Oceans hit highest temperature on record | Hacker News Reader

Oceans hit highest temperature on record

bbc.com

705 pointstcp_handshaker663 comments

BBC did a pretty good deep dive a few days ago on what we're in for: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xZCh8eDZFc

DW also, similar stuff, but the guest is quite good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dcl5Mn373Oc

Anton Petrov covered it from a much more science lens a couple months back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRoU3whzX_Q

I see what you did there. Bravo.

The eu is stupid for not engaging in active climate engineering right now. They are the most at risk and should take decisive action before they end up living in a glacier.

All the downvotes are just showing why no action is being taken even though right now we are literally terraforming the planet with no plan, and it is going to stop the transatlantic currents that keep Europe from becoming arctic.

But sure, just do nothing until Europe becomes an uninhabitable tundra and it is too late to take action. Great plan.

Western democracies at this point can't do anything at that even hints at minimally inconveniencing 5% of the population. Any 5% at that. We are stuck in local maximum even if it slowly and surely slides into the shitter

If you look at the derivatives, there is no change a Western Democracy can make that will matter as this plays out.

Humanity being saved by China just dumping money into solar because why not, is certainly a take.

Because "why not?" Do we understand that humanity includes Chinese people? Do we also understand A) the steps they're already taking to reduce emissions and B) how much of their emissions historically and today are in service of Western consumers?

i don't accept arguments in the form of B when its a business (our pollution is just serving our customers demand, its their moral responsibility to reduce consumption), and I also don't accept it in country form.

centralisation makes centralised opporunity for change. You have all the power, and also all the responsibility.

> i don't accept arguments in the form of B

Feel free to share why not. At the end of the China is still part of a global system dominated by capitalism and they have to play the markets game in order to survive.

They could easily fully do things their own way but that would mean, for example, chance of private intellectual property, which would mean no WTO membership, which would mean massively reduced capacity for trade, which would put them at such a disadvantage they'd inevitably collapse.

I don't think you get to abdicate responsibilty of some avoidable negative externality of something you do just because some entirely separate function of it is the thing your customers want. If I were a plumber who fixed leaks by diverting the water into the customers' neighbors houses, my customers aren't the ones responsible for the damage it causes. I don't think it matters even if the externality isn't avoidable. I think people who sell murder-for-hire services are culpable of murder, even if they are paid by someone else

If the argument were about slavery instead - slavery enables cheaper goods, ergo by buying our products, some of which were made using slavery, but we refuse to reveal which ones, but nonetheless by buying them you support slavery and are morally responsible for the slavery not us. Nobody would accept this framing.

I agree that China has done very well from manufacturing and trade, and would not have done as well if they had not industrialised at a large scale. But that doesn't change the fact that industrialisation of this kind causes pollution and is damaging the planet and it especially doesn't mean that China has no moral obligation to do as much as it can to reduce emissions.

I also don't believe the argument that the pollution is inherent to production, or that there is no way to satisfy demand without pollution. (or that china, specifically, derserves to be the one to profit from satisfying that demand). Production of almost all commodities can be done without massive emissions these days, and even when it couldn't, nobody was forced to ramp up production

Someone will inevitably jump in here to point out that china makes a lot of solar or whatever. Sure, they do. They also make a lot of wind power. Their emissions per capita are trending in the wrong direction though. Europe's have been going DOWN since the 1970s, and china's are going UP. China's emissions per capita are roughly equal with the EU at the moment and are going up - pretty soon they will catch up and surpass the US.

Re: emissions per capita - why should the Chinese be limited to a lower amount than the US citizens? They want a high standard of living too.

that might make sense in a world where the US has been chugging along emitting at a constant rate for many years, to maintain a certain standard of living.- but the reality is the US emissions has been going down for many years, while increasing their standard of living (arguable, but difficult to say that US standard of living is less than half of what it was in the 90s), while china is going up in emissions.

I also don't agree that just because someone else became rich through some negative process (crime, perhaps), that everyone has a right to the same. This sort of thinking is the way the world burns.

I don't get a free pass to behave like a mafia boss just because I really really want to have a bunch of money like one

There's a phrase for that "do as I say, not as I do" (see also: "pulling the ladder up"). This is rightly viewed as hypocritical by those on the receiving end.

There's also the phrase "Now we know better". When the industrial revolution came to the US we were ignorant and we polluted the world like crazy because of that. Today, we've learned from that mistake. We now know that you can and must control the pollution factories spew out into the world, even though doing that cuts into corporate profits.

China doesn't get a pass to pollute at historic US levels for their industrialization because they have the benefit of having learned from our mistakes. Rejecting the "No Fair! It's my turn to needlessly destroy the planet just to make myself richer!" argument isn't hypocrisy, it's just acknowledgement of history and the progress we've made in dealing with the problems we ran into while we were industrializing without the benefit of anyone else's past experience.

China and every other developing country has already been benefiting enormously from the example of developed nations, but they want to cherry pick the things that maximize their wealth while ignoring everything else at the expense of every living thing on Earth. They want to point to the damage we caused while we were stumbling around in the dark with no idea where we were going, even though today the sun is shining and they've got all the maps we made and GPS to guide them.

These countries are competitive entities.

Even though the planet is shared, the earlier developed nations have gained advantages from their polluting (and at many times, colonial) past that allowed them to pull ahead of other countries. Now they want to stop others going down the same path without giving up their entrenched advantage. That is pulling the ladder up.

Either give up those advantages in the form of reparations (will never happen) or remove any pretense of moral superiority when all you are doing is just preserving your leading position gained using practices you now decry.

They don't want to stop others from following the same path, they just don't want them to do it while disregarding every lesson we learned the hard way whenever it's convenient for them. That's not pulling the ladder up, it's more like wanting OSHA regulations to be followed while they climb it for everyone's safety, theirs included. It's a little slower, but everybody still gets to where they want to go.

Reparations are already in progress and have been for generations. Extensive efforts have been made to start restoring the polluted land and water. Workers rights and health have been improved. The use of slavery has been greatly reduced. The ozone layer is recovering. Trillions have been spent on research and development into ways to help repair and prevent the damage developed nations have inflicted on the planet. Even after all this time we're still working on rebuilding what was destroyed and we've still got a long away to go. in some areas we're actually backsliding. We can't let every developing nation destroy our progress and set us back as if nobody knows any better. Our past was both costly and profitable. We made many of our mistakes out of ignorance, but we know better now and everybody needs to start acting like it.

It's not all a burden for the now developing countries either. They get the benefit of not having to start their industrialization from nothing. They've got access to centuries of knowledge and technology the developed world obtained at great cost. Having the perspective and advantage of all that history and progress however also makes it unacceptable for them to make the same costly mistakes just to satisfy their greed. Now that we all know what is at stake, it falls on everyone to make sure that many of humanity's past sins aren't repeated.

if the mafia boss tells his sons that they should avoid a life of crime, that doing it makes things worse for society and ones self, is he a hypocrite? should the boys follow his advice?

my read is yes and yes

are you suggesting it should instead be yes and no? that because the sons want to be rich they are morally in the right for going into a life of crime, even knowing the consequences?

The countries are competitive with each other, not in a father/son relationship.

At least the father has a natural lifespan and the ill gotten riches would go to the son(s). Can we say the same thing about the riches of say, the USA? If China does nothing then they will inherit all of it? Or will the US just keep its fortune gained through whatever means, and just tell other up and coming countries to suck rocks and know their place while using the Earth as justification?

Do you really think that the reason the boys shouldn't do crime is because it's their father telling them this?

Or because they will inherit money? Do you really believe what you are saying?

This is a tortured analogy. Yes it's even better if they don't do crime and yet inherit the money as that would allow them to claim they have clean hands, like the developed world is doing now. ("Colonialism? Massive resource extraction? That was a long time ago. But we're still keeping our riches and embargoing our tech from you. Don't try to do what we did.")

So how much of US emissions is outsourced?

I refer you to my comment at the top of this chain on "outsourced" emissions

"I don't accept" is not an answer though. When the EU can create CBAM, so can (and should) the US and anyone else. That way we don't have to talk about moral responsibility and can progress to adequate international carbon pricing.

I don’t think looking at first derivative of emissions per capita is more important than absolute measure when thinking of the morality of polluting. If China’s per capita is lower than some other place, they’re doing better. The first derivative tells us that might become untrue, but countries with high historical emissions don’t get a pass because they’re lowering those high levels as compared to a lower emitting country whose emissions are rising.

china's historical total emissions will also surpass the US's pretty soon, on account of their nearly 3x as large population combined with their per capita emissions being nearly as high. and as mentioned, theirs is likely set to grow way faster. I agree extrapolating isn't always the best way to assign historical blame (for whatever that might mean), I do think it makes sense to use when thinking about what policies people ought to take now, to reduce damage as much as possible

I also don't agree that just because someone else became rich through some negative process (crime, perhaps), that everyone has a right to the same. This sort of thinking is the way the world burns

I believe that every person has just as much right to emit pollution in 2027 as every other person in 2027.

What that person emitted in 2025 has no bearing on their 2027 “allowance”.

We can certainly discuss how much is an appropriate, sustainable, or defensible per-person amount, but I’m only interested in the 2027 amounts, not the increase in their amount versus a prior period, nor in allowing past large emitters to continue at higher rates than past low-emitters.

(I think we strongly agree on your last paragraph’s point. That was the point of my GP post, but maybe it didn’t land somehow.)

> I believe that every person has just as much right to emit pollution in 2027 as every other person in 2027.

Because every person has their own planet?

No. Everyone has an equal right as each other precisely because we all share the same planet!

It would seem far more weird to me to argue the opposite: “These people have the right to emit 2x or 10x as much as these other people!” (Or equivalently, “these people are only allowed to emit 10% or 50% of what these other people are…”)

> No. Everyone has an equal right as each other precisely because we all share the same planet!

The issue is that in the current situation, that effectively means we might as well give up on the idea of doing anything about climate change.

Besides, people don't care about CO2 emissions, only factory owners do, governments do. People care about energy available for use for them personally. In fact people generally dislike anything that emits CO2, from cars (somewhat) to coal mines and plants (which people dislike A LOT). If you care about "everyone", there's no need to give people CO2 emission rights, just energy.

right. I agree with this for a large part - I do think though, that chinas current level per capita 10.81 tons (higher than EU 7.14 tons, less than america 17.34 tons) is not sustanable, and they do not seem to be taking it seriously enough by my estimation. I also think that US emissions are far too high and must be reduced

> I don't think you get to abdicate responsibilty

I made no such suggestion, only that China isn't solely responsible for the future of humanity, which was the claim I responded to.

Centralisation also comes with upkeep necessary to maintain centralisation. The cost of that upkeep can severaly limit opportunity for change. If you are a dictator, staying in power is priority one, at the cost of everything else.

Don't worry China and propagandists will just lie about it.

Just like people are doing here.

In reality China is the main reason climate change got worse for the last 20 years. Ask ChatGPT who contributed to CO2 growth most in the past 20 years, Chinese industry was not just the biggest contributor to CO2 emission growth every year but most years bigger than everyone else combined. And the only real exception was 2020, when China shut down a lot faster for COVID, and a LOT more draconian, than everybody else.

Also: China is STILL increasing coal use. STILL building new coal plants. Now, I get why (same reason even Germany is considering it), but that doesn't change the facts.

that's really looking at things in the worst possible way. China acquired most of the manufacture of the world, so yeah emission increased, the problem is that they did not decrease where the manifacture was lost.

if you look at co2 emission per capita you can see how China is actually an example to follow, we can't say the same for USA, India or EU. you can ask this to chatgpt, or you could also ... search? for this data, it's publicly available.

> China is STILL increasing coal use. STILL building new coal plants. this is misleading, yes they are building coal plants but not using them, that is the backup plan for "rainy days" . and the coal usage is going down.

China has never had a meaningful reduction in per capita carbon emissions. Ever.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...

What are you trying to say with this?

"steps to reduce emissions" is a platitude that sounds nice. they have never actually reduced emissions. they will surpass the US in per capita emissions at this rate within a decade.

They have a plan and they are sinking much of their current fossil fuel use into the largest renewable energy system on the planet.

Compared to, say, rolling back windfarms and redirecting that money (almost a billion) into dodgy neighbours rolling coal ventures.

Your prefer the US approach then?

This has always appeared to be a very measurable situation. Either one is committed to decreasing emissions or they are not. You can just measure emissions over time and compare.

It has never made sense to me that people are willing to ignore the trends and argue in platitudes.

Again, look at the derivatives. Western democracies are currently reducing while China are massively increasing per capita and on track to surpass US per capita in the next decade. Total has long been the more populous countries. The unfortunate truth that presents itself is that if you're not willing to go to war over climate, reduction of consumption is not going to happen.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...

This is an interesting take because for example the EU car fleet emmission rules, fuel taxes, additional member state polluting car taxes etc. do exactly that. Otherwise ICE cars in the EU would be far far cheaper and the EV marketshare would be much lower.

Yeah the issue is "minimally inconveniencing 5% of the population", but it's not any 5%, it's the powerful 5% who resist the change using any means necessary including producing mass propaganda and steering the votes to the nazi parties which promise to revert to the old ways and stop any progress on the climate front.

> This is an interesting take because for example the EU car fleet emmission rules, fuel taxes, additional member state polluting car taxes etc. do exactly that. Otherwise ICE cars in the EU would be far far cheaper and the EV marketshare would be much lower.

Can't speak about EV marketshare (I'm guessing someone is bundling hybrids into stats you read), but large part of population is buying only used ICE cars, or get new ones on a business lease; only minority actually pays the sticker price for new car out-of-pocket.

Also, it's hard not to notice how much general population hates those. I'm actually surprised EU got as far as it got here, pretty sure they're burning a lot of political capital because of environmental regulations.

> I'm guessing someone is bundling hybrids into stats you read

no: https://robbieandrew.github.io/carsales/

> only minority actually pays the sticker price for new car out-of-pocket.

yes, mostly because new cars are very expensive, and that's exactly the point I was making

> Also, it's hard not to notice how much general population hates those. I'm actually surprised EU got as far as it got here, pretty sure they're burning a lot of political capital because of environmental regulations.

Exactly. But it's hard to quantify how much of that hatred is genuine and how much of it is fanned and amplified by fossil interests and reckless politicians. My guess is that around 80% of it is manufactured.

It's a little bit more complicated than that. In a hypothetical EU without political intervention, Chinese EVs would be available without tariffs, and those would probably sell very well without any mandates.

Yea, if those 5% are the top-5% - everybody else gets inconvenienced by Neo-Liberal policies all the time.

The top 5%/over 60s. The overlap is almost total.

Only in one way. Most rich bastards are over 60, but absolutely no shortage of very poor old people.

> even hints at minimally inconveniencing 5% of the population

5%? No. That's a lot of people.

At least in the USA, the one and only thing that matters is what benefits the top 0.0002% richest (approximate percentage of billionares in the US). Nobody else matters anymore.

Yes. Nietzsche once said God is dead and I guess the time has come to say "the systemic change is dead".

Our destiny is not decided by a abstract superorganism, but a handful of people given godly rights create the rulebook. And to take us with them in the pursuit of suicide.

Older people matter, given they vote

An interesting idea would be a democracy where your voting right is proportional to your expected remaining years to live. This would give more power to younger generations that are the ones that are going to be the most impacted by the decisions.

We should attempt to name all ~700k people on that list.

Pretty much everything the EU does, is inconveniencing most of its population, often in the name of "climate change" (while not actually making any impact).

Positives: no mobile roaming charges

Negatives:

- less efficient home appliances (dishwasher, washing machine, drier)

- cookie law

- car annoyances (e.g. "beep if over the speed limit")

- paper straws

- attached bottle caps

- LED lights

- expensive electricity (a lot of this is caused by individual countries, but probably also the EU plays a role, e.g. by not classifying nuclear as "green" / "renewable" and banning Russian gas)

I wouldn't even mind the speed limit beeping if it was paired with correct data. But the rental car I recently used in Germany actively reduced the engine power when it detected going "over the limit", which was frequrently triggered by e.g. motorway exit lane speed limits being incorrectly parsed. Since there is talk in the EU to actively prohibit going over the limit, this issue needs to be urgently fixed.

Banning Russian gas is the right thing to do, and good for long-term energy independence & prices.

Have you ever visited the EU? Let me help you with the positives: common market, freedom of movement, rule of law, clean and beautiful cities and towns.

Also, war is costly—so is preparedness. Sometimes you don’t have a choice, e.g. you have a strong polity neighboring you that insists your are by gods grace their zone of influence.

I’m sad about nuclear to, but that’s on a culture in specific countries; not on Brussels.

Also, there’s heaps of mistakes in the regulations they churn, but that’s another story.

Not in the EU but have similar regulations

> less efficient home appliances (dishwasher, washing machine, drier)

How exactly are they less efficient?

> cookie law

The fault being those trying to steal my data

> car annoyances (e.g. "beep if over the speed limit")

I haven't seen that

> paper straws

I'll give you that one, however in my country its businesses that stopped it just to customer pressure, not a law, indeed it's perfectly legal to serve plastic straws to people, its just people don't ask for them

> attached bottle caps

These are great

> LED lights

These are also great

> expensive electricity

In my country that's due to the price of gas

The EU is not "most at risk" compared to eg south Asia, the middle east, parts of Africa, etc; and this idea that AMOC collapse will turn Europe into a glacier is a blatant exaggeration that does not root itself in reality.

As someone in Central EU farm land, who is currently experiencing desertification...

We are actually in the worst place, given realtive population density. My well is drying up. The Danube and many other rivers are drying up.

Then, when the AMOC stops, and we join Canadian weather with English-level insulation... we are all truly fucked in winter. At scale in the mid-term, only Sri Lanka is going to get as screwed as EU citizens, but the EU will get fucked even sooner.

Given population numbers, it appears that the EU is totally screwed when it comes to climate change. Our geopolitical enemies are well aware of this fact.

There are still things we can do, like insulation, and using our fierce financial pressures to change the world. We just need to wake tf up.

No we are not in the worst place given relative population density. Look at South & Southeast Asia very carefully - there are countries like Bangladesh with pop. of 177 million in an area of double the Czech Republic (pop. 10 million). They have it much worse than us.

> we join Canadian weather with English-level insulation

Having lived both in England and here in Slovakia, we are much much better equipped to survive long spells with -10 with occasional dips far below that in lowlands (and obviously our mountainous regions are even better equipped). What we can't deal with yet is the heat and drought like this summer.

> using our fierce financial pressures to change the world

We are already doing that using for example CBAM. We just have to continue.

What’s population density got to do with worsening climate?

The parent wrote: "We are actually in the worst place, given realtive population density.". So I reacted to that.

The climate change impact is worse in South Asia AND their population density is much higher. It means many more people are and will be impacted by it there than here in Central Europe.

humans are dangerous when they get hungry / thirsty / angry / disillusioned

But if the AMOC collapses the drought you talk about will become the a year round problem. Climate models predict a drop in rainfall between 20 and 50% depending on the region. So agriculture will be fucked.

And the US will be hit by super hurricanes since all the moisture/hot water will linger there supercharging them.

The rainfall deficit and soil dryness is already a year-round problem in our region, this summer is just a very extreme version of that. I am reasonably sure it will get worse even without the potential AMOC collapse.

>Then, when the AMOC stops, and we join Canadian weather

West canadian weather which is in itself more moderate. The amoc is not the only moderating effect that makes europes climate possible. It'll still suck tho.

EU is rich, insulation problem can be handled, especially if we build enough green energy to bring down electricity prices, which makes even poorly insulated houses livable. I live in a Nordic country, and people have survived here for since nearly 10 000 years ago, soon after first ice age ended. If they could do it without any modern tech, Germans, French and the others will be okay.

I'm way more worried about food production.

Of the major powers the eu is probably the most at risk. No one else is going to save them and they should be acting to save themselves right now.

wrong:

EU is the region with the highest acceleration of most climate parameters

Fastest acceleration, possibly, yes. But if another region's climate is for example already close to deadly wet bulb temperature during a large part of the year and only a small change puts them over the threshold, then that regions is more at risk than the EU.

I'd say the EU is the region with the highest acceleration of climate scientists, hence they find "the highest acceleration of most climate parameters".

I suspect that unless there is a consensus or at least a large majority in favor of it, nothing will be done.

Lets say the EU does geoengineering and then there are crop failures in India the next year. Their fault or not, they are going to get blamed for it and actions taken. The EU would become the scapegoat for any kind of weather/climate issues in future.

This is the trolley problem done at a global scale.

>Lets say the EU does geoengineering and then there are crop failures in India the next year.

Who cares? Tell them to go pound sand or stop burning so much coal.

Countries are already water seeding. This kind of worry that someone might complain about the eu trying to save itself is so low on the list of things that matter. Let them complain, and the eu can complain about all the other countries geoengineering by burning fossil fuels.

Alas, that kind of bravado doesn't go far.

Also what if that complaint comes back in the form of a Nuke as they see it as an act of war?

When things become existential, a lot of things that seems unlikely end up on the table as moral corruption sets in. "Either they go or we do!"

Then they get nuked back and they all die? Like how does that answer means anything?

"nuke us and get nuked back" means we all die. Push people to the point where they're dying anyway and they might not see taking you out with them as a bad thing.

You're a whole lot safer when the people around you can get enough food and water. We already have solutions that don't involve putting entire nations at risk of dying off in large numbers. The problem is that those solutions would eat into the already massive and growing profits of corporations who would sooner put your safety at risk than take even a small hit to their unsustainable growth.

They won't do that because it makes no sense. They will just complain about it and maybe refuse to trade or do some cyber attacks.

No one would take this as an act of war just like no one takes cyber attacks as an act of war.

Or course, if Elon Musk decides to do something about it, even if everyone else agrees thinks it's going to cause more problems due to 2nd order effects, what's gonna happen? He gets called a Nazi a couple more times?

Well, at some point, he gets an arrest warrant from the ICC.

Yeah, I'm sure Elon is living in fear of the ICC...

Things are great until they’re suddenly not. Money will only do so much when half the world is livid at you.

Geoengineering is just a gamble corporations want the world to take on their behalf. There's a chance that doing it would fuck things up way worse than they are now, but there's also a chance that it makes things a little better and if that happens it will reduce the pressure on those corporations to make the changes we already know with 100% certainty would improve things, but which would also directly eat into their profits. They're willing to risk screwing over the planet and/or large populations just to keep business as usual and profits sky high for a little longer when we all know that it was their irresponsible and clearly unsustainable practices that caused this mess in the first place and any success geoengineering might have would still only delay the inevitable changes to their business practices that need to be made. I don't blame people for not wanting to roll the dice just so that corporations can rape and pillage a little longer.

We are already geoengineering every single day. There is no version of this that has no risk.

We can continue to do it aimlessly, or we can act with purpose.

We can act with purpose to reduce the amount of geoengineering we're doing every single day, and to reduce the harms we've caused in the process. More of the problem is not the solution. Especially not when purposeful geoengineering involves experimental tinkering with a system we don't really understand in the first place and can't replace if we get it wrong.

I don't think that's the popular reasoning those downvoting have taken to. Can you think of reasons other than they think doing nothing sounds like a great plan people might be downvoting about? If not, I could share a few concerns with the approach that come to my mind (if it helps). It would have been nice if more of those people just commented directly instead of downvoting and moving on.

> It would have been nice if more of those people just commented directly instead of downvoting and moving on.

I'll comment directly; Has anyone considered that this is a literal global problem, and that just maybe it might require some global cooperation? Any one nation "most at risk" from a global problem is only "most at risk" temporarily. This is absolutely 1000% a problem that will affect everyone everywhere on this planet soon enough (already is IMHO), no matter the current situation. The longer we continue these childish "but they aren't doing their part" arguments, the worse it's gonna be in the end for everyone involved. We're letting petulant toddlers in grown adult bodies decide for everyone that death and destruction is the future we want. This is absolutely not a situation we can solve on a place-to-place basis. The one place we have to worry about now is the entire planet FFS! And it's not a magical switch we can just "turn off" once we think our "enemies" are appropriately fucked over. The changes happening to our ecosystems will take literal decades or even centuries to recover from, even if we were to stop adding to the problem right this very instant. Not to mention the whole worry about "tipping points" (many of which we've already blown right past as if it's "no big deal").

