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Comment by lbriner | Hacker News Reader

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!

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>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)

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.

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

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 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.

> 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.

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).

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 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).

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.

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.

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.

> "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.

If the climate effects don’t get you, the political fallout of a million climate refugees showing up at your borders will.

Sea water temperature here in Valencia was something crazy this year. I do not remember anything like this before.

“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.

reminds me of https://xkcd.com/1379/

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