Climate change affects geographies unequally. Seems like Europe and the tropics have been the first to suffer, year after year, and with the UK losing that warm current in ~47 years, can't help but wonder what is on European minds.
The main thing I have in mind is that human civilization is completely fucked. What is needed to ensure things aren’t too horrible in the next century is so drastic and requires such a global coordinated effort that will never happen. There is no technology or super authority that will magically save us from a climate catastrophe this century.
Given the vast majority of the world population still see vegetarianism as a joke and not a necessity, and developed countries are ready to sacrifice pretty much everything to the AI compute gods we are truly fucked
I guess Eric or Barron will follow Project 2025 Edition 10's guideline and invade Greenland to secure their water for USA. And Canada's favorable climate?
I'm pretty convinced that lots of people would be willing to make sacrifices. But not while Mark Zuckerberg is allowed to feed his Angus beef Macadamia nuts on Hawaii and all the invitees fly in separate private jets to COP26 instead of making it an online event.
The message of "sacrifice for thee, but not for me!" should not be underestimated here.
Not to let the 1% off the hook. Por que no los dos
It's about time to cut the crap that each person can make a difference while governments keep subsidizing all sorts of activities that damage the environment.
I will vote for forbidding beef, but will keep eating it until it is forbidden.
But you have to have some public consensus or the government will never implement such changes due to their unpopularity. This is why I think promoting some reduction in individual meat consumption is still valuable - it is good for average people to reflect on their consumption or they will vote out anyone who attempts to change it.
I don't think that the focus should be on individual blame (even just for the reason that this is politically nonviable). But you at least need to amass some collective awareness.
But I know that the meat and dairy industry are hellish for the environment. You don't need to win me in that argument, I accepted that already.
But that's the catch - either we are all in this together, or we will burn in this oven-earth of our making. There's no between. I am not becoming vegan just to die scorched anyway because meat and dairy were still subsidized and consumed.
Governments are surprisingly good to set proper incentives when they want. It could make beef and dairy economically ruinous with taxes instead of forbidding. Consumption would lower dramatically the moment a striploin beef is costing 30 bucks.
If society needs several environmental catastrophes to wake up, then I can only hope I see the other side of it.
Yes, hit the biggest poluters who incidentally put so much money into anti-climate agenda. Stop distracting with tiny individual crap.
>tries to control others' dietary habits
The problem is that way too few are willing to change their habits, and legislators have near-zero incentive to enact unpopular rules to help mitigate the problems. AI isn't going to change any of that.
but that was still way too much to ask. I'm afraid that if you insist on reducing the solution space to just 'it magically goes away and no one has to think about it', even the mighty AI might struggle. why don't fire up Claude and ask it?
It should be much easier to convince people that emission free energy production is a necessity, and yet there is for all practical purpose no such political movement or any political party that actually support the simple fact that producing electricity and heat through burning carbon based fuel is completely unnecessary and should have been relegated as a something past civilizations did. We don't need to convince the world population to change their culture in order to not construct new thermal power plants, only political will and money.
If it is a necessity, it should be government policy. Make it a regulation.
No change will happen when you switch the focus of necessity from society to individual.
UK here. It really feels like this year has been a massive wake-up call, a follow-up to the one of 2022 (and 2018, 2019, 2021...)
Some fire services have had their busiest months on record this year. In an extraordinary (and controversial) move, they convinced the government to use the phone Emergency Alert system to alert the entire country about the risk of fires.
Prior to summer, in the North of England, it was extremely windy and gloomy from September to May. Very very few blue skies. The other day, we went from a 2-day mini heat wave (35c & 28c) to gloomy cloud in 2 days - it's just so bizarre.
We've just had our 5th or 6th heatwave of the summer
A train derailed yesterday due to a buckled rail. Another derailed, cause of which is suspected to be heat/drought related. Luckily no fatalities.
We've had more wildfires than 2022 and drought is more widespread. I often can't have my window open at night when it's 29c inside because of the fires 10-20 miles away. I have no A/C
I'm wondering if our future is gales and grey for 9 months then heatwaves and drought? I know the North of England is historically gloomy, but it 'feels' different of late.
