Global Warming at 3 °C by 2050? What's Behind the New German Climate Warning
worldcrunch.com
worldcrunch.com
> And what would 3 °C mean for Germany?
> FB: In summer, meteorological records could reach up to 50 °C. Three degrees of global warming does not mean hot days will just be 3 or 4 degrees hotter. It could mean up to 10 degrees hotter. We would also face much longer droughts.
3°C warming implies summer days can get 10°C hotter. This is nightmare scenario.
I wouldn't say "people don't get" it when it's not well-communicated. When the headline always says 2-3 degrees, of course people are going to shrug.
Nowadays, people who never did anything to consume less (and made fun of people who stopped taking the plane) can't hide behind the "we didn't know" because everybody knew, so they hide behind the "it was not predicted to be as bad" and other "the scientists explained that poorly", but we know what's up, even when they lie to themselves.
Do you think that China is controlled by its customers, making it a passive bystander in its own emissions, the agency and blame for which thus belongs to the customers?
Do you think that individuals who deliberately choose to emit less exist in significant numbers in China, or in the world, or ever might do?
Now, some regions get more average heating than others, so in that is not even, and then there is the weather, what you feel day to day. And right now we are already getting extreme heatwaves and other extreme weather events like flooding rains and hurricanes in zones where they were not usual. Those will increase in frequency and intensity, and I would not be surprised if there are peaks of temperature beyond 55°C, even before 2050, in industrialized countries
We would, quite literally, be cooked. That'd leave us with summers around 140-150F.
That's nowhere near close to correct.
"It's bad enough that nuclear proponents ignore the massive cost of nuclear compared to renewables once you factor in building costs, insurance and storage imho. But then to pretend like the conservatives didn't have a choice but to bungle the nuclear exit really is too much.
The CDU never listened to the greens when it came to not killing the solar industry and serving it to China on a golden platter. Or not killing our rail infrastructure by continually delaying maintenance so that we would have to do much more costly repairs later.
But in this instance, they do, and do it in a way that is a gift to the energy companies, and instead of noticing the obvious corruption at play, people still blame the greens."
Sorry if the tone is a bit harsh, but I'm really annoyed at the amount of dishonesty surrounding nuclear energy.
I know what the Swedish green party has on their platform, open to be read at any time on their website or in paper materials, or heard by their political representatives. Their position is that thermal power plants are critical to the energy grid in order to enable renewable energy and keeping costs down. They wish to use either bio fuels or green hydrogen to fuel those power plants.
The issue I got with that plan is that current thermal power plants in practice do not use exclusively bio fuels or green hydrogen, and that the environmental science around bio fuels are poor at best and full of green washing and practices that are extremely bad for the environment. The costs of bio fuels and green hydrogen has also demonstrated to be massively expensive, making the cost of nuclear cheap in comparison.
My views of the green will change when/if the green drops their support of thermal power plants, and their overwhelming dependency of using biofuels produced from corn as a way to reduce emissions. Biofuels need to be produced without using artificial fertilizers (natural gas), and without burning down forests to make space for the farming. It also need to be cheaper than nuclear, which disqualify green hydrogen as it is produced, stored and handled currently. Carbon capture and artificial fuels are disqualified on the same point, being overwhelming more expensive than nuclear.
As an anecdote, the Swedish green party leader and a right wing party had a political debate during last election. The Right wing party wanted to demolish an oil fueled thermal power plant that is currently operated in south of Sweden, and replace with new nuclear power plant. Paraphrasing what the green party leader said: "Thermal power plants are a natural part of the Swedish grid, and nuclear energy is way to expensive. We need those plants to keep the grid stable and prices low."
Doesn't matter, at least in Germany. Maybe it's different in other countries, though this would surprise me. Here, nobody reads the party platforms, as they do not correlate with the actions of our political parties.
If you vote according to party platform, then you should probably vote for the conservatives or the reds, as they pretend to be good for the economy and the workers.
I think it's better to judge a party by their actions, instead.
There have been recently in Sweden a discussion around party voting and block voting. In concept, every politician could vote independently based on their own views and opinions, but as a practical matter they vote according to party politics. Some has now voiced that this should be mandated according to election result, while others want to keep the current system where elected has a choice to ignore party politics and be independent after the election. The reason this has become an issue is that recent elections has been very close with only a few seats difference between the blocks, thus independent (called "wilds") representatives has the ability to overturn votes when the blocks artificial maintains the relative balances between each other.
