Climate change is strengthening El Niño, coral records suggest
science.org
science.org
So there are vast areas of Coral that used to be fantastic in 2014 and which is dead since the 2015-16 season. It takes many decades to grow back if it ever does. And now we're about to have another.
Historically, something like 3.5 percent of the population need to be really engaged to make change happen, and the US isn't there right now, because we're all on our computers. The election coming up is an important one, so if you want to do something, start door knocking, become an election judge, sign up to be an observer at the polls, donate money. Indivisible is doing a lot of great, local, on-the-ground stuff, join your local chapter.
If I drive my car around today I contribute an infinitesimally small amount to the climate change problem while enjoying tremendous utility.
- your home insurance is more expensive b/c fire/hurricane/etc risk is worse in your state
- and you probably don't have flood insurance but the risks there are worse too
- climate change does have healthcare impacts, including expanded geographic range of a bunch of vector-borne illnesses, as well as acute issues during heat events. Even if you're not directly one of these patients, your health insurance costs will increase in part due to these risks.
- replacing key infrastructure which is damaged by extreme weather is expensive
- during extreme weather events, your ability to earn may be disrupted
- and every business you spend at also has increased costs due to the same factors, which they pass on to you
It turns out that multiple generations of emitting without paying attention to the externalities has created literal costs that we _all_ now bear, and these costs will continue to increase.
For climate change, I can totally understand how a household struggling to feed their kids will reject messaging of the form „oh and btw you also need to stop driving your car and heat your home lest the planet dies“. Of course they will revolt against that.
To me, fundamentally, the west MUST solve the inequality crisis first before we can ever hope of solving any of the other problems. People need slack to care about the environment, their neighbors, peace, etc.
And the other aspect of it is fairness - people rightfully look at the top, say „well the billionaires are jetting all around the globe and no one gives a fuck, why should I cut my holidays?“
We need to fix inequality first, and I project that most other issues we have today will magically resolve themselves.
It's not like these are hard choices. Either you view the differences as stark and obvious, or you think that it's all the same (and I'm never going to persuade you otherwise). I don't think I garnered even a single vote, and quite a few expressed aggravation.
Is your experience different?
I will not be surprised if we get a lot of snow this winter.
/edit. The meaning is, as the earth gets hotter, there will be winners, until it gets too hot for them too. Eventually it is too hot for all areas. But for a time, northern climates will be nice. Siberia could become a vast farm land, at same time there are no humans left at the equator. But that wont last either.
Maybe something good will come out of it, even dumbest magas et al realizing this ain't right, but I am no longer having any hope for the dumber part of the spectrum of mankind, they seem to be only reachable and manageable via emotions on which you can't build anything long term stable.
Nothing life overall can't handle, it handled much worse situations (till sun scorches it all to the cinder in a +-billion year). Our current civilization, or mankind in general are much more finicky though.
I grew up with an anxious mother and looking back on it what "mattered" to her (admittedly I don't think she can help it at all) is the feeling of anxiety itself. In other words whatever is happening she'll feel anxious about that. The "event" would just be an excuse to feel the way she was anyway going to feel.
You would think that a break for anxiety - a moment of peace and calm - would be welcome - but it's almost a crime. I've noticed this with other anxious people as well that they often don't want to not feel anxious because that feeling is somehow problematic. I think I used to be like that too.
Why am I sharing this? I think your post is such an honest take on something. You feel good about something you should absolutely feel good about (nice weather) but the zeitgeist is that you should feel anxious about it.
This squares away with something I noticed - separately from the science and mitigation, some people are only able to speak about climate in tones of anxiety - worst case predictions will definitely come through, everyone else is criminally stupid and will cause us to die, etc - and they are allergic to any other time of speaking about the issue. So for example any suggestion that there might be a milder path or that the estimates are a range etc is not met with relief but with vitriol.
