The Gargantuan Lie That Is Collapsing the Climate | Hacker News Reader

The Gargantuan Lie That Is Collapsing the Climate

currentaffairs.org

160 pointsAnon84206 comments

I wondered where this article got the idea that "half the planet" would die "in 26 years or less" with 3°C of warming. It appears to be a misreading of the table in https://actuaries.org.uk/media/ni4erlna/planetary-solvency.p... "Figure 12: Planetary solvency risk impact and likelihood definitions (illustrative)" qualified by "A risk impact matrix is a methodology for ranking potential impacts, not a prediction or central scenario."

In particular, they rate ≥50% mortality as Extreme and also rate warming by 3°C or more by 2050 as Extreme (this is relevant for the colorful severity/likelihood grids that are the focus of the paper) and somebody appears to have made the incorrect connection that an Extreme climate would cause Extreme mortality, and also by the time the Extreme climate is reached and not afterwards. Elsewhere, the paper mentions that "We have not shown an assessment for mortality in this illustration, as very limited research has been carried out on the potential for large-scale loss of life in relation to these interconnected risks on which to base an assessment."

Unfortunately, that makes the article title highly ironic.

Thank you for putting this here. While I do believe in climate change, I could not finish reading the article as it seemed like the authors opinions are led more by emotions rather than facts. And gourds.

An emotional reaction is rational.

Not to mention that if we limited access to fossil fuels today, billions of people would be dead within months. If we turned off the spigot, billions would starve and civilization would collapse quicker than you could say climate change

You're right that we can't limit access to fossil fuels today. We can't do it without a substitute energy source. We know from practical experience that replacing fossil fuels with electricity is the best option for heating and cooling buildings, water, and food.

I believe the next stage is big ass batteries to soak up excess energy production for later use and to let us work with what we have today, both in generation and grid wiring. Residential and maybe commercial big-ass batteries could reduce the need to rewire buildings for higher energy devices.

This would reduce the overall use of fossil fuels and make it available for all the things necessary to preserve human life, while making a serious dent in slowing down climate change.

At the same time, we need to tout the environmental benefits of solar farms, such as increasing biodiversity, preserving soil moisture for agrivoltaics, and reducing the stress of climate change on livestock. These will also require big ass batteries for soaking up the excess production of these solar farms.

The report does include a >50% human mortality extreme category and the author of the article is referring to a separate report suggesting 3°C is much more likely than expected. I think it's pretty reasonable to think that an extreme climate would cause extreme mortality. The report is pretty confusing to digest.

But because you think that particular consequence is overstated in the article, you're suggesting that the article itself is a lie? The title refers to the lie that we still have more time and that we don't need to get to work immediately to address climate change. It's about the overall lackadaisical attitude toward the climate emergency.

You seem to be suggesting a dismissal of the article's core message.

So, are you suggesting that we actually have plenty of time to deal with climate change, and that things like "Net Zero by 2050" correctly convey the severity of the situation?

What is your assessment of the current year number of deaths attributable to climate change, and expected number of deaths at a 3°C above baseline global average temperature?

> I think it's pretty reasonable to think that an extreme climate would cause extreme mortality.

No, it's not reasonable. They're using the same label, but there's no evidence showing that.

There are entirely different reasons. War.

Make a people's land unliveable, and make it so they cannot grow crops any more, and those people will come for your land. Imagine if 1B people decide to move to where another 1B people live, but are still struggling with climate change? Barely making it by?

So I agree with your point, 100%. You are right in the direct mortality. But also felt a tangential point of "secondary effects" was important, and this seems a good place to put it.

Global warming isn't going to actually kill many people. Instead humans fighting over resources will, I think.

An example. Canada has a population of 40 to 50million. Now imagine if for whatever reasons, much of the Souther US becomes unliveable, and at the same time, Northern Canada becomes viable as a place to live.

Now you have 100M people wanting to cross a border in a period of a few years. How can a country of 50M absorb 100M in that period of time? Chaos.

That won't end well.

Nowadays, a farmer who can't grow crops anymore doesn't necessarily have to find a farm elsewhere, but could also move to a nearby city and work in a factory. That option is enticing enough for many that they'll choose it even when their farm is doing fine. Agricultural employment is generally on a downward trend. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.AGR.EMPL.ZS?most_rec...

You may wonder where that city is going to get their food if it can't be grown nearby, but food can be traded across long distances and often already is. So a more likely scenario is that Canada massively expands agriculture with a relatively small number of agricultural workers, many of whom might certainly be immigrants, and then trades the surplus.

The one case where long-distance migrations will be unavailable are island countries that can't handle rising sea levels, but fortunately even put together they don't have very large populations, and in some cases resettlement agreements are already in place.

Canada expand agriculture. Where? Certainly not to land up north. Growing seasons are bracketed by more than just land and temperature. It's also bracketed by sunlight. Very little will grow north.

(22 hour long summer days for a one month period doesn't equate to six months of sunlight half the day. It just doesn't work that way.)

Even though I agree that what the other commenter is saying is a fever dream, I do have to note that crops grow great in Norway and Sweden... so it's at least a little to do with temperature, surely.

That's a good point. So then what makes it a fever dream?

There's North and then there's North. Canada already uses all the sensible land to use.

Nordland in Norway produced 500 tons of grain in 2024, mostly barley. https://www.ssb.no/en/statbank/table/04609 Nordland's southernmost spot has a latitude north of 65°, further north than most of Canada, save for Yukon, Northwest Territories and Nunavut. The website for Canada's Census of Agriculture is extremely clunky, https://agriculture.canada.ca/atlas/apps/aef/main/index_en.h... but seems to indicate no substantial amounts of any kind of field crops north of 60°, let alone 65°.

Hmm, this does seem to be a very nuanced map, and I guess it's more aimed at statisticians, than average people. But one thing I kept noting, was Alberta using land up north, right to the territories, and the Saskatchewan and Manitoba not.

I think there are three issues here. Climate, farm size, and reporting.

Some of the farms in the prairies are massive. I was hitch-hiking across Canada 20 years ago, and got a ride from a farmer in Saskatchewan. He told me he had some crazy number of acres of land, in the 50 thousand acre range, and that he was both the "youngest farmer" and "smallest landowner" in his coop. In the Prairies, they farm big.

And a lot of this seems to be voluntary.

So when I see the entire top half of some of these provinces simply cut off, I wonder if they even bother to report. The territories and managed differently, are directly federally controlled, and likely simply don't report. I find it hard to believe that farms stop right at the top of the Alberta border, and that's it.