Last, if we look at the actions, then guess how the green party voted when it came to construction of new thermal power plants in south of Sweden.
I’m an environmentalist. This has been a crisis my entire life. I’m happy for nuclear to be a solution exactly because it’s a crisis. Do I think it’s the best choice long run? No. It has externalities that are concerning. However, it’s a serious crisis, so go ahead and build them if it can help.
I’m an urbanist. I live in a housing crisis. I’m happy for ugly five over ones to be built to help people afford a place to live because it’s a crisis. Do I think they are ugly? Yes. Would I prefer a significant amount of revenue? Sure. However, it’s a crisis, so go ahead and build them.
When your coalition starts getting picky about solutions, it signals that they don’t actually believe it’s is a genuine crisis.
You might argue that this fear is unfounded and dumb, and again, I won't disagree. But it's not the German Green's stupidity, it's the German population's stupidity. That's why I think it's important to mention this fact every time - otherwise it will be used to fearmonger about "environmentalists want to de-industrialize and go back to living in mud huts!"
E.g. usually, the proponents ignore the risks. The day before Fukushima they would have said, Tchernobyl cannot happen here. The next castastrophe comes always from a direction nobody anticipated. In the 2010s CDU in Germany delayed modernizing the german power grid by a huge amount which the greens could not catch up entirely during their recent term in the government (as part of a difficult coalition). This power grid is now a bottleneck to install and use intelligently more solar, wind and batteries (new solar already compensated for the phase out of the last 3 nuclear power plants in the early 2020s). CDU is again in power and again doing counterproductive measures to slow down modernization of the energy system. There is no need for nuclear but for faster modernization of the grid and for more renewable energy production and storage capacities.
This is a lie.
The atomaustieg was decided by the SPD+Green coalition in 1998 as a condition for the Green joining Schroeders coalition.
The CDU actually reversed course just before Fukushima but unfortunately Merkel then undid that to try to win voters away from the greens by joining the fearmongering post-fukushima.
> the Greens extended the lifetime of the remaining plants
By 3 months, under enormous pressure from all sides during the worst energy crisis in postwar german history when they could have reversed course or extended them longer. You don't get much credit for this.
This was inarguably one of the greatest political mistakes of the 21st century so far and the blame is squarely on the Green party and their voters. The real propaganda is you trying to deflect it into the CDU.
Doubling down on your second wrong argument is not giving your observations credence. It was the conservative party in a coalition with the free-market Liberals, who passed the law giving a binding timeline for the nuclear shutdown.
> With little natural gas supplies of the country’s own, and its heavily supported renewable sector unable to fully make up the shortfall, German leaders faced a dilemma. To maintain enough gas reserves to get the country through the winter, they could try to put off the closure of Germany’s last three remaining nuclear reactors, which were scheduled to shutter by the end of 2022 as part of Germany’s post-Fukushima turn against nuclear power, and even restart already closed reactors.
> Or they could try to reactivate mothballed coal-fired power plants, and make up some of the electricity deficit with Germany’s still-ample coal reserves.
[...]
> Last week, the country’s parliament, with the backing of members of the Green Party in the coalition government, passed emergency legislation to reopen coal-powered plants, as well as further measures to boost the production of renewable energy.
I acknowledge that the politics and history of the nuclear decommission is more complicated than I understood - [2] seems to be a useful walkthrough. But it all happened with Green support and is the fruits of decades of Green ideological advocacy.
[2] https://www.cjfp.org/for-germanys-green-party-the-50-year-dr...
Nuclear reactors are not solving this problem. Period. The technology is too expensive, building them is too slow, and no one wants them.
It’s a smoke screen (that I think is) set up by big oil to distract the focus from renewables, which are cheaper, scale better, and actually endanger their business model.
This should be supported by both those that advocate nuclear and those advocating renewables. Those that do advocate for a grid with renewables that are supported with a reserve energy fleet of fossil fueled power plants, like the oil power plant in south of Sweden, will just have to find an alternative. If that alternative is cheaper, faster and more attractive than nuclear then the choice is obvious, and if its not then fossil fuels are still not an option. This include using bio fuels produced with artificial fertilizers since that process currently uses natural gas (which is why people are predicting a food shortage and famine as a result of the war in Iran).
