The deep-ocean vent south of Antarctica is real but small, on the order of a few-tenths Pg C yr⁻¹. The claim that it could double atmospheric CO₂ exaggerates the flux by three orders of magnitude relative to observed values and known physical limits.
The most optimistic estimate of deep-water outgassing south of 60 ° S is 0.36 Pg C yr⁻¹. Even if that rate tripled and persisted unabated, it would take more than 800 years to add 895 Pg C (which would be what it would require to justify the press release’s claims of “doubling”)
I believe the deep-ocean vents you mention are beside the point. The article is discussing the upwelling of cold, CO2-rich water in the Southern Ocean - not emissions from vents.
Also, it’s worth noting that the PNAS article does not mention CO2 per se, only upwelling. The article summary of the press release does draw the CO2 connection.
Besides the connections you mention, the PNAS article points out that this result illustrates that current models of ice/ocean interaction are not producing these observational trends.
Just to confirm, Does "Pg C yr⁻¹" mean "Peta grams Carbon per Year"?
It's the mass of only "C" or the mass of "CO2"? (There is like a x3 difference, 12 vs 44. Probably not very relevant, but I'd like to understand the meaning correctly.)
(This was originally a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44461309, but we downweighted that subthread. Since this is a fine comment, I detached it so it wouldn't share the same fate.)
Thanks for the clarification, these click-bait titles pop up again and again around very interesting technical climate science, causing not only pointless panic but allowing denialists to drive doubt by pointing out the BS.
Its doubly frustrating because these studies invariably indicate that climate change is happening, getting worse, and triggering feedback loops that amplify CO2.
I won't put words in your mouth but given what you say - doesn't this imply calamity? So how do we explain why Net Zero is essentially collapsing? Why do a number of countries say one thing and do another? There's certainly no consensus that survival is at stake.
Your personal test for someone making a technical claim on one matter is to ask them a technical question on another thing that they have not claimed any expertise in. If they guess and guess wrong you ignore their claims on the thing they supposedly know something about because.. points I guess.
Hey, I do a lot of crazy stuff myself, so not exactly blaming you but I don't think your "flooding == really sad" claim holds up here, because of the crazy.
It’s not how the discussion generally happens. If they are adamant that this is truth, then they are bad scientists; if they say they don’t know, of course they’re good scientists.
But it goes together: Global warming, wage gap, and the 3 other topics that shall not be named, they’re wrong on all five together for the same scientific reasons with any ability to open the discussion to being wrong.
Which makes that, global warming is, to my knowledge, only a statement by people who believe other scientific falsehoods.
Floating ice will displace exactly as much water as it does when it melts to water. Ice that melts on a land mess such as Greenland and Antarctica will raise the ocean level when it melts.
Floating ice will actually increase the ocean a tiny bit as it melts into water because the ice has lower salinity than the ocean. Its comparable to around 3% of ice that melts on a land.
"In the polar Southern Ocean, cold, fresh surface waters overlay warmer, saltier deep waters (Fig. 2A). During winter, surface cooling and sea ice formation reduce stratification, allowing vertical mixing to transport heat upward, either melting sea ice from below or limiting its growth (8). However, decades of surface freshening strengthened stratification, trapping subsurface heat at depth, sustaining expanded sea ice coverage (7, 9) and limiting deep convection along with open-ocean polynyas (10). Here, we show that since 2015, these conditions have reversed: Surface salinity in the polar Southern Ocean has increased, upper-ocean stratification has weakened, sea ice has reached multiple record lows, and open-ocean polynyas have reemerged."
That trapped warmth doesn't mean the deep water is "hot" in an absolute sense, just that it's saltier and denser and relatively warmer than the surface
In general at high enough depth the ocean temperature is constant[0].
At high latitude like the southern ocean it's constant at whatever depth.
I think the surface ambient temperature is below(cooler) the temperature where the water density is the highest around 4 degrees for pure water(water has negative thermal expansion which causes it to expand and float!), for southern ocean salinity is between 33-34 and maximum density is below 0[1] but still ambient might be lower which means the colder water is lighter.
If deep water is now rising and releasing centuries of stored CO2, we're talking about a major shift in Earth's climate plumbing. Also wild that this only became visible thanks to a novel satellite processor
The fact that this was discovered by a novel satellite processor makes an uneducated person like me on this topic wonder if this has happened before and us humans just didn't have any way of observing it. We've only had satellites for a few decades and earth and its oceans have been here a while longer than that.
The Biological Pump. Organic matter created at the surface (by photoplankton and by consumers) falls into the deep ocean, where other biological processes oxidize it back to CO2.
In the novel ‘the three body problem’ , aliens send an ai to corrupt the scientific method so humanity will remain conquerable by the time they arrive. Today our own creation , LLMs and other AI agents, is accomplishing this. I can hardly believe what i read anymore. Two forces are tearing at us. First, the output of ‘science’ is ‘click bait -ified’ for financial survival and AI is amplifying this process. Second, layers of abstraction and commenting on these ‘facts’ further clouds the discussion and prevents actual progress.
I feel like the aliens are here and have subverted humanity already. When will the ‘rest of us’ wake up to act instead of just talk?
I share your worries about the state of science, but the broad strokes of global warming have already been worked out - the absence of action is not because of quibbling over subtle details, but because of the prisoner's dilemma nature of the problem, and because the oil lobby is politically well-connected.
It should be amazing to everyone that we've invented perpetual motion machines, and corporations are trying to suppress them for profit - exactly the same as certain conspiracy theorists predicted - and those conspiracy theorists are also trying to suppress the machines.
The only difference between current reality and the predictions of past conspiracy theorists is that the perpetual motion machines only work in direct sunlight.
The part that is truly baffling to me: one of those corporations has a large perpetual-motion-machine division. And it doesn't seem to have the faintest interest in pushing to advance that.
We've been doing this for decades. LLMs may have automated it, but the plain human version was pretty cheap and plenty effective.
So we're not going to act. Actions are hard enough when everyone is in touch with reality. All potential solutions have trade-offs and everyone wants somebody else to pay the costs.
Add in a smallish but highly influential set who are convinced that the entire thing is a hoax, and progress maxes at zero. You'll be lucky if the problem doesn't accelerate. (Which is indeed what it seems to be doing.)
You aren’t commenting on the state of “science”, you’re complaining about clickbait journalism and failing to recognize that the two are not the same. With that said, I have to agree that the current state of the world is indistinguishable from what you’d expect to see if a hostile AI had taken over in 2011 and was working behind the scenes to systematically extinguish human civilization.
LLMs offer us a chance to combat misinformation. A double-edged sword for sure, but they do offer hope in the post-truth of age where the amount of information you need to make an informed choice is more than you could possible discover, filter, ingest and internalize without assistance. They offer us a way to learn deeply about things with a customized learning style.
Most climate research studies provide a range from optimistic to pessimistic outlooks on climate impacts. It would be interesting to know how the studies from the last 30 years have fared.
I have the feeling that rather the pessimistic estimates have come to pass.
Old articles. Nowadays I'd say there's an even stronger current against "doomerism", which acts as a force suppressing sufficiently bad news. Don't look up!
But I will still side with their painstaking lists of things that could go wrong, than with the insane mainstream, which mostly acts like they care first and foremost about increasing our supply of matches.
Climate migration from South and Central America to North America has already started. If the US think they have an immigration problem right now, I can’t imagine how vicious immigration propaganda is going to get when that number goes up by an order of magnitude.
Not important, but I want to briefly point out as a Grammar Nazi that you mean uninhabitable regions. Inhabitable and habitable mean the same and their opposites are uninhabitable and not habitable. This is one of those bizarre oddities of the English language.
What you will get in a comment thread like this is wild speculative climate doomerism along with sarcastic remarks about how humans are ruining the planet. This is not the place for hard facts.
Ok this is worrisome news, but from what I could gather from the article this a novel technique with no historic data. Why can't this be something that the Southern Ocean does?
Look at London. Draw a line west. Compare climates. Now do the same for New York and go East. Ocean currents are what keeps London warm and NYC cool.
So this is a huge deal. I’ve been down to the Southern Ocean, lectured all the way by scientists.
North of the Antarctic is the only place on earth where the sea can rotate completely around the world without hitting a land mass, and it is deemed the engine of the world’s oceans. Those oceans are what have absorbed most of the excess CO2 that we’ve emitted, and a lot captured has been buried in deep ocean. But the ocean warms, and can capture less CO2, and bad days are ahead.
This news signals not just a slowing in that absorption for an area, which not just sends more CO2 into the atmosphere, but has more terrifyingly unknown downstream implications for other ocean streams.
How do ocean currents keep NYC cool? I thought it was perturbation of atmospheric circulation by the Rocky Mountains, which causes higher latitude air to sweep down over eastern North America.
For that matter, the subsequent northward return of the air also causes some warming in Europe, not just warming from the Gulf Stream.
The Gulf Stream actually warms the eastern US, btw.
There was a report that said the AMOC could collapse between 2025 and 2075. That said the 2025 mark was said to be very unlikely, I hope it still is...
We thought the currents would run AMOC but got a SMOCdown instead?
Well as long as we keep pretending that the most conservative of the already downplayed IPCC estimates is the real trajectory we'll keep getting surprised over and over. It's not really a coincidence that most climate scientists are depressed.
If this is the very first time this part of the ocean has ever been imaged/studied, how do we know that this is unusual and not something that happens periodically?
Exactly the same thought I had while reading the article. They mention multiple times this is the first time ever that they’ve been able to measure anything in this area. My take on science is that we need to measure for some period of time before we jump to conclusions about the normal state of affairs.
This isn’t to argue against climate change, but I think journalism like this only fuels skeptics.
Isn't the issue that historical data is consistent with the overturning model, which adds weight to our assumption that it has previously been stable. These new measurements (and observations?) are consistent with the overturning circulation weakening.
I agree with you in principle - my impression (perhaps wrong - not an expert) was that there are additional data points supporting the idea of a consistent status quo.
Be warned, this article is misleading. The actual scientific paper shows a salinity‑driven weakening of stratification that likely allows more subsurface heat to reach the surface and melt sea ice. The article describes this as a complete overturning‑circulation reversal with dire carbon release consequences. These are claims that the paper itself does not make or substantiate. The paper actually does not use the words carbon or CO2 even once. The authors of the article took such liberties with this that I really believe this should be considered disinformation.
The article is about the overall findings and their implications, not just the specific paper istelf. Scientists will always be conservative in what they publish, scoping it down to the minimum interpretation that is supported by their evidence. The article directly interviews authors of the study and quotes them, eg:
> We are witnessing a true reversal of ocean circulation in the Southern Hemisphere—something we’ve never seen before,” explains Antonio Turiel, ICM-CSIC researcher and co-author of the study.
If you incorporate these statements it seems quite reasonable to me. You can argue with the author of the study saying that but I can't see an issue with an article reporting that they did, if that's what actually happened.
He's the only that says something that drastic in the article, and he's a physicist, not a climate scientist. The other two comments are from telecommunication engineers. I'd wait a bit to see what the general climate science community has to say about the study. Based solely on the facts reported in the paper I'd say the most worrying point is precisely that we don't know what's going on.
> You can argue with the author of the study saying that but I can't see an issue with an article reporting that they did, if that's what actually happened.
I think that's kind of the point: nobody knows if that's what actually happened and the study doesn't show any information to support any specific theory. I could be that (though I think it would be unlikely as we'd have probably seen a real steady decline in the ice sheet and not an up and down up), something else that is still concerning but not as severe, or maybe something that we didn't now before and is not as concerning.
No, the new algorithms used to be determine this was created by ICM-CSIC who are also the publishers of this article.
Also the authors of the paper is involved with the article, there is for example this quote:
“We are witnessing a true reversal of ocean circulation in the Southern Hemisphere—something we’ve never seen before,” explains Antonio Turiel, ICM-CSIC researcher and co-author of the study.
Glad I'm not the only one to see the disconnect here. I thought I'm somehow missing rest of the paper text, it really doesn't say all that much compared to the article interpretation.
Your critique appears to mischaracterize both the article and how scientific communication works. The ICM-CSIC piece isn't "taking liberties". If you read the article you will find it is presenting direct quotes and interpretations from the actual researchers who conducted the study. When Antonio Turiel, a co-author of the PNAS paper, states "we're seeing that the SMOC is not just weakening, but has reversed," that's the research team's own assessment, not journalistic embellishment.
It sounds like you really want the article to not discuss anything beyond anything explicit stated in the paper. I find that an incredibly bizarre desire which strengthens my impression of your comment as bad-faith. Research papers focus on presenting specific findings and data, while institutional communications appropriately discuss broader implications and potential consequences. This isn't misleading, it's how scientific discourse functions, AS INTENDED!
The CO₂ implications you dismiss aren't pulled out the article's author's behind. They come from researchers who understand their data and its significance for carbon cycling. Scientists routinely discuss the wider ramifications of their findings beyond what fits in a technical paper's scope. This is good, not misleading or disinformation.
Labeling this "disinformation" is a smear of what appears to be legitimate scientific interpretation by the researchers themselves. There's a meaningful difference between debating the certainty or magnitude of predicted impacts and dismissing expert analysis as fabrication.
This statement in the article is a real head-scratcher:
> Until now, the Southern Ocean region was virtually inaccessible to satellites due to its low temperatures and the complex, ever-changing dynamics of sea ice.
I hate to cast doubt on the veracity of such an interesting story, but this really makes me wonder whether the entire article is just AI garbage.
There is nothing in the article you linked that explains why "low temperatures and the complex, ever-changing dynamics of sea ice" used to make the region "virtually inaccessible to satellites" but now no longer does.
Further, I did a search using "challenges of satellites in the Southern Ocean" and found no info, rather than plenty of info.
edit: I eventually found the following link which does seem to discuss some challenges, but does not indicate that they have been solved. It certainly does not support the claim that the region is "inaccessible to satellites".
Doesn't need to be AI to be garbage per se, popular science should always be read with some skepticism as it's often a translation (pop sci) of a translation (news publication) of a paper (the actual source).
Example, pop sci will show a rendering of a lush green planet with a headline like "EXTRATERRESTRIAL LIFE FOUND!11", the news release will be something like "Potentially life-supporting planet discovered by xyz", and the actual paper will be something like "measuring device foobar123 noticed a 0.2% decrease in luminance of star aybabtu-1337 at a period of .6 frotz/picoyear indicating this planet probably isn't cooked or frozen but what do we know lol"
That sentence is garbage for sure but if you read it with good intentions from the journalistic view it almost makes sense. It is about remote sensing from satellites, not about the satellites themselves. There are lots of interesting edge cases where remote sensing does not work. The problem is usually that it is expensive to get on the ground data to validate models.
