Discussion
Sea level much higher than assumed in most coastal hazard assessments
bikenaga: [delayed]
sebmellen: The saddest part of global turmoil around AI, Iran war, etc. is how dramatically climate change has disappeared from the 'global conversation'. This is not something we can afford to ignore for much longer.
jatari: Climate hasn't been a real topic of discussion since the Obama administration.
maest: The US has been taking steps in the wrong direction wrt climate change and they will undoubtedly be judged to jave been on the wrong side of history on this one.In the near term, however, Americans will blame everything except man-made pollution for the fallout from climate change.
buildsjets: The only thing you ever post is AI summaries of articles. Why?
Schiendelman: I assume that's a bot that helps us not have to click on articles for basic information. Personally, I find it quite useful. I'd love to have that built into HN.
MisterTea: We are more than capable of reading thanks.
giraffe_lady: I don't think climate change is being ignored: AI, war profiteering, ICE, detention centers, destruction of the international system, global fascism are their answer to climate change.It's not to prevent it, or to mitigate its damages, it's for the people who disproportionately caused it, and have already benefitted from it, to finalize their control over the resources they want. Some of those resources are some of us.
georgemcbay: And they aren't even really bothering to hide it anymore.A lot of Trump's seemingly odd obsessions like taking over Greenland and Canada are less odd (but still very unsettling) when you accept that the global power elite have already accepted that run-away climate change is inevitable and the only open questions are who is going to profit from it and how.
slackfan: Politics and speed of change aside, is there a period in history in which climate was not changing?
giraffe_lady: “But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?"
surgical_fire: You don't have to worry about the future if you ensure there is no future.
sebmellen: Regardless of the politics of the day, where is the long-term, popular will (or capacity) for a "green/electric" revolution in the US? We are massively dependent on fossil fuels, and our quality of life is too.At the same time, we don't have China's industrial capacity or their stomach for massive state-driven subsidies. I don't see how you escape peak oil otherwise.
quotemstr: People have been saying this for 50 years now. Nothing's happened. You really need to knock it off with the alarmism. We cannot reorient all of society around predictions of doom that just aren't coming true, aren't coming anywhere close to coming true, and that will not plausibly come true on any relevant timescales.
sebmellen: "People have been saying computers will start to speak since the Dartmouth Workshop in 1956. Here we are 50 years later in 2006 and there's no sign of progress yet! Nothing's happened. You really need to knock if off with the predictions."
maest: Oh, I don't think this is a partisan issue (although Democrats do vaguely gesture more towards climate efforts than Republicans).I think the median American voter doesn't care and is happy to live a life of consumption with big cars, big houses and cheap energy. There is also the issue of fossil industry lobbying and propaganda, of course, but I think that's mostly working _because_ the American people don't really care.
axus: Disagree, the motives are the same with or without climate change. We're still at the slow part of the curve. Knowing what's coming doesn't change their behavior.
beedeebeedee: There are also some people in power who believe climate change is related to the end of times and eagerly welcome it to hasten their idea of ‘Armageddon’
Herring: You're giving them too much credit. They're just blind and seeking profit. Humans are just not good at planning longer than 6 months to 5 years out.
danaris: I mean, to some extent, you're not wrong, but if a Democrat were in office right now, we wouldn't be actively fighting the rising tide of solar power.At present, the bare economics of it, without any subsidies, put solar as the most cost-effective new power capacity to add.Last year—2025, the first year of Trump's second term—something like 90% of all new generating capacity in the US was solar. Even with his active antipathy toward it.There no longer needs to be a massive movement willing to pay more for energy just to get it decarbonized. All we need is for the fossil fuel industry and the people in its pay to get out of the way.
mullingitover: > At present, the bare economics of it, without any subsidies, put solar as the most cost-effective new power capacity to add.Not just more cost-effective for new power.The operating expenses for a given coal plant are greater than the buildout cost for the equivalent solar+battery plant.It no longer makes financial sense for coal plants to continue existing in almost all cases. This isn't some environmentalism thing, it's strictly hard math. Fossil energy is no longer viable without taxpayers keeping it on life support.
