With 2024 and 2023 being 2nd and 1st resp. The last 11 years were the hottest 11 in recorded history. I don't know how more evidence we need. We are standing on the train tracks, the train is coming, and many of us say "Oh just look over there instead, we'll be fine."
Meanwhile - even if you do not care about climate - there is so much money to make with renewables (production, storage, mobility, etc). China and much of the rest of the world are charging ahead, while the US wants to be a petrol state.
There's no amount of evidence that'll help. We have had a sufficient amount of that for a long while. It's entrenched economic interests fostering a lack of political will that's keeping us from taking this seriously.
Whenever you hear a politician say "carbon neutral by 2050", interrupt them. The real goal is to avoid getting too far over 1.5 degrees warming. We need to avoid reaching tipping points that will cause non-recoverable damage to the earth system. The year 2050 is meaningless. Actual global average temperatures is what should be measured.
2050 is not meaningless. Its close enough to feel like its achievable but far enough away that you can put off immediate action and still feel there is time to get it done. Reminds of the lyrics of the spirit of the west song:
You're still hearing politicians talk about climate change? This could be an American bubble but I haven't heard talk of climate change from US politicians, or the other global leaders that filter through our news cycle, since 2023.
I would imagine it's a relevant political football in most first world countries. I avoid American news, but the bits I see make me think it's probably still focused on culture war garbage.
Berkeley Earth berkeleyearth.org › home › global temperature report for 2023
Global Temperature Report for 2023 - Berkeley Earth
February 29, 2024 - 2023 was the warmest year on Earth since direct observations began, and the first year to exceed 1.5 °C above our 1850-1900 average. ...
Exactly what is it about CO2, a plant food, that scares you so much? You do realize that green plants react to increased CO2 percentage with stronger growth?
My new conspiracy theory is that Trump wants Greenland, because most of south and central America will be too hot. There are 800mln people south of Colorado. 30% will emigrate north.
> We need to avoid reaching tipping points that will cause non-recoverable damage to the earth system.
Then I'd be far more worried about nuclear war than minor temperature excursions. Aside from that "non recoverable" damage happens every day. What do you think mining is?
> Actual global average temperatures is what should be measured.
On average it was 10 degrees Fahrenheit cooler last year than it was the previous where I live in northern CA.
Local weather is what matters to individuals. So is access to affordable energy.
You cannot coerce someone to ignore their local weather and sabotage access to affordable energy because of some global average. It’s a losing battle that’s fundamentally misled.
You have to coerce the individual to follow the strategic direction despite tactical disadvantages. This is what leadership means.
If we all individually spend more money to accommodate the effects of climate change than their causes, then we are wasting enormous economic resources.
Sure, but local is a radius. There's my local, then there's my region's local, then there's my country's local. As wonderful as globalism sounds on paper, if saving the global average leads to a drought or a flood for another country, or another region, then you are trying to convince others of giving up a lot for no tangible relevant gain.
I’m amused that the argument is that we are in a Mr Burns position where different kinds of pollution we were emitting was balancing out and somehow fighting pollution is the reason global warming is worse? While I’m sure it has some effect, the amount of co2 we pump out every year as a species is insane. The effect of ship pollution mitigating that is marginal at best
Some systems pulling the average up and some pulling down but the average of them is net up. I wonder though if it would have been better or worse for us if the net change ended up negative (dropping temps every year) instead. Probably worse, right?
Stratospheric aerosol injection is the leading geoengineering proposal for a reason. If you have well-supported reasons to be skeptical, you should share it, but just saying "idk doesn't sound right to me" isn't convincing.
Even if it were meaningful, is the proposal to fight global warming to keep dirty ships? That’s an insane strategy.
More realistically, there’s vested interests in existing ships and shipyards not being made obsolete so any minute effect is overhyped as “this is how we solve global warming”.
This reminds me of a conversation I had with an acquaintance - he was convinced that anthropogenic global warming was impossible because a volcanic eruption emits so much CO2 and was completely unwilling to consider evidence that perhaps humans emitting annually 200x more than all volcanoes combined might have an effect.
You want to unthinkingly reject a proposal that makes things better because you can't understand the third order effects and refuse to accept any evidence.
The amount of aerosol you need to I next is enormous, it needs to be sprayed at an altitude higher than realistic means of injection are feasible, and it has to be done in a way that doesn’t produce so much CO2 that it defeats the point.
Can you imagine an extant tech that can come close to doing that at the required scale? I can’t.
It would be cheaper and more practical to talk about space-based sunshields, and that’s about as practical as prayer. At the altitudes any realistic glider can reach you’d have to use sulfur aerosols and not ice, and in either case you’d need to inject gigatons per year, every year because at that altitude aerosols are very short-lived.
A realistic aircraft capable of those payloads will burn avgas, no solar craft comes close to the capability. The side effects such as a significant increase in acid rain, are not trivial either.
These are fantasies of people who cannot accept the reality of what we’re facing.
Is there a real practical solution to this? It seems like all proposed solutions in last 40 years are a drop in the ocean, or just a money grab scams. Only thing that really worked for such global scale is the ozone layer repair. Global warming/climate change I guess we should just accept it and adapt?
Plenty of solutions, but politicians will never make it happen.
We calculated that capping personal emissions (mostly doable via peer pressure should we get this moving as normal people) to some top 1 percent 25 metric carbon ton and going plant based would get us net-zero while additionally getting rid of the zillionaire problem and adding extra 50-100 gigaton rewilding effect to the table.
With no bigger than marginal effect on anyone's QOL.
But we're SOL as the propaganda machines of the zillionaires keep dividing normal people to fake dichotomies.
No, there's really just a few select politicians standing in the way. Governments around the world have implemented tons of policies to attempt to address the crisis, but unless every country participates, it's economically suicidal. Carbon-intensive industries can simply move to the US, strengthening them, while those countries attempting to carry the burden of preventing climate change will be equally affected by looming disasters.
Because the US is the only country that defected from the Paris agreement. The US is the only country led by climate change deniers. Tons of countries are led by malevolent and selfish leaders, but none are as incompetent and unpredictable as the US.
