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.
- Climate Warming is a hoax
- Climate Warming is happening, but not Man Made and part of larger cycles
- Climate Warming is Man Made, but drastic De-growth strategies cause more harm.
- Climate Warming is Man Made, don't need de-growth strategies because Technology will solve energy efficiency, clean energy growth and carbon capture and humans adapt along the way
- Climate Warming is Man Made and we need drastic de-growth strategies and complete ban of fossil fuels.
For people in the last group, all other groups look like Climate Deniers because they don't agree to their de-growth/ban plans
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.
We are doomed.
Climate data is inherently noisy, and there are multiple interconnected cyclic signals, ranging from the "adjusted" factors to cycles that span decades, which we don't understand at all. "Adjusting" for a few of these, then doing a regression over the subset of the data is classic cherry-picking in search of a pre-determined conclusion. The overall dubious nature of the conclusion is called out in the final paragraph of the text:
> Although the world may not continue warming at such a fast pace, it could likewise continue accelerating to even faster rates.
They're literally just extrapolating from an unknown point value that they synthesized from data massage, and telling you that's a coin toss as to whether the extrapolation will be valid.
I am not a climate scientist so you can ignore me if you like, but I am "a scientist" who believes the earth is warming, and that we are the primary cause. Nonetheless, if I saw this kind of thing in a paper in my own field, it would be immediately tossed in the trash.
[1] You can't actually adjust for these things, which the authors admit in the text. They just dance around it so that lay-readers won't understand:
> Our method of removing El Niño, volcanism, and solar variations is approximate but not perfect, so it is possible that e.g. the effect of El Niño on the 2023 and 2024 temperature is not completely eliminated.
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.
Peer review is an important part of scientific publication, but it's also important for the general public to not view peer review as a full vetting. Peer reviewers look for things like reproducibility of the analysis, suitability of the conclusions given the methods, discussions of the limitations of the data and methods, appropriate statistical tests, correct approval from IRBs if there are humans or animals involved, and things like that. For many journals, the editors are also asking if the results are interesting and significant enough to meet the prestige of the journal.
Peer review misses things like intentional fraud, mistakes in computations, and of course any blind spots that the field has not yet acknowledged (for example, nearly every scientific specialty had to rediscover the important of splitting training and testing datasets for machine learning methods somewhat on their own, as new practitioners adopted new methods quickly and then some papers would slip through at the beginning when reviewers were not yet aware of the necessity of this split...)
Any single paper is not revealed truth, it's a step towards establishing truth, maybe. Science is supposed to be self-correcting, which also necessitates the mistakes that need correction. Climate science is one of the fields that gets the most attention and scrutiny, so a series of papers in that field goes a long ways towards establishing truth, much more so than, say, new MRI technology in psychology.
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."
Peer reviewed does not mean the findings of the paper are established fact or scientific consensus. It does not mean that the findings have been replicated by other scientists. It does not mean that the paper relied on a robust methodology, is free of basic statistical errors, or even free of logical fallacies.
Some of these limitations are due to the limitations of peer review itself. Others are just side effects of the way science works (for example, some ideas start as small, unimpressive experiments that are reported on in papers, and the strength of the findings is gradually developed over time). Obviously sometimes the prestige (or lack thereof) of the journal the paper is in decreases (or increases) some of these issues.
Anyway, peer review is a very noisy channel (IMHO).
In principle you could go (pay to†) read the actual final published copy, maybe it's different, but almost always it's basically the same, the text is enough to qualify.
If you go to https://eel.is/c++draft/ you'll find the "Draft" C++ standard, and it has this text:
Note: this is an early draft. It's known to be incomplet and incorrekt, and it has lots of bad formatting.
Nevertheless, the people who wrote your C++ compiler used that "draft" document, because it isn't reasonable to wait a few years for ISO to publish the "real" document which is identical other than lacking that scary text and having a bunch of verbiage about how ISO owns this document and it mustn't be republished.
And you might be thinking "OK, I'm sure those GNU hippies don't pay for a real published copy, but surely the Microsoft Corporation buys their engineers a real one". Nope. Waste of money.
