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eykanal: For those (like me) who don't know the authors, apparently they are well-published authors in the field of climate science whose work is very highly cited:https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C39&q=gra...Not a perfect measure of whether this is a reputable article but at least readers should know this isn't from some randos in a basement somewhere.

afandian: This is open access. No need to post a researchgate link.Here's the original: https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-6079807/v1

xyzelement: As an observation, global warming has completely disappeared as social concern in the last few years. Great that someone is still publishing research, but it seems like being a climate scientist has gone from hottest field to nobody cares.

bena: We've had other existential threats to worry about of late.People are way more alarmed by Rapid Local Temperature Rises By Mechanism of Thermonuclear Energy Being Suddenly Released.

captainbland: Today: thisTomorrow: trillions invested in new technology for simulating human torture accurately at the molecular level, requiring twice the level of all consumer electricity use on the planet. Advocates claim "all use is valid".

avereveard: as soon as there was money to be made by concentrating data center, no matter the energy density impact on environment, the once philanthropist changed tune real quickhttps://www.gatesnotes.com/home/home-page-topic/reader/three...with gems like "Although climate change will hurt poor people more than anyone else, for the vast majority of them it will not be the only or even the biggest threat to their lives and welfare. "

hackyhacky: Nothing like fascism and war to take your mind off the environment.

ck2: Basically the oceans are way way way too hot which is melting even the most ancient ice and that can never be undone in our lifetimes (well maybe from a nuclear winter)USA is about to have another El Nino summer which will be scorching from overheating oceansBut don't worry, USA is solving the problem by Biden banning cheap electric cars and Trump ending electric subsidies entirely, forcing coal plants to restart

pjc50: Well, yes, due to systematic propaganda efforts and the general shift from being against mass death to being in favor of it.

Octoth0rpe: Because of how policies are grouped together in many countries (particularly the US), the fight against fascism is necessarily concurrent with the fight against climate change.

Fricken: I haven't seen much fight against either fascism or climate change so far in the US

mchaver: I assume because the public has been consumed by narratives over data. Narratives have probably always been more powerful than data for us humans, but we now have really powerful tools to generate the narratives we like. Combine that with algorithmic feeds that prefer certain types of narratives, boring and/or annoying data gets ignored.

leetharris: Realistically, if we stopped 100% of emissions from America tomorrow, it would not matter. India and China burn orders of magnitude more, and they aren't going to slow down.US policy does matter, but in this instance, we need bigger solutions. Geoengineering type things.

kreyenborgi: Actually it would matter. Less CO2 would be released. It just wouldn't stop all the CO2 being released - but we don't need nor want to stop it all for it to matter.

marginalia_nu: Everyone and their mother is running digital influence operations, so the overall media landscape is just extremely noisy right now.This is an art that has been refined with every election cycle and every major political event since the early 2010s, and it had already gotten dang bad 5-6 years ago[1], and definitely did not get an ounce better once LLMs came along and drove the down the cost of this type of op.The result is that it's very hard to get any sort of coherent message across.[1] 'member the absolute clown fiesta surrounding COVID?

xyzelement: Yeah and I think people are increasingly losing patience and interest for what they perceive as hyperboly about fascism, climate change, etc.I am thinking back to 2016 when you could be crucified for not being sufficiently excited about climate, and we thought the world would end the day Trump became president, to now everything seems more or less normal, so people are tuning out the screamers.

knicholes: Isn't that interesting how quickly the public seems to change their passions? It's almost as if they're all in sync with each other somehow.

hackyhacky: Yes, everyone is a gullible NPC, except you.

progval: > India and China burn orders of magnitude moreThey don't, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...> and they aren't going to slow down.China already did, according to https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/11/china-co2-emis...

inetknght: Arguments against call it immoral, while counter-arguments call it "legitimate".Meanwhile, three-time Billionaire claims he's solved the problem using soylent green while fifty thousand people react in awe at the live presentation.

mrlonglong: Biden?!

monkaiju: Thankfully none of the serious solutions are nation-specific. Also they do not emit "orders of magnitude more"https://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/report_2025

f6v: The problem is, no amount of climate policies in the West is going to offset burning fuel in the developing counties. It’s a global phenomenon and addressing it locally is futile. That, and you don’t have the luxury of green solutions when energy prices were going through the roof.

latexr: Are you based in the US? Seeing how the current regime is doing its best to gut climate protections I get how it could seem that way, but it’s definitely not the case in e.g. Europe where energy from renewables continues to grow.

TimorousBestie: A weird title.The content of the paper is summed up as “everyone felt like the climate changed after 2015, the data up to 2023 was inconclusive; we finally have enough to prove it with 95% confidence.”

afh1: It has only ever been a concern in the media, in certain political circles, and among rich people with no real concerns.

hackyhacky: Polls say otherwise. 63 percent of Americans are worried you about the environment.Attempts to minimize the danger of climate change, as you have just done, are usually politically motivated.https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/visualizations-data/yc...

unethical_ban: In my social circle of liberal people, the reason is despondence.Climate change has been known for decades now, and despite the alarms and concerns, the current administration is cheerfully, maliciously removing all initiatives in the US to combat it. Attempting to destroy the solar industry and wind power. Rolling back the most common sense environmental controls for public health.Meanwhile our country has had its place in the world destroyed irrevocably (for at least a generation) and is turning further and further away from a country that cares for its citizens and its freedoms.People are losing hope, not interest, because climate change and fascism are are more alarming than ever and our government is complicit.Long standing problems are not being solved.

pjmlp: What a surprise with all the wars going on, and AI depleting Earth resources, what a change from about the pandemic era when everyone was into paper straws and cups and promising to be a better person, because that is what was going to change anything.

unglaublich: AI is nothing compared to automobiles and heating, construction and shipping.It uses a bunch of energy, but not so much compared to moving yourself around in a car of plane.

bluGill: It is also much more likely to use renewable energy. Data centers look at the local energy mix when planning where to put one. (though they are perhaps taking energy that would otherwise be shipped to a different city/state)

giwook: China has actually been leading the charge in terms of green energy lately, at least in terms of making solar power equipment more accessible by way of driving down cost.I have no idea however if they're just exporting this to other countries or if they're also pushing renewable energy domestically.From what little I've read on this topic in recent years though they seem to realize that all of that smog is coming from somewhere and are taking meaningful action to remedy it, which is in stark contrast to what we're doing in the states these days with stifling clean energy and promoting coal.

_heimdall: China has continued to rapidly increase their use of coal for power generation. Just a few days ago there was an article about them hitting an 18-year high of new coal power installations [1][1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/katharinabuchholz/2026/02/27/ch...

triceratops: New coal power installations != increased use of coal for power generation. You have to stop this lie by omission.

FrustratedMonky: Is this a reference to "Torment Nexus"?

heavyset_go: It would also work as a jab at Roko's basilisk

pjmlp: A bunch of energy, water and Earth rare materials, nothing really to care about.

tjnaylor: The title is a fair summary. The paper isn't simply confirming the "climate changed [warmed]" since 2015. The paper is showing the climate warmed the past decade twice as fast as it had between the decades from 1960-2000."This 58 indicates that the warming trend has been accelerating from a rate of 0.15 – 0.2 ◦C 59 per decade during 1980-2000, to more than twice that rate [0.4°C] most recently."

lambdaone: This is terrifying, and those fighting against stopping or reducing global warming should at this point be regarded as hostis humani generis

lapcat: See also from yesterday, "Rising carbon dioxide levels now detected in human blood" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47261968

Bombthecat: This is good! Better to be numb and stupid when we die of hunger on the streets

Gabrys1: not per capita though

hackyhacky: > addressing it locally is futile.Imagine what could be accomplished if Americans used their global influence to affect global change on climate issues with the same zeal that they pursue manipulative trade deals.

nyeah: When we had global influence, that would have been a good idea.

captainbland: While I'm sure that subconsciously influenced what I wrote, it was more a general jab at the sentiment that negative externalities can always be justified so long as a technology has users who prefer to use it.

FrustratedMonky: Yeah. Did you see article that they made a brain organoid (actual brain neurons on a chip) play DOOM?. What are those neurons experiencing?

layer8: > What are those neurons experiencing?Doom. (Obviously.)

nyeah: Nice take on the trolley problem. "No amount of pulling the emergency brakes is going to prevent passengers from dying when this runaway train finally crashes. So let's be responsible adults and put the pedal to the metal."

ecshafer: The issue with any significant steps to curbing the climate or environmental impacts with laws or treaties is always: But the economy. It creates an incentive where someone doesn't follow the laws, burn everything they can to accelerate their economy, and take industry from other countries.My proposal is thus: create a supranational treaty organization with a EPA like authority(or whatever the European equivalent is) that can inspect and fine companies in member organizations. Then any treaty members agree with the following conditions: The EPA can enter their nation freely, inspect, and are able to fine companies that break rules. Members send delegates to a session to create new rules democratically. And most importantly all members act as a cartel, imposing large tariffs on any country outside of the organization. So if US was in and Mexico was out, you couldn't just pollute in Mexico, without some massive tariff. This creates an economic incentive to be in and clean.

WarmWash: The real problem is that everyone has to sacrifice, but half the people think there is no problem and then other half thinks only corporations need to sacrifice (and are unwilling to sacrifice themselves).

_heimdall: Electric cars aren't a magic bullet. We need to drive less, not scrap ICE vehicles and buy new electric vehicles made on the other side of the planet with globally sourced materials and shipped to the US.

bojan: Do they have to be a magic bullet?Switching from ICE to electric is a much smaller ask than switching from personal cars to... bicycles?

nDRDY: With a correspondingly smaller decrease in CO2 output. We're in a Climate Catastrophe on the edge of Global Tipping Points, remember!Sarcasm aside, I think this is why people have generally stopped caring as much. What we are being asked to do (buy new shiny things for some estimated small percentage decrease in lifecycle CO2 output) does not match the messaging.FWIW I cycle almost everywhere.

jokoon: Nothing will change until developed rich countries are starting to hurt.And I don't think it's going to hurt enough in 10 or 20 years.The pain will come slowly, people won't see it.It's like going back to the middle age so slowly, that the population don't realize or feel it.And honestly, wars and trump are making climate concerns so difficult to think about.

abound: I've been mentally tabulating a list of reasons rich (and or older) people should care about climate change, even if you're only looking out for your own interests:- Your children and younger family members will have to deal with this- Climate change is causing increasingly worse turbulence for airplanes- It will disproportionately affect your favorite vacation spots- Probably something about stock markets and pensions - a world constantly wracked with increasingly severe natural disasters isn't the most economically productive one

Frogeman: The majority of pollution is caused by 3rd world/ eastern countries.Do you want to go to war with China to enforce an environmentalist agenda?

spwa4: Was anybody really expecting anything else? The only factor that would matter is if oil producing nations STOP producing oil entirely. Not reduce, not limit, stop. Same with coal and other small contributions. Note: limiting exports, CO2 limits in oil customer states, ... all of that just doesn't matter. And, obviously, this is just not on the table. There is no way these nations will make such a decision because what it would mean for their economy. Plus it wouldn't matter unless they all make that decision.

DrBazza: And when we've somehow stopped using fossil fuels for electricity, what next?Guess what a lot of plastic is made from? And how planes fly, and boats move?And there's lots of countries that aren't at 'Western' living standards. So we have decades of those countries building and emissions to come.Plus of course there's a lag in CO2 emissions to climate change. The next couple of decades are going to get a lot worse, before they get better, if at all.https://www.wri.org/insights/4-charts-explain-greenhouse-gas...

captainbland: I hadn't until you mentioned it but now I have! I expect one day they'll generate a language model on one and then we can just ask it, assuming they don't give it a special rule about never describing its experiences.

lambdaone: Yes. The obsession with demonizing AI/data centre loads seems to be a deliberate distraction from the much, much larger carbon loads of the economy at large relative to which IT power consumption is a tiny proportion.

DangitBobby: I think it's much less cynical than that. People both fear and dislike AI, recognize that the "it may destroy my livelihood and commodify human creativity" complaint falls on deaf ears, and are latching onto anything resembling a credible ethical complaint that people may actually listen to.

gman83: I think it'll start hurting sooner than that. We're already seeing property insurance rates spiking, and in some places it's even impossible to get property insurance. We could well be up for a 2008-level real estate crash. That should get Americans' attention.

alberto467: True but also building a new electric car consumes many order of magnitudes more resources (and it will keep consuming them) compared to a bicycle.But hey, at least you get to keep 99% of your comfort while making 50% less emissions! (if it really is that much).

tsoukase: This ship has sailed, warming is irreversible. Developing nations mainly in Asia (China, India etc) are, well, developing and burn like there is no tomorrow. But they are not to blame. It is their turn to live nicely, like the US and Europe did for decades. Nobody can remove this right from them.

siilats: yeah all these charts you need to read the footnotes, this wikipedia is co2 from fossil fuels not land changes which probably is some random fraction

tjnaylor: Fossil fuels—coal, oil, and gas account for approximately 90% of all human-produced carbon dioxide.https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/fossil-fuels-are-th...

tarr11: It says this in bold red at the top - "This is a preprint; it has not been peer reviewed by a journal."I am not a climate scientist - how should I think about this statement? Normally I am looking for some statement that shows a document has been vetted.

luxuryballs: I’m out of the loop on researchgate, when you say “No need” is it like an archive.is? Why is it less desirable or, if I’m reading your tone correctly, a “backup option”?

serioussecurity: They're a user hostile attempt to extract money from people. They make their website hard to use.

missedthecue: Most countries including the US are deploying record amounts of renewables. But the climate conversation is definitely reduced, and that's global. Its been a good while since I saw angsty euro teens throwing tomato soup on paintings or gluing themselves to motorways. That used to be a monthly occurance.

latexr: The US still produces more than half (58%) of its electricity from fossil fuels. In the EU, it’s less than a third (29%).https://ember-energy.org/countries-and-regions/united-states...https://ember-energy.org/countries-and-regions/european-unio...In the EU I hear of new climate initiatives all the time. From the US every bit of news I know about is how they’re making it worse.

nDRDY: It's a good job Americans are right if they were to start swinging their global weight around.

afandian: I'm a bit of a scholarly infrastructure purist. The paper has a DOI, it leads to a landing page that has the full text, and the content is open licensed.Like if someone posted a link to an archive.is version of a Wikipedia page, you'd probably prefer to get the canonical link to that content.ResearchGate is a bit of commercial enclosure of infrastructure that is, and should be, open. Who knows, maybe it has other value. I'm not an academic so I don't know.

wing-_-nuts: Nothing will change until billionaires start losing money over it. Then it will be a national priority.It's also why I've sort of resigned myself to a cynical optimism that the worst won't come to pass. The rich are not going to tolerate losing money. They will force through geoengineering stopgap measures that will save us from catastrophic warming, at the cost of unknown consequences.This is why I vehemently disagree with those who say we shouldn't be conducting research on geoengineering. It will be done. The only question is, will we have done enough research to understand the potential consequences, or not?

ndiddy: I don't see the US doing anything about global warming regardless of who's in charge. China has won on manufacturing cheap wind/solar energy and is scaling up their cheap EV manufacturing right now. Trump is definitely accelerating China's future dominance by completely forgoing anything related to developing or manufacturing green tech in favor of fossil fuels, but I think both parties would rather get into a conflict with China than cooperate with them and purchase their energy tech to deploy domestically. Solar and wind power are already far cheaper than coal or natural gas, and are much quicker to deploy, but the US government would much rather prop up the domestic fossil fuel industry than cooperate with China on renewables because fossil fuel is where all the incumbent money is.

WarmWash: China installed the most new coal power last year than it has in 20 years.If you think China is developing renewables out of some kind of green future plan, well there is a whole lot of geography and geopolitical information that you are out of the loop on.

lapcat: The economy is an abstraction. Millions of individual consumers are concerned with the environment and have demonstrated that they're willing to take individual actions to reduce their environment impact. However, individual consumers are not in charge of the economy, which is increasingly consolidated and monopolistic. The majority of pollution is coming from industrial activity, not from consumer activity, not even auto exhaust, and the most important decisions are made by wealthy industrialists who seem to care only about unlimited growth of their own wealth and power, at the expense of the planet.From a political perspective, I think the problems of global warming and wealth disparity go hand-in-hand. It's difficult to solve one without solving the other. To the extent that the ultra-wealthy own the politicians, or actually become politicians themselves, there is little hope for environmental regulation.Consumers don't need or necessarily even want unlimited economic growth. That only "helps" consumers if they're relying essentially on trickle-down economics, where we have to allow the ultra-wealthy everything they want in the hope that they'll spare us some change. A more equitable distribution of the current wealth would reduce the pressure to produce ever more, more, more.

sealthedeal: Oh no!!! The Earth is Earthing!