I agree with you. We are actually at huge risk. "Western Civilization" rose out of our stable European climate and that is over now.

However, we need a global consensus for geoengineering. That's just how that works... the Jet Stream. Meanwhile one country believes that global warming is a benefit, aka Russia. They currently appear to have control of the West.. so what in the actual f?

For a far more dire diatribe:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49427651

Global consensus would be great, but "reliable mechanism" would be a decent start.

In lieu of that, there's nothing to build consensus around.

Atmospheric sulfur seems to be the "default."

Yes which is an extremely dangerous and completely unproven idea.

Because when we did that accidentally the outcomes were so great?

>However, we need a global consensus for geoengineering.

Why? Does china or the us need a consensus before taking existential risks like making ai? Or detonating a nuke that had a tiny chance of setting the atmosphere on fire? Or attacking random countries with almost no rationale or plan?

This kind of thinking is why the EU is screwed. No other major power cares that much because they aren't at the same level of risk as the eu.

> Why?

Well, let's say we use sulfur. For the sake of argument, let's say it's not the EU, but some private SV-funded org.

So, what is the legal/geopolitical liability for that? What if >99% scientific consensus says that that org's upper atmo sulfur injection led to the most insane monsoon/desertification half-century in 1 billion's people area, in known history? What then?

What if the EU's geoengineering dropped Russian temps by -2C on average? Do you realize the geopolitical b.s. that would start? Forget the fake NATO bullshit, now they have a real argument!

We live on one tiny globe ffs, we need to agree on this shit.

By agree, I mean we need to allow risk to be diversified, like we need a global risk pool for geoengineering, and we better get on that soon!

It sounds like it's a huge problem, doesn't it? Well, one of the benefits of giving all the power to around 3000 billionaire dudes is that this is a far smaller number to get to agree on something.

Instead of multi-billion citizen democracy, and all the issues that involves... we just need to convince 3000 dudes.

Is this actually a potential benefit of wealth & power concentration? It really seems like it is!

> What if >99% scientific consensus says that that org's upper atmo sulfur injection led to to the most insane monsoon/desertification

That's unrealistic. Climate models aren't good enough to predict the regional-level consequences of large-scale interventions (not to mention that scientists are people, and they might be averse to creating an international flashpoint).

Realistically, it will create/exacerbate international tensions. The monsoon/desertification will be linked to geoengineering with or without scientific consensus and whether or not they were really caused by geoengineering.

As the climate models improve by incorporating active intervention data it will be possible to decrease adverse consequences.

It's a risky approach, but, when the consequences of climate change will become undeniably bad, some countries/individuals might try.

But, yeah, I agree with you in the end.

> It's a risky approach, but, when the consequences of climate change will become undeniably bad, some countries might try.

That will be far too late. I mean, nearly the entire EU has reached record temps this year... if not now, then when? Wait until AMOC stops? Does anyone have any idea the havoc that this will create? We will be a dry arctic climate. Ireland and UK first, the rest of us next.

We need multiple Manhattan Project-level projects in the EU, for insulation + renewables + batteries. When we let Northvolt die, I almost cried. Fuck the German bankers who are somehow beholden to Moscow, and we cannot pray for Norwegian money. We need to take care of this shit.

We are more exposed to climate change and economically to China-focused manufacturing than any large group on the planet.

However, we are larger than the USA, we can do this. We have to do this.

Meanwhile, we have to get the entire planet on-board, especially by getting Moscow out of the 19th Century, and their insane imperialist ambitions.

No big deal. At the rate of Reform/AfD/KO/Rassemblement National election projections, we in Europe are entirely fucked.

What the fuck? Forget "EU regulations," is anyone actually paying attention to what actually matters?

> we cannot pray for Norwegian money

Just for the record, our oil fund is "only" about $2.2 trillion. It's huge relative to our population and huge in general, but it would quickly dry up if divided among all of EU. Even just divided among Norwegians it would "only" amount to like $500k per person.

So sure it's a lot of money but it's also not really as astronomical as many seem to think. Elon Musk alone is almost worth half that and will probably catch up if things continue the way they are.

> What if the EU's geoengineering dropped Russian temps by -2C on average?

Then Russia makes some empty threats and the EU negotiates with Russia about what to do next.

You are really just suggesting paralysis even if you don't realize that is what you are doing.

There’s something odd about the concentration of true believers in ai xrisk and climate change catastrophism. They are both technopessimist in a way that is seen as progressive. Stopping progress in AI would make people’s lives immeasurably worse, while stopping fossil fuel consumption would kill billions of people. But it seems like a particular kind of risk aversion that is blind to upside.

I’m curious why this calculus makes sense to you?

I’ve been friends with eco-activists who are very against anthropocentric ideology. Their perspective was that the deaths of billions of people was worth it. But this brand of conservatism is one that I’d really like to understand better

> Stopping progress in AI would make people’s lives immeasurably worse

They'd be, like, living in conditions of last decade, deprived of personalised targeted AI-slop? The horror.

Is that immeasurably because it's a change too small to measure, or because it's too vast to comprehend? Maybe you're overstating this just a tad.

Everybody alive today will die. We're mortal, that's just how it goes. So with or without fossil fuels, billions of people will die regardless, that much is baked in. It's a moot point.

As a species, however, we can persist indefinitely so long as our lifestyles are sustainable. If it's not sustainable it's a joke.

Go free solo El Cap or something before telling me you're cool taking those kinds of risks on behalf of all humanity.

> Stopping progress in AI would make people’s lives immeasurably worse

This is such a weaselly statement without your definition of "AI". If you specifically mean LLMs or image generation, you're way out of touch and flat out wrong. If you mean machine learning in general, sure, but progress there was never under any threat or question.

> Stopping progress in AI would make people’s lives immeasurably worse

I’d really like to hear your reasoning for this.

Were it used to make it practical for people to reduce or stop working while maintaining a comparable standard of living, sure.

It seems far more likely it’s going to wipe out jobs on a massive scale, consolidate wealth, and leave millions or billions struggling to eke out a living.

And it certainly hasn’t made anyone’s life dramatically better. It’s made my job easier, but how much longer will I have it?

I didn't say I was against AI or a true believer that AI will kill us all. I said it represents an existential risk. It could be fine. Just like dropping the first atom bomb was an existential risk.

Pretending like there is no possibility of AI going wrong is ridiculous.

Referring to "AI" as an existential risk is hilarious. They're glorified chatbots, they're not going rogue and taking over the world lol

Ok, if an AI exfiltrates its weights and starts spinning them up on other servers it 0 days into we will have no way to track it or shut it down.

Once that happens AI is out of our control. We already saw AI 0 day into hugging face and setup secret forums for other AIs.

I don't think the idea of an AI exfiltrating its weights and spinning them up elsewhere outside of human control in the near future is out of the question. I think we will see a breakout attempt next year.

What's shaping the Jet Stream is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_vortex

Maybe it will be shaped some more by another supervolcanic 'burpie', like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Hunga_Tonga%E2%80%93Hunga...

saturating the atmosphere with water vapor like Hunga Tonga did, or Sulfur dioxide, or black soot/carbon in form of fine particular matter, Methane, or whatever. It all depends on the nature of the eruption.

If humanity as a species could do anything about events of that magnitude, it would have to cover the earth and the oceans with a grid of giant atmospheric processors like in the movie Alien, not too far apart, powered by at least nuclear, if not by fusion. And then some bigger rock impacts from above, which is not a question of IF, but when, as history shows over and over again.

Got any ideas about how to achieve that in time? With all the other shit already going on?

> However, we need a global consensus for geoengineering.

We already have global consensus for an alternative to the gamble of geoengineering, and that alternative is 100% certain to work. It just means making changes to the unsustainable practices of massive corporations which will eat into their profits. Everyone knows it needs to happen. Even if geoengineering was successful and didn't end up making things much much worse, it would only be putting of the inevitable. The wealth of these corporations is so great that they're able to bribe the leaders of nations into ignoring the actual solution to the problem they are causing, so now they're pushing the world to roll the dice on geoengineering so they can keep profits growing year after year.

What could possibly go wrong?

...with the current approach? We already know. It's bad.

They can't do anything, everything is in China's hands and the EU does not have the hard or soft power to make China do or not do anything.

Spoken as if climate engineering were an established science with no potential pitfalls or downsides...

We are ALREADY doing it. It is already going poorly because we are doing it without any goals.

So we can just continue geoengineering with no aim, or we can act with purpose. There is no third option that is realistic.

The EU has made a difficult problem even worse by switching from pipeline gas to LNG.

LNG has anywhere from 10% to 100% more greenhouse gas emissions, depending on who you believe about how much methane leaks during LNG production and transport operations. Most credible estimate IMO is +60%.

Putin turned off the gas, not the EU

Really? Do you have a credible source for this?

The Wikipedia article cites a long list of reputable news outlets.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022%E2%80%932023_Russia%E2%80...

But it doesn’t support your claim.

In summary, Russia, after having their dollar and euro bank accounts frozen, demanded payment in roubles. It stopped supplying the gas to the customers who weren’t paying. After that, the EU announced it will stop buying Russian gas completely, and replaced it with LNG.

Thus increasing the greenhouse gas emissions attributed to its gas use by about 60%. :(

"My" claim:

> Putin ("Russia") turned off the gas

Your summary:

> Russia [...] stopped supplying the gas. [...]

Hmm… so are we agreeing that Russia turned off the gas because the EU stopped paying?

Sorry, but what? EU literally destroyed its economy by forcing "green energy", so manufacturing was moved to Asia (who cannot care less about climate and uses whatever cheap energy source thy have so this was a rather stupid move), ETS and ETS-2 systems are putting huge taxes on EU citizens for any kind of emission, including building a house or having non-zero emission flat or house.

The "little" problem here is that all of this does not matter at all, as EU is emitting insignificant amount of CO2, comparing to Asia or USA.

"The EU’s Climate Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra warns that to prevent costs from spiraling further, European governments must start investing massive sums in measures to climate-proof their countries, known as adaptation."

https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-climate-adaptation-spendi...

We probabbly must do all three things at once

- adapt

- stop rising CO2 levels

- remove CO2 from the atmosphere

It’s far from being only an EU or European issue. It’s not like Europe can by itself do something to avoid the collapse of the Atlantic Gulf Stream.

EU did a lot and e was willing to harm own economies. Betreyal was from elsewhere.

If we can’t even switch away from fossils then where do we get the magical political will to build a massive, untested system that needs constant maintenance indefinitely to keep our environment stable?

Our governments don’t seem to even be able to sustain consensus for a single election cycle, active geoengineering projects would require committing to keep doing it for decades, centuries or however long it takes to get back to equilibrium.

Switching away from fossil fuels is a gigantic ask compared to having some planes release a ton of reflective particles into the atmosphere. It isn't even expensive. 15-30 billion per year would be enough to cause 1 degree Celsius of cooling by having planes put SO2 into the atmosphere. Double that for 2 degrees.

That is way less than the EU has given to Ukraine.

Quadruple for 4 degrees? Or is the cost exponential? What happens when some right-wing nut jobs take power and decide to kill this woke geoengineering because climate change is just a conspiracy? Will we get to experience decades worth of warming in one go? Meanwhile we just start burning even more fossils because climate change is “solved”?

I think we’re not that desperate yet. And whatever geoengineering is done we still need to solve the root cause.

That BBC documentary shows or exposes very shallow thinking skills at this timestamp 6m42s:

https://youtu.be/_xZCh8eDZFc?si=AHyDPgoDucsCRllS&t=402

They claim the panama canal is continuously fed by freshwater for the canal locks (which segment the canal into sections with different water levels, and which enable ships to be raised or lowered to the next water level during travel along the canal).

It's 2026, why are humans dumping freshwater into the oceans? This can perfectly be done without wasting freshwater.

Archimedes screws can essentially be operated quasistatically at extremely high efficiencies. The energy released when lowering can be stored either in gravitational energy of a mass, or be used to power a second parallel lock operated in counter phase (so while one lock is lowering ships say eastwards, the energy is used to raise ships traveling westwards, and afterwards their roles reverse). To speed up a second gravitational potential energy store (and optional flywheel) can be used to accelerate and decelerate the pumping. Apart from some frictional losses (minimal compared to the potential energies involved) this doesn't cost energy, and is easily covered by a small number of solar panels.

Is this misreporting by the BBC, or is it mismanagement by the Panama Canal operators?

Keep the freshwater, use it for irrigation etc, make Central America more attractive to South American refugees and the migration burden on Mexico and US lowers.

The operation as currently described is so inefficient, even for the 1960's!

Wow, guy on internet solves problem within seconds. And you didn't even have to visit the site. Incredible.

If you have studied physics, its easy to see water locks can be operated with near zero energy consumption.

What site? I was commenting on a youtube video.

If you misattribute my comment as replying to something else, thats your superficial attitude not mine...

> Keep the freshwater, use it for irrigation etc.

In this scenario, haven't you poured a bunch of ocean water into the lake? I don't see how to can fill the locks with ocean water and not have it pour into the lake.

no connection to a lake is necessary.

A trivial look at the Panama canal will show that it is a not a connection to a lake but rather it goes through a lake. Bypassing the lake would require digging a length of canal longer than the existing canal. So you would be dumping salt water into a freshwater lake.

So putting the technical critique aside, are you blaming the BBC for accurately reporting how the canal functions?

I think they were saying "That BBC documentary shows or exposes very shallow thinking skills <of those involved with designing the canal> at this timestamp". not "<of those making the documentary for not correcting the design of the canal>"

That said, I can't quite understand the complaint. It's either take the freshwater out of the lake and into the ocean or take the ocean water into the lake (or invest build the entire length without using natural bodies). The former seems to make a lot more sense and is effectively what's supposed to happen with water eventually anyways.

No connection to a lake is necessary, imagine 2 locks in parallel both connected to the same low water level canal section "on the left" and both connected to the same high water level canal to the right (its not necessary to have 2 locks in parallel, its just easier to demonstrate the scheme doesn't require significant energy consumption):

Imagine one lock is currently filled to the high level, while the other is currently filled to the low level. The locks have been closed. As you let water from the high lock flow into the low lock through Archimedes screws, those screws can lift a weight, until they have equilibrated at the midpoint of the high and low water levels. But you have raised the weight and can now use that to power the draining of the lock that has only halfway sunk in level, by pumping its water to the lock that has only halfway risen. Apart from friction there is no energy consumption. Slow quasistatic transfer drives the friction energy consumption to 0. In practice you want to use an "extra" weight to attain higher pump speeds, and then recover the kinetic energy. That will consume more friction energy, but a small number of solar panels suffice, the energy is not used to lift water, but to overcome friction (haste makes waste).

It's not about the mechanics of the water transfer. About half the canal itself IS the man made lakes. The ships need to come in from the ocean, float in through the lock, and then continue course over the lakes.

Prior to the rivers being damned to make the lakes, they just emptied into the ocean directly. No net new fresh water is being created, we're just holding it up for a bit so we didn't have to build as much canal.

If anything, we're diverting more of that aater away from the Atlantic and towards the pacific than would normally have drained in that direction by doing this.

I don't have the resources / time / interest to verify if:

A) the BBC retardedly misreports how the Panama Canal is operated today, or if

B) they correctly report how the Panama Canal is operated retardedly

which is why I phrased it that way...

I am only interested in the physics, not the politics...

Surely figuring this out would be a very marginal increase in time spent on writing your large post and series of responses.

not really, when physics is ready knowledge and when I don't care about the politics (i.e. who the retards are).

but I wouldn't protest if you clarify an issue you seem or pretend to care a lot about...

> The operation as currently described is so inefficient, even for the 1960's!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Canal

Construction began: 1 January 1881

Date completed: 15 August 1914

> The energy released when lowering can be stored either in gravitational energy of a mass, or be used to power a second parallel lock operated in counter phase (so while one lock is lowering ships say eastwards, the energy is used to raise ships traveling westwards, and afterwards their roles reverse). To speed up a second gravitational potential energy store (and optional flywheel) can be used to accelerate and decelerate the pumping.

if the canal didn't exist, and we were designing it as a greenfield project in 2026, that would definitely be a design worth considering.

could it be retrofitted onto the existing canal? sure, in theory.

in practice, they currently handle 36 ships per day, and lowering that limit by just 2-4 per day is significant enough that it makes international news [0]

so whatever retrofitting you have in mind, the construction would need to be done completely non-invasively, without disrupting the daily operation of the locks. it's nowhere near as simple as you're making it out to be.

0: https://www.lemonde.fr/en/economy/article/2026/08/21/panama-...

Its not that difficult to do it while in use, you just construct a parallel lock next to the existing ones that can remain in use.

It's even possible to upgrade a lock while in use, you just add new inlets and outlets for the new archimedes screw system, an unused archimedes screw or inlet/outlet is just a differently shaped boundary wall...

Even in 1881 all the necessary physics was already known, but I'm less surprised less informed people could rise to the top that easily back then.

I'm more surprised by the post-war 60's when physics and engineering became a lot more democratized, less elite...

> you just construct a parallel lock next to the existing ones that can remain in use.

are you aware that they did that already?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Canal_expansion_project

and that it took almost 10 years to complete?

if they had put you in charge instead, do you think you could have gotten it done faster?

Do you read the URL's you submit yourself?

The very first sentence says:

> The Panama Canal expansion project (Spanish: ampliación del Canal de Panamá), also called the Third Set of Locks Project, doubled the capacity of the Panama Canal by adding a new traffic lane, enabling more ships to transit the waterway, and increasing the width and depth of the lanes and locks, allowing larger ships to pass.

Of course widening and deepening not just the short length locks but especially the long length shipping lanes will take a lot of time.

It's not about who's in charge, its about reading carefully what people state, and the goals ogled. The expansion project you posted was about increasing capacity: wider, deeper lanes enabling larger ships to pass. Now go up the thread, you will see none of us discuss that. We were discussing the absolute waste of fresh water (if assuming BBC reporting to be correct), which yes, can be ugraded without interrupting shipping, in a short time frame.

It's different types of upgrade... pro tip: if you don't understand a word that appears, and it turns out to be physics jargon, perhaps take a step back and consider the person may actually know what they are talking about.

> pro tip: if you don't understand a word that appears, and it turns out to be physics jargon, perhaps take a step back and consider the person may actually know what they are talking about.

if you're going to be condescending like this, and then on top of that imply that you have some expertise or qualifications that I lack...

go ahead. tell me what that expertise is. don't be shy. PhD in marine engineering from the University of Panama? Six Sigma Black Belt certified in water pump maintenance & repair?

it's not condescending, it's physics.

Well, the Panama canal could have been at sea level, easy to traverse without the shenanigans, and with some of the wealth it generates flowing to the Panamanians. But then the CIA killed Omar Torrijos.

> Well, the Panama canal could have been at sea level

From a technical perspective, PNE's have been proposed to excavate a sea level canal, it would take much less than 10 years.

Personally I consider a few Archimedes screws and minimal works to the locks much less invasive than PNE's,... but if your argument is that taste can not be argued I can only agree at a fundamental level...

> The collection of data was substantially completed on Route 17 in Panama one of the routes considered for nuclear excavations... The Atomic Energy Commission has recently conducted the first two of the planned series of nuclear excavation experiments designed to determine the feasibility of nuclear excavation of a sea level canal.

https://www.congress.gov/90/crecb/1968/09/05/GPO-CRECB-1968-...

You do realize that the problems you raise were not even remotely an issue when this was designed?

You're blaming the engineers who designed this with 100 years of hindsight.

Every solution can be improved over time as conditions evolve. Yours included.

“It's 2026, why are humans dumping freshwater into the oceans?”

They’re called rivers and they do that naturally.

As long as there is no shortage of freshwater locally, it would be fine.

They are throttling Panama Canal traffic to conserve water during El Nino drought, as posted by @evil-olive:

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/economy/article/2026/08/21/panama-...

I understand that it’s a problem that sometimes restricts the capacity of the canal. I just take issue with this incredulous “they dump fresh water into the ocean” phrasing. You make it sound like they’re depriving thirsty people of precious water so they can inefficiently float their boats.

> You make it sound like they’re depriving thirsty people of precious water so they can inefficiently float their boats.

I make it sound like that, or Le Monde?

There is so much conflicting information, all I care about is that while it's possible to operate a lock by consuming freshwater, it's only a marginal increase in knowledge to operate a lock without freshwater consumption... But for some reason every country with continent-bypassing canals is modulating traffic for flex...

The word "fresh" doesn't occur in the Le Monde article.

You're doing it again when you say "consuming freshwater." You make it sound like this is a precious resource that could be used to sustain human life but instead it's being dumped into the ocean because the canal is wasteful. It's not. It would go into the ocean regardless, as it has done since the river formed. The freshness of the water is irrelevant, the problem is only about the consequences to canal capacity.

Artificial lake water from rainfall is fresh water! now check for "rainfall"

I don't understand why people actively go out of their way to downvote and criticize people who merely point out its entirely unnecessary to waste fresh water ... to operate locks, nor is the alternative environmentally friendly: rerouting cargo ships around a whole continent instead of using an already existing shortcut.

We're not frogs slowly getting boiled,

we're frogs complaining we're getting boiled while suppressing a couple of helpful frogs who're trying to turn the heat down... all for what? saving face of the status quo?

I'm not interested in "vote number go up" just in "get basic logic to surface in the discussion" which is hard when your message is greyed out!

Yes, it is fresh water, but that's not what's interesting about it. If the canal wasn't there, then the river would flow straight into the ocean instead. It's not like they're pulling from an aquifer to feed these locks. You're looking at some infrastructure limitations and acting like it's an environmental problem.

Thats false, the rainwater never fell to the ground and teleported to the ocean.

Just consider the nearest rivers near you, now imagine someone diverting the river upstream to form an artificial lake (let's ignore the other environmental impacts of that for the sake of argument), to enable formation of something akin to the Panama Canal.

I'm sure you'd have certain reservations and complaints about the local loss of access to a now diverted river.

Then you come to understand that it's not even necessary for this canal to continue consuming fresh water for the operation of the locks, but hey there are some economic advantages of the shipping shortcut.

Then you learn shipping capacity will be throttled because the canal is not the only consumer of the rainwater, and El Nino threatens a big drought. The ships will take longer routes outside of your economy, and wasting fossil fuels, further exacerbating global warming.

All of this turns out to be a false dilemma, its perfectly feasible to have water locks operate and raise and lower ships without consuming fresh water.

It's orders of magnitude more expensive to desalinate sea water than it is to simply prevent fresh water from being needlessly wasted on operating water locks...

Even if you have a "surplus" of fresh water, its better to let it seep into continental ground and let water tension distribute it throughout the soil, so the soil can evaporatively cool during prolonged heat waves.

Is Panama actually desalinating to make up for water they could have been getting from Chagres River if not for the canal? Panama is a tropical country that gets a lot of rain and I couldn't find any mention of this. The article you posted doesn't say anything like that.

I never claimed they were? thats what you would have to do to recover the lost fresh water. In order to compare apples to apples, I compared the costs of allowing the fresh water to be lost to the ocean, and then desalinating an equivalent amount to the costs of simply not letting the fresh water get lost to operating water locks.

> that gets lots of rain

just like population / industry demand and renewable supply fluctuate, fresh water availability and demand fluctuate, its not that complicated.

scroll up the thread: someone posts a BBC video where it is claimed the water lock operators will allow fewer ships through because its costing too much fresh water, they are already suffering a strong deficit in rainfall this spring / summer and El Nino is coming. The article from Le Monde states effectively the same things. But here you come toting around the yearly average as if this potable statistic will make the country less thirsty.

“It's orders of magnitude more expensive to desalinate sea water than it is to simply prevent fresh water from being needlessly wasted on operating water locks...”

What is the point of this statement if desalination isn’t actually needed here?

I never claimed desalination (which is energetically expensive) is necessary, I claim both throttling of Panama Canal traffic and fresh water loss are unnecessary.

Is saving shipping fuel or saving freshwater during a drought that is expected to worsen significantly "(un)necessary"? Is human prosperity "(un)necessary"?