† If you have a relationship with a research institution it might have this or be willing to help you order it from somewhere else at no personal cost.
[1] - Actually, there are hoops on pre-print repositories, such as arXiv, so not everyone can post there. I guesstimate that 99% of the public has no means of posting on arXiv.
In 2020, China made a commitment to the world: to peak carbon dioxide emissions before 2030 and strive to achieve carbon neutrality before 2060. Last year, China announced its 2035 Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) for addressing climate change.
"The outline draft clearly emphasizes actively and prudently advancing and achieving carbon peaking, proposing that during the 15th Five-Year Plan period, carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GDP will be reduced by 17%, and a preliminary clean, low-carbon, safe, and efficient new energy system will be established. This clear roadmap will help us achieve high-quality 'dual carbon' phase goals and lay a solid foundation for carbon neutrality," said Wei Yuansong, member of the CPPCC National Committee and Director of the Water Pollution Control Laboratory at the Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences.
from： https://www.news.cn/20260305/7ad8d5ee3a6d4b28b1b62230199f1d0...
this is in china's next 5 year plan
I'm literally in the plane flying back from Shanghai right now, where cars have blue plates for petrol cars and green plates for electric ones.
Easily 70% of the cars on the road are electric, and basically all of the scooters used for deliveries.
The roads are so quiet it's sometimes dangerous because you don't hear the scooters come behind you.
They'll undoubtedly be the world leaders in clean energy.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-...
Meanwhile the Paris Accord seems to bludgeon Europe and America (who are reducing their CO2 emissions significantly), with the net effect of accelerating the deindustrialisation of the West (thus helping industry grow in China).
The Accord should focus on moving industry away from China to countries where electricity predominantly comes from renewables.
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.
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.
Then why is my electricity and gasoline both so much more expensive than they used to be?
I think the flaw in this thinking is thinking that burning things is the cheapest way to get energy.
Oil processing and extraction is a complex industry which requires a huge continued investment. Coal requires massive mining operations. Natural gas is probably the least intensive of the burny things, and it still requires a pretty advanced pipeline to be competitive.
Renewables are relatively cheap one time purchases. Save energy storage, the economy that is most competitive at this point is one powered by renewables.
That transition is already happening in the US without a massive government regulation/mandate. In china, it's happening a whole lot faster because the government is pushing it. And the chinese economy is at no risk of being outbid by smaller economies burning fuel.
The main reason burning remains a major source of fuel is that for most nations, the infrastructure to consume it has already been built. It's not because it's cheap.
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".
And slowly raising the price on a smooth forward looking schedule lets businesses make rational choices about budgeting for that or for migrating to greener options.
Companies are excellent at adapting to acheive their best interests, to any predictable continuous (as apposed to discontinuous) economic change. Especially when it is a market based change, as that creates a level playing field.
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.
But the source could be the most likely place for corrupt reporting. Or: Maybe the source element is not dangerous but downstream by-products are.
Like you’ve said: It’s a problem.
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257%2Faer.15000001
It's essentially a carbon tax on local production and a corresponding carbon tariff on imports. Countries that already have a carbon tax or equivalent don't get tariffed. IOW, they're part of the club.
Usually a carbon rebate is also included in the plan, although that's not strictly necessary.
Germany was spear-heading an effort to create a carbon club, but it fell apart, unfortunately. At the time a club that didn't include the US seemed infeasible.
In 2026 a club that doesn't include Trump's America is a good thing, not a bad thing IMO.
It is not equal responsibility.
"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.
Or quickly develop to the point where solar, wind, and hydro is cheaper than getting dead fossils out of the ground and processing them.
I am not familiar enough with the economics of this to know whether we are close to that point, but I can imagine once we cross it, combustible fuel burners will be at a disadvantage if they haven't invested in infrastructure needed for renewables.
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.
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.
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.
Consumers usually want products that they own, not rent, products that last for a long time and don't need to be constantly updated or upgraded. Coincidentally, this is also better for the environment. Producers often want the opposite of that, in order to maximize profit. So what we get depends crucially on the power balance or imbalance between consumers and producers. This is where consolidation and monopolization become a major factor.