Climate change mitigation is a collective action problem in the form of a prisoner's dilemma or a tragedy of the commons. If every agent (i.e. country) refuses to cooperate, every agent will suffer major damage from environmental disasters. If all agents cooperate, they only suffer minor damage from economic policies designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
At first sight, this doesn't seem like much of a problem. The solution seems self-evident, before one considers countries adopting different strategies:
If one country defects, they benefit massively from hosting the world's carbon intensive processes, yet all countries will equally share in environmental catastrophe. Thus, the optimal strategy for any single self-interested agent is always to defect, no matter what the others do. Paradoxically, the optimal strategy for each agent in isolation leads to a catastrophically bad outcome for all agents if they all choose that strategy. Everyone wants to be the parasite, but if no one is the host, we all die.
It wouldn't matter if the US were a tiny island nation, but the US has the largest carbon footprint, the largest economy, and the most capable military. The US led the democratic world. They could have solved the prisoner's dilemma by enforcing global cooperation. If the US and its allies would threaten to sanction those countries who don't cooperate, the payout matrix would shift towards cooperation being a stable Nash-equilibrium. It would no longer be in a country's interest to screw everyone else over, so they'd stop. The US and the entire world would be better off.
* has been the largest cummulative emmitter of CO2,
* has "outsourced" much of the emissions due to its current consumption levels to offshore manufacturers such as China,
* was an early recognizer of the serious implications of CO2 emmissions causing AGW, going back to the 1970s,
* was and still is home to some of the largest fossil fuel companies that have been activly gaslighting the world about the realities of AGW since the 1970,
* is, or at least was, a global leader that was admired with an aspiration lifestyle that has set the tone for lifestyle globally - a lifestyle with consumption and emission attributes that have disasterous side effects if attained globally.
There are some 190+ countries about the globe, it's very much the case that not all countries are equal actors in this issue.
Before areas become completely uninhabitable, we will see areas become increasingly stressed: heat waves, more extreme weather events, poorer crop yields, depleting aquifers.
Stress increases conflict risk. Fights for essential resources (land, water, food, shelter) will break out long before those essential resources are completely gone.
If we skip past the immense suffering and death part, we will probably end up on a planet where national borders have been redrawn by war and desperation, and a smaller population that lives in more northerly climes.
Our politicians are already thinking about them, which is why they are cracking down on immigration and generating relentless propaganda demonizing refugees and asylum seekers.
Yes, we got to adapt, we won't cool it down and "repair" what is broken.
However we can slow down the effects and try to stop the effects. So it's "only" 1.5° or whatever, not 3°, 5° or 10°. And if we raise average by 10° at least not by the years 2100, but 2200 to give time to adapt.
"Adapting" means resettling people, restructuring agriculture and food production, etc.
(All numbers are quite arbitrary picks, just as any goal one tried to set before)
CO2 output per person in the US (all sources including industry, etc): ~13-14,000kg
Average distance driven per year per capita in the US: ~20,000km
Average CO2 output of current private vehicle fleet: ~250g/km
Therefore, over one third of total CO2 output per person is personal vehicle use. Considering only CO2 output due to personal choices driving has to be well over half.
Most people don't - or refuse - to consider the obvious choice to take personal responsibility. Drive less.
Driving isn't realistically a personal choice. Roadways designed for cars extend from every single point in the country to every other. The support for alternative methods of transportation varies greatly by area, but is generally poor.
Riding a bike or taking the bus is objectively the worse option for most people. That's not personal choice, that's policy.
Reversing course for a car-culture country like the US would take 50+ years. If it's even possible, which I personally don't think it is — the US is too far gone.
To an extent I agree with you. Some places and lifestyles (e.g. means of earning a living) don't make cutting back on driving a viable choice.
However, these things can and do change (introduction of public transport and saner planning allowing local shops and the possibility for children get to and from school autonomously for example).
One problem as I see it is that many people that don't have a viable choice other than driving everywhere are politically opposed to structural change. Adopting this political point of view is also a personal choice.
love how a completely valid point gets downvoted becuase the average person refuses to believe they are part of the problem "no! its those big corporations and airline industry! my daily commute has no input at all!"
I guess returning to the office isn't so great. Pointy hair bosses rage everywhere.
But beyond driving less, surely eating further down the foodchain helps as well. Plants and shellfish are efficient. Cows are not. Eat fewer burgers and a few more lentils and mussels. Unless you are RFK Jr then of course please eat lots and lots of fatty cow, tallow, butter. Go full on Atkins please and follow right behind him.
This also means two thirds of emissions are not due to vehicular emissions. Let’s tackle that first, more bang for the buck?
Also - does that per capita figure include cargo? If so, how much? Does it matter if random individual takes personal
Responsibility and stops driving when all those long haul trucks will still be on the road?
My point is that in terms of personal responsibility nothing comes remotely close to driving but a vanishingly small proportion of people are willing to consider this.
I would say it's often because people see individual examples in action. Some people follow those examples. Then more do. You are more influential than you think.
The real solution is pricing the true cost of the externalities fairly and globally.
Everything which isn't sustainable must he taxed to the degree to offset the damage. We know well that economic incentives work best and that markets are efficient to achieve optimal solutions.
The core issue is just game theory to coordinate globally all players to prevent free riding.
There are a lot of money scams out there to be sure.
It's unlikely that something like carbon capture will ever significantly reduce the CO2 in the atmosphere. It's just too energy intensive.
But there are a lot of practical solutions to significantly curb emissions that mostly just require regulations and taxes.
Things like building out rail transport. Heavily taxing air travel. Taxing all forms of carbon emission (fuel taxes would be pretty effective). Subsidizing non-co2 emissions, pushing for electrification when possible and power generation which uses non-CO2 emission. Stop wasteful pipedreams like "clean coal". Force data centers to be better citizens. For example, make them buy the battery/solar systems to offset their consumption. Make them participate in district heating schemes.
There's also some hope that even without intervention some of this will happen somewhat naturally. Solar and battery is already very cheap. Both are causing changes in the shipping and transit equations.
Which was, stop using CFCs, and stop venting them into the atmosphere to "dispose" of them. We also stopped lighting rivers on fire for mostly the same reasons, stop dumping industrial waste in them.
> I guess we should just accept it and adapt?
