tito

Interesting about the dual peaks. I'm still getting up to speed on El Niño, as of a few weeks ago it had not been something I dug into before.

Zeke's multi-year comparison chart (#1) ends in December, but the forecast chart does show through July 2027 all the different models. I don't see any modeling a double peak, though that NASA-GEOS-S2S-2 line peaks in February.

25 years of data, any other impacts you've seen from carbon dioxide rising? (~370 ppm in 2001 to 420 ppm this year)

Link to Frontier's biomass storage portfolio: https://frontierclimate.com/portfolio?pathway=biomass_carbon...

Well said. Generally speaking, most people I speak to about climate have a mental model for "climate change" as a dimmer switch. The planet gets a little warmer, littler warmer, littler warmer, and we get a bit more uncomfortable each time.

But this mental model loses the most important feature of the climate system.

It's not a dimmer switch. It's more like an ON / OFF switch.

We live in a stable climate today. Things are getting a little warmer. And we see some weird things. But still, even at a little warmer, we are in the same stable climate system, just a little warmer or cooler.

However, if we flip to "OFF" on a stable climate by getting a lot warmer, our climate system moves to a chaotic state unlike anything we've ever known in human history.

Frontier has contracted $700M of carbon dioxide removal credits to date.

You can find Frontier's portfolio here: https://frontierclimate.com/portfolio

And their perspectives on their process here: https://frontierclimate.com/pathway

Which post is that?

Let's say I take it that whatever post you're referencing is slimy, built on disaster capitalism, and downright bad. And your being jaded is totally understandable.

To that I remind you: "All that is necessary for evil to succeed is for good people to do nothing"

What could you do to do drive the world in a different direction? (see my other posts for projects if you want help out with our El Niño Ready dashboard)

Trees and seagrass can address the sequestration side.

You can find examples here on Frontier's site of companies that are taking biomass (plant stuff like tree waste) and sequestering it in mines or other storage deep underground.

When thinking about sucking carbon from the sky, I find it useful to separate how I think about grabbing on to carbon dioxide from how to store carbon dioxide, rather than thinking of it as one step. I find it's easy to get lost and either over or undervalue things otherwise.

Plants and trees are excellent at grabbing on, for example, and with a good process they can lead to very cheap methods to store/remove carbon dioxide for a thousand years.

Here's Frontier's whole portfolio: https://frontierclimate.com/portfolio

Marine carbon removal: 16

Biomass carbon removal & storage: 13

Direct air capture: 12

Field weathering: 8

Mineralization: 8

Indeed! Umbrellas, poofy jackets, backup batteries, we've created lots of innovations to make society more resilient when the weather gets weird.

And, at the same time, polluting the climate makes the climate system far more susceptible to flipping to a chaotic system unknown to humanity.

As Stewart Brand says, "We are as gods and might as well get good at it."

Not sure why folks downvoted you.

On every stable planet, pollution is accounted for in every transaction. Stripe is just building where the puck is going!

Strange timeline indeed but Stripe is a big backer for climate solutions and climate research, including a $2B carbon dioxide removal initiative called Frontier: https://stripe.com/climate

Stripe's climate scientist Zeke Hausfather built this dashboard: https://dashboard.theclimatebrink.com/#enso

El Niño is already underway. Stripe's climate scientist Zeke Hausfather built a dashboard here: https://dashboard.theclimatebrink.com/#enso

We're way off the charts already.

This El Niño is off the charts for any ever recorded in human history.

Stripe's climate scientist Zeke Hausfather came to AirMiners to tell us about what's next: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-Xu_H3Wo8o

In 1877, 50 million people starved to death from El Niño. The charts are looking far worse in 2026 (thankfully our supply chains and infrastructure are much better today)

We can't stop the storms but we can work to avert the impacts and save lives.