michaelteter: Fox News and Trump still routinely say it's a hoax. And their devotees repeat that line in one breath, and in the next breath say, "wow, we just set a new high temp record in January!"
metalman: Watch your warming oceans expand in real time herehttps://nsidc.org/sea-ice-todayabove shows what may be the earliest ever peak sea iceandhttps://www.ospo.noaa.gov/products/ocean/sst/contour/and the one above is absolutly terrifying , or should be to wanabe hegemnons thinking that the naritive, is thiers.
lazyasciiart: Can you explain what background knowledge I need to be terrified looking at the second one?
metalman: it is a tool that shows daily snap shots of the SST to use it you need to have a good grasp on geography/oceanography, and then spen a bit of time each day looking at it, and cross corelating with things like hurricanes, to see the trace spiral of cooler water that a giant storm will imprint into the oceans surface, or this year, the very significant chanhes in the worlds major hot and cold currents, and size of the spill over from the south wester pacific into the atlantic.
sebmellen: The other thing is, we can't stop. Someone always will outcompete you if you try to pause.
sebmellen: Yes, exactly my point. It's too hard to grapple with, so it's easier to ignore.
solid_fuel: I think every browser has an AI summary feature now, if you find reading and engaging with information just too difficult and challenging.
0xffff2: I say this as an American... I can't help but feel that the US will be judged to have been on the wrong side of history in virtually every topic for which there are sides in the last decade if not longer. For reasons I don't understand, we seem to be actively and aggressively working to destroy our country and as many global institutions as we can.
datsci_est_2015: > For reasons I don't understandHistory is full of examples, but maybe not explanations, of the type of behavior coming out of the current administration in the US. They’re not particularly special, or extraordinary, by any measure. They’ve simply made the decision to hit the “defect” button over and over again like a teenage boy discovering porn for the first time.And since the adults that preceded them were reasonable and responsible, they built up plenty of rules and norms, creating many opportunities to now hit “defect”.
mmooss: Could you give us some of these examples?
mmooss: IIRC, polls show most Americans support action on climate change. When it's politicized, then they oppose it.
crystal_revenge: Reducing the severity of climate change (we've already signed up for potentially civilization destroying consequences, even if we could go zero emissions today), requires keeping proven reserves in the ground. No amount of "green" energy will impact our future if it doesn't mean we start using less fossil fuels (globally) than today.Darkly, a disastrous global nuclear war that sends us back in time 500 years would be the most effective and most probable way of achieving this.
spongebobstoes: what if we could capture carbon at a significant rate? I know that we can't right now, it's a hypothetical
bgnn: It's not only carbon. There are a multitude of gasses which cause greenhouse effect.
tencentshill: No, it just got boring. There have been massive renewable buildouts since then, as a direct consequence of those policies. No matter how much trump hates it, the economic scales have already tipped.
spwa4: The point is that renewable buildouts don't help. ONLY permanently preventing exports in oil producing countries helps. Not temporary reductions. Stopping exports entirely before the oil is dug up. Everything else might be nice in it's own right, but doesn't change the global warming calculation much at all.Which effectively means that renewable deployment in the west might still be a good idea, but not because it supposedly slows or stops global warming.
datsci_est_2015: People spend entire careers doing these types of analyses, so my off-the-cuff comment will always be amateurish in comparison. But here goes anyway, some examples of blunders that come from a place of arrogance, or being overeager to hit the “defect” button: - Various Roman emperors overextending and destroying what their predecessors slowly built - Indigenous peoples (especially the Americas) allying with colonial forces to defeat other indigenous enemies (won the battle, lost the war) - Brexit - Perhaps the most documented regime of all time, 1930s and 40s Germany. Specific event? The eastern offensive Edit: - Royal lineages have plenty of examples, like Louis XVI
mmooss: Those seem like over-ambition or hindsight, which is different than constantly, intentionally doing things in a way that will fail.The indiginous people's choices can't be understood without knowing their political context in regard to other indigenous people and the colonial powers.