Ocean shipping produces more pollution than most countries. There are only like 5 countries that produce more carbon than the worldwide shipping fleet. If they cared then "cheap crap from China" wouldn't exist.
It's a scam. They want to monopolize the economy and they're using your environmental consciousness as the wedge to push you against your own best interests.
Ocean freight accounts for 2-3% of global emissions. It is orders of magnitude more efficient and clean than air or road freight per ton-kilometer. It's twice as efficient as rail. The ability to efficiently transport goods enables your current standard of living. A world economy without ocean freight would be minuscule and of course far more polluting, without even considering land use.
I heard about this[1] recently, essentially spurring a massive plankton bloom to capture carbon where it ends up on the sea floor and becomes future oil deposits in a few millenia.
The nice thing about it is that it doesn't require global cooperation.
I was under the impression that there have been multiple large extinction events in the past caused by excessive anaerobic decomposition underwater that led to the oceans becoming swamps and giving off nasty toxic gasses.
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster has a pretty good summary of the challenges and solutions.
There is developing real practical solutions, and then there there is the willingness of governments, big corporations, and the general population, to implement real practical solutions. The latter is much much harder than the former.
Nobody has to "like" them. The centralized command and control structure is mostly in place to just force them down everyone's throats. Once we have centralized digital currency it will be a foregone conclusion
If only. Given how power and influence works currently, I would guess that those that have real control over these currencies would most likely use that power as they do now - to further their exploitation and pillaging of the earth with environmental considerations coming a distant second (or third, fourth, whatever...)
How will a centralized digital currency affect whether I decide to burn carbon fuels? If it gets obnoxious enough I can just use a different currency instead.
As with most difficult problems, this is a messy political problem, not a technical one. There is zero chance we avoid 1.5C gain. The best you can do is make life decisions for yourself to make your lifetime as comfortable for you as you can, assuming it will happen. I started doing that 5 years ago.
Technologically practical? Certainly. Kick renewables and electrification into high gear. Treat it like the emergency that it is.
Politically practical? Not a chance. It was already a major struggle a decade ago when the political climate was much more favorable to addressing the problem. Now, even the countries that want to do something about it are going to be more concerned about more immediate threats like being invaded.
Our best hope is that green technology quickly gets to the point where it so heavily outcompetes CO2-emitting technology that the latter disappears on its own. But this will take longer than it should.
I'm not sure what we should do, it's very hard to determine what minimizes harm and maximizes benefits at a global scale. It's certainly not as simple as extremists would like to believe. Certainly it would be much (MUCH) less risky to slow warming as much as possible and maintain constant or slowly reducing CO2 levels.
I think from the standpoint of predicting what will happen, my best guess is that people will use fossil fuels until it is economically not viable to do so. If you want hasten it at an individual level, buy solar panels and have your house disconnected from the grid until fees you pay no longer subsidize fossil fuels. Frown at people and refuse to give them positive social cues when they buy a car that isn't electric. Instead of "oh nice car" just say "it would be so cool if they had a plugin version!". Support electrification of things like heat and water heating so long as it can be powered by non-fossil sources.
In the long run I think solar power, effective battery technology, and the peaking of the global population combine to cause fossil fuel usage to reduce over the next 100 years or so until CO2 levels stabilize. Lots of large CO2 emitters are already leveling off - the output is too high to sustain but at least it's no longer increasing year over year - such as from cement production.
Honestly it's not much but that's what you can do, larger social movements and political action do not work when someone's decision is whether to spend $800 a month or $100 a month to heat their house. Anyone who says it does should buy a thermometer, but instead they will get a plane ticket to the next big city to run around in the street yelling at police (literally the only people paid to not care about your slogans) while nobody really notices.
Electric cars are the savior of the auto industry, not of the climate. It needs to become viable for most people to get around without cars at all. The intensity of their resource consumption, both for manufacture and for infrastructure, independent of their fuel source, cannot scale up for the world population.
If we are in overshoot scenario even reducing emissions may not be enough. There are warming gases currently trapped in permafrost, the natural carbon storage capacity is very dynamic, so global warming may target new (worse) equilibrium beyond what we think we can achieve in best case scenario.
And if my grandmother is dead it's too late to ask her to borrow money. It's easy to chain together low probability what-ifs and come up with everything on fire.
Were you aware that the last time the planet was estimated to have co2 levels over 420ppm the global temperature was 10 degrees Celsius warmer overall? This is the global equilvant of being locked in a car in a sunlit parking lot.
Living in the coldest corner of my country, this is an extension of Siberia and getting hotter and hotter by the year, I amateurly confirm the global observations. Specifically I estimate the average temperature increase of the latest 3 years to be about 2-3C comparing with >20 years ago. A vital decease in heating costs with a whole month without heating is welcome. The future becomes from manageable to fate.
A change in attitudes is not enough. Structural change is needed to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. Currently, the population is unable to achieve results.
The population is achieving results. Most of these results are occurring in China, which has begun an unimaginably huge deployment of renewables and nuclear. Europe is also making progress. The rest of Asia will go next, and then (as it develops industrially) so will Africa. Even parts of North America will quickly electrify: for example, Canada just agreed to reduce tariffs on Chinese EVs to 6% from 100%.
Our ecological goals are to make biosphere damage scarce, but our economic practices aim to make scarce things plentiful. We need something to balance out the effects of scarcity-based economics.
In the very fun board game ‘Evolution : Climate’ you “breed” animals designed to survive the climate conditions on the board. One strategy is to switch to breeding ‘carnivores’ that then can feast on the creations of other players. They downside tho is that once other players evolve their animals to have carnivore protections (fight back, scales, protective shells etc) the carnivores start to quickly starve and that player must quickly change out of this eat everything strategy back to a more sustainable strategy.
In a similar way I think what works is to push back against growth only and growth at all costs approaches and back practises and models and communities that are working in other ways.
The trouble is, when I receive my paycheck, it just comes as "dollars". I don't know whether my employer got them by providing services to communities which are working in other ways, or whether they come from more nefarious behavior--and I have no way to refuse one sort but accept the other.
The kind of community action you're describing happens, but we need to find ways to help it scale.