A lot of the "convenience economy," dominated by temporary, disposable goods, is predicted on consumers having no free time, because they're constantly working. Despite vast improvements in worker "efficiency," we haven't seen comcomitant reductions in the number of hours worked. The future of leisure facilitated by technological advances, which everyone was imagining 50-60 years ago, never became a reality. The technology did advance, but the leisure did not. The other day (or night) I noticed Amazon delivery drivers arriving for neighbors after 9pm; this is a dystopia.
Gosh, if only consumers and producers were the same people. What could we call this new economic paradigm?
But no, economic monarchy is the only way to have Freedom (TM)(R), so let's slap on some easily-sidestepped regulations and keep going the same direction! It'll probably turn out fine.
"But what about <technology/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.
You can’t change the world with plans that last no longer than a presidential term.
I have this gut feeling the world had finally got to the point it decided to fix this pesky warming issue among other things, with a nice and cozy nuclear winter.
(/s, obviously)
That blank will not be filled in with today's technologies, but with technologies we cannot conceive of today and with an energy abundance that we can hardly imagine.
Even in this apparently dire predicament, optimism is warranted.
Here's the original: https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-6079807/v1
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.
Your personal website has an expired certificate.
Seems like it expired end of Feb.
The uncomfortable truth is that that people in affluent countries don’t want to change their lifestyle. Affluent countries are less affected by global warming than countries responsible for a fraction of global emissions. All the emissions from manufacturing follow suit.
Of course, people should do everything they can to reduce or offset their own emissions. But the solution is going to have to be societal, keeping up with energy demand by adding more nuclear, solar, and wind to the grid.
The USA has uniquely high emissions (matched only by a couple oil states). This is not solely explained with affluency.
-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
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.
Daily commute represents 20% of CO2 emissions, it's an insanely high number, and it has an incredibly easy, already tested thanks to COVID, solution.
People will say "but what about the shops that will close". They won't, they will relocate in residential neighborhoods where people now live AND work.
All the potential issues people might raise actually disappear as WFH becomes the new normal and not a potentially temporary state like it was during COVID.
Even if only 50% of jobs can be done from home, that's an instant 10% reduction JUST from commute. But in reality it'll lead to a much larger decrease, with less spending on fast-fashion, more proximity businesses, etc.
I can't afford it. For context, I paid £500 for my current vehicle back in 2020. My bills have only gone up since, but my salary has not.
> Migrate from gas appliances (range, furnace, water heater) to electric (induction, heat pumps)
I can't afford that either. When I got my home assessed, switching to heat pumps requires replacing all the radiators in my house and extra insulation, etc. My gas boiler does have a built-in electric induction system, but it's only used when the tank is cold.
> If your power grid isn’t clean, add rooftop or balcony solar
I can afford the solar panels, but I can't afford the battery storage, nor the installation, and my area does not allow for an inverter connected to the main grid.
Most 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 it
Here 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
- etc
If you are not doing ALL OF THESE you have no right on telling other people how they produce their CO2.
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.
They're literally mentioned by the first IPCC report already.
my 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.
And grow new trees in their place of course.
I think it's important to mention the effects we're seeing today are caused by the emissions from decades ago.
Second, not sure if the paper in the OP touches this but we've reduced aerosols in the atmosphere. These previously were masking the effects of climate change by cooling the temperature.
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.
Where is this new figure coming from? It seems about 60X what's being published elsewhere.
Current rates of sea level rise are still in single digit millimetres per year (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_level_rise), 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://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/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://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice); the thickness of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth) which is not even all oceanic.
Great! That means we dont need to reduce emissions, cuz the magic bullet will just take care of everything. No need to change anything.
Why is it always never 'burn less fossil fuels'.
Anything but the oil company bottom line huh?
We MUST MUST MUST stop burning things. Stop it.
- We are still mining and burning coal. This is incomprehensible. US, AU, etc Eg: https://www.nacoal.com/our-operations
- We are still subsidizing oil to around $1T/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.
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?
Ridiculous take, and you’d know that the OP was correct if you cared enough to know what researchers were actually saying.