They need to look inward before pointing outward.
are not the German government.
In Europe. Still cleaner than the US, China, India, Japan, and the world avg:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electric...
Coal and gas are down 50% compared to 10 years ago despite the shut-down. Nevertheless, shutting down the last few ones was bad.
Or did you mean to do something differently?
There has been a lot of debate over AC use. Everyone chiming in only discusses runtime energy use.
The biggest issue is mining and manufacturing, and the moving of all the materials, parts, and such.
Every AC has sheathed wires and circuit boards.
Every airplane, car, phone, network router, refrigerator... same expansive mess creation.
Gamers complaining about disc less games despite that problem pipeline and waste.
Complaining about RAM prices despite the problem pipeline.
No one is focused on the lag effects, externalities, of billions using up an endless supply of technologies and dumping airplane smog in the atmosphere. Etc, etc, etc
Thermodynamics makes it pretty clear that energy is not gone just hanging out in the atmosphere.
Thermodynamics means we may be fucked even if we slow down; that energy in the atmosphere can only go from atmosphere into oceans, glaciers, and permafrost. There's a lot of potential energy in the Earth to release as it absorbs the heat already in the atmosphere
Tbf the issue is the user-hostile parameters of buying a diskless game. Most people would be happy to download their games if they could back them up to a thumb drive and never get locked out of them and sell the game when they’re done with it.
Seems deeply tangential, but it’s not. Blaming people for wanting a physical thing because the alternative is being further abused by a corporation - that’s a miss. Be mad at game platforms for not offering real ownership in whatever the most climate-friendly way possible. Be mad at governments for not forcing companies to cost in the negative externalities of their business.
FairTax is regressive and does nothing to stop a trillionaire from launching dick rockets to nowhere. Each rocket and launch using more resources than a poor person will their entire life.
So you oppose green tax policy on the grounds that it isn't punitive enough against rich people? A rich person living a miserly life would pay little in taxes, I see no problem with that.
I assume that you are alluding to someone specific with the rocket launching trillionaire quip. That would be the same person who helped make electric vehicles viable and also helped develop reusable rockets, far greener than one time use ones, no?
Though, I do recognise that having one regressive tax wouldn't necessarily make the entire tax-and-transfers system regressive (or even more regressive, if that tax money is spent).
But regarding your second statement. The actual problem is the greenhouse effect of CO2 and Methane in the atmosphere which traps the suns energy in our atmosphere heating up oceans, ice and landmass. The heat we produce is negligible compared to the energy the sun sends every day. The greenhouse gases are the problem. And you are right, pulling away that blanket so that more heat can dissipate into space will take a looong time (growing trees) or cost an insane amount of (clean) energy, reversing the chemical processes of burning oil, gas and coal.
But without more info, that seems like a pretty awful assumption. A lot of the stuff we export are services and high value goods that I would think have a relatively low "emissions to value" ratio compared to the lower value manufactured goods we import.
I don't know why you think that, pretty much everything we buy devolves to energy in some form or another.
And, when you look at actual data, e.g. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=33812, that is exactly what you see.
Co2 parts per million are a stock, like the level of water in a bathtub. Annual emissions are a flow, like how strongly the water is flowing in.
The tub is fuller than ever before AND filling at the fastest rate ever.
The problem is that carbon energy is useful. So unless something globally beats almost all use cases then somewhere marginally it will be worth burning vs not burning it.
They do increase in rate as you said (for now).
If your stat had any sense then atmospheric carbon levels would rapidly plunge in a few centuries without humans burning carbon. They plainly don't do that.
You are right the the ocean is the largest carbon sink, and it has the negative side effect of acidifying.
If we do what we do now, what the UN IPCC is focusing on, which is lowering CO2 in the west to bring CO2 usage up everywhere else. China, India, and Africa and South Africa (hopefully) in the future then we've not just achieved nothing, we've made things worse.
It seems to me if oil keeps being dug up what we do on the usage side just does not matter unless everyone agrees to lower the total, because someone will use it. By the way, CO2 will keep increasing if we burn more than about 18 mbd (0.03% of what we use now).