That said, I don't think I said you cannot grow crops in the north, just that you're heavily limited in what you can grow. Some grain crops, in the south, you can get several crops a year. Hay, and some wheats, you can get 2 or 3 in a year.

But not corn. And not potatoes. And not a lot of other staples. Corn and potatoes are big, in terms of overall calories. Here, in Quebec near Ottawa, there are two types of human corn grown. In french they call it 'yellow' and 'bi-colour', in english Canada 'yellow' and 'peaches and cream' corn. The bicolour type has yellow and almost white kernels, and you can grow two crops of them here in this region, if lucky. For traditional yellow corn? On some cloudy years, the local farmer I buy from? They might lost their entire 'yellow corn' crop. It needs a lot of sun.

I suspect the faster growing crop is less nutritious, although I could be wrong. One problem is that due to cross-pollination, it's kinda hard to get the original yellow corn.

Anyhow. Not sure if you'll see any of this. But thought I'd respond regardless.

The duration between the equinoxes is the same six months everywhere on earth. 22-hour days are balanced out by 2-hour days, not a smaller number of days with more than 12 hours of daylight. Of course plants that need, say, 10 hours of light for 9 continuous months to mature would be in trouble, but a lot more could grow closer to the poles if it were warmer. A lot more did grow closer to the poles during the Early Eocene Climatic Optimum. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Eocene_Climatic_Optimum#...

This is a classic example of book knowledge, and reality.

The type of light is important. Days of sunlight mean little, if the sun barely gets more than a few degrees above the horizon. And our human bred crops? Well, we'd need to take time to even hope to adapt them.

They are very coddled, and need loadd of sun.

No evidence?

The extreme global average temperatures haven't happened in the entire history of human civilization, so the kind of evidence you might be expecting is tough to come by. But there are dozens of papers suggesting what might happen using trend projection and knowledge of agricultural and sociopolitical constraints, if you care to look. There is also the fact that heat related deaths are already in the hundreds of thousands per year and the trend is upward.

The fact that someone finds it unreasonable to think that an extreme climate would cause extreme mortality is ... interesting.

> I think it's pretty reasonable to think that an extreme climate would cause extreme mortality.

Is this the standard of evidence we want to use to develop policies that will upend economies and impact the lives of billions of people? "It sounds about right"?

So just crack on with a +3 degree rise.

So much for human ingenuity, when being able to buy plastic shit on amazon is prized over having a temperate world.

We wouldn’t want anything to threaten the line going up.

> I think it's pretty reasonable to think that an extreme climate would cause extreme mortality.

Classic equivocation fallacy on the word “extreme” in two different contexts.

If our arguments are so transparently wrong, it makes it easier to dismiss climate change.

> So, are you suggesting that we actually have plenty of time to deal with climate change

As Babbage put it, I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

The article is about not having time to waste. It is not about the expectation of what might happen at the extreme. I understand it's easier to dismiss and point out an equivocation fallacy than to discuss the main position of the article.

As T.S Eliot put it, humankind cannot bear very much reality.

It's quite striking to note how media coverage of climate change and pollution have gone down so much. I remember in the 90's it was very much in the popular mileu.

What's more we are living through an actual green revolution. Solar power and batteries have never been so cheap - and still promising to get cheaper and better with sodium ion batteries.

In the 90s it was something to deal with later. Now that it's something to deal with right now, of course they won't cover it. In a few decades they'll cover it again, but only to say how it's too late now.

Another factor is that rich oil and gas people figured out they could just buy the media.

And government.

The bigger factor is probably the global pandemic, economic degradation, looming nuclear winter, genocide, WW3, aliens, and singularity. Not to mention orange clowns. We have surpassed the Britney Spears controversy era. Unless the polar bears are going to invade DC and attack ICE, we might not hear much about the climate change until these other problems go away.

And let’s also not forget, we all want the climate crises fixed, but nobody is willing to personally make any changes to their lifestyle!

All parties are incentivized against fixing this problem.

That is fundamentally the problem with whole thing. Vast majority of population on Earth is not ready for personal sacrifices needed. And if some government will get to around it, I am pretty sure they will be replaced and most things are rolled back.

My guess is that we somehow end up geoengineering it with even more debt...

Why would they be when they see the hypocrisy of the chattering classes? How many celebrities or billionaires have curtailed their own lifestyles while pitching for climate change? Has the number of luxury jets and superyatches gone up or down over time?

The average person may seem stupid but they are paying attention to the actions, and it all sounds like "I got mine, screw yours" to them.

Hypocrisy is really not as useful as people think. Imagine if some man, who beat his wife, made a career of talking about the important and harrowing issues of domestic abuse.

People would rightly scratch their heads at such an over-the-top hypocrite. But surely, the man would be correct: domestic abuse is an important issue. And imagine a response from the peanut gallery? "I'm not going to stop beating my _own_ wife until that hypocrite gets his comeuppance!"

What have luxury jets and superyachts got to do with the chattering classes? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chattering_classes

Gas stoves and ordinary jets do.

Standard tragedy of the commons behavior...

And people in developing countries complain that "why should beef or jet vacations be taxed more, those Westerners got to enjoy it, and now when we want to enjoy it, it's suddenly bad?".

And we rich Westerners think it's sacrifice to have to drive an EV or pay more for beef...

The solution will have to come from growth and technical innovations, not personal sacrifice.

I agree, because (and I'm being a bit flippant) I sure as hell am not giving up my gas stove while billionaires fly around in private jets and MAGA guys are coal-rolling in their F-250s...

It seems to me that carbon capture technology plus renewables and nuclear + dream energy (fission) will be the future but we're probably not going to go off of fossil fuels much, which will necessitate in part the need to suck this stuff out of the atmosphere.

CO2 capture and planetary albedo management are going to be the only way. For cO2 capture to be meaningful, we need to increase our planetary energy production by 2 or 3x so we can put that energy into sequestration, and obviously those gains cannot be based on fossil fuels. Albedo management is much faster to roll out, but will have a lot of pushback because it will also create locally undesirable outcomes.

The tipping point is one bad summer. Photosynthesis stops at 40-45c (some plants like cactuses can do night processing based on stored energy, but staple crops don’t do that). If we have just one bad summer, billions will die. Civilization is perpetually just a week or two without food for 30 percent of the population away from complete collapse, and it takes thousands of years of stable conditions to recreate.

If we have a bad summer in the northern hemisphere, we could easily lose the capability to sequester carbon or manage planetary albedo in a meaningful way. Stopping emissions is not a solution at this point, we are already way too deep in self reinforcing methane loops for that to even be the primary factor in warming acceleration.