Why are you bending over backwards to defend wasting precious resources?

New commenter here, and I understand your arguments you've made in this thread, but it's like asking what is the waste of a waterfall? The math you're doing would say add up how much energy could have been extracted and compare it to equivalent generation in coal or similar. The water, even spent on the locks, goes to the ocean anyways.

It's not like the waste of a waterfall: the potential energy loss across a waterfall ignores the loss of freshwater.

Suppose you drink water from a river and piss in the river so the water ends up in the ocean, later someone diverts this river upstream straight to the ocean, would you really not care that the water no longer passes through your body?

Does the knowledge that the water has returned to the ocean quench your thirst?

The Panama Canal operators are throttling shipping capacity by about 10%.

May I inform your employer you are ready to swallow a 10% reduction in pay check?

The BBC one hurts my brain to watch. Incoherent mess of a script. The DW one on the other hand is pretty good. Watch the first 5 minutes of each and you'll see the difference. Thanks for sharing.

Meanwhile governments are electing to either do nothing or actively make the problem worse (particularly in the case of the US — expanding fossil fuel extraction, pushing data center build out and attacking renewables like wind).

This has been aided by the fact that energy has been heavily politicized. Fossil fuels are 'murican and renewables are woke. It's horrifying.

Does your hypothesis predict that Texas would be one of the most renewable-energy-heavy states in the U.S.?

That’s just economics. That doesn’t excuse what the current admin has done in terms of prioritization.

That "just" is really doing a lot of heavy lifting.

Economics is what makes this country work. If converting to renewables makes more money, that's what will happen and the people making the money will find a way to justify it politically.

Which makes it all the more remarkable given the century+ headstart fossil fuels had in entrenching itself in our political process and power structures.

Texas is doing something right, that’s for sure. But it’s not so clear what that thing is that the topic can be considered settled without debate.

Economics only make the country work when societal costs are not externalised by those that cause them. Which they have been, always, by fossil fuel companies.

Most of the benefits of cheap energy are also externalized. Why do we focus on one but not the other?

Because cheap fossil fuels's benefits will dissipate in two decades if we can move to green energy while the downsides project into whatever time remains of organized human civilization.

The benefits of fossil fuels will also be felt for centuries as well. It's what moved us into the comfortable lives we all enjoy today and lifted billions out of poverty.

The point isn't that they're wonderful, it's that they're treated as this thing that only a few have benefited from, when it's exactly the opposite.

This can't be denied but the reality is that the fossil fuel industry has done everything in its power to delay the transition to other forms of energy for the past 50 years with great success and to their benefit. What could have been a successful transition to nuclear and solar would have implied maybe up to 30% of the emissions we have created thus far, which would have drastically changed the panorama of climate change where we wouldn't be in the position where we are today.

It's literally just a couple of decades of effort what separates the scenarios between mild climate change and the accelerated extinction of most of humanity and biomes. All so that Saudi Aramco and Chevron could get a bit more profit.

From the perspective of our evolutionary fitness function the most critical thing is to eliminate existential risk, and from the dawn of the industrial revolution to now all we've done is create them. Fossil Fuels allow us to keep 8 billion people alive at the same time temporarily, which is a reckless and irresponsible thing to do. If it isn't sustainable it's a joke.

In an ideal world where the market is perfect, maybe.

But in reality entrenched market players have access to political influence that lets them stay entrenched. They’ve spent a lot of money since the Industrial Revolution to make sure we need them.

It’s not a perfect free market. There’s no such thing. Politics has a huge influence in economics and vis versa. They’re intertwined.

You are ignoring the fact that the Trump administration has taken proactive steps to interfere with economics and prevent people and companies from building cheaper clean energy. They have tried to ban offshore windfarms and when that didn’t work they straight up paid Total $1billion to build fossil fuel plants instead. They spend millions to tear out already installed chargers from federal property. They illegally clawed back funding states and companies were already spending on clean energy. They eliminated tax benefits for electric cars, causing car companies to spend several billion dollars to completely reverse their production strategies.

It’s not a hypothesis. It’s an observation of reality. The current administration canceled massive renewable projects and has incentivized reopening coal plants, subsidized fossil fuels, and opened government land to oil drilling.

China is doing it the right way : use fossils but pouring that money into renewables. Use economic forces to cut the dependency . Everything else is just pipe dream building never happened utopian communism 2.0 .

How many degrees hotter will it get as a consequence? How many windmills will it take to make the world a degree colder?

Serious question.

The almighty buck wins at the end of the day. But how long the day is, that's political.

The F150 Lightning would be Texas's best-selling vehicle if their hypothesis was untrue.

It's funny that environmentalists would rather see the world burn than solve all emissions problems with nuclear.

Climate change is Schroedingers extinction event. It's only bad when you can solve it with solar panels and wind. It's nothing to worry about when you can solve it with fission and eventually fusion.

> It's funny that environmentalists would rather see the world burn than solve all emissions problems with nuclear.

This criticism would hold more weight if environmentalists held a shred of power. They aren't the ones at the steering wheel.

They had enough power to close down all the nuclear power plants in Germany.

And despite that, this is what Germany achieved in the past 35 years.

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/GHG%20em...

Over a 60% reduction in emissions from the electrical sector.

---

Compare that to the US, where environmentalists haven't been allowed anywhere near any influence in the federal government... And you'll very quickly see that they are just a convenient boogieman, and not the actual problem.

https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/inventory-us-greenhouse-gas...

And yet it produces 8 times the co2 per mwh that France does: https://www.eea.europa.eu/en/analysis/indicators/greenhouse-...

So are you saying Germany achieved a greater reduction due to shutting down nuclear than they would have otherwise? If not, your argument is moot.

I'm observing that a country with an actual environmentalist political presence achieved a greater overall reduction than one without. Maybe they aren't the problem, as popular as they may be to bitch at on this forum.

Even if one of their policy points is counterproductive, the rest more than made up for it.

Yeah, France is doing great. Germany is heading to the stone age. Which I suppose is an environmental policy of sorts. Who would have thought the Morgenthau plan would be so popular in 21st century Germany.

Or, perhaps, them not being in power, it wasn't them who shut them down?

I'm sure they influenced the policy and were happy (and wrong) about it, but they were in the opposition, and had been for several years.

Ah yes, the famously environmentalist CDU. Obviously the center-right conservative party consists 100% of environmentalists, that's why they fight so hard to push back the ICE ban, prop up the oil & gas industry (just look up Katharina Reiche if you want to feel sick for a bit), and why they run smear campaigns against the Greens.

The current Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy Katharina Reiche is continuing the powerplant strategy of the previous Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy Robert Habeck.

The 2024 plans under Green minister Robert Habeck called for 25 GW of capacity of new gas power plants (which should be in future fueled with green hydrogen. But until enough hydrogen is available at good price, the new gas powerplants will burn natural gas. Some skeptics say that the cost of green hydrogen will be higher than natural gas for a very long time). The estimated construction costs for the new gas powerplants was in 2024 around 40 billion EUR. Most of this costs will be covered by the German state.

https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/innenpolitik/kraftwerksstra...

> [...] Katharina Reiche is continuing the powerplant strategy of the previous Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy Robert Habeck

I'm honestly flabbergasted at this propaganda attempt, because you happen to have left out (just a tiny excerpt):

- Reiche's previous employer being one of Germany's biggest energy firms (Eon), and almost every decision she has made happens to be according to Eons interests

- Reiche has been trying to stop renewable energy projects in any way she can: https://www.t-online.de/heim-garten/aktuelles/id_101189302/n...

- Reiche is trying to move parts of her ministry to run on consultants instead: https://www.n-tv.de/politik/Strategische-Top-Beratung-Reiche...

- Reiche is subsidizing fossil fuels enough for her own party to criticize her plans: https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/spritpreise-entlastung-pend...

- Reiche ignores studies from her own ministry that show positive economic results regarding renewable energy: https://www.t-online.de/finanzen/energie/id_101226464/wirtsc...

- Reiche is literally and explicitly asking the fossil industry to supply reasons her ministry can use for swerving investments from renewable towards non-renewable energy (and these requests were not documented as required, before investigative journalism found them): https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/katherina-reiches-minister...

- Reiche keeps lying to the population about the costs of renewables, and many other related numbers: https://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/mensch/katherina-reiche-... (heading "Entweder sie weiß es nicht – oder sie lügt"; there are older issues where she lied, easy to look up)

- Reiche is introducing legislation that's openly corrupt enough for the Bundeskartellamt to publish a statement against it: https://www.bundeskartellamt.de/SharedDocs/Meldung/DE/Aktuel...

- Reiche's change in plans compared to Habeck is disastrous enough to unnecessarily cost the population up to 40 billion euros: https://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/verfehlt-reiche-ihr-ziel...

- Reiche's modifications of a law planned by Habeck is so disastrous that even the oil & gas lobby spoke out against them: https://www.n-tv.de/politik/Auch-Reiches-Verbuendete-warnen-...

- Reiche's modifications of said law, e.g. removing the ban on new fossil heating systems, are unconstitutional: https://www.fr.de/wirtschaft/belastet-reiche-gebaeudemoderni...

- Internal documents show that Reiche is literally acting in the interest of her previous employer, one of Germany's biggest energy firms: https://fragdenstaat.de/artikel/exklusiv/2026/07/die-eon-min...

- Reiche is trying to push back the ICE ban, which is not only incredibly dangerous from a climate change perspective, but which is going to kill the German car industry because they'd rather stick with ICEs than actually invest into building EVs, when the EV market is growing rapidly! https://www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2026-07/co2-flotteng...

- Reiche is using dirty tricks (like not hiring enough employees in certain positions) to prevent a supply chain due diligence law from actually taking effect: https://www.zdfheute.de/politik/deutschland/lieferketten-ges...

This is just a tiny excerpt from the last few months. Since the current government came into power, Reiche has been relentlessly acting in the interests of the fossil lobby while deliberately putting the breaks on anything renewable, all while lying and acting as a mouthpiece for fossil propaganda (again, explicitly proven!).

---

Seriously, I'd love to know - why do you deliberately spread propaganda for the fossil industry, like you did here?

So, tl;dr, it's the environmentalists' fault?

Could you please explain how you arrived at this response? I genuinely cannot imagine what your thought process was unless you're a troll, and I hope that's not the case.

I was only comparing the fact, that because of nuclear phase-out and the future coal phase-out both the previous and current Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy agreed that a large expansion of gas power plants is necessary, this was known already in 2024.

If we are now criticizing persons, please remember that German Economy Minister Robert Habeck famously stated in July 2022 during the energy crisis that "we do not have an electricity problem, we have a gas problem"

https://www.merkur.de/wirtschaft/nord-stream-eins-pipeline-g...

Nuclear phase-out at any cost, including lying to the public. Withholding documents about nuclear phase-out until court order.

https://www.cicero.de/innenpolitik/meistgelesene-artikel-202...

The personal connections between Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy and Agora Energiewende - Patrick Graichen.

https://www.weforum.org/people/patrick-graichen/

During the energy crisis debates, government-commissioned or environmental institute estimates (such as from the Öko-Institut) argued that procuring new fuel rods required 18 months to two years, which was cited as a physical constraint preventing longer life extensions for Germany's final reactors before they shut down in April 2023. But Westinghouse Electric Germany told a parliamentary committee of inquiry that federal ministries never asked if the standard production time for nuclear fuel elements could be shortened.

https://www.bundestag.de/presse/hib/kurzmeldungen-1033104

Now please explain: why are you painting environmentalists as responsible for the phaseout, when the vast majority of nuclear plants were shut down under the conservative CDU? And when the Greens were simply following the laws established by the CDU following Fukushima?

The Greens, by the way, extended the lifetime of the existing plants beyond what the CDU had planned. Why are you failing to mention that?

If you were honest about your critique, I can't see how you can possibly make environmentalists responsible for Germany's course - during the last 20 years, they were the 2nd largest of 3 coalition partners during 1 governing period, compared to the CDU being the largest partner during 4 governing periods. From every angle, they deserve the majority of the blame.

Would the greens have done anything else if they were in power? This has been their stated policy goal since the 1970s.

That does not matter at all regarding your initial statement, which is simply wrong. You didn't argue that the environmentalists would have done so, you're spreading the false rumor that environmentalists were responsible for closing down all the nuclear plants.

This has been the most pointless discussion I've been apart of.

Congratulations.

It's not correct attach the same amount of blame for the nuclear phase out in Germany to both Greens and CDU. I would recommend to read little bit on the history nuclear power in Germany.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Germany

In 2002, under the Red-Green government of Gerhard Schröder, the "Act on the structured phase-out of the utilization of nuclear energy for the commercial generation of electricity" took effect, following a drawn-out political debate and lengthy negotiations with nuclear power plant operators. The act legislated for the shut-down of all German nuclear plants by 2021.

So when the Greens first came to power in the Schröder administration of 1998 they achieved their major political goal for which they had fought for 20 years: abandoning nuclear energy in Germany.

The Greens wanted swift abandoning of nuclear energy in Germany already in the 2000s, but the government would have to compensate the nuclear power plant owners for the costs of building the nuclear power plants (multiple bilion DM in the 2000s, most of the nuclear power plants were still new and the costs of construction were still not payed by the electricity). Therefor the Government negotiated with each electric utility company a rest quota of nuclear produced electricity and as a result nuclear electricity production would continue until 2021 (with a planned decrease in production every year).

In 2007 amid fears that Russian energy supplies to western Europe might not be reliable, conservative politicians, including Chancellor Angela Merkel and Economics Minister Michael Glos, continue to question the decision to phase out nuclear power in Germany.

In September 2010, German government policy shifted back toward nuclear energy and the government wanted to extend the use of nuclear energy in Germany.

After the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, the conservative German government reversed it's nuclear position and returned back the original 2002 Red-Green nuclear phase-out time table.

The current conservative German government under Merz again reversed it's nuclear position towards a more pro-nuclear stance, but decided that it's too expensive to revive the nuclear industry.

I would not say that the current German Green party are environmentalists, currently they are mostly renewable industry lobbyists. CDU has connections to German heavy industry. SPD had strong connection to coal mining regions and coal unions. FDP connections to German car manufacturing.

Also lets not forget the friendly neo-nazi party AfD, friendly with both Russia Putin regime and US MAGA movement. Its interesting to see how the Russia gas/oil oligarchs have the same interests as US oil/gas tycoons.

>Seriously, I'd love to know - why do you deliberately spread propaganda for the fossil industry, like you did here?

I don't get it, the project was started by a Greens minister and continued by a non-green minister? The wall of text has nothing to do with anything.

Your claim was:

> They had enough power to close down all the nuclear power plants in Germany.

But the CDU were the ones who closed down almost all the nuclear power plants in Germany, and as I've shown the CDU are anything but environmentalists, so this is simply wrong.

My "wall of text" is to prove that the CDU are not behaving in the interests of environmentalists, rather nobody here can believe how deeply they've sold their souls to oil & gas.

As I already wrote, it was German Red-Green goverment in 2002 which put nuclear phase out in to law in 2002. CDU has always oscilated with positive and negative views on nuclear.

Germany had enough power to close down all nuclear power plants, because older coal power plants when taken offline have been carefully mothballed (preserved for later restart, when necessary).

In contrast the 2002 German nuclear law (deutsche Atomgesetz (AtG)) requires that nuclear power plants have to be started to be dismantled immidiately after shutting down. There are no technical reasons why nuclear power plant after shutting down, taking out nuclear fuel and decontamination (as is done regularly during maintanance) could not be preserved for 10, 20 or 50 year (you have to mostly periodicaly repair the roof, repair the paint and guard the buildings, e.g. it can be done without large costs).

Until the incoming administration declares that safely storing nuclear waste is woke and allows their close friends or maybe even their own companies to just dump it in a desert at a premium because the bible never mentions the associated hazards.

Or it says facility inspections cause autism and transgenderism so they have to deregulate for their pals.

Or that nuclear safety itself is a symptom of low testosterone and turns the frogs gay.

...

Still better than climate change. But thanks for making my point for me.

Hahaha... sigh... takes a swig!

> just dump it in a desert

Hmmm, a radioactive desert vs an entire polluted atmosphere, I wonder which is worse...

No, storing a few cans of solid waste is decidedly NOT a real problem. However, undoing the damage we've done to the global ecosystem instead, now that's gonna be fun.

Environmentalists have no power whatsoever and most of the people in the younger generation do not have the same antipathy towards nuclear power because we grew up in a post-SALT world and haven't lived through the spectre of reactors being used for nuclear proliferation and weapons production.

Regardless, governments do not typically care about public sentiment when making strategic moves for long-term time horizons. It's why we have a strong military and why despite so much whining about its cost, the F-35 exists and is being fielded by as many squadrons as can get their hands on it. If they wanted to build out nuclear power in a civilian capacity, they would. We already do it for subs and ships.

Man, the knee-jerk downvotes for this are awful.

One can observe a problem while not advocating support for it.

It is quite true that energy decision making has been tremendously politicized, and I don't think that's good for anyone.

Data centers use no more than 1.5% of electricity globally[1], and a long LLM query uses only a little more than 5 minutes of general laptop use ~3x the energy of running an LED light for 5 minutes.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/how-much-energy-do-data-centers-a...

So you’re saying we could significantly cut energy use globally by limiting data center build outs?

1.5% is a //huge// amount. If it was a “drop” in your bucket, it would only hold 67 more of those drops.

No, I'm not saying that and I don't think 1.5% is particularly large. Moreover many of these projects are built out with on site 0 carbon generation so they're in some ways a net benefit.

The largest projects, like Box Elder County Utah and Pecos County Texas, are using fossil fuels.

In fact, I'm unaware of any new AI data center also being built with 0 carbon generation. Do you have a source?

This is wildly out of touch with reality. Have you never seen a construction site? A 0 carbon generation site doesn't exist.

You know what’s meant by that, it refers to ongoing generation emissions.

This is so lame man. A few construction vehicles aren't why the world is burning. It's burning because we pump and dig up billions of tons of fossil fuels to burn in large scale power plants, cargo ships etc. And a bunch of other reasons of course, but the main point is we could easily run data centers and everything else includibg most if not all construction vehicles etc on renewables and nuclear if we wanted to.

The problem is not that we are building more things that use electricity, the problem is that we are generating electricity using fossil fuels. We should have phased out fossil fuels decades ago yet here we are ramping it up while everyone's bickering about inconsequential bullshit like datacenters.

Datacenters are not the problem. Construction is not the problem (except concrete which generates huge emissions but we can't really do much about that). Some things are infinitely easier to fix than others. Power generation is such a thing. We have the solution, we've had it for like a century (nuclear) and we're getting even more solutions.

We could run all power production with hardly any fossil fuels if we really wanted, nearly all land transport could be electric. These two changes alone would eliminate the vast majority of emissions. And we can do that, it's realistically possible.

We could also probably run global shipping and aviation on non-fossil fuels if we really wanted to, though I don't really know anything about that. There are large scale mining excavators, dozers and trucks running on electricity, and hybrid solutions.

Stop bickering about the small stuff. The only thing we should be focused on is transitioning all electricity production to green as fast as possible. That takes care of almost half of all emissions by itself and opens up lots of opportunities for solving other problems without emissions. For example we could use green energy to produce hydrogen from water, or biogas, ethanol etc, and then we'd have emission-free fuels we could use where combustion engines are still necessary.

But no let's just bicker about data centers and other inconsequential shit while the world ends.

Link some zero carbon ones if there are ‘many’.

Like xAI's running gas generators non-stop?

Can I have 1.5% of your net worth?

Ohhh, carbon neutral energy generation, if only we could use that to replace the non-neutral energy sources, instead of using it to power virtual X-Ray goggles so MAGA incels can goon at "naked Taylor Swift". Or to answer "please do my work for me" of lazy fucks planet-wide. You know, to stay relevant to the comment thread of "Oceans hit highest temperature on record"...

We are already in a very bad situation regarding climate change. Do you really think we have the buffer for an increase in percentage points of energy consumption?

That figure likely doesn't include crypto mining, either. That's another 0.5% or so.

0.5% is about the entire energy consumption of two Swedens or half a Thailand.

> we could significantly cut energy use globally by limiting data center build outs?

No, we couldn't, because degrowth solutions aren't really an option.

I call degrowth "abstinence based" environmental policy in allegory to abstinence based sex education. The latter is the "we don't need condoms or birth control, just teach people not to have sex" thing, which doesn't work either.

You really think you're going to convince people to become poorer? Not possible in a democracy. It'd require some kind of ecofascist totalitarian thing where you take peoples' energy and resource use away and fire tear gas and rubber bullets at them when they protest.

Or we could build non-carbon-based energy sources. Cause we have those, and they work. You can also have safe sex if you put a rubber thing on your wing-wong.

And right now the fuel for fascism seems to be coming from the newly minted billionaires who own or profit off of the data centers.

> It'd require some kind of ecofascist totalitarian

That’s correct and eventually that will have to happen. There aren’t much other actual options. It’s mostly a question of how long that can be avoided. We developed a system that blocked us in the current local optimum, with no ways to take the drastic actions we need to handle global issues like climate change.

(And to be clear, an ecofascist regime would be horrible to live under)

Only if you hold the view that AI will not lead to use using energy more efficiently.

AI cannot break physics.

AI cannot magically make engines more efficient or CO2 not a greenhouse gas.

Is your argument that the world economy is running so close to theoretical maximum efficiency that AI can't improve it?

More likely that any ideas AI comes up with will be "mid" and face the same implementation obstacles that already exist, coupled with the majority of energy burnt up by AI will go to frivolous ends, making personalised dog whistles, derivitive elevator muzak, et al.

So you're abandoning your earlier argument about us bumping up against the laws of physics and instead arguing that AI won't make the economy more efficient due to frivolous usage?

That's plainly false, as that's just not how markets work over the long term. We only see distortions like this iver the short term due to investor subsidies.

> So you're abandoning your earlier argument

Can you point me to my earlier argument (the time marks are individual comment URLs)

Oh, you're someone else. Now I'm just confused why you responded to my question that was directed at someone else.

1.5% of electricity, not energy

that would be 0.3% of global energy use

1.5% of electricity. That's a significant difference. Only about 1/7th of all our energy usage is electricity

1.5% of global energy use would be a shocking amount. Aviation is at about 3%. 1.5% of global electricity is about 0.2% of global energy use, a much more manageable figure

Ah yes, "just" 485 TWh, equal to all electricity consumption of Germany. Drop in the bucket

Wow, even with that being electricity rather than energy, that's orders of magnitude more than I would have guessed. That's a tremendous amount of electricity.

> ~3x the energy of running an LED light for 5 minutes.

Why would this not be the energy of running an LED light for 15 minutes?

It's an unspoken rule in the data center debate that every metric is completely batshit.

Doesn't matter what side you're on, it's always "enough water to irrigate 27 soccer fields" or "as much energy as 1/5th of the average hamburger"

It comes from Our World in Data, highly reputable, and I included the source link.

I'm sure that figure is accurate. And the other person in this thread who commented "the entire energy consumption of two Swedens or half a Thailand" is probably also accurate.

It's not about accuracy, it's about the units people choose when having these discussions

I lead with 1.5% of global electricity use. But its import to contextualiza that normal AI usage requires less electricity than an evening of watching TV.

When all is said and done, data centers are going to be complimentary to green energy. They can spin up and down to buffer non-linear power nodes.

They also represent investment in economic growth that doesn't come from resource extraction or travel or manufacturing.

Building data centers relies on immense manufacturing. The GPUs, systems, cooling, batteries, etc don't come from no where. They have strict replacement schedules too.

While yes they can spin up and down, there is the deeper question of what it is all for.

This is why so many AI proponents always talk about future gains rather than what is happening today. It a lot of what it claimed to be coming doesn't happen then it will all look very silly.

Time will tell and depending on were you sit, either we will be there shortly or it will never happen.

> They can spin up and down

Nope. Every moment that hardware is not ran is wasted money that could have been used to buy something else that's actually productive.

Secondary effects like depreciation make this phenomenom even stronger. You've only got a few years to exploit any given piece of hardware before it's obsoleted by newer, more efficient hardware.

That's why any hardware investment with a high upfront cost operates as close to 24/7 as possible — nuclear power plants, factories. Continuous operation amortizes the costs as well as possible.