That is the sh* that happens when we move the system too far away from its previous equilibrium. It might settle to a drastically different one that will decimate huge proportions of population.
The example I use is this. Falling of a building is harmless, standing on the ground is harmless. It is the transition that matters.
I'm sure we can survive fairly reasonably in whatever climate we end up with in a few hundred/thousand years, but the gap in between is a really doozy. The stories and myths about the selfish people of our times will go on for millennia.
It is the book series 'Carbon Ideologies' by William T Volleman, the opening few pages are written to those that read them in a few hundred years. Those that read these today are already convinced, those in the future will want answers. All he does is use examples of how we live to point out that we are not inherently evil, just looking out for our more immediate needs.
There are a couple of key differences that I think could lead to a shift towards selfishness.
With the size of populations, there's less feeling of individual impact. If I don't do "my bit" then it's such a miniscule negative to society as a whole, it won't really matter.
We have a relatively new economic principle that if everyone acts in their own best interests, that will also further society's interests. That means there's no moral choice between what benefits me and what benefits others, I can always pick what benefits me.
These aren't universal, but are two simple reasons why selfishness could be more prevalent now than a lot of history.
You explained it in the last sentence. Some people are just more anthropocentric then others. IOW, some people get all emotional if the topic is the future of humanity, and others couldn't care less. Thats a fact you will have to accept at some point.
It does not sound like a subtle signal or warning about crossing a threshold, more like a we are already past the point of no return and now we can just sit back and watch as the apocalypse unfolds, first row seats for all recent generations.
Some things are set in motion. But it's not clear if we have reached a state yet, where climate change will reinforce itself indefinitely.
Staying below 1.5 degrees global warming is very unlikely at this point. But every tenth of a degree counts. Humanity needs to be decisive in slowing down climate change. This is a matter of political will.
Two things: slowdown and adaptation.
Slow CO2 emissions because every tons make it worse for +10 000yrs.
Adaptation, because infrastructures changes are slow to do and the sooner we start the sooner we can absorb damage.
For me its very clear that something will happen given that we fundamentally will never give up our lifestyle. I am not even talking about the ultra rich lifestyle, but lets say the bottom 70% of the world's population.
We don't need to give up our lifestyle. We could switch to renewables, which would create jobs and save money in the process.
The reasons we haven't done this are because China and India are hungrily industrializing, and the Republican Party in the US is captured by fossil fuel companies.
Stop blaming China and India. They're an easy excuse.
And yes, we do need to give up several aspects of our lifestyles. Meat consumption absolutely must come down. Air travel must come down. Disposable goods, and consumer plastics, must come down. Our lifestyles must change. Capitalism encourages status symbol goods such as beef, travel/tourism, excessive consumption goods, etc.
We need widespread consumer behavioral change before we have any hope of governments listening to people. As long as half of the population doesn't care about the climate then nothing meaningful will get done. For real change to happen people need sunk cost. Right now people have far too many excuses and denials to actually do much. There is always a China to blame, or a company to blame, or a mega rich person to blame.
Note that most of the emissions come from fairly mundane stuff, notably heating and road transport. Tackling those is fairly straghtforward without that many changes in lifestyle. The last ~20% is where it becomes really difficult without major changes.
> As long as half of the population doesn't care about the climate then nothing meaningful will get done.
This is fairly common misconception. At this point the vast majority of people is on board, but the perception is skewed by vocal minority. Big part of the work at the moment is just communication to help closing this perception gap.
That sould be the least we do, some sort of coordinated global action to slow down, stop, eventually recover? The damage, and yet not a single country is willing to do anything serious in that regard. Politicians are exclusively focused on their political career, not thinking about the greater benefit to Earth, life, the human civilization. Pretty hopeless how things stand right now.
okay then why is it taboo to suggest geoengineering interventions like injecting sulfer into the upper atmosphere? The climate advocates don’t have any decisive and ambitious actions that they actually are willing to try.
Because we consistently over estimate our ability to understand the impact of our interventions in complex systems. Look at Cane Toads in Australia or tumbleweed in the US.
Now that we've established that, what's your decisive and ambitious action you've made towards addressing climate change, so we can learn from the example you've set?
It's a bad idea, the best way to deal with problems is to face them directly, no matter how desperate. This is a similar failure to COVID where they thought lying to the public would make for better outcomes but ended up sowing distrust. In the case of climate change this sows complacency.
> This is a similar failure to COVID where they thought lying to the public would make for better outcomes
I'm curious which lies you're referring to. "Two Weeks to Flatten the Curve" reminded me of the time I had fun with my passenger's ignorance of celestial mechanics. She thought the moon really was done for, but after a few more minutes had passed it started to come back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24881670
> but ended up sowing distrust.
Because most people eventually caught on that they were being lied to?
Yes. For example, in the US, they told people to not wear masks at the beginning of the pandemic, saying it wasn't airborne because they wanted to save masks for medical professionals. They should have just said directly that medical professionals need masks, so conserve them, reuse them, donate them, whatever, but anything but lie to the public. It helped create the conspiracy culture around COVID.
My favorite lie had to do with how there weren't enough ventilators. That one got memory holed relatively early, once the frontline medical workers figured out they'd been tricked into thinking ventilation would be helpful for SARS-CoV-2 patients who were not actually in respiratory distress.
My other favorite lie was that the failed ebola drug remdesivir was helpful for COVID-19. The conspiracists think Remdesivir was used to punish people who declined the mRNA jabs.
> It helped create the conspiracy culture around COVID.
I think conspiracists saw very clearly what was going on. A dissident scientist I respected said, at the very beginning, that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was almost certainly a product of the UNC's gain-of-function research. He knew the UNC's work had been transferred to Wuhan, China.
> They want decisive and ambitious action, you can't get that if we all turn to doomerism.
What if "doomerism" is a key component to demoralize people to accept "decisive and ambitious action"?
Note that most of the environmental policy talk is on a global level...blaming living people who aren't wealthy enough to benefit from financial capital. Making everyone who doesn't make their living off of financial assets have a worse quality of life...while those who benefit from financial assets even more wealthy.
Environmental policy talk is not on a local level. Never mind the water usage of the AI centers & how it affects communities. The farmers will have to sell their land so big capital to buy it on the cheap. The money pump always leads to accumulation of Capital.
It sure seems like the rhetoric goes one way. Making the rich richer...so they have all the carbon credits to do whatever they want...transcending the "tyranny of morality" while they fly in private jets to "save the climate". Making the working/middle-class poor..."you will own nothing & be happy". Making the poor radicalized & pointing their finger at each other.
This seems like a global scale psychological experiment more than anything. At some point the true believers in climate science will be disappointed by the contradictions of their heroes...because at the end of the day...it's about money & power. There is no "we". There is only "you will have to sacrifice so I can be more wealthy & hold more leverage over you".
Yes sure. But as someone who was a kid in the 90s all my life I learned about how climate change is the biggest challenge to humanity. Yet all my life I have seen grown adults pretend it doesn't exist, and when that was no longer avoidable they pretended is was natural and when that was no longer defendable... You get the idea. And I grew up in a part of the world where you could see the glaciers melting with your own eyes.
The doom of climate change is mostly people to dumb to understand the most basic of models or (worse) unwilling to do so on ideological grounds. I already decided not to have children in my life because I think it is irresponsible to put them into this world. We will have enough climate migration anyways.
The truth is that there are tripping points that are extremely hard to reverse and may or may not trigger other tripping points. Reading these risks as a reason not to care is the opposite of what should happen.
And then you figure out what the real reason is to burn the world: some rich fucks trying to extract a few thousand dollars per second more f4om the r3st of us.
Did it actually say it will DOUBLE the CO2 concentration?
Definitely past the point of no return. I guess us millennials WILL actually see the worst climate change outcomes WELL within our lifetimes...
We don't really know at what point that is. It's probably something we can only identify in hindsight. I find it bewildering that our approach is basically FAFO.
The keyword here is "Long term" I suppose, that can mean anything. I couldn't actually find where this claim comes from. The referenced paper doesn't seem to say anything about doubling CO2 concetrations.
If it "Short Term" becomes obvious that we are past the point of no return it doesn't really matter if "Long Term" units is 100 or 1000 years. Most future living things will be suffering. There could have been more future things than past things to enjoy this beautiful planet.
In my home town back in Russia they now easily grow the stuff of my unreachable back then in USSR childhood dreams - apricots, cherries (the large sweet ones). The children there though don't do backcountry skiing like i did 40+ years ago because there is no snow these years there. And Russia pumps out fossil fuels without any care. They feel that things like opening of the Northern Passage and more agriculture on the previously hardly suitable lands are great for their future (they aren't climate change deniers, they are believers. Like everybody else there, I was taught about climate change as a clearly established scientific fact in the 6th grade in 1985).
So, until somebody brings out 10+ aircraft carriers and enforces global climate accord, i don't see any progress happening here.
I see the major problem isn't that there will be just warmer temperatures, but that the climate will become unpredictably changeable. For the moment, it can be beneficial for agriculture in some areas, but it's likely that our global food production will have to massively change to take into account times of drought and flooding that will destroy crops in some areas. Whereas now we can just grow crops in fields, we may have to grow food in greenhouses just to be able to provide the plants with consistent growing conditions.
There are a lot of variables here, and one is the sun. The other is time.
We can certainly, even without genetic engineering breed crops more suited for shorter growing time frames.
There are a lot of corn hybrids, some mature fast, others far slower. Some require more sun, others less. For example, some of the faster growing varieties only take 60 days to mature, others 100+. But here's the thing. Those are 60 "good weather" days. As in not too much cloud, not too unseasonably cold or warm, reasonable amounts of rain and water, and so on.
As corn takes time to grow and mature, it doesn't matter how much sun you throw at it, it still only grows so fast. Up North, even if it's warmer, you still need enough sun too. Compressing the sun around the summer solstice doesn't help. Giving it 22 hour long days of sun doesn't just magically make the corn grow 2x as fast as an area with 11 hours of usable sun.
And the spring is still "rainy season". Some crops can't take too much rain.
Where I live, a local farmer grows traditional yellow corn, as some prefer it over newer, 'peaches and cream' hybrids. But some years? It just doesn't mature. Too much cloud, or other inclement weather (too hot, too cool, to much sun, etc) and being further north means there is little wiggle room in the growing season.
I guess my point is, Northern areas will require only certain crops. That's fine of course, and it will indeed feed people, but some crops won't be on the table.
One thing that may have already helped Russia, is the extensive work the Soviets put into breeding crops to grow further north:
While I do not doubt the weather is more mild in Russia these days, it's also quite erratic. At least it is here in Canada. Some winters mild, then bam a winter of "old". So I wonder if the above breeds have given Russia a leg up on taking advantage?
Russia exports agricultural products. The productivity has dramatically increased after privatization of agricultural sector and of course they are using those breeds plus some advanced tech sometimes. I have seen a research on how to automate watering during drought in mid-2000s, and that was literally saving the crops. Also the governance is relatively efficient in this sector.
I don't think Russia is unique here. I was talking about it because i know it. i can't talk this way about say China or Argentine (or basically any other country except may be US where 25+ years of residence give me some knowledge to talk about).
At double the current ppm it'll start to impact our cognitive abilities, we're not doing much about it now but wait until the average joe drops another 10 IQ points...
This is just not true. We're watching ocean currents collapse in real time. You're the frog getting boiled being angry at the thermometer. Wake the f- up.
> “The likelihood that the AMOC collapses, let's say, before the end of the century, according to numerical models and our understanding, is pretty small. Most likely the weakening will be modest,” he says.
'Land area increase in eight of nine atolls. Island change has lacked uniformity with 74% increasing and 27% decreasing in size.'
'Results challenge perceptions of island loss, showing islands are dynamic features that will persist as sites for habitation over the next century, presenting alternate opportunities for adaptation that embrace the heterogeneity of island types and their dynamics.'
Also: "Sea-level rise and climatic change threaten the existence of atoll nations. Inundation and erosion are expected to render islands uninhabitable over the next century, forcing human migration"
Politicians, almost without fail, subscribe to climate hysteria, as that allows them to do whatever they want and claim they are doing it for the climate. It's a perfect boondoggle for them.
Not exactly a catastrophe. But I did hear that the summer this year in Norway is particularly harsh. I hope you get some days this year when it's possible for you to go outside without getting heat stress. It's important to stay safe out there.
School chemistry means it was a ~20 year old prediction 30 years ago, based on known oil deposits 50 years ago.
It would have been a hopeful prediction from today's perspective, as we would necessarily have stopped pumping and burning oil by now, but unfortunately we haven't.
No, it wasn't wrong, because "oil reserves" are defined as: "quantities of crude oil and natural gas from known fields that can be profitably produced/recovered from an approved development", which means they change over time, when we find new oil or develop new technologies. And that's also what happened.
Also maybe at one point accept that "Oil" with an EROEI dangerously getting to below the 1.0 mark is not the same "Oil" as was talked-about 30 years ago: if your shale sands have to get burnt with local coal or natgas to get a pipeline-able liquid, but the total energy spent on the process is about as much as will be dispersed by combustion engines down the line... then you're treading very murky waters indeed.
It's not necessarily a doomsday cult as long as there is incentive to build green infrastructure.
AI is a massive waste of power in many (most?) cases, but electricity does not necessarily need to be generated in a way that releases CO2. Solar panels, wind farms, geothermic energy, and even nuclear plants can satisfy AI's requirements and only leave it to be a local problem.
Unfortunately, the USA, the government of country with the biggest impact per citizen as well as the hotbed of current AI development, has started taking down climate change related information to serve their oil baron masters. That leaves environmental responsibility with companies and their shareholders.
AI isn't a doomsday cult. It's the epitome of the "Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders" meme in real life.
Right now we are using renewables essentially at capacity, always. Any extra electricity use therefore needs fossil fuels to power it. It's as simple as that.
The AI computation explosion is completely irresponsible and any claims that it can be green are false unless the data centers produce their own solar/nuclear on-site (and even then it's producing tons of waste heat).
Exactly. Why is this so hard to understand? It's about the marignal use. I can't believe anybody who is smart and thought about this for two seconds can make this argument in good faith.