It feels like we do not have the money to begin to prepare and fix things that need fixing to continue the life we have. We haven't built a reservoir since 1990 despite massive population increase. Our rail network is not prepared for heat waves or long periods of drought or long periods of rain or long periods of ice/snow. London buses mostly have no A/C, ditto rest of the country. Many people don't have money for A/C at home - not even sure our electricity network could handle it. And about 100 other issues...
Country Share Cumulative Cumulative (Gt)
China 33% 33% 11.4-13.1
United States 11.7% 44.7% 16.0-18.1
India 8% 52.7% 19.1-21.2
Russia 5.1% 57.8% 21.1-23.2
Japan 2.5% 60.3% 22.1-24.2
UK 0.8% 0.3-0.4 (no cumulative figure)
Note that, first, there really is not much point to doing anything if you don't reduce by at least 52% in 3 years or less (less than that, or more time, will not make the difference between IPCC >2 and <2 scenarios). Hence without drastic reductions from the Chinese government (not promises, not "look at our beautiful new solar field", ONLY we're stopping these HUNDREDS of coal mines WITHIN 2 years) you've pretty much already lost, since a lot of countries lower on the list will definitely be increasing, and have declared it colonization for the west to demand they stop. Oh, by the way, you also must convince many African countries to stop that whole "electricity for our people" thing, otherwise the needed reduction is also a pipedream.
Note that just stopping CO2 output does not matter if it just gets transplanted somewhere else. In other words: the only way to make a difference is to stop first coal and then oil from being dug up in the first place, and let the CO2 emissions "take care of themselves". Otherwise CO2 emission reductions are local, not global, and so without reducing coal mining and oil pumping reductions do not matter and will not make any difference to global warming.
The only countries in the EU that have any influence at all is Norway, and they would have to just give up between 20% and 40% of their national income (France and the Netherlands are rounding errors, and Russia is not EU), and that's a typical figure.
And just so we're clear: reducing GDP by 20% to 40% will require a multiple of that in average wage reductions (so let's say at least 50%), without rents reducing by a single cent. You know, to give some idea what you're actually asking for from Norwegians.
In other words: this will not happen, there is no way in hell the governments involved will agree to even half of what's needed. And the UK, in fact all western governments other than Norway, US, Canada and Mexico have no influence and cannot realistically make a meaningful contributions to stopping climate change. And even those countries that can contribute will have to give up A LOT and it won't matter unless you get China, Russia and Saudi Arabia to follow suit.
Oh and if you do get this going, it'll cause a lot of pain in most of the world.
Admittedly not including China though
You have not been paying attention. China, and every socialist country for that matter, is part of every authoritarian network, serving their own purposes.
Oh, you have the money.
You just don't want to spend it, for that would shift the balance of political power in the country towards labor and away from capital, and away from the old and towards the young, for the wages of labor and the young would have to rise.
That's anathema to an upper class and a body politic whose primary objective is controlling the cost of labor, and even the political party that's named after labor has no plan to change that.
This is going to continue until the current body politic is more afraid of dying from heatstroke than they are of anyone else being in charge.
Oh OK. What can be cut in our current spending?
That was the means by which relief funding was appropriated from the public in 2020, and it was a huge success. Most people don't even know that happened (or the scale at which it occurred) beyond some vague notion of "deficit".
You'll pay for it with inflation and lower purchasing power relative to other nations for a time, but your body politic have demonstrated that is the only type of tax increase they'll ever consent to. But if you don't do it, you won't even have an economy with which to pay the bills.
Last time I checked our expenditure is at least in part covered by income and not solely printing money.
Pretty much all BEV buses have it (even the ones from before it became mandatory, since they plenty of power to spare anyway), which already covers more than 40% of the fleet, and the remaining hybrid buses are in the process of being phased out over the next few years. Sadly, the 'Boris bus' New Routemasters with their famously-inadequate forced air cooling are likely to be the last to go because they can't be sold on for less-intensive use elsewhere.
