With a headline like that the graph should be at the beginning. Usually you'd put it up front and then talk about the graph, not put it at the bottom and talk about how people aren't talking about it.
Anyway, I scrolled down to the graph and skipped the text. We are currently 4 std deviations above the mean with respect to El Niño temperature.
But there's also a historical line -4 std deviations from the mean. Was that an eventful year too? I can't tell and the graph is at such low resolution that the source URL isn't visible. If the graph and data is so important, shouldn't we care more about presentation? This is either super sloppy or deliberate obfuscation.
Look, I'm all for good reporting on climate. This just doesn't feel like it.
The graph represents 44 years of statistics, and shouldn't be dismissed out of hand. But you can not determine how these stats relate to longer term time frames such as a 100 years or more. Obviously the article wants you to believe the absolute worst about how these modern indicators compare back even further than the data shows, but how much of that is confirmation bias, and how much is actual science?
Not ignoring anything, just commenting on what the graph says as a singular piece of evidence. And it's "the hundreds of other signals that tell a similar story" that can lead to confirmation bias (ie. following a narrative arc) and potentially interpreting this piece of evidence more strongly than it actually deserves.
See, you're part of the problem. This perfectly demonstrates the point of confirmation bias. You've already decided what the evidence shows, so you don't need to analyze it independently and objectively. "We already know what it means! Stop thinking!"
they gradually swapped in biased thermometers, or the thermometers were always biased to start showing temperature rise around 2026? what motivates thermometers to commit confirmation bias?
By choosing what data to show. There is a lot of data to choose from in climate science. How do you think we end up with such strong arguments on the issue? Cherry picking is as big a problem in climate science as anything else.
a lot of those thermometers have been operating for years or decades, in order to cherry pick each year again, you'd have to censor traces that were still used the year before, so at least such cherry picking should leave measurable traces
can you identify cherry-picked "retired thermometers" from this dataset and earlier ones by the same source(s)?
I believe they were responding to your "confirmation bias, how?" question, rather than the narrative around thermometers. So from that lens, the confirmation bias is choosing to show temperature (objectively measured with assumed-reliable instruments / thermometers), but arguably choosing to hide other kinds/categories of data.
Fwiw, I am not backing them up, since I do not know what other data they might be referring to (and I am not very knowledgeable in topics within climate science).
You're surprised in the context of global warming that the physical quantity of temperature was selected? The temperature quantity itself was cherry-picked?
Does anyone besides you expect them to demonstrate global warming but please without mentioning temperature - that's obviously cherry-picked of course... /s
1 - the area was cherry picked.
2 - only this year's data is highlighted in red - the data from last year wasn't highlighted. It's hard to know if this is a trend or it's just a weird year.
3 - the time horizon is cherry picked. Why mean on a given day rather than the mean for a week?
Imagine someone else cherry picks the line that is really low and highlights it. Or they pick a different area which shows cooling. Now you have some idiot claiming global cooling.
The thing about cherry picking is that it works so well. When someone pointed out the cherry picked data, you couldn't even come to the conclusion it was cherry picked. And you are on hacker news. Imagine the really really silly people.
Fair, I had to click into the full size (I pinch zoomed on my phone). But now the fact that 1988/1989 are outliers raise a few more questions about the variance calculation. In particular, the title suggests that those weren't included in the variance calculation.
A 3.5-sigma event is a 1-in-1000 chance. Yet we have 2 of them in our data set that goes back only 40ish years? Something is suspect. Maybe I'm not accounting for the likelihood of a random walk excursion probability, but if a 3.5 sigma event isn't a 1-in-1000 event I have difficulty interpreting.
I think a 3.5-sigma event being a 1/1000 probability is only under the assumption of random data - a constant climate would deliver more-or-less random data around some mean.
The appearance of two 3.5-sigma events suggests that the data is no longer being randomly generated around that mean, but is instead drifting away from that mean.
