climate that existed a century ago. It's oscillating around a much warmer baseline.". Well, and why then does this graph start in 1982? Why can't you show that century?
Like "The red line is this year. It doesn't just set a new record. It has departed entirely from the range of previous observations.". No, it fucking doesn't!. Look at the graph, there is a line at -3.5 sigma! Well within range. And even so, it's statistics, outliers are to be expected.
What this article and this graph need is a permanent relocation to the trash can. And a lesson for the author in science. Real science, not misleading propaganda that hurts the cause more than it helps.
#LiarDreaming
it doesn't say what year is that though.
What can scientists do? Even if they are 100% right and can prove it, they have no power to do anything. Governments of the top countries are puppets of the US, so there’s not much to do. Other governments are dealing with more mundane problems. And the “A fucked up planet affects everyone equally” is just not true. Billionaires can live in a fucked up planet just fine. They don’t even need people (as demonstrated by AI and its goal of replacing workers). They truly don’t care about us. And if the worst forecast for the planet is to come, they also won’t care (they would just live to their fullest while they can)
The people who truly don't care are not in the US; they're China and India, whose per capita CO2 emissions are exploding to the upside. China alone makes up like a third of the world's emissions. They don't talk about cutting emissions but about slowing their growth, and yet people are upset at US politicians as the US is busy meeting climate goals it doesn't even profess (and which don't bind China). When you look at actual data, the people you're blaming aren't the ones you should be blaming.
- Per capita: US has the highest emissions: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita
- Cumulative, US has the highest emissions: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co-emissions?c...
As a European, we have the same thing going on, except we're usually saying "let the US and China do it first", but our cumulative baggage is also pretty big.
In some way, the US and EU are even MORE responsible for reducing emissions and cleaning up their mess, because they reaped all the benefits of a high GDP because of massive burning of fossil fuels without investing heavily into renewable infrastructure.
In the face of what is advertised as an existential global threat, the argument that the Chinese should be excused for failing to curb their emissions, on the grounds that others in the past also emitted, contradicts the idea that emissions pose an existential global threat.
We could build out private solar farms though.
/The Ministy for the Future/ also contains a grassroots group that does something implementable by individuals and extremely effective.
These are the types of solutions we should be cheering, because people voluntarily chose the less-CO2 product due to its appeal. No heavy handed laws required.
Deploy solar everywhere. On roofs (inefficient), plug in solar, vertical solar, solar on reservoirs, highways. Everywhere. Use excess production!
Phase 1
1) Buy only EVs[1]
2) Use EVs as energy storage. Pay the EV owners because power price goes negative (or worst case charge at no cost).
3) This will immediately capture clean energy that is being curtailed (~20% or more)
4) Without 3 in place, we can't accelerate clean energy, because curtailment will increase, making it unproductive.
5) Pay the EV owners to supply power back to the grid. They now replace peaker plants, which is the most expensive part of electricity bills.
6) EV storage becomes the new grid, creating a gigantic energy reservoir. Extremely resilient energy storage. (think just like the kube/containers, cattle/pets, etc)
With the scale of EV car adoption, we'll get better and better at batteries, making them significantly cheaper. This will allow us to build battery swapping infrastructure for big vehicles. Most likely, this will be sodium or solid state.
Phase 2: All big vehicles (trucks/buses) can use battery swapping stations spread out everywhere. The battery swapping stations serve multiple functions, they are an essential part of the short term battery storage (multi-day), a layer above the EV storage. And they also provide the battery swap infrastructure. They get paid for being charged (negative price) and then again for the trucks using them. We shouln't build charging infrastructure for big vehicles, it is capital intensive, requires a lot of expensive machinery, real-time transmission capacity, real estate, wasted time, etc.
Long term/seasonal: Build Ammonia --> electricity emergency plants. We need ammonia at a massive scale anyways for fertilizer. The best outcome would be green ammonia (green hydrogen), using excess power from clean energy.
Industrial uses (heat): Green hydrogen on demand, freshly produced from solar. Hydrogen is the smallest molecule, explosive and corrosive, won't work with any storage.
All heating and cooling: Use heat pumps. Use CO2 as refrigerant and ban everything else. We are going to see 100x deployment of ACs everywhere, all of the third world will buy AC as their incomes increase.
[1] Govts could ban all ICE vehicles, but they wont. Fossil fuel lobby wont let them. For the fossil fuel shills who are invitably going to comment that EV doesn't work for them, please continue using your EV for your daily commute from Alberta to San Diego. There will be enough used ICE cars for the next 20 years.
> This is why graphs like this matter. Not because they prove that catastrophe is inevitable, and not because they predict the precise sequence of events over coming years. Science rarely deals in absolutes. What they show is that Earth is moving beyond the range within which modern human civilisation developed. We’re entering climatic conditions that our infrastructure, ecosystems, economies and institutions were never designed to accommodate.