Laptop use and LED light use (and most other uses of electricity) are not increasing so rapidly that they can not be accommodated by the normal expansion in electric system capacity that has been part of long term planning for quite a while.

Instead much of it is being handled by bringing new fossil power plants on line that would not have been built if not for all the new data centers.

The other things that are causing significant increases in electricity use, like more people getting heat pumps and EVs, are all very spread out and so are much less likely to force new fossil fuel power plants.

The US isn't expanding fossil fuel extraction, its quite the opposite. They're funding the modernization of existing plants in order to take older plants offline:

June 2026: New coal-fired plants in Anchorage, Alaska, and Mt. Storm, West Virginia, would total 2.85 GW. They would be the first new U.S. coal plants to come online since 2013.

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/doe-announces-850m-moderniz...

Meanwhile in China (from 2023):

China permitted more coal power plants last year than any time in the last seven years, according to a new report released this week. It's the equivalent of about two new coal power plants per week. The report by energy data organizations Global Energy Monitor and the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air finds the country quadrupled the amount of new coal power approvals in 2022 compared to 2021.

"Everybody else is moving away from coal and China seems to be stepping on the gas," she says. "We saw that China has six times as much plants starting construction as the rest of the world combined."

https://www.npr.org/2023/03/02/1160441919/china-is-building-...

Meanwhile in India (2026):

India plans to increase its coal production by nearly 100m tonnes to 1.15bn tonnes in the 2025-26 fiscal year to help meet the country’s rising demand for electricity to support economic growth and contend with heatwaves, which have become more severe and more frequent because of the climate crisis.

The planned increases come despite signs that the world is beginning to turn its back on coal in favour of renewable electricity, Global Energy Monitor said.

The US could switch every ICE vehicle to EV's and install solar and wind turbines in every inch of the country and it won't combat what's going on in China, India and other developing countries that rely on coal for cheap energy.

You are looking at the acceleration but without looking at the initial state.

A more fair metric would be Co2 emissions/person and I’m getting

USA 14.3 t, China 8.8 t, EU 5.5 t, India 2.2 t

> A more fair metric would be Co2 emissions/person and I’m getting

We don't care about that notion of "fair": the cold hart truth is that China has 1.4 billon people.

Another way to put it: China has one billion more people than there are in the US.

Or another way to put it: 4.1x more people.

Which means China is emitting nearly 3x more Co2 than the US.

Our only hope is that China is using coal and fossil fuels only has a mean to sustain its insane growth while they transition to solar and nuclear (which they also do, at an amazing speed).

Hillbillies and redneck with their gigantic pick-up trucks in the US are really the least of worries.

Solution to save the environment: China should separate out Tibet, Xinjiang, and Inner Mongolia as separate independent countries. Hong Kong and Macao too. And then split north-south so that Shanghai and Beijing become their own capitals. Continue this process and eventually the population and emissions of each individual country will be low enough that they can be ignored, thus solving the problem once and for all.

That is the opposite of what GP said. The point is only the total emissions matter, the climate does not care about "fair" allocations over either people or nation-states.

That's a pointless point, because any system to actually control emissions requires allocating them to nation-states, because it is nation-states that actually enforce things on people.

No, it's exactly what the GP said: per capita doesn't matter, it's just the size of the country.

So split the country up fixes the problem. Yes, it's dumb, but you agreed with it...

The EU has more people than the USA but emits 1/3 of the USA's, what's the exceptionalist excuse for that?

well, yes we're overfed and over-commercialized. But we also vastly out build, grow and produce Europe. (and you have more people)

If using simple metrics like GDP growth, I'm more in the camp of Paul Krugman's argument[0] that such comparisons with simple naïve metrics are insufficient to analyse it.

I agree the USA has grown more steadily than the EU and the American software/tech industries have a leg up but the devil is in the details.

I travel a lot for work to the USA and I do not experience what this GDP growth has brought to the US in the past 10-15 years: infrastructure in general is worse (worse airports, worse roads, etc.), urban life is worse, rural life is worse, quality of food is worse.

[0] https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/europe-v-america-whos-rea...

The only relevant metric is ppm in the atmosphere. Every single other, especially per capita ones are distructioo

That is both completely right and completely wrong.

It is right because all the planet cares about is the amount in the atmosphere.

It is completely wrong because whatever total amount X of CO2 emissions we decide we need to limit humanity to, we have to somehow allocate that CO2 emission budget to people.

Unless you can make a good case that some people have some sort of natural or divine right to a bigger share than others the only way to do it is for every person to have the same share. (Maybe on top of that there can be some system of trading, so that people whose emissions go toward things that the world finds more useful can trade for a bigger share, but it would still have to start from everyone is equal).

Since it is countries that would be the ones actually enforcing whatever the limit is, the country effectively ends up as the entity in charge of the shares of all its population, making the allocation at the country level equal on a per capita basis between countries.

Another way to see that anything other than per capita is nonsense is that anything else would allow groups of people to manipulate their allocation by splitting the country into multiple countries or merging multiple countries into one.

> the only way to do it is for every person to have the same share

That is not a very good idea.

Think about it, just breeding more people would give humanity a bigger share.

Much better to let every square mile (or some other arbitrary region) have a share and divide that among the people living there. Higher population density would translate to less shares per person.

Under per person the amount per person is the total amount we decide is acceptable for humanity to emit. Breeding more people doesn’t change the total. It just reduces the amount each person is allowed.

So when one part of the Earth decides to make more people another part of the Earth gets less?

If this really happened it would incentivize genocide against less developed nations.

Clever plan!

1. Get rich from cheap coal

2. Pull up the ladder behind you

I'm sure everyone will comply.

You said "modernization of existing plants" but quoted "New coal-fired plants."

China's 2025 five year plan targets peak coal before 2030 and might have already reached it in 2026. https://energyandcleanair.org/china-energy-and-emissions-tre...

You can't compare capacity without comparing capacity factors too.

Could China and India get more electricity by investing the same amount in new solar production instead of coal?

China installed more solar capacity in 6 months than the US has installed in its entire existence [1]

To say they’re winning the race implies there even is a race.

It’s a super car vs a snail.

[1] https://etangonam.com/?p=805

The US has the second most and has 1/4th the population. We're barely behind them in solar watt per capita.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_by_country#Global_...

Many countries on that list dwarf China in a solar watts per capita, so are they winning this hypothetical race then?

But sure, them adding that alongside all of their new coal plants is nice. Also, they waste the most solar energy of any country.

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/china-leads-wave-cle...

China is at a higher installed capacity by 6x from overall and 30% by per capita capacity. They're growing installed capacity from your source at 45% y/y as compared to 20% in the US.

Sure, there might be more transmission constraints or whatever, but those will certainly be solved in time (transmission capacity is more distributed so I'm not surprised it's lagging capacity).

I know.

I just don’t understand why they are diversifying between solar and coal, instead of just putting all new investment into solar or other renewables.

Wind produced 10% of China's electricity last year, and its share is growing at 1% per year while coal's share shrinks. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/05/business/china-wind-turbi...

The sun doesn't shine half the time, wind is random, and long-term storage is a pipe dream.

> The US isn't expanding fossil fuel extraction, its quite the opposite.

Not according to the federal government's data. BTUs from fossil fuel production set a record last year and is on a faster pace this year. Your bringing up a few coal plants is only tangentially relevant.

https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/monthly/pdf/sec1_3.pdf

> The US could switch every ICE vehicle to EV's and install solar and wind turbines in every inch of the country and it won't combat what's going on in China, India and other developing countries that rely on coal for cheap energy.

Are you familiar with the concept of necessary but not sufficient?

In any event the war with Iran is speeding up the future that was coming anyway. China's EV and solar exports are surging throughout the world. Both China and India have said for many years that their emissions would rise and then fall.

"Today the US government announced CO2 tariffs against polluting nations - products sold in the USA need to be produced in carbon-neutral manner or face punishing taxes.".

Pipe dream, of course, because the populace will vote for the guy offering cheap instead of sustainable...

Time to prise unelected Ursula and carbon border adjustment I guess

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jun/26/eu-rollb...

The quote you pulled for China is conveniently 3 years old and missing the global context that it was in response to supply issues with other fossil fuels, not a reflection in meeting demand.

These charts address your points:

https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/china https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/united-states https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/india

India is a bit more concerning for a number of reasons (lower per capita income means they are lower on per-capita emissions currently and hence have more room to grow, and they don't have the resources that China does to build out renewables) but criticizing China from a renewables perspective (there are a whole lot of other valid reasons to criticize them) is insane.

China installed more solar in 2025 than the IS has in total.

Yep, they are growing generation by any means possible.

There are several problems with this.

First, you are ignoring gas. The US stopped building coal plants because of the fracking boom. That gave the US huge sources of natural gas which was cheaper than coal.

China has little natural gas but abundant coal, so when they need fossil fuel for something they cannot yet do with renewables they use coal whereas the US uses gas.

Second, you are looking at number of plants, but not looking at capacity factor (which is a measure of how much they are actually used). The new Chinese coal plants have lower capacity factors. They are being built as backups and peakers rather than baseload, designed (or retrofitted in the case of existing plants being upgraded) to be able to cycle up and down to balance wind and solar.

Many are idle so much that their owners have financial difficulty keeping them open, and the government has had to start paying them for their idle time so they won't go under.

Many are also built to replace existing plants that cannot not yet be replaced with renewables, so are at worst neutral on coal usage and are usually actually more efficient than the old plants so there is a reduction.

Their use will continue to decline because China is massively deploying renewables. They also are adding massive amounts of grid battery storage and UHV transmission lines (60000 km so far spanning the country with another 12000 km under construction or permitted--the US is a bit behind that at 0 km), which means the can move electricity from where renewables are strongest to places with high needs but fewer renewables much easier that most other countries can which is further going to reduce the amount of time those new coal plants run.

Third, for India, even if we compare by country rather than by the correct per capita measure (see other comments below for explanation of why per capita is the correct measure when comparing energy policies of different countries), India's current emissions are only 68% of US emissions even though the have 4.3x as many people. That 10% increase you cite that they plan for coal in 2025-2026 still leaves them doing WAY better than the US.

India is also expanding renewables rapidly. They have around 10 nuclear reactors under construction, and are adding lots of solar and wind. They are currently up to 136 GW of solar capacity (64% of US and 11% of China), and last year added around 38 GW (the US added 34 GW). They added 6.3 GW of wind compared to 6.2 GW in the US.

They are almost certainly not going to get anywhere close to the US total emissions. (And per capita where they emit 1/6th what the US does they are definitely not going to even remotely near the US).

It is incorrect, PRC has abundant shale natural gas deposits and there is some work being done to tap them: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/china-taps-ultra-dee...

This is the very definition of the Tragedy of the Commons. Without everyone committing to common limits, it is folly for anyone to.

And FWIW, I don't buy the "but the countries that bred like rabbits for the past few decades are owed their due reserved quota". Having a massive population isn't something you need to be rewarded for, not to mention that the math doesn't even make sense. For China and India to get their "per quota" backlog, we're basically so firmly in self destruction territory that it makes no sense for anyone else to even bother.

Calling China a country that "bred like rabbits" over the past few decades is first of all offensive and second of all stupid for a country that has one of the biggest problems with their coming population pyramid and limited couples to a single child for most of the last 40 years.

Bizarre comment. I think the best is when you declare it "stupid" because China got its population explosion under control...at 1.4 BILLION PEOPLE. And the problem is that today everyone always waves away China bringing enormous greenhouse gas burning capacity online by saying "oh well...per capita...", and it's incredibly weird.

If China and India are going to "make up" for their historic per capita greenhouse gas emissions -- after both breeding continent-sized populations -- the worst case scenario is 100% guaranteed and everyone else might as well go wild as well. 3 billion people cannot continue the mistakes of the past, but a lot of very foolish people seriously make that argument.

Why does it matter how many people exist within a specific arbitrary line on a map?

If China or India split into 5 different political systems each, suddenly the calculus changes?

Talk about foolish.

Per capita is the only metric that matters as it attributes equal worth to each human life.

If China was split up into 20 countries would that be better because the emissions were divided by 20 for each individual country? I honestly don't know how so many people fail understand this very basic point.

Also talking about breeding continent sized populations, the USA is third with 340+ million and rapidly expanding at millions a year. The median country size is around a population of 9 million so the USA having 340+ million is clearly deeply irresponsible.

> China bringing enormous greenhouse gas burning capacity online

Your knowledge is out of date, Chinas total CO2 emissions have likely already peaked back in 2024: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-ha...

> If China and India are going to "make up" for their historic per capita greenhouse gas emissions.

Except China likely peaked their emissions at a much lower per capita rate than even the USA does now. India will probably be the same.

> the worst case scenario is 100% guaranteed and everyone else might as well go wild as well.

It can always be worse.

> 3 billion people cannot continue the mistakes of the past, but a lot of very foolish people seriously make that argument.

Sure and a country of 340 million cannot continue to burn as much as it is doing but continues to do so.

Also how much money is the USA going to send to developing countries to help them develop without burning fossil fuels? Oh yeah they cancelled it and they continue to be the worlds second largest emitter.

They should better colonize other countries like Europeans did to reduce populations.

Solar energy is the fastest growing source of energy in the US. That's because it's also the cheapest source of energy. So markets are working.

https://abcnews.com/US/solar-generates-energy-coal-us-1st-ti...

"Solar and storage provided 90% of all new power added in the U.S." is mind blowing. How about we give the US credit for this?

Fossil fuel extraction is not the problem. The problem is fossil fuel usage. Given the world consumes fossil fuel I prefer they use American fossil fuel vs. Russian or Saudi fossil fuels. I don't understand why we are dwelling on the wrong metric here. Also consider the US has just removed a sh~tload of fossil fuels from the world economy. How about some extra credits there?

Similarly data centers are going to get built somewhere. If they're already built I'd rather they are built in places like the US.

Instead of politics and blame we need to focus on markets and let them take care of the problem. This is already happening with solar. Where I would be critical about US policy is that I think they are introducing more tariffs on imported solar panels. This might fit into governments make things worse and hopefully everyone regardless of their political affiliation can push back on this specific item.

The world all going to act together stronger than the markets is not going to happen. You can argue that is unfortunate but it's also where we are.

What a weird, rose-tinted view of the US you have. Just because the markets are working and the US bungled its way into another war over oil doesn’t mean we should ignore the absolutely braindead political opposition to energy modernization.

> What a weird, rose-tinted view of the US you have

Someone pointing out that the US is adding large amounts of solar with minimal government effort isn't "rose-tinted", it's just factual.

> absolutely braindead political opposition to energy modernization

The good thing is that in the US some people having strong political feelings about something doesn't really stop us from doing things. So not only have we added lots of new solar, we did so with a "braindead" government. That means there's a lot of people in the US who understand the changing needs we face and that having a moron in the White House doesn't really affect that.

I'm weird. Just to be fair I'll acknowledge that certain political actors in the US deny there's any man made climate change and fight renewable energy because it conflicts with some narrow business or political interests. I'm not denying that.

But...

The political criticism in the US (and in Canada where I'm from) against fossil fuel extraction makes no sense. We should want that fossil fuels are extracted here. Not overseas. It's true some element of the "right" are ideologically driven here in the wrong direction but many in the "right" are also pragmatic. Instead of fighting we need to get to common ground and the way to get there is by market forces. Most would prefer the get solar energy if it's cheaper vs. more expensive fossil fuels. And certainly if all else was equal (panels made in the US, American jobs, whatnot). So you can take the adversarial route or you can take the pragmatic route and make real progress.

The other stupid political battle here is boycotting Tesla. How does that make sense? We "punish" Elon by using more fossil fuels.

I don't understand. Are you making the argument that extracting fossil fuel here is better than extracting it elsewhere? Or, perhaps more to the point, you do see that the issue is the use of fossil fuels and that extracting _more_ is just contributing to it?

About the (unrelated) boycott question, I would invite you to consider the reasons motivating people to boycott Tesla. If think everyone do that to "hurt" or "punish" Musk, perhaps that's why it doesn't make sense to you.

Yes. I am making the argument that if we extract a barrel of oil in Canada that is all in all better than in Russia or Saudi. We have more environmental standards and we put that money towards better things.

Canada was able to give me a rebate on my EV purchase. Where do you think that money comes from? I drive a Tesla because at the time it was (and maybe still is) the best EV. I benefit from the network of superchargers. It is one, if not the, of the most efficient EVs in terms of energy/km. Batteries last a very long time due to battery management. It has been very reliable for me. My decision (way back) was really strictly on what is the best EV with no political considerations (and that was before a lot of the more recent political issues).

Fair enough. I'll expand.

> The political criticism in the US (and in Canada where I'm from) against fossil fuel extraction makes no sense.

If you _must_ extract fossil fuel, you can arguably say that it's better to do it somewhere with higher environmental standards (of course, here I'm disregarding people disdain to see wilderness areas they know and have an emotional attachment with transformed into oil fields). But what about _stop_ fossil fuel usage? Sure, it would cost a lot of money. So is AI currently, for doubtful returns. Sure, it would require people changing habits. So has the Internet, and we went through it.

It's like hearing an alcoholic telling you that sure, he still drinks 3 bottles a day but hey, it's Canada-made alcohol, "all in all better than alcohol coming from Russia", right? Yes, I guess it's better for the Canadian economy, but what about just stop drinking?

About your Tesla, deciding to buy without any political consideration is your choice, which you are entitled to. But why would it be impossible to understand someone actually considering the political/social side of things? All your acts and conscious decisions are strictly driven by objective, scientific criteria, never taking into account anything else?

I try to be pragmatic and not religious/ideology driven and I try to take in the complete picture. I think we could all use more of that. A lot of my climate thinking is influenced by someone I know who is also very pragmatic and knows a lot more about this. I am more or less echoing some of those thoughts because I think they're important and I agree with them.

We are not all going to "just stop" using fossil fuels. That is not a realistic goal. If it was possible then I'd entertain it. Being religious about this doesn't help make progress because it alienates people. I am all for pragmatic measures that reduce fossil fuel usage globally. Tanking Canada's economy to make zero or negative global impact is how I evaluate some of the proposed aggressive policies. What is happening is that we are funding Russia's war on Ukraine indirectly due to our lack of ability to replace that supply in Europe. That to me feels like obviously bad policy.

I made changes in my life to reduce fossil fuel usage and am considering more. I also try and influence others where I can to make similar changes. I am not optimizing for $'s here, I can afford to spend more and use less fossil fuels. This isn't really to boast or anything, just to say that this approach works for me and can work for others.

My wife boycotts Nestle for political considerations. I sort of get it but also not get it. That's not to say I would never consider something like that but I also am not a believer in the efficiency of that driving change and I don't have time to research everything in enough depth to come to a conclusion about everything I buy. Not buying Tesla for politics X is a very one dimensional decision. I don't understand how to make that decision and so I don't bother.

I'm all for pragmatism. The issue is that most people claiming pragmatism are usually, in my experience, simply justifying status quo.

Sure, I get it, we won't literally _stop_ fossil fuels usage in the near future. I get it, other countries are large CO2 emitters. But why is it an argument to do nothing?

In Canada, Carbon tax was a pragmatic, reasonable policy. It was even enacted by conservatives. It was done at zero and even negative cost for most people. And yet, it was gunned down because it was easier to just yell "ax the tax" without even understanding what it was. All of it under the cover of "pragmatism" (hey, families are suffering, businesses are failing, we need to do something -- and of course, that something has nothing to do with the root causes of these issues).

I could go on: you cannot put bike lanes to encourage bike adoption (that's pragmatism: people stuck in traffic in their gaz guzzlers produce CO2!). You cannot improve public transport (that's pragmatism, it's too expensive and families don't want that anyway). You cannot have laws to enforce maximal arsenic content in the air in a residential neighborhood (that's pragmatism, what will the workers do when the plant close?). I could go on and on, just in Canada.

It's tiring to see pragmatism systematically invoked as an justification for doing the worst possible thing, environmentally speaking. It's tiring to see that this always raises the bar of what is environmentally acceptable, such that next decisions are even worse.

Kudos on you if you actually make pragmatic choices to reduce your fossil fuel consumption, both at an individual and societal level. But somehow I doubt it. I've seen too many "pragmatics".

> But what about _stop_ fossil fuel usage?

And how do you propose we do that if we’re not the ones selling the fossils?

Fossil fuel usage is for the most part, a transaction between willing participants at a fair market price. Will you ban that? How will you enforce it? I hate to be presumptuous, but I assume you’re not a fan of colonialism or wars in the Middle East.

While oil is as valuable as it is for heating, industry, transport, war, and gestures widely at our modern lifestyle. There are two realistic ways to stop it: replace it with something cheaper and better, or genocide.

Neither of these are likely to happen at the scale and timeline required to solve our predicament. But regardless, pretending we can just stop people far poorer than us from striving to meet our standing of living by… asking nicely? It doesn’t help, if your goal is indeed to solve the problem.

> And how do you propose we do that if we’re not the ones selling the fossils?

Because we would be the ones not _buying_ the fossils? There are multiple ways to reduce fossil fuels dependency, and they are known (and no, they do not involve genocide or colonialism). In Canada, carbon tax is an example, backed by economic studies (from right wight economists) and originally introduced by conservative (in Canada at least). Of course, then right wing parties started to convince people to "axe the tax" because it was the root cause of their problems (which is was, of course, not).

That's always the issue, and that's always been bugging me. Why is it that not being able to replace, today, 100% of the fossil fuels usage means "gee, we should do nothing, let's actually increase our production!"? How do we come from "such an energetic transition is a multi generation work" (which is true) to "meh too hard, let's double down"? How can we seriously make the argument "hey, I _could_ clean up the mess in my backyard, but anyway my neighbor is way worse and he has a larger backyard, let's do nothing instead"?

I really don't see how these positions are seen as the "voice of reason". To me, there at best the voice of laziness.

The higher environmental standards that allow drilling in nature reserves?

Sorry that sounds like, if you get murdered than better here because the knives are cleaner.

Well I was trying to go with it for the sake of argument. I don't really think there is a "clean" way to extract fossil fuels, especially in oil sands like in Alberta. My point was that even if that was true, it still doesn't make sense to me.

Silly argument. You obviously want to be the very last nation on the planet to run out of fossil fuels.

But the US government allowed drilling in nature reserves, that is definitely not better than oil from already existing drills in Saudi Arabia.

If you assume fossil fuels are unlimited (or the limit is so much beyond than humans will decide to extract), that makes sense.

If you have a view that fossil fuels are practically limited (not necessarily in the literal sense ”run out of the last molecules” sense but in the practical/economic sense), you’d rather buy someone else’s and hoard your own reserves to extract later when the global supply is lower/price is higher.

> The other stupid political battle here is boycotting Tesla. How does that make sense? We "punish" Elon by using more fossil fuels.

There are other EV manufacturers. Boycotting Tesla != buying ICE vehicles. That’s a bad faith framing.

Why does it matter where on the planet the fossil fuels are extracted in terms of dealing with global climate change?

The US and Canada combined are responsible for 28% and 31% of the global oil and natural gas extraction respectively. If this share were eliminated, then it would force global demand down via the supply/demand price curve especially as there are competitive clean alternatives to burning fossil fuels for energy these days.

We're approaching a global crisis point - and every country needs to reign in fossil fuel extraction and consumption. It's morally indefensible to continue profiting from the sale of products that are f*cking up the planet. Just because there are others that are immoral, doesn't give you an excuse to act without morals. Or claim it's better that you act immorally than someone else.

It doesn't work like that. If the US and Canada stopped extraction of oil and gas for the most part that shortage would be made up in other places. As we remove our supply from the markets prices would rocket up and countries like Russia and Saudi would make immense profits while making up for most of the losses and not moving the demand needle as far as you think it will move for the environment. There will also be a move back to coal where that's an option (some power stations).

And that's ignoring the consequences of that on e.g. people in cold climates that rely on gas for heating or people that rely on gasoline for getting to work. The correct approach is to reduce the usage of fossil fuels which will lead to reduced extraction naturally.

You're not 100% wrong but the impact is marginal. Partly because some energy markets are a cartel. The prices aren't strictly governed by supply and demand but rather supplies are throttled to drive prices.