30 years ago I attended a university lecture in an economics class and the professor spoke about the economic consequences of global warming - some places will be better off and plenty of places will be worse off. There will be water shortages in some places, while heavy rainfall in others. He presented it as a given fact that the global warming is coming - and pretty much the whole audience was shocked. Finally someone asked if he really thinks that it is unavoidable. And his answer was yes, that is human nature. As long as fossil fuels are there and cheap to explore someone will use them.
30 years later it looks like he was right.
Edit: the IPCC was founded in 1988 thus people started in the 70ies to understand that there will be a problem but there was a very long period of inactivity. Personally I am quite optimistic that fusion will become commercially available before 2040.
I can't think of a single time in history that humanity responded to a threat in a fully coordinated manner. Maybe this is the first time, but the incentive stack from the individual voter all the way up to geopolitical grand strategy argues against it.
Trying to tell poor nations to remain poor -- or telling rich nations to consume less -- is a losing game. There's evidence that as societies get richer, their populations demand cleaner air, water, etc. And, as another commenter mentioned, a realistic hope is that the whole green-tech stack matures to the point where it can compete on price.
We'll either make lower-carbon/lower-warming solutions work at near-market rates, in a way that allows personal and national economies to grow, or it'll just be talk for the next 50 years as well.
Denialism is not the majority position of the readership as a whole in my experience.
It's more that such titles attract the denialists and edgelords like bees to sucrose.
Lack of significant action is more a majority position, and that's unsuprising given many people struggle with how to make meaningful change as individuals or accept greater risk and reduced returns as C-suits of corporations.
That’s not the raw data. The original recordings were made by merchants on parchment. They measured the volume of water in a wooden box, to set the buoyancy for their loads
For the interested, here[1] is an article on an attempt to recreate and verify measurements made during the HMS Challenger expedition in the 1870s.
It was recently done so the full results aren't out, but one aspect they noted was that the traditionally-created hemp rope stretched about 10% so temperatures were taken at slightly deeper depths than expected. This can be used to calibrate the data from HMS Challenger.
I appreciated your comment because more discussion will better help everyone understand the various tranches of surface temperature observations.
I did a quick review, and appreciated the article because they were clear about how their methods different from the recordings. For one using different pressure sensors, and they mentioned the depth differential they measured would lead to variability in the ocean temp readings.
There are tons of raw data available freely and publicly. In my estimation, there is no comparable scientific discipline with a better curated data environment.
What exact raw data would you want? I am sure ChatGPT can throw together some python that will download the relevant data.
Climate deniers are perfectly trained for finding some weak spots in any data anytime they want. It would be better for them to be trained enough to show at least any links to any studies though. It is so hard to convince a climate denier to give at least one climate-denying source for the sake of experiencing some laugher together.
you're right this is much to complicated and important for anyone to understand. just take our word for it that we have to make things more expensive, raise taxes, and restrict freedoms to fix it.
If you are serious about this, you know full well the data is out there. So stop asking for it and just go get it, go write some code and process it, then come back here and report your results.
Yeah, we definitely need to put more weather stations in urban areas and remove rural ones. That's how we can reach first place every year. Being number 3 is disappointing.
With 2024 and 2023 being 2nd and 1st resp. The last 11 years were the hottest 11 in recorded history. I don't know how more evidence we need. We are standing on the train tracks, the train is coming, and many of us say "Oh just look over there instead, we'll be fine."
Meanwhile - even if you do not care about climate - there is so much money to make with renewables (production, storage, mobility, etc). China and much of the rest of the world are charging ahead, while the US wants to be a petrol state.
There's no amount of evidence that'll help. We have had a sufficient amount of that for a long while. It's entrenched economic interests fostering a lack of political will that's keeping us from taking this seriously.
Whenever you hear a politician say "carbon neutral by 2050", interrupt them. The real goal is to avoid getting too far over 1.5 degrees warming. We need to avoid reaching tipping points that will cause non-recoverable damage to the earth system. The year 2050 is meaningless. Actual global average temperatures is what should be measured.
2050 is not meaningless. Its close enough to feel like its achievable but far enough away that you can put off immediate action and still feel there is time to get it done. Reminds of the lyrics of the spirit of the west song:
It's a ways outside of town
But the distance has its uses
Close enough to make the effort
Far enough to make excuses.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZXgl5KxUQY
https://theshovel.com.au/2021/10/26/man-announces-he-will-qu...
This.
You're still hearing politicians talk about climate change? This could be an American bubble but I haven't heard talk of climate change from US politicians, or the other global leaders that filter through our news cycle, since 2023.
Of course. Here's the Australian PM 4 months ago:
https://www.pm.gov.au/media/setting-australias-2035-climate-...
Here's the NZ PM last month:
https://www.ruralnewsgroup.co.nz/rural-news/rural-general-ne...
I would imagine it's a relevant political football in most first world countries. I avoid American news, but the bits I see make me think it's probably still focused on culture war garbage.
A couple years back I saw articles about how we're basically less than a year from the tipping point.
Then nothing.
My guess is we passed the tipping point. It's inevitable by now.
For sure but we can still stop making it even worse.
Berkeley Earth berkeleyearth.org › home › global temperature report for 2023 Global Temperature Report for 2023 - Berkeley Earth
February 29, 2024 - 2023 was the warmest year on Earth since direct observations began, and the first year to exceed 1.5 °C above our 1850-1900 average. ...
Even if we stop all emissions right now, we'll exceed the 1.5C target, so...
The Doomerist paralysis has been engineered by the folks who look to benefit the most from inaction, mainly the fossil fuel and related industries.
To not even attempt to head for the lifeboats is suicide.
Exactly what is it about CO2, a plant food, that scares you so much? You do realize that green plants react to increased CO2 percentage with stronger growth?
You're the one calling me a "doomer"?
Plants and humans both love water, but you can still drown.
Where do i even begin to respond to this?
Plants growing slightly faster does not mitigate the many consequences of increased CO2.
Nitrate is a plant food too, doesn't mean it's not killing large parts of the ocean.
I didn't call you anything, I wasn't even talking to you.
The nice thing with climate change is that it can always get worse !
If we miss the 1.5 target then the next target is 1.51. And so on.
Every point of a degree we can mitigate will matter a lot.