This means nothing will matter unless you get US, Norway, Russia, China, and the Middle East to comply. And by comply I don't mean lowering the oil pumping, but stopping 100% (yes, technically 99.97% or more). That includes the oil they pump for their own use.
And obviously I realize this argument doesn't work. We cannot proceed along this way, it's not reasonable towards so many people, who have the right to life, an economy and energy. So we'll have to find an entirely different way to deal with these changes.
Markets are powerful. No real solution other than making market competitive alternatives such that the desire to dig up oil is simply lost. This may or may not be feasible.
However, every other sector has been rather flat in terms of emissions since the 90s. When you account for the fact that a large amount of industries have moved to China and other developing countries, the fact that emissions from industries have been flat, means that the overall consumption has gone up.
If you account for the emissions that we’ve offshored, we’d not be looking so good.
Because they outsource their dirty work. To get a true picture of US/EU emissions you need to factor in the factories in Asia that are producing their consumer goods, as well as the global transport network that supports this.
We can't. We're too late.
China (13 GT), the US (4.6 GT), and India (3 GT) alone represent 51% of global carbon emissions - and at least in India's case, it is growing at a rate of 5%.
Throw in other large polluters like Russia (2 GT), Indonesia (0.8 GT), Iran (0.8 GT), KSA (0.6 GT), Brazil (0.5 GT), and Vietnam (0.5 GT) whose rate of carbon emissions is growing in the 5-10% range and you see there is no path forward.
Any amount of de-carbonization that China or the collective West does is automatically negated by the other countries I listed. At best global carbon emissions stagnate - which by default is going to lead to a 2-3 °C increase in temperatures.
That's why nothing will happen.
Developing countries like India, Indonesia, and Vietnam are continuing to expand their emissions as they industrialize. All are expected to have an GDP growth rate in the 6-8% range over the next decade, as will their peers across Asia, so the carbon footprint globally will only increase.
Even China's emissions rate aren't decreasing - they're stagnant, which is a good shift, but not enough to turn the tide given how large China's existing carbon footprint is.
Edit: can't reply
> but they're not going to expand by taking on coal and fossil fuels...
India [0], Vietnam [1], and other large industrializing nation in Asia have all doubled down on expanding coal usage over the last 6 months. And that's ignoring increased usage of NatGas and Oil.
[0] - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/india-will-use-more-...
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/vietnam-looks-more-c...
But the UK and EU (the only large polluters who have even considered carbon tariffs) have largely watered them down - for example, yesterday with the UK increasing it's duty free steel quota for India [0] as Tata Steel owns much of the UK's steel capacity and demand (JLR is a Tata company). Add to that the EU's largest steel maker is owned by India's Mittal family (AcrelorMittal) and European conglomerates like Renault [1] are expanding manufacturing in markets like India, which means using Indian steel.
And all of that ignores domestic growth in all those countries. Base GDP growth rates are expected to be in the 6.5-8% for India and ASEAN despite deglobalization because domestic markets are growing.
[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-14/india-win...
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/world/india/renault-plans-boost-indi...
I have seen the argument shift from 'That's a lie. Global warming doesn't exist. Stop pushing regulations for a non-existent problem.' To 'Maybe it does, or there is some human impact but this is all within normal variation and the climate can take some amount of pollution so stop trying to regulate it!' to, I guess the new argument of, 'It's too late so why try? We shouldn't change course because it won't matter so stop trying to regulate the problem away.' It isn't too late. Do something.
And that does nothing to stop the collective 8 GT of carbon emissions coming from India and the other countries I listed with an average emissions increase rate of around 3-5%.
Huh. "China’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions fell by 1% in the final quarter of 2025, likely securing a decline of 0.3% for the full year as a whole" [1].
So "rapidly de-carbonising" is wrong. But decarbonising per se is correct.
[1] https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-ha...
NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory, 2 (OCO-2) provides the most complete dataset tracking the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂), the main driver of climate change. Every day, OCO-2 measures sunlight reflected from Earth’s surface to infer the dry-air column-averaged CO₂ mixing ratio and provides around 100,000 cloud-free observations.The main point to be landed by that terse comment was that the world isn't merely reliant on CCP statements.