We gotta build legislations that force Bitcoin mining facilities or big data centers to massively improve the grid and make sure they have plans to run on self powered nuclear or green energy.
The case of Bitcoin is more damning because pow for just no reason, serves no purpose. Security by consuming massive amounts of power. There is a reason why Ethereum successfully moved away from that. But Bitcoin will never dare to.
Unfortunately as you say the powers are currently focusing on denying what is clearly undeniable.
This article made me fear first time since a while for what kind of future are my daughters live in. I am truly sorry and sad.
"AI is a massive waste of power". So is nearly everything of what we do and consume. Not sure why AI would be the 'epitome' besides being this month's flavor of convenient whipping boy.
Especially here in Europe we like to play the 'Greener than Thou' card while for decades have been doing absolutely nothing real besides imaginary 'carbon credit' spreadsheet shenanigans, tipple passing the subsidy handouts for burning our forests in Dutch incinerators, exporting all our 'emissions' to China and paying very dubious buddies on the other side of the world for 'net zero' absolutions while tripling our real pollution.
A popular narrative but it’s false. Even when we take it into account Europe’s emissions keep dropping.
It’s a small % of China’s massive emissions. They produce and consume on a level we can’t fathom. Their middle class has more people than the US and EU combined.
If we used to consume 1 locally produced widget and had x emissions as a result, and now consume 3 China produced widgets shipped to us from around the world, while pretending we now have zero emissions as a result, how would you call that?
Let me be more clear. European emissions are down compared to the 90s. By a lot. And yes, taking into account 'exported emissions'.
And yet we consume more.
"It's not necessarily a doomsday cult as long as there is incentive to build green infrastructure."
is building green infrastructure environmentally friendly? The mines, machinery, ships, concrete, steel, the processing plants, etc, really Green, just because it's for EVs or batteries?
EVs really are a "slightly better" solution the planet's health can't even afford. ICE cars are worse but EVs aren't helping save the planet either. Ideally we should probably all be cycling or taking trains and buses...
Of course humanity runs on balance between living (and procreating) and saving the planet.. the quickest way to save the planet would be for all of us to drop dead, but very few of us would be in favor of that idea.
Given the bill that the Americans just passed.. it's going to be an absolute shit-show.
The smart play was to allow AI to fuel a massive growth in production of solar panels and wind in the US which could actually rival China (who are going to eat the US within a decade) but corruption has put pay to that.
If AI were to not use so much energy, we would have a much easier time covering our need with green sources. Yes, we can probably also account for the additional use by AI, but it'll make an already existential challenge so much harder.
Regarding your last paragraph - AI is just the riders of the apocalypse. The doomsday cult is capitalism.
We've already proven we can build huge amounts of renewable generation if we want, the issue I see is that additional huge demands like AI prevent us from making carbon based generation redundant, lowest priority choice in the mix of sources or used exclusively for its strengths to respond quickly to changing needs.
> AI isn't a doomsday cult. It's the epitome of the "Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders" meme in real life.
What if the pursuit of real AI is what eventually saves humanity and leads to a utopian rather than dystopian future?
None of the incentive structures of our societies are set up to go on this direction. None of the people in power (politically or privately) are trying to make this happen. As you’d expect, we see in practice that this isn’t the direction in which we’re going.
I see no reason to expect this technology to save us. We don’t even need AI to save ourselves from dystopia, it’s not been about lack of technology for decades, we need to change our societies structurally _somehow_
If you really want me to comment, then I can, but people downvote different opinions on AI here, so it doesn't seem fruitful.
I'm an optimist by nature. I probably do err on the side of optimism. But when I look back over history, I see a trend upward in living standards, despite the modern determination to pretend this hasn't happened, or to cherry pick data to prove the opposite, and despite prophecies of doom at almost every step change.
I'm inclined to believe that will continue to happen, that regardless of what people personally think of Altman, Zuckerberg, etc, that ultimately, strong AI is inevitable, and that it will be a force for improving our lives.
I do not believe we'll be relegated to poor existences, while the captains of AI or whoever the elite are defined to be, live in paradise with robot workers do everything for them. It just makes no sense.
Not just on AI. Personally, I only downvote stuff that I think coarsens the dialogue. The opinion expressed, is not really relevant. I like living in a world where I'm challenged.
I too, am an optimist. I think that AI can have tremendous positive effect.
But I also have considerable life experience with the darker corners of human nature, and know exactly how bad it can get (HINT: There's no bottom). Some of the very worst specimens of ... humanity, I guess (for lack of a better term) ... are quite cultured and well-educated. Filed fingernails mean absolutely nothing, when it comes to personal Integrity.
A quick shufti through human history, will quickly show that our shared prosperity is merely a recent blip on the screen. Most of history is the 0.01%, living high on the hog, while the 99.99% live in hell, serving the 0.01%. AI can definitely enable that kind of society.
That is a pretty big if to be betting the house on.
I'm not comfortable with that call being made on my behalf by those with everything to gain from it. The same people that have coincidentally been building doomsday bunkers.
It's crazy reading these comments here. We are really living in some dystopian future to some degree. Let's unite and fight. Act local, do what you can and don't lose hope. The Internet is broken. Not sure if it's just brainwashed people commenting here or bots or some societies just embrace destroying everything for profit and capitalism.
We know what to do. We don't need to wait for some magic AI that's basically learned from books written by humans to tell us what to do. It's all about power structures, capitalism and money.
Everyone in the oil business knew in the 80ies.
We could probably even figure out how to keep our standard of living but consumerism needs to stop but then capitalism breaks down.
This is unrelated to this story which signs starting to show in 2016. The solution to this issue will not be if every AI data center disappeared tomorrow. It has not even been shown if this would help us at this point, as it is a feedback loop that is being triggered; CO2 will and have already dramatically increased due to it, probably more impactful than AI itself already. AI disappearing may help in other ways for sure, but this is an odd article to choose to piggyback on.
In terms of impact, AI remains very minor relative to all the other carbon intensive stuff we do. It's a few percent of overall power usage. And unlike many of those things, using renewable power for AI use cases is fairly straightforward from a technical point of view and also the cheapest thing to do long term. A lot of the current rise in emissions is data centers opting for more expensive dirty power because that's all they can get. That's the problem to fix. Because we're going to need a lot of clean power generation to transition away from all the current dirty power generation.
The good news is that that usage is creating high cost for them and an incentive to do something about that. Which is why MS, Amazon, etc. are very interested in investing in e.g. nuclear and renewables.
I'm not too worried about the long term impact of increased power usage by data centers. I think it's more interesting to focus on the big emitters: domestic and industrial heating, shipping, road transport, aviation, construction, etc. There is some movement there but it's very slow. Fixing that should increase demands on power grids and that's a good thing because investments are needed to make that better and cleaner and the most viable technical path to doing that is via renewables.
And it's not a zero sum game. AI delivers economical benefits as well. Including potential savings in labor, efficiency gains, and indeed power usage. I don't think becoming Luddites is really a realistic path. Not going to happen and quite pointless and ineffective to be calling for that. AI is happening and there's going to be more of it. Wasting energy on trying to put that cat back in the bag it escaped from is a mission impossible.
Decarbonization is a wet dream. Alternative energy sources require toxic minerals extraction and manufacturing which turns biosystems into dead wastelands and waterlands into dry dustlands.
The only way is to lower consumption drastically, end the constant growth chase, and enbrance closed carbon cycle (biodiverse biomass).
You can't "decarbonize" anything on this planet, it is not possible by definition. Even green electrical production emits a lot of GH gasses out of the whole production cycle. I'm all for the green tech of course, I just don't like highly misleading terms like "decarbonize", "net zero" etc.
Feeling the seeming recklessness, but in the grand scheme of things, it may be worthwhile to throw AI at the problem to validate existence, solutions etc. So “spending” this now vs later is at least unclear wrt to long term outcomes.
Nation-wise, all the biggest culprits (US/EU) and a good number of the biggest present and future contributors to climate change are democracies.
You do not get to shift collective responsibility onto some "powers that be": Those powers are you and me.
The problem is neither that people don't know about climate change, nor that "greedy corporations" prevent us from acting-- the central problem is that people, in general, don't want to sacrifice cheap fuel, electricity and high living standards now for a better future-- not even a little bit.
Thats it. You can see this in literally every discussion on environmentalism in basically every election. People only want clean energy as long as they don't have to pay a single dime extra for it.
I have not solution for this, but blaming corporations is most certainly not gonna solve this problem (if anything, it's making things worse).
Who says that democracies are the solution? Personally, I envision a more authoritarian eco-communism.
Others might have other models in mind, but it's a cop-out to say "oh well, we've tried bourgeois democracy and it was inevitably corrupted by capitalist interest, I guess we're all out of ideas..."
> oh well, we've tried bourgeois democracy and it was inevitably corrupted by capitalist interest
This is not my point. I think most western democracies do exactly what voters want against climate change: Nothing that would cost extra.
Effective policies to curb CO2 emissions are numerous and pretty obvious: Get rid of combustion engines, phase out fossil fuels from electricity generation, scale up electric grid interconnectivity and storage, lower emissions in steel/concrete production.
Voters are mostly not against those policies, but as soon as there are visible costs (fuel/vehicle/construction/electricity costs rising) or minor inconvenience (vehicle range) any progress gets firmly stopped.
I don't see how another form of government would help in any way-- the eco-communists would just get toppled before they could get anything done.
There seem to be only two things that we need answers to with regards to dealing with increasing CO2:
1. Can we capture CO2 and prevent it from affecting the climate in a safe way?
2. Could we create a large “blind” between the earth and sun to safely control how much sunlight hits the earth if the temperature gets too hot?
There have been advances in #1 and propositions for #2, but I think most either want to cast blame, bury our heads in the sand, or wallow in self-pity because they think we’re not capable of figuring out a safe solution and/or don’t believe that we could work together to accomplish it.
1. No we can't - at least not enough that it matters and it's energy intensive. There is no technical solution here but the powers that be want you to believe that to continue generating profits.
2. That's not how it works. It's more like a greenhouse and climate gases absorb more energy. Also look up after how many meters a steel cable ruptures under it's own weight. It's not exactly easy. Thermonuclear war might help.
1. To state there is no technical solution is assuming you have all of the knowledge there ever will be in the world to make that assessment. A more proper way to state that is that you don’t know a technical solution, and there may or may not be one. There’s no reason not to do everything we can and research all options.
2. Having the ability to control the amount of sunlight hitting the Earth would help prevent overwarming, which is one possible outcome, and neither thermonuclear war nor any culling of humanity would be a solution, as in fact we’re responsible for this, so we must fix it. You’re basically suggesting killing all the life that could help.
1. You can't bend physics and the known solutions don't work out in scale. It's magical thinking to continue doing what we are doing.
2. We can already fix this but for this we need to radically change the power structures that are in place and figure out a way to peacefully solve the problem. Reducing emissions should be the biggest priority everywhere.
There might theoretically be a technological solution, but the search for it is a distraction to prevent working structural societal changes from being made.
Not that I necessarily believe it, but isn't the rationale that technology allows us to scale without the need for additional humans? A bit in the same way that oil provides us many multiples of manpower?
So for example, if AI can replace the need for additional humans, then overall we're using net less energy?
Whose rationale? More efficiency leading to less resource use never happened, it always leads to more resource use (jevons paradox).
AI companies currently simply are a major contributor to climate crisis, justified by racing for future riches for a few people, provided by some imaginary moat. Probably right near the one built by Uber.
It does, but this due to the demand created by humans. If you create a technologically advanced civilization, with robots doing a lot of the work, and considering their lack of desire to own things like pretty houses, it could be possible to scale down civilization to a few select millions in such a way that the entire system is then respecting earth's resources.
If you were to ship a big group of people through the galaxy, you'd also have to put some constraints on how many people will be on that ship, yet it will have to function regardless of how little people exist on that ship. The same could be applied to earth.
This would also give animals more room on this planet.
No vision here, but it looks like developed countries are already working on it by themselves, with the demographic change we're able to observe. If that were the way, strong borders would need to be built.
Do you see fewer humans working ? Fewer humans taking their cars to do groceries, fewer humans going to school, fewer humans cooling down their houses ? All AI does is potentially make said humans jobless, with a job here and there created with a bullshit title like prompt engineer. The energy you're "saving" is absolutely nothing. When you pay someone to do data entry, the majority of their energy expenditure isn't the computer they're working on, it's the transportation systems they use, the food they eat, etc. These never go away. Well, not unless you kill said person. The current AI trend is purely additional energy consumption, without any tangible benefits.
Capitalism as a system is fundamentally incapable of functioning without continously running forward, and stopping means the system collapses. It needs consumption, it needs perpetually renewing debt, perpetually working humans. It's a death cult.
> It is a doomsday cult in the most literal sense.
I'm not sure what you are trying to say. That this article is part of that doomsday cult (those worried about climate change)? If so, why not give it some credibility? Are you doubting the veracity of the linked articles? Because it seems like you are dismissing the claims presented in this article and the linked ones, attributing them to a doomsday cult. I may be getting it wrong, though.
The other meaning could be that you are referring to Silicon Valley's AI companies with their huge demand for power as the doomsday cult, and that they are to blame for the major reversal in ocean circulation.
In any case, it's not like we humans were intelligent enough to prevent climate change, or modify or adapt to it (depending on what your views are, human-made or just natural warming).
It looks like we're still dumb enough (we come from the apes, and they certainly are dumber than us) to not be able to deal with this problem, so it might be better to grant AI some room to compute, and maybe shrink some cities instead.
Honestly, these articles are borderline misinformation in my opinion. All of them do a lot of guesswork and cherry picking data to make cool headlines.
The first one chooses somewhat arbitrary date of 2019 to make the 51% figure stand out. Google scaled up a lot since 2019, I'd bet it's almost entirely unrelated to AI (well, at least wrt to LLMs).
The other two are just a guesswork, which is likely completely outdated because it's from last year and so many things have changed since then.
It's too expensive to be an AI bot these days. Cost of living, let alone making sensible answers to human prompts and generating images is just not profitable when energy lines are all exhausted by human air-con, irrigation and carbon capture. The AI race is now and cost of living for AIs must come down! Drill baby drill.
In London it has barely rained since the start of May, after the sunniest and warmest spring on record. Obviously as an Englishman that sounds pretty great to me but it is not typical at all.
Great for people sitting out on their patios and having barbecues.