fred_is_fred: Over the past 5 or so years, I've seen population projections missed over and over. Growth is slowing and it's slowing faster than projected. Almost every projection is too high. Does that have any impact on climate change rates? Or is it a wash because societies with shrinking populations are using more resources? I've not been able to find much research here.
crystal_revenge: > wrong side of history on this one.There's not much history left. What we're seeing right now is people getting ready to win the end game of civilization. The oligarchs are well aware of the myriad existential threats to our civilization (and species) and are playing the game to make sure they're the last person alive living in comfort.History will increasingly be told by powerful, oligarchical, modern warlords.
netsharc: Huh, warlord tribes roaming the earth, their members formed by descendants of the Loser Ranks of Musk, Zuck, Bezos, Ellison.. that'd be an interesting dystopia.Someone commented along the lines of "I never thought the people bringing about the destruction or the planet would be such dweeby dorks."
AngryData: Ideally we would but that costs energy, and if we can't afford the energy to completely remove the need for fossil fuels, spending even more on capturing it again seems still far out of reach.Part of the reason it is still far away despite the increasing prevalence of renewable sources is that not everything is a 1:1 replacement between electric power and fossil fuels, fertilizer and many of our chemical productions can be done without fossil fuels, but at 10x the energy cost that we currently use.We like to focus on things like cars and engines, but those were always an easy win because internal combustion is only 30% efficient to start with while electric motors are 90%+. But as a source of chemical process energy not only can fossil fuel sources be more efficient than as a motor fuel, our electric energy replacement for chemical synthesis and purification is not always very efficient itself, on top of being an energy intensive product already.I think last time I looked, which was admittedly a few years ago now, fertilizer production with fossil fuels consumed 1% of the world's electrical production, and the best anyone could hope for in synthesizing nitrogen from the air and not using any fossil fuels was at least a 10 fold increase in energy requirements. Which means clean fertilizer requires at least 10% of total world electrical production, which is obviously an ass ton. Perhaps we have slightly more efficient fertilizer synthesis now, but at the same time farmland utilization has dropped which means a higher reliance and demand for artificial fertilizer.Of course I think this is all avoidable if we weren't complete slaves to capital markets and just built tons of nuclear reactors and solar plants even if it that means they weren't all profit makers. Energy production and availability is ultimately one of our largest bottlenecks across almost every industry and human endeavor.
bombcar: There are tons and tons of things that are supported in the abstract and opposed in the particular.It's how everyone is YIMBY until something is happening near them and suddenly they're all NIMBY.
KellyCriterion: yes, I guess with fusion this would be possible?
jdlshore: Solar + battery is a miracle technology that’s being installed at an enormous rate. Technically, it’s fusion power, capturing energy from a fusion plant 8 light-minutes away. :-D
crystal_revenge: And the Obama administration really just talked about it. It was under his administration that the US shale oil extraction really started heating up.The problem is the only solution to climate change is keeping oil in the ground. There are other things that can be done to make a zero emissions transition less painful, but oil (and all other fossil fuels) need to start staying in the ground.During the Obama administration is when we started to see a dramatic increase in US oil production [0]. The US hegemony is oil powered and founded on the petro-dollar. There's no way US policy can be aligned with anything remotely resembling a path towards a sustainable energy environment.0. https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/leafhandler.ashx?n=pet&s=m...
jdlshore: The Inflation Reduction Act was a massive climate bill: $400 billion worth. I don’t think it’s fair to characterize that as “just talked about it.”
marssaxman: We haven't even started - not really. Every year we set a new record for CO2 emissions: we continue to accelerate.When you must look to the third derivative before you can find any trace of hope, you're not in a good situation.If it's boring, it's because we've given up.
sebmellen: So we are more than 1 million square kilometers lower than our record minimum year of 2012. Holy shit.https://nsidc.org/sea-ice-today/sea-ice-tools/charctic-inter...
jacquesm: https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/the-scariest-climate-plot-...
sebmellen: Jesus.
Schiendelman: Please don't engage like this, it's not appropriate on HN.If you're curious about why such a summary might be useful to someone, ask!