Climate arguments devolve into appeals to impact claimed by authorities rather than any examination of what they’ve said.
Would they really want to risk being basically excommunicated from their area of research for daring to provide ammo to “climate change deniers”?
65M seems a lot bigger than the 3.6mm/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?
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.
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.
I didn't see it mentioned in the article, though I did do a very brief read through. And it has been a while since I looked at the shipping lanes thing.
I hasten to add this is not to claim we should not have cleaned the shipping lanes. I don't know enough to say on that front. My gut would be that it was still the correct move.
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. Longtermism nonsense over the today.
The entire EU produces only about half of the USA's total emissions, despite having a population of over 100 million more people.
"Average" Canadian. A lot of the population lives in a climate where half the year more energy is required to survive the climate. And the population is exponentially smaller than the United States, India, or China.
That's like calling out the guy in the mountains burning a campfire to stay warm at night when the guy sleeping on the beach in Hawaii requires none.
Point being, brand new account, if we want solutions it needs to be done without such angling or it all reduces to absurdities and jabs instead of cooperation. It needs to be realistic in terms of where people are being absurdly wasteful, but also sympathetic that we do not all face the same circumstances.
It's a hole and we don't get out by digging downward.
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.
we don't need to adopt this form of thinking at all, no one is owed anything.
Warming is here and will continue.
Our decisions from here on could vary the outcomes between massive disruption and movement of people to a wholly uninhabitable planet.
They do not have to repeat our mistakes. We can help them build out renewable energy instead.
We don't want your disgusting lifestyle. We want you to stop being so bloody infantile and greedy.
Apologies for the strong words but the current state of things has me pissed off.
It's in no nation's interest, from a game theory perspective, to stunt their own growth to reduce emissions. If the US stops, Russia and China will destroy the west. If China stops, they'll never catch up technologically. Ditto for India. Smaller nations have even less incentive (they'll easily be conquered by neighbours), except for the ones surrounded entirely by friendly nations...
I personally won't criticize people who take flights to go on vacation (I don't but I accept those who do). But I'll be pointing out the hypocrisy of those who take flights to go on vacation and yet want to micro-manage how others should live their lives so that they'd be "polluting less".
Recently some infographic made the round for it showed the act a human can take and the pollution it generates. The reason it circulated a lot is because the first item was highly controversial: "having a kid". And yet there's lots of truth in that.
For example my wife and I we got one kid and my wife is now in her forties and we won't have a second one. And I'll never ever take a single lesson about pollution from anyone who had two kids or more.
I'm the one who don't fly. I'm the one who only had one kid. And I'm not criticizing other people's lifestyle and choices. But if you open your mouth, I'll point out the hypocrite you are if you either fly or had two kids or more.
> And I'll never ever take a single lesson about pollution from anyone who had two kids or more.
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.
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 warming
2. Who produces most of these chemicals
3. Are there any global trends over the last 20 years in production of these chemicals
https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions
https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/europes-crusade-against-air-co...
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%.
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 of 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 is 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 the economic advantage of renewables. And geoengineering measures can be enacted unilaterally by many powers - as long as the political will is there to absorb a few strongly worded condemnation letters.
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?
Maybe that's why the Trump regime wants so badly to invade Canada and the Groenland?
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.
Not only climate change, but aggressive firefighting over the past 50 or more years has caused a lot of material low in the fire ladder to accumulate, which in natural or at least pre-Columbian forests would be cleared out by routine fires. Brush and deadfall for example. The larger trees in healthy forests don't succumb to fire, but these fires have been decimating whole stands of trees. Pair that with almost zero snowpack this year, the only positive thing I can say is that I'm glad I can enjoy spring a bit earlier this year.
We need some mechanism that penalizes polluters, benefits low emitters, and stops/limits/taxes/... worldwide shipping when local alternatives are available to avoid these [1] abominations.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/1e4zl...
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.
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).
I 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."
- 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
If my 50 years on the planet has taught me anything, it's that this is not a sufficient motivation the current generation in power.
Related, home insurance cost increases (and, in places, unavailability) from wildfires & worsening storms hits the pocketbook directly.