I apologize again for using your post as a prompt to put this in words - but what I read in your words is the pressure to feel anxious about something that you just aren't anxious about (hi from Vermont btw same great weather here) and I think this "pressure to feel anxious/guilty" is a byproduct of those who have grabbed on to climate as an "event" that justifies their own anxious feelings. Again that's separate from what's actually going on - I am commenting on anxiety not climate.
When I was younger, I learned that science was something pure. But as I've grown older, it seems like science is really about how it's used—and who gets to use it.
https://publish.uwo.ca/~jbell/univ.pdf
Otoh I think Grothendieck's point would be stronger today if his tribe of scientists are expanded or even replaced by "programmers"
Fossil fuelled Data Centers might soon surpass shipping as CO2 producer, given that shipping might even be peaking
Hackerism as the New Universal Church? Then you can hope to go to a (emotionally) warm place on Sunday, everyday
Where the categorical imperative would be: if people want it, build it..
Furthermore, I disagree with the radical ecological claims in the link. Humans might be developing technology that ends up destroying the public commons we call nature. However, I firmly believe there must be a better path to coexistence.
Climate science is pretty close to a "pure" hard science. What's not pure are the sloppy geopolitical and socio-economic predictions built on top of it.
when are we going to acknowledge this catastrophe that we are barreling towards?
i can only hope that things start improving. between this and government im gonna lose it
Not to be a total downer, but probably never unless all the Republicans in the US suddenly disappear? Like, remember who the "we" is in your question. Remember what policies they stand for and what methods they employ.
China seems to be winning now. And lead in solar, and robots.
>And lead in solar, and robots.
And new coal, don't forget about that.
For the last full year where we have data (2025), China made slightly less electricity from coal than the one before. Unlike Trump, China's authoritarian leadership seem to have their eye on the ball, China is on Earth so if we trash Earth's climate that's China's climate too. But also, more so than the gas which powers so much of Europe and America's electricity generators, coal is obviously poison, even the unburned coal looks like a movie prop to signify "Mysterious evil"
The toxic waste from a gas power plant is a transparent gas that readily mixes with the atmosphere. Does it cause problems? Yes. But compared to "And here's a mountain of radioactive and highly toxic coal ash that's produced by our coal power plant" it's rather subtle.
In all but some very extreme cases this is unaffordable because the fossil fuel generator is expensive to build and yet is increasingly stranded destroying any further value.
The U.S. reduced it by 37%, while increasing output by ... 12%.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-mix?tab=line&...
Also talking into considering the insane wealth disparity and the current rate of change, "coal" is just ragebait.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-mix?tab=line&...
Rather than try to guess from our high level data about China I'm going to explain more generally how this works.
Generators always have what's called a "Capacity factor" which tells us how much power is actually produced relative to the naive "nameplate capacity" the specified maximum power output of that generator.
For a nuclear power station maybe you run for 48 days straight at 100% output and then you spend 2 days shutting down, refuelling and spinning it back up, so that's 96% capacity factor. That's very high, only need a few maintenance problems and you would not hit those numbers, real world nukes maybe trend to 90%
Coal needs more maintenance downtime but historically you might expect 80% factor, say you have 1000 400MW coal power stations, that's theoretically 400GW of power but because of 80% capacity factor figure you've got more like 320GW
Renewables are free, so increasingly it makes no sense to run a fuel consuming generator when there's free electricity available. However both PV and wind are intermittent to some degree, it's not sunny at night and sometimes it's just not windy.
So you might build 500 more of those 400MW power stations, at your 80% capacity factor that's 160GW of new electricity supply for a total of 480GW. But actually your plan is to run them just as hard but less often, for 50% capacity factor across the entire fleet, an average of 200 + 100 = 300GW. Over a year your total output from coal generation is down, but your fleet of coal power stations grew enormously, you just don't run them as often.