Isn't it interesting how the warming target is always a few tenths of a degree above the current level of warming?
That goal is no longer possible.
I agree that staying below 1.5°C is extremely unlikely at this point. But it is still worthwhile to try to keep it under 1.6°C.
I don't think it's that easy to interrupt politicians, especially these days as more and more protections are justifiably given to them.
Do you have an example where you personally interrupted a politician effectively?
My new conspiracy theory is that Trump wants Greenland, because most of south and central America will be too hot. There are 800mln people south of Colorado. 30% will emigrate north.
:)
> We need to avoid reaching tipping points that will cause non-recoverable damage to the earth system.
Then I'd be far more worried about nuclear war than minor temperature excursions. Aside from that "non recoverable" damage happens every day. What do you think mining is?
> Actual global average temperatures is what should be measured.
On average it was 10 degrees Fahrenheit cooler last year than it was the previous where I live in northern CA.
Congratulations, you know the local weather
Local weather is what matters to individuals. So is access to affordable energy.
You cannot coerce someone to ignore their local weather and sabotage access to affordable energy because of some global average. It’s a losing battle that’s fundamentally misled.
You have to coerce the individual to follow the strategic direction despite tactical disadvantages. This is what leadership means.
If we all individually spend more money to accommodate the effects of climate change than their causes, then we are wasting enormous economic resources.
Sure, but local is a radius. There's my local, then there's my region's local, then there's my country's local. As wonderful as globalism sounds on paper, if saving the global average leads to a drought or a flood for another country, or another region, then you are trying to convince others of giving up a lot for no tangible relevant gain.
Related: Earth is warming faster. Scientists are closing in on why (https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2024/12/16/...)
I’m amused that the argument is that we are in a Mr Burns position where different kinds of pollution we were emitting was balancing out and somehow fighting pollution is the reason global warming is worse? While I’m sure it has some effect, the amount of co2 we pump out every year as a species is insane. The effect of ship pollution mitigating that is marginal at best
Are you sure? There is a lot of it https://www.shipmap.org
Some systems pulling the average up and some pulling down but the average of them is net up. I wonder though if it would have been better or worse for us if the net change ended up negative (dropping temps every year) instead. Probably worse, right?
Stratospheric aerosol injection is the leading geoengineering proposal for a reason. If you have well-supported reasons to be skeptical, you should share it, but just saying "idk doesn't sound right to me" isn't convincing.
Even if it were meaningful, is the proposal to fight global warming to keep dirty ships? That’s an insane strategy.
More realistically, there’s vested interests in existing ships and shipyards not being made obsolete so any minute effect is overhyped as “this is how we solve global warming”.
This reminds me of a conversation I had with an acquaintance - he was convinced that anthropogenic global warming was impossible because a volcanic eruption emits so much CO2 and was completely unwilling to consider evidence that perhaps humans emitting annually 200x more than all volcanoes combined might have an effect.
The proposal is the spray purpose made reflective aerosols high in the atmosphere.
We almost certainly will end up doing this, negatives be damned. Even worse it's just a bandaid not a fix.
"Less bad" is still better than "worse"
You want to unthinkingly reject a proposal that makes things better because you can't understand the third order effects and refuse to accept any evidence.
The amount of aerosol you need to I next is enormous, it needs to be sprayed at an altitude higher than realistic means of injection are feasible, and it has to be done in a way that doesn’t produce so much CO2 that it defeats the point.
Can you imagine an extant tech that can come close to doing that at the required scale? I can’t.
High altitude solar drone gliders that collect low level water vapor and spray it to form ice.
It would be cheaper and more practical to talk about space-based sunshields, and that’s about as practical as prayer. At the altitudes any realistic glider can reach you’d have to use sulfur aerosols and not ice, and in either case you’d need to inject gigatons per year, every year because at that altitude aerosols are very short-lived.
A realistic aircraft capable of those payloads will burn avgas, no solar craft comes close to the capability. The side effects such as a significant increase in acid rain, are not trivial either.
These are fantasies of people who cannot accept the reality of what we’re facing.
That will lead to world war.
https://archive.ph/jXcuJ
Why: reduced albedo (less reflective clouds) because ships don't have so much sulphur in their fuel any more.
Is there a real practical solution to this? It seems like all proposed solutions in last 40 years are a drop in the ocean, or just a money grab scams. Only thing that really worked for such global scale is the ozone layer repair. Global warming/climate change I guess we should just accept it and adapt?
The real practical solutions are trivial, the politics are not. It's a collective action problem, where the US is one of the actors.
Yup.
Plenty of solutions, but politicians will never make it happen.
We calculated that capping personal emissions (mostly doable via peer pressure should we get this moving as normal people) to some top 1 percent 25 metric carbon ton and going plant based would get us net-zero while additionally getting rid of the zillionaire problem and adding extra 50-100 gigaton rewilding effect to the table.
With no bigger than marginal effect on anyone's QOL.
But we're SOL as the propaganda machines of the zillionaires keep dividing normal people to fake dichotomies.
No, there's really just a few select politicians standing in the way. Governments around the world have implemented tons of policies to attempt to address the crisis, but unless every country participates, it's economically suicidal. Carbon-intensive industries can simply move to the US, strengthening them, while those countries attempting to carry the burden of preventing climate change will be equally affected by looming disasters.
The same root cause everywhere . The zillionaires threatening to flee from the taxes. Annex Greenlands, Ukraines...
Taking children to pedo islands.
Once we'll wake up to the fact that almost every human becomes corrupt when treated with enough power we'll grok this.
And provide mental health services to the zillionaires and also they'll be happier.
Nobody wants the future we're getting.
why reference US here? All countries are actors here.
Because the US is the only country that defected from the Paris agreement. The US is the only country led by climate change deniers. Tons of countries are led by malevolent and selfish leaders, but none are as incompetent and unpredictable as the US.