We're building tools at: https://elninoready.earth

One thing we need help with is how to provide detailed recommendations per city/address to people based on historical El Niños. What are local emergency notification services, where can you get free sandbags, should you expect floods, droughts, tornadoes? What backup services are there if 911 goes down? (If you have ideas, here's our github: https://github.com/titojankowski/elninoready)

Our first step is bringing together people at New York Climate Week so that's what's up on the site right now.

AMA

Hmm. If being "politically permissible" has shifted, it's probably away from taking action at all.

What's shifted in the other direction is that it's getting too damn hot here and some people are starting to notice.

Is anyone here good at building lists of contacts? We're sending out a "Q&A about El Niño" to everyone organizing events at New York Climate Week, with the goal of having them spent 2 minutes talking about El Niño at their event.

We have a partial list...could use some help!

For anyone here looking to "do something" about global warming...One thing we're working on is how to avert the worst impacts of the 2026 El Niño, and use that as a way to break open a new conversation about the warming planet and what we can do about it.

One thing we need help with today is finding any other events at New York Climate Week that are about El Niño to feature on our site: https://elninoready.earth/

For anyone here looking to "do something" about global warming...One thing we're working on is how to avert the worst impacts of El Niño, and use that as a way to break open a new conversation about the warming planet.

One thing we need help with today is finding any other events at New York Climate Week that are about El Niño to feature on our site: https://elninoready.earth/

I've decided that I'm going to reverse climate change and everyone is welcome to come with me to figure it out.

Thanks for what you do! Here's a recent post on my newsletter about recognizing those who do the work: https://tito.co/posts/why-dont-i-complain-about-carbon-dioxi...

Another dimension to add is how global warming is uniquely heating up at the 4,500 to 5,500 m elevation mark, coincidentally right where glaciers are

(tldr properties of how our atmosphere works and the pollution we put in it ends up being a laser beam at the same height as glaciers form)

Paper here: eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/id/eprint/235707/1/NATREVEARTHENVIRON-24-558_-_Pepin_final.pdf

10.1038/s43017-025-00740-4

Pepin, N. et al. (2025). "Elevation-dependent climate change in mountain environments." Nature Reviews Earth & Environment 6(12), 772-788.

For those of you with a one track mind like me: each CO2 heat pump uses <10 pounds of CO2, roughly the carbon dioxide emissions from driving 10 miles.

So no, switching everyone to a CO2 heat pump will not magically store all our emissions.

Makes sense. The challenge I have is that a lot of people on the planet think the same things. So it's more than just some person spouting weird things off a weird website. The entire output of our civilization right now is higher and higher CO2 levels. I appreciate the chance to talk it out. I supposed multiple downvotes is what leads to something being marked "dead".

HN's community moderation tools seem to fail at times, so I'm responding to ssearyus's comment that is marked [dead]:

ssearyus: At the risk of being immediately downvoted, let me point out that a 250ppm CO2 level is borderline disastrous for plant life -- at 180ppm, plants would starve globally. The increased CO2 levels in recent years (slightly added to by human activities) is immensely helpful for drought-resistance, as stomata do not then need to open as much to get sufficient CO2 with the result that they transpire less water. The above, and the fact the by far the most important GHG in the atmosphere is water vapor (CO2 is comparatively a rounding error) should give reasonable people pause for thought.

My response: I think there's something you're trying to say, but it doesn't come through clearly in these many points.

- 250ppm is not disastrous for plant life. That's around preindustrial levels of CO2 (280ppm) and plants did just fine

- What do you mean by "starve" here regarding 180ppm?

- And why are you talking about 250ppm and 180ppm specifically? No one is talking about 250ppm or 180ppm as targets (or maybe you are?)

- Water vapor is indeed a greenhouse gas, and contributes to warming. But it's best thought as an accelerant. Warmer temperatures bring more water vapor bring higher temperatures, bring more water vapor etc etc. The rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is so important because it trigger in many ways a feedback loop, one of which is rise in water vapor as a greenhouse gas. The feedback loop caused by temperature/water vapor is one of the reasons we need to be very careful with our human-made emissions.