More concretely, if all the data were within 2-sigma, then you could invoke the null-hypothesis and refute climate change. Beyond 2-sigma (and even worse two 3.5-sigma events) refuting climate change becomes (much) less reasonable.
> The appearance of two 3.5-sigma events suggests that the data is no longer being randomly generated around that mean, but is instead drifting away from that mean.
Not if the two 3.5-sigma events are in opposite directions, as in this case.
Yes, I'd forgotten that detail. Still, though, chaotic bifurcation could be present with Il Niño and La Niña driving high & low extremes. Same mean, maybe, but with a bimodal distribution?
The event in this case is a daily observation, so in the last 45 years there have been 16k events. Under Gaussian assumption, 3.5 sigma outliers in positive direction are 1 in ~4,000 events, in either direction 1 in ~2,000, so approx. 8 days would be outliers in the recorded period. Judging by the looks, it's pretty close. And the data is absolutely not Gaussian: at best it's the result of a Gaussian process, as the daily recordings are not independent, but dependent on the previous day.
The tails could be heavy, it's true. This could make my usual 1-in-1000 heuristic overly conservative. Let's go with that, heavy tails. The data shows we are at something between a 1-in40 and 1-in-20 deviation. Normally (pun intended) that's ~2-sigma deviation. So... I guess it doesn't really seem like an epoch defining El Niño.
The author of that Climate Casino post has some... strong views. So you might want to bear this in mind when reading his analysis:
"The human cancer is destructive to every living thing, as humans continue to eat the planet into oblivion. As someone who values “everything else,” I would be one of the first to rally behind the NTHE philosophy if it had any scientific basis at all. I want the human cancer gone from this planet."
It's additionally not clear that TFA is a copy of the Climate Casino (CC) post.
It's on the same topic, possibly spurred by the CC. Yes it uses the same graph (which I presume CC also didn't make), but otherwise the content and writing is very different. It's less detailed, possibly LLM written, but also more approachable.
I guess re-posting about a salient topic is now just "AI copyright theft".
“Let's be clear. The planet is not in jeopardy. We are in jeopardy. We haven't got the power to destroy the planet - or to save it. But we might have the power to save ourselves.”
But I don't think it's all that interesting of an argument. When people say save/destroy the Earth, they mean humanity. Call that arrogance, but it's true.
The most powerful humans, and human systems, often score very low on stewardship and empathy. While "cancer" triggers as opinionated, using a less-charged analogy I think should probably make a similar point.
Agent Smith: I'd like to share a revelation during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet.
One of my favorite worded bits of machine logic about humans. All of the sci-fi tropes have it. The "I, Robot" movie has similar "my logic is undeniable" comment about the same conclusion of the humans being the problem. I just really liked Agent Smith's specific comments
He is wrong, by the way. Most animals multiply until they exceed carrying capacity, then die off in massive numbers, then repeat. They may find a long-term equilibrium. The current boom in human population, and a subsequent die-off that has not yet happened, were predicted back in the 1970s.
It is also probably BS to assume a periodical die-off for humans in the near future. At the moment, humans are not showing any signs of a die-off, they are just not multiplying anymore. Humans do have something that animals do not, a culture. And this culture seems to have induced a downward variation in population.
This happened in rapid succession in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. First rodents and small scavengers multiplied rapidly, but then the easy food ran out and their predators showed up, and the cycle repeated. The zone is now roughly at equilibrium, we think, but it's isolated and surrounded by human activity so it's hard to be sure.
The Kaibab Plateau deer disaster from 1906 to 1939 also demonstrated boom and bust cycles.
Complexity resists reduction, yet fundamentals that affect change over time exist.
That said, growth seeks to shed restrictions upon it, but unrestricted growth has many suboptimal effects on the area it grows in.
If you propose a system growth effect thesis (established example: the iron law of oligarchy), it's not possible to show its influence both accurately, and in such a way that agrees with most observers. It may not even be useful; it might exist as a concept better in a group relation with other concepts, and focusing on the group might be most useful.