Climate change mitigation is a collective action problem in the form of a prisoner's dilemma or a tragedy of the commons. If every agent (i.e. country) refuses to cooperate, every agent will suffer major damage from environmental disasters. If all agents cooperate, they only suffer minor damage from economic policies designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
At first sight, this doesn't seem like much of a problem. The solution seems self-evident, before one considers countries adopting different strategies:
If one country defects, they benefit massively from hosting the world's carbon intensive processes, yet all countries will equally share in environmental catastrophe. Thus, the optimal strategy for any single self-interested agent is always to defect, no matter what the others do. Paradoxically, the optimal strategy for each agent in isolation leads to a catastrophically bad outcome for all agents if they all choose that strategy. Everyone wants to be the parasite, but if no one is the host, we all die.
It wouldn't matter if the US were a tiny island nation, but the US has the largest carbon footprint, the largest economy, and the most capable military. The US led the democratic world. They could have solved the prisoner's dilemma by enforcing global cooperation. If the US and its allies would threaten to sanction those countries who don't cooperate, the payout matrix would shift towards cooperation being a stable Nash-equilibrium. It would no longer be in a country's interest to screw everyone else over, so they'd stop. The US and the entire world would be better off.
Fiji less so than the US . . .
The USofA in particular
* has been the largest cummulative emmitter of CO2,
* has "outsourced" much of the emissions due to its current consumption levels to offshore manufacturers such as China,
* was an early recognizer of the serious implications of CO2 emmissions causing AGW, going back to the 1970s,
* was and still is home to some of the largest fossil fuel companies that have been activly gaslighting the world about the realities of AGW since the 1970,
* is, or at least was, a global leader that was admired with an aspiration lifestyle that has set the tone for lifestyle globally - a lifestyle with consumption and emission attributes that have disasterous side effects if attained globally.
There are some 190+ countries about the globe, it's very much the case that not all countries are equal actors in this issue.
What about poor people that live in areas in the world that will become completely uninhabitable?
Before areas become completely uninhabitable, we will see areas become increasingly stressed: heat waves, more extreme weather events, poorer crop yields, depleting aquifers.
Stress increases conflict risk. Fights for essential resources (land, water, food, shelter) will break out long before those essential resources are completely gone.
If we skip past the immense suffering and death part, we will probably end up on a planet where national borders have been redrawn by war and desperation, and a smaller population that lives in more northerly climes.
Our politicians are already thinking about them, which is why they are cracking down on immigration and generating relentless propaganda demonizing refugees and asylum seekers.
Whose politicians are you referring to?
It's going to happen, so that's exactly what we should be prepared for.
I'm sad all ocean megafauna are going to be extinct.
Are you sure the whole world won't become completely uninhabitable? It's not like we have a trial earth to test this out on.
Perhaps they are part of the depopulation agenda.
Yes, we got to adapt, we won't cool it down and "repair" what is broken.
However we can slow down the effects and try to stop the effects. So it's "only" 1.5° or whatever, not 3°, 5° or 10°. And if we raise average by 10° at least not by the years 2100, but 2200 to give time to adapt.
"Adapting" means resettling people, restructuring agriculture and food production, etc.
(All numbers are quite arbitrary picks, just as any goal one tried to set before)
Drive less.
CO2 output per person in the US (all sources including industry, etc): ~13-14,000kg
Average distance driven per year per capita in the US: ~20,000km
Average CO2 output of current private vehicle fleet: ~250g/km
Therefore, over one third of total CO2 output per person is personal vehicle use. Considering only CO2 output due to personal choices driving has to be well over half.
Most people don't - or refuse - to consider the obvious choice to take personal responsibility. Drive less.
Driving isn't realistically a personal choice. Roadways designed for cars extend from every single point in the country to every other. The support for alternative methods of transportation varies greatly by area, but is generally poor.
Riding a bike or taking the bus is objectively the worse option for most people. That's not personal choice, that's policy.
Reversing course for a car-culture country like the US would take 50+ years. If it's even possible, which I personally don't think it is — the US is too far gone.
To an extent I agree with you. Some places and lifestyles (e.g. means of earning a living) don't make cutting back on driving a viable choice.
However, these things can and do change (introduction of public transport and saner planning allowing local shops and the possibility for children get to and from school autonomously for example).
One problem as I see it is that many people that don't have a viable choice other than driving everywhere are politically opposed to structural change. Adopting this political point of view is also a personal choice.
love how a completely valid point gets downvoted becuase the average person refuses to believe they are part of the problem "no! its those big corporations and airline industry! my daily commute has no input at all!"
and this is why we'll never solve the problem
I guess returning to the office isn't so great. Pointy hair bosses rage everywhere.
But beyond driving less, surely eating further down the foodchain helps as well. Plants and shellfish are efficient. Cows are not. Eat fewer burgers and a few more lentils and mussels. Unless you are RFK Jr then of course please eat lots and lots of fatty cow, tallow, butter. Go full on Atkins please and follow right behind him.
This also means two thirds of emissions are not due to vehicular emissions. Let’s tackle that first, more bang for the buck?
Also - does that per capita figure include cargo? If so, how much? Does it matter if random individual takes personal Responsibility and stops driving when all those long haul trucks will still be on the road?
My point is that in terms of personal responsibility nothing comes remotely close to driving but a vanishingly small proportion of people are willing to consider this.
A few decades ago we explained that personal responsibility isn’t the solution.
Please catch up. Why we’re having a conversation from the year 2000 now is beyond me.
I also suggest reviewing the “nuclear isn’t part of the solution. Besides it takes a decade” discussion.
> A few decades ago we explained that personal responsibility isn’t the solution.
I've never seen that argued persuasively. All the arguments I've seen are the usual hopelessness for democracy, lack of agency, and victimhood.
Lots of people acting in the same way is the foundation of democracy.
How does cultural change happen?
I would say it's often because people see individual examples in action. Some people follow those examples. Then more do. You are more influential than you think.
What I've read is that diet can do more, though of course it depends on what you currently eat and your current transportation.
Flying is much higher than driving.
The real solution is pricing the true cost of the externalities fairly and globally.
Everything which isn't sustainable must he taxed to the degree to offset the damage. We know well that economic incentives work best and that markets are efficient to achieve optimal solutions.
The core issue is just game theory to coordinate globally all players to prevent free riding.
There are a lot of money scams out there to be sure.
It's unlikely that something like carbon capture will ever significantly reduce the CO2 in the atmosphere. It's just too energy intensive.
But there are a lot of practical solutions to significantly curb emissions that mostly just require regulations and taxes.