- "CO2 is comparatively a rounding error": Whether by mass or volume, CO2 is not a rounding error by comparison to water vapor. There's roughly 4 to 6 times the amount of water vapor as CO2. I wouldn't call 25% a rounding error. Maybe there's something I missed here.

- And when you say water vapor is "by far the most important GHG in the atmosphere", does that mean you're working on lowering water vapor levels in the atmosphere? Or what are you working on regarding solving for this? Maybe something with airplane cloud formation trapping heat?

Want to do something about this?

El Niño this year is going to be especially crazy, worst in human history by a large margin looks like. I'm putting together El Niño Climate Week to work on averting the worst impacts. It's a good opportunity to move the conversation forward about how our climate is changing very quickly.

https://elninoclimateweek.com

My projects tend to be pretty good schelling points for people that like to take action, in case you're finding the comments here frustrating ("I'm not surprised", "we just need to X", "we're doomed", "it will be fine", etc etc etc)

The top 10% richest humans emit about half of all emissions.

Decile 10 (richest): ~48%

Decile 9: ~15%

Decile 8: ~10%

Decile 7: ~8%

Decile 6: ~6%

Deciles 1 through 5 combined: ~12%, so about 1 to 3% each

I wouldn't necessarily focus on it, but it's something good for your mental model of how to solve the challenge.

The reason I say I wouldn't focus on it is I'm coming around to the idea that "carbon footprint" is effectively a marketing campaign brought on by oil companies to have us focus our individual power where it has the lowest leverage - sorting trash, our own individual emissions, etc, Instead of mobilizing hundreds, thousands, millions, and billions of people to change policy and technology.

Sources like this: www.oxfam.org.uk/media/press-releases/richest-1-emit-as-much-planet-heating-pollution-as-two-thirds-of-humanity-oxfam/

The top 10% richest humans emit about half of all emissions.

Decile 10 (richest): ~48%

Decile 9: ~15%

Decile 8: ~10%

Decile 7: ~8%

Decile 6: ~6%

Deciles 1 through 5 combined: ~12%, so about 1 to 3% each

Sources like this: www.oxfam.org.uk/media/press-releases/richest-1-emit-as-much-planet-heating-pollution-as-two-thirds-of-humanity-oxfam/

They tell you you have a particular type of power. You have the power to sort your trash, nothing wrong with that. But what's left off and out is you have the power to change what dozens, thousands, millions, and billions of people do. "Carbon footprint" was a marketing trick played by the oil industry. It worked great.

What's needed now is something like a "carbon wave", where you evaluate your impact by how quickly you move the entire world forward.

There's a new book on this to that just arrived to me last week: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-carbon-wave-leah-c-stok...

Call Congress about this, here's how to find contact information for your congressional representatives: https://www.house.gov/representatives/find-your-representati...

Thanks for leaving it up! I'm on the perimeter of the HN community generally, but one observation is that what you said is present in a lot of discussions here. Kind of an "insistent powerless". I wonder if sentiment analysis over the years would show this is on the rise at HN. As a long time reader it seems like it is to me, but it could certainly be my own bias etc.

I work on climate solutions and find it in a lot of the threads here. It generally sounds like "Not only am I powerless, you are also powerless too", and it comes up in all sorts of ways.

I lean towards agreeing with you. That said, people often confuse carbon dioxide removal with CCS. Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) generally refers to "carbon neutral" technologies to pull carbon dioxide out of emissions. At some kind of theoretical best, CCS is carbon neutral, so the best CCS can ever hope to offer is being neutral like solar, wind, or nuclear.

Carbon dioxide removal refers to a different process. Carbon dioxide removal is the process to pull carbon dioxide back out of the air itself. It's not a supplement or replacement for carbon neutral technologies. Every model proposed by the IPCC to stay at 1.5C of warming requires billions of tons of carbon dioxide, alongside zeroing out new emissions.

Also, this event is about El Niño.