*Observing CO2 from space*: A Decade of progress from NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatories (OCO-2 and OCO-3)
The take away is that the orbiting readings are bedded in reality and don't contradict what's being released as official ground numbers for China (they have ground reading networks that overlap with internationally staffed / instrument supplied networks)
(2025) A recent article published in the journal of Earth and Space Science provides a comprehensive evaluation of the latest version of the OCO-2 total column CO2 retrievals against data collected from a global ground-based network known as the Total Carbon Column Observing Network (TCCON).
~ https://www.tccon.caltech.edu/
(2026) We provide the first global comparison between OCO-2/3 with COCCON observations to evaluate the mean differences between the ground- and space-based data sets and identify regions where these differences are most pronounced.
Sure, I gave you that. But you went further. China is not “rapidly de-carbonizing right now.” It’s forecast to start rapidly decarbonizing in the next decade.
Not sure what your point is, just posting lies?
Ordinary plebs trying to prevent climate change is like subtracting $100 from a billion dollars - it does not make any meaningful difference.
Ultimately consumption is 2/3s of all emissions, and the majority of it is not billionaires.
And, if some do, do they not maximise that profit by seeking to maximise the consumption of others?
It stops making any difference if everyone stops trying. You compare this to subtracting $100 from a billion, but a billion dollars is composed of 10 million $100, and there's only a few rich people in those 10 million.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/22/books/review/ian-mcewan-w...
The EU has already seeing 10,000 excess deaths from climate changed caused heat waves and this is a minuscule taste of what's to come.
A very large percentage of mass extinction events have their roots in increased atmospheric CO2, but all of them on dramatically increased time scales. The closest thing in the history of the planet to what's happening to day was PETM [0] and that was only a lessor extinction event because the Earth was already quite warm (for example, there was already no polar ice at the time).
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene%E2%80%93Eocene_therm...
People aren't getting together and having children at even replacement rate (2.1)
The OECD developed countries population basically peaked a few years ago, even including migration. After the peak, they're on track to lose 300-350 million people in the following 40-50 years.
we were sorta going to do something about it, but then we invented LLMs and now nobody cares because $$$ and AI is shiny
> I fear future generations will not view us in a positive light.
you can be sure that they already will curse us
In particular, it is hard to be optimistic on the emission scenario nowadays. So the report opted for emissions starting to drop around 2040, if I remember correctly.
That's my new baseline. Sorry I cannot find the report anymore. I am pretty sure it was posted on hacker news though.
The other interesting thing in the book is the emergence of radical groups fighting against who they see as responsible for the destruction of our planet and potentially even our civilizations. We could see a lot more social violence, assassinations (Mangione-style) etc. I'm fairly sure that's going to happen.
Maybe I've lost hope, but I honestly do not want my kids to have any kids of their own, as I'm afraid of the world they will inherit. (And I've been a confirmed techno-future-enthusiast my whole life until 5-10 years ago.)
The world energy mafia, primarily petroleum, but also nuclear and coal, will not give up their revenue streams.
Carbon concentrations will continue to rise, and quite likely accelerate.
The overwhelming majority of sustainable generation is in large, regional scale projects, because this keeps the profit in the hands of the established energy utilities.
Nuclear... nuclear... I would pose a question to every bone head here who advocates it: Can we start storing the spent waste in YOUR garage?
The profit motive loves nuclear energy, because tax payers pay to build and decommission it, while industrial scale utilities get to operate it while money is popping out.
Nuclear is the most expensive form of electricity generation, by far. By very very far.
Distributed generation and storage is advocated by no one with an equity stake in the status quo.
The fundamental problem, is that the world economy is run by organized crime.
The US whitehouse has now made this explicit, however the situation has existed in this context since the invention of distributing petroleum and electricity.
> 3°C or more by 2050. Multiple climate tipping points triggered, tipping cascade.
> over 4 billion deaths
If so, big shifts would already be imminently felt within next 5-10 years.
Remember that there would basically be no place to hide from these direct or knock-on effects.
Not for any self sufficient "prepper with a Mac Studio" nor for any billionaire with their "Galapagos" private island data center come habitat or any other short-sighted fantasy escape scenarios.
https://actuaries.org.uk/media/ni4erlna/planetary-solvency.p...