NicuCalcea: Why not encourage people who can reasonably cycle to do so? It's not a magic bullet either, but it's no less magic than EVs.

fjwater: I don't think that's fair to say; the USA's CO2 emissions per capita are roughly 150% of China's, and the average Canadian emits more than 7x as much as an Indian citizen.The entire EU produces only about half of the USA's total emissions, despite having a population of over 100 million more people.

queenkjuul: China produces a lot less carbon per capita than we do

nyeah: ResearchGate isn't open access.

noboostforyou: How so? I don't have an account but I am able to read the entire paper directly from the OP's link, is there some sort of free limit or something that I have yet to hit? I get some banner ads served on their site but I'm not seeing how it isn't open access.

al_borland: Most people pushing back against data centers simply don't want invite something into their city that will use up resources (likely raising prices), while the big selling point is that it will put them out of work. You can say that won't actually happen and everyone will keep their jobs, but that has not been the messaging. CEOs want to know how many people they can get rid of once they start using AI. Why would anyone sign up to have that in their backyard?

thinkcontext: I wonder if the current war will significantly accelerate the roll out of non-fossil energy. If the Strait of Hormuz stays closed for a few more weeks there's going to be significant pain, not just for energy but things like fertilizer etc. Once you deploy a solar panel it works for 20+ years, conflict doesn't cut you off from energy.

jmye: My country mines rare earth metals. Your country processes them into computer chips. Joe and Jane's country want those computer chips to fuel their economy.Who's getting fined, here? Me, because mining the stuff is inherently dirty (without, probably, significant research and capital investment)? You, because you need the stuff to build other stuff? Joe and Jane because they're the ones ultimately driving the production of the stuff? If you fine me into not producing the raw materials, what, ultimately happens to your economy and Joe and Jane's? If I don't sign up, where are you going to get the raw materials, if I'm tariffed into oblivion?Sorry, I'm not trying to like, doom this away - but there are so many interconnected pieces, that I don't think it's a problem that can even start to be solved from an internet comment. At some point, voters in democratic societies need to decide that they care as much about the world their children will inherit as they do a ten cent difference in gas prices ten minutes from now. It's unclear that they ever will on a long term, consistent basis.

microtonal: Switching from ICE to electric is a much smaller ask than switching from personal cars to... bicycles?Bikes are awesome. I do 95% of my trips by bike. It's healthy, cheap, and has very low amortized emissions. Everybody can repair a bike with a small amount of training.More countries/cities have to do bike-centric road design.

moogly: I would be fine if LLMs disappeared tomorrow, but if I couldn't heat my house, I'd freeze to death. But I guess some would argue that everyone needs to live in a city with district heating.

asib: Developed rich countries are hurting. See the wildfires across North America, massive amounts of flooding across Europe, etc.Nothing will change until many of the global electorate stop burying their heads in the sand. These people don't change their minds until things affect them specifically. Then they change their mind, and all their former fellows tell them they're brainwashed.This doesn't change until nearly everyone is affected, and by then we're so far into the catastrophe that the consequences don't even bear thinking about.

socalgal2: What have you done? Why is it someone else’s problem?

bluGill: If there was some investment most of us could switch to public transit. The problems people have with transit are mostly around there isn't enough of it to be useful - when /where it is useful people use it.

alberto467: That's not the full story, you're right that they "could switch", but would they actually?Good, working and efficient public transit still means having significantly less comfort compared to having your private vehicle. Pretty much the only exception is using the metro in a congested downtown area at peak traffic (still, your metro experience will also be degraded by the peak traffic), or perhaps if parking your vehicle will be very difficult. And i say this as someone in a rather big city in Europe who is currently only using public transit. And there is a lot of stuff that i'd like to do but i can't do since i currently don't have access to a car or motorbike.People don't just want "useful", at least the majority of people in developed countries also want "comfortable", and "nice", and "easy", and "enjoyable". A peak-hour metro ride or missing your tram by one minute is none of that.

pc86: If the original is available, posting anything else is by definition less desirable.

cetinsert: Good! Won't change a thing in how I live my life!

californical: I feel like the possible real estate crash could be really interesting.Even different parts of a city would likely be affected very differently, where the edges near the fire risks crash, and the even mildly safer areas boom with high demand

apexalpha: A lot HAS changed. Europe even has a tax on CO2 emissions.It's just not enough and it's very hard to convince the public to accelerate when the US not only gave up but it actively reversing to fossil fuels.

cryptoegorophy: Climate change is not the main cause for turbulence.

mrintegrity: As you are probably aware, the op didn't say that it was

cryptoegorophy: If it is too late to do anything, why should we care? We can’t reverse it, so why should we care about slow down?

wing-_-nuts: This is like punching a hole in your wall and saying 'there's already a hole, why shouldn't I just demolish my entire house'

jmcgough: Soon, we'll have millions of climate change refugees, battles over resources, regular once-in-a-century storms, more wars. We're close to the point where we'll be too busy thrashing to address the root cause.

deadbabe: > Nothing will change.Fixed

code4life: Where i live, we had the coldest winter on record in 30 years. I’m going with that.

throwway120385: The jetstream which prevents the polar vortex from migrating south is getting weaker.

energy123: The initial pain will be diffuse and not obviously caused by global warming.For example, destabilization of equatorial countries due to wet bulb temperatures, through multiple causal paths: worse education outcomes (many days off school during hot months), worse economy (can't work outside), worse life satisfaction -> more autocracies, more water scarcity.Then you get more emigration to the colder north, more conflict and more suffering. But not much of it is easily and directly attributable to temperatures.Much of it is foregone upside, like GDP growth that's 3% instead of 5%.

marcyb5st: I am not sure how not directly linked to global warming. I am currently on the phone but I remember a study that mentioned that Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh would see a deadly heat (wet bulb temperatures) from basically 0 as it is right now to 30 days/year by 2050 or 2060. I can't remember right now.If that is not linkable to global warming I am not sure what is. And that is a huge event. In Europe we are struggling with accomodating perhaps 10M people. What happens when 1.5B come knocking because if they stay they die?

cetinsert: Sure.

maffyoo: some context here is really important:China started construction on an estimated 95 GW of new coal power capacity in 2024 it accounted for 93% of new global coal-power construction BUT, importantly, Coal power's share in the electricity mix has steadily declined, dropping from around 73% in 2016 to 51% in June 2025 heavily driven by renewables push in ChinaChina's average utilisation rate of coal power plants in 2024 was around 50% meaning there's already spare capacity. The continued building is driven largely by energy security concerns, financial incentives for coal-mining conglomerates, and institutional momentum. The most immediate trigger was power shortages of 2021, when factories had to cut production due to blackouts. That was politically embarrassing, so provincial governments and energy companies rushed to approve new coal capacity as an insurance policy. More than 100 billion yuan in capacity payments were made to coal plants in 2024 essentially the government paying plants just to exist after all half the capacity isn't being used.Chinese policy makers have plans to "strictly control" coal use during the current period and start phasing down coal use during the 15th Five-Year Plan period covering 2026–2030. China also has a long-stated goal of peaking carbon emissions before 2030 and reaching carbon neutrality by 2060. which probably explains the apparent paradox of being world leaders in renewables but investing more in Coal than anyone else. usual caveats notwithstanding

santiagobasulto: What! you're saying that my selective recycling of paper and having the plastic caps attached to the bottles didn't work? SHOCKING(only europeans will understand)

pvaldes: [delayed]

utopiah: > until developed rich countries are starting to hurt.Well Spain, 12th largest by nominal GDP and the fourth-largest in Europe, isn't exactly poor and yet seems to hurt quite a bit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_in_Spain#Impact... ... but I bet the wealthiest Spaniards have air conditioning, heating, bottled water delivered at home by staff, etc to isolate themselves. That does include politicians.So... IMHO until the richest of the rich countries hurt, then nothing will change. They (we?) are very sheltered precisely by leveraging their wealth to abstract away from the lowly difficulties of life, like the weather.TL;DR : yes, but the more insulated feel it less and consequently, rationally, think they have more time thus postponing the process.

alberto467: I think a lot of people have lost faith in the ability of the world to come all together and make the necessary sacrifices to make a difference. Especially when some parts of the world are in competition with each other and not making these sacrifices allows them an edge.Also another group of people have realized they are not willing to forgo all their petty and unnecessary comforts nor are they willing to pay any price increases that would be required to adopt less economical but more sustainable services or production methods.I don't think there's been any big change in climate change believers/deniers, but i do think some people have started accepting that we're doomed and that there is no "practical" solution. And if you think you're doomed, you might as well skip the sacrifices and enjoy your last days (decades) to the fullest.

bondarchuk: "People aren't willing to pay price increases" is interesting. Of course that's what they say when you ask them directly. Yet everyone is currently paying massive price increases as a result of covid-era money printing. I'm not saying you're wrong necessarily but what it shows it that it has been possible in very recent times that a collecive decision was made which increased general prices for everyone.

alberto467: > that a collecive decision was made which increased general prices for everyoneI think you're referring to inflation with that? I wouldn't necessarily say that inflation is the result of a "decision", certainly not a direct decision of any single person nor any collective group. Economies can move around in weird and unpredictable ways, and they are also quite intertwined at the global level making policy decisions even more complicated and unpredictable.The "money printing" decision wasn't made by asking the public: "would you like to help our economy and businesses and our essential public services in this tragic event? Oh btw you'll be paying for all of this with inflation, are you still sure?". Politicians tend to conveniently leave the second part out, and also, this questions wasn't asked to the public at all. I believe a sizeable amount of the public would've responded "no, let the people die, let the businesses die, i'm not paying for them".Which is why for example, in many democracies with tools of direct democracy, such tools cannot affect fiscal policy, because people are dumb and they would just say "i want all of the welfare and zero of the taxes", bringing the country to ruin.

haizhung: Don’t get cynic. The good news is: the worse it gets, the more impact every single .1 degree of prevented climate change has.I’m with you in the billionaires. Research has shown again and again that people do care about climate change and want it to be stopped - but only if they have the socioeconomic status to actually care.If, as so many people on this planet, you are living paycheck to paycheck, and the social security nets are being dismantled by the uber rich, you instead switch into a „protect what’s mine“ mindset. This further exacerbates the tragedy of the commons.So I am of the following opinion: fix wealth inequality; which will give people their actual lives back; and will reduce the political power of the sociopathic billionaire class.Then, the rest almost takes care of itself.

cess11: "What happens when 1.5B come knocking because if they stay they die?"More taxes go to ammunition for autonomous border guard systems.

wizzwizz4: This is not inevitable. We have time, now, to prepare for the future, which doesn't have to be a carbon copy of today.

asib: I've voted for parties that care about addressing the climate catastrophe.It's obviously someone else's problem if that someone refuses to accept there's a climate catastrophe.

chazburger: I don’t know, was in Haiti a few months ago and they burn all kinds of shit there. Gotta get them on solar and wind. Whatever happened to the Clinton foundation’s billions?

vrganj: Honestly, if the economy is killing us all, then screw the economy.The way our economic systems are set up is inherently anti-human and only benefits a tiny fraction of the population anyways.It's time for a fundamental rethink.

kergonath: We must limit the problem, then adapt and mitigate. Some damage is irreversible, it does not mean that it’s a good idea to stop trying to understand what will happen. You don’t stop weather forecasts when a hurricane touches land just because it’s going to happen anyway.Reality is not binary. There’s a whole spectrum of situations between "everything gets back to normal and all is well" (which was never on the cards after the 1980s) and "all humans die within a century". And the nuances in between still affect billions of people.

SoftTalker: "since 1945"

mountainriver: We are already seeing it in Colorado. Record low snowfall, record heat, record winds; which are a very bad set of conditions for fires.The power company is now preemptively shutting off our power. Which is really fun in the winter.I’m honestly not sure about the future of my hometown Boulder. The odds of it fully burning to the ground seem to increase significantly every year.

jcfrei: I have a different take: Things will change once a big part of the electorate no longer feels like climate change policies will hurt their pocket. A lot of the opposition to the policies are from people who aren't in the richer percentiles and probably work in a field that's related to fossil fuels (like heating engineers, car mechanics, etc.). They fear job losses and that their commute and heating bills go up.

virgildotcodes: The universe was not built to cater to our desires. We can't have our cake and eat it too.Virtually all economic activity consumes resources and energy, directly or indirectly, and in the process creates ghg emissions.If we want to curb climate change and our emissions, it necessarily means we're going to take an economic hit.We either do that willingly with some degree of ability to exercise control along the way, or be forced by physics to take an even worse economic hit and face vastly more death and suffering without our hands on the wheel.There's no option where we don't get our pockets hurt.

Findecanor: We have needed tariffs for many years now. The EU has some tariffs on imports, but they are only used to level the playing field for companies in EU countries with emission rules against companies in countries without, and only in some select industries.They need to apply overall, on all goods and services.And emission limits need to be progressive over time, with a limit for each year, not just "x% at year 2030".

standeven: The main driver of this is human-produced CO2, and there are meaningful ways to reduce usage.-Switch to an electric vehicle -Migrate from gas appliances (range, furnace, water heater) to electric (induction, heat pumps) -If your power grid isn’t clean, add rooftop or balcony solar -Encourage friends and family to do the same

tlogan: The sad reality is that much of the climate work done in the West does not matter because China, India, and the rest of the world are not involved.

myrmidon: Western efforts matter because they allow less wealthy nations to follow along a proven path towards sustainability.Nnobody is going to follow a hypocrite, and no one in east asia is gonna cut back on consumption/growth/lifestyle if rich westerners can't even pretend to put in some token effort for the same cause.Solr and wind power is arguably a huge success story (looking at china specifically) because it was arguably enabled and triggered by western efforts in research, development and commercialization.

chewbacha: They are already in pain but are blaming immigrants instead of trusting science.

xienze: True or false: a person in a third world country has a lower carbon footprint than someone in a developed country.Also true or false: an immigrant from a third world country will have a higher carbon footprint if they emigrate to a developed country.Maybe they are part of the problem.

AlexeyBrin: > What are those neurons experiencing?A reasonable explanation is that a few neurons probably don't have conscience so they can't really experience anything.

captainbland: It's an interesting question as to what that level is likely to be though. The chip in question apparently has around 800,000 neurons (https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2025/06/04/hardwar...) so not a trivial quantity which makes it significantly more complex than most insects' forebrains but still less complex than any mammal.I think once they're able to put 15 million such neurons on a single device that puts them in the range of more relatable animals like mice and Syrian hamsters, and I also expect that relatability is also what will drive most opinions about consciousness.

juujian: It is already published at Geophysical Research Letters, a highly (if not the most) reputable source in the area. But that journal is behind a paywall: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/202...

nsxwolf: We already mined enough uranium for 500+ years of energy but people want to bury it in a mountain instead.

kergonath: > This ship has sailed, warming is irreversible.Nobody who understands the subject claims that it is reversible on a human life scale. In the realistic best cases, it’d stabilise in a couple of decades and slowly decrease from there.The real question is not whether it is reversible, but how high it will go and how we are going to deal with it.

3371: Yeah just fix that already, how hard could it be?The problem is human, not society, I don't any any -ism can fix human.

sulam: FWIW my personal assessment is that this acceleration is both real and largely out of our control. Models in the past did not attempt to account for non-anthropogenic carbon emissions, but as we experience further warming, most especially in the Arctic, feedback loops and tipping points mean that this (carbon emissions caused by “natural” processes) are becoming more evident. This is especially sensitive because a large proportion of such emissions are methane, which is a much more powerful greenhouse gas vs CO2, albeit with a much shorter expected effect time once airborne (~12 years). Consider also that warming is not uniform and the polar regions are warming significantly faster (3x) than lower latitudes, making permafrost melting a very significant climate tipping point. The last point I’ll mention is not about non-anthropogenic emissions but rather absorption. The world’s oceans have been a significant absorber of CO2 however that process is sensitive to temperature and is less effective as the planet warms, not to mention acidic ocean waters prevent shell formation, which is a minor but meaningful carbon sink all by itself.I’m of the opinion that direct air capture is the primary escape hatch we have for not hitting 3 or even 4C warming in the next 100-200 years, which mean major dieoffs in warm latitudes, even for humans, due to exceeding wet bulb limits. Oh and roughly 65M of sea level rise as the planet shifts to a snow/ice-free mode.

pinkmuffinere: No offense, but internet opinions are a dime a dozen -- do you have some special experience / credentials in this area? The arguments you provide are all just the sort of thing that PhD students would study, and incorporate into their models. I'm inclined to believe the experts, but if you _are_ one, and are saying with authority that these effects are missed, that is a much more interesting story.

hendler: The question is not if the commenter is an expert, but if they are correct.The claim that some models didn't take larger systems into account is also because an expert in the arctic wasn't an expert in oceans. And the expert in biodiversity isn't an expert in food supply chains. Expertise isn't the question. Instead it is - do all of us who are non experts (all of us) have enough expert data to have a systemic understanding of an accelerating trend?

pinkmuffinere: Ya, I agree, but I am not familiar with the intimate details of present climate models, nor am I planning to be. I can't/won't directly evaluate whether the argument they present is correct. But if _they_ are familiar with the intimate details of present climate models (ie, if they are an expert), I will tend to trust them more.

deepsun: Well, most deforestation happens in poop underdevelopment countries. Yes, they hurt, but keep doing it.

wing-_-nuts: Global warming doesn't care about 'per capita'

myrmidon: There is literally no charitable interpretation of this point.How much of a problem any individuals CO2 emissions are is completely decoupled from what nation they live in, or how many people live in that nation specifically.If you hypothetically split up Asia or the US into 100 smaller countries then local emissions are not suddenly more (or less) of a problem than the are now (duh).And of course more people have more of an influence on global outcomes.This whole argument makes about as much sense as demanding that black people in Europe should not pay any income tax, because the total tax income from black people in Europe is very low, and "national budget does not care about per capita".

wing-_-nuts: This is so disingenuous. Individuals do not build coal power plants, utilities (and therefore, governments) do. India and China are continuing to build fossil fuel power generation. Global warming does not care about 'fairness', global warming cares about co2 PPM in the atmosphere. When we address climate change, we have to do so at the government level, or we mine as well not bother.The whole idea that we should look at 'emissions per capita' or 'historical emissions' in the interest of fairness is simply giving a license to governments to kill genuinely poor people in the third world.