No-one else should really be being surprised by the changes to our weather patterns, since they're all roughly in line with the modelled effects of the changing climate. Air to air heat pumps (which work as AC) are now included in the various grant schemes, £30bn is being spent to upgrade the national grid by 2029, and the shift to zero carbon energy sources is well under way.
The water situation is more problematic, but in the short term the current El Nino increases the likelihood of having a wet winter so at least the reservoirs ought to have a chance to fully refill this year.
I also tell them to remember that food prices and insurances prices will inevitably go up.
And I won't much more that that because everything else fails (even the death of 1000 persons in my country during this years heat waves just make people say "bah, that's life")
This is 100% a one way street for most governments.
that only a big catastrophe, possibly a global war, will make people think again
a) Asteroid strike
b) Arrival of Aliens (in a sense of "evident to everywhone on earth")
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-08-13/risk-of-...
But first we get to experience (probably) record rainfall in autumn and winter.
In any case, Europe is warming up faster than the global average, Niño or not.
What's that going to look like?
>> What's that going to look like?
There is a very graphic way to understand the problem.
Some cities in Canada are Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, Quebec, Winnipeg or Regina.
London and Berlin are closer to the North Pole that any of these
-----------------------
Minimum temperature registered in London -17 Celsius. In Quebec and Montreal: -36 and -37.8 Celsius.
Berlin is a little closer than London to the North Pole but also more continental, so more like Regina in that sense.
Berlin lowest temperature registered is -15 Celsius, and in Regina: -40 Celsius
... And Edinburgh is closer to the North pole than any of these, and a little Northern than Manitoba, where reaching -40 Celsius a few nights is expected each year, and more than 30 Celsius in the summer is normal.
No argument from me. It would not have completely saved us but we’d be in a better position now. The absolute priority should be to avoid burning fossil fuels for energy.
> But Russian propaganda entrenched in spy infested austria and germany forces cheap gas upon us
Indeed. Germany’s energy policy was a huge risk and set Europe back. I am not sure whether Schröder was a useful idiot or a willing pawn, but the fact that there was no reckoning is very disappointing. And all of Merkel’s balancing act came to naught anyway. So much time wasted…
Personally I am a bit ambivalent. It’s not needed in most cases most of the time, but it could help transitioning en masse to reversible heat pumps, which would be a step in the right direction. What I worry is that it would be hailed as a silver bullet and detract from improving thermal insulation and mitigating techniques that would not require constant energy supply.
We need to see where we will be, not where we are. The electric grid is not going to get more stable in the next years and will get more and more strained as more and more of our economy has to use electricity. Reducing energy use where appropriate should be a higher priority than an AC band-aid.
But my observation of the media landscape is that right-wing politicians hop on everything that can be shown as boneheaded leftists who refuse progress. Of course, the usual useful idiots like Mélenchon are happy to oblige, but the mainstream left-leaning parties are not particularly anti-AC.
I am in general right in economic and left in personal freedom. And currently i have no representation. Because both extremes are infested with ex KGB/FSB agents causing social unrest in europe. Same with waves of refugees.
"We must absolutely not install air conditioning everywhere; that would only make things worse." The words of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the radical left La France Insoumise party, on Friday, June 19, in response to the far-right Rassemblement National (RN)'s large-scale air conditioning plan, reflect a widely held sentiment in France.
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/environment/article/2026/06/20/is-...
I am not making stuff up, these people just have too much space in news.
Aircon uses a ton of electricity, electricity generation is, at present, hovering around 50% from fossil fuels (in the EU as a whole[1]) which means all other thing being equal you'll be still pumping more CO² into the atmosphere further exacerbating climate change.
So yes, installing aircon everywhere would only make things worse. Those are just verifiable facts.
But you'll note he's not shaming anyone, as per the original claim.
But thanks for the rant, it was highly amusing.
1. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/interactive-publications/e...
Yeah let them fry.. that is pure leftist bullcrap. Of course aircon uses energy. But in a grand scheme of things it is nothing. And we need to live with consequences of people like him who would fought nuclear energy.
Guess it will cancel out the increased temperature?