It’s an inconvenient truth, to be sure.

Just in case if not aware yet: read Termination Shock, a Novel by Neal Stephenson

Ministry for the Future is, in my view, much better.

The only solution that will come is from large swaths of the words population to be rapidly reduced, from a garden variety of natural disasters

That's what's happening whether anybody wants it to or not.

The majority of the population on earth goes with what's convenient. Which is something that can easily be influenced, even without banning any options

at the end of the day 'personal changes' as a fix for climate change are just another lie big corporations fed us to make it feel like the onus was on a personal level.

the amount of co2 that industries pollute and that various regulation would be able to change is multiple orders of magnitude compared to regular personal responsibility.

I mean, in the real world, people will just vote out politicians who raise their gas prices.

Doesn't seem to have worked this time.

Who do these corporations pollute for? Isn't it for individuals?

Who benefits from a corporation? Is it the customers, the workers or the owners?

In many cases, it's all three.

But not equally.

In some cases it might be and others it might not. In many cases that's going to be extremely hard to measure and equality might not even be desirable.

And in other cases, it's extremely bad for the consumers. See: enshittification due the lack of good regulations, https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/26/ursula-franklin/

For the accumulation of wealth and power. This is the natural consequence of unregulated capitalist incentives. Do you think the corporations care about the individuals?

I suppose you can see it that way, but ultimately the power is mostly in the hands of individuals, either by voting in elections or voting with their wallets.

However, this does not mean corporations aren't actively trying to influence and manipulate them, or that they don't exert pressure on politicians. Aren't Americans responsible as a whole for electing Donald Trump, for example?

Over 70% of Americans oppose data centers being built in their local area, yet they continue to be built, even when local elected representatives publicly oppose it. It's easy to see who really has the power and how futile elections can be.

Changes to those corporations will obviously have downstream effects that voters will largely not tolerate.

Even outside of America?

"The amount[...] that industries pollute" is just "personal changes" with more steps.

Personal changes against the grain or personal changes following the grain.

Imagine I want to be responsible by drinking soy milk but it's hidden in a corner of the supermarket.

Now imagine every supermarket prominently displays soy milk and cow milk is hidden in the corner. Seems easier to make the change, right? Many people will change automatically because they don't really care and just do what's easiest.

I wish the soy one were hidden on a corner on my local supermarket. There isn't even one anymore in my country, and that's the biggest soybean producer in the world.

Other plant milks are 3x the price of the cow one because of economies of scale and subsidies. It's all a big joke.

In some countries they're not allowed to call it "soy milk" which is a big joke. I understand why you can't call it "milk <font size=1>of the soy variety</font>" but nouns with adjectives can, in fact, refer to things the adjective-less noun doesn't refer to.

So the soy yoghurt in Germany is called Alpro - the brand name. The dairy industry even fucked themselves over, because even their real yoghurt doesn't meet the strict definition and has to be called "mild yoghurt" instead.

This sounds right. An individual person can’t change a complex system that gives him everything they have, from plastic forks to gas cars. The society can get together and agree on things, but the society clearly just isn’t concerned enough. There is no solution or workaround to this, unless certain scientific discoveries get made that change the warming trends by sheer coincidence. They would have to coincide with popular demand, like more attractive electric cars, and new materials, or fusion energy that’s cheap. Or, perhaps, AGI decide it for us.

Frankly, the self reinforcing methane loops we have already triggered make emissions almost irrelevant at this point. If we want a planet compatible with human prosperity, we have no choice but to do planetary scale geoengineering; albedo management and metascale carbon capture are really the only options at this point. We crossed the rubicon a few years ago and even stopping emissions altogether tomorrow won’t stop the avalanche at this point. It would buy us a few decades, at best.

What's your evidence we hit the methane runaway tipping point?

I think it’s fairly speculative, but I used to hang out with scientists from the UAF geophysical institute, I still keep in touch. They seem to believe it is the case. some of them have told me that if they were to publish it would be career suicide, and one is actually afraid to talk about it except when he’s drunk.

I figure if those guys, at least as smart as I am and way, way better informed, think it’s probable then I should consider it a significant possibility.

I really hope they are all full of shit lol.

We should abolish oil companies and make sure the only place you can gas up your lifted truck is the Democratic People's Fuel Depot, that will solve climate change.

Why would it be too late?

It'll already be summer temperatures in winter and most life will have died off

Some reports indicate it is already to late for emission reduction, or even elimination, to halt the feedback effects that continue the trend. But it won't be too late for active climate engineering until the effects of the climate change prevent our ability to do that engineering.

Thermal systems are slow. On the planetary scale of pump and dump heat the lag is something like 30 years. So the change you’re experiencing today is the effect of what was exhausted in the 90s. What we’re getting in 2050 is already locked in.

I don't disagree but I feel like this comment chain kinda implies taking action today would actually meaningfully change the trajectory too...

It really doesn't. Climate change is a global problem. It would need a global solution, and everyone should know that that's beyond unlikely to appear... So the only thing you can do is reduce local pollution - which is meaningful in it's way (better quality of life), but has no long term impact on the climate.

It really depends on which action you take.

Because photosynthesis grinds to a halt at about 40c. This is what people are missing. Climate change isn’t the world hiding in their apartments with the AC blasting, its cities burning a week after everything seemed fine.

Civilisation takes millennia of stable, plentiful resources to create, and a week without food for 30 percent of the population to utterly destroy.

I’d love to be wrong, if you disagree please say why.

Climate change is no food next year because this year's heat wave killed all the crops. If we're unlucky. But there's still next year to get unlucky. And the year after that. And the year after that.

It's not—the point is that many people that were claiming climate change is a hoax have shifted, now that it's much plainer that climate change is real, to saying it's too late to do anything about it so we shouldn't try.

It's just finding new narratives to protect the incumbent moneyed interests from ever having their infinitely increasing rate of growth threatened.

>Another factor is that rich oil and gas people figured out they could just buy the media.

Yea, they figured it just now, in the 2010s and 20s. During the 90's the thought just didn't occur to them...Makes complete sense.

Nothing discredits an idea so much like the proponents of it being total idiots.

> Another factor is that rich oil and gas people figured out they could just buy the media.

Who is this "media"? Is this the same "media" that Trump and his dullards claim is so corrupt and contrary to The Truth? Are you influenced by this "media"? I don't read The Guardian or Jacobin, but I'm occasionally exposed to their headlines and they are certainly reporting on climate change. Are they part of the "media"?