At midnight with dead calm, those power stations are running pretty hard, belching out far more CO2 than in the past. But on a breezy but clear summer afternoon most of them are idle because there's free electricity from every solar and wind farm. So it averages out as less coal, yet there are more coal power stations, at least for a time.
Cheap storage starts to eat into this. A coal station which runs for an average of 18 hours per day is fine (75% capacity factor), one which runs for six hours per day (25% factor) is an economic encumbrance, six hours per week (<4%) is a reason to mothball the oldest or worst stations and give the others more work.
Guess who is the main target of a purge in the US now.
Many of the people still rejecting climate change are scientists and engineers whose egos make them obligate contrarians.
US population voted trump, lets not forget that. We (rest of the world, >95% of mankind) will never forget that, and the fact that he still has >5% support tells everybody all they need to know about current US and what to expect from it in future. All that says more than any wishful thinking that feels good and fuzzy warm inside.
I'm appalled that there still seems to be the need to find _evidence_ for this.
Probably the last person who was able to effect big positive change was Nixon.
And yet, every day, I see us getting removed further and further away from it.
The “problem” is there will always be independent upcoming nations like china and India that don’t really care to make sacrifices for collective goals. Their people are finally experiencing materially better lives and that comes w energy consumption.
This will ultimately be solved by markets and technology. People 100y ago were concerned about horse crap flooding the streets and what solved that wasn’t some agreement to limit horses but the invention of the automobile. Same will happen here and it’s already beginning to happen
It certainly is reduced per-production. China has double the carbon emission intensity of production that the USA has for example.
One can see the climate crisis like that. Only global accords work, otherwise self-limiting CO2 is mostly sacrificing one's economy while others do better. USA will block all international climate accords. Because the president and half of politicians acts like climate change is not real. Because a whole party thinks that. Because voters think that. Because the media tells them that. Because the media treats fossil company propaganda like science. Because it's so cheap for a handful of companies to corrupt media or politics.
What is the epistemology of the majority of voters... scandals, conspiracy theories, UFO:s. What shows on TV or on your feeds. I assume it's child's play for some non-western actor to cause constant infighting in the west, causing billions in economic losses or destruction of alliances. For whole planetary level issues, who's the opponent, working in the shadows? Maybe, after all, the aliens are already here...
Unfortunately we as people cannot see our older ones so future planning is not so easy…
Guns and ammo was the conclusion how to prepare for the future - in the book “10 Billion” by Stephen Emmott.
If I pour some water in a bucket and come back to find it's all leaked out, and do this every day for all of human history and always get the same result, I don't conclude the water wouldn't leak if it just tried a little harder.
There's a hole in the bucket.
That doesn't mean it's possible for every problem. There's always a coordination cost. The larger your per-person cost times the number of people you need, the more unlikely the coordinated action is to happen. Spontaneous coordination is an oxymoron and improbable by definition. It's a situation where the system doesn't do what's energetically favored and instead does something else that isn't.
Ascribing agency to systems is a human bias. Ascribing it to groups of agents is both human nature and the fallacy of composition. Blaming individuals instead of looking at the system and the context is both human nature and the fundamental attribution error. This is one of many places where the bucket leaks.
Currently some groups with low coordination costs (and so high leverage) are coordinating to increase coordination costs for the groups that oppose them, using tactics that are independently high-leverage, multiplying their effect so much that they can make the opposition's costs effectively unbounded. Human nature makes the opposition wilfully, aggressively deny this and insist their costs are low and people are just bad and lazy. (Somehow, everybody being bad and lazy all at once does not reflect on human nature.)
The argument about coordination costs is more or less uncontroversial when projected into any other subject. It's only controversial here because of human nature. It's another leak.
Your opposition's agency is concentrated and yours is dilute. Human nature tilts the playing field, diluting yours and concentrating theirs. Accept this and adjust your strategy, or lose.
But it seems you actually agree with my initial statement? Or what are you arguing against? Because in my mind, altering our social and political systems is the only way to adjust our strategy.