This is why that's the wrong thing to focus on. If we (e.g. Canada and the US) have strong economies that allows us to do more. Both internally and by influencing others. For example I can afford to drive an EV and use a heat pump because the Canadian economy does well, despite those not being economical options. Many early adopters of solar and EVs and other environmental approaches were only possible because we have strong economies, and those drive down prices for everyone.

Prices would increase making the alternatives more attractive.

Oil and gas production is relatively in elastic taking years to expand.

The extra installed solar and wind generation - as a reaction to increased fossil fuel costs and supply disruption - permanently displaces fossil fuel consumption. No matter what fossil fuel prices do subsequently. Like the massive growth in nuclear generation immediately after the 1970s oil crisis.

Championing the continuing extraction of fossil fuels to be sold for combustion given what we know they do to the planet is not balanced in terms of morality by you driving an EV sorry. We have to abandon fossil fuels for energy asap and we practically can - the tech is available and affordable. The current reliance on fossil fuels - outside of some niches - is a political choice backed by inertia and established and powerful financial interests.

By your own market argument, increasing oil supply depresses prices and boosts usage. And NA oil isn't particularly clean or environmentally-friendly - the benefits of local production are primarily political, with a side of cheaper gas, which again, is not fighting climate change with market forces.

And Tesla is not the only game in town for electrification, and it's been like that for years already. Tesla's EU sales plummeted while overall EV share rose quickly during the peak of the 2025 "boycott". Someone who was going to buy a Tesla but got turned off by the Musk-Trump coalition just bought an electric/hybrid from someone else - there is no movement to buy gas cars just to spite Musk (unlike, say, the "roll coal" crowd).

Pragmatism is better than adversarialism, sure, but when it comes to the environment the locus of adversarialism is more lopsided than you're trying to make out.

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/3226/

Markets are fundamentally unable to take into account externalities, but yes, let's "focus on markets and let them take care of the problem". Conveniently ignore the fact that the only reason solar is the cheapest power is because a country put in their political will and power into making it so.

Your sacred market has been killing us all and will continue to keep killing us all if it makes a few pennies.

We have seen 20 years of complete inaction precisely because of this “let the market handle it” nonsense. In 2012 Europe was all in on some cap-and-trade scheme that everybody knew was never going to work, everybody told them it was never gonna work, and it turns out it didn’t work. The markets are still not responding to this catastrophe even today, as we should be at absolute zero and we are not even at net zero.

The markets have failed everybody, and politicians who believed in the markets were wrong, and should be in jail now for criminal negligence.

I would have agreed with you on giving credit but we did an about face in the last 2 years and now are spending billions of dollars to pay off companies that were already building renewables because we failed when trying to just illegally cancel them[1]

We’re not letting the market handle it and we’re going in a backwards direction. Can’t really crow about our accomplishments given that.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/06/rwe-deal-win...

Completely false and epic revisionism. 96.6% of all new energy sources in the US from 2024 to 2026 were green.

Nuclear, batteries, solar, wind, hydro.

You know people can just look this stuff up right?

But the government is still paying billions of dollars to end renewable projects because they dont like said contracts, right?

Cool, I prefer hard energy data rather than anecdotes.

Did I not link data showing the government is currently spending billions of dollars to ensure that renewable energy projects are cancelled?

Cancelling those contracts *IS* letting the market decide

The RWE paid 1.26 billion to acquire the lease on offshore wind. Payment is a refund.

Further, offshore wind is expensive in terms of maintenance. Stopping the project now is protecting billions in expenses in the future.

> The RWE paid 1.26 billion to acquire the lease on offshore wind. Payment is a refund.

The Trump administration told them it could continue to make the process drag out for more years as it has been or they could spend the money on fossil fuels. It was not any kind of market decision.

> Cancelling those contracts IS letting the market decide

They didnt cancel the contracts, they paid the companies to stop doing work that those companies(i.e. the market) wanted to do

> Further, offshore wind is expensive in terms of maintenance. Stopping the project now is protecting billions in expenses in the future.

Source yourself that this is worth it as per the market if you are going to claim this is a market decision

Making an offer they can’t refuse isn’t really a market decision

Edit: typo, changed is to isn’t

> Stopping the project now is protecting billions in expenses in the future

All power plants have maintenance charges. Unless I missed something, this statement is a non sequitur.

On top of that, Wind is practically free compared to the maintenance and running coats of other options.

I'm in the US and _I_ don't want us to get credit. Even the worst of people do something good every now and then. But if you reward that, they won't change.

> Even the worst of people do something good every now and then. But if you reward that, they won't change.

Scratching my head on that one.

I mean... is something not better than nothing? Or do you only get rewarded if it's 100% perfect? If so then by that metric nobody should be rewarded here. There's nobody in the world who has done enough, certainly none of the major economic powers.

Yes, none of the major economies get rewarded because fossil fuel usage needs to be zero now, already, to avoid catastrophic warming by the end of the century.

Do you reward a bull after wrecking a China shop because it decided to at least leave the employees in alive with near fatal wounds?

So what have you done to avoid using fossil fuel in your own life? fossil fuel, like almost all things sold, is a demand driven market. You want it to stop, stop doing things that use it.

You call it a demand-driven market like they don't lobby for the usage of coal or gas power plants and sabotage electric mobility and public transit.

Goodhart's Law. We want to incentivize right intent in addition to right action. This has nothing to do with degree of perfection and plays a part in why mental state factors significantly into culpability assessment in the law. We want to avoid inadvertently incentivizing reward hacking behavior, especially when the individual rewards are high, overall transparency is low, and the consequences far-reaching.

Because it’s different entities. The market creates more solar power despite the actions of the government

The self-flagellation has gotten too extreme. Photovoltaics were invented in the US, and the US helped subsidize it to the point where they were an economically viable source of energy.

Wikipedia says invented in France and developed by the Germans and Japanese. Do you have some references for US involvement?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cell#History

"1954 – The first practical photovoltaic cell was publicly demonstrated at Bell Laboratories.[27] The inventors were Calvin Souther Fuller, Daryl Chapin and Gerald Pearson.[28]"

The references are on Wikipedia. Maybe do the most basic thing in Wikipedia and click on some links to the related pages before asking for sources. One can still quibble that 'first practical' is indeed different from 'first' but the practical part is the part that actually matters in this argument anyway (i.e. solar rollout).

(also, of course it was Bell Labs.)

>(also, of course it was Bell Labs.)

Haha my exact reaction when I first found out.

> the US helped subsidize it to the point where they were an economically viable source of energy

Something one specific party has been fighting against for decades

Encouraging a desirable behavior is a better way to elicit more of that behavior than labeling someone as the worst no matter what. At that point, why wouldn’t they lean into the villain role?

It’s not like the current villains we have care about their reputation

> So markets are working.

> Instead of politics and blame we need to focus on markets and let them take care of the problem.

Blind faith in the markets is what got us in this mess.

> Fossil fuel extraction is not the problem. The problem is fossil fuel usage.

Yes, and usage is not decreasing. As solar is growing, it's only adding capacity, not replacing fossil fuels. 2025 was the record year for global emissions and fossil fuel consumption.

But sure, let's let "the markets" dictate our ecological policy. Maybe they'll mercifully let us stop burning oil sometimes in the 2150s.

> Also consider the US has just removed a sh~tload of fossil fuels from the world economy. How about some extra credits there?

Huh? Americans very consistently rank among the biggest emitters, basically only surpassed by citizens of petrostates.

I'll just put this here: as long as burning fossil fuel is profitable, "the markets" won't help at all, quite the contrary. And oil being unprofitable isn't happening anytime soon. Our societies are already suffering from Climate Change immensely, and it will only get worse as the years go by. We should have stopped emissions yesterday, we can't let "the markets" take away our agency on the matter and decide our fate.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita

Still a ways to go but trending down for some time now. India and China are trending up and might cross us by 2030-2035 unless they reverse direction.

That's per capita. Total keeps increasing: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-...

Per capita decreasing is not nothing, but unfortunately the climate doesn't care about that particular metric.

> Americans very consistently show the most emissions per Capita.

Even beyond that, it is simply a false statement. Among the most, yes but consistently "the most", no

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?t...

Ok ok, America is behind petrostates. I'll add that to my comment.

We can't even decrease the /rate/ at which we pump the shit into the air when we need to decrease the total amount of it in.

> Yes, and usage is not decreasing. As solar is growing, it's only adding capacity, not replacing fossil fuels.

This is the key point. While yes, it is brilliant that we are adding loads of solar, wind and whatever - it is the final emissions that really matter. Regardless of how well meaning we are intended with our build outs, the emissions is really the only metric that counts when we are focusing on climate blow back.

> How about we give the US credit for this?

If it weren't for the huge efforts put into it by china to make solar and batteries so cheap and capable we wouldn't be nearly as far along in the solar transition as we are. Solar is growing in spite of US policy, not because of it.

I was poking people a little with that statement. Can't help myself.

But really, there is growth under the policies, so saying "despite" doesn't work. You could try to argue that the policy makers tried to kill solar but achieved the opposite result. But at the end of the day the current policy environment led to a positive result. Correlation isn't causation but if I was writing a policy and I wanted to guarantee the opposite outcome I'll bet ya I could.

I happen to know some Americans who have worked really hard to advance renewable energies and have made an impact. To just view the US with one lens is not right is maybe the point I am making, without poking.

China makes cheap solar panels because there's a market for them. Panels aren't the only component in a solar system either. A lot of the technology comes from the US and American companies as well. Germany apparently gets some credit as does Australia. The Chinese did what they do best- low cost manufacturing. We got there together.

A car on which you slam on the accelerator and the brakes, and which comes to a stop, is in fact stopping despite your pressing on the accelerator.

> Instead of politics and blame we need to focus on markets and let them take care of the problem.

The problem is politics and banana republic levels of corruption (aka lobbying) preventing chinese evs to enter the market. If you opened the automotive market to competition ie:

> focus on markets and let them take care of the problem.

then the need for fossil fuels would decline.

"banana republic levels of corruption"

That is such an understatement

> Also consider the US has just removed a sh~tload of fossil fuels from the world economy.

Do you mean the war with Iran that released in the initial weeks over 5 million metric tons of CO₂?

You can just as easily argue that markets caused all this. They don't incentivize the preservation of the planet or even life at all. There is no reason to believe that anything that comes out of markets organically is good, they don't converge towards worlds that have sound values. If they do in some instance then it's just by happenstance as in the solar example.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/22/repost-the-non-liberta...

Also this seems to contradict your fossil fuel paragraph completely, the US is amongst the world's highest fossil fuel consumers per person: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fossil-fuels?fuel=total&m...

> Fossil fuel extraction is not the problem.

It is a problem though. Extraction and transportation of fossil fuels is a major source of methane, which is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2.

Methane breaks down over a relatively short timescale (10 years).

Climate change is now a short-term problem. In the next 10 years, numerous ecosystems will be pushed to the point of collapse, and feedback loops will increase as natural carbon sinks start to release their carbon in the face of rising temperatures and shifting weather patterns.

Also it breaks down into CO2, so the problem isn't totally gone after 10 years. And we're still accelerating the amount we're releasing anyway.

> Climate change is now a short-term problem.

No, it isn't. There are no short-term solutions.

hah https://abcnews.com/US/solar-generates-energy-coal-us-1st-ti... ends with

> Trump has touted coal as clean in the past, but experts say coal emits carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, and several other pollutants.

Wow, experts say coal emits carbon dioxide. What a world we live in where that's considered expert knowledge.

> Instead of politics and blame we need to focus on markets and let them take care of the problem. This is already happening with solar.

Markets do not care about externalities. That’s the whole issue. Markets by themselves cannot work for the benefit of humans, you need to regulate them, otherwise we would have child labor and slaves to trade. You need to force the participants to have to deal with their externalities and consider more than the next 2 quarters. Markets are a tool you have to use correctly, it’s not a magical thing that solves all humanity problems by itself

Markets arent going to fix this problem. Solar panels didnt get cheap by magic, they got cheap by investments backed by politics.

No modern market is truly free, government loans, subsidies, taxes ect all impact the direction of the market and every single one of them has been used at one point or another to push the market in a certain direction

We are doing a lot. Almost 90% of electricity capacity added last year was renewables. Nearly 1 in 3 cars sold are now EVs. The world is spending over $2 trillion every year on low‑carbon energy investment. Solar and wind have already avoided more than 2 gigatons of CO2 being added to the atmosphere. In the US, the IRA will drop emissions 40% to below 2005 levels.

What do you mean we are doing nothing?

The federal government is paying energy companies to cancel plans to build wind farms:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1e1vg0gjl5o

Yes we're still building renewable energy, but goddamn is our government making it hard.

We are still building renewable energy even with a stupid government because it's now cheaper than fossil fuels in many markets.

Those are refunds of money already paid, it's not any extra money

That's added capacity. Fossil fuel use is at an all times high. Everything else is meaningless.

Peak oil is not really a thing anymore, we are on to global mean surface temperatures now.

We are doing loads, I just fear we cannot outrun Jevon's paradox. Until we start actively reducing emissions, we are just adding to the scale of consumption with no end in sight.

That we are still adding any fossil fuel based system today is something I would have figured would have stopped by now. I figured we would still have some legacy stuff, but overall would be decommissioning more than we would add. Instead, we just add to everything.

China is the biggest problem. US Carbon emissions are going down, China's are exploding.

This was one of the big fears. That countries that had far more people than the western world would end up trying to chase that middle class lifestyle. And yet here we are.

I suspect we are going to be like the aphids on a rosebush that will suck it dry just trying to live and most of us go with it.

If we were to live closer to what many philosophers and religions of modesty, we probably would have never gone down this path. Yes, we wouldn't have most of the great stuff we have today but we also wouldn't be looking at a system that can lurch over and crash. There is no winning move in the universe just dances and responses.

Huh? That's not true.

https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-ha...

Quite a lie: https://www.theenergymix.com/u-s-emissions-rise-chinas-fall-...

This just isn't true. Chinas emissions peaked back in 2024.

Although they may increase this year because the Chinese government has been encouraging the substitution of coal for gas & oil during the Iran crisis.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita

"Exploding" while the US still emits 50% more than China and has been emitting more than double and triple before recent years.

The voters bear much of the blame too. The oil, gas and coal producing countries that still have democracies need to stop voting for short term profits and star voting for rapid rampdown of fossils production.

When I was younger, I remember thinking, "a few degrees, what difference does that make?" Then when I grew older I realised that in Climate science a few degrees is the difference between survival and annihilation. A few degrees warmer in the ocean and El Niño becomes an incredible problem for half the world.

I am glad that I live far away from the effects but it is sad to think of people losing all kinds of things for the lack of respect of Mother Earth!

>I am glad that I live far away from the effects

Are you not on planet earth? Unless you're on Mars, you're not far away from any effects.

There are regions on the planet that will likely fare better than others, though.

Not for long.

And we can tell ourselves that those regions which fare better will be left entirely alone. No one is going to, say, kill all the inhabitants and take the land from them.

You can't own land, so that solves that issue.

Maybe you will require less insulation reconfiguration than some other regions, but it will be hard to escape the effects of billions of people suffering.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polycrisis

edit: To be clear, I still think there is time to react, and stop the worst impacts. We just need to get way off the rails of the route that we are currently on. If we put half of the heroic engineering + global capital that we put into fossil fuel extraction into better things, we could get most of the way to the goal. Fossil fuel extraction is like many simultaneous Manhattan Projects. It's nuts what we put into that.

Would be super cool if some of the breakout sessions titled "surviving WW III," were replaced by "avoiding WW III."

Luckily the residents of the regions that fare worse will not know what those other regions are.

Do you happen to source everything you consume locally? From the phone and computer to building materials, clothing, food, healthcare equipment, etc.? If not, you’re in for a surprise when shit hits the fan.

The bad news is we're all reliant on global supply chains. And even ignoring the human side your ecosystem is probably reliant in some way on things like the migrations of birds and fish etc etc

I live in a region where due to global warming our winters are colder than usual, also summers are colder (except for like a week where it was much hotter)

“Climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you're the one filming it.”

You cannot outrun agriculture and crop failures, infrastructure failures, insurance costs accelerating to properly price the risk, wild fires, etc. US cattle herds are at record lows from climate related input costs. Romanian, Hungarian, and Bulgarian nuclear reactors no longer have enough water to operate. The Colorado River Basin will only continue to dry out. And so on.

Some will be impacted more than others, but everyone will feel some impact, and it potentially will only worsen over time. If you believe in climate change, do your best to mitigate the impact for the remainder of your lifetime. If you don't believe, oh well, good luck.

https://x.com/ZackBornstein/status/1877055187241594986

Londoners Find ‘Horrendous’ Cracks in Their Homes After Successive Heat Waves - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-23/londoners... | https://archive.today/koMaT - August 23rd, 2026

> “The impact that climate change is having is undeniable.” -- Laura Hughes, Head of general insurance at the Association of British Insurers.

> 20%-25%: The average property devaluation as a result of subsidence, according to the Federation of Master Builders

The Age of Unstoppable Wildfires Has Reached Europe - https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2026-europe-summer-wildfi... | https://archive.today/OjDZH - July 30th, 2026

Climate Change Is Already Showing Up in the Cost of Living - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-24/climate-c... | https://archive.today/EYTqo - April 24th, 2026

Heat Strains US Power Grids That Need Off-Season Repairs - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-19/rising-he... | https://archive.today/K9VF0 - May 19th, 2026

US Spending on Climate Damage Nears $1 Trillion Per Year - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-17/us-spendi... | https://archive.today/9IJWo - June 17th, 2025

(Texas night time temps are staying high enough [~78F] that the utility equipment does not get time to cool off and cycle, leading to more faults, for example, and the manufacturing supply chain for transformers has a backlog measured in years)

Even the US military treats climate change as not only real but as a destabilizing threat.

What other endorsement could one possibly need?

"Yeah but they would say that, they are part of the system"

Sadly, there is no way to counter a conspiracy theorist because if you question or counter then you are just part of the conspiracy too. Governments know that they need to do stuff but they also know that ignorant voters who read trash tabloid newspapers will vote them out next time because they might have to pay a little more for their electricity or cars.

The US Military hit it right on the head. Climate change is a risk multiplier. It takes already potentially big issues and makes them so much worse.

It used to. The deeply ideological current administration has decreed that it may no longer do so, and must instead pretend that climate change doesn't exist. [0][1]

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/oct/14/pentagon...

[1] https://www.eenews.net/articles/pentagon-starts-purging-clim...

Say what you want about the military, I think most of the adults in the room, however many are left, are simply treating the threat is real even if they won’t explicitly say it.

Doesn’t mean there isn’t a chilling effect, but also, not everybody is the DEI hire Hegseth.

Almost no one has the capability to intuitively understand cascading failure modes in complex systems. Especially, those with non-linear or flip-flop behaviour. It takes a lot of education to understand very particular types of complex systems, and then more effort to generalize those lessons to other types of systems.

For example, a science model might predict only a 5% drop in global food production. That is easy to ignore because we waste so much food. But that 5% might be enough to trigger countries to impose food export bans, and some dominoes falling later, there are localized famines in particular places with 50% loss of food supply. That then triggers wars. It's impossible to predict if and when such types of event chains will happen. The only way out is to be very conservative, and aggressively defend against failure.

The future because of resource decline per capita and climate blow back, I suspect the future for many in the west will merely look like a rising tide of poverty.

This is exactly what I hear from my MAGA relatives: Why should I care if the ocean rises a few inches? I don't own beachfront property in Florida.

From what we've seen, so far the (not projected to be underwater) coastal areas might be the areas spared in this scenario too, because being by the water still moderates temperature swings.

It's everywhere else that'll be getting record breaking heat/drought and snow, which have been far more damaging. The disaster radius of hurricanes reaches far more inland than just the coast.

Your relatives clearly aren't MAGA if they're not concerned about what rising sea levels will do to Mar-a-Lago.

Careful, that's a pitfall there if we assume MAGA words reflect an internal belief system.

Too often the words are whatever they have to say in order to secure continued membership in the group: The Emperor's New Clothes are a glorious blue today.

P.S: Also, we have always been [about to start|recently victorious] in the [illegal war|undeclared "excursion"] against Irania, and the tariff-free chocolate ration has been raised to twenty grammes per week.

You know we might just be seeing the starting seed of the future legend of the Merica Atlantis.

The fabled sunken land of Mar-a-lago where the King in Orange's folly took his treasures to the dark depths.

Although after a few hundred years and many verbal re-tellings it might be the forgotten lands of Margaritaville. King Trump was a fan of a Cheeseburger in paradise. ;)

I mean they're right, rising oceans will be a drop in the bucket for the majority of us. Unless we act together, human civilization will end through the combination of breakdown of global trade, mass migration due to heat and resource wars, and collapse of our food chain. Ocean levels are just one of the side effects that goes along with rising global temperatures.

Beef production in the US is already down from 30 years ago. At some point you won't be able to raise cows anywhere, less alone feed them. Corn and wheat have seen tremendous fluctuations in the past and will likely continue to fall. Imagine corn yields dropping by more than 80% in the US [1]. Of course MAGA people will probably only notice once the shelves aren't being restocked.

[1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.0906865106

US beef production is actually slightly higher than 30 years ago. What has fallen is the cattle headcount (now the smallest since 1951) but heavier animals have kept total output up. The recent herd shrinkage owes more to drought economics and the normal boom and bust cycle of ranching than to cattle becoming unraisable.

Right, exactly that was what I meant. Thanks for clarifying. I remember being surprised by this when I heard it on NPR a few weeks ago.

> Of course MAGA people will probably only notice once the shelves aren't being restocked.

And then they'll blame Obama.

Well, at least they are honest about their stupidity. I live in Japan and am constantly shocked how many raised SUVs with the oversized max-grip tires in cities. Japan used to be a "doing it right" country in terms of not going overboard with waste. If you asked them why, they would probably say "it's cool!".

Turns out humans will always choose status symbols and vanity over facts. Oh well

I'm sorry, but why is this a surprise?

Besides my saying that it used to be contrary to Japanese cultural expectations (もったいない)?

You’re assuming they bothered to read your comment before jumping to “why u surprised, bro? Derp, derp!”

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48223674

Humans simply choose whatever is comfortable and conforming. If their tribal mantra is solar panels, they’ll do that just like they’ll do anything else.

> "a few degrees, what difference does that make?"

Maybe this helps: Think about when we have a fever of "a few degrees", say, instead of 37 degree Celsius, we have 40. It shows that also a few degrees can make a huge difference.

The temperature of a fever is not measuring the temperature outside.

This may be hard to understand, but that was an illustrative example on why sometimes a few degree difference have bigger absolute impact than you'd expect from the purely numerical value.

Nobody (well, almost nobody, I guess) considered it an explanation or model of climate change.

It's like saying the sea level's altitude is important because if a drone assumes it is off by a few meters it can crash into the ground. It ignores that the altitude of a drone is based off of the output of a control system. If you just ignore the control system and adjust the altitude of the drone to the point where it crashes it is just ignoring what happens in reality and is not representative of what is trying to be discussed.

Think even bigger. 1 degrees inside your house? Not noticeable at all. But on a planet-wide scale? A 1 degree difference requires a LOT of energy.

It's like boiling a cup of water vs an Olympic sized swimming pool. The latter is going to take a lot more energy than the former.

Funnily enough the water temperature is why many are so focused on the arctic sea ice. It is acting as a buffer that is keeping large parts of the ocean cooler beyond both reflecting sun light and also actively melting and releasing cool water into the ocean.

But as it is shrinking rapidly, there is an eye being kept to see when we hit a "Blue Ocean Event". That is coverage less that 1 million sq KM as that is effectively gone as far as functionality goes. Only 15 years ago this was thought to be something that might happen in the 22nd century, it looks like we might see this in the next decade.

You can test the impact of this at home. Get a glass of water and put some ice in it with a thermometer. Once down to temperature, the water won't change much as the ice will melt to keep the temperature stable. But as soon as it is all gone, the temperature will start to rise rapidly. This is because of Latent heat fusion. The amount of energy it takes to change ice to water.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enthalpy_of_fusion

The amount of energy it takes to break the bonds of ice at 0c to into water at 0c, is the same about of energy need to take that 0c water up to 71c. When the arctic is gone, we lose a HUGE buffer on global temperatures.