Edit: "on trajectory" to "Extreme" was too strong; it’s the report’s worst case band and not a forecast. What they’re basically saying is that "the chance of this happening is way too high".
This is nonsense. (And your own source doesn't support the claim that the consequences of global warming will be unmitigable for anyone.)
Many parts of the world will become milder for human occupation as a result of climate change. And nothing realistically forecast is unavoidable with wealth–rich countries will A/C and seawall their ways around the consequences.
Edit: the report’s "Extreme" severity band is indeed not a forecast but they’re basically saying "the chance of this happening is way too high".
Many effects would hurt most people. But some would also be profited from. It’s incredible–as in debilitating to one’s credibility-to claim that everyone would suffer in the extreme case.
The rich, and I say this broadly to include the rich countries, will probably be fine. Poorer, yes, but not uniformly. Plenty of plenty of places and people would see booms from the new weather patterns, coasts and social fault lines.
Please also consider infectious disease and famine throughout the world.
You can hide from the temperature. You will have a harder time hiding from war and disease.
Also how much faster and higher will that number go with all the data centers? Can't imagine it not just getting worse.
For temps by latitude/region this source seems ok on a quick search https://scied.ucar.edu/interactive/compare-climates-regional...
Poland continues to experience significant cold related deaths and any warning might be welcomed.
Eg: Have you seen a train derail? A couple of degrees of tilt - nothing .. and then .. whoops.
The global climate has been 'stable' about mean values for the bulk of human written history and development of urban civilisations. The planet now hosts 7 billion+ people, largely urban, and feed by a century of stable agriculture patterns write large.
The disruption of that will have a major impact across the human population of the planet.
The tipping points, when they come, are related to the significant loss of polar ice, and the beginning of positive feedback of atmospheric insulation factors other than CO2.
Melting ice, the transformation from near zero degree ice to near zero degree water, takes up a large amount of the energy from the sun trapped by increasing insulation. The energy used to melt X tonnes of ice, if no ice can be melted, will instead raise the temperature of X tonnes of water by some 66 degrees C (or there abouts - worth looking it up exactly).
Increased land and sea surface temperatures releases methane from peat bogs and tundras, and increases the water vapour content of the lower atmosphere.
Both of these things increase the insulation factor of the atmosphere to a greater degree than CO2.
I think the problem is much worse than people imagine as well. Of those around 5.5 to 6 billion people live in "developed world" conditions (sanitation, water & electricity to the home). Over the next 20 years that's expected to grow to by another 1.5 billion (the previous 20 years was around the same). That alone is going to be a huge demand in energy, for construction and ongoing day to day energy usage.
On the other hand global energy demand has a very close correlation with the number of people living in developed world conditions - so after this point the growth in energy demand should start to level off.
Let's hope China continues to push renewables, and their investment in developing countries favours that instead of fossil fuels.
Historically? In written human history?
If we're talking the state of the planet throughout the past 4 billion odd years of existence, it once had no breathable atmosphere and had a stretch with a largely molten surface, and got smacked up hard when the moon was spun off.
None of these things are relevant to the planets near future as a direct result of human induced changes of the past century and a half.
Denser air carries more momentum, which means more frequent (and more severe) hurricanes.
And here we are.
In itself, that doesn't mean they're wrong. But right or wrong, it's unquestionable that they have been successful at antinuclear activism. As a result, their activism has the net effect of promoting carbon pollution, and by no small measure.
As well as radiological pollution, for that matter: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14169712/
More humid air is less dense than less humid air at the same temperature and otherwise same composition. H2O has a molar mass of 18, vs ~29 for dry air.
The first is that 3C represents a lot more energy in the atmosphere. That translates to more water evaporating from the oceans creating bigger more violent storms (think more frequent flash floods).
It changes the ocean currents which can be really bad. Right now Europe is warm for it's latitude because of a weakening current from the equator to the UK brings a lot of heat. If that completely collapses, Europe can enter an ICE age.
The rising temperature also ends up weakening the vortex of the north pole which mostly keeps the arctic temperatures sealed up north. As that vortex weakens, spills of crazy blizzards can hit unusual places pretty hard. The winter storm in 2021 is an example of that happening.