DennisP: And since perhaps a source would be helpful, here's the research saying climate change is having a significant effect:https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2023gl10...BBC reporting:https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240524-severe-turbulenc...

jmye: What an odd question. Is this just the "and yet you participate in society" meme trying to act as insightful conversation, or did you have something to actually say?

kergonath: That is completely wrong.First, the West and particularly the US are still well ahead of China regarding both historical total emissions and per-capita annual emissions. And regardless of what China does in the future we still need to get our acts together domestically.Also, China is aggressively pushing low-carbon energy sources on all fronts. Where they are now is not necessarily an indication of where they will be in a decade or two.A large part of their emissions is the result of stuff they make for us. If we are serious about climate policy, we have to set up trade barriers proportional to greenhouse gases emissions to limit this effect. These policies must be informed by climate science.Finally, regardless of what the rest of the world does, mitigation depends only on us and how well prepared we are.Really, there is absolutely no scenario in which it is not a good idea to understand what the hell is going on with our climate.

tlogan: If the United States stopped polluting 100%, global pollution would decrease by only about 10%. Probably even less, because much of that pollution would simply be exported through outsourcing. So what happens next?

shevy-java: I think it is already pretty clear to everyone, save a few scientistis who keep on preaching "we can prevent this!!!" that global warming will continue. I am all for being more energy efficient and what not, but the reality of the situation is that there are factors that are orthogonal to this - as well as a few states that sabotage everyone else. The USA in particular; the US government is by far the biggest troublemaker here. China and India are also troublemakers because they are so huge, although to be fair, China also invested a lot into green energy.We need to adjust strategies here. The "zero emission" strategy failed; it is not practical. Politicians love them because they are in the media, but everyone sees that this strategy is not working. Same with carbon tax - it drove prices up but didn't really help much at all otherwise. We need to stop pursuing strategies that do not work here.

chinathrow: Companies are setting up constantly running gas turbines for powering AI datacenters - insanity.

jedberg: Unfortunately most political systems around the world reward short term results, not long term thinking.Just look here in the USA -- the Democrats tried to do some forward thinking things like subsidizing solar and wind, and they were rewarded by losing at the ballot box (of course that isn't the only reason, but it's one of many).There are no rewards for long term thinking, so it's hard to get anyone to do it.

tgsovlerkhgsel: Prices are a great incentive.In Germany, 1 kWh of electricity costs roughly 3x as much as 1 kWh of gas. That doesn't make heat pumps very attractive. Historically the differences were even worse.Relying on people individually making choices that are better for the environment at a disadvantage for themselves is not going to work.

sulam: 2 years ago this was hard won knowledge, searching for papers and then putting it all together in survey form for analysis. Today I can tell you: feel free to ask Deep Research or another LLM you trust to do that work for you, generating citations along the way. You can convince yourself vs me having to convince you. It will take about 15 minutes.

pinkmuffinere: For better or worse, I don't trust an LLM to give me a correct answer in this space. But you've kindof dodged the question by recommending LLM's -- do you have special experience / credentials in this area?

sulam: I answered elsewhere. I’ve been doing research on this topic for about 10 years, but I am not a climate modeler. I have spoken to people who are climate modelers and, at the time, these non-anthropogenic factors were not controlled for. They acknowledged that this was a blind spot that needed more research. At the time Arctic warming was only just beginning to be recognized as happening more quickly than the rest of the planet and the implications of that were concerning but unclear. There is still some acknowledged lack of understanding for just why the polar regions are warming so much faster (it’s not all melting / albedo feedback, because it’s happening in Antarctica too). What is less debated at this point is that permafrost comprises a truly mammoth proportion of CO2/CH4 reserves that are on an accelerated melting path (~1000Gt was the last estimate I saw, although it’s not all likely to go up at once of course).

Yhippa: If they said yes, would you blindly trust them? They told you to "do your own research" effectively and you punted. That would arguably be a more reassuring path for you I assume.

pinkmuffinere: Truthfully, because they dodged the question I am now a bit suspicious of everything they say. It just seems a bit deceitful. I explicitly called out the dodging not because I wanted to hear from them after they'd dodged it, but because I want to make it clear to GP that their answer is not sufficient, and highlight to others that they maybe shouldn't trust GP.If they had answered my first question in the affirmative (something like "I am a researcher at X institute on this topic"), ya, I think I would have trusted them.

fnordpiglet: The problem is humans are really bad at perceiving externalities at this scale, cause / effect between small actions and large effects, and effects that play out over the span of their lifetime rather than the span of their day. The denialist rationale shifted over the years from doubting the very basis of the science, to claiming its just a short term blip, to its natural long term cycles, to … everything that involves not looking up.I think the truth is we won’t really take this seriously globally until the changes are so severe that it’ll take generations to undo if ever.

cogman10: I have a different different take. It's not the electorate's pocketbook that matters, it's the political donors pocketbook that matters."Drill baby drill" will be echoed so long as petroleum companies and petroleum rich nations dump billions into propaganda outlets, politician campaigns, and in the US, PAC groups to support "drill baby drill" friendly politicians.So long as that dynamic exists, it doesn't matter if 80% of the electorate screams for change. So long as the incumbent advantage exists forcing people to vote mostly on social issues, these sorts of economic and world affecting issues will simply be ignored.There's a reason, to this day, you'll find Democrats talk about the wonders of fracking, clean coal, and carbon capture.IDK how to change this other than first identifying the issue. Our politicians are mostly captured by their donors. That's the only will they really care about enacting.

jcfrei: Not sharing your take of the electorate's powerlessness at all. It's not an overwhelming majority (only 57% of voters in the US: https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/54124-nearly-half-american...) which thinks they need to do more about climate change. I think most politicians are in tune with their voters - you need to change the people's minds if you want stricter policies. Refine the question a bit more and ask people if they still want to do more against climate change if some basic necessities in their life will get more expensive and you will likely even drop below 50%.

wing-_-nuts: Relying on DAC is putting our fate in the hands of a technology we've never deployed beyond some pitifully small pilot projects, and expecting that we're going to be able to deploy that at a larger scale than we've deployed any technology since electricity itself.We're going to have to resort to geoengineering alright, but it's gonna likely be stratospheric sulfate injection given how cheaply that can be done. Is it ideal? Nope. Better than global warming itself? Time will tell.

madman2890: We need the government to release the alien technology to the public now.

ragall: > What happens when 1.5B come knocking because if they stay they die?We sink the boats.

skvmb: Y E S

peterpost2: Are you that excited to see innocent people die?Or am I misunderstanding your comment?

tlogan: China creates about 30–35% of global emissions. India about 8% but it is climbing fast.What rich countries do is they just export their factories to other countries and say: look we do not pollute.

youngtaff: US is the largest historical emitter… responsible for something like 25% of all man made CO2 emissions

tlogan: The entire west world contributes 28.8%. US is about 11%. [1][1] https://www.iea.org/reports/global-energy-review-2025/co2-em...

pfdietz: Albedo modification (stratospheric aerosols) seems much cheaper than direct air capture, as a stopgap.

shadowgovt: At this point, one possible 50-years projection of outcomes here is that China eventually declares the US an existential threat to humanity's continued existence and deploys economic or military power to stop it unless the US gets its act together on carbon emissions. Can't build those AI datacenters if China has physically embargoed the chips.That may seem extreme, but the Chinese culture is more collectivist than its Western counterparts and (perhaps unlike the US culture) can recognize a threat as complicated as "This entire nation's set of rules they treat the universe by threatens humanity existentially" even when said nation can't recognize it in themselves. Plus, India is hit hard and fast by climate change in the short run so China already has an ally in their backyard who would support them doing something about polluters.

vixen99: And this? https://ourworldindata.org/profile/co2/china

lunias: It's my understanding that if you look at a large enough historical time window, although warming has accelerated recently (and we are in part to blame); the Earth is still relatively cool compared to historical averages.

sulam: I’m not a modeler but I have directly asked modelers if clathrates, permafrost melting, wildfire incidence and ocean drawdown responses to warming was incorporated in the major models. 5 years ago the answer was no. Today the answer might be yes, but this is not really the point I’m trying to make. It’s really that we should expect to see acceleration in warming as the natural environment responds to anthropogenic (“forced”) climate change.

mlyle: The models don't consider these because there's considerable uncertainty as to the size of these effects and potential countervailing forces of similar magnitudes.The fact is, for all of these other secondary effects etc... we just don't know. It's too complicated of a system.So as a result, we've got a prediction of something between "somewhat bad" and "catastrophically-is-an-understatement bad" with a maximum likelihood estimate of "really really bad."

jgalt212: > Oh and roughly 65M of sea level rise as the planet shifts to a snow/ice-free mode.Where is this new figure coming from? It seems about 60X what's being published elsewhere.

deepsun: Re carbon capture -- we can cut trees and dump them in "carbon storage" places like the bottom of some water bodies where due to lack of oxygen no rotting happens, like peats and e.g. Black Sea.And grow new trees in their place of course.

adrianN: It’s difficult to scale this to the levels we would need to make a difference.

lazide: The more likely candidate is mineral based, because yes trees are hard to scale this way.

transcriptase: Would a PhD student incorporate something into their model that flipped their results from agreeing to disagreeing with the premise that has not only practically become a religion, but forms the foundation for more and more funding flowing into their field each year?Would they really want to risk being basically excommunicated from their area of research for daring to provide ammo to “climate change deniers”?

tasty_freeze: Considering the scale that we are burning oil and gas, our sequestration efforts would have to be comparable. Continuing to burn oil and gas and trying to recapture it is madness, like realizing you are driving way too fast and instead of taking your foot off the gas, you keep flooring it but start applying the brakes.If we could actually grow trees to capture carbon equivalent to 250M+ barrel of oil per day, it would be better to just grow trees and burn them for energy.

wizzwizz4: So, those of us with no suede in this race, who will see no reward from the system anyway, are the only people who can be trusted to make change. That means you and I (and I dare say a significant portion of the populace).It's not obvious what we can do (individual actions taken within the context of a system are dwarfed by structural forces of the system), but we're the only ones who are going to do it. So, let's assume we did fix things, and we're looking back from 2050, doing a retrospective. What things did we end up doing, that got us to that point?

sulam: And yet we can still say something simple that is true: warming will accelerate due to non-human greenhouse gas emissions as the planet continues to warm, due to feedback loops and tipping points in the natural carbon cycle. This is an unassailable statement.

mlyle: > This is an unassailable statement.No. I believe what you're saying is very likely to be true, but we know there's both positive and negative feedback and we don't really know how they really will interplay and where all the tipping points are.There may even be significant phase delay in these mechanisms and so we could even get oscillation.

gzread: Indeed, no reason to expect anything will happen differently from what is currently happening, but on a 150x bigger scale.

jjtheblunt: curiosity rabbit hole spawned from the article:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles

everdrive: >But don't worry, USA is solving the problem by Biden banning cheap electric cars and Trump ending electric subsidies entirely, forcing coal plants to restartPeople really think if they just buy the right products we'll solve this problem. People are really fundamentally unable to solve global warming issues. There are a few fundamental problems:- Broad, collective action is not possible in just any direction. People can broadly get behind causes that are related to some fundamental human motivation, but generally cannot be guided towards nuanced political topics except via general tribalism and coalitions. (eg: you can go to the moon, but there's only broad support for this in the sense that it has consequences for national pride. You didn't have a whole nation helping the the logistics; you just had broad coalitional support.)- People think that merely buying the right product will help, but major impacts to climate would require a serious modification in quality of life and material wealth. This will never have broad support. People will always scrape out the most comfort and most material wealth that is possible, and will only allow themselves to be constrained by hard limits. Technology can help here to a degree, but once technology helps, people just advance to the next hard limit. For instance the use of insecticides, industrial fertilizer, and large-scale factory farming just allowed for more population boom. Rather than arriving at a place where where had near infinite abundance, we just ate up the gains with expanded population and luxury products. (sort of how computers don't get faster; once the computer is made faster, the software does more and the actual UI responsiveness just stays in the same place.)- People would need to intentionally decrease population and find healthy limits with the environment. No living thing does this. If you watch population curves in predators and prey, they occur because the hard limits force starvation and population decline. (ie, if the wolves eat too many deer, then the wolf pups starve, the wolf population declines, and then the deer can rebound.) In other words, nature is not "wise and balanced" but instead the balance is a mere fact of competition and death. The moment we produce an abundance, we use up that abundance. This may not be true in the case of some individuals, but broadly this is true for any population.- No political body, even an authoritarian regime could force these things. People would revolt. Authoritarians themselves often get into power by promising abundance they can never actually deliver on. No authoritarian has gained power by promising to reduce abundance and material wealth.

bobson381: So I've been on a journey of discovering basically this - limits to growth - for the last few years. It's been .... an emotional roller coaster as someone living in the developed world. I'm following the work of Nate Hagens and others in the space, but The Dread still ebbs and flows.How do you hold this dispassionately? How do you get to a point of wanting to reproduce, or even wanting to continue, as an act of radical hope? Absurdism? Pure interest in watching it all unfold? I'm pretty aware that we are going to have constraints forced on us as like, a thermodynamic function, but ... how to cope? Go back to the tragedy?-confused, interested, fascinatedly dreading

MaxHoppersGhost: Throughout human history entire families, tribes, villages, and cities were on the edge of death, whether it was by disease, famine, or invaders. This is nothing new. Don't by into the people selling fear.

Shin--: Hilarious take. China and India have historically emitted much less carbon than many western countries, per capita they emit less Co2, and a large part of emission is to produce for western countries, which have effectively outsourced their emissions to other (poorer) countries.At the same time, the US is the main force fighting against carbon neutrality, renewable energy and pretty much anything reasonable. By directly burning a lot of fossil fuels and by lobbying and poisoning discourse in other countries.Meanwhile China is by far the biggest producer of anything related to renewable energies and installing more renewable energy than the rest of the world, by far.If anything, the work done worldwide does no matter (it still does though) because USA is doing their best to destroy the planet.

tgsovlerkhgsel: China has long surpassed most countries in per-capita emissions and is still on an upward trajectory. India is on an upward trajectory but still below the world average. The US and Canada are higher than China but on a downward trajectory. The EU is on a downward trajectory and below China.https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita

ACCount37: That's the sum of climate change. "GDP growth of 3% instead of 5%."Severe enough to be noticeable, but not severe enough to warrant radical climate action. Not an extinction threat. A "slow trickle of economic damage, some amount otherwise preventable death and suffering, diffused across the entire world, applied unevenly, and spread thin across many decades" threat.And stopping the GHG emissions demands radical, coordinated global action. Major emitters would have to pay local costs now - for the sake of global benefits many decades down the line. And those emitters are not the countries that face the worst climate risks. Global superpowers can tolerate climate change - it's countries that already struggle as it is, that don't have the resources to adapt or mitigate damage, that can face a significant uptick in death and suffering rather than damage in the realm of economics.That makes climate action a very hard sell for the politicians. Thus the tepid response.By now, I'm convinced that the only viable approaches to climate change lie in the realm of geoengineering. Which does not require multilateral coordinated action against a "tragedy of commons" scenario, and are cheaper than forcing local GHG emissions into negatives. Even non-permanent geoengineering solutions offset impacts here and now - thus buying time for fossil fuel energy to succumb to economics.

gzread: And then when the GDP finally collapses, there will have been nothing that could be done about it for the last 50 years and they'll ask wtf we were doing in 2040, why we didn't stop it then.

01100011: What about solar shades? Seems like a relatively quick and easy way to regulate solar input. It's nice too because you can quickly remove it if necessary.

ACCount37: Only becomes viable if you have things like Starship online and fully operational, with launch rates at the level of Falcon 9 today. At the minimum.Still a more viable option than bringing greenhouse gas emissions into the negatives globally, by the way. But that's a low bar. Nuking the ocean floor is probably a better call.

NDizzle: At what European tax rate will China and India work on reducing their CO2 emissions?

jgraham: China has now had flat CO2 emissions for two years, and experienced a decline in overall CO2 emissions during 2025[1]. Part of this is that they're deploying way more renewables than basically any other large economy [2].They've also pivoted their industrial strategy so that basically the entire green energy sector depends on Chinese supply chains. This is significantly contributing to their economic growth [3].I don't know to what extent taxation in Europe contributed to China's decision making here, but it presumably created an market for green energy and therefore helped solidify the economics.This is of course not to say that there's nothing to criticize in China's environmental policies; there certainly is. But the trope of "why should we do anything because China won't" turns out to be spectacularly ill-informed. Indeed I think it makes more sense to ask the opposite: what are the likely consequences now that China has positioned itself as the global centre of green energy, and what should other countries be doing to ensure that they're not left behind?[1] https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-ha... [2] https://www.carbonbrief.org/g7-falling-behind-china-as-world... [3] https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-clean-energy-drove-more...

xienze: Aren’t all these developed countries voluntarily self-depopulating by way of having birth rates below replacement? Seems like the problem will sort itself out if we can resist the urge to invite the entire third world to come in and instantly raise their carbon footprint to first world levels.

adrianN: That effect is much too slow.

masklinn: > Models in the past did not attempt to account for non-anthropogenic carbon emissionsThey're literally mentioned by the first IPCC report already.

bko: > Nothing will change until developed rich countries are starting to hurt.Ironic OECD countries actually REDUCED their emissions based on a peak in 2007 and continue to do so. Not reduced as a percentage of GDP or adjusted for population growth, but reduced in absolute levels. It's all China, but I guess it's cool to blame things on developed countries.There are literally 100k deaths in Europe that can be prevented if they lifted restrictions on AC so that they can feel good about making a negligible effect on carbon emissions. So I think you have it opposite, how much pain do rich countries have to endure before they realize that their efforts are in vain.And before you say "that's because the West outsources all the dirty production to China", even trade adjusted emissions are down considerably and continue to be down.Please do some research if you're interested in this topic, it's not hard to do. Just follow the logical steps.1. What causes global warming2. Who produces most of these chemicals3. Are there any global trends over the last 20 years in production of these chemicalshttps://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissionshttps://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/europes-crusade-against-air-co...

gzread: China is some years behind our industrial development then undevelopment, and is building an entire USA of solar panels every year or whatever - can we expect them to quickly reduce emissions soon?

htx80nerd: let me guess we only have 10 more years, again?

mempko: Regarding carbon capture, it will take more energy to capture the carbon than we burned putting it up there in the first place. Alan Kay, who actually did some systems work on the environment, explained it to me that the climate system is like an upside down coke bottle. It doesn't take much energy to tip it over, but it takes a lot more to put it back up.In other words, we shouldn't have tipped it over in the first place. We may not have the energy to put things back to a habitable place.

marssaxman: The prospect that the future we're headed for will be one where the survival of civilization (and much of humanity) depends on a massive, ongoing industrial process of upper atmosphere pollution, in order to counteract the massive, ongoing industrial process of CO2 pollution we can't be arsed to rein in, leaves me feeling relieved to be mortal.

wing-_-nuts: I don't disagree. At this point, I'm thankful I never wanted kids.

nancyminusone: Don't kid yourself - we closed this one with "Won't Fix" a while ago."But what about <technology&#x2F;option>?"No. Full stop. We're not going to do it, and we're not even going to apologize for it either.All we can do now is prepare, not that I've seen a lot on this front either.

ryeights: >If we are serious about climate policy, we have to set up trade barriers proportional to greenhouse gases emissions to limit this effect.Consumption economies can incentivize production economies to emit less.

zdragnar: Depending on the tree, freshly cut wood can have anywhere from 1:3 to 2:1 ratio of water to actual wood fiber.So, unless we want to remove a massive amount of fresh water from the ecosystem, we also need to invest energy in drying out the wood well below natural humidity levels (transport to a desert maybe?) on top of electrifying what is currently a diesel and gas heavy industry (cutting and transporting logs with heavy machinery).There's definitely lower hanging fruit for getting C02 out of the cycle.