Things like building out rail transport. Heavily taxing air travel. Taxing all forms of carbon emission (fuel taxes would be pretty effective). Subsidizing non-co2 emissions, pushing for electrification when possible and power generation which uses non-CO2 emission. Stop wasteful pipedreams like "clean coal". Force data centers to be better citizens. For example, make them buy the battery/solar systems to offset their consumption. Make them participate in district heating schemes.
There's also some hope that even without intervention some of this will happen somewhat naturally. Solar and battery is already very cheap. Both are causing changes in the shipping and transit equations.
> is the ozone layer repair.
Which was, stop using CFCs, and stop venting them into the atmosphere to "dispose" of them. We also stopped lighting rivers on fire for mostly the same reasons, stop dumping industrial waste in them.
> I guess we should just accept it and adapt?
Ocean shipping produces more pollution than most countries. There are only like 5 countries that produce more carbon than the worldwide shipping fleet. If they cared then "cheap crap from China" wouldn't exist.
It's a scam. They want to monopolize the economy and they're using your environmental consciousness as the wedge to push you against your own best interests.
Ocean freight accounts for 2-3% of global emissions. It is orders of magnitude more efficient and clean than air or road freight per ton-kilometer. It's twice as efficient as rail. The ability to efficiently transport goods enables your current standard of living. A world economy without ocean freight would be minuscule and of course far more polluting, without even considering land use.
Don’t live like a rich person in a developed country - they’re the only ones whose co2 footprints are too high.
I heard about this[1] recently, essentially spurring a massive plankton bloom to capture carbon where it ends up on the sea floor and becomes future oil deposits in a few millenia.
The nice thing about it is that it doesn't require global cooperation.
[1]https://www.onepercentbrighter.com/p/the-no-bullshit-way-to-...
Edit: I should probably link where I heard about it to give credit to someone who deserves it
https://uncomfortableconversations.substack.com/p/the-climat...
I was under the impression that there have been multiple large extinction events in the past caused by excessive anaerobic decomposition underwater that led to the oceans becoming swamps and giving off nasty toxic gasses.
These plankton blooms happen naturally and are part of the biosphere already. There's a whole food chain that the guy breaks down in the podcast.
He was saying that this is usually kicked off by whale poop I think but because of the low numbers of whales, it happens way less now.
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster has a pretty good summary of the challenges and solutions.
There is developing real practical solutions, and then there there is the willingness of governments, big corporations, and the general population, to implement real practical solutions. The latter is much much harder than the former.
Look at the degrowth movement. There are solutions but nobody, especially the leadership, are going to like them.
Nobody has to "like" them. The centralized command and control structure is mostly in place to just force them down everyone's throats. Once we have centralized digital currency it will be a foregone conclusion
If only. Given how power and influence works currently, I would guess that those that have real control over these currencies would most likely use that power as they do now - to further their exploitation and pillaging of the earth with environmental considerations coming a distant second (or third, fourth, whatever...)
How will a centralized digital currency affect whether I decide to burn carbon fuels? If it gets obnoxious enough I can just use a different currency instead.
That is the point...you can't
> Once we have centralized digital currency it will be a foregone conclusion
In that case... what will be a foregone conclusion once we have a centralized digital currency?
As with most difficult problems, this is a messy political problem, not a technical one. There is zero chance we avoid 1.5C gain. The best you can do is make life decisions for yourself to make your lifetime as comfortable for you as you can, assuming it will happen. I started doing that 5 years ago.
Technologically practical? Certainly. Kick renewables and electrification into high gear. Treat it like the emergency that it is.
Politically practical? Not a chance. It was already a major struggle a decade ago when the political climate was much more favorable to addressing the problem. Now, even the countries that want to do something about it are going to be more concerned about more immediate threats like being invaded.
Our best hope is that green technology quickly gets to the point where it so heavily outcompetes CO2-emitting technology that the latter disappears on its own. But this will take longer than it should.
I'm not sure what we should do, it's very hard to determine what minimizes harm and maximizes benefits at a global scale. It's certainly not as simple as extremists would like to believe. Certainly it would be much (MUCH) less risky to slow warming as much as possible and maintain constant or slowly reducing CO2 levels.
I think from the standpoint of predicting what will happen, my best guess is that people will use fossil fuels until it is economically not viable to do so. If you want hasten it at an individual level, buy solar panels and have your house disconnected from the grid until fees you pay no longer subsidize fossil fuels. Frown at people and refuse to give them positive social cues when they buy a car that isn't electric. Instead of "oh nice car" just say "it would be so cool if they had a plugin version!". Support electrification of things like heat and water heating so long as it can be powered by non-fossil sources.
In the long run I think solar power, effective battery technology, and the peaking of the global population combine to cause fossil fuel usage to reduce over the next 100 years or so until CO2 levels stabilize. Lots of large CO2 emitters are already leveling off - the output is too high to sustain but at least it's no longer increasing year over year - such as from cement production.
Honestly it's not much but that's what you can do, larger social movements and political action do not work when someone's decision is whether to spend $800 a month or $100 a month to heat their house. Anyone who says it does should buy a thermometer, but instead they will get a plane ticket to the next big city to run around in the street yelling at police (literally the only people paid to not care about your slogans) while nobody really notices.
Electric cars are the savior of the auto industry, not of the climate. It needs to become viable for most people to get around without cars at all. The intensity of their resource consumption, both for manufacture and for infrastructure, independent of their fuel source, cannot scale up for the world population.
> Electric cars are the savior of the auto industry
You should check with Ford on that. 19B write off this year
If we are in overshoot scenario even reducing emissions may not be enough. There are warming gases currently trapped in permafrost, the natural carbon storage capacity is very dynamic, so global warming may target new (worse) equilibrium beyond what we think we can achieve in best case scenario.
And if my grandmother is dead it's too late to ask her to borrow money. It's easy to chain together low probability what-ifs and come up with everything on fire.
Were you aware that the last time the planet was estimated to have co2 levels over 420ppm the global temperature was 10 degrees Celsius warmer overall? This is the global equilvant of being locked in a car in a sunlit parking lot.
Were you aware that when CO2 was at 7000ppm the temperature was about the same as when it was 420ppm? What's your point?