There is no monoculture "media" and to the extent there is, it is (in the US at least) overwhelmingly left-leaning. And ironically, when there were fewer outlets for information, those outlets (because they served such a large and diverse audience) hewed to a common sense/conventional wisdom understanding of the facts.

No is one controlling media. Maybe the CCP through TikTok steering.

> Is this the same "media" that Trump and his dullards claim is so corrupt and contrary to The Truth? Are you influenced by this "media"? I don't read The Guardian or Jacobin, but I'm occasionally exposed to their headlines and they are certainly reporting on climate change. Are they part of the "media"?

This would have any meaning behind it if e.g. Jacobin had the same reach and viewership as Fox News. But it doesn't, so your entire argument rests on false assumptions.

Fox News' influence is greater than its (pathetic by historical standards) geriatric audience share, but it far far less influential than its opponents imagine. What changes if they were gone? Another right-leaning organization would rise a la MSNBC to fill that demand.

I would love to think that http://thedispatch.com would become the standard bearer of thoughtful conservation of liberal values, but it would probably be ONN or some shit.

the "media" means "the media that the majority of the people consume" -- that is most certainly not the Jacobin, or even the Guardian

in the US, it's Fox "News", and the other big networks - NBC, CBS, ABC, to a letter extent CNN, NYT, WaPo

look up the ownership of those networks. why do you think the Ellisons and Trump are trying so hard to get Paramount to take over Warner Bros after it already took over SkyDance?

The reason your favorite issue is not the cause celebre: Trump has flooded the zone with shit.

He holds the microphone, all day, everyday. The World Cup provides a moment's respite, until... Trump grabs the microphone.

If the lurch to the left succeeds, the leftist agenda will dominate the headlines (modulo Trump's extraordinary ability to dominate all conversations, national to dinner table).

The Guardian is part of the Guardian Media Group, owned by the Scott Trust Limited. The trust was created in 1936 to "secure the financial and editorial independence of The Guardian in perpetuity and to safeguard the journalistic freedom and liberal values of The Guardian free from commercial or political interference". (wikipedia)

This is highly unusual for a newspaper, most media don't have that kind of independence. The Guardian is also unusual in having made a commitment to covering the climate crisis very extensively. I don't think it's a coincidence.

As I mention below, it's Trump news overwhelming everything. If WaPo was publishing 100% more climate news, no one would notice, because... no one would click those articles!

It's not even news! MAGAs I bet are resigned to a warmer climate, just arguing over cause and mitigation.

I guess was drives me nuts is "mysterious Greedy Fatcats are controlling the world" when much simpler explanations satisfy. (I'll allow that I'm sympathetic CCP steering of TikTok).

That's the 4 stage strategy: https://youtube.com/watch?v=QYHwgQLvjqs

Which shows how badly the popular media cover hard news. "Social justice" is all the rage now thrown together with anything else that's exciting to watch on video.

What does this even mean?

Are you talking about US media?

Seems like a delusion to me. Social justice is yet another banned topic under conservative corporate ownership.

Quick headline check:

- Trump claims to have invented a word that exists

- “Burger King’s New Whopper Strikes a Blow in Fast Food Wars”

- “US strikes $1.2bn deal to pay German firm to halt offshore wind projects” (is this a social justice topic?)

- Attorney General confirmation political reporting

- school shooting reporting (is this social justice??)

And there it is

I was reading somewhere that we are already fucked even if we were to completely halt greenhouse emissions today. Apparently we kickstarted some positive feedback loop (I think it was the thawing of the permafrost in Siberia/Canada) which releases enormous quantities of Methane and that with the higher temperatures we already reached we decreased Earth albedo as there is less snow/ice reflecting light into space.

I really hope that particular article was wrong, because the alternative is that we have to resort to geo engineering. Considering that the governments can't really coordinate in preventing this, I don't see them coordinate in fixing it, especially because the scale and costs of the "fixes" are astronomical.

There's an old joke that goes about like:

How do you solve Global Warming? Nuclear Winter ...

I really hope this is not how we end up geo-engineering our way out of Climate change.

While it's great that green energy is now economically feasible, the idea that there will quickly (say, in the next 50 years) be a "green transition" that eliminates the usage of carbon fuels is still highly dubious.

What we've seen is new renewable capacity carving out a tiny sliver in the energy mix, sometimes even being able to meet all new demand in the installation period, but we still have all the existing demand running on the old stack.

https://ourworldindata.org/energy-mix

This book talks about this: https://www.amazon.com/More-All-Consuming-History-Energy/dp/...

There's also the fact that global society is not a real time strategy game being managed by a well intentioned min-maxing actor driving compounding efficiency gains in resource usage. It's a free for all where everyone is paranoid that they'll be destroyed if they don't use every dirty trick they can (on a global geopolitical level), entrenched oligarchies permanently lobbying for their inefficient, destructive structures to continue (on a domestic economy level) and so on.

It's not looking good overall.

Until this administration which is actively canceling wind projects with taxpayer money.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49208314

Well "climate change" as understood today wasn't really talked about much in the 90s, as I remember it. Some broad, apocalyptic concern about creeping temperatures and knock on effects over many decades.

But I do remember quite a bit about "pollution" and like general acute environmental issues. Smog in LA, the hole in the ozone, etc. Those were both more understandable and visible to your average person and more tractable. And there was the obvious hook about energy independence after the fairly recent (at that time) oil embargo and such.

The Green party (are they still around?) talked about more vague issues like ocean plastic and six pack wrappers on birds, but I don't think we made a ton of progress there, but then that was less consequential anyway.

I feel like we went down the worst timeline since then when it became very political and people burn gas for the hell of it, and others hate people who do so. Solar and nuclear (or hell even just solar) could give us clean, cheap energy abundance, but the people championing solar tend not to do it from the abundance perspective, but in tandem with cutting energy use which is a hard sell and not necessary anyway, in my opinion.

You do realize some of us were alive in the 1990's? That's a really odd thing to lie about.

Did you forget the Earth Summit and its Climate Change Convention? Or the Kyoto Protocol?

Both sat at the top of the news agenda for months! Not to mention years of features, long-form journalism, and documentaries. And then the denialist backlash began to kick off in the late 90s, which (initially) added to the media storm.

Your balcony solar is a drop in the ocean of CO2 that USA, China and India keep spewing out.

https://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/report_2025

I think this has to do with the fact that the public has caught on to greenwashing. One example that sticks out in my head is the "save a tree use a plastic bag" thing. I think the appeal to environmentalism was enough to change customer behavior, or at least not cause resistance, but the real motivation for the change was probably financial.