And responses to actions to display a system's properties tend to be about those actions, not about the system.
Some of the most popular responses re: growth are "the area doesn't have a beneficial significance equal to the beneficial significance of the growth", but one is measured essentially to support propaganda, and other is barely measured and poorly understood.
Once you narrow the framing, people criticize the framing as the reality, not its usefulness as a paradidm for the reality of the issue. The map is not the territory; we cannot "describe" reality. We can create interfaces to that reality, we can measure, discuss, theorize about cause and effect, attempt to emulate or simulate to better understand, but responses tend to focus on the interface instead of the reality, and then devolve to epistimelogical "statements about statements" type activity.
So, because he's a nutter the graph shouldn't be front page news is the argument then? That'll teach him.
He will learn the regret the day he dared say "hey, this graph means we're all gonna die if we don't do something! Look at it!" because we outsmarted him by refusing to look.
Well before I knew he was a nutter, it strikes be that the graph starts in 1991. Feels like we should should have more data than that, and that the same graph would be more powerful if it started in 1800 and showed the same thing (or at least, earlier in the 20th century, surely we must have data from the 1950s at least? probably earlier?)
Not saying that the data is not concerning, or that climate warming isn't real, BTW. I'm just saying this particular graph feels fishy.
Because he's a nutter, you should not take his word for it that a 3.5 sigma event (1 in ~2000 for a normal distribution) in the temperature of a particular ocean region means we're all gonna die if we don't do something.
I can understand the desire to be concerned about the climate systems that keep earth habitable for humans starting to break down might come with some extreme views. It seems almost thinking we can continue as normal given the predictions of climate scientists are now coming true, is the extreme views. I worry that these climate scientists might have under egged their estimates due to a “sensible mindset” rather than following the data and we could be in for a horrifying next 30-50 years.
The data seem to suggest an urgent need for solar radiation management because reducing fossil fuel consumption to a negative value isn't really a viable plan, as it turns out. Instead, we will have to use technology to solve the problem, surprise surprise.
Calcium carbonate has the benefit of de acidifying the ocean.
We did try planet-scale geo engineering. It has worked so far, predictions were met. Heating through CO_2 and other heavy molecules works as predicted. Cooling through Sulfur compounds works even better than predicted, as evidenced by the sudden rise in temperatures after cessation of sulfur-rich fuels.
And in the end, all solutions we can attempt are technical and in some aspect untested. We just assume that the consequences of some of those solutions are small enough, but none have really been tested at scale.
Optimistic of you to assume it’ll only be fifty years. Do you expect humans to adapt that quickly? The climate will be messed up for centuries at least
Where do you get the "centuries at least" bit? The hole in the ozone layer "repaired itself" much faster after humans made changes. There's no more acid rain in Los Angeles after humans made changes. These all happened within my lifetime. We also saw during covid lock downs how quickly things changed from the sudden slow down in human activity.
You can look up the carbon cycle on Wikipedia, it is fairly well understood where atmospheric carbon can go. Most processes that sequester carbon long term take geological time spans. So unless you think we engineer sequestration at a rate comparable to what we emit today, atmospheric carbon is here to stay for a really long time. Personally I think we won’t be able to scale sequestration technology sufficiently in the next decades to make a dent in the carbon levels.
Carbon sequestration through plant-life seems to increase more than expected with rising atmospheric CO_2 levels. We are currently seeing increased global plant mass.
Both of those problems you cited are far smaller and easier to fix than the ~1,500 gigatons of C02 humans have emitted in the past century. CFC's have a half life of only 50 years, C02 just persists now forever since we're dumping it faster than can be consumed. Acid rain was a mostly localized problem, not one spanning the entire Earth and affecting ocean temps, ocean currents, etc etc. The cited problems are insanely easy to solve compared to global climate change.