Reading helps. Also it's pretty clear from the "waaaaah" that you are not asking a good faith question but rather dismissing the article, without bringing any information or sources to back whatever point you are trying to make - ironic.
I know this because every prediction of climate doom turned out to be false.
Entire nations were going to disappear under rising sea levels. It has not happened. I'm not saying no land sinks, but sea levels are not rising rapidly enough to prevent Al Gore (author of "An Inconvenient Truth") from buying an ocean-front home. The same applies to John Kerry and dozens of other outspoken prophets of doom who warned us that rising sea levels would submerge entire nations. They used the proceeds of their fear-mongering to buy oceanfront homes.
I remember signs in Glacier National Park telling us the glaciers would be gone by the year 2,000. It has not happened.
This "signal" too will pass.
Please check back in 5 years.
These are not projections. These are measurements.
These are known trends from the past century. The trend is accelerating in what seems to be an exponential pattern.
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...
We are experiencing record heat in northern Europe, with temperatures in line with what a couple of decades ago would be expected in north Africa during the summer.
Southern Europe is already experiencing massive droughts in major urban centers.
Nope. They color coded the maps differently, but the temperatures are in line with what is normal for that part of the world.
> Southern Europe is already experiencing massive droughts in major urban centers.
But a quick we search tells me: "Southern Europe is currently experiencing wetter-than-average conditions"
Where is rainfall down so much that there are "massive droughts" in Southern Europe?
> These are not projections. These are measurements.
Please check back in 5 years. The temperatures in the Niño 3.4 region of the equatorial Pacific will be below the 100-year average by then.
Kiribati and Tuvalu have measurable loss of land due to rising sea levels that is impacting people today. About 80% of the Maldives Islands will likely be uninhabitable within the next 25 years. The Marshall Islands have lost 18 out of their average 200cm above mean sea level height - roughly 6% of its land.
We have seen massive glacial retreat even in just the past 10 years, let alone the past 50. This is happening the world over, and at a rate that is not previously seen in the geological record (happy to argue this, thats my background). We are seeing large ice loss and lack of matching accumulation over Antarctica and Greenland - two great places to observe large scale processes. We just saw the Arctic stay largely unlocked for sea ice/shipping last season. The sum of these will take a moment to kick in, but the failure of conveyor currents will kick us all in the arse quite significantly and likely within our lifetime, and we have already seen hiccups.
How much % of the world's population would have to do those things, for the graph to show a reversal of the trend? 10%? 50%? Everyone?
"Electric cars" is less likely tho because having a car at all is a money drain.
Even if you don't take it as prescriptive, it would be dumb not to take it as descriptive (i.e. what the other player will do in a situation)
Policy changes are needed to address this problem. It’s a political problem that needs a political solution.
How does enforcing emissions regulations result in less productive cars?
Cars move about 1.5 people per trip on average. A big pickup or SUV is not any more productive doing this task than a mid sized car.
Eat less and different meat with a smaller footprint. Mostly poultry, eggs, also more organ meats, etc. Also combat fertiliser runoff, etc.
The methane output of a field of cattle isn't that dramatically different from a forest with deer, decomposing wood, etc. Methane is also a potent but temporary actor and tackling it primarily just buys us very little time which will be used as an excuse to keep pumping co2.
However we grow a good bhunch of the feed for that cattle and for ourselves with fossil fuel based fertilisers. We need to quit that. If we get rid of both that 8% co2 output for fertilisers and get rid of the manure as well because we ditch meat too much...
Well we'll solve a lot of related problems by drastically reducing the world's population with a gigantic famine.
Don’t worry about that, just recycle more!
It is about time we stop blaming the individual at the bottom of the ladder for the problems of society. And let me preempt you: society isn’t made up of individuals, but it is much greater than the sum of its parts.
Or to put it another way - which of those things is under our control? If one can do something more, then why not? Because billionaires? The climate doesn't blame anyone, it just exists; being to blame or not, doesn't matter when we're all in the same boat together.
I’m the first to recycle, so you’re preaching to the choir. What I’m saying if we could do better than self-flagellating. Or rather, there is nothing our self-flagellation will achieve in the end.
We keep focusing on things that are easy to measure like how much meat does one person eat, rather than the real numbers that are effectively immeasurable. Am I a worse person for eating beef, yet not using LLMs nor driving a car, than a vegan would might do all those things? Only for my conscience to know. In the end, it all amounts to hypocrisy, and squabbling among the plebes, while the rich keep polluting the planet.
Consumer demand doesn't determine whether to build coal vs solar vs nuclear. Public policy does. No new oil/gas/coal plants, period, and start working to shut down the ones we have. Electricity generation is the source of about a third of all CO2 emissions.
Consumer demand doesn't determine whether we do carbon capture, or reforestation. Those require public policy.