Its because society has decided that anyone talking about climate change is rude

It isnt nice to talk about climate change because it's become extremely obvious that blaming the rich and the government is not working. The responsibility lies on the 8 billion individuals making excuses.

So the news isn't really covering it anymore because PEOPLE COMPLAIN.

https://www.mediamatters.org/broadcast-networks/abc-cbs-and-...

Just in case you miss it: The author of the post, Adam McKay, "is the Academy Award-winning director of The Big Short, Vice, and Don’t Look Up and the founder of Yellow Dot Studios."

I think us people do not have the capacity as societies to effectively anticipate and solve problems that we can see approaching but have not become catastrophic yet. We always act shortsightedly and ..hope for the best. Most of the people will just not vote/support anything that might bring them some minuscule pain. Even if we know by logic that the problem is coming, we tend to follow whomever will tell us that it's not a problem and base our hopes on him/her. Think of a problem that we saw coming in the future and we collectively solved. I can think of none.

It is very hopeful that renewables are being pursued and developed by China at least to some degree and have become economically attractive. That's the only feasible way to minimize the damage that's already been done.

It's not even at society scale IMO. How many times do people at a company deprioritize small-to-medium fixes on things that may/will become a problem later? Sometimes you have to wait until a problem gets "big enough" before you can get buy-in from colleagues to address it.

Of course details matter and what I mentioned above is not a universal truth. It is an often observed pattern though.

> Think of a problem that we saw coming in the future and we collectively solved. I can think of none.

My favorite counterexample is the ozone layer. When I was a kid, that was the Big Bad environmental concern. But we actually worked together on a global scale to fix it.

Broader climate change is a much bigger problem with stronger financial and political incentives, but in principle we've done it before.

The Y2k bug.

Eight excruciating paragraphs before the author stops rambling and gets to their thesis. So much fluff.

I think its an article about gourds? With some climate change opinions in the middle.

The climate change part raises some good points, but why gourds?

Cast away the gourd! Follow the shoe!

Don't Look Up

This. Maybe I am impatient but I was just scrolling through the first half.

I guess time zones are driving a significantly US-centric response. My company works on climate repair. We're just a four person menlo park startup so far with some pilots in the field but we have a couple of billion in our sales pipeline, entirely based on people who have sought us out. Global spend on climate doubled last year and is on a tear this year. Recent events, from the closure of the gulf of Hormuz to the huge fires in Europe have stiffened peoples' resolve.

Sure, the US cut spending since early '25, but even before those cuts, the US was less than 8% of global spending on climate intervention. But it's destructive: though we're based in the US, there is no commercial interest in the states and all our pipeline is outside the country.

Climate denialism is extremely destructive, but it's pretty much entirely a phenomenon of USA, Russia, Germany, Netherlands, France, UK, Canada, and Australia (crudely ranked by % of population), plus of course some gulf states. One of our three founders is an anthropologist and her field work has found that hardly anyone outside the top of the OECD has any doubt that the climate is changing and affecting them directly.

There's not enough happening but the derivative feels strongly positive.

What is Climate repair? What is your company doing to repair the climate?

Climate report is exactly what it sounds like: turning back the clock on temperature rise in the atmosphere and oceans. I’d like to get it to 1750, but really it isn’t really necessary to turn the clock back more than a few decades.

We are working on methane emissions and methane concentrations in the atmosphere (we can destroy methane in gas streams with very high levels all the way down to ones below the current ambient environment (which is about 2 ppm).

We really need to stop using fossil fuels but sadly the drivers of that are not really related to pollution. And we need to clean up the atmospheric damage, which is more than the super pollutant methane, rather it’s primarily CO2. But methane will buy us more time.

Apart from climate repair, people are also trying mitigation strategies (e.g. moving away from low-lying places) but that’s a lot harder than it sounds for psychological and sociological reasons.

Also people are just trying to address the heating problems directly, mainly by changing the earth’s albedo or putting up an umbrella at L1. Nobody really has any idea of the consequences of such approaches even if they were viable, but they are pretty dangerous from both the physics and again sociological factors. And it doesn’t address the underlying problems.

> I’d like to get it to 1750

You want to bring humanity back into the little ice age?

> Before that [Holocene], for hundreds of thousands of years in the Pleistocene era, humans (and our hominid ancestors) spent most of their time running from drought, fires, floods, extreme cold and heat, predators, and each other. The population was likely no more than a few million people spread across the whole planet. At one point we may have almost gone extinct, with just 10,000 Homo sapiens clinging to life. But after the advent of the Holocene and its remarkably stable climate, in only 100 centuries the world population has risen to 8 billion.

This is extremely misleading. The "remarkably stable" climate didn't bring the world's population up to 8 billion, it was abundant energy from fossil fuels (7 out of 8 of all of the humans that have ever lived have done so in the industrial era). The Holocene isn't some serene stable climate period - there are still natural disasters at about the same rate they have been occurring throughout the past 11k years - but the difference is that we're much less likely to be killed by them due to abundant energy and technology. The transition from the Pleistocene into the Holocene definitely made life easier, mostly because of the natural warming.

Our economy is an abstract intangible system which requires infinite growth and debt issuance, this in reality requires more caloric expenditure and resource consumption. Thermodynamically this is pretty bad news. At one point the see-saw is gonna tip the other way, then it might cool off for a spell.

When it tips the other way, we will be entering the economic dark ages, exactly proportional to how long we’ve been kicking this can down the road, which is likely since 2007 at least.

Sadly I think the only solution is to invest to build more energy infrastructure and more AI, so that in the future when the shit really hits the fan we have enough energy and assistance from AI to create a scalable technology to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere proactively.

In my view there is no credible future in which the world will become carbon neutral in 1 or even 10 years. It just ain't happening. This is one of those problems where the train is already running down the hill, and we need to engineer a way to catch it. We cannot stop it anymore.

Like a tree planting robot?

AI is literally burning through vast amounts of fossil fuel, all so we can write more homogenous emails and vibe code useless things, and your proposal is moar AI?

> so that in the future when the shit really hits the fan we have enough energy and assistance from AI to create a scalable technology to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere proactively.

> In my view there is no credible future in which the world will become carbon neutral in 1 or even 10 years. It just ain't happening.

So we're going to skip becoming carbon neutral and go straight to carbon negative, because...magic, I guess?