It's likely / probably unsolvable at this point as we're hitting tipping points for which there is no effective return such as permafrost melting and releasing more co2, causing more heating, melting more co2, etc and partial shutdowns of critical ocean currents. But yeah I know...MUH FREEDOM.
Changing refrigerants and propellants away from fluorine chemistry and installing desulfurization equipment on coal plants are both many orders of magnitude easier than reducing the amount of hydrocarbons we burn globally to the point where the temperature increasing is stopped or reversed.
One of them requires the entire global population cooperate to burn fewer hydrocarbons. The examples you mentioned were handled in the US by regulating power plant operators and chemical manufacturers.
The point is that if humans would change, the Earth would change quickly. The way the first comment was worded made it sound like the Earth would need that time and not that humans will drag it out that long. That's a given. The Earth will snap back fairly quickly if the pesky humans would just get their shit together.
Melting glaciers and ice caps is another such thing. As soon as the polar albedo changes because there is no more snow and ice, temperatures will stay elevated for a far longer time than it took to melt those caps.
People in the climate movement are rarely professional PR folks. Weaponizing their personal faults against the objective subject matter they talk about is disingenuous anyway?
You cannot deduce factual correctness from how "holy" the messenger is.
Wanting every living human being to die and our species to go extinct ("NTHE" stands for "near-term human extinction") is a little beyond not being professional PR folks.
Per the article, the NTHE "movement" are doom sayers, not doom pushers. That is, the NTHE people are people who predict that humanity and most complex life on Earth will be killed off by global warming by 2030 (used to be 2026), through a somewhat convoluted but unavoidable series of consequences of the polar ice cap melting completely (in their theory). There is no indication that the NTHE people want this outcome to happen, it's just the outcome they think is already unavoidable.
Now, the author's position is both more and less nihilistic. The author also seems to think that human extinction is unavoidable, but he thinks the timeline is much more dragged out. He also seems to think that this is actually the preferable outcome at this point, given that global warming is our own fault, and that the only thing we should do is try to make it so that the planet is as well as it can be after we are finally gone.
I wasn't aware I had weaponised their personal faults, or indeed claimed that what they said was indicative of being a personal fault. I read his post, and then read some more of his writing, and simply felt it would be worth posting what I read in this thread. For me at least, it was a useful experience that changed some of what I was reading into the commentary surrounding the data. YMMV.
I just left a comment on this elsewhere, but are you using cloudflare or nextdns? They seem to block archive sites, especially archive.today (archive.is, etc)
The NextDNS (and others) blocking of archive.today goes back far beyond 2026 and this specific DDOS event. Perhaps that contributed to the hostility behind it, I don't know. But citing that event for other examples does not apply well.
Please do not misinterpret this as an excuse or pardon of anything. I love archive.today and all their subdomains. I use it regularly and have been having problems for years, especially with NextDNS. I am seriously disappointed to learn of the DDOS event, but there remain other angles on the topic in general. I am still struggling to process WTF they would do what you reported -- how could they think that would be worth the consequences, accomplish anything? Almost seems suspicious in itself.
Thanks for the info. But ever a shill for archive.is
You should immediately switch your internet provider to Andrews & Arnold https://aa.net.uk/ - every HN reader from the UK should. I'm certain they won't censor you any more than required by law.
Disclaimer: I'm not sponsored by them, nor am I their customer. They just seem cool.
That was my first reaction too. A perfect fit for a cover image of a story. Also generally when referencing something within an article you want to display a figure before talking about it.
Plotting it this way is just a shift and rescaling. As the other commenter already showed this will lead to a plot that looks pretty much the same in terms of difference relative to the past data. I think standard deviation makes sense here since we don’t really have an innate sense of what is a meaningful change in ocean surface temperature and the point is to show that we are already far beyond normal here.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. It's a hallmark of a low-effort comment that it is not even terminated with a period, and this is the case with many of your comments.