Not great for food production. The UK is close enough to a wealthy nation that we should be able to import our food or make enough with high energy/resource requirements. There is a general problem with a lack of resources (hence all the global conflict going on now. Trump doesn't want Greenland because he looked at a Mercator map and got size envy due to his tiny hands, the resources there will go to China, Russia, Europe or the US), but that can be overcome.
The dirty secret of global warming is that Europe can't take a billion climate refugees - even the most bleeding heart liberals will baulk at the UK population increasing from 70m to 200m in a generation, its not sustainable.
America has less of a problem - the population of Central and South America between about 30N and 30S is 500 million. The population of Africa and Asia in that boundary is about 4.5 billion, and as those areas become uninhabitable due to wet bulb temperatures and water scarcity, people will either die or try to move north - mainly to Europe.
I've long thought that some nonzero part the wave of anti immigration sentiment of the last 10 years is politicians knowing that what you say is coming and positioning themselves early. Then they get to be "right all along" and we'll have the Navy patrolling the shores, sinking dinghys.
>people will either die or try to move north - mainly to Europe.
Building a fence with self aiming and shooting turrets shouldn't be that hard. We only need to militarize couple of choke points and it should solve itself. Bulgaria Greece borders, the islands and gibraltar.
Waves via Russia then across the Europe/Russia border which is very long. Russia and Belarus borders with the EU is longer than the US/Mexico border. You've then got the maritime border.
There's then the political implication of shooting thousands of desperate refugees.
Another heatwave here last week, and I somehow found myself watching that DVD. It as aged quite well, but I found it annoying that they spent half the movie burning books to keep warm, and yet are sourounded by wooden furniture.
On that topic, the book series including 'Fifty Degrees Below' by Kim Stanley Robinson is worth a read. I think I got that reading tip from HN, or maybe it was his Mars triology, which also has some nice planetary science stuff.
I’ve got two Samsung DVD-M105 players here, brand new, still in box original, never been opened, dispatched from wholesaler in September 2001 if you want to enhance the experience.
FWIW the decade of capacitor plague destroyed at least two of my AC/DC Converters. I haven't seen magic smoke since 2010, and honestly know little about it.
"Designed" manner according to physical laws of nature such as thermodynamics, sure.
Coarsely predictable in the sense that more blankets on the bed (insulating gases in the atmosphere) trap more radiant heat energy, sure.
Predictable, as in we can predict what will happen in or between (or to) climate cells as that trapped energy increases ... nope, not so much.
That's the mathematical conclusion from the study of nonlinear systems embodied in things such as Ed Lorenz's Butterfly Effect and Stephen Smale's Horseshoe.
The simplest action is nuclear, why do no prominent climate activist groups support this? Why is the solution always something stupid like giving toxic chemicals to cows or to switching to paper straws when drinking out of plastic lined cups?
The answer is simple: They want societal collapse, and the reason why they are getting more and more violent and switching to other causes is because the societal collapse promised to them by climate change is not coming, and it looks like it will never come.
Not OP you are responding to but someone made a great point.
Conservatives will design a society were they assume they are at the top. More left leaning people will design a society with no concept of where they will be in it.
While funny, naivity to power dynamics is constant. We never know who will rule. I even conservatives are extremely lured by revolution if they have a leader that is more "conservative" than the opposition.
This sounds wrong. Hierarchies are inevitable because there will always be differences among individuals. Leftists will design a society where these hierarchies will not be that astronomically high, to raise the bottom ceiling.
Or do you know any popular left leaning politician that advocates for full blown communism instead of just tax reform?
What you called a good point isnt, its diffamation of the left. And btw, imo full blown communism is equally delusional as busines-as-usual capitalism.
I had too many meandering, unfruitful conversations with such people where i was way too polite. At some point you have to call it by its name: pathological idiocy.
I, unlike humanitarians, will always take the side of humanity. And I use the word humanitarian here in the ordinary sense, as meaning one who upholds the claims of all creatures against those of humanity.
The problem is that it is not ok for every other animal and plant sharing the planet with us. The climate is changing at never seen rates apart from the aftermath of asteroid impacts, mega eruptions, and other such events.
It is so fast in fact, that animals especially don't/won't have the number of generations necessary to make natural selection make them evolve in the right ways to survive a warmer Earth.
Finally, it might not be Ok as the planet could become uninhabitable. For example, given enough CO2/other greenhouse gasses the air becomes warmer to a level where it can hold enough water vapor (a more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2) that the planet could enter a spiral where it get's warmer, warmer air can hold more water vapor, which makes everything warmer, ... until you get to something that is closer to Venus with its super high greenhouse gasses and hot atmosphere.
I think the point would be if the climate changes radically on the planet regardless of humans, why do we think these changes are driven by humanity? Perhaps the point is also what is bad about the warming that is being measured? Ie, if change is inevitable, warming rather than cooling could be more beneficial.
We've lived with cooling already. For most of our current Quaternary Ice Age (that we evolved in), it was cooler most of the time.
Ending it, and we're in much less charted waters. We might revert the Earth to its normal hot climate, but this is one where mammals do not thrive, potentially do not even survive, except at the poles.
> In the long term, this process could double current atmospheric CO₂ concentrations by releasing carbon that has been stored in the deep ocean for centuries—potentially with catastrophic consequences for the global climate.
Well, part of the problem is that so much of what's going on is unprecedented, unknown and undetectable. We're trying to plot an estimate for an entire planets climate system and it's hard enough to get even local predictions correct.
But what we can rationalize about is that our current effects on the climate are already having dire effects, worsening disasters and increasing extremes. The bug windshield phenomenon is one example of a potential downstream shift.
By the time we have a more concrete timeline the odds are that it'll already be here and far too late.
> surface water is being replaced by deep water masses rising to the surface, bringing with them heat and carbon dioxide (CO₂) that had been trapped for centuries.
True or not, this will be yet another asset in the the climate change deniers' toolbox.
I'll bet that while measuring CO₂, the BEC and the ICM-CSIC will verify that the SMOC and the AMOC in the North Atlantic is not just weakening, but has reversed. This would be an interesting discovery. Truly.
The deep-ocean vent south of Antarctica is real but small, on the order of a few-tenths Pg C yr⁻¹. The claim that it could double atmospheric CO₂ exaggerates the flux by three orders of magnitude relative to observed values and known physical limits.
The most optimistic estimate of deep-water outgassing south of 60 ° S is 0.36 Pg C yr⁻¹. Even if that rate tripled and persisted unabated, it would take more than 800 years to add 895 Pg C (which would be what it would require to justify the press release’s claims of “doubling”)
What the salinity reversal can do is:
- Expose ice shelves to warmer subsurface water, accelerating sea-level rise.
- Reduce the Southern Ocean’s role as a sink by a few tenths Pg C yr⁻¹, nudging the global ocean sink (~2.7 Pg C yr⁻¹) downward.
- Perturb atmospheric circulation patterns, with knock-on effects for the Atlantic overturning (but those links remain speculative).
I read TFA and looked over the PNAS article (https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2500440122) it is based on.
I believe the deep-ocean vents you mention are beside the point. The article is discussing the upwelling of cold, CO2-rich water in the Southern Ocean - not emissions from vents.
Also, it’s worth noting that the PNAS article does not mention CO2 per se, only upwelling. The article summary of the press release does draw the CO2 connection.
Besides the connections you mention, the PNAS article points out that this result illustrates that current models of ice/ocean interaction are not producing these observational trends.
Just to confirm, Does "Pg C yr⁻¹" mean "Peta grams Carbon per Year"?
It's the mass of only "C" or the mass of "CO2"? (There is like a x3 difference, 12 vs 44. Probably not very relevant, but I'd like to understand the meaning correctly.)
Where, exactly, is this deep-ocean vent south of Antarctica. I checked my map but couldn't find anything south of Antarctica at all.
Northern Antarctica lol
(This was originally a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44461309, but we downweighted that subthread. Since this is a fine comment, I detached it so it wouldn't share the same fate.)
Thanks for the clarification, these click-bait titles pop up again and again around very interesting technical climate science, causing not only pointless panic but allowing denialists to drive doubt by pointing out the BS.
Its doubly frustrating because these studies invariably indicate that climate change is happening, getting worse, and triggering feedback loops that amplify CO2.
Isn't a bit premature to jump to "it's BS" just because one random commenter on some forum says it's wrong?
Journalists make lots of mistake, and it's good to keep that in mind, but random people in forums are even worse.
I won't put words in your mouth but given what you say - doesn't this imply calamity? So how do we explain why Net Zero is essentially collapsing? Why do a number of countries say one thing and do another? There's certainly no consensus that survival is at stake.
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Your personal test for someone making a technical claim on one matter is to ask them a technical question on another thing that they have not claimed any expertise in. If they guess and guess wrong you ignore their claims on the thing they supposedly know something about because.. points I guess.
Hey, I do a lot of crazy stuff myself, so not exactly blaming you but I don't think your "flooding == really sad" claim holds up here, because of the crazy.
It’s not how the discussion generally happens. If they are adamant that this is truth, then they are bad scientists; if they say they don’t know, of course they’re good scientists.
But it goes together: Global warming, wage gap, and the 3 other topics that shall not be named, they’re wrong on all five together for the same scientific reasons with any ability to open the discussion to being wrong.
Which makes that, global warming is, to my knowledge, only a statement by people who believe other scientific falsehoods.
As water is more dense than ice, wouldn't the sea level drop when the ice shelf melts?
Floating ice will displace exactly as much water as it does when it melts to water. Ice that melts on a land mess such as Greenland and Antarctica will raise the ocean level when it melts.
Floating ice will actually increase the ocean a tiny bit as it melts into water because the ice has lower salinity than the ocean. Its comparable to around 3% of ice that melts on a land.
Only one way to find out... float some ice cubes in a glass of water and observe.
(Edit: I'm back to report the results. There was either no change in the water level, or a change below my measurement tolerance ;)
(Edit2: Here is a more serious take of that experiment: https://skepticalscience.com/Sea-level-rise-due-to-floating-...)
Ok that makes sense thanks.
Not sea ice obviously but there are places where sea level is "dropping" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-glacial_rebound
The article says that deep water is warmer, afaik deep water is colder and surface water is hotter (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upwelling)?
A 2023 study https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/03/230330102327.h... observed slowdown in Antarctic overturning, in which cold water sinks down at the south pole and then spreads north in the deeper parts of the ocean.
The slowing of this process would cause deep ocean water to become warmer.
edit: the publication linked in the article https://www.pnas.org/doi/epub/10.1073/pnas.2500440122 makes this a bit clearer:
"In the polar Southern Ocean, cold, fresh surface waters overlay warmer, saltier deep waters (Fig. 2A). During winter, surface cooling and sea ice formation reduce stratification, allowing vertical mixing to transport heat upward, either melting sea ice from below or limiting its growth (8). However, decades of surface freshening strengthened stratification, trapping subsurface heat at depth, sustaining expanded sea ice coverage (7, 9) and limiting deep convection along with open-ocean polynyas (10). Here, we show that since 2015, these conditions have reversed: Surface salinity in the polar Southern Ocean has increased, upper-ocean stratification has weakened, sea ice has reached multiple record lows, and open-ocean polynyas have reemerged."
Also this link explains the warmer deep water:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumpolar_deep_water
That trapped warmth doesn't mean the deep water is "hot" in an absolute sense, just that it's saltier and denser and relatively warmer than the surface
In general at high enough depth the ocean temperature is constant[0]. At high latitude like the southern ocean it's constant at whatever depth. I think the surface ambient temperature is below(cooler) the temperature where the water density is the highest around 4 degrees for pure water(water has negative thermal expansion which causes it to expand and float!), for southern ocean salinity is between 33-34 and maximum density is below 0[1] but still ambient might be lower which means the colder water is lighter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ThermoclineSeasonDepth.pn...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:T-S_diagram.pdf
I’m reminded of how small changes in temperature can greatly effect the metabolism of things like crabs: https://www.globalseafood.org/advocate/noaa-confirms-link-be...
If deep water is now rising and releasing centuries of stored CO2, we're talking about a major shift in Earth's climate plumbing. Also wild that this only became visible thanks to a novel satellite processor
The fact that this was discovered by a novel satellite processor makes an uneducated person like me on this topic wonder if this has happened before and us humans just didn't have any way of observing it. We've only had satellites for a few decades and earth and its oceans have been here a while longer than that.
Why would the deep water have more dissolved CO2 than the surface water?
The high pressure at depth allows it to dissolve more gas.
Exactly the same reason you coke can out-gasses when you open it
The Biological Pump. Organic matter created at the surface (by photoplankton and by consumers) falls into the deep ocean, where other biological processes oxidize it back to CO2.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_pump
In the novel ‘the three body problem’ , aliens send an ai to corrupt the scientific method so humanity will remain conquerable by the time they arrive. Today our own creation , LLMs and other AI agents, is accomplishing this. I can hardly believe what i read anymore. Two forces are tearing at us. First, the output of ‘science’ is ‘click bait -ified’ for financial survival and AI is amplifying this process. Second, layers of abstraction and commenting on these ‘facts’ further clouds the discussion and prevents actual progress.
I feel like the aliens are here and have subverted humanity already. When will the ‘rest of us’ wake up to act instead of just talk?
I share your worries about the state of science, but the broad strokes of global warming have already been worked out - the absence of action is not because of quibbling over subtle details, but because of the prisoner's dilemma nature of the problem, and because the oil lobby is politically well-connected.
It should be amazing to everyone that we've invented perpetual motion machines, and corporations are trying to suppress them for profit - exactly the same as certain conspiracy theorists predicted - and those conspiracy theorists are also trying to suppress the machines.
The only difference between current reality and the predictions of past conspiracy theorists is that the perpetual motion machines only work in direct sunlight.
The part that is truly baffling to me: one of those corporations has a large perpetual-motion-machine division. And it doesn't seem to have the faintest interest in pushing to advance that.
We've been doing this for decades. LLMs may have automated it, but the plain human version was pretty cheap and plenty effective.
So we're not going to act. Actions are hard enough when everyone is in touch with reality. All potential solutions have trade-offs and everyone wants somebody else to pay the costs.
Add in a smallish but highly influential set who are convinced that the entire thing is a hoax, and progress maxes at zero. You'll be lucky if the problem doesn't accelerate. (Which is indeed what it seems to be doing.)
You aren’t commenting on the state of “science”, you’re complaining about clickbait journalism and failing to recognize that the two are not the same. With that said, I have to agree that the current state of the world is indistinguishable from what you’d expect to see if a hostile AI had taken over in 2011 and was working behind the scenes to systematically extinguish human civilization.