ACCount37: That's the nasty thing. It doesn't "finally collapse".The world just eats the climate costs and keeps going.There's no global catastrophe. No single moment when the magnitude of your folly is revealed to you a blinding flash. Just a slow trickle of "2% worse".

gzread: There's only so much worse things can get before the fundamentals of civilization aren't there any more. 3 meals a day from anarchy.

philipwhiuk: The people who say the Earth is flat have been "searching for papers" too.No offense, but you sound like an oil shill.

honkycat: we have had several manhattan project in the last 100 years, but they have all been for stuff like:- creating a new addictive form of entertainment we can use to brainwash people- Creating expensive data centers that MAY end up being extremely useful in the long runand never for saving the lives of the people on our planet.Humanity is doomed. We deserve it.

kakacik: Politicians, at least freely elected, are a symptom of given population at given time. Don't blame trump for trump, he made it painfully obvious to whole world who he is and who he certainly is not, sort of kudos to him for being consistent.Blame fully the people who saw all this and voted for him twice. At least if you care about root of the problems and not just venting off. I am not offering a solution to educating half of US population which clearly doesn't care about facts, or lacks any basic moral compass... I don't have a practical solution.US 'special' form of voted democracy failed and failed hard, lets see how far this gets in next 3 years and if any actual lessons learned happen afterwards (I don't hold my breath since reality doesn't behave just because it would be nice and viable time to act is gone I think).

adrianN: That unfortunately doesn’t help with ocean acidification.

loeg: So what? You still save millions of lives.

01100011: CA buying gasoline from Bermuda, shipped via the Panama Canal, because it refuses to allow new refineries is the perfect demonstration of this.

gzread: That's also kind of a pigovian tax though, right? By making gasoline more expensive they discourage its use. I guess they're chicken to make it an actual taxAlso why wouldn't it come from other US states? Seems easier

amelius: > We need to stop pursuing strategies that do not work here.We tried top down. Didn't work.We tried bottom up. Didn't work.

vorticalbox: i think the only real strategy is that people take a hit to their standard of living but i don't think anyone will sign up for that.

gedy: All those RTO commuters &#x2F;s

pcthrowaway: I suspect the reason Trump is talking about annexing Canada is because of our vast swathes of land which have historically been too cold for settlement, which are going to become much more temperate in the near-ish future.

hnfong: That explains the 300 IQ attempt on claiming Greenland.

Invictus0: absolutely nothing can be done about this

gzread: This isn't a powerful motivator to people who think they will win those wars.

jmcgough: The top three emissions sources are industry, electricity, and transportation. There have been important federal and state-wide attempts to address these, but Trump guts regulation every time he's in office. Chevron is dead, SCOTUS repeatedly rules to let big business do whatever they want, and we're now burning even more coal to meet AI energy demand.Compare this to China, where the government is aggressively promoting green energy and electric car tech.

tsunamifury: China is the number one burner of coal and other dirty fuels and only growing. This type of disingenuous analysis really sets the wrong understanding of the world.

gzread: It's also the number one producer of solar energy and growing. It's just a huge country with a lot of everything. Can we help them use more solar?

hnfong: You're arguing a hypothetical where the US stopped all emissions 100% and the rest of the world isn't doing anything.The reality is that China is aggressively pushing solar and electric vehicles, and the West is complaining about it. Meanwhile the current US president's maxim is "drill baby drill".I mean, if we don't need to stick to facts, let's discuss the hypothetical scenario where I am a powerful wizard, and when I say a magic word and I can halve the total amount of CO2 in the atmosphere?OK, now where's my Nobel peace prize dammit??

imglorp: > direct air capture is the primary escape hatchWe MUST MUST MUST stop burning things. Stop it.- We are still mining and burning coal. This is incomprehensible. US, AU, etc Eg: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nacoal.com&#x2F;our-operations- We are still subsidizing oil to around $1T&#x2F;year, not counting oil wars.Yes it will take some grid and storage upgrades (US) and continue to embrace renewables. It would be cheaper than the oil subsidy.Otherwise it doesn't make sense to put CO2 into the air with one hand and take it out with another.

karol: It's gonna be great, when it's warmer.

jcfrei: Same reply to you as the other commentator: Fully agree that not doing anything will hurt more. The hard part is finding policies that actually work without costing the lower and middle class more right now. The conservatives basically everywhere around the world are against redistribution - so they ideologically oppose anything that looks like it. At the same time if we just enact policies that limit CO2 the rich people won't really care that flying, heating, driving and some foods have gotten a bit more expensive. But the poor people will. And of the ones who would get hurt by the higher prices a lot of them are ideologically opposed to any kind of redistributing policies. So you are kind of stuck in a catch-22 for now.

gzread: An interesting policy proposal is negative tax. Basically take the carbon cap, divide by the number of people, and give the equivalent carbon tax price to each person. A person who uses exactly average carbon sees no change, while a person who uses less gets a tax rebate, and a person who uses more pays more. You can charge it at the source, tariffing oil by its carbon content and then reducing taxes by that amount for everyone.

jcfrei: Again - poor people, which:- still drive old cars with lots of CO2 emissions- live far away from their workplace- probably have a poorly isolated home with oil or gas heatingwill be the ones with higher than average emissions. And the rich people who do will just shrug at this minor extra expense. I feel like this is not mentioned enough in discussions (probably because wealth disparity is such a touchy subject) but your ability to reduce your carbon footprint is also directly tied to your wealth.

crims0n: I don't know why you are getting downvoted, you are absolutely correct: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;climate-environment&#x2F;2024&#x2F;09&#x2F;1...

baq: > major dieoffs in warm latitudes, even for humans, due to exceeding wet bulb limitsmy extremely pessimistic position is nothing will happen systemically even after the first few such events, and they'll take tens if not hundreds of thousands of lives.I hope writing this out jinxes it.

zeryx: Are you kidding? It will be Millions easily. It will just take 1 or two blackouts in wet bulb conditions to cause that

kai_mac: capitalism is going just great

MarkusQ: Dumping wet wood--even very, very wet wood in a lake and sinking it to the bottom does not "remove a massive amount of fresh water from the ecosystem". It does not remove any fresh water from the ecosystem.

daed: > Ironic OECD countries actually REDUCED their emissions based on a peak in 2007 and continue to do soAny idea what percentage of this reduction is due to offshoring manufacturing?

bko: Keep reading the comment, pretty much the same.> https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ourworldindata.org&#x2F;consumption-based-co2

philipwhiuk: > I’m of the opinion that direct air capture is the primary escape hatch we have for not hitting 3 or even 4C warming in the next 100-200 yearsWhy is it always never 'burn less fossil fuels'.Anything but the oil company bottom line huh?

culi: nobody will champion degrowth because it means less profits

thinkcontext: > Blame fully the people who saw all this and voted for him twiceThrice actually

epolanski: Which in turn are also relatively small compared to the damages of cattle and fishing.Seriously adapting our diets around being more sustainable. I'm not advocating for veganism or such, but at least to understand that eating a burger pollutes as much as driving a large vehicle for 50 miles and that maybe we can substitute that with poultry or eggs or cheese many times.

pjmlp: What about putting trees down for soya fields?

alex_young: Animal agriculture is around 15% of global emissions, and AI is probably .1% to .5%, but sure, stop using LLMs. That will solve the problem.

pjmlp: Indeed lets tear down forests to build soya fields for all that fake meat tofu.

kergonath: Please remember that we are not talking about stopping climate-related policies. The point here is climate-related science. And even if you are an arch-conservative and you assume (despite all observations) that you can do fuck all about it, knowing how things are going to be is very useful if you intend to survive, never mind thrive.

dontwearitout: Chapter 1 of "The Ministry of the Future" describes a fictional wet bulb event. It's grisly and horrific and I highly recommend you read this chapter, it changed my view on climate change.https:&#x2F;&#x2F;books.rockslide.ca&#x2F;read&#x2F;780&#x2F;epub#epubcfi(&#x2F;6&#x2F;14!&#x2F;4&#x2F;2&#x2F;...

marcyb5st: Thank you. I will

tencentshill: Milankovitch cycles? What time frame? Did humans live in the same areas during that time? At -4C cooler new york city was under 2000 feet of ice. +4C would be devastating for most of humanity.

wing-_-nuts: We could cease burning all fossil fuels tomorrow and we'd still have to resort to geoengineering. Read the IPCC projections. All of the ones that keep us below 3c require 'negative emissions'. That's code for DAC, a technology that we've only ever deployed to small pilot projects, deployed more widely, more quickly, than we've deployed any technology ever.TLDR: We're gonna have to use sulfate injection until we can transition our economy

stainablesteel: this strangely self-hating and suicidal message has been spread for decades now, this falls along the same kinds of thinking as blood grudges and blood wars.we don't need to adopt this form of thinking at all, no one is owed anything.

bigattichouse: I'm hoping the current oil-war will cause people to re-assess fossil fuel use as expense becomes untenable and we start choosing electric vehicles and renewables.. which will just become "normal" and oil can stick around for synthetic chemistry routes.

adrian_b: Whether there will be a global catastrophe or not, is unknown yet and unpredictable.There are many mechanisms of positive feedback that can accelerate global warming instead of just reaching an equilibrium at a higher average temperature than now.If some of those mechanisms of positive feedback would be triggered, a global catastrophe would be possible, due to excessive speed of the climate change, which does not give enough time for the biosphere to adapt to it.

krd8ssb: To add to this, no matter what countries do, we can make our local environments nicer to live in by reducing pollution but across the globe, solar activity has exponentially more, and the ultimate impact. With the magnetic field weakening, it's going to continue going in this direction as it has throughout history.I'm not saying we shouldn't do what we can to make our local environment better and protect and Preserve what we have. We absolutely should. I'm just stating that this is not the first time the Earth has heated or cooled and nothing that we do will ultimately stop it from this cycle from continuing.

dcchambers: There's literally nothing that can be done about it. The people with actual ability to make a change don't care.We're going to have to figure out how to adapt to it. Expect many of the things you love now (seafood, coffee, etc) to be gone within your lifetime.

deaux: > (of course that isn't the only reason, but it's one of many).This is disingenuous. It's one of many in that it may have contributed 0.0001%. If they wouldn't have done that, would they currently have more power? Absolutely not, believing otherwise means being clueless about what has motivated people to vote in certain ways.

abustamam: > The pain will come slowly, people won't see it.I'd argue that many lower and middle class folks already feel the effects of GW, even if they may not be able to articulate it. The flip side is that developed rich countries will hurt because of this but the people in power won't care because it probably only (visibly) affects the lower class, and they can always take their jets and rockets to countries (and eventually planets!) that haven't been fucked.And they'll spin it to blame it on immigrants somehow.

zargon: Yes. And if we don't also stop burning fossil fuels then we'll never even break even.

PowerElectronix: And yet the minimum extension of artic ice ever recorded was in 2014.I think there are more effects to account for when extrapolating measured temperatures, mostly made on the ground with cataclismic effects. After all, all the carbon being emitted nowadays was in the biosphere back in the days. Why couldn't it return back to it without the earth becoming inhabitable?

culi: The research isn't there. Jury is still out on whether the long term consequences are a net benefit. In the end you're talking about increasing emissions for a temporary decrease in temperatures. And the chemicals we have that are good candidates for albedo modification are quite toxic. Today more than 10% of deaths globally can already be attributed to air quality

pfdietz: If India is experiencing large scale mortality from warming, they aren't going to give a damn about your concerns. They're just going to inject aerosols into the stratosphere.

culi: India especially is experiencing many more deaths from air quality than from warming

therealdrag0: You don’t think weather is explainable, or?

newsoftheday: > See the wildfires across North AmericaI asked Gemini, "How long have wildfires across North America happened and are they truly any worse now?""Wildfires have occurred across North America for millions of years, predating humans entirely." It also had some very detailed information backing that up.I then asked, "Were any of those fires in the past 20 years started by arsonists?""Yes, arson is a significant factor in North American wildfires, though it is often overshadowed by accidental human causes (like downed power lines or unattended campfires) and natural causes like lightning."

islandfox100: Well if Gemini says fires have existed, that's enough proof!!!!

deaux: > What have you done?Made a shitload of sacrifices, how about you?

jedberg: There's nothing you as an individual can do, or even a small group of individuals. This is where government is supposed to work. Using its power to force everyone to do something for the collective good that isn't profitable.Almost all emissions come from factories. There are only two ways to reduce that -- a global set of rules that increases costs to reduce emissions, and an overall reduction in consumption, via a carbon tax.

bryanlarsen: > Almost all emissions come from factories.industry, electricity and home use (heating & A&#x2F;C mostly) are all roughly 30% of emissions.But I agree with you about solutions. The market will quickly bankrupt any companies that induce extra costs to decarbonify. It's the governments job to ensure that externalized costs like CO2 emissions are internalized via carbon taxes.

patwater10: Look at the Colorado River situation to see how it's affected the US already. Now that hasn't really impacted consumers per say other than through indirect water conservation and higher consumer grocery prices (slightly not a primary driver on the latter). But it's a massive deal that will ripple out more and more in the coming years.

bko: I thought the world and civilization would collapse because of carbon emissions. It's either serious or it's not. If it's serious then it doesn't really matter right?It's like you're on a boat that sprung a leak and everyone grabs a bucket. But a few people choose to not help because it's not fair for whatever reason.

thfuran: What?

bko: The point is that China is the only thing that matters at this point. It's a lot bigger, has surpassed OECD and is growing quickly. Every decline of emissions by developed countries is more than made up for by growing China emissions

islandfox100: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.carbonbrief.org&#x2F;analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-ha...Chinese emissions have peaked and are now falling.

mbgerring: The only extant “X-risk” is, and always has been, climate change. “AGI” is science fiction, and actually-existing AI is making climate change harder to deal with, by increasing electricity demand on our fossil-fuel-powered grid with no attendant increase in clean generation.Serious engineers need to stop whatever they’re doing and work on this problem.Also, if you’re hiring: I’m an expert on the U.S. regulated utility industry, demand management, and solar & battery system design, fabrication and deployment.

deaux: > The hard part is finding policies that actually work without costing the lower and middle class more right nowYou imprison the current administration for treason, seize their ill-gotten gains and there you go, hundreds of billions of dollars.It's absolutely trivial. There's just a group of people that doesn't want it.Simultaneously institute an inheritance tax as well as an exit tax of 90% of assets above $1+ billion, at time of death or leaving. That's a cool $1+ trillion in revenue for the next few decades. Both exit taxes and inheritance taxes are very established and work fine in plenty of countries, FYI. Not like yearly wealth taxes that are always criticized as not working or untested.It's trivial to come up with policies that don't hurt the lower nor the middle class. Laughably easy. There's however a group of people that are blocking them. Those people are the problem and they need to be removed to get closer to preventing then oncoming extinction event (which has complete scientific consesus). These policies work, and what needa to be done is removing of their blockers.

nairoz: And don't fly

pinkmuffinere: My impression is that flying on a commercial plane produces less CO2 than driving? So if your only options are drive vs fly, I think flying is the correct choice -- is that right?

zaken: It's about 60 mpg per passenger to fly domestically and 90 mpg per passenger to fly internationally.If you have a family of 4, you can think of it as the equivalent of a 15 mpg vehicle for domestic flight and 22 mpg vehicle for international flight. So somewhere in the range of a full-size pickup truck.But -- when you fly, you go very far. If you go on vacation to Hawaii from San Francisco once a year with your family, that's the equivalent of driving a Ford F-150 for 5000 miles. If you visit India or China that's 15,000 Ford F-150 miles! In a single trip, more than what most people drive in an entire year!So you can make a big difference just preferring local vacations instead of remote ones.

zdragnar: Sinking wood into a lake won't remove the carbon unless you have a very deep lake, and you'd need many, many of them to have any impact on the CO2 levels whatsoever. The scale of wood that would need to be harvested is far beyond dropping some logs in a lake.They need to go into a deep enough pit where the methane produced from anerobic breakdown won't reach the atmosphere.The conditions that created the lignite coal and peat simply aren't that easily reproducible, especially with large volume of wood (rather than ferns over thousands and millions of years).

HappyPanacea: > There are literally 100k deaths in Europe that can be prevented if they lifted restrictions on AC so that they can feel good about making a negligible effect on carbon emissions.What restrictions are there on AC?

bko: Several EU countries have mandatory temperature limits for air conditioning in public buildings. Spain, Italy, and Greece have all announced that A&#x2F;C in public buildings cannot be set lower than 27C (80F) in summer Some exceptions allow up to 25C like restaurants and some work places.The EU's F-Gas Regulation creates significant restrictions on refrigerants used in air conditioningThere's significant red tape when installing AC due to building regulations90% of US homes have AC while only 20% of European homes have it, I don't think that's by accident.Fun fact, some EU countries even have laws telling you how much you can open your windows! In the UK, there is a law that in any public building, windows must not open more than 100mm (about 4 inches).

peab: they continue to build more solar, more wind, but also more coal power plants.

bschwarz: [delayed]

post-it: Reducing sunlight to the surface means we lose solar power effectiveness and we need to use more power for artificial lighting to grow plants.

altruios: Most of the surface of the earth is covered with water...What if we cover the ice caps, and cover parts of the ocean instead of messing with grow cycles of plants on land...No reduction in solar power, no artificial lights to grow plants. What effects might that have on ocean life? (below a certain depth - probably nothing, so surface ocean life is what we need to look at).Just my two cents... we got plenty of surface area we can cover and potentially not affect much at all for day to day for animals, plants, and humans.

post-it: Plankton in the ocean produce our oxygen via photosynthesis.