Please don't post flame bait on HN, including population-wide swipes like “the ignorance of the common human being”. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I'm not sure if you're being actively malicious or just a great example of how lies can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes, but your comment is a great example of what we're up against here.
If by "all snow would disappear forever from Earth" you meant "the Arctic could be seasonal-ice-free in the summer" by 2013, then, sure.
Communication about truth is also hard when against decades of industry, talk radio, right-wing media, and Republican propaganda lying about the climate. And humans, with very little scientific or critical thinking skills, felt comfort in the lie that "everything is ok!". Getting past a person's discomfort in order for them to accept truth is a high hill.
the problem with this kind of article is half of them push a doom angle and the other half talk about carbon footprint. both of them have the same effect making people give up or do useless lifestyle changes that do nothing for the environment.
we should be pushing for backend changes that are invisible but actually make things better. that means massive subsidies to build out clean power and electrify everything. politicians right now are either doing "think of the corporations we need to leave it up to the market" or insane degrowth proposals or straight climate denial.
the only reason people hate some environmental policies is because they are the wrong ones. we need a wave of green populism thats been missing for decades to scrap unpopular things like ulez, combustion engine bans or individual carbon tax and focus on positive changes people want.
that could be: give away solar panels and two way heat pumps to low-income families, tax the profits of oil and gas companies, enforce right to repair, remove tariffs on chinese car makers if they create jobs in europe, fund train networks to get tickets cheaper than flying, invest in renewable energy to make electricity cheap. theres a lot of options. all of them will lead to some inflation and public debt but there are easy ways to offload that to the rich.
the point is changes that are good for the climate and good for (ordinary, working and middle class) people are better than changes that hurt or just appear to hurt people, even if they are a bit less effective.
Or -- hear me out on this one -- we could ban wind energy, raise costs for electric vehicles, and use government resources to promote increased use of coal and oil.
That would have a bunch of advantages such as sounding familiar to leaders whose heyday was in the 1970s, of not making us feel bad about the state of the world, and occasionally giving financial kickbacks to government leaders.
Or... if you don't like this approach, maybe making changes in political leadership is the single most important thing to do.
I feel like you're not actually engaging with GP's point, Jonathan Swift.
Their point is that unpopular climate policies are exactly what is pushing the general populace towards this sort of regressive climate policy you're describing. "Maybe we should make a change in political leadership" is not a productive contribution when the current leadership is the result of bad policy messaging. GP isn't opposing leadership change, they're explaining how to move towards it.
(As much as I'd like to believe that people will just gain an educated understanding of the issues and choose correctly, the unfortunate fact is that real-world politics doesn't work like that, and has to contend with the fact that populism is what wins elections)
> That would have a bunch of advantages such as sounding familiar to leaders whose heyday was in the 1970s, of not making us feel bad about the state of the world, and occasionally giving financial kickbacks to government leaders.
Besides 'kickbacks' I don't think those reasons have much to do with it. The policy benefits the fossil fuel industries' investors / owners, and follows the rent-seeking, anti-free market theory and practice of many current capitalists (specifically, that's not about capitalism but a current powerful group of capitalists). Those capitalists strongly influence government.
The other effects you mention persuade the public.
EDIT: We might ask, if the above theory is true, why the same rent-seeking capitalists do use that strategy for renewable energy? Maybe those industries, dominated by many non-American companies, are hard to monopolize? But I'm wandering far into speculation.
> give away solar panels and two way heat pumps to low-income families
There's no need to caveat benefits like this by income - the most popular social programs are almost always universal. Also the added bureaucracy of validating that someone lands in a category isn't worth the overhead. Why wouldn't we want everyone to install more solar panels and two way heat pumps?
First off. Richer people tend to have larger houses, so use more energy. In the UK the grants are such that for me in a smaller house. A heat pump is the same price as a replacement boiler. You could up the grant amount but unless you're going to have a regressive policy of giving more to the rich you aren't going to give the rich all the heat pump and solar they need/can install.