Cutting 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...
There are a certain number of people who just cannot change. There are large numbers of diabetics who die despite an enormous number of warnings.
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
I expect "change" when people form unions or union like organisations and withhold or redistribute their labour, both waged and in more subtle forms, such as attention, and unwaged but socially important labour (e.g. women refusing to be servile homemakers and instead get guns and start soup kitchens).
What rich countries do is they just export their factories to other countries and say: look we do not pollute.
China has also been deploying lots of renewable and nuclear energy, and their carbon emissions actually falling.
Solar and wind have gotten so cheap we should be able to forgo more fossil fuel deployment in developing nations.
The base then started demanding this from their reps and Trump almost picked up on this himself. It took years to undo that damage and even now we're barely back at a pro-clean air, pro-solar and pro nuclear position...
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.
There are two clear parallel points to this:
1. Over the time frames we're discussing (even the next 50 years) how many "poor" countries will there be left? We're seeing substantial progress on economic, educational, and other fronts over the past 50 years.
2. Will there ever be a time when the change occurring is direct and over a short enough time frame to matter to "rich" countries? Yes, it will suck if most of Florida is underwater, but this process has already started, and has been going on for 20, 30, 50 years? And most people care very little. If it takes a century for the state to completely submerge, that apathy will continue.
If some extreme weather event hits you you may lose your only house, your savings, your health, maybe a good percent of the population of rich countries are vulnerable ot that. In the other hand if someone rich and powerful in those or even somewhat poorer countries, they may buy another house, have more already, lose some money and goods but that's it.
Until those extreme weather events, floods and so on affect enough of the people those people have around, to eventually affect their business and them. But by then it will be far too late.
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.
Sure, blame developed nations for getting us here, but the path forward isn't solely in the hands of those developed nations.
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!
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.
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.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/05/26/key-findi...
On the plus side, I think we'll solve global warming, with technology, in a few generations.
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.
The EU reduced their emissions by over a third from their peak. Their emissions per capita is less than that of China (not meant to be a dig at China who is the leader the development of renewables). Even Americans reduced their CO2 emissions by 15% in absolute terms and by about 30% per capita as well.
Why is it so hard to understand that individual people, let alone hundreds of millions of people in aggregate, can have multiple priorities? This whole doomerist attitude doesn't help anyone. If anything, it contributes to the erosion of the good things we already have. Nobody gave a damn about USAID saving millions of people until it could be weaponized against Trump/Elon for taking it away.
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?
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.
Things have already changed!
They already are. China does whatever it wants en mass meanwhile.
More specifically, nothing will change until the politicians and billionaires personally get hurt.
The negative effects of climate change need to come for them personally for them to care.
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.
These are all related. All of them are connected to humans pushing the planetary resource limits from various directions. We're attacking Iran now in part because climate change has dramatically increased the water stress conditions making the population more susceptible to political collapse. It's also happening because it puts energy stress on our geopolitical adversaries (same with Venezuela). Trump emerged in the first place because declining American prosperity (despite GPD numbers) drove a large portion of the population to nihilism.
Fixed
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.
Do you want to go to war with China to enforce an environmentalist agenda?
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.
I've lived in multiple countries and came back to visit after decades. I didn't notice any change of temperature. Some years are slightly warmer, some years are slightly cooler but they all feel within the norm from how I can remember. I remember some very bad heat-waves during my childhood which I've never experienced again.
I know this is anecdotal evidence, but it's MY anecdotal evidence which I gathered first-hand and therefore I can trust. I gathered many data points over several decades.
Also I have many alternative narratives which better fit the data. I've identified some critical flaws in climate models related to simulation complexity and also plant evolution, both backed by professional insights and independent scientific observations.
So unfortunately, I just don't believe current narratives about climate change. The data doesn't fit that narrative, it fits other narratives much better.
I have friends shoving sausages and burgers into them while ordering countless things on Amazon every day, yet they think they help by buying a hybrid car, couldn't even be bothered by using public transport even though it's faster and cheaper where they live, because "too many people, dirty".
Go figure.