> So we're going to skip becoming carbon neutral and go straight to carbon negative

Yes, when the effects on the environments are so bad that there can be no denying anymore because they affect everyday life of almost all people.

I am not saying this is a good option. I am saying that I don't see an alternative to get a world wide mobilization. Do you see China and the US becoming carbon neutral in the next 10 year?

The annoying "magic" dig was unnecessary. With (clean) energy abundance you can indeed capture enough CO2 to make a world wide impact.

> Yes, when the effects on the environments are so bad that there can be no denying anymore because they affect everyday life of almost all people.

I can't reconcile 2 things here. The effects will be so bad, but at the same time we will have energy abundance to go beyond carbon neutral and carbon negative. Have you ever lived in a country with famine or where energy/water is only available for few hours a day?

Do you think such country has a capability to have energy abundance for carbon storage.

> The annoying "magic" dig was unnecessary.

I'll decide what's necessary in my comments, thank you very much. Unless you want to get responses like "your entire comment wasn't necessary", to which I will not stoop to.

> With (clean) energy abundance you can indeed capture enough CO2 to make a world wide impact.

I've yet to see how that is possible from your comment. Maybe it is "annoying" to you to provide some arguments, but that's how discussions work between adults.

At this point I’m not sure what to do about it. I already live a low-ish carbon life. I barely ever fly. Only drive when I need to. Try and use items that are non-plastic where feasible. I don’t buy extra clothes.

It’s at the point where I wish it were solvable, but I don’t believe it is, so I can’t afford to think about it. Maybe people better than me can, and good luck to them.

Maybe convince your relatives to do the same?

That’s pointless.

Political change is needed to achieve any of this. Changing your individual behavior or even the individual behavior of everyone you know – while certainly not wrong! – won’t solve this.

This is like trying to abolish slavery in 19th century US by not owning slaves and trying your very best to not buy anything that involves slave labor … laudable, but not a way to abolish slavery.

Isn't political change brought about by collective changes in behaviors of an individual and of those around them?

Exactly! Politics try to appease the mass. If the mass would be willing to put climate change first we would have other policies, instead we follow the dark visions of lunatic billionaires

I think that’s an interesting point and one I did actually think about while writing my comment but ultimately didn’t address.

The interaction between individual behavior changes and political changes is interesting and to my mind where lots of interesting stuff happens. I’m not 100% convinced that politics is always downstream from culture and culture is downstream from individual behavior changes but I do agree that there is an interesting interaction happening that’s worth looking at and addressing.

The abolitionist in isolation certainly will not be able to abolish slavery, however their individual behavior might contribute to an atmosphere where slavery is ostracized and seen as more obviously evil by more people, thus making it easier for politicians to make political decisions that ultimately lead to the abolition of slavery.

I think that is why it is always so important for me to point out that it is certainly never wrong to individually behave in a way the limits your own individual contribution to climate change. I mostly have a problem when that‘s the end or even the main focus of it. Climate protection to my mind is most effective when it is tightly coupled to clear political demands. Too often individual behavior changes are used as action terminators. My impression is that individual action is often presented (as here) as a complete solution to climate change when it is anything but.

In the West it feels like individual change is kinda marketed as a substitute for political change.

Actually if that can bring up your morale, just replacing coal power plants with nuclear (or other 24x7 clean energy source) would keep up at the 1.5°C objective.

It's not at all about individual action. This scale of problem requires policy intervention and investment at national levels, and inter-governmental coordination internationally.

The big, meaningful wins come from things like stopping the use of coal, not signing-off on new oil and gas exploration, tax-incentives and disincentives, grid work, fining polluters.

We instinctively frame this as an individual problem, the cynic might say we've been encouraged to, but the reality is that whether or not you fly this summer has precisely dick-all impact globally. It's the actions of our governments that count.

At least in theory, our governments are voted in place exactly by us. Trump voters loved his ideas and he's implementing them now, yay success. Also industrial pollution is fueled by our buying habits just as well - if nobody would order stuff brought by ship from overseas, well, we wouldn't have many of those huge(ly) polluting ships around. So I wouldn't leave out the personal responsibility here: we make decisions every day, and giving up paper straws is only the most insignificant one.

It's about taking a holistic view of the situation as well. Shipping is a big producer world wide, but stopping it entirely barely makes a dent. A lot more is industry, appliances, heating.

And those boats make a lot less of an impact than all those trucks driving everything across land.

Wise choices are needed.

did our buying habits force AI into everything?

To face this directly: I think an honest answer is probably "yes".

Our buying habits empowered the type of company that wants to put AI into everything. Whether they continue to do so or not will also depend on our buying habits going forward.

Large merchant ships are extremely efficient in terms of CO2 and other pollutants released per ton of cargo. I agree with ordering less stuff when practical but most of the emissions happen due to manufacturing and use, not transport.

> It's not at all about individual action. This scale of problem requires policy intervention and investment at national levels, and inter-governmental coordination internationally.

It is all about individual action. And then the emergence from that to what amounts to the multi-pronged solutions that are needed to address a wicked problem. Like create the "big meaningful wins" you mention. There is no mailbox where you drop off "stop the use of coal", and it happens, neither is there a magic button. A complicating factor is that we are not able to see how our small individual actions contribute to solving the wicked problems, and we are not able to coordinate them at scale.

Individual action definitely doesn't hurt, but it is not enough.

You and all your friends could install solar and batteries and drive EVs and all the energy consumption for your house, cooking, and travel could be totally green and renewable. That's great! But in the US in 2025, 63% of energy consumption is commercial+industrial [1].

National policies need to be set to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and deforestation through clean alternatives, subsidies, regulation, and probably treaties. If you can make green cheaper and/or a better product functionally, you don't have to convince people.

  [1] <https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/use-of-electricity.php>
  [2] <https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emissions>
  [3] <https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/deforestation-rates-by-country>

Well, COVID made sure almost nobody was flying for a couple months. Carbon emissions were slightly down if I remember right.

You can keep telling people to avoid flying and live a life of low carbon footprint, but if the issue is much more systematic, economical and technological, it will just become a distraction and make people dislike you (and the cause).

I do all those things freely, and that offsets your carefulness. But I don’t/won’t have kids, so I’m not even a drop in the bucket.

Don't have a pet cat or dog.

Owning an unnecessary carnivorous animal is rather bad news from a CO2 perspective. A dog can be responsible for higher CO2 emissions than a car.

https://impact.ed.ac.uk/research/climate-environmental-crisi...

https://www.zerosmart.co.uk/post/the-average-carbon-footprin...