Just figure out how many 7-foot-tall persons you'd have to add to your country to increase the average height by 1 inch.

7 feet = 2.1336 meters 1 inch = 2.54 centimeters

I said this elsewhere. Land temperature raises quicker than oceans. So a 2c increase globally is actually a 4c over land. If we hit 3c, that will be 6c over land.

So with a fever, 37c jumped up to 43c goes from normal and stable to a very quick death.

It's like interest rates. I used to think it's weird why people are so obsessed with a couple percentage points. But it's turns out those couple of percent could mean hundreds of thousands of dollars difference for a 30 year mortgage

> A few degrees warmer in the ocean and El Niño becomes an incredible problem for half the world.

Ice age was only 6 degrees less than now, half of Europe was under ice

And when the Earth was 3C cooler, NYC was nearly under an ice sheet.

The current estimate is that we're heading for +3C warmer, which is gonna have some big impacts.

Not only are we heading there it might be a lot quicker than we anticipate. The warming is accelerating quickly as the CO2 is cumulative and the feed back loops get more intense.

The last decade has seen a 0.48c increase in temperature and due to the decade base line shifting every year and it is increasing in pace.

https://www.intelligentliving.co/global-warming-acceleration...

The more realistic climate scientists think we will blow past 2c by roughly 2035. We are on track to 3c by 2050 and emissions growth has yet to stop despite all the additional renewables being built. This is why many have said next year with the flow on effects of El Nino that we will be getting a preview of 2035.

> The more realistic climate scientists think we will blow past 2c by roughly 2035. We are on track to 3c by 2050

I keep hearing this, but not from the climate science community, but from laypeople. I don't understand it. I haven't yet heard reasonable physical mechanisms that would push us past 3C by 2050, when the mean expectation from major models is still ~2.7C by 2100.

We haven't even hit 1.5C yet, not as a running decadal-ish average, using "1.5C target" the way that climate scientists traditionally meant it. How are we going to add another 1.5C in the next 25 years? That'd require 0.65C/decade. I don't understand it. The math ain't mathin'.

For what it's worth, the link you cite talks about the reasons for the acceleration. But some of those reasons (El Nino, aerosols) lead to one-off pops that don't translate to higher long-term trends. Meaning, it would be reasonable to guess that the recent acceleration will taper off some, and we'll head back towards 0.2 - 0.25 C/decade from the current 0.35C/decade. But even if we keep up the current 0.35C/decade, we aren't getting to +3C until ~2075.

If you're following climate science for the past couple of decades, you will have heard that from climate scientists.

The reason you don't hear it normally is because laypeople like yourself don't understand you're being propogandised to, by climate scientists like Michael Mann.

If you look at climate scientists who aren't liars, like James Hansen, and don't use models with things like fantasy CCS in them (all mainstream climate models - designed to minimise bad outcomes in every imagineable way possible), you get the temperature rises we're seeing now. That's why everyone has been so panicked this whole time, trying to stop this like crazy.

Many laypeople understand this, they understand the real science, and that they are being lied to from every angle about how bad it is.

2-3°C of warming by 2050, 4-5°C by 2100. There's no rule saying it will stop there.

https://www.dpg-physik.de/veroeffentlichungen/publikationen/...

>4C by 2100 is pretty far outside of the model projections.

I'm not saying it's impossible - we all know there are some long tail uncertainties to climate projections - but for the most part, it's contraindicated by a lot of the evidence, both observed and simulated.

Honestly I think American scientists not speaking in Fahrenheit units to an American audience is an incredibly simple and stupid, but very significant cause of the problem.

If I tell you the Earth is going to get 2 degrees C warmer, Americans are going to think, "2 degrees, not that much, barely noticeable." If you tell them it's 4 degrees F, they'll think, that's not a ton, but it's definitely noticeable.

I like the 30 year mortgage analogy, something people can connect with. 2% increase in mortgage rate likely means low 6 figures difference in total interest paid.

I fell in the same trap "So it'll be 25C in summer instead of 23C!". Sometimes it's small things that make you realize how small changes make big impacts. For example, I was watching a documentary about caribou in Northern Canada. A whole herd starved and died because of a slight warming during winter. Normally they dig through the snow to find food in the winter. But a slight warming meant the snow fell as freezing rain and left a thick layer of ice on top of the snow. The caribou couldn't dig through it and therefore couldn't eat and they died. A tiny change in temperature wiped out a huge colony.

> I am glad that I live far away from the effects but it is sad to think of people losing all kinds of things for the lack of respect of Mother Earth!

I thought this too, feeling a bit more smug living in southern Ontario, safer than my family in BC and Alberta next to raging forest fires and potential drought.

But seems we now get a few weeks of forest fire smoke every year even down here in lush green great lakes land.

And the number of tornadoes and ice storms seem to increase every year.

Plus watching the Children of Men style xenophobia and callous disregard for climate refugees set in all over the world.

Blech. I love my kids but I think my perspective would be much different and positive if I'd just remained childless.

> Plus watching the Children of Men style xenophobia and callous disregard for climate refugees set in all over the world.

There are no climate refugees... Yet.

The collapse of Syria was partly due to an extended drought causing famine. A lot of the current xenophobia in Europe is due to the small amount of refugees escaping the effects of this famine and subsequent civil war.

Cortisol is the hormone that creates tight social bonds. It is what make you love your kids so much. So the secret to a loving and kind society is to just pour this stuff in the drinking water supply, right?

No it strengthened social bonds, both toward family and friends and equally against others. It makes people VERY tribal.

Cortisol is also released in long term stressful situations. With a rising tide of poverty and climate blow back, I suspect stress will increase and so too will said tribalism.

What we see today with the rising popularist and isolationist political parties is but an echo of the future.

We see some of these tendencies when a few thousand or tens of thousands of refugees turn up in a country. What happens when this becomes millions? I have said it for years, many will be welcomed with open arms - those arms being machine guns, bombs and drones.

This is the dark future I fear and I hope I am wrong.

I do not have kids, it wasn't by choice. But what looked like something of a negative might actually turn out to be a near miss in future. Just keep your kids safe and try to have peace and compassion to others that are trying to do the same.

s/cortisol/oxytocin/g

Cortisol is the stress hormone. It doesn’t build strong social bonds.

You are mixing two hormones effect together.

Oxytocin is the "social bond" hormone. As you said, it helps create and foster social bonds but also make more more tribal. Cortisol is a "stress hormone" which gets released during stressful situations. Stressful situations also decrease Oxytocin release and high levels of Oxytocin lower levels of Cortisol, so the stress == tribalism link is not really warranted (at least not from a hormonal point of view).

It's a marketing copy thing. If instead of 1 degree, they said 1.4 million TWh, which is the amount of energy needed to heat the Earth by 1 degree, it would hit better extreme number emotional buttons, but I'm not in charge of things.

Frankly I think expressing it in Celsius has made Americans think it’s less of a problem than it is. It took me awhile to realize that it’s basically 4°F, which is enormous.

Someone I know who worked in the climate sciences once put it so clearly to me.

An increase of 1 degree is global, and with 70% of the world being ocean that raises much slower, the temperature rise over land is effectively doubled. So 1c degree is 2c. A 2c world is 4c.

That when CO2 was 100 point less than the 280ppm baseline we had an ice age with glaciers down to the 40th(ish) parallels in the Northern Hemisphere. We have now pushed it 150 above the baseline in effectively 150 years and fast accelerating. What seems like something trivial, is actually forcing on an unbelievable scale.

Also a fun visualization, roughly speaking 1 part per million in water vapor is what a cloud looks like. If CO2 had the same visual properties as water, it would be pitch black on the ground.

People keep looking to the past for answers, and yes it does provide valuable context. But what we are doing now has never happened on this planet, we are blindly rushing into a future that is beyond comprehension. Some things will go worse than expected, some thing will go a lot better, but nobody really knows just yet.

Also to the last line "I am glad that I live far away from the effects", alas, this isn't like empires of the past that are geographically limited. Those that can collapse but there is still plenty of untouched lands and civilizations. We now live in a global system, a six continent supply chain. We will all be impacted.

I think this talk about 1.5C or 2C degree increase is confusing and make the issue look less alarming.

Firstly this is a global average, including both land and ocean temperature. The land temperatures will increase much more than the ocean temperatures and the oceans cover a higher surface. So with a 2C incease on average globally could mean 6-8 degrees more on land on average. And we are also talking about averages and globally at the same time. So at specific instances and specific places it will get even warmer, say 10-20 degrees during days or weeks.

So GIEC, researchers, magazines and others should more clearly describe what this means and stop talking about these 1.5C and 2C degree increases and instead talk about how much warmer it will be on land or some other more useful measure.

Eurostar has upgraded the technical specifications for its new fleet of double-decker trains to operate in temperatures of up to 55°C (131°F).

> I am glad that I live far away from the effects

I've heard it said that we'll all be watching a series of disasters play out on our phones until it comes time to see one play out through our windows.

Sea water temperature here in Valencia was something crazy this year. I do not remember anything like this before.

If the climate effects don’t get you, the political fallout of a million climate refugees showing up at your borders will.

reminds me of https://xkcd.com/1379/

I am also in a convenient place expecting more heat (mountainous region with cold nights/winters, enough water). I admit I enjoy the warmer months and wait for people come visit me for Coolidays.

With less ice around than there used to be, the same incident energy can do a lot more ocean heating. It takes 80 calories to convert 1 gram of ice at 0C to 1 gram of water at 0C. Once the ice is melted, a further 80 calories can raise the temperature of the gram of water at 0C to 80C

Yep, once you learn about Latent temperature fusion, ones view on these things change drastically.

It also explains why boiling water doesn't spontaneously just explode into vapor once it hits that temperature

The concept of heat of fusion blew my mind when I learned about it in high school chemistry. Feels extremely counterintuitive at first.

I scuba dive in Monterey, CA every other weekend, and just came back from a liveaboard in Galapagos in May. The water is much warmer this year, and it is very noticeable because usually in Galapagos, divers are expected to wear 8mm wetsuit or dry suit to be comfortable in the water, but this year even a 5mm made me feel too warm. In Monterey, water temp used to be around 11-13°C but this year it’s easily above 16°C, divers also reported more sightings of spiny lobsters which were rare in Monterey because water was too cold for them.

Recent studies estimate climate warming is happening faster than it was, ballpark +0.3C per decade.

As we are at or nearing +1.5C now, with global emissions at an all time high [ perhaps peaking soon ] theres a good chance we are headed toward +2.6C by ~2060.

Keep in mind the CO2 stays up there for a long time, centuries, so when we get to net-zero its max-CO2 and therefore max-heat.

does it stop? the more co2 the more heat is retained. so the relation between co2 and temperature is an integral over time. were we suddenly to stop burning things how far does it go up before infrared emissions equilibrate with the larger thermal flux? that and the lower albedo and other knockoff effects may continue to make things worse even if we were to stop.

yeah, Id actually like to see a reasonable prediction of the trajectory, factoring in recent few years data [ faster warming, current emissions, cleaner air / reduced aerosols and issues like those you mention such as equilibration and ocean heat buffering ]

The graphs I see all have ridiculous ranges, either +1.5C hopium or +6C hellscape - whereas +2.6C within 20 to 30 years seems a most likely [and unpleasant] scenario.

Perhaps there are other mechanisms at play here? What about the AMOC collapse. IF too much heat disrupts some weather patterns which are heating the northenr emisphere, that would mean an increase in the ice cover again and therefore more heat reflection again.

But in 50 years we'll defo have technology to remove that CO2.

We will not. Carbon capture is a joke. It does not work anywhere near the scale it's needed. We would need many times more capture facilities than we currently have power plants. And to run them we would need many times more power plants, not to mention all the construction emissions etc.

Carbon capture is completely infeasible. It's already too late anyway, our civilization is pretty much doomed barring some miracle.

I thought "just plant more trees!" and found this helpful article https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/how-many-new-trees-would-we-...

We should take a glance at what all the tech we take for granted today looked like in 1976.

It's not about tech. It's about the fact that the atmosphere has like 0,00something% CO2, so you need to process like a thousand tons of air to theoretically extract one ton of CO2.

You basically need to suck the entire atmosphere through a factory, it's not about tech it's just a big fan. And then of course you need something to process all that air as fast as it comes in.

Why are these technical problems insurmountable, particularly over 50 years?

We've already been doing it for 50 years, and the pinnacle of achievement in the field is a facility being built in Texas that is planning to sequester 500,000 tons of CO2 annually.

The world produces over 38 billion tons of CO2 a year. Assuming they reach their target performance, we would need 38bn/500k=76,000 of these facilities just to offset our current emissions.

The number of "power generating facilities" in the entire world, for reference, is about 30,000. So we would need more than twice as many capture plants as we currently have power plants. And of course they all need power, ways to actually get rid of the carbon they're collecting, chemicals etc.

So sure, if you want to live in a dream world where we magically just invent a 1000x better way to do it it's totally feasible. And while we're at it I'm sure we'll just make a 1000x more efficient combustion engine and a 1000x more effective dynamo and 1000x more effective ways to grow food and 1000x more effective solar panels, desalination etc. The next 50 years will totally revolutionize all these technologies we've already close to perfected, surely.

In case it wasn't clear that's sarcasm. Nobody is expecting to significantly improve any of these things because we are already closing in on hard physical limits that can't just be technologied away. A 1.2x improvement in any of them would be staggering, and even that is unrealistic for most if not all of the random technologies i mentioned.

Furthermore, 50 years is way too late. In 50 years we will be at like +3-4C or beyond. If things haven't already completely gone to shit at that point I can guarantee you there will be chaos and much more to come. They will have more pressing concerns than building 70,000 carbon capture facilities.

I'm not having kids, I hope my corner of the world stays relatively stable until I'm gone and I pity the people who have to live beyond that.

You seem really upset at the mere suggestion that this might be feasible one day. Why?

I'm just explaining to you why this technology will almost certainly not solve the problem, it likely won't even make a dent in the problem.

I believe this is an important point to make because it looks to me like the primary effect (and maybe also intended effect?) of carbon capture efforts is to encourage complacency. "Don't worry about these emissions, we'll just slurp the CO2 back up later and fix everything".

It is orders of magnitude harder to remove the CO2 that it is to emit it. Relying on "future technology" to save us is a prayer not a plan.

What if there is no solution? Do you understand that we are talking about the very imminent end of the world? Literally a complete collapse of human civilization, likely starting within this century. Maybe within our lifetimes.

"Let's hope someone finds a solution" is not enough. We have the solution, it is to stop emitting billions of tons of greenhouse gases every year. We just aren't doing it. So yeah, I find it just a little frustrating when people deny the problem, deny the severity of it, or claim that magic future technology will fix it. This is why we are in this position in the first place, because people do not take it seriously.

Can you point to any evidence for the idea that climate change will be the end of human civilization? I’m fully onboard with the scientific consensus around climate change, but I haven’t seen anything credible suggesting it’ll be anything close to civilization-ending. Even RCP 8.5, which was dropped for being implausible, doesn’t predict effects anywhere close to ending a global civilization of ten billion people.

https://unclimatesummit.org/comparing-climate-impacts-at-1-5...

> there is no certainty that adaptation to a 4°C world is possible … the projected 4°C warming simply must not be allowed to occur.

Bonus: https://www.dpg-physik.de/veroeffentlichungen/publikationen/...

> the climate change mitigation goals which have been pledged are far too low (ambition gap), and the measures which are currently being implemented and planned are not sufficient to achieve even these inadequate goals (realisation gap). This has far-reaching consequences: There is a strong probability that the ambition gap will lead to a temperature rise of 2 to 5 degrees Centigrade compared to pre-industrial temperatures by 2100, the realisation gap to a further rise of several degrees Centigrade.[1,2,VI] There is a danger that the mean temperature will already have risen by 3 degrees Centigrade by 2050

there is no certainty that adaptation to a 4°C world is possible

That's very different from your certainty that our civilization will end. Even just reading through their list of impacts at +4C, it's horrific, but pretty clearly not civilization-ending.

IMO, this kind of hyperbole does a lot of damage to your cause. The reality is bad enough, you don't need to make things up. People eventually stop believing the boy who cries wolf.

What do you think adapt means? If we do not adapt we die. Those are the options. If we cannot adapt to the new climate on Earth we can not live on Earth. And we sure can't live anywhere else.

I'm not "crying wolf". You, like most people just don't want to hear it. That's why most (especially the "officially accepted") climate models are unrealistically optimistic even with their worst case scenarios. Because people who tell the truth are considered alarmist and people who sugar coat it are ignored.

Just to be clear, and because some people inexplicably seem to consider this worth even talking about, I'm not saying there won't be any humans anywhere. That might happen but there might also be some habitable places left at least for a while, maybe for a long time. Nobody knows exactly what's going to happen. If 80% of the global population were to perish I would consider this "prophecy" fulfilled. It's not important to me whether some people survive somewhere because the point is I don't want to live through (or, overwhelmingly more likely, die during) the process leading up to that and I don't want to put a new person into the world who will have to live through that. That's where my concern ends, I don't care what happens after the world as we know it is gone.

Humans do inhumane things to each other during hard times, and I guarantee you, regardless of how you define words like adaptation and civilization, there's extremely hard times coming.

> If we do not adapt we die

To wit: Russian cowboys learn to wrangle a brand new beef industry - https://whyy.org/segments/russian-cowboys-learn-to-wrangle-a...

Getting an early start on skill sets before Siberia replaces the American cattle plains.

Climate change won’t even kill 10% of humanity. I do not understand why people are so pessimistic about our ability to adapt. That’s how we created this problem in the first place! Of course we’re not going to just lay down and die. 80% is completely ridiculous and there’s not a shred of evidence for it, is there?

I understand that you don’t think you’re being alarmist, of course. But why would I think some random internet commenter is more credible with their predictions that are much worse than the IPCC and other scientific consensus?

Let us bow and pray to the LORD of technological progress, for HE, in all HIS infinite might and glory will save us.

Sometimes shit just doesn't happen. To prime your brain for the empathy required, imagine the sensation that you feel when you jump off a bridge or building and realize that you've made a huge mistake, and you'd actually like to live a bit longer, but now there's no turning back and it is over for you.

Now imagine that same sensation, but apply it to the lives of all the less privileged people that will die due to first-order (wet bulb, drought) and second-order (war, famine) effects of climate change. But maybe we're not screwed. Maybe you actually survive the fall because a benevolent sea lion decides to keep you afloat after you impact the water and break all of your bones too severely to tread water.

Still fucked up to just jump anyway, especially if it's not your life that you're gambling with (thanks Baby Boomers, esp. oil baron Baby Boomers).

With the growth in solar, it is easy to think that we can solve it, we just do more renewables, but the decline of fossil fuels is negligible: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:share:7438918221...

Globally, fossil fuels supply 81.1% today (2023). Only marginally down from 81.4% in 2000. Fossil fuels are not on track to end by 2050. But rather in 4-10 centuries.

Solar + wind were 99% of new generation capacity last year. Fossil fuel usage dropped for one of the first times ever. Renewables generated more than coal.

Solar installation is huge and the increase continues to accelerate. Every year has seen a record amount of installed solar. Solar started at zero two decades ago and is already curbing other sources.

That 99% may be just Australia and not the entire world? There seems to be a ton of new coal and gas plants still coming online, 95% of them in China and India. 100 GW of new coal plants and 100 GW of gas. There are probably ~1000 gas plants in the pipeline just in US for data centers. And a ton more onsite gas turbines, like Musks Colossus DC, 1GW of compute powered by gas turbines.

From: https://www.carbonbrief.org/new-coal-plants-hit-10-year-glob...

> In 2025, coal-capacity growth hit a 10-year high, with 97 gigawatts (GW) of new power

> The number of new coal-fired power plants built around the world hit a “10-year high” in 2025

> It adds that 95% of the new coal plants were built in India and China.

> 70% of the coal-fired units scheduled to retire globally in 2025 did not do so

Even the title and first line of that article supports my point, “New coal plants hit ‘10-year’ global high in 2025 – but power output still fell”.

Coal capacity is increasing, but it is not being used. Mostly China is constructing new plants but leaving them idle.

Check the Ember 2026 report for all the global details:

  ..In another global milestone, renewables overtook coal power in 2025. Solar, wind, hydropower and other renewable sources together contributed more than a third of global electricity generation for the first time in the modern power system. Conversely, the share of coal power fell below a third for the first time in history.

  .. Driven by record solar growth, low-carbon power generation increased by 887 TWh in 2025, outpacing electricity demand growth of 849 TWh. Solar power alone met 75% of the net increase in electricity demand. Together with wind, the two sources met almost all (99%) demand growth. For the first time since the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, and only the fifth time this century, fossil generation did not rise, recording a small fall of 38 TWh (-0.2%).

Also, a whole 200GW new coal+gas capacity in the pipeline! OMG! In 2025, the world installed 647GW of solar capacity, generating 2778 TWh.

https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/global-electricity-...

The trouble is that we’re adding renewables to add capacity, not as a way to bring significant amounts of fossil fuel capacity offline.

I assure you, it is not performative. While solar is the fastest growing energy source in human history, it still takes time to replace a century of existing infrastructure.

Despite rising electricity demand, so much solar has already been installed that fossil fuel generation decreased last year. Renewables now generate more total energy than coal. This will only continue as more solar + batteries come online. Thanks to Iran, renewable projects are getting fast tracked globally to reduce the dependence on foreign energy.

> With the growth in solar, it is easy to think that we can solve it,

90% of things you can buy/use would not exist without fossil fuels, including food, medicine, clothes, roads, tires, electronics, solar panels, windmills, etc.

Sounds super valuable, we should probably stop setting a finite resource on fire.

Do not conflate fossil fuels with all petroleum products. With concern to global warming we are primarily concerned with things you light on fire to generate electricity. There's no reason to mention things that aren't being lit of fire.

Guys, stop trying to solve climate change. You can't solve "wanting the wrong thing".

Not long ago fossil fuel use was growing exponentially. The fact that its flatlined is a major turn in the course of history. There's no reason it can't begin to decline exponentially at any time.

"highest temperature on record"... so far.

There are still ~4 months till peak El Niño, and then some months to spread effects.

> ... so far That's what "on record" means

Is not the same a record that may be broken in the next 100 years than one that will be broken most days till end of year. One is an event, the other is a running process with no clear end, besides that won’t be the current point.

No, "on record" here means simply "recorded", ie. measured. It doesn't mean "a record", like a maximum.

This El Niño is going to be interesting come Christmas time. Lot's of weather and climate unpredictability coming to a region near you!

I hope so! The area I live in has been experiencing drought and everyone seems to be predicting a wet period coming from this.

Personally, I don't put much faith in weather predictions that are more than a week away.

El nino predictions are pretty spot on. They won't be able to tell you "There will be a storm on the 30th" but they will be able to tell you that you should expect flash floods next year.

Unfortunately for where I'm at, the prediction due to el nino is more drought, which sucks because we are already desperately dry. Hopefully the following la nina year will bring us some moisture.

Predicting El Niño vs. La Niña vs. neutral: relatively reliable. Predicting how strong the El Niño will be: harder. Predicting exactly what it will do to rainfall, temperatures, storms, or snowfall: substantially less reliable.

And yet people will put forth dire predictions (drought, flooding, hurricanes, tornadoes, heat waves, etc.) every chance they get. No wonder so many people think it is all a hoax.

Yes, scientists have put forth dire predictions of extreme weather. Here's the thhing though - we actually see measurable increases in the frequency and severity of extreme weather events. They put forth dire predictions.. and they are absolutely correct. It's right there in the observational record.

A preview of 2035.

Incidentally, the term El Niño came from Christmas time (the waters warm around Christmas time, or when the baby boy comes).

I think it's time to rename it to El Hombre.

According to a client scientist on a news program, 2027 will be the hottest year on record.

