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).
Data centers use no more than 1.5% of energy 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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."
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
"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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 .
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.
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.
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!
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.
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 WWIII," were replaced by "avoiding WWIII."
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.
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
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.
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 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.
> "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.
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.
“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.
(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)
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.
"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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Does anybody else feel like this is the answer to the Fermi paradox? Advanced civilizations simply exploit, consume, and pollute their way of existence.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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!)
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.
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.
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).
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.
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?
> 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'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.
> 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
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 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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).
Data centers use no more than 1.5% of energy 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.
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
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.
When all is said and done, data centers are 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.
1.5% of electricity, not energy
that would be 0.3% of global energy use
> ~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"
Ah yes, "just" 485 TWh, equal to all electricity consumption of Germany. Drop in the bucket
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.
> 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.
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.
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
You can't compare capacity without comparing capacity factors too.
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...
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
...
> 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.
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.
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 WWIII," were replaced by "avoiding WWIII."
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.
Not for long.
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
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.
> 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.
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 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.
> "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.
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.
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.
“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)
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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
> Of course MAGA people will probably only notice once the shelves aren't being restocked.
And then they'll blame Obama.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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/
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
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.
Then you might like this site: https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/?dm_id=world2
Does anybody else feel like this is the answer to the Fermi paradox? Advanced civilizations simply exploit, consume, and pollute their way of existence.
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.
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?
14 billion years and not a single piece of evidence of a prior civilization.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 millions it will kill first won't be among the overconsumers who are driving climate change.
>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!)
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
> 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.
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...
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).
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.
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'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.
they don't care who lives or dies. they probably think it only affects "bad" people.
> 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
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Next year will be a new record
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.
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
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
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
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.
> 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.
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.