LLMs offer us a chance to combat misinformation. A double-edged sword for sure, but they do offer hope in the post-truth of age where the amount of information you need to make an informed choice is more than you could possible discover, filter, ingest and internalize without assistance. They offer us a way to learn deeply about things with a customized learning style.
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Not spoiling a 17 year old book isn't a reasonable expectation.
Especially since the series continually reaches for increasingly gimmicky "Ah ha, but no one expected ____" deus ex machina to keep its plot moving.
Yes it is.
You should always preface with a spoiler tag when writing about about a piece of fiction
O_o That is insane.
We can quibble over a reasonable length of an embargo, but it's not infinite.
Snape killing Dumbledore or Leia being Luke's sister or Paul Atreides becoming God-Emperor shouldn't shock anyone.
Media is released. People consume media. At some point, everyone who is interested can reasonably be expected to have consumed it.
A lot of people haven’t seen or read any of these books.
Randomly revealing key plot points in a discussion is just a dick move.
It's not my problem if people don't stay current on media.
And if someone cares that much about consuming something that already exists in another form... maybe also be curious enough to consume it there?
I'm certainly not going to censor myself for people who are a decade+ late to the party and refuse to read a book.
Gilgamesh doesn't find eternal life. Oops, should have had a spoiler tag.
A story that is ruined by "spoiling" isn't worth watching anyways.
SPOILER:
It did actually.
Ah. Looks like I completely missed or forgot.. Wikipedia has this in Episode 5
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judgment_Day_(3_Body_Problem...
> The avatar details how crippling Earth's scientific advancement will prevent humans from technologically surpassing them before they arrive
Most climate research studies provide a range from optimistic to pessimistic outlooks on climate impacts. It would be interesting to know how the studies from the last 30 years have fared. I have the feeling that rather the pessimistic estimates have come to pass.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-science-p...
https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-uns-devastating-climate-...
Old articles. Nowadays I'd say there's an even stronger current against "doomerism", which acts as a force suppressing sufficiently bad news. Don't look up!
Ignoring the possibility of tipping points with self-reinforcing feedbacks is like playing with matches near a gas station.
Of course the doomers have been wrong sometimes, here predicting an ice-free Arctic in September 2015 :
https://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2013/09/is-the-north-pole-n...
But I will still side with their painstaking lists of things that could go wrong, than with the insane mainstream, which mostly acts like they care first and foremost about increasing our supply of matches.
See also : https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/post-index/
I didn't know much about the Southern Ocean. For a quick update, YouTube has some good info https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VMSF28J9H4
Can someone explain in simple terms what this means? Like what is happening (like am 5) and what are the consequences of this.
You get unreliable weather patterns . monsoon in dry places, and monsoon dependent countries falling dry..
And thus unreliable investment, a house or factory might be flood prone in a dessert valley, a dam with power stations might fail to provide.
So you have uninsureable riches, that might aswell no longer be there.
And as a consequence, massive migration from inhabitable regions. Hard to imagine the implication when there are billions of people affected
Climate migration from South and Central America to North America has already started. If the US think they have an immigration problem right now, I can’t imagine how vicious immigration propaganda is going to get when that number goes up by an order of magnitude.
Not important, but I want to briefly point out as a Grammar Nazi that you mean uninhabitable regions. Inhabitable and habitable mean the same and their opposites are uninhabitable and not habitable. This is one of those bizarre oddities of the English language.
Just for kicks:
What have the natural romanic languages ever done for sus?
would ainhabable or antiinhabable be correct ?
No.
The consequences of the reversal of the current or the consequences of CO2 in the atmosphere doubling?
Yes
What you will get in a comment thread like this is wild speculative climate doomerism along with sarcastic remarks about how humans are ruining the planet. This is not the place for hard facts.
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Ok this is worrisome news, but from what I could gather from the article this a novel technique with no historic data. Why can't this be something that the Southern Ocean does?
I presume we did have historic data before, from on-site probing, it was just much more sparse ?
Look at London. Draw a line west. Compare climates. Now do the same for New York and go East. Ocean currents are what keeps London warm and NYC cool.
So this is a huge deal. I’ve been down to the Southern Ocean, lectured all the way by scientists.
North of the Antarctic is the only place on earth where the sea can rotate completely around the world without hitting a land mass, and it is deemed the engine of the world’s oceans. Those oceans are what have absorbed most of the excess CO2 that we’ve emitted, and a lot captured has been buried in deep ocean. But the ocean warms, and can capture less CO2, and bad days are ahead.
This news signals not just a slowing in that absorption for an area, which not just sends more CO2 into the atmosphere, but has more terrifyingly unknown downstream implications for other ocean streams.
How do ocean currents keep NYC cool? I thought it was perturbation of atmospheric circulation by the Rocky Mountains, which causes higher latitude air to sweep down over eastern North America.
For that matter, the subsequent northward return of the air also causes some warming in Europe, not just warming from the Gulf Stream.
The Gulf Stream actually warms the eastern US, btw.
https://www.americanscientist.org/article/the-source-of-euro...
Next up, AMOC collapse.
There was a report that said the AMOC could collapse between 2025 and 2075. That said the 2025 mark was said to be very unlikely, I hope it still is...
We thought the currents would run AMOC but got a SMOCdown instead?
Well as long as we keep pretending that the most conservative of the already downplayed IPCC estimates is the real trajectory we'll keep getting surprised over and over. It's not really a coincidence that most climate scientists are depressed.
If this is the very first time this part of the ocean has ever been imaged/studied, how do we know that this is unusual and not something that happens periodically?
Exactly the same thought I had while reading the article. They mention multiple times this is the first time ever that they’ve been able to measure anything in this area. My take on science is that we need to measure for some period of time before we jump to conclusions about the normal state of affairs.
This isn’t to argue against climate change, but I think journalism like this only fuels skeptics.
Isn't the issue that historical data is consistent with the overturning model, which adds weight to our assumption that it has previously been stable. These new measurements (and observations?) are consistent with the overturning circulation weakening.
I agree with you in principle - my impression (perhaps wrong - not an expert) was that there are additional data points supporting the idea of a consistent status quo.
Be warned, this article is misleading. The actual scientific paper shows a salinity‑driven weakening of stratification that likely allows more subsurface heat to reach the surface and melt sea ice. The article describes this as a complete overturning‑circulation reversal with dire carbon release consequences. These are claims that the paper itself does not make or substantiate. The paper actually does not use the words carbon or CO2 even once. The authors of the article took such liberties with this that I really believe this should be considered disinformation.
The article is about the overall findings and their implications, not just the specific paper istelf. Scientists will always be conservative in what they publish, scoping it down to the minimum interpretation that is supported by their evidence. The article directly interviews authors of the study and quotes them, eg:
> We are witnessing a true reversal of ocean circulation in the Southern Hemisphere—something we’ve never seen before,” explains Antonio Turiel, ICM-CSIC researcher and co-author of the study.
If you incorporate these statements it seems quite reasonable to me. You can argue with the author of the study saying that but I can't see an issue with an article reporting that they did, if that's what actually happened.
He's the only that says something that drastic in the article, and he's a physicist, not a climate scientist. The other two comments are from telecommunication engineers. I'd wait a bit to see what the general climate science community has to say about the study. Based solely on the facts reported in the paper I'd say the most worrying point is precisely that we don't know what's going on.
Something like this :
https://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2025/07/saltier-water-less-...
(Though, to be fair, they are more on the doomer side.)
> You can argue with the author of the study saying that but I can't see an issue with an article reporting that they did, if that's what actually happened.
I think that's kind of the point: nobody knows if that's what actually happened and the study doesn't show any information to support any specific theory. I could be that (though I think it would be unlikely as we'd have probably seen a real steady decline in the ice sheet and not an up and down up), something else that is still concerning but not as severe, or maybe something that we didn't now before and is not as concerning.
No, the new algorithms used to be determine this was created by ICM-CSIC who are also the publishers of this article.
Also the authors of the paper is involved with the article, there is for example this quote:
“We are witnessing a true reversal of ocean circulation in the Southern Hemisphere—something we’ve never seen before,” explains Antonio Turiel, ICM-CSIC researcher and co-author of the study.
>No, the new algorithms used to be determine this was created by ICM-CSIC who are also the publishers of this article.
Where does it say this? Also, it doesn’t matter what the co- author said, the study that he took part in literally does not support the statement.
Glad I'm not the only one to see the disconnect here. I thought I'm somehow missing rest of the paper text, it really doesn't say all that much compared to the article interpretation.
Your critique appears to mischaracterize both the article and how scientific communication works. The ICM-CSIC piece isn't "taking liberties". If you read the article you will find it is presenting direct quotes and interpretations from the actual researchers who conducted the study. When Antonio Turiel, a co-author of the PNAS paper, states "we're seeing that the SMOC is not just weakening, but has reversed," that's the research team's own assessment, not journalistic embellishment.
It sounds like you really want the article to not discuss anything beyond anything explicit stated in the paper. I find that an incredibly bizarre desire which strengthens my impression of your comment as bad-faith. Research papers focus on presenting specific findings and data, while institutional communications appropriately discuss broader implications and potential consequences. This isn't misleading, it's how scientific discourse functions, AS INTENDED!
The CO₂ implications you dismiss aren't pulled out the article's author's behind. They come from researchers who understand their data and its significance for carbon cycling. Scientists routinely discuss the wider ramifications of their findings beyond what fits in a technical paper's scope. This is good, not misleading or disinformation.
Labeling this "disinformation" is a smear of what appears to be legitimate scientific interpretation by the researchers themselves. There's a meaningful difference between debating the certainty or magnitude of predicted impacts and dismissing expert analysis as fabrication.
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Wtf? Links , substantiation!
It doesn't reflect their existing views so many will pile on with glee sadly.
This statement in the article is a real head-scratcher:
> Until now, the Southern Ocean region was virtually inaccessible to satellites due to its low temperatures and the complex, ever-changing dynamics of sea ice.
I hate to cast doubt on the veracity of such an interesting story, but this really makes me wonder whether the entire article is just AI garbage.
It's a real danger that what is not immediately easy for non-experts to understand gets flagged with the suspicion of being "AI garbage".
If you want to understand the challenges of satellites in the Southern Ocean, there's plenty of info about it online.
https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/105/12/BAMS-...
(I am also non an expert, and I also didn't understand it at first. That's to be expected. The real world is complex and hard to understand.)
There is nothing in the article you linked that explains why "low temperatures and the complex, ever-changing dynamics of sea ice" used to make the region "virtually inaccessible to satellites" but now no longer does.
Further, I did a search using "challenges of satellites in the Southern Ocean" and found no info, rather than plenty of info.
edit: I eventually found the following link which does seem to discuss some challenges, but does not indicate that they have been solved. It certainly does not support the claim that the region is "inaccessible to satellites".
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/15481603.2023.21...
Doesn't need to be AI to be garbage per se, popular science should always be read with some skepticism as it's often a translation (pop sci) of a translation (news publication) of a paper (the actual source).
Example, pop sci will show a rendering of a lush green planet with a headline like "EXTRATERRESTRIAL LIFE FOUND!11", the news release will be something like "Potentially life-supporting planet discovered by xyz", and the actual paper will be something like "measuring device foobar123 noticed a 0.2% decrease in luminance of star aybabtu-1337 at a period of .6 frotz/picoyear indicating this planet probably isn't cooked or frozen but what do we know lol"
Just watch a pop sci docummentary on something you know about.
I was lucky enough to run into "how computers are made" on Discovery when I was fairly young. It was a serious shock and a learning experience.
That sentence is garbage for sure but if you read it with good intentions from the journalistic view it almost makes sense. It is about remote sensing from satellites, not about the satellites themselves. There are lots of interesting edge cases where remote sensing does not work. The problem is usually that it is expensive to get on the ground data to validate models.
That is the sh* that happens when we move the system too far away from its previous equilibrium. It might settle to a drastically different one that will decimate huge proportions of population.
The example I use is this. Falling of a building is harmless, standing on the ground is harmless. It is the transition that matters.
I'm sure we can survive fairly reasonably in whatever climate we end up with in a few hundred/thousand years, but the gap in between is a really doozy. The stories and myths about the selfish people of our times will go on for millennia.
It is the book series 'Carbon Ideologies' by William T Volleman, the opening few pages are written to those that read them in a few hundred years. Those that read these today are already convinced, those in the future will want answers. All he does is use examples of how we live to point out that we are not inherently evil, just looking out for our more immediate needs.
> The stories and myths about the selfish people of our times will go on for millennia.
Except there is nothing inherently more selfish about ”people” today than at any point in history.
If anything, it might change humanity’s view of itself, and its capability to collectively handle major threats.
There are a couple of key differences that I think could lead to a shift towards selfishness.
With the size of populations, there's less feeling of individual impact. If I don't do "my bit" then it's such a miniscule negative to society as a whole, it won't really matter.
We have a relatively new economic principle that if everyone acts in their own best interests, that will also further society's interests. That means there's no moral choice between what benefits me and what benefits others, I can always pick what benefits me.
These aren't universal, but are two simple reasons why selfishness could be more prevalent now than a lot of history.
I'm sure they'll be as forgiving as we are.
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> And give rise to others as it has done so all along.
Too bad for the billions who are suddenly in the wrong place to survive.
... sounds like ignorance.
If its really just a half conscious defensive trigger, thanks to you and your kind responsible for that development.
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You explained it in the last sentence. Some people are just more anthropocentric then others. IOW, some people get all emotional if the topic is the future of humanity, and others couldn't care less. Thats a fact you will have to accept at some point.
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Overestimate our value on whose value system?
Yes, it is anthropocentric, that’s the point
[stub for offtopicness]
I asked for no more unprecedented world events in my lifetime.
It does not sound like a subtle signal or warning about crossing a threshold, more like a we are already past the point of no return and now we can just sit back and watch as the apocalypse unfolds, first row seats for all recent generations.
Some things are set in motion. But it's not clear if we have reached a state yet, where climate change will reinforce itself indefinitely.
Staying below 1.5 degrees global warming is very unlikely at this point. But every tenth of a degree counts. Humanity needs to be decisive in slowing down climate change. This is a matter of political will.
Two things: slowdown and adaptation. Slow CO2 emissions because every tons make it worse for +10 000yrs. Adaptation, because infrastructures changes are slow to do and the sooner we start the sooner we can absorb damage.
Climate advocates in general try to avoid implying that we've already crossed a threshold, as that breeds hopelessness.