Also temperatures in a parked car routinely go over 70C (160F) throughout the entire car.
Living in the coldest corner of my country, this is an extension of Siberia and getting hotter and hotter by the year, I amateurly confirm the global observations. Specifically I estimate the average temperature increase of the latest 3 years to be about 2-3C comparing with >20 years ago. A vital decease in heating costs with a whole month without heating is welcome. The future becomes from manageable to fate.
https://archive.ph/KVTqO
A change in attitudes is not enough. Structural change is needed to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. Currently, the population is unable to achieve results.
The population is achieving results. Most of these results are occurring in China, which has begun an unimaginably huge deployment of renewables and nuclear. Europe is also making progress. The rest of Asia will go next, and then (as it develops industrially) so will Africa. Even parts of North America will quickly electrify: for example, Canada just agreed to reduce tariffs on Chinese EVs to 6% from 100%.
Agreed.
Our ecological goals are to make biosphere damage scarce, but our economic practices aim to make scarce things plentiful. We need something to balance out the effects of scarcity-based economics.
In the very fun board game ‘Evolution : Climate’ you “breed” animals designed to survive the climate conditions on the board. One strategy is to switch to breeding ‘carnivores’ that then can feast on the creations of other players. They downside tho is that once other players evolve their animals to have carnivore protections (fight back, scales, protective shells etc) the carnivores start to quickly starve and that player must quickly change out of this eat everything strategy back to a more sustainable strategy.
In a similar way I think what works is to push back against growth only and growth at all costs approaches and back practises and models and communities that are working in other ways.
The trouble is, when I receive my paycheck, it just comes as "dollars". I don't know whether my employer got them by providing services to communities which are working in other ways, or whether they come from more nefarious behavior--and I have no way to refuse one sort but accept the other.
The kind of community action you're describing happens, but we need to find ways to help it scale.
30 years ago I attended a university lecture in an economics class and the professor spoke about the economic consequences of global warming - some places will be better off and plenty of places will be worse off. There will be water shortages in some places, while heavy rainfall in others. He presented it as a given fact that the global warming is coming - and pretty much the whole audience was shocked. Finally someone asked if he really thinks that it is unavoidable. And his answer was yes, that is human nature. As long as fossil fuels are there and cheap to explore someone will use them.
30 years later it looks like he was right.
Edit: the IPCC was founded in 1988 thus people started in the 70ies to understand that there will be a problem but there was a very long period of inactivity. Personally I am quite optimistic that fusion will become commercially available before 2040.
And dear downvoters, dont shoot the messenger.
The next one probably will be even hotter
I can't think of a single time in history that humanity responded to a threat in a fully coordinated manner. Maybe this is the first time, but the incentive stack from the individual voter all the way up to geopolitical grand strategy argues against it.
Trying to tell poor nations to remain poor -- or telling rich nations to consume less -- is a losing game. There's evidence that as societies get richer, their populations demand cleaner air, water, etc. And, as another commenter mentioned, a realistic hope is that the whole green-tech stack matures to the point where it can compete on price.
We'll either make lower-carbon/lower-warming solutions work at near-market rates, in a way that allows personal and national economies to grow, or it'll just be talk for the next 50 years as well.
Banning CFCs. But that didn't require giving anything up really so it was an easier sell.
Wow, a shocking amount of climate change denialism in this thread. Honestly what I expected from HN readership.
Denialism is not the majority position of the readership as a whole in my experience.
It's more that such titles attract the denialists and edgelords like bees to sucrose.
Lack of significant action is more a majority position, and that's unsuprising given many people struggle with how to make meaningful change as individuals or accept greater risk and reduced returns as C-suits of corporations.
Just came back to this and realized I had forgotten a “not”. Meant to say “not what I expected…” and I was quite surprised.
Third hottest year on record, so far.
Uhm obviously. It would be difficult to have a year from the future on record wouldn't it?
I’d love to see the raw data.
Here's a raw table in .txt format from NASA
https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/graph_data/Global_...
That’s not the raw data. The original recordings were made by merchants on parchment. They measured the volume of water in a wooden box, to set the buoyancy for their loads
What are you even talking about. They had weather stations with mercury thermometers and wrote down temperatures in a logbook.
For the interested, here[1] is an article on an attempt to recreate and verify measurements made during the HMS Challenger expedition in the 1870s.
It was recently done so the full results aren't out, but one aspect they noted was that the traditionally-created hemp rope stretched about 10% so temperatures were taken at slightly deeper depths than expected. This can be used to calibrate the data from HMS Challenger.
[1]: https://www.oneoceanexpedition.com/article/checked-150-year-...
I appreciated your comment because more discussion will better help everyone understand the various tranches of surface temperature observations.
I did a quick review, and appreciated the article because they were clear about how their methods different from the recordings. For one using different pressure sensors, and they mentioned the depth differential they measured would lead to variability in the ocean temp readings.
Not on the ocean, and not covering even 1/1000% of the coverage we have with satellites on the surface
There are tons of raw data available freely and publicly. In my estimation, there is no comparable scientific discipline with a better curated data environment.
What exact raw data would you want? I am sure ChatGPT can throw together some python that will download the relevant data.
https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu/datasets
You are capable of operating Google, right?
And what will you do with the raw data? Are you trained in processing and interpreting it? How good is your math?
Climate deniers are perfectly trained for finding some weak spots in any data anytime they want. It would be better for them to be trained enough to show at least any links to any studies though. It is so hard to convince a climate denier to give at least one climate-denying source for the sake of experiencing some laugher together.
you're right this is much to complicated and important for anyone to understand. just take our word for it that we have to make things more expensive, raise taxes, and restrict freedoms to fix it.
Right, if only scientists who understood it would publish some sort of document explaining their methods and citing the raw sources.
> we have to make things more expensive, raise taxes, and restrict freedoms to fix it
Aha, right on cue the mask slips off. Desperately trying to justify your own selfishness in the name of "freedom".
If you are serious about this, you know full well the data is out there. So stop asking for it and just go get it, go write some code and process it, then come back here and report your results.
Yeah, we definitely need to put more weather stations in urban areas and remove rural ones. That's how we can reach first place every year. Being number 3 is disappointing.