(Que outrage from pet owners and people suggesting I'm a crazy vegan.... I'm most certainly not vegan or veggie!)

So we should not own pets, because the real polluters (companies) are lobbying to keep polluting? What bothers me so much about this idea of individual responsibility is that we get blamed for a choice we couldn't possibly make. It is up to the people in power to start making change, and it is important that people vote and educate themselves, but IMO this idea of individual responsibility for societal problems like climate change is ridiculous and only leads to inaction! We need to hold companies accountable, and we need to hold governments accountable. Own a dog, enjoy your life!

There's multiple vegan brands for dogs and cats feed. If it looks "unnatural" I suggest some reflexions:

    - Most kibble's ingredients are not naturals
    - Most of the kibble's flesh comes from a non-natural production
    - Your pet health (and your own health) require some "nutrients" instead of "food types"

Agree 100% societal decisions are more important than individual ones. However the choice in question could be made as it's not doing (pet ownership). Don't take it personal, OP is not telling you what to do or blaming anyone but instead share some data. As you said: enjoy your life :)

PS: price-wise they tends to be in the premium range. If your cat already has allergies and special kibbles for that, vegan kibbles are in the same price range and are particularly good for that condition.

You should never restrict a cat to a vegan diet. That is very unhealthy for them.

Let me cite yourself:

> If you have data that supports this assertion, show it.

Aside personal anecdotic evidences of cats thriving after +10 years of vegetal feed, here's some:

> Considering these results overall, cats fed vegan diets tended to be healthier than cats fed meat-based diets. This trend was clear and consistent. These results largely concur with previous, similar studies

> In most cases differences between dietary groups were not statistically significant

[2023, 127 cats in the vegetal group] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjourn...

I admit that's not much, but If you think about it there's no reason a carnivore may not live healthy if provided the right nutrients, whatever the sources. Those nutrients are already well studied -especially for one of the two most common pet- and generously added in kibble because the base is often poorly balanced.

That's observational, self-reported data. In other words, completely worthless.

Ah, uk research institutions. The paragon of austerity for the common man. How are we going to fix the climate crises? Not a sensible carbon policy and mandates on international corporations and nation states[1][2][3][4].

No, just stop having pets.

I don't think you're a crazy vegan, and I'm not outraged. But your proposal is ridicules.

1 - https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10...

2 - https://influencemap.org/briefing/Carbon-Majors-2024-Data- Update-35466

3 - https://www.theenergymix.com/17-of-worlds-20-biggest-carbon-...

4 - https://www.rinnovabili.net/environment/pollution/world-co2-...

Lot of info overload going on.

Most people dont know covid hasnt disappeared. It keeps evolving and there are strains out there still causing issues. But thanks to the attention economy dynamics, all sorts of random people were acting like they were virologists, epidemiologists, microbiologists at its peak. They have all disappeared ie shifted focus to whatever else. Meanwhile the ecosystem and infra dedicated to keep track of this stuff chuggs along keeping the lights on. All am saying is there is no reason to keep everyone in a freaked out state.

Stop voting for Republicans. That's a good start.

> This massive lie can best be summed up as “when it comes to climate change... we have more time.”

This time we have no more time but 25 years ago when we had no more time it was true?

Or we've never had more time?

Limiting temperature change by every additional 0.1°C is still worthwhile from a human welfare perspective.

In that sense it is never to late. We can always do something to limit the damage. It’s just that it gets harder and harder and some damage becomes irreversible at a certain point.

Had we done more 25 years ago it would all have been cheaper, easier and led to less damage overall. That doesn’t mean doing something now is suddenly not worth it.

I suppose millions can die in slightly more comfort.

Millions fewer people will die. That’s the difference.

It’s just a sliding death scale, not a binary one. Sure, there might be steps, it might not all be linear, but still: doesn’t mean at some point doing something is pointless.

Limiting temperature change by every additional 0.1°C is not really about comfort. Either way rich people will be comfortable and poor people will be uncomfortable or dead. It's about buying everyone more time to adapt.

With respect to human lives it could mean the difference between tens of millions of deaths and billions of deaths. With respect to wildlife it could be the difference between losing 10–20% of the planet's species in the Holocene extinction versus 40% or more as per the IPCC. With respect to migration it could mean the difference between levels that are painful versus globally destabilizing. With respect to geoengineering it could mean that we have significantly more time to refine the technologies before they're inevitably deployed.

in some way i guess thats always been an issue with the messaging on climate change and the issue in general.

its always a problem and its slow moving enough and cumulative enough that it will always be better to fix it sooner but the real dangers are many years off.

when the jet stream collapses overnight then we'll be forced to deal with it

Alternatively, think of an alcoholic telling his doctor ‘you told me to stop drinking 5 years ago but i’m still fine’

It’s a slow train, but the damage is cumulative and it will get us eventually.

Okay great. We’re out of time. Fine, we get it. But the problem with this article, and many other similar articles, is it seems like it’s just designed to scare the shit out of us.

No call to action, no recommendations in what to do about it. It’s basically insinuating that we, the regular people, are the responsible.

As there in-lies the problem, and it makes me furious. The onus to engineer our way out of a climate catastrophe is not on the regular people. The onus is on the people who engineered is into this problem. Government, industry, politicians, scientists, literal engineers.

If this is really as urgent they say it is, then why aren’t they acting faster to retool our infrastructure? Joe Schmoe doesn’t have the ability to build more electric cars. He can’t go out and build more nuclear power plants, or build solar farms.

The problem here is every time you read an article like this you’re left feeling guilty. We’re told we’re the problem. Joe Rogan (and others) are the problem. Not the people who actually got us into this situation. The energy here is so misguided. It’s infuriating.

I love you Adam McKay and your art, but us normal folks are just living life, with the tools & systems that were engineered for us by other people. Stop telling us we’re the problem.

I don't see him as blaming us regular people. Just liars (which he takes pains to enumerate thoroughly). Of course most of us are just living our lives. But sometimes even us normal folk have an opportunity, when we bump into one of these liars or have a conversation about one, and we can at least remind folks this is still a problem.

The main thrust of the article is that the attention to the uncomfortable issue of climate change has been replaced with noise about everything else and comfortable lies about things being fine, and that the drop in attention correlates strongly with climate change worsening as such making the case that even just bringing more attention back to the issue could help prevent it.