Ugh, this is like my catchphrase now, but: "If everybody just" is a description of a problem, not a solution. Specifically a problem that exists because they haven't justed and will never just, no matter what could happen if they just.
Coordination metaproblems where coordination problems that exist cannot be solved because of human nature are a consequence of human nature interacting with the laws of nature.
My argument is that we don't have that capacity. The system that we have is what we have because it's what has self-assembled and would self-assemble every time if we ran it again.
I may be wrong, but that's what I'm claiming.
If we want a system different than what self-assembles, we should first admit what self-assembles, and admit it's not because of individuals not doing their part or whatever. The system is the way it is because the natural laws it follows lead it to that state. This is where the whole idea of coordination as a simple answer fails.
People won't spontaneously all accept an unappealing, morally unpleasant, complicated explanation of why things aren't better when a simple, pleasant, satisfying, even righteous explanation is available and fits their preexisting worldview.
I am tired of the moralizing arguments[0] from people sabotaging their own causes, blaming people who are doing something that might work instead of sabotaging harder. If I misunderstood and that's not you, I'm sorry.
I should have been less snippy at the top either way.
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But different societies have developed different systems over the course of human history, no? You're probably looking at the "system" from a different perspective than I do, so I'd appreciate if you could describe this in more detail!
> My argument is that we don't have that capacity.
If humans don't have the capacity for long term collective action against individual interests, there is literally no point in trying any other system.
> If we want a system different than what self-assembles, we should first admit what self-assembles, and admit it's not because of individuals not doing their part or whatever. The system is the way it is because the natural laws it follows lead it to that state.
I really think you're reading positions into my initial comment that I've never stated, because this seems tangential to my thesis.
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Edit: just saw the part starting at "I am tired of the moralizing arguments", not sure if I overlooked it or you edited. Either way I get your frustrations and agree that simplistic answers don't help. My initial comment was not meant as "it would be so simple if everyone just did X", but as a rebuttal to the idea that humans are incapable of long term collective action against individual interests. If humans fundamentally don't have the ability there'd be no point in trying, but I believe that we do have the capacity and should try, just as I understand you do too.
> If I misunderstood and that's not you, I'm sorry.
> I should have been less snippy at the top either way.
No worries, and thanks. I appreciate that you've explained your thoughts further!
I can't keep writing now but I will try to organize some thoughts and come back later.
As far as I can see, greed isn't automatically the biggest determining factor in such systems. It can be, but I'd need to read convincing studies by historians to believe you on this.
(of course I'm not advocating for monarchy)
That is to say, it's not always a monarch versus their general, oftentimes peasant, populace, it's rich and powerful people against other rich and powerful people.
All these relationships were incredibly important to the power dynamics, and you don't get to redefine "greedy" as "greedy, except those who are too greedy to properly play the political game". Greedy monarchs didn't last, and the greediest non-monarch-rich were unlikely to have enough allies to become dangerous.
We should also not forget that a lot of effort has gone into decarbonising, and there's plenty of work going on in international cooperation, engineering, urban planning, education etc. whose work has already decreased the potential warming of the planet. We're still on a very bad trajectory that still needs more work, and there are moneyed organisations trying to stop the transition, but we shouldn't be so doomer to believe that nothing is happening.
I don’t dispute capitalism and democracy.
Just trying to figure out what I (as person) really need.
Every weekend travelling by plane just to experience something else?
Ordering some stuff across the globe from Temu, Aliexpress just because it is cheap(er)?
Eating e.g. tuna because it is healthy that had to be transported around the globe?
Drinking wine from South Africa because I don’t like Californian? (Blind tests by Wine Spectator magazine confirm that even a sommelier doesn’t recognize cheap from expensive ones.)
Global export-import statistics is staggering… just a few: all metals, honey, fish, vegetables from Spain, avocados from Peru, almonds from California, cheaper than local milk transported across Europe , bananas from everywhere you can imagine… supply and demand - a lot of people have a much more money.