ACCount37: There is not enough "positive feedback" going around in the system to do anything of the sort.Plenty of feedback mechanisms were proposed, investigated, and found lacking. It's a "makes climate change 10% worse than it would otherwise have been" kind of thing, not a "makes climate change 1000% worse than it would otherwise have been" kind of thing.

jedberg: It's definitely more than .0001%. Look at the campaigns. How much time did the GOP spend harping on windmills and solar subsidies and "clean coal". Calling out democrats for trying to make the environment better at extra cost to US citizens was a huge part of their campaign.

deaux: I expected you to say this, but hoped you wouldn't. Of course I know they talk about it. GOP campaigns say and do a lot of things, there's dozens of topics they shout about. From Benghazi to Hillary's Emails to gender-neutral emails to immigrants to indeed coal&#x2F;renewables and so on. You could easily name 30 topics.The topics have different purposes. Fossil fuels vs renewables in particular hasn't won the reps a single race, I repeat. Every race they've won, they would've won without it. And every race they've lost, they would've lost without it. The purpose of bringing up that particular topic for them isn't to help win close races.

tsoukase: Stop burning fuel now will return us centuries in past. I suppose to about 1700, 20 years ago it would return us to 1500. Then a handful of people had heating in their homes and a horse to travel. This will happen again if we stop burning now.

gethly: fuuuuuuuuck oooooofffff

bojan: Why not both? Encourage cycling when possible, and when not, an EV.Looking at American commute distances however, cycling, even with an e-bike, is likely not a reasonable option.

bdangubic: The issue is not just commute distances, it is cultural. Just in my personal "click" there are 5 people of which:- 2 live less than 5 minutes from a metro that literally takes them to the office, they never take the metro- 2 live easily within a biking distance to work, 1 has a bike, another has e-bike, they never bike to work- 1 lives literally walking distance to work, she never walks to workPublic transportation where I live is vast, you can easily commute with the public transportation to just about everywhere but only low(er) income people will take public transportation.Two most-frequently cited reasons I hear why not bike&#x2F;walk&#x2F;...1. Dangerous - every female friend I have lists this as #1 reason they always drive. Regardless of the fact that I live in the area where I often forget to close my garage overnight and leave the front door open (very very low crime rates) the women feel unsafe. A lot of sensationalism in the news regarding every minor thing happening might be to blame but I have a wife and a daughter and am godfather to several girls so I understand2. Inconvenient - what if after work I want to go to ____ and ____ and ____. Now I got to track back home and then perhaps change clothes, clean the house... and then get into the car to go to _____.

muwtyhg: Because from a human perspective, it doesn't matter. The planet used to be a ball of molten rock at one point, it doesn't mean we should shrug our shoulders at the thought of it returning to a molten state. It may be "natural" but it's not suitable for humans.

p_j_w: >a few neurons probably don't have conscienceGiven our piss poor understanding of consciousness, I have to ask: on what grounds do you make this claim?

jmcgough: Over the past century, the US has produced more cumulative carbon emissions than any other country, and it's not even close.China is in the middle of a massive expansion in wind, solar, and electric vehicles. The US is burning even more coal to support AI, and has gutted much of its federal emission reduction efforts.

marcosdumay: This changed on the last decade or so. It's close now.Of course, China has 5 times more people than the US, so they get a little bit of leeway. But they are close, and their emissions are growing.That said, yes, they are investing more than anybody else. And they are improving the technology we need more than anybody else. People talking about military intervention are full of shit, but we could use some diplomatic collaboration.

jimnotgym: > and their emissions are growing.I know nothing about it. I have read comments on this very comments section, with references, that say China's emissions are not growing. This is what makes this subject so hard for the average numbskull like me, so much misinformation.

fortedoesnthack: it depends where you live... I live in Japan now. One comment I hear often and see reflected in old TV shows is how different summers are already. 20-25 years ago it would have been considered a hot summer day around 30c.Now every summer day is 30c+.Also, a comment I hear often is that people didn't really need air conditioners back then. You definitely cannot get away with living in Tokyo without an air conditioners these days!

_whiteCaps_: Same thing here in Vancouver. I took a picture of my car's dash display reading 43*C during the heat dome in 2021!

O5vYtytb: Fair? Maybe not, but IMO it doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is gross emissions. The effects of a warming planet will not be fair. We should be looking to reduce&#x2F;eliminate emissions wherever they are happening.

vrganj: China's actively fixing the problem. [0]Why aren't we?[0] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;world&#x2F;2025&#x2F;nov&#x2F;11&#x2F;china-co2-emis...

LegionMammal978: U.S. and EU CO₂ emissions have been actively dropping for the last 20 years [0]. (Of course, it's different question how quickly they ought to be dropping.)[0] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ourworldindata.org&#x2F;grapher&#x2F;annual-co2-emissions-per-...

maxglute: Euro intransience about AC is confusing.As for PRC, they brrrted out enough solar last year to replace about 40 billion barrels of oil over their life time, or about annual global consumption of oil @100m barrels per day. They have enough renewable manufacturing capacity to displace global oil, lng and good chunks of coal.PRC is basically manufacturing the largest carbon displacement, i.e. emission avoidance system in the world, and if not for them, global fossil consumption would double.It's even more retarded accounting that taxes PRC manufacturing renewables as generation emissions while fossils extractors, i.e. US whose massively increased oil&#x2F;lng exports do not count towards US emissions.At the end of the day, PRC's balance of emissions vs how much they displace via renewable manufacturing makes their emission contribution net negative, by a large margin. OCED countries reducing their emissions don't even compare in terms of contribution, it's borderline performative. OCED need to be reducing emissions and generating equivalent displacement to be net negative. It doesn't have to be domestic net negative, simply export&#x2F;fund enough renewables to developing countries whose power consumption and downstream emissions will increase by magnitudes... you know subsidize them like OECD was suppose to do. Reality is rich countries don't want to do shit about the "global" emission problem, at least PRC selling renewables at commodity pricing to displace velocity of fossil consumption increase. Ultimately, 4 billion developing people going to 100x their energy consumption, which like AC is net moral good over net emissions. The real battle is how to keep new power use as emission free as possible, and only PRC is doing that in numbers that matter.

myrmidon: > It's all China, but I guess it's cool to blame things on developed countries.This is just a naive take. You'd obviously expect chinese emissions to be higher (than the US) assuming similar industrialization, because you are counting emissions for like triple the amount of people.What you conveniently fail to mention: US citizens still emit over 50% more CO2 each, and China basically just caught up to emission levels of developed countries (EU, Japan), while still being significantly below US levels. High income countries combined still emit more than China, too (richest ~15% globally).If your argument would make any sense, then the obvious solution would be to split China into 3 countries, making the emissions instantly negligible compared to the EU&#x2F;US. Problem solved?!There is no reality where we make good progress toward climate change without the "main culprits" (=> nations with highest historical and per-capita emissions) making the first steps.Why would a country like India pay&#x2F;sacrifice to reduce emissions while western citizens still pollute at much higher levels after reaping all the spoils from historical pollution?You could argue that wind&#x2F;solar is a huge success story in this regard already, with western nations driving lots of the research&#x2F;development&#x2F;commercialization efforts (over the previous decades) and now indirectly causing much bigger nations like China to transition onto those very quickly instead of basically fully relying on fossils for decades to come.

cataphract: > Why would a country like India pay&#x2F;sacrifice to reduce emissions while western citizens still pollute at much higher levels after reaping all the spoils from historical pollution?To avoid their country having large regions become uninhabitable?

chneu: Really AI is a drop in the bucket compared to other things. Beef and dairy take up an incredible amount of water, land, and energy but we don't complain about that.AI could lead to massive savings and improvements in terms of emissions and climate change. AI could possibly help us out of this.Beef and dairy have no chance of helping us. They'll kill us and the beef nuts will say how they saved 4% of emissions by moving some cows around. Problem solved.

tdb7893: I remember a couple years ago my family was worried about the Amazon burning and I was like "well, you could eat less beef as that's driving a lot of that in Brazil". Turns out they didn't care that much. With how generally hippie my family is it really made me realize how absolutely screwed we are ecologically.There's a reason bird populations are down 30% in my parents' lifetimes (https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.audubon.org&#x2F;press-room&#x2F;us-bird-populations-conti...) and I don't think my generation is going to do much better.

epistasis: A year ago, the IEA thought China's emissions had peaked:https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reuters.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;energy&#x2F;chinas-fuel-demand-m...And this recent assessment puts emissions at "flat or falling" for the past 21 months:https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.carbonbrief.org&#x2F;analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-ha...

fjwater: I don't think it's fair to look only at gross emissions by country. How can we demand that India drastically cut its emissions when its per capita output is already so low? Forcing reductions there effectively caps their living standards while developed nations continue to enjoy the benefits of much higher individual carbon footprints.

stfp: Anecdotally, as I spend time between the US and the EU, the divide is large and clear now. It feels like folks in the US sort of just gave up (me included to an extent), whereas in Europe there seems to be a stronger resolve at a personal level and institutional level, to keep reducing energy use, plastics, driving, waste, etc. The US on the other hand is accelerating overconsumption in all directions.It's especially depressing for me when it comes to younger folks. In Seattle where I live (not the suburbs, actual Seattle) some teenagers drive to school in 6 seater SUVs and spend their lunch time in there, with the engine on. A minority of students of course but that's still a mindfuck... in Europe they would get so much shit from other kids and neighbors. Drop in the bucket in terms of actual emissions but a very strong symbol of the lack of awareness&#x2F;motivation.

ActorNightly: The individual contributions from emissions are much smaller than industrial scale emissions. People can still do what you describe if we magically move all power production to solar&#x2F;nuclear, and move to cleaner airplanes, and things would be headed in the right direction global warming wise.

BikiniPrince: That’s a reach and a half. Did you practice they in a mirror? You can’t argue at scale so you blame the individual for not living in a hut. Nice try.

adrian_b: Such claims are ridiculous. Nobody needs burning fuel. Everybody just needs energy and it does not matter which is its source.If enough energy is produced by other means than burning fossil fuel, nobody will return to the past.I happen to be one of those who does not use directly any kind of energy, except electrical. Despite the fact that I am still connected to methane gas distribution, I have never burned it for already around a decade. (And unlike most, I cook myself from raw ingredients everything that I eat, but I stopped using flames for that many years ago.)If burning fossil fuel would stop completely right now, that would not affect me at all, much less would return me centuries in the past, as long as the electrical energy supplier has enough sources in its hydroelectric, solar, wind and nuclear plants, all of which are abundant where I live.

myrmidon: Even for a giant country like India you control <20% of global population, and you are responsible for much less than 20% of the effect (climate change).So why would India take more expensive and painful steps than say, the US or EU, or Japan? India both indisputably affects and controls climate change less then the US or EU, so why would they put in completely outsized amounts of effort to fight it?

epistasis: The energy situation is actually changing very quickly precisely because renewables and storage are so cheap. Building a new natural gas plant today is really hard to justify in most places in the world.Capitalism will actually save the day, because a bunch of capitalists advanced renewable technology to the point where it was cheap.The biggest impediment to change right now is actually political interference in deployment of cheaper renewables. You see this all across the US both in intentional and unintentional ways. Trump explicitly cancels permits for wind, tries to ban solar on federal lands, and forces coal plants to keep running even when they are super expensive and raise the cost electricity.Unintentional political impediments are also endemic in the US; permitting and interconnection of residential solar makes it 5x-6x more expensive than places like Australia, even in places like California that should be accelerating residential solar and storage.There's a lot to be hopeful about when it comes to climate change, in addition a lot to be scared about.

M95D: > Capitalism will actually save the day, because a bunch of capitalists advanced renewable technology to the point where it was cheap.That "bunch of capitalists"... why are you avoiding the true word: "China"?

epistasis: That's not the true word though, is it? It's an effort of capitalists the world over. And crucially, German government incentives when solar was still very expensive.

squibonpig: Are you a climate change doesn't matter guy or a china is the climate change causer guy? You can't do both at once.

bko: I'm pointing out the hypocrisy and the focus people have on developed countries is just signaling. A weird anti-west sentiment from people who almost exclusively live a wealthy life in the west.I'm not an expert, but from what I have read I believe humans do have an effect on climate. However this doesn't mean that any draconian measure that would essentially impose one world government and population control (which is the inevitable outcome of all of this) is preferable. But more importantly I'm anti stupid measures like restricting air-conditioning because they make a negligible impact and literally kill 100k+ people a year.

lukeschlather: China has roughly .4 AC units per person while the USA has roughly 1 AC unit per person. You are simultaneously arguing everyone should have an AC, and that China should stop expanding their usage of AC.I'd argue everyone should have an AC if they need one (probably China needs more than they have.) But we shouldn't build any more fossil fuel extraction, people who need AC should figure out how to do it with batteries and renewable energy. (Nuclear is fine, if it makes sense economically.) We don't need population control, we just need to add sufficiently large taxes on things we want less of. AC isn't a thing we want less of, it's carbon emissions.

exceptione: Don't do the AC thing, it is a stupid trope under blogfluencers. There are no restrictions (beside positioning the outer unit in such a way that you don't cause your neighbors to lose sleep). As the summers get more extreme in Europe, more residents decide getting one is starting to pay off, so you see more AC's, but many people think they are doing fine without.

cataphract: Yeah, never heard of such a thing. The restrictions are placing the units in common areas of the buildings -- in that case you need permission -- and external walls are usually common parts. Placing them in the façade may have additional restrictions.But, if anything, energy efficiency standards for new construction are so strict that heat is becoming less of a problem.

crystal_revenge: This is why it's clear we will never do anything to slow the progression of climate change.By far the most effective an immediate solution to limiting the damage of climate change is to simply to keep fossil fuels in the ground.People talk about the economic pain of doing this, but that economic pain is nothing compared to the impact of unmitigated climate change.Even though this would be painful, it is also by far the easiest and fastest to implement solution. It would take fantastically more time and resources to scale up direct air capture (even if it existed in a scalable format today) to come anywhere near addressing this problem.> Yes it will take some grid and storage upgrades (US) and continue to embrace renewablesThis is not exactly true, we would have to experience global economic collapse in order to reduce our fossil fuel use. 80% of energy is not spent on electricity globally and this is non-electricity usage is where most of the fossil fuels are consumed and this drives most of the global economy. There's a good reason there are multiple wars being fought over for oil.

Liftyee: The economic pain is current. The impact of unmitigated climate change will happen in the future. Thus, the ingrained short-term thinking of the markets and politicians makes this sort of planning ahead difficult.It seems like the whole economic system runs on a quarterly time scale - just look at all the times negligent maintenance to improve profits in the short term have caused disasters in the long term.Not sure what the solution is though, so I won't complain too much.

small_model: "Preprints and early-stage research may not have been peer reviewed yet."I have a paper that says Global Warming is not real (Also not peer reviewed)

jacquesm: Are you going for a record in bad takes? Your account is a month old and yet I recognize it on sight for the bs takes. Try a bit harder please.

small_model: My point is until it's peer reviewed it offers no value. Do you know how many papers are published that don't pass peer review?

jacquesm: > My point is until it's peer reviewed it offers no value.That's just your opinion.It clearly has some value, whether or not it will have even more remains to be seen.

9rx: > - Climate change is causing increasingly worse turbulence for airplanesCutting out air travel is the single most accessible and impactful thing an individual can do with respect to climate change. You can stop turbulence from getting worse, but since you won't be flying in the first place...

crystal_revenge: > Ironic OECD countries actually REDUCED their emissions based on a peak in 2007 and continue to do so.Our economies are built on oil burning somewhere else in the world. You can try to point the blame at China, but the wealth generated in the middle east selling them oil is a major part of the reason why US stock markets keep going up.If you forced China to use less fossil fuels you would personally feel a much larger hit to your quality of life.We in the developed world love to outsource the violence and environmental damage we cause. It's one thing to wash your hands, but quite another to then try to point the finger.

Retric: > If you forced China to use less fossil fuels you would personally feel a much larger hit to your quality of life.America imports more from Mexico, Canada, and the EU than China which ranks as #4 when you consider EU as a single entity. https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_the_largest_trading_pa...Imports from China are a small fraction of GDP and offset by exports to other countries. OECD countries are largely exporting labor not the kind of heavy industry associated with heavy CO2 emissions. Which makes sense as China has relatively cheap labor, but they don’t get a discount on Oil.

crystal_revenge: > Mexico, Canada, and the EUDo you want to take a wild guess as to which country is a top 3 importer to all of these countries&#x2F;regions?Here's a clue: it's the same country that is a major exporter of oil from GCC countries, and the wealth from those GCC countries is a major contributor of investment to US industry&#x2F;financial sector.The correct answer, is of course: ChinaThe global is economy is very tightly interconnected and still very much driven by oil and fossil fuels in general. You can do all the accounting tricks you want, but developed Western lifestyles, especially in the US, are entirely supported and made possible by growing global fossil fuel usage.

Retric: > Do you want to take a wild guess as to which country is a top 3 importer to all of these countries&#x2F;regions?Canada imports 377 Billion from America and only 88 Billion from China. https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_the_largest_trading_pa...So you clearly don’t actually understand global trade if you think being top 3 trading partner somehow drastically changes the equation here.