If you are looking for the "call to action," you are missing the entire point of the article. There have been millions of calls to action for over 50 years and they have not made any difference. The point is that we must sit with the fact that it is too late. We have made our death bed and now we must be prepared to deal with what comes next.

you:

>It’s basically insinuating that we, the regular people, are the responsible.

the article:

>Like all grand lies, “we have more time” takes many different forms, often focus-grouped. [...] There are the queries of “What’s your carbon footprint?,” as if individual people with plastic bags or straws were the problem and not gigantic multinational corporations.

Yeah I probably overreacted a little bit, I got a little fired up :) I re-read it and caught that line as well.

So Adam isn’t directly saying normal people are the problem, he does apparently believe it’s on the mega-corps, politicians, media, etc. But the end result is kind of the same.

Okay fine, maybe grifters and liars in politics and media are subduing the population into caring less about climate change. I don’t really agree with it, but let’s accept it for arguments sake. Okay now what? The thesis here is that nothing is changing because not enough people believe (even though he admits a small minority of people deny climate science), or not enough people are speaking up loudly about it.

So back where we started. Whether in our own accord, or because the media is manipulating us, he believes the crux of the problem is not enough people are getting loud and angry about climate change.

I would argue it’s more likely we’re entering into a period of “climate fatigue”. We’ve been bludgeoned over the head & brow beaten about climate change for so long, and’s seen little to no change in the systems at scale that are at the root, we’re all exhausted.

I skimmed over half way through and they were still talking about gourds.

This is a tough read. I'm not sure who it's aimed at, since the article mentions only 14% of Americans (surely one of the most climate denying countries) don't believe climate change is real. It's alarmist in a way that is whistlecalling but not in a useful way.

It also lies with graphs in a way that I just hate -- we have surface temperature charts that show growth trends going all the way back to ... 2024. Please. This page from wikipedia shows a much longer range with a lot more context: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Holocene_Temperature..., and reasonable qualifiers on the methods used to go back.

Useful proposals always welcomed, ideally ones that in a game theoretic sense do not reward defection and are realistic about the economics of releasing more CO2 as part of power production, but this essay isn't it.

I hate when such (great) articles end with "we have a lot to do". Please give at least a couple of examples of a constructive action. "Write to your government", "Support this NGO". Do not loose the moment of attention you have just won.

Just think of all the good NGOs have done

Vote. It's literally the best thing you can do, apart from going into politics yourself

This is too rare and too little.

In this case, do the things that it says are no use focusing on. Change your individual behavior to align with the position you profess to have taken about whether or not climate change is a serious and urgent problem.

Are we ready to have a discussion about seeding the upper atmosphere with SO2 yet?

Can we say for certain that doing so would not have an unintended side effect, given how complex the biodome is? If not, then likely no.

One day the calculation is going to be "do nothing and cook ourselves to death" vs. "Put SO2 in the atmosphere and see what happens next".

If the SO2 brings about destruction sooner, I'm of the camp that "well, we were destined for death anyway...".

I can understand a no answer from people who think climate change is no big deal, but it's kind of weird that people who think climate change will kill hundreds of millions -- possibly everyone -- say no on the grounds that it has risks.

Possible unintended side effects is better than "everyone dies".

Ten years ago, I was saying we should experiment with it on a small scale so that if it does become necessary, we're not shooting blind, but even then the doomers were opposed because of "risks". You know what else has risks? Unmitigated climate change!

Maybe after double digit million death count.

Or just a rogue country that's being hit by the crisis more than others

Not "collapsing the climate"

Collapsing human-optimum climate, a temporary state Earth entered about 15 thousand years ago and made modern civilization possible.

The truly sad thing about it all is not the damage to some abstract "environment". The fact remains that we had an Eden-like planet for a few thousand years and completely and utterly wrecked it to maximize the "wealth" of a few generations of elites.

The gargantuan lie that is collapsing the climate is that we told ourselves nuclear is deadly dangerous, but coal & gas are merely "dirty".

The people who deny climate change have won, and accepted the [now] inevitable downfall of humanity as we know it. They are enriching themselves to have the financial power to give them the personal power to adapt to climate change. The rest can rot in hell. In essence, they're able to build their own Arc of Noah, and you and 99,999999% of everyone else (nevermind all the animals) aren't on the guest list.

In order to not cause chaos, they lie (by denying climate change, sowing FUD) or ensure the issue isn't mentioned/covered (by owning media, self-censorship). "Keep calm, everything is going extremely well."

I believe Earth isn't badly off with a lot less humans, I just don't like the distribution of survivorship isn't going to be random. Survivorship bias is going to contain heroic stories, but in the end a lot of people without power/money are going to take the shortest straw. And, that wasn't necessary.

The track Extrawelt - Phoebe has an excellent quote on the matter. Paraphrased:

> "We would be the first lifeform that wipe itself out. But what is unique is we did it knowingly. Why didn't we save ourselves from [...]? Is the answer, we weren’t sure if we were worth saving?"

Bullshit alarmism like this helps no one.

Just because it makes you feel uncomfortable doesn’t mean it’s bullshit.

Global economy could face 50% loss in GDP between 2070 and 2090 from climate shocks, say actuaries

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jan/16/economic...

German scientists warn global warming is accelerating faster than expected, raising the risk of a 3 °C rise by 2050 https://worldcrunch.com/focus/green-or-gone/global-warming-a...

> This particular sub-genus of grifts, half-truths and strategic omissions ... “Manifest Destiny.” “Aryan superiority.” “The divine right of kings.” “The domino theory.” “Israel has a right to defend itself.”

aaaand, you lost me.

Was it domino theory?

Exactly the same point where I determined the article is garbage.

Thanks for quoting, I wasn't going to read the article, but now I realise the author is obviously onto something and I'd do well to read him.

If you read the article, he is not saying that Israel doesn't have a right to defend itself. He's saying that Israel's right to defend itself has been a lie told to justify the genocide they are carrying out in Gaza.

I've always thought it's pretty obvious how all this climate change stuff will play out:

- Yeah some govts reduce carbon emissions, but others don't care (china) or can't afford to focus on that (developing economies).

- Climate activists will continue to act like we're to literally ruin the world (this is stupid). Climate change deniers will say temperature changes are just cyclical (also stupid).

- On a global macro scale, fossil fuels continue to be consumed as long as it makes sense economically

- Solar eventually gets cheap enough to begin to truly displace fossil fuels. EVs also go mainstream. Both happening now.

- In the end... life will just go on as we just naturally move up the tech tree and fossil fuels become an ever smaller part of the energy mix

You might want to research such things as "feedback loops", the effects a high CO2 had in the past million year with extinction events and the almost impossible task of reversing the released CO2 and more. Climate scientists have studied these models for years now, real life is not a CIV game.

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