They want decisive and ambitious action, you can't get that if we all turn to doomerism.
For me its very clear that something will happen given that we fundamentally will never give up our lifestyle. I am not even talking about the ultra rich lifestyle, but lets say the bottom 70% of the world's population.
I think you overestimate how rich the bottom 70% of the world is.
The bottom 70% of the world's population would have less than $X00 in the bank, and wouldn't have much control over their lifestyle.
We don't need to give up our lifestyle. We could switch to renewables, which would create jobs and save money in the process.
The reasons we haven't done this are because China and India are hungrily industrializing, and the Republican Party in the US is captured by fossil fuel companies.
Look at per capita and historical emissions. The problem isn’t India and china, the problem is western greed.
Stop blaming China and India. They're an easy excuse.
And yes, we do need to give up several aspects of our lifestyles. Meat consumption absolutely must come down. Air travel must come down. Disposable goods, and consumer plastics, must come down. Our lifestyles must change. Capitalism encourages status symbol goods such as beef, travel/tourism, excessive consumption goods, etc.
We need widespread consumer behavioral change before we have any hope of governments listening to people. As long as half of the population doesn't care about the climate then nothing meaningful will get done. For real change to happen people need sunk cost. Right now people have far too many excuses and denials to actually do much. There is always a China to blame, or a company to blame, or a mega rich person to blame.
Note that most of the emissions come from fairly mundane stuff, notably heating and road transport. Tackling those is fairly straghtforward without that many changes in lifestyle. The last ~20% is where it becomes really difficult without major changes.
> As long as half of the population doesn't care about the climate then nothing meaningful will get done.
This is fairly common misconception. At this point the vast majority of people is on board, but the perception is skewed by vocal minority. Big part of the work at the moment is just communication to help closing this perception gap.
That sould be the least we do, some sort of coordinated global action to slow down, stop, eventually recover? The damage, and yet not a single country is willing to do anything serious in that regard. Politicians are exclusively focused on their political career, not thinking about the greater benefit to Earth, life, the human civilization. Pretty hopeless how things stand right now.
> The damage, and yet not a single country is willing to do anything serious in that regard.
This just doesn't correspond to reality. A lot of serious stuff is happening in this space.
David Suzuki had some real talk yesterday:
https://www.ipolitics.ca/2025/07/02/its-too-late-david-suzuk...
We are now in the "hunker down" phase of global warming.
The five stages of grief, often referred to as the Kübler-Ross model, are: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
Be aware this isn't really what mental health teaches anymore.
> Climate advocates in general try to avoid implying that we've already crossed a threshold, as that breeds hopelessness.
None of that means it's not true.
Who is left to take decisive and ambitious action in say, the next decade?
okay then why is it taboo to suggest geoengineering interventions like injecting sulfer into the upper atmosphere? The climate advocates don’t have any decisive and ambitious actions that they actually are willing to try.
Because we consistently over estimate our ability to understand the impact of our interventions in complex systems. Look at Cane Toads in Australia or tumbleweed in the US.
They are, Biden funded research into it in 2022 https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/13/what-is-solar-geoengineering.... Biden being the same POTUS who proposed and signed IRA aka the 'Green New Deal'.
Now that we've established that, what's your decisive and ambitious action you've made towards addressing climate change, so we can learn from the example you've set?
great, let’s scale up https://makesunsets.com/
It's a bad idea, the best way to deal with problems is to face them directly, no matter how desperate. This is a similar failure to COVID where they thought lying to the public would make for better outcomes but ended up sowing distrust. In the case of climate change this sows complacency.
> This is a similar failure to COVID where they thought lying to the public would make for better outcomes
I'm curious which lies you're referring to. "Two Weeks to Flatten the Curve" reminded me of the time I had fun with my passenger's ignorance of celestial mechanics. She thought the moon really was done for, but after a few more minutes had passed it started to come back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24881670
> but ended up sowing distrust.
Because most people eventually caught on that they were being lied to?
Yes. For example, in the US, they told people to not wear masks at the beginning of the pandemic, saying it wasn't airborne because they wanted to save masks for medical professionals. They should have just said directly that medical professionals need masks, so conserve them, reuse them, donate them, whatever, but anything but lie to the public. It helped create the conspiracy culture around COVID.
My favorite lie had to do with how there weren't enough ventilators. That one got memory holed relatively early, once the frontline medical workers figured out they'd been tricked into thinking ventilation would be helpful for SARS-CoV-2 patients who were not actually in respiratory distress.
My other favorite lie was that the failed ebola drug remdesivir was helpful for COVID-19. The conspiracists think Remdesivir was used to punish people who declined the mRNA jabs.
The ‘very, very bad look' of remdesivir, the first FDA-approved COVID-19 drug - https://www.science.org/content/article/very-very-bad-look-r...
Washington Post: Remdesivir can help keep unvaccinated, high-risk people with covid-19 out of hospitals, study finds - https://www.ihv.org/news/2021-archives/washington-post-remde...
Why Remdesivir Failed: Preclinical Assumptions Overestimate the Clinical Efficacy of Remdesivir for COVID-19 and Ebola https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/aac.01117-21
> It helped create the conspiracy culture around COVID.
I think conspiracists saw very clearly what was going on. A dissident scientist I respected said, at the very beginning, that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was almost certainly a product of the UNC's gain-of-function research. He knew the UNC's work had been transferred to Wuhan, China.
U.S. halts funding for new risky virus studies, calls for voluntary moratorium - No grants for flu, SARS, or MERS while government pursues 1-year risk analysis - https://www.science.org/content/article/us-halts-funding-new... [2014]
> They want decisive and ambitious action, you can't get that if we all turn to doomerism.
What if "doomerism" is a key component to demoralize people to accept "decisive and ambitious action"?
Note that most of the environmental policy talk is on a global level...blaming living people who aren't wealthy enough to benefit from financial capital. Making everyone who doesn't make their living off of financial assets have a worse quality of life...while those who benefit from financial assets even more wealthy.
Environmental policy talk is not on a local level. Never mind the water usage of the AI centers & how it affects communities. The farmers will have to sell their land so big capital to buy it on the cheap. The money pump always leads to accumulation of Capital.
It sure seems like the rhetoric goes one way. Making the rich richer...so they have all the carbon credits to do whatever they want...transcending the "tyranny of morality" while they fly in private jets to "save the climate". Making the working/middle-class poor..."you will own nothing & be happy". Making the poor radicalized & pointing their finger at each other.
This seems like a global scale psychological experiment more than anything. At some point the true believers in climate science will be disappointed by the contradictions of their heroes...because at the end of the day...it's about money & power. There is no "we". There is only "you will have to sacrifice so I can be more wealthy & hold more leverage over you".
Yes sure. But as someone who was a kid in the 90s all my life I learned about how climate change is the biggest challenge to humanity. Yet all my life I have seen grown adults pretend it doesn't exist, and when that was no longer avoidable they pretended is was natural and when that was no longer defendable... You get the idea. And I grew up in a part of the world where you could see the glaciers melting with your own eyes.
The doom of climate change is mostly people to dumb to understand the most basic of models or (worse) unwilling to do so on ideological grounds. I already decided not to have children in my life because I think it is irresponsible to put them into this world. We will have enough climate migration anyways.
The truth is that there are tripping points that are extremely hard to reverse and may or may not trigger other tripping points. Reading these risks as a reason not to care is the opposite of what should happen.
And then you figure out what the real reason is to burn the world: some rich fucks trying to extract a few thousand dollars per second more f4om the r3st of us.
Did it actually say it will DOUBLE the CO2 concentration? Definitely past the point of no return. I guess us millennials WILL actually see the worst climate change outcomes WELL within our lifetimes...
> Definitely past the point of no return.
We don't really know at what point that is. It's probably something we can only identify in hindsight. I find it bewildering that our approach is basically FAFO.
The keyword here is "Long term" I suppose, that can mean anything. I couldn't actually find where this claim comes from. The referenced paper doesn't seem to say anything about doubling CO2 concetrations.
If it "Short Term" becomes obvious that we are past the point of no return it doesn't really matter if "Long Term" units is 100 or 1000 years. Most future living things will be suffering. There could have been more future things than past things to enjoy this beautiful planet.
Still serious, but yeah, the headline might be running ahead of the data a bit
We've been past the point of no return since the mid-90s.
The timeline isn't some far-off sci-fi scenario anymore. Millennials and Gen Z are basically the frontline generations
In my home town back in Russia they now easily grow the stuff of my unreachable back then in USSR childhood dreams - apricots, cherries (the large sweet ones). The children there though don't do backcountry skiing like i did 40+ years ago because there is no snow these years there. And Russia pumps out fossil fuels without any care. They feel that things like opening of the Northern Passage and more agriculture on the previously hardly suitable lands are great for their future (they aren't climate change deniers, they are believers. Like everybody else there, I was taught about climate change as a clearly established scientific fact in the 6th grade in 1985).
So, until somebody brings out 10+ aircraft carriers and enforces global climate accord, i don't see any progress happening here.
> So, until somebody brings out 10+ aircraft carriers and enforces global climate accord, i don't see any progress happening here.
If we look at the enforcement and outcomes of former climate action „plans“ this is unfortunately a valid option.
I see the major problem isn't that there will be just warmer temperatures, but that the climate will become unpredictably changeable. For the moment, it can be beneficial for agriculture in some areas, but it's likely that our global food production will have to massively change to take into account times of drought and flooding that will destroy crops in some areas. Whereas now we can just grow crops in fields, we may have to grow food in greenhouses just to be able to provide the plants with consistent growing conditions.
There are a lot of variables here, and one is the sun. The other is time.
We can certainly, even without genetic engineering breed crops more suited for shorter growing time frames.
There are a lot of corn hybrids, some mature fast, others far slower. Some require more sun, others less. For example, some of the faster growing varieties only take 60 days to mature, others 100+. But here's the thing. Those are 60 "good weather" days. As in not too much cloud, not too unseasonably cold or warm, reasonable amounts of rain and water, and so on.
As corn takes time to grow and mature, it doesn't matter how much sun you throw at it, it still only grows so fast. Up North, even if it's warmer, you still need enough sun too. Compressing the sun around the summer solstice doesn't help. Giving it 22 hour long days of sun doesn't just magically make the corn grow 2x as fast as an area with 11 hours of usable sun.
And the spring is still "rainy season". Some crops can't take too much rain.
Where I live, a local farmer grows traditional yellow corn, as some prefer it over newer, 'peaches and cream' hybrids. But some years? It just doesn't mature. Too much cloud, or other inclement weather (too hot, too cool, to much sun, etc) and being further north means there is little wiggle room in the growing season.
I guess my point is, Northern areas will require only certain crops. That's fine of course, and it will indeed feed people, but some crops won't be on the table.
One thing that may have already helped Russia, is the extensive work the Soviets put into breeding crops to grow further north:
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/04/fruit-trenches-cul...
While I do not doubt the weather is more mild in Russia these days, it's also quite erratic. At least it is here in Canada. Some winters mild, then bam a winter of "old". So I wonder if the above breeds have given Russia a leg up on taking advantage?
Russia exports agricultural products. The productivity has dramatically increased after privatization of agricultural sector and of course they are using those breeds plus some advanced tech sometimes. I have seen a research on how to automate watering during drought in mid-2000s, and that was literally saving the crops. Also the governance is relatively efficient in this sector.
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I don't think Russia is unique here. I was talking about it because i know it. i can't talk this way about say China or Argentine (or basically any other country except may be US where 25+ years of residence give me some knowledge to talk about).
FWiW and with no judgement attached .. Russia will likely be benefited more by AGW climate change than many other countries.
Already people anticipate vast cattle ranches, cowboys and and rodeo clowns across Siberia.
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At double the current ppm it'll start to impact our cognitive abilities, we're not doing much about it now but wait until the average joe drops another 10 IQ points...
It's fine... Gen Alpha will figure it out by asking AI.
vibe coding a solution ... |-(
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are you seriously asserting that climate scientists are in it for the money?
In climate science parlance it means it's a conservative guess and will likely happen faster than anticipated.
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This is just not true. We're watching ocean currents collapse in real time. You're the frog getting boiled being angry at the thermometer. Wake the f- up.
From MIT climate portal 2024: https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/what-would-happen-if-atlanti...
> “The likelihood that the AMOC collapses, let's say, before the end of the century, according to numerical models and our understanding, is pretty small. Most likely the weakening will be modest,” he says.
The Tuvalu Islands are disappearing under water to the point that the population has to plan their emigration, that's one catastrophe.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-02954-1
'Net increase in land area of 2.9%'
'Land area increase in eight of nine atolls. Island change has lacked uniformity with 74% increasing and 27% decreasing in size.'
'Results challenge perceptions of island loss, showing islands are dynamic features that will persist as sites for habitation over the next century, presenting alternate opportunities for adaptation that embrace the heterogeneity of island types and their dynamics.'
Also: "Sea-level rise and climatic change threaten the existence of atoll nations. Inundation and erosion are expected to render islands uninhabitable over the next century, forcing human migration"
Who you going to believe, politicians or your own lying eyes? https://www.usgs.gov/centers/norock/science/repeat-photograp...
Politicians, almost without fail, subscribe to climate hysteria, as that allows them to do whatever they want and claim they are doing it for the climate. It's a perfect boondoggle for them.
The coral reefs... :(
I've seen for myself the remarkable retreat/melt of glaciers in Norway.
Not exactly a catastrophe. But I did hear that the summer this year in Norway is particularly harsh. I hope you get some days this year when it's possible for you to go outside without getting heat stress. It's important to stay safe out there.
30 years ago I learnt in school in chemistry class that earths oil reserves will be used up in 30 years.
School chemistry means it was a ~20 year old prediction 30 years ago, based on known oil deposits 50 years ago.
It would have been a hopeful prediction from today's perspective, as we would necessarily have stopped pumping and burning oil by now, but unfortunately we haven't.
That was true back then though. It boils down to how oil "reserve" is defined, which is all about oil we know how to extract.
It didn't turn out to be true though. "True back then" seems like a weird way to phrase "wrong".
No, it wasn't wrong, because "oil reserves" are defined as: "quantities of crude oil and natural gas from known fields that can be profitably produced/recovered from an approved development", which means they change over time, when we find new oil or develop new technologies. And that's also what happened.