Vessel and plane trackers show so many vehicles moving around that I wonder how whales can handle this traffic.
There is chemical and industry that is real spin doctors.
(Almost) everyone wants to have house, car, cheap everything, travel everywhere. Those who can’t afford do everything to become rich.
Wealth is good. Plundering to get more money not so much. And mankind plunders like there is no tomorrow. All the CSR, circular economy etc is nice but brainwashing and stuff for distraction so people could feel better.
I do the capitalism part, or more specifically what form of capitalism because there is a vast range between "society should work for capitalism" and "capitalism should work for society".
I'd likely argue that on the whole capitalism in it's current form isn't working for society and the trend is towards that getting worse over time.
But we should. This is a taboo topic but pretending that these consequences are either disconnected from capitalism or that capitalism is some natural law of the universe that should never be challenged is, for lack of a better word, delusional.
These consequences are inherent to capitalism because people benefiting from it demand infinite growth and nobody is incentivized to care about the environment. People who care about it get outcompeted by those who don't in ruthless pursuit of "efficiency".
We can try to regulate it to the point that people wouldn't call it capitalism anymore but the nature of a system where the only incentive is maximizing profit will always have a natural tendency to harm the environment, so it should be disputed.
We're already in an ice age (there is ice at the poles). I suspect you mean this would make Europe cooler, but do nothing to reverse the trend of increasing global mean surface (land + ocean) temperature.
Edit: For reference: https://colossal.com/direwolf/ https://colossal.com/mammoth/
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_meridional_overturnin...
Such confidence.
> This is definitely an interglacial period.
Absolutely, and therefore just as I stated, by your link, we are in an Ice Age.
(Perhaps you could read to the end of the very first sentence of your link?)
> that's not how glacial periods are defined.
What, exactly, made you think I was defining a glacial period when I spoke of "Ice Age".
If it's not clear by now, I was responding to an abuse of the term Ice age, after all ... https://youtu.be/zQuGub7yzpA?t=98
We saw during the COVID lockdowns that a few months of no cars and drastically reduced oil usage in general how much things improved for nature in general, in fact. Earth will recover very quickly once we're gone, the question is more how do we avoid the "humans gone" part because we presumably want to keep the human species going.
>>>
Arguments based on human nature are nearly always awful.
...
It's human nature to care about yourself, but it's also human nature to care about others.
Different norms develop around different aspects of our nature.
You can't then use human nature to explain why it's okay to violently enforce social norms related to property,
but an unworkable injustice to violently enforce social norms related to charity.
...
While it might be human nature to consider the wood I chop mine, and the wood you chop yours,
it's probably not human nature to consider the wood as belonging to an entirely made-up legal entity
that neither planted the trees nor cut them down.
The fact of this weird arrangement, which goes against the self-interest of every woodsman,
does seem natural to a lot of people, points to the core of the problem with appeals to human nature.
...
The human nature being appealed to is shaped by the system it's being used to defend.
The thesis: Climate change is strengthening El Niño clearly uses the word "is".
Everything else is evidence, both for and against the thesis subject to interpretation.
Here it's "Something we can see in coral records correlates with what we'd expect given the thesis"
The study doesn’t prove climate change is the culprit. But because the intensification coincides with rapid postindustrial warming and exceeds El Niño’s natural variability, the authors argue that human-driven warming is the leading explanation.
As the weight of evidence in favour of a thesis builds, so does the confidence in the thesis itself.
That being said, consensus would not necessarily settle the thing.
Even when the worldwide scientific community reaches a consensus and accepts using plain language (as in "It _is_ unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land" [1]), you still have a number of politicians begging to differ. [2]
[1] https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/chapter/summary-for-polic....
[2] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/de-pire-en-pire-sur-france-5-... (Sorry, fr-fr)
https://www.breitbart.com/environment/2019/09/20/nolte-clima...