ActorNightly: Its not that.Basically, on the average, people don't have ability to think rationally into the future. Most people think only 1 level of cause and effect.Right now, for the vast majority of people, global warming isn't a problem when your house has AC, your car has AC, your workplace has AC. When you are forced to do things that you see no direct effect of, it makes it seem less important, and its a self reinforcing cycle where you see other people not doing it and you wonder why you have to make your life harder.People will start caring only when their direct lives are affected. So unfortunately, the only way to fix global warming is to let it get bad enough to where there is enough death and destruction for people to start paying attention.

triceratops: To deniers both arguments are valid - just use whichever one is more convincing to the person you're talking to. The objective is continue using fossil fuels no matter what.

triceratops: > can we expect [China] to quickly reduce emissions soon?They did, last year.

rcMgD2BwE72F: What did we even try? We did talk a lot though.

crystal_revenge: > the ingrained short-term thinking of the markets and politiciansHonestly, if we made even a step towards the changes necessary to limit the current damage most of HN readership, especially the "green" ones that don't seem to understand global energy usage, would be revolting as well.The pandemic was a great example of what this would look like as a first step. If we even cared a tiny bit about slowing climate change, there would have been at least some amount of people voicing that we should actually continue to follow early pandemic economic restrictions since it did impact global oil usage.I pointed this out pretty frequently at the time and was nearly always down voted for it. People want "green" to mean "buying the right thing", they don't want "green" to mean "slicing my annual pay to 1&#x2F;3, never using Amazon or large retail company to purchase thing, no fruit in the winter, and expensive locally woven clothes".

reducesuffering: The only extant “X-risk” is, and always has been, economic collapse due to loss of energy. “Climate Change” is science fiction.&#x2F;sIt amazes me climate change X-riskers scoff at denialists and then do the exact same denialism with AGI. How many leading AI scientists (like climate science) would it take to convince you?"Our great religion, their primitive superstition"[0][0] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;EELDM6m

bko: I can easily google restrictions and share them, and I have in other comments but let me throw it back at you.Why do 90% of Americans have AC while only 20% of Europeans do?Why does US have ~4 heat related deaths per million while Europe has ~235 per million?Do you think it's just stupidity (Europeans don't know the relationship between heat and AC)? Or poverty? Any other explanation?https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.un.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;story&#x2F;2024&#x2F;08&#x2F;1152766

sofixa: Most of Europe simply doesn't need an AC. Spain, south of Italy, south of France, parts of the Balkans. But in countries like UK, the Nordics, Germany, etc. you'd need something more than "open windows" for mere days of the year, if that. The people who live in the places that need AC usually have AC. It's actually pretty damn simple.

ViewTrick1002: > Why do 90% of Americans have AC while only 20% of Europeans do?Because Rome is further north than New York and Paris is just south of Ottawa&#x2F;Montreal.

ceejayoz: Raw latitude hardly tells the entire story.

shashurup: To be honest, looking at Paleogene climate reconstruction I believe it was the best time in earth history. The way things go shows us that all attempts to resist burning fossils are quite futile. It takes some kind of catastrophe to change people habits. The level of coordination required to achive the goal of lowering emissions looks unachievable to humanity. We have enough time to adapt, adaptation is more reasonable and pragmatic approach.

adrian_b: During the Paleogene, the terrestrial plants and animals were very different from those of today.Now on all continents and islands most of the big animals and plants are humans, domestic animals and cultivated plants. The wild animals and plants, even if they are much more varied, with many thousands times more species than the domestic ones, are much smaller in quantities, with only a few kinds that are non-negligible, e.g. ants, termites, rodents.So if we will return in a short time to the Paleogene climate, the main question is how this will affect the few dominant animal species, like chicken, humans, pigs, sheep, cattle, dogs and the main cultivated plants, all of which are not adapted to a Paleogene climate and which will not be able to adapt in such a short time.It is likely that places like Canada, Alaska, Greenland, Siberia, Antarctica might become nicer places where to live and practice agriculture, but the few people who live now there would not welcome invaders coming from places that are no longer habitable.

reitzensteinm: Nah, the analogy for your argument is:Two Americans and ten Chinese are on a lifeboat. The Americans are each eating two sandwiches a day and the Chinese are eating one. Supplies are low. You do the math and note that the Chinese sure are eating a lot of sandwiches.

AnthonyMouse: > US citizens still emit over 50% more CO2 eachThe problem the US has per-capita is lower population density. The majority of the US population lives in suburban or rural areas without mass transit and changing that on the relevant timescale is not feasible. It also has major population centers in areas that experience winter and thereby have higher energy costs for heating, exacerbated by the lower population density (more square feet of indoor space to heat per capita), with the same infeasible timescale for changing that.As a result, the only way to fix it is to switch to other forms of energy rather than having any real hope of significantly reducing consumption in terms of GWh. Use more electric cars and hybrids, generate electricity using solar, wind and nuclear, switch from fossil fuels to electric heat pumps for heating, etc. But that's largely what's happening. The percentage of hybrid vehicles goes up, despite Trump's posturing nobody actually wants coal, ~100% of net new generation capacity in recent years is solar and wind and even when new natural gas plants are built, they're displacing old coal fired ones, which results in a net reduction in CO2. It would be nice if this would happen faster, but at least the number is going in the right direction.The problem China has is that they've been building brand new coal fired power plants at scale. WTF.

bdangubic: You listed out a whole lot of excuses for America, suburbia this, heating that, etc etc, etc...Now an assignment - you are Chinese and you have 1.5bn people in your country, lets hear it? You think you can't reasonably list 100x "excuses" for their "issues" and "reasons" for CO2 consumption?They are working a lot harder than pretty much all other countries combined to usher in renewables and many other things while we elect people who don't know what wind is&#x2F;does and stare at the Sun during the eclipse.

AnthonyMouse: What excuse actually is there for building new coal plants instead of directing the same labor to building more nuclear or renewable generation? There is no reason to build coal, Trump is a fool for proposing it but China have been the ones actually doing it.

iknowstuff: You’ve been misinformed. Yes solar activity fluctuates. Human induced climate change is still real and affecting temperatures much more rapidly.

crystal_revenge: I think you're missing the point. A large part of the things we import from those countries indirectly come from China, so it's disingenuous to claim that China is not a major contributor to the US economy based solely on what we import directly from them.For example the US's top product imported from Mexico are vehicles, electrical equipment and machinery. But those things are assembled from parts produced in China. So if you reduce China's use of energy you not only impact the direct trade that we benefit from but also the indirect trade.And you still haven't addressed the way the global financial system is so tightly interconnected. GCC countries invest an estimated $1 trillion in the US, but a large chunk of that wealth comes from oil being sold to Asia, with China being one of the major purchasers.The point stands that you can't meaningfully disconnect US energy usage from Chinese energy usage. If, for example, we were to stop GCC export to China (and not sell that oil in order to fight climate change) the US economy would ultimately collapse (this is in fact one of the major strategic levers that Iran has right now).

ToucanLoucan: > (and eventually planets!)This particular point is remarkably optimistic on the part of our ruling elites who genuinely seem to think they'll be abandoning Earth like the Titanic and running off to Mars or whatever. I wonder if it's just wishful thinking or if they genuinely believe living off-terra would be a luxury experience, and not what it far more likely would be, which is hurtling through a void separated from instant death by nothing more than sheet metal, and after months of that, living inside a specially pressurized biosphere on an alien world that is, at all times, trying to kill them. And is almost guaranteed to succeed if nothing else by attrition.I wonder if any will think as they prepare to die whichever death comes to them first that maybe just paying taxes and not having a private jet wasn't that steep of an ask after all.

abustamam: Lol. Yeah I actually hope they aren't serious about it and are just using it as an excuse to send things to space because it's cool. Because I do not foresee us colonizing Mars in our lifetimes. I'd be happy for them to test the waters for us though.

Qiu_Zhanxuan: This is All on the US

timmg: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ourworldindata.org&#x2F;grapher&#x2F;annual-co2-emissions-per-...

morphle: > We MUST MUST stop burning things.Yes, we must. It is so rare to see someone saying this in public. Thank you for this simple clarity.Stop burning everything! Fossil fuel, wood, plastic, garbage.We only need solar energy at 1 dollarcent or eurocent and a little batteries for the convenience of using electricity when the sun does not shine.In the north snd south you need more solar panels in the winter than in the summer by a factor of 50. But that pays it back in summer when you have a squanderable abundance of free and clean energy. We can store that surplus energy in purifying drinking water, melting iron ore or aluminum, melting plastics or silicon ingots.Storing surplus heat or cold in the ground is another luxury, because it is more expensive than 1 dollarcent or eurocent solar.Wind and hydro are also more costly than solar so they are another luxury with worse environmental costs than pure solar cells.We need to build Enernet, a peer to peer electricity net and internet between all buildings with power routers. for around 100 dollar per building. You buy and sell your house surplus solar electricity to the neighborhood where it can be stored in car batteries. See my Fiberhood white paper [2].[1] Enernet: Squanderable abundance of free and clean energy - Bob Metcalfe https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;axfsqdpHVFU?t=1565[2] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.researchgate.net&#x2F;profile&#x2F;Merik-Voswinkel&#x2F;publica...

reducesuffering: > Stop burning everything! Fossil fuel, wood, plastic, garbage.I don't understand the wood argument. Isn't it widely accepted we need to do burns to manage forests? Wood is a short-term cycle of carbon. It releases when it burns but frees up space to capture it right after. When people live on rural plots and trees fall, should they burn for heat (and lessen needing other energy sources) or let it decompose and cause the same thing? It's not the same as extracting deeply embedded carbon sources that won't make it to the atmosphere if untouched (fossil fuels)

morphle: Wood and plant burning requires a longer nuanced answer than the Hacker News format allows. Humanity must not cut forests or grow plants unnecessarily. If you must use wood to build a house -(there are better and cheaper materials in terms of energy and climate change enhancing emissions, see for examples Amory Lovins book Reinventing Fire or his lectures on Youtube) - then first grow those trees in a place that has no natural forest. And then do not burn the wood after you demolish the house. Do not use wood from forest, humans should let the forest manage itself.Same with clearing the underbush of Meditaranian and hotter climate forest to prevent forest fires. If humanity had not managed those forest (grazing animals, building roads, harvesting) in the first place than there would have been no buildup of excess material that sustain wildfires past its natural rate.

t0bia_s: To alarmists both arguments are valid - just use whichever one is more convincing to the person you're talking to. The objective is stop using fossil fuels no matter what.Im not sure what is this type of debate good for.

ActorNightly: I really wanna know the kind of person you are that thinks that Trump makes logical decisions.

pcthrowaway: I didn't say it was logical, I said there was some kind of rationale.

kristopolous: American here, you're correct.

M95D: I can't say anything about the German gov. I don't live there and I have no info. But I wouldn't call bureaucrats "capitalists" either.

shashurup: I don't see that everything except Canada, Alaska, Greenland, Siberia and Antarctica was inhabitable. For instance in Eocene the climate remained fairly warm and homogeneous (the most uniform in the Cenozoic).From the equator to the poles, forests grew. Fossilized remains of cypress and sequoia have been found on the Arctic Ellesmere Island, and palms — in Alaska and northern Europe.Equatorial and tropical forests (with palms, fig trees, and sandalwood trees) persisted in Africa, South America, India, and Australia.Eucalypts, sequoias spread widely, and new types of broad‑leaved trees appeared.By the end of the Eocene, rainforests were preserved only in the equatorial parts of South America, Africa, India, and Australia — due to the onset of cooling.

bdangubic: ⬇ what he said

miroljub: This comment makes me more skeptical.Do you want to tell us to trust the authority instead of the presented data and arguments?Usually, insisting on references, citations, and author status is a sign that the study doesn't hold on its own merit.

unethical_ban: Yes, credibility is one component of evaluating conclusions from evidence.

NotGMan: Credibility of evidence, not the people doing the evaluation of the evidence.

joquarky: Most people can't afford to go 100% electric.Many of them are already sacrificing health care to afford food and shelter.

bko: Got it, it's cooler, no one needs AC. Next question, why are there a lot more heat deaths per capita. I mean, a lot more (4&#x2F;million vs 235&#x2F;million)Should be simple

beepbooptheory: Because 'global warming has accelerated significantly'?

wilg: then it wouldnt be cooler would it

nostrademons: The "Our World in Data" citation cuts off right as China's emissions started to decline. More recent data [1] indicates that China's emissions have been flat or falling since the beginning of 2024, and falling fast in the last quarter of 2025 (1%, which is huge on a quarterly basis).China's decarbonization & renewable efforts have been paying off in a big way. EVs now have a 51% market share among new vehicles [2], exceeding every single major city in the U.S [3] (though the SF Bay Area comes close). Likewise, renewables are 84.4% of its new power plants in 2025 [4].[1] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.carbonbrief.org&#x2F;analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-ha...[2] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;electrek.co&#x2F;2025&#x2F;08&#x2F;29&#x2F;electric-vehicles-reach-tippi...[3] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;interactive&#x2F;2024&#x2F;03&#x2F;06&#x2F;climate&#x2F;hybri...[4] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.cnesa.org&#x2F;latest-news&#x2F;2025&#x2F;11&#x2F;4&#x2F;chinas-newly-inst...

MarkusQ: So sink them in the ocean. Or better, burn off the hydrogen and use the energy to dry the wood, leaving the bulk of the carbon, and then mix that in with the soil.Recreating the lignite era process could be as easy as genetically engineering an alternative,presently indigestable version of lignin.But my point is that the claim above that sequestering wet wood will somehow take meaningful quantities of water (fresh or otherwise) out of the ecosystem is just plain silly.

zdragnar: > Recreating the lignite era process could be as easy as genetically engineering an alternative,presently indigestable version of lignin.Ah yes, so easy. Why on earth have we been treating wood with chemicals to prevent rot in our structures when we could have just engineered them to not rot all along?

chinathrow: If we just could stop burning that oil, that would be great.

simonsarris: US, AU?https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ourworldindata.org&#x2F;grapher&#x2F;coal-consumption-by-count...

imglorp: Yeah true. I was just giving western examples.To be fair, CN is known for exploring all avenues and are deploying a ton of solar and nuclear. http:&#x2F;&#x2F;large.stanford.edu&#x2F;courses&#x2F;2022&#x2F;ph241&#x2F;patel2&#x2F;images&#x2F;f...

simonsarris: It's commendable relative to other countries not deploying much, but nonetheless, CO2 cares only about totals. See consumption by source:https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ourworldindata.org&#x2F;grapher&#x2F;energy-consumption-by-sou...

drnick1: > There are literally 100k deaths in Europe that can be prevented if they lifted restrictions on AC so that they can feel good about making a negligible effect on carbon emissions.Which restrictions on AC? I know that Europeans don't use AC as much as the US because of a mixture of historical and cultural reasons, but I wasn't aware of any restrictions. What prevents someone in Europe from buying and installing an AC unit in their own home?

vladvasiliu: Here in France, where you need a bureaucrat to sign off some paper for another bureaucrat, and where we levy taxes on taxes, I'm not aware of any restriction on AC from the state. Sure, the politicians say we should put up with sweltering heat, unlike them who have reasons to run their cars' engines for hours while they sit around in useless committees inside air-conditioned historical buildings. But there's no law against AC yet.What usually happens, is that most people live in cities. And in cities, they have to get a permit from the HOA and from the city, lest the outside unit deface some historically significant square concrete building (yeah, I know there are actually historically significant buildings, ugly concrete ones built after 1950 aren't among them, though they're where the majority of the people live).

acdha: It’s a common fossil fuel industry talking point, which hopes that the listener doesn’t realize that the climate changes in the past which weren’t deadly happened on much slower time scales. We have a much larger human population now so if you’re saying “nature will survive” you’re also saying that you’re okay with millions of people dying or becoming refugees.

tgsovlerkhgsel: The paper doesn't seem to account for the reduction in sulfur emissions from ships, which was widely reported to be the cause for some of the recent warming?

moffkalast: The worst thing you can do when you're actively geoengineering is to abruptly stop doing it. So naturally we found a way we were already doing it and cut it immediately to make sure we fuck ourselves as much as possible :)I'm almost convinced it's intentional at this point, the rich are busy building their offbrand vault tec bunkers and starting random wars for no real reason.