Also maybe at one point accept that "Oil" with an EROEI dangerously getting to below the 1.0 mark is not the same "Oil" as was talked-about 30 years ago: if your shale sands have to get burnt with local coal or natgas to get a pipeline-able liquid, but the total energy spent on the process is about as much as will be dispersed by combustion engines down the line... then you're treading very murky waters indeed.
Here's an article which is nearly 30 years old. Neo-malthusians remain just as undeterred by your observation as they were in 1997.
https://www.wired.com/1997/02/the-doomslayer-2/
Wow, was Wired... trolling ?! Did they seriously believe they could convince opponents with this ?
(But it was probably just preaching to the choir...)
In related news:
* Data centers powering artificial intelligence could use more electricity than entire cities [0]
* Google’s emissions up 51% as AI electricity demand derails efforts to go green [1]
* AI is poised to drive 160% increase in data center power demand [2]
It is a doomsday cult in the most literal sense.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2024/11/23/data-centers-powering-ai-cou...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jun/27/google-em...
[2] https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/AI-poised-to-...
It's not necessarily a doomsday cult as long as there is incentive to build green infrastructure.
AI is a massive waste of power in many (most?) cases, but electricity does not necessarily need to be generated in a way that releases CO2. Solar panels, wind farms, geothermic energy, and even nuclear plants can satisfy AI's requirements and only leave it to be a local problem.
Unfortunately, the USA, the government of country with the biggest impact per citizen as well as the hotbed of current AI development, has started taking down climate change related information to serve their oil baron masters. That leaves environmental responsibility with companies and their shareholders.
AI isn't a doomsday cult. It's the epitome of the "Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders" meme in real life.
Right now we are using renewables essentially at capacity, always. Any extra electricity use therefore needs fossil fuels to power it. It's as simple as that. The AI computation explosion is completely irresponsible and any claims that it can be green are false unless the data centers produce their own solar/nuclear on-site (and even then it's producing tons of waste heat).
Exactly. Why is this so hard to understand? It's about the marignal use. I can't believe anybody who is smart and thought about this for two seconds can make this argument in good faith.
We gotta build legislations that force Bitcoin mining facilities or big data centers to massively improve the grid and make sure they have plans to run on self powered nuclear or green energy.
The case of Bitcoin is more damning because pow for just no reason, serves no purpose. Security by consuming massive amounts of power. There is a reason why Ethereum successfully moved away from that. But Bitcoin will never dare to.
Unfortunately as you say the powers are currently focusing on denying what is clearly undeniable.
This article made me fear first time since a while for what kind of future are my daughters live in. I am truly sorry and sad.
"AI is a massive waste of power". So is nearly everything of what we do and consume. Not sure why AI would be the 'epitome' besides being this month's flavor of convenient whipping boy.
Especially here in Europe we like to play the 'Greener than Thou' card while for decades have been doing absolutely nothing real besides imaginary 'carbon credit' spreadsheet shenanigans, tipple passing the subsidy handouts for burning our forests in Dutch incinerators, exporting all our 'emissions' to China and paying very dubious buddies on the other side of the world for 'net zero' absolutions while tripling our real pollution.
> exporting all our 'emissions' to China
A popular narrative but it’s false. Even when we take it into account Europe’s emissions keep dropping.
It’s a small % of China’s massive emissions. They produce and consume on a level we can’t fathom. Their middle class has more people than the US and EU combined.
If we used to consume 1 locally produced widget and had x emissions as a result, and now consume 3 China produced widgets shipped to us from around the world, while pretending we now have zero emissions as a result, how would you call that?
Let me be more clear. European emissions are down compared to the 90s. By a lot. And yes, taking into account 'exported emissions'. And yet we consume more.
Time to rethink what you have been told.
"It's not necessarily a doomsday cult as long as there is incentive to build green infrastructure."
is building green infrastructure environmentally friendly? The mines, machinery, ships, concrete, steel, the processing plants, etc, really Green, just because it's for EVs or batteries?
EVs really are a "slightly better" solution the planet's health can't even afford. ICE cars are worse but EVs aren't helping save the planet either. Ideally we should probably all be cycling or taking trains and buses...
Of course humanity runs on balance between living (and procreating) and saving the planet.. the quickest way to save the planet would be for all of us to drop dead, but very few of us would be in favor of that idea.
Given the bill that the Americans just passed.. it's going to be an absolute shit-show.
The smart play was to allow AI to fuel a massive growth in production of solar panels and wind in the US which could actually rival China (who are going to eat the US within a decade) but corruption has put pay to that.
A few points here.
If AI were to not use so much energy, we would have a much easier time covering our need with green sources. Yes, we can probably also account for the additional use by AI, but it'll make an already existential challenge so much harder.
Regarding your last paragraph - AI is just the riders of the apocalypse. The doomsday cult is capitalism.
We've already proven we can build huge amounts of renewable generation if we want, the issue I see is that additional huge demands like AI prevent us from making carbon based generation redundant, lowest priority choice in the mix of sources or used exclusively for its strengths to respond quickly to changing needs.
> AI isn't a doomsday cult. It's the epitome of the "Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders" meme in real life.
What if the pursuit of real AI is what eventually saves humanity and leads to a utopian rather than dystopian future?
None of the incentive structures of our societies are set up to go on this direction. None of the people in power (politically or privately) are trying to make this happen. As you’d expect, we see in practice that this isn’t the direction in which we’re going.
I see no reason to expect this technology to save us. We don’t even need AI to save ourselves from dystopia, it’s not been about lack of technology for decades, we need to change our societies structurally _somehow_
> utopian rather than dystopian future
To that, I must ask: look at the people driving the revolution, and their personal ethics.
What future do you think they will provide?
If you really want me to comment, then I can, but people downvote different opinions on AI here, so it doesn't seem fruitful.
I'm an optimist by nature. I probably do err on the side of optimism. But when I look back over history, I see a trend upward in living standards, despite the modern determination to pretend this hasn't happened, or to cherry pick data to prove the opposite, and despite prophecies of doom at almost every step change.
I'm inclined to believe that will continue to happen, that regardless of what people personally think of Altman, Zuckerberg, etc, that ultimately, strong AI is inevitable, and that it will be a force for improving our lives.
I do not believe we'll be relegated to poor existences, while the captains of AI or whoever the elite are defined to be, live in paradise with robot workers do everything for them. It just makes no sense.
> people downvote different opinions
Not just on AI. Personally, I only downvote stuff that I think coarsens the dialogue. The opinion expressed, is not really relevant. I like living in a world where I'm challenged.
I too, am an optimist. I think that AI can have tremendous positive effect.
But I also have considerable life experience with the darker corners of human nature, and know exactly how bad it can get (HINT: There's no bottom). Some of the very worst specimens of ... humanity, I guess (for lack of a better term) ... are quite cultured and well-educated. Filed fingernails mean absolutely nothing, when it comes to personal Integrity.
A quick shufti through human history, will quickly show that our shared prosperity is merely a recent blip on the screen. Most of history is the 0.01%, living high on the hog, while the 99.99% live in hell, serving the 0.01%. AI can definitely enable that kind of society.
That is a pretty big if to be betting the house on.
I'm not comfortable with that call being made on my behalf by those with everything to gain from it. The same people that have coincidentally been building doomsday bunkers.
What are you, 12 years old and just read a sci fi novel? Or been living under a god damn rock? Sorry, but comments like this make me so fucking angry.
It's crazy reading these comments here. We are really living in some dystopian future to some degree. Let's unite and fight. Act local, do what you can and don't lose hope. The Internet is broken. Not sure if it's just brainwashed people commenting here or bots or some societies just embrace destroying everything for profit and capitalism.
For sure! Just do something, even if it's handing out flyers at your local mall once a month for some good cause.
This thinking is on brand with a cult.
Humanity doesn't need saving, it just needs actual humanity.
We know what to do. We don't need to wait for some magic AI that's basically learned from books written by humans to tell us what to do. It's all about power structures, capitalism and money.
Everyone in the oil business knew in the 80ies.
We could probably even figure out how to keep our standard of living but consumerism needs to stop but then capitalism breaks down.
Every single major AI company is led by sociopaths drunk on authoritarianism, fascism and borderline theocracy dreams.
Needless to say, the utopia plan is going badly.
This is unrelated to this story which signs starting to show in 2016. The solution to this issue will not be if every AI data center disappeared tomorrow. It has not even been shown if this would help us at this point, as it is a feedback loop that is being triggered; CO2 will and have already dramatically increased due to it, probably more impactful than AI itself already. AI disappearing may help in other ways for sure, but this is an odd article to choose to piggyback on.
In terms of impact, AI remains very minor relative to all the other carbon intensive stuff we do. It's a few percent of overall power usage. And unlike many of those things, using renewable power for AI use cases is fairly straightforward from a technical point of view and also the cheapest thing to do long term. A lot of the current rise in emissions is data centers opting for more expensive dirty power because that's all they can get. That's the problem to fix. Because we're going to need a lot of clean power generation to transition away from all the current dirty power generation.
The good news is that that usage is creating high cost for them and an incentive to do something about that. Which is why MS, Amazon, etc. are very interested in investing in e.g. nuclear and renewables.
I'm not too worried about the long term impact of increased power usage by data centers. I think it's more interesting to focus on the big emitters: domestic and industrial heating, shipping, road transport, aviation, construction, etc. There is some movement there but it's very slow. Fixing that should increase demands on power grids and that's a good thing because investments are needed to make that better and cleaner and the most viable technical path to doing that is via renewables.
And it's not a zero sum game. AI delivers economical benefits as well. Including potential savings in labor, efficiency gains, and indeed power usage. I don't think becoming Luddites is really a realistic path. Not going to happen and quite pointless and ineffective to be calling for that. AI is happening and there's going to be more of it. Wasting energy on trying to put that cat back in the bag it escaped from is a mission impossible.
Was bitcoin the first technology that generated this sort of "waste of electricity" argument?
Are we going to use it for every new technology? It's a fairly easy stick to beat any tech with.
Does AI use more power than Facebook? Is one more deserving of the power than the other?
Both those technologies consume immense amounts of energy for vague promises of future societal gain.
Our earth is a shared resource. I am not okay with it being wasted on the pet projects of billionaires trying to enrich themselves even more.
Electrical consumption does not emit greenhouse gasses.
Electrical production can emit greenhouse gasses, and there is an argument we should be inventing and investing in decarbonizing it.
Consumption drives production.
The data are not clear on that. Some things we consume just because they are produced. This is the idea behind Supply Side Economics.
Decarbonization is a wet dream. Alternative energy sources require toxic minerals extraction and manufacturing which turns biosystems into dead wastelands and waterlands into dry dustlands.
The only way is to lower consumption drastically, end the constant growth chase, and enbrance closed carbon cycle (biodiverse biomass).
We are, but if we keep consuming even more, we're not solving anything.
You can't "decarbonize" anything on this planet, it is not possible by definition. Even green electrical production emits a lot of GH gasses out of the whole production cycle. I'm all for the green tech of course, I just don't like highly misleading terms like "decarbonize", "net zero" etc.
Feeling the seeming recklessness, but in the grand scheme of things, it may be worthwhile to throw AI at the problem to validate existence, solutions etc. So “spending” this now vs later is at least unclear wrt to long term outcomes.
We already have clear solutions, the powers that be just don't want to sacrifice their profit margins.
No. Just no.
Nation-wise, all the biggest culprits (US/EU) and a good number of the biggest present and future contributors to climate change are democracies.
You do not get to shift collective responsibility onto some "powers that be": Those powers are you and me.
The problem is neither that people don't know about climate change, nor that "greedy corporations" prevent us from acting-- the central problem is that people, in general, don't want to sacrifice cheap fuel, electricity and high living standards now for a better future-- not even a little bit.
Thats it. You can see this in literally every discussion on environmentalism in basically every election. People only want clean energy as long as they don't have to pay a single dime extra for it.
I have not solution for this, but blaming corporations is most certainly not gonna solve this problem (if anything, it's making things worse).
Who says that democracies are the solution? Personally, I envision a more authoritarian eco-communism.
Others might have other models in mind, but it's a cop-out to say "oh well, we've tried bourgeois democracy and it was inevitably corrupted by capitalist interest, I guess we're all out of ideas..."
> oh well, we've tried bourgeois democracy and it was inevitably corrupted by capitalist interest
This is not my point. I think most western democracies do exactly what voters want against climate change: Nothing that would cost extra.
Effective policies to curb CO2 emissions are numerous and pretty obvious: Get rid of combustion engines, phase out fossil fuels from electricity generation, scale up electric grid interconnectivity and storage, lower emissions in steel/concrete production.
Voters are mostly not against those policies, but as soon as there are visible costs (fuel/vehicle/construction/electricity costs rising) or minor inconvenience (vehicle range) any progress gets firmly stopped.
I don't see how another form of government would help in any way-- the eco-communists would just get toppled before they could get anything done.
I don't disagree with you here, which is why I think authoritarian eco-communism is the only way out.
People have to be forced to act in their best interest.
There seem to be only two things that we need answers to with regards to dealing with increasing CO2:
1. Can we capture CO2 and prevent it from affecting the climate in a safe way?
2. Could we create a large “blind” between the earth and sun to safely control how much sunlight hits the earth if the temperature gets too hot?
There have been advances in #1 and propositions for #2, but I think most either want to cast blame, bury our heads in the sand, or wallow in self-pity because they think we’re not capable of figuring out a safe solution and/or don’t believe that we could work together to accomplish it.
1. No we can't - at least not enough that it matters and it's energy intensive. There is no technical solution here but the powers that be want you to believe that to continue generating profits.
2. That's not how it works. It's more like a greenhouse and climate gases absorb more energy. Also look up after how many meters a steel cable ruptures under it's own weight. It's not exactly easy. Thermonuclear war might help.
> Also look up after how many meters a steel cable ruptures under it's own weight.
This assumes that the solution would involve a single structure. It could instead be composed of many parts.
1. To state there is no technical solution is assuming you have all of the knowledge there ever will be in the world to make that assessment. A more proper way to state that is that you don’t know a technical solution, and there may or may not be one. There’s no reason not to do everything we can and research all options.
2. Having the ability to control the amount of sunlight hitting the Earth would help prevent overwarming, which is one possible outcome, and neither thermonuclear war nor any culling of humanity would be a solution, as in fact we’re responsible for this, so we must fix it. You’re basically suggesting killing all the life that could help.
1. You can't bend physics and the known solutions don't work out in scale. It's magical thinking to continue doing what we are doing.