Then of course there's the potential melting of the ice caps which will release a lot of methane into the atmosphere (speeding up warming). That will ultimately cause sea levels to rise which won't be great for the state of Florida.
Mass migration, crop instability, more frequent and more extreme weather. It's just a combo of bad things that all come together at once.
The probability is not quantified so it's impossible to react to. Over-protecting from a risk is as bad and under-protecting.
For example - something bad can happen to you any time you leave your house. However if you "protect" against that the risk by never leaving the house you are almost certainly worse off.
In case of climate the "thing to do" to protect from the risk is to minimize the economic activity that has improved life for everyone. Stopping that has an immediate "cost" which looks large compared to the unquantified risk it allegedly mitigates.
This is not generally true.
> For example - something bad can happen to you any time you leave your house.
The better analogue would be: outside of your house is a robber that will rob you if you leave the house. But you can't quantify how bad it will be to get robbed.
How would protecting ourselves against 50 °C summer heat (122 °F) ever be as bad as keeping 40° heatwaves or better yet, a return to the 35° summers?
50° means a human mass extinction event. There are no corporate profits possible in that scenario anyway
Let's agree that 50c summers are bad. What's the probability that summers will become 50c in the next 100 years and what's the cost of lowering that likelyhood?
Let's say there's a low probability (0.01%) and the cost of action is high. Let's use a ridiculous example: you have the opportunity to lower the risk further by half at the cost of immediately killing your family, any pets you have, and yourself. Would you, sparqlittlestar, kill your family, pets and self to move the risk of 50C summer in the next 100 years from 0.01% to 0.005%? I assume the answer is no because it's obviously and intuitively not worth it
On the other extreme let's say there's a 50% risk of 50c summers and you have a low-cost option (snapping your fingers) to halve it to 25%. You would obviously do that.
To generalize this point, it doesn't make sense to talk about how bad something could be without quantifying how likely that event is and the cost of mitigation. I find that talking about worst case outcomes regardless of likelihood is basically anxiety. Like someone who never gets on a plane because of how horrible a crash could be, separately from the reality that your particular flight is not going to crash, and meanwhile everything you miss out on by not flying is real.
Might be worth shifting subsidies away from meat and towards plant protein to a level consistent with the social cost of carbon, but one could probably expect resistance from a certain demographic, maybe loudly exclaiming on social media that it's a secret government plot to emasculate them or something. (and opposition from industry groups as well probably)
You're talking about eating plant protein, what's the point of throwing in an atack on men, even a subset of them? Or do you really think that the main thing that bars us from eating less meat or any other kind of utopia is some evil men doing "or something" on social media?
Your comment could have stood on its own without throwing your bigotry, or ignorance, in to unnecessarily antagonise people.
My comment here is arguing against casual, and especially unbased, bigotry against men. Which your comment demonstrates.
Drive-by shittiness makes the community worse. Do better.
> Conservative pundit Tucker Carlson, for example, produced a documentary in 2022 featuring the Raw Egg Nationalist, a prominent far-right influencer, who said that Impossible, Beyond and other plant-based companies are part of a “soy globalist” conspiracy to criminalize meat consumption and weaken citizens through poisoned food.
https://theconversation.com/plant-based-meat-alternatives-ar...
I'm sorry I'm bigoted against right-wing nonsense but considering they want to literally erase queer people from existence I would think I am at least a little justified in thinking badly of them.
Boterman, Willem Rogier (14 January 2026). "The political ideological dimensions of meat consumption". Political Science. 78(1): 73–99. doi: 10.1080/00323187.2025.2602446. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00323187.2025.2...
I answered your comment because it was purely about gender, nothing political, and because the claim about social media posts being a major barrier was nonsense.
Yes, there are political underpinnings to eating animals. I assume you're American, so here's a gallup poll for the US:
https://news.gallup.com/poll/510038/identify-vegetarian-vega...
Since this is about America, it's about right vs liberals (so not left), and indeed they're 3 times more likely than conservatives (9 vs 3%), and indeed women are 2-3 times more likely than men to be vegetarian/vegan (6 vs 2%).