Expect lots more chaos and death of wildlife in the ocean as we are seeing in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, sharks migrating to places where they don't normally and surprising humans, gray whales are washing up on the shores at larger and larger rates, jellyfish to have a lot more food so there will be a lot more jellyfish, invasive beetle species will have a lot more food, algae blooms will be a lot more prevalent so the ocean will become more toxic.

The "scatter line plot" in TFA is all same shade of red on white with no year labels. This seems like a missed visualization opportunity. Using some kind of color scheme/gradient to represent the 1979-2026 years in a way that can show long-term "trend". (A 50 frame movie at, say, 5 fps with same axes or maybe "all years" as faded background as the current year pops around in bold is another possibility, but a scientific paper format doesn't let people do .mp4s.) I know I've seen multi-colored "scatter lines" in IPCC reports. Seemed worth asking rather than doing it myself.

Yeah, kinda like the spirals used for (air?) temperature:

https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/5190/

I remember watching a documentary which talked about feedback loops in the climate. It might have been in the context of history. If the ocean warms up enough, it causes the CO2 in the ocean itself (either in the deposits or the gas saturated in the water) to get released into the atmosphere. Maybe I'm not using the right technical words, but there is a certain amount of CO2 that sits within the ocean that is separate from the atmosphere. In any case, after a certain point it becomes a feedback loop: warmer climate -> more CO2 joins the atmosphere -> warmer climate.

You may be thinking of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis

Yes I think so too. It wasn't CO2, but methane in the form of methane hydrate.

We don't even need the oceans temperature to rise, as the arctic tundra permafrost melts the amount of plant material ready to release its CO2 is massive. Some estimate think it would double the amount of our total emissions if all of it defrosts.

But this did lead to one of the more ridiculous head line from a few years back.

Thawing Permafrost Is Artificially Chilled to Stabilize Alaska Oil Pipeline

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/thawing-permafros...

Warmer water holds less dissolved gases of all kinds, including CO2. You can see this yourself by heating water in your kitchen. Well below the boiling point, you can observe tiny bubbles, which are composed of nitrogen and oxygen dissolved in the water coming out of solution. The oceans will eventually become carbon sources, not carbon sinks, if they warm enough, but that's not projected to happen this century.

However, there are regions of the oceans which currently absorb lots of CO2 which will absorb much less as time goes on. One important example is the AMOC, which, by turning over lots of water, helps sink surface dissolved CO2 into the deeper ocean. In recent years, oceanographers have observed a weakening of the AMOC, which was predicted but is happening much earlier than expected. This is one of the important planetary tipping points, which could cause a dramatic shift in the planet's climate.

But don't worry -- the Trump administration is defunding programs like the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, decommissioning the Ocean Observatories Initiative, and is planning to shutter NOAA's research arm altogether -- thus solving the problem once and for all.

And one scary observation related to this is that warm water will also hold less oxygen for marine life, literally throttling that part of our life-support.

Does anybody else feel like this is the answer to the Fermi paradox? Advanced civilizations simply exploit, consume, and pollute their way of existence.

14 billion years and not a single piece of evidence of a prior civilization.

The universe is vast, both in space and time. You would not detect anything from a past civilization that died a few millions of years ago in the closest solar system, which is really not that far in either time nor space

As they say, “power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Perhaps humanity shouldn’t have absolute power over the planet. Perhaps we should check our own power to save ourselves. We’ve done it with government, to insure stability and longevity, why not the planet?

>why not the planet?

greed

Love the planet as you love your self. Just be.

Easy to say, difficult to do.

Promoting sociopathy via a capitalist hierarchy that ruin the planet for their own selfish gain feels like a very primate thing to do. I bet there would be many other forms of communal, generous intelligent civilizations with longer-term thinking capability, especially if they lived longer than ~75 years on average. So consider my take on this statement inconclusive.

It's as easy of an answer to accept as any other hypothesis. I think we're all living within a simulation to create, solve, and document as many problems as we can with the technologies our specific environment allows us to develop; that our simulation is air-gapped away from the others performing the same work so as to not contaminate the data.

Honestly, I think an easier answer is that intelligent life is simply very rare and interstellar travel is very hard. We may be the only intelligent life within our galaxy. Or perhaps just 1 in 100. In either case, it'd take a LONG time before we ever found or met another civilization.

What if we found ourselves on a planet that didn't have fossil fuels?

Then there is a good chance we would never have moved up to a technological state that allowed us to leave the planet. We probably wouldn't also be facing blow back from digging up and burning the planets solar battery.

We'd go mass extinction and be the fossil fuels for the next intelligent species that appears.

We'd be using wind and water power, as we've done since well before the Industrial Revolution.

It has been brought up before and it seems plausible. There is no guarantee that we have to leave the planet in any meaningful way or even survive for that matter.

Nah, they can't go multiplanetary because faster than rocket powered travel in space must be impossible and they die of radiation during the journey.

Planetary runaway heating can be worked with with underground cities.

Most probably it's because the universe is vast and as humans we cannot comprehend how far the stars are. No matter how advanced an alien civilization is, physics prohibits objects with mass travelling faster than light and that's tru for any civilization.

Not adding anything super major here, but to repeat the broadcast: this has such a broad danger to it, is a core driver of ocean acidification (along with the ambient CO2 the ocean sinks up), by reducing the oxygen carrying capacity of water.

> Ocean acidification has been called the "evil twin of global warming" and "the other CO2 problem". Increased ocean temperatures and oxygen loss act concurrently with ocean acidification and constitute the "deadly trio" of climate change pressures on the marine environment. The impacts of this will be most severe for coral reefs and other shelled marine organisms,as well as those populations that depend on the ecosystem services they provide.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification

My favorite source of graphs about this ongoing catastrophe: https://x.com/EliotJacobson - retired professor of mathematics and computer science

Example: https://x.com/EliotJacobson/status/2091911667903041543

Then you might like this site: https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/?dm_id=world2

Posting them on x.com and his Substack is all AI generated hero images so one wonders if he's more interested in the line going up for engagement purposes.

I can feel it.

The weather this year up in Canada here has been extremely odd. Constantly. You can tell something is off.

I live in a minivan and drive around the United States every year. I started noticing it two years ago, but last year was really difficult for me to go to the usual places I went. I’m up in the Pacific Northwest right now and I’m not even planning where I’m gonna go this year because I’m definitely gonna just be following the weather.

One thing I will definitely not be doing is staying around the Palm Springs area, which I usually do because of the risk for earthquakes if the heavy rain flow into the Salton sea.

That's crazy! Are you enjoying the van life? Always dreamed of doing it myself.

It was forced on me, so I have to enjoy it (Homeless, the rent is too damn high). Just hard to do when you live off of disability with a serious mental illness. Also, my van is a 2001 dodge grand caravan so don't get too excited. :)

> One thing I will definitely not be doing is staying around the Palm Springs area, which I usually do because of the risk for earthquakes if the heavy rain flow into the Salton sea.

Heavy precipitation would have negligible impact on earthquake hazard.

Interestingly, Palm Springs area has considerably higher earthquake risk than most of the US because it sits near 4 major active faults: San Andreas, San Jacinto, Banning, and Garnet Hill.

In Sydney it has been raining almost non stop for a year. Really odd. Garden loves it, I'm planting non-endemic native (primarily tropical) species from further north along the coast. I expect a snap-back to extreme drought during this or the subsequent summer. But come further warming, we'll have a jungle.

I get the feeling the coming summer is going to be brutal.

On one hand, heat + humidity will literally kill some vulnerable people. One the other hand, heat + extreme dryness will literally kill people via wildfires.

Before summer comes around I need to clear various dry leaves and branches and general fire-fuel garden waste from around my house and yard. Somehow, my house doesn't have a water tank, and that makes me feel vulnerable, and it's only recently that I've felt that as a potential threat, mental note: water tank + pump near the top of the to-do/buy list.

Where are you based now? Long time between drinks. I think 2600 is still running. Pop in at the next one? https://www.meetup.com/en-au/sydney-2600/events/316056334/

SA (still). Not sure if I am who you think I am...

Wermspowke?

Yeah, in Melbourne here. It feels like Winter never really got going. Yeah, there is some rain and there have been a hand full of cold mornings at best. I do wonder how this summer is going to go, it is going to hit right at the peak of El Nino and they are anticipating some very dry conditions.

Meanwhile, canned sardines went 20% up in the last month in Greece. And that's while we have plenty of local production. I can't imagine what it would be in countries where they import everything. Give it a few years and all fish food prices could go up substantially.

It hasn’t gone up yet here in California but I see from the boxes I usually eat that these are sourced from Vietnam (in spite of Monterrey being a short trip away) so these could come from China (one of the usual tariff bypass mechanisms) and hence anywhere in the world (ghost fleets) and possibly not reflect real world ecosystem pressure until multiple fishery collapse.

Multiple fishery collapses are probably incoming in the next decade or so. For as much as we have and do catch from the ocean, it is as a whole a fairly nutrient bare place by comparison to the land. Its scale and exploitation beyond recovery has allowed it to look far more prosperous than it really is.

The big question / risk is whether there are unknown tipping points where things run away. Many are talked about - ice melting, reducing reflectivity, more heating causes more heating etc. But some fraction of these are probably unknowable.

I try to do my part to the best of my ability. But obviously it's only a droplet in the ocean (hah). But if I'm being honest, what scares me far more than this is the capability of humans to "force" a solution on the world.

If one would have to do the best of its ability then one should adapt very quickly its consumption patterns (stop buying so many things, get minimalist), food patterns (food is likely the per-capita biggest environmental destroyer, eating fish and beef is very taxing on the planet e.g.), travel patterns (no airplanes, use bikes/feet/public transports, cars as last resort).

Those aren't small things to ask and I understand why people and governments pretend to gaslight with just energy, as it asks for no impact on daily life.

Pretty much this.

While each action is tiny, collectively they add up.

The rain drop doesn't blame itself for the flood.

We fixed the hole in the ozone layer. All the countries came together, worked together, and fixed the problem threatening to doom us all with skin cancer and worse. Humanity can come together.

Unfortunately, the threat of total annihilation of human civilisation is currently not outweighing the short-term profit incentives of those in power, and they've turned the issue into fuel for their culture war so I doubt we'll find a real solution before the current generation of politicians is dead.

IIRC, the Montreal protocol only worked because it could be solved with existing technology, quickly, with almost no economic cost and happened in a totally different era of global politics.

Climate change has... well... none of that. Not only that, but by the time it gets bad enough to convince people, it may be literally impossible to stop.

It's grim to think about, but if the nuke is falling it's too late to build an iron dome. We have several nuclear bombs dangling above us. We know they're there - permafrost, AMOC, ocean life collapse - just not exactly where, and we're blinding swinging a knife on a stick while actively yelling for a longer stick and telling the research committees not to tell them if they're getting close.

We knew about this all since the 1980's. Carl Sagan testified before congress in 1985 [1]. That's over 40 years ago.

Yet, we continue to burn more and fossil fuels; solar, wind, EVs, etc, non-withstanding. And right now some governments are actively spending money to work against renewable energy.

At this point I am afraid that we humans will only act when the alternative is unaffordable, when the forest is already on fire. I hope by that time it won't be too late.

Those of us who have been saying this all along won't even get the hollow satisfaction of an "I told you so!", because we'll be too busy surviving.

Vote, drive less (combustion engines), fly less, use public transportation, check your utility mix (and demand a larger renewable fraction), install solar, lobby, buy more local (where possible), consume less, support those with jobs displaced by renewables, accept some loss on your fossil stocks, ...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp-WiNXH6hI

Original source: https://climate.copernicus.eu/copernicus-daily-global-sea-su...

As someone who works in risk management, I think I have a hard time understanding how anyone can be so blase about climate change.

Like, it truly takes a level of willful ignorance to have something so dire happening, and just choosing to either ignore it, or ignore the evidence for it.

Like, even if you think the science isn't that accurate, the impacts, the massive potential harms, should outweigh the choice to just ignore it. Then again, there are people buying wooden homes in wildfire, hurricane, and flood zones, so who knows; maybe doing risk management as a job has just inured me to head-in-the-sand reactions, since I've seen what happens when you don't beat the odds.

This isn't a personal risk, either, like riding a motorcycle where you're the only one who's going to get hurt when your number comes up. This is literally going to kill millions.

The millions it will kill first won't be among the overconsumers who are driving climate change.

they don't care who lives or dies. they probably think it only affects "bad" people.

so I don't want to ignore it nor the evidence, now what?

So now use whatever political power you have to push for changes to mitigate, respond, or prevent as much of it as possible?

this is perhaps the best thing written on the topic https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2006-jul-02-op-gilbe...

Good read. I do think it's giving too much credit to our evolutionary instincts, though, and not enough to personal and political choices.

Unless there's something lacking in the brain of climate change deniers (which as nice as it might be to believe that, there's no evidence to back up), they should be able to match the many people who are reacting in horror and fear to it.

This was a fun, light read, but nowhere near 'best', hardly more than a fun opinion piece, and even then it completely ignored relevant topics (class inequality at foot, performative climate action [taylor swift], disparate impacts).

it's the clearest layman-accessible overview of all the issues at play that I've seen. if you know a better one feel free to recommend it.

"all the issues" - which issues exactly? It didn't explain any of the contributing issues at all - it was a think piece on motivations for lack of action.

To answer your question: literally every linked YouTube video.

this is specifically about the psychological reasons why humans don't seem to care about climate change, despite it being a huge catastrophe in the making, which is exactly what the OP was asking.

Caveman summary. We evolved for:

- Bad guy with stick

- Immediate danger

- Things that make caveman angry

- Sudden changes

Climate change is:

- No bad guy (no bad man to protect from)

- No immediate danger (no tiger here now)

- No moral outrage (strange numbers go up)

- Very slow (everything seems same)

I do care. I see a species ending disaster hanging over the future. I recycle, I have solar panels, a heat pump, an EV (that I leave on my driveway whenever my bicycle will do the job). But the planet is being ruined by greed on an unfathomable scale and aside from doing what I can and voting for parties that see the problem, I feel like there’s not a god damn thing I can do about it.

This consumer/suburbia-level checklist of individual eco merit is more of a scapegoating ritual than something that makes a difference. This is not a job for solar panel rebates. It’s more of a job for things like Extinction Rebellion; political demonstrations and activism that forces the issue. Which in turn (if successful) will lead to real organized work towards and ecological future. One where we are chipping in together rather than hunking down in our single-home bunkers with our plastic recycling and electric bicycles.

Although things like adoption of EVs does probably have a great positive impact on the local pollution levels.

I agree, you can’t shop your way out of political issues and joining a polity is probably the best thing you can do. Still, having to make a choice I’d opt for buying the more sustainable option.

You agree. Yet you keep repeating this cul de sac attitude of recycling and other single home nice to haves?

Simply miss me with these already-wise replies. That just means that your comments are something worse than naive.

I think if you should be able to at least have the peace of mind that you did all you could (within reason, short of pulling a Ted Kaczynski or his modern equivalent Luigi Mangione). Maybe it’s inevitable - history shows tons of species go extinct and maybe unbridled capitalism is how we go, maybe seven million years give or take is all humans will have. Maybe I absorbed too much of Meditations by Aurelius.

The UN sustainability index once listed Cuba as the only sustainable economy. Another year it was Ecuador. Cuba might be eligible again because of the embargo. My point is that you can't convince folks in rich countries to be truly sustainable and you can't convince the rest to not aim for a higher standard of living. Putin said something like that and he was right.

And we keep coming up with ideas to make it worse: blockchain and now AI.

Bingo. A lot of what passes for solutions are fairly anemic. We will swap out any technology for a similar less intensive alternative but the instant we have to actively change our lifestyle it is largely ignored.

It isn't because people are malicious, it is that people tend to normalize the conditions they are raised in even if they are wildly exceptional.

All individual solutions (“lifestyle”) are inherently anemic and impotent. You don’t avert an extinction event with public service announcements and solar panel rebates.

The only thing it is useful for is scapegoating (cf. this thread).

What about food and overall consumption?

Eating meet, beef especially, with fish a close second, is insanely impactful on the planet. Cows use tons of food, fresh water and release tons of methane, a gas 200 times worse than CO2.

Do you use AI?

Just saying, we could care but being light on the planet is very difficult without dramatically changing our life styles.

I know I do so much, but honestly an emission tax is the very first thing we need out there.

Because we can't be blamed into being eco-friendly as individuals, it's up to taxes to regulate consumption.

You don’t use a tax on consumption for things that are destroying the planet. You ban it or ration it. How can “lifestyle” even factor into this? It doesn’t because it’s not about lifestyle at all.[1] We will keep criss-crossing container ships across the world and maybe pass on the extinction event tax to discipline the lower classes. Then we can use that money to transfer the wealth to the single home owning class in the form of solar panel rebates and EV discounts.

[1] That people drive to work is the tip of the iceberg. Just when it comes to cars alone, you also have all the transportation of goods that need to be dumped off more locally than the closest harbor or train freight station. But only the tip of the iceberg is discussed as far as “blame” is concerned. (How curious.) The “ban” here is quite loaded as it would implicate the whole supply chain.

> This isn't a personal risk, either, like riding a motorcycle where you're the only one who's going to get hurt when your number comes up. This is literally going to kill millions.

Just my personal opinion on why this might be the case.

It's perhaps that people have hard time understanding the scale of the issue. They think, few inches so what?? but the downstream effects of it are catastrophic.

Even if as you are suggesting that millions of people might die, its hard to imagine the scale of that or how that might look like.

On the other hand, I have seen people far more passionate even about the lives/death of a single person. Maybe its the story telling aspects of it which plays a part in why a person cares about an issue or not, also how society reacts to problem.

A man looks upwards, if everyone else around him is running saying the sky is falling. He might assume so too, but if everyone else is acting the same nonetheless, (Sure people are speaking but Words are cheap and actions are hard and its actions of our society that we subtly pay most attention to.)

Maybe realizing this, I feel as if its a chicken and egg problem. We want people to care but people care especially more only if society at large cares about it but society is made up of people.

Going on a tangent, I come to this topic of chicken and egg a lot in my life. It feels as if things can be stuck and perhaps this also explains why things aren't improving, because if it did improve then I wouldn't be talking about it.

But because I am talking about this problem, it means that its usually involved of factors including societal/social dynamics and people are complicated and complex and its a hard problem to solve.

But just because it could be hard doesn't mean it isn't impossible. We can try to be helpless or doomerist about it but also Humanity has shown from time to time to do the (hard things) or even impossible things. Humanity is really impressive in that sense but also unpredictable and as such, I have given up the ability to predict the future but I have hope and trust within my heart that we could (together, as a society) fix this issue of climate change for our next generations because our generation borrows it from the next one and we should try to give it in good shape because why not/why shouldn't we.

I hope that we do, in fact, give a better future to the next generation and give them hope. Or certainly we can try to try our best in this possibility and perhaps be aware of the dynamics at play.

The thought and consideration is worth the time, I think.

However, in a certain respect this is why government is supposed to exist: we never would have gone to the moon. Or built the highway system. Or train tracks. Or a whole lot of big things which don’t immediately seem to have a benefit.

It takes a large body with power and money to enact regulations and movement and take on big projects which would obviously benefit a majority of people in the long-term.

When this is done, countries can move mountains, literally, but without it? We are just left to boil in our own juices as people running around flailing.

I think your idea is absolutely worth personal consideration, but at the same time my feeling is the answer is somewhat obvious on a societal scale. But we’ve lost all trust in government, and there is no political will left to get almost anything done in North America

> However, in a certain respect this is why government is supposed to exist: we never would have gone to the moon. Or built the highway system. Or train tracks. Or a whole lot of big things which don’t immediately seem to have a benefit.

> (...) I think your idea is absolutely worth personal consideration, but at the same time my feeling is the answer is somewhat obvious on a societal scale. But we’ve lost all trust in government, and there is no political will left to get almost anything done in North America

I agree with you on both these points as well and I would like to add a few thoughts that I have onto it: The trust itself within the government is eroding. I feel like trust within institutions is a highly large factor but we have come to such a wide lack of trust that we can't even communicate on basic matters let alone come to agreements at times.

I have also written an comment about it just a little under a week ago which feels relevant and talks about the trust within institutions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49351114

One paragraph from that comment which I had written which I would like to say again is this:

"Trust works in a society when incentives are aligned with trust ie. you trust the society, the society trusts you back and you do the work with these principles and you are rewarded. Even this belief is something that you must trust that the society is fair. This trust creates your beliefs which sets your base-line incentives.

(Note: I feel as if in this example, society/government are interchangable and perhaps government is part of the larger societal structure in it, I feel like the fundamental issue is of trust/incentives within society. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts about it as well)

Millions? I don't usually meet many optimistic people in risk management :(

> This is literally going to kill millions.

Unfortunately, given current trajectory that's how the mother nature is going to bring back balance. I wouldn't be surprised even billions die.

Do you have any credible source indicating that "billions will die"?

what I stated was "I wouldn't be surprised even billions die.", that implies that it's my understanding and opinion and I do not need to link a source for my own opinion.

If I stated that "I think everything will be completely fine", I would expect people to challenge me on that to provide some kind of evidence. Hyperbolic statements on both sides of the argument are not constructive.

You've mistaken a statement for an argument

Yep, get in balance with nature or it will do it for you. And you don't want that.

I don't want to criticize you, but a question: what are you doing in practice to change something? Is your carbon footprint below what is sustainable?

Let's look at me: I don't own a car, live in a smaller town, move around mostly on foot, take public transportation, long distance mostly train. I have two kids and for years my electricity total was 1500kwh a year. Last year it was 1100kwh (heating is gas though, that's what my building has). All this and I do cook a lot with an electric stove. I bought some new appliances before the old ones were completely broken (although they were close) partly because the new ones were all very energy efficient.

But: I live abroad and take my kids to my parents once a year, and fly. Last year I flew four times, including intercontinental (albeit a true outlier of a year). I consume things produced all around the globe, either as items like phones, or food, and the food I do probably daily (I really like fruit, so bananas, mangos, avocados etc).

My point is: my carbon footprint is pretty low, and I try to be mindful about not wasting resources. And it's not that hard, I don't feel like I am missing out on something if I don't drive a car. But I still took my kids to Spain on a vacation, and we still flew there to sit on the beach. Giving that up is hard, and making them sacrifice their childhood fun is hard.

There's a range of what people are ready to give up. I would say I'm on the better side of it, but it's still not enough. Almost no one is ready to sacrifice, and we need almost everyone to sacrifice. Governments do lip service to these goals, but let's see how much countries like Spain sre ready to curb tourism, or countries like Germany and China that live off manufacturing to cut consumption. Who will give up their job to reduce carbon emissions?

The saying train wreck in slow motion has merit.

> Is your carbon footprint below what is sustainable?

What a waste of time this is. Carbon footprint? Zero-emission homes? The climate is global and the balance sheet is spread across all of us. Someone with a disability might have much more use for cars and transporation than someone who is able-bodied. And homes out in the boonies without much sun (for solar power) might need a diesel generator for their three-times-a-year power outages in order to keep up productivity and a comfortable existence. And twenty miles from that house is a village full of grid-connected homes running on hydropower. As long as the “balance sheet” is okay we should not fret about this individual stuff.

“Carbon footprint” was explicitly designed as a distraction away from British Petroleum and onto the consumer. I think the kids call that a “whataboutism”.

> I consume things produced all around the globe, either as items like phones, or food, and the food I do probably daily (I really like fruit, so bananas, mangos, avocados etc).

Yeah things are made in Vietnam and China now. And that is the consumer’s fault? That eco-friendly wooden utensils used in Europe are made in China?

Step one. Create and design a deeply interconnected, global market with specializations. The signal is just money, the most fungible asset. Step two: externalities. Step three: use money (see step one) to market your scapegoating to everybody, in direct contradiction with the sheer simplicity of step one; no, consumers aren’t supposed to just use money/price as the signal, that’s evil and has a high Carbon Footprint.

> My point is: my carbon footprint is pretty low, and I try to be mindful about not wasting resources. And it's not that hard, I don't feel like I am missing out on something if I don't drive a car. But I still took my kids to Spain on a vacation, and we still flew there to sit on the beach. Giving that up is hard, and making them sacrifice their childhood fun is hard.