Ma8ee: They are also building more solar panels and wind turbines than the rest of the world combined, and are the biggest investor in renewables. Their emission of CO2 just recently peaked. But they need a lot of power, and most of the new coal plants are there for days when there’s neither sun or wind.

teamonkey: Their credibility and experience makes it more likely that they will have followed scientific procedures correctly, that their measuring techniques will not have obvious flaws and their findings reflect the evidence.This is not an appeal to authority: the paper will be examined thoroughly by peer reviewers and likely by academics across the world, in part because of their credibility. That will take time. Meanwhile it should be taken seriously.

notarobot123: Ironically, those still unconvinced of the human influence on climate change seem to be the sort that would trust the basement randos more than they would reputable scientists

jihadjihad: Because they are practicing the reverse scientific method. They hold a conclusion in their hand, like, man-made climate change is a hoax, and seek to find any threads of "evidence" that support their foregone conclusion.

blell: You can apply that too to the “man-made climate change is real” argument.

jrajav: Allegations of cherry-picking scant bits of evidence to support a claim are less effective when that claim is held up by vast quantities of distinct, high-quality evidence.

tlogan: So we do not need to worry. China and India will cut their emission a lot and we US just need to cut a little. Problem solved. &#x2F;s

yoyohello13: They don’t need to sign up for it. It will happen regardless.

ares623: They'll just continue blaming immigrants.

jtr1: "But the economy" is an out-of-date framing. The cost of renewables has been plummeting for well over a decade. New renewables are now cheaper than new fossil fuel plants in most of the world, and in many regions they're already competitive with or cheaper than simply running existing fossil fuel infrastructure. As modern wars in Ukraine and now Iran are increasingly demonstrating, they are not only cost effective but rapidly a matter of energy sovereignty and national security.That's not to say we won't need treaties and supranational entities for some aspects of decarbonization. Methane emissions outside of agriculture are notably a problem of enforcement.We're badly in need of a collective update to our priors regarding renewables. In the US, a hostile policy toward renewables is not only shooting ourselves in the foot environmentally, we are now actively impoverishing ourselves due to entrenched economic interests across the fossil fuel industry and the cultural inertia they actively worked to develop.

breakpointalpha: In principle, you are right. Cheaper than coal renewables are winning. Don't forget though, that fighter jets can't operate on batteries.

blell: What we should do is make gas four times more expensive through taxes to guarantee the poor never vote for the progressives again. Unironically.

rootusrootus: It's a culture thing, nobody on the right would ever be convinced by science, they will shop around until they find what they need to hear. My sister in law sent me a video and told me that she thought it was a really good explainer and had a lot of good facts and figures to support it. To humor her, I took a brief glance at it, and saw that it was produced by Dr. Shiva. I was thinking "no way, it can't be that Shiva, could it, email guy?" Yes, yes it was.We are doomed.

madaxe_again: Tell her that you have a greenfield synergistic solution to upscale her big tent.

ares623: Just need a map for all the bunkers. It's gonna be the future version of open-world video games.

marcosdumay: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ourworldindata.org&#x2F;co2-emissionsThe discussion is about what happened last year. We don't have the last year's data assembled yet.There's a real possibility it changed.

mentos: What if global warming is beneficial to keep the next ice age at bay?

funkyfiddler369: that's cute but you can't blame people for holding opinions based on phenomenal observations before they learn the language and can perform experiments. the fact that so many can't is the sole reason you might be considered somewhat superior or competent. more people with scientific skills and a personal way to explain and adhere to the scientific method would mean that your competence would be no more than average, if at all. how would that make you feel?more importantly though, is the fact that there are enough "critics" that consider Global Warming a cycle that "man" merely accelerated by a few decades. most of these "skeptics" are also perfectly capable of discerning between the amount of energy "wasted" in office buildings and lit up skyscrapers as well as anything at the end of luxury supply chains and markets and what the rest of the world "wastes" or expends. to them, the hoax is the "man-made" part ...it should be "some-man-made climate change"

exhumet: my wife is an actuary, and we always joke that you know climate change has real cause and effect because the actuaries are specifically monitoring and modeling for it lol

cmxch: And what exactly would prevent a country like the United States to use its outsize resources to moot this org?

kibwen: If the US refuses to participate in the energy revolution, then it'll be a Russia-tier power within a generation.

teamonkey: What percentage of the 128-million-square-km cross-sectional area of the earth are you proposing to shade?

ComputerGuru: No one thinks only corporations have to sacrifice; they do think that it's folly to ask individual members of society, who on average contribute the smallest overall proportion to global warming, to sacrifice while corporations continue to squander away our natural resources. And the pareto principle agrees.

kibwen: No, that's insufficient. Yes, corporations that cause the most warming will need to be curtailed if we're to survive. But those corporations are in the act externalizing costs. Once you force them to internalize those costs, the visible costs to consumers will increase, meaning less consumption overall. If you can't convince those consumers that less consumption is a good thing if it's in the service of saving the biosphere, then they're going to rebel against your efforts to properly force companies to account for the environmental costs of their products. There's no either&#x2F;or here, it's the responsibility of both corporations and individuals.

00N8: It would be a lot easier if the global population stabilized at around 1 billion. It's conceivable we could get down to that by bringing 3rd world areas up to 1st world standards in terms of women's rights, access to birth control, education, standard of living, etc., since developed nations have had declining birth rates for quite a while. But it's not a cheap or popular idea & would take several generations anyway.

Forgeties79: >that’s cuteUnnecessary but moving past that: I understand where you’re coming from but a hallmark of people like that is they are not willing to learn or be swayed no matter how you try to educate them. They have decided what is real and it often dovetails with their social&#x2F;political views in a way that is very hard to disentangle.

culi: Early IPCC reports, all the way up to AR5 basically threw their hands up when it came to permafrost emissions. They admitted we didn't have the necessary data yet and for the most part didn't account for it at all in their modelsCheck out the 1.5C special report. Go to section 2.2.1.2, last paragraph says> The reduced complexity climate models employed in this assessment do not take into account permafrost or non-CO2 Earth system feedbacks, although the MAGICC model has a permafrost module that can be enabled. Taking the current climate and Earth system feedbacks understanding together, there is a possibility that these models would underestimate the longer-term future temperature response to stringent emission pathwayshttps:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ipcc.ch&#x2F;sr15&#x2F;chapter&#x2F;chapter-2&#x2F;#:~:text=Geophysi...

Someone: The claim being discussed is not that they didn’t account for it, but that they didn’t attempt to account for it. Reading that text, I think they did, but chose not to include it (I guess because they didn’t need to to make their point and, by not including it, avoided opponents from arguing about the validity of the result based on uncertainties in those models)

lokar: Is it fair to say they account for it, but don’t try to quantify if?

01100011: Pipelines, the Jones Act and CA blend requirements prevent CA from getting much gas from other states.

jpadkins: kinda obvious, the wealthy parts?

tzs: > The only thing that matters is gross emissionsWhich is why, unless you can come up with a good argument that some people have some kind of divine or natural right to a bigger share of whatever global emissions budget we decide we need to stick to, per capita is the correct way to compare countries.

epistasis: tl;dr The amount of fossil fuels it takes to make stuff is not nearly as big as the amount of fossil fuels we use to transport ourselves in cars.Consumption-based accounting of CO2 emissions is harder than production-based accounting, but it allows us to see more clearly what the CO2 cost of our lifestyle is. It's been ~5 years since I looked at one of those in detail, but I don't think it's changed much since then. The big takeaway for me was that for the US, which has massive emissions compared to Europe countries, urban&#x2F;suburban design and land use was by far the biggest determinant of CO2 consumption, followed by income&#x2F;wealth. Despite their higher wealth and ability to spend more, residents of urban areas have for lower emissions than suburban residents.See, for example, https:&#x2F;&#x2F;coolclimate.org&#x2F;mapsThere's a tendency to think of consumption in zero-sum terms, but it turns out that energy efficiency has a massive impact on emissions, and also that intuition about quantities of emissions is really hard to gain without a lot of study.

vixen99: Would someone like to explain why the Chinese (if as you say produce 30-35% of global emissions) don't appear to see a problem or at least if alluding to it as they do, fail to do much about it as major contributors of emissions? And then of course there are the countries proud of a relative lack of emissions who are merely exporting the problem to somewhere else, often enough, China.

youngtaff: Yes, they're still burning coal and gas but China are making huge strides in non CO2 intensive electricity generationChina are the reason solar has become so affordable for the rest of the world

tlogan: The latest major IEA estimate says China’s CO₂ emissions reached 12.6 Gt in 2023, up 4.7% from 2022.On the other hand U.S. CO₂ emissions decreased slightly between 2022 and 2023. About 2–3% (from 4.79 to 4.68 Gt)I just do not understand how we can claim any kind of progress here.

jpadkins: > Oh and roughly 65M of sea level rise as the planet shifts to a snow&#x2F;ice-free mode65M seems a lot bigger than the 3.6mm&#x2F;year rise we are seeing today (with +1.5C in warming already happening). Where did you read that we will get 65M of sea level rise with 1.5-2.5C more warming?

teamonkey: That’s because we’ve outsourced so much of our manufacturing to China. Of course ours is going down while theirs is going up.

tlogan: Using the IEA’s 2024 energy-related CO₂ data, advanced economies emitted 10.9 billion tonnes out of a global 37.8 billion tonnes in 2024, which is about 28.8% of the world total.So if developed countries completely eliminate all pollution we will reduce it by 30%. Good. Then what is the next step? War with China? Attack India?[1] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.iea.org&#x2F;reports&#x2F;global-energy-review-2025&#x2F;co2-em...

acdha: Let China continue to cancel fossil fuel plants as they roll out renewables and electrify at rapid scale? It’s not 1980, China is leading a lot of key technologies and they’re looking like they value long-term planning a lot more than we do.To the extent that they need a nudge, a carbon tax would be very effective for correcting export market incentives, too.

tlogan: They are doing so good that they increased their emission by 4.7% from 2022 to 2023. &#x2F;s

UqWBcuFx6NV4r: That’s a red herring. It’s not worth mentioning.

ant6n: > I’m of the opinion that direct air capture is the primary escape hatchGreat! That means we dont need to reduce emissions, cuz the magic bullet will just take care of everything. No need to change anything.

tzs: A gas furnace produces at most 1 kWh of heat from 1 kWh of gas. A heat pumps produces 3-4 kWh of heat from 1 kWh of electricity. If electricity is 3x as much as gas per kWh the heat pump should be less expensive to operate.Plus, it also gives you AC which comes in handy if you live someplace where you want AC.

TimorousBestie: They’re referring to this: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reuters.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;autos-transportation&#x2F;bidens...The Republicans are even more protectionist and sinophobic, however. Nobody ever had the option to vote for importing Chinese EVs.

mrlonglong: I might buy one just to annoy them then.

alecco: Just in time to cancel out with a little nuclear winter.

test001only: Could be lot of reason. Older European cities with high-density stone buildings and less green space often trap heat more effectively than typical U.S. suburban layouts. Europe has a larger proportion of elderly residents (aged 80+), who are the most susceptible to heat stress. You just picked a data and are trying to fit your narrative on top of it without really considering all possible aspects.

bko: You make a lot of great points. You know what would be great for helping those elderly residence prone to heat strokes living in high-density stone buildings with less green space? Air conditioners! In face, I think EU should mandate air conditioners in every home.

pluc: Yeah but now you can ask a question instead of providing a search term!

azan_: It's not a great idea to blame AI, which is small addition to the global emissions. I suggest focusing on what's really important, not what's currently trendy.

topaz0: This is like saying in 1910 "cars are a tiny fraction of our emissions, you should be focusing on the steam train and the woodstove"

azan_: No, it's not. The comparison makes zero sense and is fuelled by social-media sentiment, not facts.

topaz0: It's already using on the order of 1% of global energy, and there are active plans to expand that by a factor of 5 or more in the near future. That's as a percentage of current energy use, which is already way higher than it should be, so if all other sectors reduced theirs to sustainable levels it would be like 5% now and 25% planned. It's a bit more complicated when you account for renewable energy, but certainly adding consumption is not helping there. Now that buildout may not happen as planned&#x2F;advertised, but I think it's very reasonable to worry about new things that make the situation worse even by a few percentage points when you need to make things better overall by much more than that to make progress. Of course this is not to say that we shouldn't be worried about&#x2F;working on other sources of consumption that are currently a larger fraction -- we need to keep doing that too. But giving a pass to hundreds of TWh from AI junk in favor of trying to reduce the thousands of TWh from some other source by a couple hundred is a good way to erase the gains that you make over there.

tim333: I'm not sure about AGI as in human level intelligence being sci-fi. We seem rather close. I've never been much of a doomer though re AI X-risk.

pfdietz: Pretending stratospheric aerosols would be related to that is very dishonest and you should be ashamed.

culi: Besides the well-documented increases in PM2.5 concentrations at ground level we already have clear research on we'd also face- ozone layer depletion- reduced precipitation in an area already drought-stricken. As well as other difficult to predict effects on local climate and weather- alteration of many stratospheric chemical cycles. We're talking changes to nitrogen oxide chemistry and even impacts on hydroxyl radicals which drive atmospheric cleansing capacity- increased risk of acid rain from sulfuric acidLike I said. The research is not there. There are many many side effects we haven't worked out yet.And spare me the personal attacks about dishonesty, jackass

designerarvid: There’s actually research to support the claim you’re making here (Elaboration Likelihood Model).When forming attitudes in an area where one doesn’t care, one tends to rely more on who is saying it than what is being said. The opposite is true, if you care about [climate change], you listen to the arguments regardless of who is presenting it.

aziaziazi: Speaking of deforestation:> Globally, 77% of soya is produced for animal feed, 19.2% for direct human consumption and 3.8% for industry (biodiesel, lubricants, etc.).https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.deforestationimportee.ecologie.gouv.fr&#x2F;en&#x2F;affect...Poultry protein efficiency is 21% and beef 3%> We find that reallocating the agricultural land used for beef feed to poultry feed production can meet the caloric and protein demands of ≈120 and ≈140 million additional people consuming the mean American diet, respectively, roughly 40% of current US population.https:&#x2F;&#x2F;iopscience.iop.org&#x2F;article&#x2F;10.1088&#x2F;1748-9326&#x2F;11&#x2F;10&#x2F;1...

jillesvangurp: The way a good heat pump works is that you can get about 3-5kwh of heat out of 1 kwh of electricity. So, they can save money over gas even though electricity is more expensive per kwh. And of course gas prices fluctuate quite a bit. Right now Germany is low on gas and gas prices are going through the roof because of the situation in the middle east.Here in Germany this issue is lack of policy, financing, and a lot of people are renting. I actually pay about > 100&#x2F;month for gas. I live in a 20 apartment building with a big furnace in the basement for the whole building. A heat pump would be cheaper to run but you'd have to do a big one for the whole building. This is actually a good thing. Big heat pumps can be quite efficient. It's probably cheaper than having to install 20 heatpumps for 20 apartments.But buying and installing heat pumps costs money. Technically, it is actually an investment (i.e. it has an ROI). If you do this collectively as a building, you'd do it to lower your monthly bills. This is something that should be possible to finance out of those savings (at least partially). That's literally why private home owners install heat pumps and get their money back in 6-10 years typically. Faster if they also invest in solar. And get an EV that also powers from those panels.But this where things break down in Germany. You need consensus. And financing. And there are home owners that can block things and it's their renters that pay the heating bill so the owners don't care. And so on. And if you are renting, you are not going to pay for this either. So, everybody just coughs up the money every month without even questioning it. My apartment doesn't even have a thermostat or a smart meter for electricity. Apparently that's normal in this country. Germany is just deeply bureaucratic and inefficient. For all the talk about environment, they can't be arsed to do what the rest of the world did decades ago: save some energy with smart meters.Policy could help here. Mainly clearing up bureaucracy. And maybe some more subsidies&#x2F;incentives (those already exist) or low interest financing. And a clear political goal to vastly reduce expensive gas imports. Even if the electricity for powering these heat pumps would come from gas powered electricity plants, it would still require a lot less gas. And of course Germany has lots of wind power. I think other countries in the EU are a bit further with their thinking than Germany on this front. On paper it having lots of apartment buildings like mine actually means it is fairly straight forward from a technical point of view to upgrade these buildings.

rapind: > "What happens when 1.5B come knocking because if they stay they die?"You think that’s bad... Up here in Canada we’ll have to deal with Murican immigrants as things heat up. Talk about killing the vibe.

un-diletante: I think the least of your worries will be immigrants when an imperialistic nation with superior military power realizes that the annexation of your land is necessary for its survival.

asdff: Why would the US annex canada? It is already in the american hegemony.

JumpCrisscross: To distract from the Epstein files.

asdff: I'm surprised even the smarter democrats are saying that stupid line. Distraction would imply there are still to be people who have not yet learned and formed an opinion on the Epstein files. Everyone knows about these already and made their positions about it.As it turns out the most abhorrent things can come out with those Epstein files and it doesn't seem to hurt Trumps support among his base any. Doesn't seem to be threatening any legal action for him or implicated parties. Once again only Maxwell is in jail, somehow, with dozens and dozens of witnesses stepping forward. Democrats have been grandstanding on this man for 10 years now and haven't been able to stop him. I think by this point it is clear he is going to get away with everything even if people want to write about him "flailing." Him flailing is literally him achieving all his domestic and foreign policy goals right now and his base couldn't be more pleased...

numpad0: > What happens when 1.5B come knocking because if they stay they die?Like let them build few of those sci-fi domes and let them keep buying disposable bottled oxygen? I don't get the pessimism. India makes its own rockets. Pakistan has nukes. Why are they supposed to be incapable of holding the nation together on Mars-like Earth?Tokyo is already hitting 40C&#x2F;100F at >90% RH during summers. It's already mildly unsurvivable. Nobody cares. Maybe in 10-20 years we'd be wearing spacesuits, but do anyone seriously think the equatorial regions will be uninhabitable and land prices on northern Europe is going to skyrocket???

asdff: The fact people already live in some of the hottest places in the world today should speak a little to human resiliency.

vlz: We can live in hot places if the air stays dry, which it usually does or historically did. If the air gets more humid we cannot anymore.> Humans may also experience lethal hyperthermia when the wet bulb temperature is sustained above 35 °C (95 °F) for six hours.https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Thermoregulation

logicchains: Empirically, Europe's embrace of the "energy revolution" has done far more to bring it closer to Russia, making energy 2-3x more expensive and gradually destroying Germany's industrial base. So much so that it can't even produce as many munitions as Russia, in spite of a GDP around ten times larger.

culi: it did not factor into their models at all. They simply mentioned it. Mostly as an asterisk for why their models are likely an underestimation

charlie90: Assume the avg. home will last 50 years. Limit construction on new suburban developments, problem solved in 50+ years. It would be unpopular, but you claimed it wouldn't be possible, very different. The latter is denying agency in the situation.

anigbrowl: My phenomenal observations are that it's been getting warmer during my lifetime, but as soon as I mention this in an online conversation I get slapped down with 'the climate is always changing' and 'n=1'.Most climate change denial arguments eventually boil down to social assertions about the change believers having perverse incentives, like being greedy for grants to go on sailing vacations to Antartica or feather their academic nests.

Tiktaalik: Those are our emissions that we have exported to china. Your TV, Phone, etc etc isn't built in NA.

vogu66: The article has comments on pubpeer (below) and comments on the pre-print page. https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pubpeer.com&#x2F;publications&#x2F;973ABFB81F504E8CB1B50E941CF...The gist of several comments is that the paper does not actually demonstrate an accelerated global warming, but instead an acceleration of anthropogenic global warming, when removing the influence of several natural factors. To be clear, they are not discussing the fact that there is global warming, just saying that currently, we cannot say that global warming has been getting faster after 2010 with statistical certainty.

danny_codes: Bro what are you talking about. Nuclear power exists. You simply scale one we have now by 10x and buy BYDs EV capacity for 5 years and you’re done.It’s not even particularly expensive relative to GDP.

tlogan: Sadly, it does not come from other states. It comes from other countries which, amazingly, tend to have much less strict environmental regulations.Yes, California is a little cleaner because we have fewer refineries and gas is more expensive, but globally we are probably about even.