But we're talking about tiny, tiny percentage points. It's the same across the entire West. So singling out men, or even conservatives, for a tiny difference feels like antagonisation with no basis, and your comment reads not like arguing for climate or animal welfare, but as fighting your culture war. And everyone outside of your bubble will see it for a weak attack and dismiss it as just a vehicle for your favourite flavour of bigotry.
Hence why dropping it would have been better.
As an aside: women are the vast majority of leisure travellers (>70% for all travel, and much higher for leisure only). Women are probably 99% of consumers of fast fashion, and the majority of consumers of smartphone updates. The gap is much starker, and seeing it as a culture problem would be justified in discussions about pollution (though not socially acceptable...). But if you were talking about, I don't know, the externalities of coffee production, and women/liberals drank 51% of coffee and men/conservatives 49%, and you complained about women, I'd also just dismiss your comment as bigotry.
I was under the impression that it was about the demographics that are unresponsive to efforts to reduce meat consumption, but I suppose I could be mistaken.
> I assume you're American
I am not.
> So singling out men, or even conservatives, for a tiny difference feels like antagonisation with no basis
I consider the Boterman paper and other similar works (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/136843021882440..., https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019566632..., etc) to be sufficient basis. One does not need to eliminate meat entirely to significantly reduce it. Also, I consider right-wingers to be more reactionary than conservative.
> but being bigoted is wrong in any way.
I think I'm ethically justified in bigoted towards people that want me to die, but whatever,
My point is that, whatever your papers assert, the differences on carnism, in absolute terms, are so insignificant on the political/gender spectra that accusing one side on this basis can only be seen as having the only purpose of attacking that side, not of genuinely wanting to see meat consumption reduced.
When you look at the data (or when you don't eat meat and regularly debate randos about it), you will see it's not a conservative/liberal, man/woman thing, but a generalised disregard for animal life. So turning it into a culture war just makes it worse, because the conservatives who read your attack will be likely to start seeing it as part of their identity while liberals will do nothing, so in total this worsens the issue.
A big part of my debates on this site is about animal cruelty, so I'm not defending those who eat animals here, only pointing out this approach is both a lie on numbers and bad for the cause.
> justified in bigoted
You seem to think that bigoted means having a negative view, but it's actually "obstinate and unreasoning attachment of one's own belief and opinions, with narrow-minded intolerance of beliefs opposed to them". The unreasoning part and acting on prejudice is what I'm saying is bad.
https://zeihan.com/the-end-of-germany-as-a-modern-economy/
FTFA:
"Three unsolvable problems will lead to Germany’s collapse as a modern economy over 20 – 30 years."
Even if few days get 10C hotter in the summers, more and more houses will retrofit themsevles with ACs much like Singapore. I live in NL, and I can def see a future where District Cooling[1] becomes a thing.
If something is bound to happen, I think a better way to spend energy and money is to prepare for it. In that sense, I would like to see a study on which crops we as a human species could rotate too, what new lands could use investment and how should new housing and public infrastructure be built than constant articles like these which presents no realistic solution.
perversely, global warming earlier than expected is a good thing [for us] as it will wipe away all meaningful opposition to geoengineering.
note how according to them having 50C days is a likely outcome. no one will tolerate this. sending the sulfur planes is assured at that point. you wouldn't even need to try and convince people with harvest yields.
> geoengineering might lead to geopolitical conflict
it remains to be seen who will start the geoengineering effort, arguably Russia would benefit from global warming and so will Canada, so the US food supply should also remain secure.
It's not like we just decide to solve something and then it just happens. There can also be serious outcomes of errors are made that are more serious than climate itself.
conservatively, "$18 billion per year per degree Celsius of warming avoided".
How often do you want to do that? Where? How? What's the effect on plants and insects and human?
It seems to me like the start of a dystopian sci-fi story with humanity retreating from the surface as acidic rain destroys all plant life.
I think we're currently in the situation that we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas.
Including paying to have wood pellets shipped across the Atlantic using bunker fuel and then calling it "bioenergy"
The EU is 'clean' largely out of it's own limited access to fossil fuels and other energy resources rather than because they are "doing their part".
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-world-carbon-emissio...
Note: a lot of the countries on this graph are quite famous for not only refusing to implement any climate policy, but not having the necessary government control (or will) to do it even when agreeing to it.
Australia and Canada also very high per capita.
Really needs a global solution with China and/or US leading.