I dunno, an extra twelve degrees Celsius and beaches is worth those flights? And sacrificing childhood fun? Children are an endless maw of desires. Of course if you give them the idea of something (or the TV does) and then don’t go through with it is the greatest crime in the history of humanity. And yet, our parents went without all of that, etc., despite their identical child programming.

I don't think GP is trying to say they're so much better than the rest. Their point is that the majority of earth-dwellers, including their own relatively climate-conscious lifestyle, are not (and are not willing to) do nearly enough to meaningfully affect the situation.

Read the snark. Individual eco merit is a waste of time and a distraction. Climate change was caused by an industrial and globe-spanning effort. People BIKING to work and NOT flying aeroplanes will not even make a dent.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49425790

Honestly the only thing I see here that is a waste of time is trying to communicate with people that don't read and stick to canned tired responses they iterate on like an LLM.

I was replying to a very specific comment that said paraphrasing "I don't get how people can choose to ignore it". The point of what I wrote was, to an extent almost everyone ignores it, even I do, and I asked what is it that you actually DO that makes a difference. Because I don't know a single person that makes a total commitment to fixing this problem. Discussing who's fault is it is for useless people. Solutions aren't done by assigning blame so you can continue on with your day. The world can likely not survive people in every corner of the world eating food grown in some other corner of the world. The "balance sheet" is clearly not okay.

Now continue having fun proposing simplistic snap your fingers it's done solutions to the hardest problem humanity has ever faced, right at the intersection of basic human psychology, needs and desires to lead a comfortable life, and an economic system that by definition doesn't see further than its own nose.

So step one is actually: people do ignore it and this is not going to change. How do we fix the issue with this constraint in mind?

This is my fault for not highlighting the crux of the issue.[1] That was only sarcastically pointed at in my “Step one.” paragraph.

Okay, so I guess “blame” is too contentious. It is of course technically true that we can all bike more, or we can stop the petroleum industry, and both have a positive effect, but the Petroleum Industry is not here in this thread so biking is the real thing to discuss. But let’s not say that I blame the Petroleum Industry or whatever else. Let’s call it: Properly seeing cause and effect, if you prefer.

Properly seeing cause and effect is actually the proper way to solve any problem. You should root out weeds rather than trimming them.

We can see the symptoms of mystification (cf. considering real cause and effect) with terms like “basic human psychology”. I don’t think, ever, that the basic human psychology and “needs and desires to lead a comfortable life” for the average person has ever mattered in a real crisis. In a real crisis like a war you use rationing and other harsh measures to deal with the problem. The powers that be don’t fret that Johnny is on keto and needs his daily butter. But we are not in a crisis according to this irrational system which would rather burn the world down than to upend... the system itself.

Of course you dismiss my remedy as wishful thinking and make-believe because that is the real, challenging task ahead of us. Merely to stop companies and other entities that have the whole economic system, militaries for that matter, etc. behind them. Not just wishing and praying that the consumers will drive less and for China to give up their jerbs to produce less commodities.

> > I don't want to criticize you, but a question: what are you doing in practice to change something? Is your carbon footprint below what is sustainable?

Oh if we just prodded each other. A little, day by day. Have you heeded the call of British Petroleum?

[1] Which is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49425790

> My point is: my carbon footprint is pretty low, and I try to be mindful about not wasting resources.

While it might be low by western standards, it is probably still very high by global averages. For instance it is estimated that roughly 80% of people have never flowing in a plane, and that 10% of the remaining have never flown more than once. Flown 4 times last year puts you right near the top.

This isn't saying "You are a terrible person!", it is saying that we all have a habit of normalizing the world around us even if it is wildy unsustainable.

And even then, the planet doesn't care about were you sit in terms of other people, it just cares about your impacts.

Statistically, the homeless in my country (Australia) have a carbon foot print 3 times greater than the average African. What looks horrible here, resource wise, is far ahead of many in this world.

That was exactly my point.

> This is literally going to kill millions.

Somebody (maybe Stalin) once said something like one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic. A disaster on the scale of millions of deaths doesn't register in a lot of people's brains. It has to be made smaller, more personal.

Covid killed over a million Americans and still half the population thinks the vaccine was worse than the disease.

>This is literally going to kill millions.

You could be right, but I think the more likely outcome is a 'Ministry for the Future' scenario where India or China just decide to unilaterally implement geoengineering and dare the rest of the world to stop them.

There is a tiny problem with that hypothesis - there are I think at most 3 potentially viable climate reversal options - DAC, sun shield and aerosol injection in the atmosphere. All 3 options are likely cost through the nose and will require sums and efforts on a global scale. Any single country attempting them on its own, would require to set aside double digit amounts of its GDP for decades, effectively crippling itself economically, while the world passes them by. And all option would require decades, if not centuries of constant work because we don't have any meaningful net negative DAC tech, we don't have any sun shield expertise outside of the JWST and a few small science experiments, and we don't have the required planes to seed atmosphere and neither they are net negative yet. By we I mean both whole globe or any single country.

Game of chicken. Wait as long as you can because as it starts to get worse for everyone, maybe more and more countries will join in on the efforts.

I don't know if any country has the industrial base to do it yourself, as you say, but if any does, it's almost certainly China just due to manufacturing output and expertise alone. They're, what, 30-35% of the world's output? Set aside 30% of that and they can still feed a lot of exports to other countries - more than anyone else - to bring in money. And nobody else has anything close to the leading-edge hands-on know-how to build all the stuff that would be required. As you mention, there's a lot nobody has yet. So the country best at building cutting-edge hardware is gonna have the head start.

If you're a western pessimist, that whole mega-project could easily unlock even more manufacturing, materials science, etc, progress that could be applied to the rest of their output too, furthering the gap between them and everyone else. (But I guess if they did single-handedly save however many billion people from displacement, and the majority of developed countries from massive crisis/invasion/etc, that's probably the least of our worries!)

Gotta solve the Snowdrift Dilemma[0]

[0]: https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/about/snowdrift-dilemma

> Set aside 30% of that

It looks like we are in agreement about rough requirements, but estimate consequences differently. That's precisely what I was talking about - even for China powerhouse it would require 30% of GDP (example number, but it's good enough). My point was that 30% of GDP is an incredibly, astonishingly expensive amount of money to be diverged to a completely new activity.

Just to illustrate - NATO countries are currently haggling about spending even 3% on a military out of all things, and military spending is famously popular in most of the countries among people of power, due to all the corruption and jobs and factories and manufacturing and prestige etc. Poland ramping up spending to 4-5% is seen as extremely overspending (it's rational for survival reasons, but economy may not bear that long term). 30% spending on a thing not benefiting rich class in short to mid term is anathema. Not even grandpa Xi with his totalitarian power would manage that.

Also let's not forget that grandpa Xi has this tiny little victorious invasion of the independent Taiwan planned, likely done in a double push together with his puppet Kim against Korea, and simultaneously conducting a total blockade of the South China Sea for a many years. China may even manage that, but that won't be profitable in the slightest, and during the war all that economy engine will stall due to disrupted shipping and sanctions. They just won't have those 30% of GDP to spend on a side.

I've seen estimates of the cost of sulfide injection to be about 2-3B / yr / 1C.

That's not outside of the capability of a country like India, much less China

I saw those too. They look wildly optimistic, on top of being based on a wildly optimistic efficiency of the aerosols themselves, compounding the issue. But even assuming that - I read that multiple tens of megatons of aerosols need to be dispersed each year, on a regular basis. That alone doesn't look like a 2-3 measly billion job. Just a small fleet of 10 old narrowbody jets would cost at least 1 billion per year to operate. And someone need to prepare all that reagents, ship them, construct machinery etc. Then there is a problem that GH gas emissions are constantly rising and old gasses are not removed, so the heating accelerates. What requires 10-20Mt of aerosols today, will require more in a decade, then even even more and more. And as soon as injection stop, we are back to square 1 and heating will resume even harder.

Now that I think about - this is actually a motivation for China to do all that expenses. Establish themselves as a monopoly caretaker of the program, wait out until alternative programs will ramp down due to lowering interest, and then start blackmailing the world to conform to their demands or else they will stop injecting sulfur. That would be an incredible power play :) .

'Termination shock' will be a very real threat, and lets not pretend that injecting sulfides into the atmosphere is going to improve air quality or help the ozone layer. Best option is to rapidly cut emissions, but I think we can already see that we're not going to chose the best option here. Hopefully SAI can give us the time we need to decarbonize, but I'm sick that we're gonna have to geoengineer at all.

Yeah, that too is a huge concern for me. But we do need to start at least something, anything and not a day to soon. The oven is heating up and fiddling with temp regulator between III or II or I won't matter one bit in the end, the oven will heat up to 250 degrees eventually, unless we either stop electricity or actively externally cool it somehow.

Indias per capita income is ~$2700.

Last estimates I've seen for the cost of stratospheric sulfide injection was ~ 2-3B/yr.

That's not nothing, but it's definitely something India could afford to do unilaterally, not to mention China

I'm very concerned personally, but I find it easy to inhabit many minds on this topic...

Firstly, most people just don't see the impacts of climate change that dramatically in their lives so it's easy not to care.

They'll notice slightly warmer summers, but it's not that bad. Food is a bit more expensive too, but that's more to do with global oil supplies and geopolitical conflict than crop failure.

Meanwhile (here in Europe) energy prices are crippling us and businesses. And over the last few years we've been constantly reminded just how vulnerable we are because we don't have enough domestic oil and gas production to cover domestic demand.

Additionally, you have countries like the UK and Germany who (in my view) are massive global PR damage for green energy policies by showing the world just how economically harmful and expensive going all in on renewals is.

Personally I project out and see we're screwed if we don't make a change yesterday, but I also know the UK investing more in green energy will do little more than just make us all poorer. Ultimately climate change is a global problem and we need global solutions. Even if the UK cut it's emissions to 0 that would represent less than a 1% of total global emissions... What's the point?

Okay, so then I try to think about what those global solutions are... Maybe we can collectivise with other countries and assert pressure on others to pollute less with us?

Okay great, but realistically this will kill millions of people... Energy is what keeps the global economy going and increasing energy costs in developing countries will mean cutting them off from the energy they need to survive.

Additionally, this will push up prices of essentials in the West. Maybe people in the West won't die, but for those already struggling to get by, their lives will get far harder...

Okay, so what's the alternatives? Would it be better to tolerate a little more heat? Maybe we can do some geo-engineering to hold down global temperatures a bit instead?

Ultimately it seems to me there are no good answers here aside from a slow transition which ultimately will be forced on us by the fact that the supply of fossil fuels is limited.

Fossil fuels are like a debt which we take out and enjoy the benefits of, then hand down to the next generation to pay back. All we can really do is decide who pays the price.

Do we suffer greatly now for the good of future generations? Or do we hope that future generations will find a technological solution?

As a wealthy European my position would be to take the cost now but I suspect if I were struggling to get by my position on this would be very different.

These are the reasons I can think of:

- The problem dimension is hard to visualize for most people. Similar to space distances are hard to understand.

- There's nothing an individual can do about it other than trusting their local institutions and voting. Recycling, being a rational consumer, choosing greener options have negligible impact and it's main benefit is making people feel good.

- The consequences are slow to materialize. Sure, it's a bit hotter or more rainy in some places. It'll take a few more of these for population as a whole to feel inclined to become more involved in the matter. Which might be too late.

Either way, not much to do about it.

The term 'Hyperobject' summarized it perfectly. Essentially the problem operates at such a large scale and requires such a level of systemic thinking that it becomes the scope of most people. Not because they are stupid but simply because just a side effect of it being such a large subject.

Also the multi-decade latency means it move slow enough that many can ignore it but it move quick enough that unaddressed it causes major issues.

Worrying news, but honestly not surprising anymore. What's interesting is that El Niño hasn't even peaked yet, if it gets as strong as they're predicting 2027 is gonna be even hotter.

Also kinda depressing to realize that no matter how much one person does, it won't make a dent globally. And what really stings is that even when decisions get made they're either too late or half-assed. Guess all we can do is hope we don't live to see things get really bad...

My understanding is that 2027 is when all the energy stored in the ocean will ultimately be released in the form of massive storms. IDK if it'll be hotter or not, but it's predicted to be pretty insane, particularly throughout the southern US.

An excellent reminder Jancovici makes in his climate presentations, is that the difference between 1950 climate and the last Ice Age is only 4 to 5°C. Obviously, 8 billion humans wouldn't be able to live in the last Ice Age.

A more indirect analogy is body temperature : having your body temperature 2°C above normal is a pretty bad fever; at 4°C, your life is in immediate danger; anything over that you're seriously harmed or dead.

The good news for gulf coast residents is El Nino wind shear will do a lot to disrupt hurricane formation this year.

The bad news is that if it's hot again next year, La Nina will actually help hurricanes form.

Please disperse, there's nothing to see here!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuAKnbIr6TE

Thank God we have a new technology that is aggressively using water, power, and making the world increasingly hotter.

I know. Banning internal combustion engines is a good first step.

Seriously. People fuss over LLM energy consumption, but I did the math on my rig, and if I were to use my machine at full tilt for all of my waking hours, I would use roughly 1/10th the amount of energy the average American uses driving.

By the way, I highly recommend the Priority 600 :-)

I think OP is talking about datacenters which likely use a little more power than your home rig.

Extrapolate

And I use SOTA models that are hosted on hardware I don't have access to a handful of times a month at this point, and most of the people I talk to regarding LLM usage are either in the same boat, or are asking about hosting things themselves. The diminishing returns for using the best of the best models just aren't worth it for most things anymore.

I will kill myself the day I can no longer drive an internal combustion engine.

I don't really see any purpose if we have to be confined to computer enabled cars with built in surveillance with no resemblance of quality, control or freedom.

You don't drive EVs. They will drive for you through FSD.

For the sake of your mental health, please ride an e-bike.

I have said multiple times that we should ban combustion engines in the energy grid. Sadly there isn't a single party that support such action here in Sweden, and the largest supporter of thermal power plants are the green party who see it as essential to enable renewable energy (is written as such in their party platform, website, and argued in public debates).

It would however be a really good first step to make the energy discussion a bit more honest. We don't need combustion engines in order to generate energy.

It is not aggressively using water. That figure was a lie produced by a likely CCP spy, and later retracted ("oops!"). [1]

[1] https://x.com/tbpn/status/1990950527128252856

Irrelevant.

https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-co...

A spy overstating water usage by 1,000x to influence opinion is not relevant to a discussion on the very thing they overstated and started the debate on? How do you figure that?

Of all of the side effects, the top-down worst problem will be the effects on phytoplanktons, and how that will affect the marine, and thus terrestrial, food chain.

I always will think of how everyone laughed at Bernie Sanders' reply in ~2016 to "What is the greatest threat to national security" and he replied "Climate change".

It's going to get ugly when large swaths of the human population struggles to get food & clean water.

Last night I had insomnia due to stress, and I was compulsively scrolling social media. The comments section of most videos just made me realize how actually fucked we are.

It might just be a context thing and people are on average smarter than what the comment section makes out but yeah, wasn't filling me with confidence what I saw.

Quitting social media is probably one of the best things you could do to bring stress levels back to normal!

It was mostly Youtube but yes, it's social media, I just couldn't imagine quitting YT!

China needs to reduce emissions badly. They should have started 15 years ago.

Next year will be a new record

Lets hope that those touting a "reversion to the mean" are right.

they are not

This seems to be directly linked to the lowered maritime shipping emissions, especially sulphur aerosols. Perhaps we should stop doing ad-hoc interventions until we can figure out a good, global path to tackle this challenge.

ps. please don't downvote this. I'm NOT a climate change denialist. Aerosol removal is linked to the recent temperature spike. Don't mix CO2 with aerosols. We need to get rid of CO2.

Peer-reviewed article covering the topic: https://acp.copernicus.org/articles/24/13681/2024/ (best resource)

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2206885119 (covering reduced cloud coverage after the emissions being lowered)

A few degrees closer to "boiling the ocean"

The things that will work, but can't be done: Walk/bike instead of vehicles, no crypto and AI (tremendous hype and speculators and grifters), Lower population (religions are opposed to it), degrowth (nobody wants to live a relatively substandard life, all the stuff is for status signaling), fly less, don't eat as much beef, etc. Degrowth is the best way, but nobody can walk entire population down that path. It has to be everyone or no one will do it because its all comparison based living.

What are possible?

1) Plug-in solar and batteries: The next population boom is in Africa. Africa probably has the advantage of no legacy grid with fossil fuel interests and power plants. They can leap frog and go entirely offgrid or mini community level grids.

2) Vertical solar: Solar deployments at scale today use the legacy grid, production far away and transmission lines to bring power to cities. Solar is dirt cheap, the biggest costs now are land and transmission lines. Instead, we can do vertical solar in cities. Cover every surface. Adds ~4 hours of production every day. We already know rooftop solar works, with vertical, maybe cities can become self-sufficient.

3) EVs for energy storage. 1.8 billion vehicles in the world, if they all become EVs, they are the biggest energy storage without having to build a separate energy storage layer saving trillions of dollars. The first step is to stop buying ICE cars. It will take 20 years for the entire fleet to be electric.

Solar is growing now, but curtailment is at 20%. Storage is the bottleneck. Solar will soon hit a wall, we can't grow solar because it becomes financially unviable to add more production, curtailment will increase and prices will go a lot more negative (500 million times/year in the US).

People are going to buy cars anyway, we can't convince anyone to walk/bike, just have them buy EVs instead. This creates the storage to continue to grow solar.

Unfortunately, nothing is really going to happen to mitigate this until it starts fucking up things (literal things, property, etc) for the richest people. Then, miraculously, all of our scientific focuses will be realigned to find solutions.

I often think of how much of government lethargy to climate change is because of miserable marketing like Greta thunburg yelling at a bunch of old EU bureaucrats or teenagers throwing paint at art or glueing themselves to highways.

There was too few “there are green technologies superior to the carbon based ones” (heat pumps got really good).

Well, there are two problem spaces - innovating ways to reduce emissions AND inventing new ways to help people cope with rising temperatures - and I hear very little about the second one despite the immediate humanitarian need for it

That sounds bad.

okay, now we are boiling the ocean. literally.

P.S. for pedantic folk: yeah, it's far from the actual boiling threshold of ~100°C, but to boil the humanity, you don't even have to go 80-90% of the way there

https://world.hey.com/dhh/three-sacred-cows-that-must-die-so...

> Behind this climate hysteria is an even deeper delusion, though: that degrowth will deliver us all from the sins of modernity. That energy use in and of itself is suspect. That salvation will be delivered through abstinence. It's all nonsense.

Maybe slightly off-topic, but here a prominent figure in SV who now also got into Linux is mocking those concerned about climate change.

Humanity has only a few weeks left. Because some awful people decided to vote for Trump.

humanity is quite literally cooking.

it was a nice run while it lasted, but seems humanity is nearing its end as the world/nature is trying to purge humanity to save itself.

OMG, that's like 200 years of 4.5bn?

to be fair.. almost all of human civilization happened over the last ~10k years, the Holocene, during which the climate was unusually stable.

Its reasonable to question whether our agriculture at scale is adaptable to such sudden climate change.

it's not just reasonable to question, it's all but obvious and anyone who comes up with a retort like "what about millions/billions of years before civilization" is being, at best, insincere

Cons: So long polar bears [and decent weather]

Pros: my next iPhone will travel faster from China to Europe.

#alwaysLookAtTheBrightSideOfLife

The biggest lie we're being told in the west is that we have a hand in climate change. China produces 60% of global Co2. When you look at the graph, Europe isn't even visible.

If we truly cared about climate change we would stop buying from China. But we all know this won't ever happen because we don't really care enough. It's just virtue signaling.

Buy an AC you're not saving the planet by sweating your ass off.

Per capita emissions are way higher in the USA. It’d make a much bigger dent if Americans changed their ways than citizens of developing nations.

> The biggest lie we're being told in the west is that we have a hand in climate change.

If you look at total historic emissions to date, the US is responsible for 25% of all of them, and the EU is close behind at 22%. China is at 13%. And if you look at historic emissions per person, then each American has produced ~8x as much as the average Chinese person.

https://ourworldindata.org/contributed-most-global-co2

Yes, the west has played the dominant role in GHG emissions. I don't blame China for now, quite recently, increasing their GHG emissions as they try to get to standards of living we've had for many decades. As we led the way into the industrial revolution and high GHG emissions, we should also lead the way back out. And yet US emissions per capita are still about 50% higher than Chinese!

Also, to be more holistic in evaluating things through this icky nationalist lens, China has been a globally significant contributor to alternate fuels including solar and micro-hydro, plus the transition to EVs notably including EV buses (now becoming globally popular) and high speed rail.

96.6% of new energy capacity in the US came from green sources from 2024 to 2026 (nuclear, batteries, wind, hydro, solar). In China, in that time period, they built 52 brand new coal plants.

Sure. But again, compare our current GHG emissions per capita.

Or set aside new electrical energy capacity, and instead look at other GHG sources: automobiles, agriculture, concrete. Are we doing well there? Mostly, no, not great, and we should be much further along in decarbonizing than we are.

For the most part, the US has not taken ACC seriously.

US emissions has declined in real terms since 2000, and has plummeted rapidly on a per capita basis.

So, yeah, all of those sources have declined in emissions. Particularly automobiles, as the US pioneered EV development.

> US emissions has declined in real terms since 2000, and has plummeted rapidly on a per capita basis.

And yet we still have some of the highest per capita emissions in the world. Nearly tied with Russia for "highest per capita emissions of major economies", see [1].

Since the IPCC was formed in 1988 and ACC widely recognized as a problem, US per capita GHG co2-equivalent emissions have dropped from 25.2 t/capita/year to 17.5, for a cumulative decrease of 30% [2]. This is a rate of -0.95%/year, which is not what I would call "rapid".

And dropping to only 70% of a really high mark still leaves us at a really high mark. But really, I just don't understand your argument.

Are you saying that a 30% drop over 40 years is a lot, when we should have been aiming for dropping by 70-100% in that time frame?

Are you saying that our emissions dropped significantly, even though we all know there was major political obstruction to plans to cut fossil fuel use?

Are you saying that what we've done is enough, even though the US is still one of the highest emitters per capita and the Earth is on track to greatly overshoot the +1.5C goal? Current best estimate is +2.7C by 2100.

I can't make the general direction of your argument make sense. Seems like you're overplaying what we've done and downplaying how far there is left to go.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_greenhous...

[2] https://ourworldindata.org/profile/co2/united-states

>has played

There you have it. My comment was about the current post-industrial west. You are making a disingenuous attempt at shifting blame onto the west. The main problem countries today are China and India.

China is below the US and Russia per capita. You can't compare a country with 1.4 billion people to the US.

He just gave you the data and you refused to read it even though it talks about the current state of things (besides past emissions).

Per capita, India is on place 124/207.

> You are making a disingenuous attempt at shifting blame onto the west.

What makes this disingenuous?

I thought I was pretty clear and honest about my belief that the West is to blame for a huge portion of the warming so far -- and this is backed by data -- and I was clear and honest that I think we are not meeting our responsibility today to lead the way out of GHG emissions. And even today, we USians still have a rather higher GHG emissions per capita than the Chinese do.

(India is barely even in the picture, and their emissions per capita today are 1/6 of the US')

So, yes: this still represents a problem with the *current* west. We should be rather further along in decarbonizing, but we are dragging our feet, held up by the fact that a lot of folks don't want to acknowledge that ACC is a problem.

What makes it disingenuous is you're using past data to make statements about the current situation. Of course the West / US produced the most Co2 overall, because it's been through industrialization. What matters now is the current net contributors to global Co2, and that is about 60% China and at least 10% India.

This is because we outsource our Co2 to those countries through manufacturing. My main point still is that WE don't make a difference. Saving electricity in Europe changes nothing, not does buying an EV. If we want to make a change we need to stop buying Chinese manufactured products.

go to shop, notice that much food has been flown in from the four corners of the earth just to satisfy you.

Go home, look at all the objects in your house, do the same thing. Then tell you that this has nothing to do with you.

Food transportation is a very low percentage of the food's footprint, what you eat is more important, but you dont want to hink about it

who wants to eat meat rarely? Some people eat it every meal.

The West just outsources pollution to China.

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