1. For now, we can cool Earth artificially. 1 gram of SO₂ in the stratosphere offsets the warming effect of 1 ton of CO₂. It's known to be safe and effective. This company is already doing it: https://makesunsets.com
2. Fossil fuels will be phased out over the next few decades, but CO₂ stays in the atmosphere for several centuries. The practical solution will probably have to be "carbon sequestration", where you capture CO₂ from the air and pump it underground where it stays forever. Such storage is mature tech in the natural gas industry, but the capturing CO₂ tech needs a lot of work.
> and there can be "no longer any doubt".
Who has written this?
The planet as a whole will do just fine. We're not going to break the planet. The reason that people bring up the huge anthropogenic spike in temperature is because us anthropoids evolved in the context of a narrow band, and it would seem as though we're moving the global climate out of that band.
If you go from the top of a building to the bottom, it isnt the height that is the issue but the speed of change. You take the lift, not jump of the side of the building.
Not during our civilization's existence.
Given the other tech in the novel, that seems highly likely. It includes nanobot "assemblers".
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.
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.
We tried top down. Didn't work.
We tried bottom up. Didn't work.
(only europeans will understand)
There's more than one aspect to the environment. Plastic pollution and global warming are two separate concerns with separate ways of dealing with them.
So yea, no way is oil stopping or even dipping slightly any time soon.
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...
The intention of the United States and the world is divided.
We love our money too much to care about the Next generation, In my view.
What do you mean?
The intention of the United States is maximizing oil use.
The intention of the World is maximizing oil use. Even EU countries are panicking over maybe being forced to use just a little less oil.
So where do you see this difference? Clearly, the entire world agrees: global warming is less serious than higher prices on oil. Much less important.
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.
From their About: “Work on Climate quickly built the world’s largest and most successful community of its sort – with tens of thousands of members around the globe, thousands of whom have found climate jobs and started companies”.
Not affiliated but I ran into this initiative recently.
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.
/s
It 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]
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.
Do you know how can fertilizer be produced without animals ? Oil
> On 1 January 2020, a new limit on the sulphur content in the fuel oil used on board ships came into force, marking a significant milestone to improve air quality, preserve the environment and protect human health.
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.”
EDIT: The title is weird because it’s generic to the point of being unsearchable. I’m not disputing the facts of the paper.
Since manuscripts are written for those working in the field, and need to be, it's one of the big challenges of science communication. In the past these articles would be in a library and mailed out to the subscribing specialists, which minimized the confusion. In the age of the internet, even our dogs can read highly specialized scientific pre-prints that haven't even been peer reviewed yet.
"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."
The actual abstract reads: "Recent record-hot years have caused a discussion whether global warming has accelerated, but previous analysis found that acceleration has not yet reached a 95% confidence level given the natural temperature variability. Here we account for the influence of three main natural variability factors: El Niño, volcanism, and solar variation. The resulting adjusted data show that after 2015, global temperature rose significantly faster than in any previous 10-year period since 1945."
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.
And if the voters were just a bit smarter and not bought into the “China bad” narrative, we might even get proper, nice, affordable EVs in the US.
USA is about to have another El Nino summer which will be scorching from overheating oceans
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 restart
Switching from ICE to electric is a much smaller ask than switching from personal cars to... bicycles?
People 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.
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
"And remember, now that I'm gone, every problem that occurs is my fault. So stop looking for the culprit, find a solution"
The Republicans are even more protectionist and sinophobic, however. Nobody ever had the option to vote for importing Chinese EVs.
Galveston, Texas
Morgan’s Point, Texas
Annapolis, Maryland
Norfolk, Virginia
Rockport, Texas
Bay St. Louis, Mississippi
Miami and Miami Beach, Florida
Charleston, South Carolina
Atlantic City, New JerseyThat 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.
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.
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 China
China'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
Power companies in the US are already deploying renewables pretty quickly without incentive. If the tariffs are dropped that'd further incentivize build out.
What should be done is carbon taxes and subsidies, but that's not likely to be done. And since that's not going to happen, economics is what will drive transition.
If I do this, this would have been a crime. Nothing more.