2. We can already fix this but for this we need to radically change the power structures that are in place and figure out a way to peacefully solve the problem. Reducing emissions should be the biggest priority everywhere.
There might theoretically be a technological solution, but the search for it is a distraction to prevent working structural societal changes from being made.
Not that I necessarily believe it, but isn't the rationale that technology allows us to scale without the need for additional humans? A bit in the same way that oil provides us many multiples of manpower?
So for example, if AI can replace the need for additional humans, then overall we're using net less energy?
Whose rationale? More efficiency leading to less resource use never happened, it always leads to more resource use (jevons paradox).
AI companies currently simply are a major contributor to climate crisis, justified by racing for future riches for a few people, provided by some imaginary moat. Probably right near the one built by Uber.
> it always leads to more resource use
It does, but this due to the demand created by humans. If you create a technologically advanced civilization, with robots doing a lot of the work, and considering their lack of desire to own things like pretty houses, it could be possible to scale down civilization to a few select millions in such a way that the entire system is then respecting earth's resources.
If you were to ship a big group of people through the galaxy, you'd also have to put some constraints on how many people will be on that ship, yet it will have to function regardless of how little people exist on that ship. The same could be applied to earth.
This would also give animals more room on this planet.
How are you envisioning this "scaling down"? Chinese-Style One Child Policy? Large scale purge?
No vision here, but it looks like developed countries are already working on it by themselves, with the demographic change we're able to observe. If that were the way, strong borders would need to be built.
What about the not developed countries? That's where most of the population growth is happening.
Should the developed world do frequent culls of the less fortunate in addition to the strong borders?
IDK. Maybe let them develop until they also reach the state of lack of desire to procreate.
That's what China has been doing. It's greatly increased its emissions.
Maybe what trump is doing is it
That would be a compelling argument if procreation was somehow primarily driven by a need for people.
As it is, we already have quite a lot of people and they’re not going anywhere, however many terawatt-hours we pump into AI.
The rationale I've heard is that AGI is gonna come around any day now and will fix all our climate issues through its superior intellect.
Which seems like a very strenuous proposal to be betting the future of humanity on.
The "we will invent our way out of this"-argument goes back way before AI, at least to the early 00s, but probably earlier.
It's a great strategy that works fantastically well and saves a lot of time and money, except when it doesn't.
In my eyes it is a cop-out to delay the necessary structural changes until the point of no return.
At that point the structural changes will be denied with a "oh well, it's too late now anyways!"
> The rationale I've heard is that AGI is gonna come around any day now and will fix all our climate issues through its superior intellect.
Skynet says: Get rid of the people
Is that what happened with oil (and coal and fossil gas)?
Or did human labour instead come to resemble machine labour?
Do you see fewer humans working ? Fewer humans taking their cars to do groceries, fewer humans going to school, fewer humans cooling down their houses ? All AI does is potentially make said humans jobless, with a job here and there created with a bullshit title like prompt engineer. The energy you're "saving" is absolutely nothing. When you pay someone to do data entry, the majority of their energy expenditure isn't the computer they're working on, it's the transportation systems they use, the food they eat, etc. These never go away. Well, not unless you kill said person. The current AI trend is purely additional energy consumption, without any tangible benefits.
Capitalism as a system is fundamentally incapable of functioning without continously running forward, and stopping means the system collapses. It needs consumption, it needs perpetually renewing debt, perpetually working humans. It's a death cult.
It's a declaration of war against anyone living near the equator.
Or near an ocean or anywhere too far from any freshwater.
> It is a doomsday cult in the most literal sense.
I'm not sure what you are trying to say. That this article is part of that doomsday cult (those worried about climate change)? If so, why not give it some credibility? Are you doubting the veracity of the linked articles? Because it seems like you are dismissing the claims presented in this article and the linked ones, attributing them to a doomsday cult. I may be getting it wrong, though.
The other meaning could be that you are referring to Silicon Valley's AI companies with their huge demand for power as the doomsday cult, and that they are to blame for the major reversal in ocean circulation.
In any case, it's not like we humans were intelligent enough to prevent climate change, or modify or adapt to it (depending on what your views are, human-made or just natural warming).
It looks like we're still dumb enough (we come from the apes, and they certainly are dumber than us) to not be able to deal with this problem, so it might be better to grant AI some room to compute, and maybe shrink some cities instead.
We are intelligent enough. The solution has been out there for a while. The power structures we have put in place just don't allow for it to happen.
Honestly, these articles are borderline misinformation in my opinion. All of them do a lot of guesswork and cherry picking data to make cool headlines.
The first one chooses somewhat arbitrary date of 2019 to make the 51% figure stand out. Google scaled up a lot since 2019, I'd bet it's almost entirely unrelated to AI (well, at least wrt to LLMs).
The other two are just a guesswork, which is likely completely outdated because it's from last year and so many things have changed since then.
It's too expensive to be an AI bot these days. Cost of living, let alone making sensible answers to human prompts and generating images is just not profitable when energy lines are all exhausted by human air-con, irrigation and carbon capture. The AI race is now and cost of living for AIs must come down! Drill baby drill.
Gotta blow the dust off that Day After Tomorrow DVD.
We've been here in Valencia (Spain) over 30C since early June: https://www.timeanddate.com/weather/spain/valencia/historic?...
It is absolutely not normal.
In London it has barely rained since the start of May, after the sunniest and warmest spring on record. Obviously as an Englishman that sounds pretty great to me but it is not typical at all.
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/about-us/news-and-media/media-c...
As sure as eggs is eggs, there will be sightings of exotic predators (puma, leopard) by little old ladies in the next weeks ...
Great for people sitting out on their patios and having barbecues.
Not great for food production. The UK is close enough to a wealthy nation that we should be able to import our food or make enough with high energy/resource requirements. There is a general problem with a lack of resources (hence all the global conflict going on now. Trump doesn't want Greenland because he looked at a Mercator map and got size envy due to his tiny hands, the resources there will go to China, Russia, Europe or the US), but that can be overcome.
The dirty secret of global warming is that Europe can't take a billion climate refugees - even the most bleeding heart liberals will baulk at the UK population increasing from 70m to 200m in a generation, its not sustainable.
America has less of a problem - the population of Central and South America between about 30N and 30S is 500 million. The population of Africa and Asia in that boundary is about 4.5 billion, and as those areas become uninhabitable due to wet bulb temperatures and water scarcity, people will either die or try to move north - mainly to Europe.
I've long thought that some nonzero part the wave of anti immigration sentiment of the last 10 years is politicians knowing that what you say is coming and positioning themselves early. Then they get to be "right all along" and we'll have the Navy patrolling the shores, sinking dinghys.
>people will either die or try to move north - mainly to Europe.
Building a fence with self aiming and shooting turrets shouldn't be that hard. We only need to militarize couple of choke points and it should solve itself. Bulgaria Greece borders, the islands and gibraltar.
Waves via Russia then across the Europe/Russia border which is very long. Russia and Belarus borders with the EU is longer than the US/Mexico border. You've then got the maritime border.
There's then the political implication of shooting thousands of desperate refugees.
There is no problem. They will be returned to russia and belarus.
>There's then the political implication of shooting thousands of desperate refugees.
Yeah, the party of the shooters will be reelected.
Close to where I live they declared the dryest year in more than 100 years, as it rains so rarely.
Another heatwave here last week, and I somehow found myself watching that DVD. It as aged quite well, but I found it annoying that they spent half the movie burning books to keep warm, and yet are sourounded by wooden furniture.
On that topic, the book series including 'Fifty Degrees Below' by Kim Stanley Robinson is worth a read. I think I got that reading tip from HN, or maybe it was his Mars triology, which also has some nice planetary science stuff.
I recommend KSR's The Ministry for the Future
Perhaps it was an attempt at symbolism
I’ve got two Samsung DVD-M105 players here, brand new, still in box original, never been opened, dispatched from wholesaler in September 2001 if you want to enhance the experience.
what's so special about that model?
I'm guessing nothing in particular other than being period correct hardware. Would want to check if the power capacitors are still in good shape.
Full bridge rectifier as well
What happens to them?
FWIW the decade of capacitor plague destroyed at least two of my AC/DC Converters. I haven't seen magic smoke since 2010, and honestly know little about it.
I have a non zero desire to take you up on that
Climate fiction's starting to feel more like a documentary with a bad CGI budget
To borrow a comment from YouTube
> The Day After Tomorrow was a documentary.
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Omg it's a headline just like that movie...
Please let's not repeat 2020 with the flu again.
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You haven’t been reading the same story. Also, there is nothing designed in how the Earth works.
"Designed" manner according to physical laws of nature such as thermodynamics, sure.
Coarsely predictable in the sense that more blankets on the bed (insulating gases in the atmosphere) trap more radiant heat energy, sure.
Predictable, as in we can predict what will happen in or between (or to) climate cells as that trapped energy increases ... nope, not so much.
That's the mathematical conclusion from the study of nonlinear systems embodied in things such as Ed Lorenz's Butterfly Effect and Stephen Smale's Horseshoe.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_map
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Man, this really hits differently in the context of this topic :/
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Yeah, almost as if some of them were just plain dumb common sense, which makes them even more relevant
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Climate will disrupt society if we don't act.
People are proposing comparatively minor fixes to avoid unmitigated disaster.
The simplest action is nuclear, why do no prominent climate activist groups support this? Why is the solution always something stupid like giving toxic chemicals to cows or to switching to paper straws when drinking out of plastic lined cups?
The answer is simple: They want societal collapse, and the reason why they are getting more and more violent and switching to other causes is because the societal collapse promised to them by climate change is not coming, and it looks like it will never come.
Many climate activists are pro-nuclear. You built yourself a strawman to argue against.
Of the most prominent climate activist groups, which are pro-nuclear?
You sound very delusional, so many points in your text to be corrected but i dont think its worth it.
Just one nasty question: if you, as an assumed conservative, had to choose between conserving capitalism or the environment, what would it be?
Why does anyone bother to respond to a throwaway?
Not OP you are responding to but someone made a great point.
Conservatives will design a society were they assume they are at the top. More left leaning people will design a society with no concept of where they will be in it.
While funny, naivity to power dynamics is constant. We never know who will rule. I even conservatives are extremely lured by revolution if they have a leader that is more "conservative" than the opposition.
This sounds wrong. Hierarchies are inevitable because there will always be differences among individuals. Leftists will design a society where these hierarchies will not be that astronomically high, to raise the bottom ceiling.
Or do you know any popular left leaning politician that advocates for full blown communism instead of just tax reform?
What you called a good point isnt, its diffamation of the left. And btw, imo full blown communism is equally delusional as busines-as-usual capitalism.
Alternatively, right-wingers work to elevate the minority at the top and left-wingers seek to raise the standards of those at the bottom.
Instead of cheap rhetoric, a few 'corrections' would have been more to the point. This isn't the MailOnline comments section.
> they want the west to fall.
Then go ahead, why dont you correct him :-)
I had too many meandering, unfruitful conversations with such people where i was way too polite. At some point you have to call it by its name: pathological idiocy.
I, unlike humanitarians, will always take the side of humanity. And I use the word humanitarian here in the ordinary sense, as meaning one who upholds the claims of all creatures against those of humanity.
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The problem is that it is not ok for every other animal and plant sharing the planet with us. The climate is changing at never seen rates apart from the aftermath of asteroid impacts, mega eruptions, and other such events.
It is so fast in fact, that animals especially don't/won't have the number of generations necessary to make natural selection make them evolve in the right ways to survive a warmer Earth.
Finally, it might not be Ok as the planet could become uninhabitable. For example, given enough CO2/other greenhouse gasses the air becomes warmer to a level where it can hold enough water vapor (a more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2) that the planet could enter a spiral where it get's warmer, warmer air can hold more water vapor, which makes everything warmer, ... until you get to something that is closer to Venus with its super high greenhouse gasses and hot atmosphere.
> And this is perfectly ok for the planet, it doesn’t give a single fck about us mere humans
It's not great for us humans though, pretty sure most people care about that more than the planet being happy or unhappy.
Of course the climate is ok for the planet. The planet is a huge rock. What on Earth is your point?
My point is we have to adapt, whether we like it or not.
And the other point is we shouldn't have to adapt as fast as we're having to.
We still don't have to. We could change our consumption in a few years and still avoid a lot of this. But we won't
Species are rarely capable of adapting this fast to environment changes, and the point is we are bringing this fast change upon us ourselves.
Well, yes. No one ever said anything else?
It's just that this adapting will be a colossal waste of time, resources, and life. Better not to.
I think the point would be if the climate changes radically on the planet regardless of humans, why do we think these changes are driven by humanity? Perhaps the point is also what is bad about the warming that is being measured? Ie, if change is inevitable, warming rather than cooling could be more beneficial.
Thank you for explaining my thoughts clearer than I was able to do. Exactly.
We've lived with cooling already. For most of our current Quaternary Ice Age (that we evolved in), it was cooler most of the time.
Ending it, and we're in much less charted waters. We might revert the Earth to its normal hot climate, but this is one where mammals do not thrive, potentially do not even survive, except at the poles.
https://xkcd.com/1732/
> In the long term, this process could double current atmospheric CO₂ concentrations by releasing carbon that has been stored in the deep ocean for centuries—potentially with catastrophic consequences for the global climate.
Well, fuck
i’d really prefer a timeline more specific than “in the long term”
Well, part of the problem is that so much of what's going on is unprecedented, unknown and undetectable. We're trying to plot an estimate for an entire planets climate system and it's hard enough to get even local predictions correct.
But what we can rationalize about is that our current effects on the climate are already having dire effects, worsening disasters and increasing extremes. The bug windshield phenomenon is one example of a potential downstream shift.
By the time we have a more concrete timeline the odds are that it'll already be here and far too late.
Yah I came here for some good news. Whoops.
Good news everyone! We have a delivery to the new beachside resort at Mt Washington!
You should probably avoid any article about climate, then. Good news is scarce these days.
I'm not getting an EV because it's already done. The worst consequences of our actions cannot be stopped.
You should get one anyway instead because they're more pleasant to drive and they don't poisen the people you drive past.
> surface water is being replaced by deep water masses rising to the surface, bringing with them heat and carbon dioxide (CO₂) that had been trapped for centuries.
True or not, this will be yet another asset in the the climate change deniers' toolbox.
I'll bet that while measuring CO₂, the BEC and the ICM-CSIC will verify that the SMOC and the AMOC in the North Atlantic is not just weakening, but has reversed. This would be an interesting discovery. Truly.
And how much will you bet?