_aavaa_: The argument isn’t that the whole earth becomes inhospitable. But that certain regions do, and the rest will have their climate differ drastically.If you live on the coast and the water level rises, your home is inhospitable, even if someone 100mi inland is fine.If you live in a region that usually was 90F in the summer and is now >110F regularly, that’s going to cause problem.

alexk307: There isn't enough fossil fuels in the ground for us to burn to cause a 20F+ increase in annual summer temperatures globally...

wewtyflakes: Their argument is not predicated on a 20F+ temp rise globally; their argument is about regions.

danny_codes: Physically that’s not the case.Scaled up nuclear power could be had for $3-4B a gigawatt&#x2F;h. We waste say $1T a year on basic things, like not having universal healthcare. So a simple policy change would let us build about 300 reactors a years, after some scaling period. The excess energy can be used to turn C02 back into oil.It’s not technically that difficult, we just chose to waste money on stupid things and rich people toys instead.Energy abundance is simply the choose to build nuclear power plants at scale

shrubby: We could chop of a quarter of total emissions (directly + rewilding effect) by ending factory animal production and swapping to plant based.Another quarter from the top 5 percent emissions that have practically nothing to do with the wellbeing, but only social comparison mechanisms (envy, herd mentality).But for that humanity would need leaders that are not either idiots, corrupt or spineless and toothless.But hey, I guess that's too much to ask, after all we're talking about unconscious reactive species that's only rumored to have brains or morals.

xandrius: I can barely get some people to do a week off eating red meat, imagine going cold turkey completely. If people haven't revolted about other stuff they definitely will for saving their meat consumption.

logicchains: The scientific method is making testable predictions. You can look back 10, 20, 30, 40 years at the predictions of sea level rise made by climate scientists, and the sea level today is nowhere near where they predicted it would rise to. If someone's continuously making incorrect predictions it's not reasonable to assume their predictions will suddenly become accurate, especially when there's no feedback loop to weed out people making bad predictions (unlike e.g. in finance where people whose models have little predictive power eventually go bankrupt). No climate scientist has lost their job for making incorrect predictions of sea level rise twenty years ago.

digdugdirk: Systems are complicated. Given there are numerous predicted outcomes (it's not just about the actual measured sea-level rise, after all) and many of those predictions are coming to pass far earlier than hoped, it might be worth having an open mind to the fact that sometimes people who devote their lives to studying something might be worth listening to.

carlosjobim: One rule which always holds true in life: people who ask for sacrifice will never sacrifice an inch themselves. No matter what cause.

alexk307: Most of the increase in local temperatures are overnight lows in the Winter. I'm not sure there's any peer-reviewed mechanism to suggest that daytime Summer highs will increase 20F+ due to greenhouse gases in any parts of the world.

jfengel: I'd say that for a non-scientist, you should treat it as a non-event -- a paper that hasn't happened yet.The climate is not something for which you need daily, weekly, or even monthly updates. Rather, this paper is just one more on top of a gigantic pile of evidence that that climate change is serious, something that we can and should do something about.If the paper passes muster, you'll hear about it then, though all it'll do is very slightly increase your confidence in something that is already very well confirmed. Or, the paper may not pass review, in which case it doesn't mean anything at all, and you fall back on the existing mountain of evidence.If the paper had reached the opposite conclusion, that might merit more investigation by you now, since that would potentially be a significant update to your beliefs. And more importantly, it would certainly be presented as if it were a fait accompli, even before peer review.Instead, you can simply say, "I don't know what this paper means, but I already have a very well-founded understanding of climate change and its significance."

pastage: That sounds like a perfect match for a meta study do you have any? I am very dubious about your conclusion. I am basing this on work I did in high school on this so I really have no sources for my claim.EDIT did some more searching and have not been able to finding anything supporting you claim. People have not been very alarmist about sea levels.. 7500m by the year 2500 in Waterworld does not count.

Zetaphor: People wouldn't just lie on the internet!

nostrademons: We're kinda doing that, through zoning requirements and NIMBY politics. It is, as predicted, very unpopular, and has a number of unfortunate side effects like rising homelessness, declining fertility, and increasing inflation.On the plus side, we're going to have many fewer people in 50 years, which will lead to correspondingly less CO2 emissions.

WaxProlix: Chinese demand is increasing just like everyone else's, and they're both retiring older less efficient plants and using fossil fuels as both peaker and baseline generation. But coal utilization overall, despite massive growth in energy demand, is basically flat in China. There's plenty of reason to build out coal capacity to keep grids stabilized while you transition to solar and wind (China finished their 2030 1200GW solar capacity target 6 years early in 2024 and continue to grow that number at an incredible rate).I agree that new coal sucks but it's a very easy talking point for westerners like us to latch onto when our own contributions to emissions remain way over 50% higher per capita - despite much of the manufacturing and such not happening in our countries.

AnthonyMouse: > But coal utilization overall, despite massive growth in energy demand, is basically flat in China."Basically flat" only after running up an exponential curve so that coal consumption is now higher per capita in China than it is in the US and China is generating ~60% of its electricity from coal compared to ~16% in the US.> I agree that new coal sucks but it's a very easy talking point for westerners like us to latch onto when our own contributions to emissions remain way over 50% higher per capitaYou don't even get to say "westerners" anymore. CO2 emissions are higher per capita in China than they are in Europe because they burn such a disproportionate amount of coal, and are only lower than the US and Canada because the US and Canada burn more oil per capita from being so spread out.

WaxProlix: Sure but they don't burn oil because they don't have oil. So focus on fossil fuels in general, or emissions rather than just coal specifically - again it's not good to add new coal plants but they're growth negative. And EU has done an admirable job of reducing their emissions, with help of course from Chinese manufacturing of pv cells etc.

estimator7292: We are already far past the point of mere thousands of lives. Entire cities have been wiped off the map by floods.It will take millions, if not close to a billion lives before we get serious

zahlman: > Entire cities have been wiped off the map by floods.Could you name some?

zahlman: > Oh and roughly 65M of sea level rise as the planet shifts to a snow&#x2F;ice-free mode.Current rates of sea level rise are still in single digit millimetres per year, so that would take millennia. If there's even enough ice in the caps to get that far. Pre-historically, vast ice sheets covered broad swaths of regions now considered "temperate" (per the famous XKCD, "Boston [was] buried under almost a mile of ice"); what remains is a tiny portion and it's simply hard to imagine that it could fill the seas to such an extent.If you have detailed calculations, please feel free to cite them. But my back-of-the-envelope reasoning: NOAA gives an average sea depth (https:&#x2F;&#x2F;oceanservice.noaa.gov&#x2F;facts&#x2F;oceandepth.html) of 3,682 meters. You propose that this could increase by nearly 2%. But the density of water only exceeds that of ice by about 9% (via https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Ice); the thickness of the https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Antarctic_ice_sheet is only about half that average sea depth; and it covers only about 4% of the water-covered area of the planet (14 million km^2 vs. 361 million km^2, per https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Earth) which is not even all oceanic.

qgin: All data centers in aggregate (AI and all other uses) use about 1.5% of electricity production, which itself is about 20% of total energy use.So when people are focusing on AI above all other energy uses, it doesn't really paint an accurate picture of what's going on.

tencentshill: Wasn't crypto a significant percentage as well? And that was before the AI buildout started.

rvz: Not even close. Crypto has always been able to cut their own emissions before needing lots of compute.AI on the other hand cannot, and still needs thousands of wasteful data centers.

Supermancho: Except for the industries where it does matter. Trivializing the needs of complex and energy hungry supply chains, is bad faith. They are one of the many reasons fossil fuels are so widely used.

bryanlarsen: If we stop using fossil fuels for the >90% of usage where fossil fuels are easy to replace, it'll make it much easier & cheaper for the <10% where it's difficult.

mbgerring: “AGI” was literally made up by a Harry Potter fan fiction community

wewtyflakes: So your argument that this statement by them: "If you live in a region that usually was 90F in the summer and is now >110F regularly, that’s going to cause problem." is hyperbole, then? Okay, going with that, what temperature range would you find credible, as to describe a region that is seeing wilder swings in summer highs?

casey2: I'm confident that pushing everyone involved with Starship into the ocean would be a better and faster and more ethical green transition.

yoyohello13: I wish it were different but I would not be surprised if it’s billions before anything changes. And even then there will be a major proportion of people that celebrate it as the second coming.

fwipsy: Billions? Sounds optimistic. Try trillions or quadrillions before anything really changes. Orders of magnitude are just a dime a dozen after all.

djoldman: Basically this is the slowest train wreck in history that just won't be stopped. By 2050 (only 24 years away), these cities are projected to flood more than 1&#x2F;3 of the days of every year: Galveston, Texas Morgan’s Point, Texas Annapolis, Maryland Norfolk, Virginia Rockport, Texas Bay St. Louis, Mississippi Big cities close behind the above: Miami and Miami Beach, Florida Charleston, South Carolina Atlantic City, New Jersey

cryptoegorophy: From what I understood we are closer to the “all humans will die within a century” and if this is the case then what’s the point of doing anything? Does it matter if our effort just delays the “all humans will die” by let say 50 years? Radical change we need to do if we are serious is going back to caves. 0 consumption. I highly doubt anyone will do that.

mempko: Since the industrial revolution we've emitted about 1.5 trillion tonnes of CO2. Direct air capture requires roughly 1,500 kWh per tonne, so recapturing all of it would take around 2,250,000 TWh. Current global electricity production is about 30,000 TWh&#x2F;year. That's 75 years of the entire world's electricity output just for capture, before you even convert it back to fuel, which costs even more energy. And thermodynamically you can never break even: we only extracted maybe 30-40% of fossil fuel energy as useful work, but reversing the dispersal of CO2 from 420ppm in the atmosphere fights entropy all the way back. It will always cost more energy to put back than we got taking it out. As for the nuclear numbers: Vogtle, the only recent US build, came in at ~$16B&#x2F;GW, not $3-4B. The world started construction on 9 reactors total in 2024. The all time peak was ~30&#x2F;year in the 1980s. 300&#x2F;year has never been close to reality. Average build time is about 9 years per reactor. I'm not anti-nuclear but you can't hand-wave your way past thermodynamics and industrial scaling with "it's just a policy choice."

cryptoegorophy: No. It is like punching a hole in your wall when something else punches the wall daily with increased rate. No matter what you do at this point the wall will be destroyed.

willhslade: Soil is generally garbage though. Just saying.

like_any_other: Many scientists (cited by Supreme Court justices even) practice that same method: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dailycaller.com&#x2F;2025&#x2F;03&#x2F;31&#x2F;exclusive-researchers-axe...

alexk307: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ourworldindata.org&#x2F;grapher&#x2F;summer-temperature-anomal...Somewhere on the order of 1-2C if you start from the 1850s.

nomel: > Thus, the ingrained short-term thinking of the markets and politiciansI don't think they're the only ones to blame. People want what's cheaper&#x2F;keeps their standard of living the same. Any of these changes temporality upset and outright destroy large portions of the economy. You would be kicking the silent majority right in the wallet, who doesn't care all that much about any of this.

tzs: They are building coal for things that cannot yet be handled by renewables because coal is the fossil fuel natural resource they have the most of.It's the same reason it was the dominant fossil fuel for electricity in the US until the shale revolution made natural gas cheap and abundant.The reasons Trump is a schmuck for pushing coal are (1) he wants it instead of renewals rather than as a way to help fill the gap between renewables and what we need until we can build enough renewables and storage, and (2) in the US that makes no sense because because natural gas can fulfill that role and is better in pretty much every way that coal.Compare to China which is putting vast amounts of resources into building renewables, storage, and also a nationwide UHV distribution network (currently 40-50000 km compared to ~0 in the US) which means local variations in solar&#x2F;wind can increasingly be covered by non-local renewables, which should reduce the need to fire up those new local coal plants.

dang: Ok, we've changed the URL from https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.researchgate.net&#x2F;publication&#x2F;389855619_Global_Wa... to what that doi.org link redirects to. Is it better now?

afandian: Cool, thanks. I approve!In a pure world everyone would use DOIs to refer to published literature. This would give two benefits: first, always link to the current version. Second, be a persistent identifier for the content.But HN isn't a specialist scholarly content platform, so it's practical to link to the landing page.

giarc: >people won't see it.You are correct because it's happening already (massive wildfires burning down cities, 100 year floods every year, mass migration out of hot, dry climates) and the news will state something like "scientists are 85% certain this fire was accelerated by climate change" and then will move onto the next story. Climate change is all around us, but we refuse to see it.

BLKNSLVR: Can we hope that the Strait of Hormuz remains essentially blocked to oil exports for an extended amount of time...?

Aerroon: Oil companies sell you gasoline that you burn.

0wis: If only the German infrastructure hadn’t been built for Nordstream…In France, with Nuclear power and renewable it’s 20% lower.Prices also depends on who you want to give power.

phasnox: > Switch to EVMost people can't afford one> -Migrate from gas appliances (range, furnace, water heater) to electric (induction, heat pumps)Electricity is considerably more expensive, people that leave paycheck to paycheck would not be able to afford itHere are somethings YOU can do personally to help:- Never fly in an airplane again- Never use ANY vehicle again, walk everywhere(yes EVs also pollute)- In the winter, don't turn on the heat.- Eat only vegetables and things you don't need to cook- etcIf you are not doing ALL OF THESE you have no right on telling other people how they produce their CO2.

Aerroon: And why would countries adopt this? So that other countries can use this cartel to push their own agenda? If anything it seems like it would be in every country's best interests to make sure such an organization doesn't exist.In my opinion one of the reasons why European economies have been struggling for a long time is because energy has been much more expensive than elsewhere. Part of it is the excise tax on gasoline because it drives up the price of everything.Even to this day EU countries where people earn less than a third of what Americans earn still pay more for gasoline.

sph: Worse, even if we’re going to do it, the next idiot in power is going to roll it back and declare to big fanfare and applause that coal is back.You can’t change the world with plans that last no longer than a presidential term.

apublicfrog: Thankfully most of the world ignores America and does their own thing.

BLKNSLVR: There are plenty of people who find it convenient to listen to the current administration, and these people vote. I just hope they remain in a minority in my country. It's always a close run race though...And a 'more conservative than conservative' party is getting increased media attention here at the moment, which could do serious damage.

bakies: Dismissing thousands of years of global temperature averages because you had a cold winter, very smart.

code4life: Im not dismissing anything. I’m just saying, when a measurement was taken in my region in 1925 it was warmer then than it was 100 years later in 2025.

BLKNSLVR: So we won't be able to fight air wars over the last remaining pieces of arable land.I'm convinced.

BLKNSLVR: Recycling someone else's quote:"The economy is a wholly owner subsidiary of the environment"Many people use the 'but the economy' argument (including my mother in law, maddeningly) without seeming to have any remote clue as to the truth of the quote above.

JohnMakin: Don't Look Up

e1ghtSpace: Maybe we can nuke a handful of countries and try to go for just a light nuclear winter to get everything cooled down again.

jimnotgym: Genuinely not being snide, I really do not know.Is it possible to produce steel on industrial scales without coal?I know early ironmaking (I live fairly close to Coalbrookdale!) used charcoal, but is that possible at a large scale?

acdha: It’s complicated: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.mit.edu&#x2F;2025&#x2F;decarbonizing-steel-tough-as-steel...This is one of the stronger arguments for a carbon tax: if you can’t ignore externalities, people have strong incentives to use less (e.g. buying a car instead of an SUV or biking) and all of the alternative fuel and process work is going to be easier if the cost comparison is more even.

jimnotgym: Thanks for the link. I read about electric arc furnaces reprocessing scrap steel somewhere else recently. Do we really never need virgin steel again, we already have all we need?

boxedemp: We'll fix it if it become cost effective. It might, but probably won't because if the scale.

nielsbot: we're going to chose the most convenient path. if climate disaster becomes inconvenient, we'll attempt to do something about it.it will be a disaster.

BLKNSLVR: I'm the immortal words of Zapp Brannigan:https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;DH_gPGl5FF4

hvb2: > What excuse actually is there for building new coal plantsJust that they're still 'developing' and aren't even close to the historical contributions of the US?Assuming you're American, it's a bit rich to have contributed more in absolute terms and then tell other countries what they can't do.Explain me why the average car in the US is a tank with horrible fuel economy? In rural I can sorta see it. But in cities, why drive a truck? These are all choices that America makes.

AnthonyMouse: > Just that they're still 'developing' and aren't even close to the historical contributions of the US?This is a sham excuse. Building coal power plants before solar or nuclear were viable or even existed is not the same as choosing to do it in modern day.> Explain me why the average car in the US is a tank with horrible fuel economy?The "best selling" light vehicles in the US are pickup trucks because the sales numbers aren't divided out into personal and business purchases and businesses buy a lot of trucks. The best selling non-pickup is the Toyota RAV4, which gets better than 30 MPG in the non-hybrid version and better than 40 MPG in the hybrid version.

myrmidon: Come on. This is bullshit and you know it. There's >10M light trucks sold each year and <3M passenger cars.This is not because most of those trucks are used by some business, this is because people like to drive around in them.

teyopi: Hi, unrelated:Your personal website has an expired certificate.Seems like it expired end of Feb.

mr_toad: > fighter jets can't operate on batteriesGas turbines can run on a variety of fuels, natural, synthetic or a mixture of both. It’s actually one of the reasons that a turbine was chosen for the M1.

_aavaa_: I'm not talking about global, look at individual countries:- Andora (5C&#x2F;9F)- Montenegro (5C&#x2F;9F)- Japan (4C&#x2F;7F)- Italy (4C&#x2F;7F)- Spain (3C&#x2F;5.4F)Even with current rates I think we'll easily hit a 20F increase in several regions.