Personally rather than giving someone benefits to pay for electricity I'd rather install solar on their roof.
So for a government, this needs not cost more than what they are doing now.
> that could be: give away solar panels and two way heat pumps to low-income families, tax the profits of oil and gas companies, enforce right to repair, remove tariffs on chinese car makers if they create jobs in europe, fund train networks to get tickets cheaper than flying, invest in renewable energy to make electricity cheap. theres a lot of options. all of them will lead to some inflation and public debt but there are easy ways to offload that to the rich.
The problem is that most of these (and potentially all of these) ideas sound good, but achieve very little. Some (e.g. right to repair, sadly) will achieve almost nothing at all. This would be a scatter-gun approach at best; at worst, it creates the impression of doing something while actually doing very little.
I don't know what the best solution is. Arguably a genuine carbon tax (one that taxes large producers for the previously-externalised costs of greenhouse gas production, while providing tax cuts to the general population) is the single most effect means of enacting real change. However, Australia demonstrated that even a scheme that results in real, substantial income tax cuts while generating measurable, real reductions in emissions is vulnerable to a scare campaign by a committed, ultra-right attack dog politician.
I strongly suspect that our only potential way out of this now is via geoengineering, and that's fraught with dangers. I am also worried that a lack of government interest in climate change will eventually induce a highly wealthy individual to undertake geoengineering privately, without oversight, scientific input or regulation. But I cannot see the world stopping this any other way, other than by reversing the effects of climate change via nuclear winter.
> Some (e.g. right to repair, sadly) will achieve almost nothing at all.
I'd be curious as to why you say that. I feel that, right now, you would be correct. But if we could move society to a new paradigm where right-to-repair were the default, then cheap non-OEM parts manufacturers would bloom and repairing something would become much cheaper than replacing. Imagine if every object sold had to come with a manual describing how to repair common failures, and a support department to answer for other components.
Personal anecdote: My $700 oven has a microswitch that broke. The oven wouldn't work without it but the replacement part was all of $5. However the vast majority wouldn't know how to repair it.
Expand this to cellphones, computers, tables, wardrobes, cars, tractors and I feel it would have an impact. And... I suppose... my gut feeling is the biggest part of the problem is psychological. People are overwhelmed and don't know what they can do to help. Raising awareness is crucial, but just raising awareness obviously does nothing to reduce CO2 emissions - it's in second order effects when people start thinking harder about what they can do.
Another anecdote: I gave a seminar recently about energy to a small local environmental conference in a nearby town. My starting point was that nobody knows how to talk about energy - we can talk about length, size, weight, cost, speed, age, price, longevity and so, because we know the units - feet or meters, pounds or kilograms, dollars/euros/yen/etc, mph/kph/mps/etc and so on. But ask someone what is a "Joule" or what can you do with a "kilowatt-hour" and you get blank stares. The outcome? I learned of an attendee who drew lines on his kettle for 1-cup, 2-cups, and so on, and now boils only the necessary amount of water. That won't really move the needle on CO2, but it will raise awareness.
That's the reason why. That's just too big of an "if".
Any premise that is predicated on an artificially-induced complete paradigm (counter to the interests of capital, no less) shift to bear significant fruit is pretty much a non-starter. You need incredible buy in for that (which right-to-repair is just too niche to have), and established interests will still push against it every step of the way.
Maybe the EU could do it, but even then I'm skeptical.
No matter how bad the climate crisis gets, those who have the power to change it (heads of state/capital) will never abandon their lifestyles which expend 1000x more energy and fossil fuels than the average person. Pushing for voluntary, individual reductions in consumption is pointless and insulting to the average person.