Tomorrow: 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".
Meanwhile, three-time Billionaire claims he's solved the problem using soylent green while fifty thousand people react in awe at the live presentation.
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.
Guess what happens when you add them up...
It uses a bunch of energy, but not so much compared to moving yourself around in a car of plane.
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.
Let's stop building homes to live in and use motor vehicles for travel. Smartphone with LLM access will fulfill all our needs.
When the oil in your frying pan is smoking, adding a tiny bit more heat may be unwise.
> Here we account for the influence of three main natural variability factors: El Niño, volcanism, and solar variation.
Whoops! Whoopsies! Oopsy doodles!
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/motivation.
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?
(the Iran collapse that led to mass protests and then mass murder of the mass protests is itself a climate driven issue https://www.unicef.org/iran/en/climate-change )
LLMs hit the market and you never hear anyone talk about carbon at all. At all. Maybe Apple will mention it a little bit but they're not in the big datacenter game
The costs of LLMs are just being completely paved over. We don't let manufacturers dump cadmium into the rivers in the US anymore, even if it would enable cheap or magic products, it's insane that we're just ignoring all the external impacts in this particular area
https://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. "
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.
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.
People are way more alarmed by Rapid Local Temperature Rises By Mechanism of Thermonuclear Energy Being Suddenly Released.
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.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1118464/transportation-c... shows the American trend, then look at which other countries that’s similar to assuming we electrify a given fraction of the transportation sector:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
This is even more wrong when you look at how Africa is electrifying. Unlike the United States, China continued to invest in solar panel production and so they’re now the cheapest option for electrical power for millions of people since solar panels run for decades and don’t require trucking diesel fuel around or building out power grids. Investments in batteries are having the same cycle: richer countries have the research universities and product development but then anyone can buy the product.
https://apnews.com/article/solar-energy-china-imports-batter...
That’s why the fossil fuels spend so much money spreading messages like yours: they grew fat on government subsidies and they need those subsidies to continue or even expand as the basic economics increasingly favor renewables. Trump has to force coal plants to stay open because otherwise the operators would switch to cheaper options.
Part of the problem seems to be that many countries won't do shit, so all the improvements that have been made are just completely negated by other poluting more.
Every f'ing time it snows someone has to snide in with "BuT I ThOuGhT GlObAl WaRmInG WaS ReAl!?!?!?!?!" And i have to take a breath.
Eventually we'll have to deal with the Giant Spider Downtown, it's just that the to-do list is growing from the top.
Consider for a moment that there ARE people this straight-up evil....
Why care when we're already over the edge and there isn't anything we can do about it?
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?
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.
- 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 run
and never for saving the lives of the people on our planet.
Humanity is doomed. We deserve it.
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.
it's not about us guys, relax.
>We remove the estimated influence of three main natural variability factors: El Niño, volcanism, and solar variation. The resulting adjusted and thus less “noisy” data show that there has been acceleration with over 98% confidence, with faster warming over the last 10+ years than during any previous decade.
Those are factors in this analysis that weren’t in all prior analyses, and the confidence levels in this analysis have improved greatly and we know much more certainly that global temps are rising faster now than earlier decades.
It is specifically about cleaning up the data by removing these 3 and showing a clearer picture of acceleration without these 3 factors.
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.
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.
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.
Another thing I have wondered is whether it is ethical to oppose solar power because I don’t like how it looks. Again here the environmentalists have an answer. Yes it is.
Recently I was wondering about geothermal power as well, but I learned that the good people of black rock city believe that we should leave no trace and a geothermal plant would leave a trace so it’s far preferable to drive a large number of ICE vehicles to the desert.
In general, I think that we probably exaggerate climate change a lot. It’s not a big deal, at least when compared to things like sunshine for a park for underserved minorities.
all the carbon storage methods (efficient and otherwise) studied so far could be immediately put into action.
In addition to the immediate reduction in the use of fossil fuels for energy production, the scenario could be completely changed in 10 years, water could be desalinated, desertification reversed, etc.
Free and unlimited energy would be the solution to everything. The question is whether we will get there before it's too late... and perhaps AI is the answer?