"ulez"? I assume that you mean Ultra Low Emissions Zone, such as the ones in London or Milan? As I understand, for the people who live inside the zone, there has been a dramatic improvement in air quality. For the people who live outside and need to pay to drive in the ULEZ, I suggest they switch to a lower emission or electric vehicle to avoid or reduce their driving fees. In the case of London, the gov't should offer huge incentives to small businesses replace old dirty diesel trucks.
> remove tariffs on chinese car makers if they create jobs in europe
I recommend that EU follow the path that the US followed. It maintains modest tarrifs on auto imports, but strongly encourages (cheap lending, tax rebates, etc.) foreign manufs to build and operate plants and R&D centers in the US. Since the late 1980s, this has been widely practiced by Japan, Germany, and Korea. As the US auto industry became less and less competitive, they were effectively replaced by autos built in the US by foreign companies.
> fund train networks to get tickets cheaper than flying
I did a quick Google search. More than 70% of air passengers are travelling for leisure; some sources say as high as 88%. We should use a "green tax" on all air passengers to help fund anything and everything to reduce carbon footprint. How about 10-20 USD per ticket? In my mind, air travel in rich countries is way too cheap in this era.
How is ulez unpopular? Its geographical, age or class axis. In some places: like the cities, its extremely popular and extremely unpopular in other places: just outside the cities, especially for people who can't afford electric vehicles.
Just cos some people vandalise the cameras, don't make it inherently popular or not. Its just that a very few _really_ don't like it, to the extent they're willing to smash stuff up.
> give away solar panels and two way heat pumps to low-income families, tax the profits of oil and gas companies, enforce right to repair, remove tariffs on chinese car makers if they create jobs in europe, fund train networks to get tickets cheaper than flying, invest in renewable energy to make electricity cheap... there are easy ways to offload that to the rich.
The basic issue remains that if we don't punish people relative to their burning of carbon then we're never gonna deal with climate change. One human can undo the hard work of many in one casual or selfish act. By the sound of international debate on the subject we should probably be investing in geo-engineering instead if we care for outcomes.
For all the presumed benefits of a populist green movement, I doubt it would actually care enough about the root issue and easily yield to self-interest. Every electorate-level conversation about climate change always starts and ends with talking about someone _else's_ carbon usage, never our own. As a species we're simply not mature enough to note what habits we've deeply embedded in our culture that are inherently problematic, like supermarkets.
I agree - I think we really need to encourage reduction in the obvious negative habits and encourage people to take up more positive habits. eg.
- Use car less; walk, cycle, or use public transport more
- Eat meat & air-freighted food less; eat local/seasonal produce more
- Treat household items as disposable less; repair what breaks and buy for longevity more
I am sure there are plenty more, but how to incentivise these things is a hard problem. One exception being food, where you could easily shift agricultural subsidies away from intensive factory farming and towards local/seasonal food (details may be more complex, but it's do-able!)
As a rule most people with a ~10 year old car which runs fine at low cost are going to be frustrated at an extra tax on their vehicle. (It is not like the manufacture of a new electric car is green.)
Ordinary People always were going to have to suffer to migrate off fossil fuels. Expecting them to like it is somewhat hopeful!
sure, but air quality is noticeably better in cities, so I can't let it stand that its just inherently unpopular. Some people like the benefits and enjoy them, those who don't like the downsides express that loudly.
It's not just a talking point (see ded comment below), every time we try to publicly survey to implement traffic calming ideas in our city (UK) its a stalemate between in towners and out of towners. Usually the crowds turn up to alternating ballots which is fun. Only thing that upsets me is out of towners talking like literally nobody wants it, which clearly isn't true.
I mean if your commitment to climate change or air quality in cities ends at charging people with vehicles that pollute more to enter the city: then did you have any in the first place?
You say "entering the city" but it literally applies to people who live there. My old car would have cost me every use even if all I did was move it to respect a temporary parking restriction. It isn't about dislike, it is financial hardship largely affecting those of more limited means (hint, old cars).
I am fine with ulez, but it is really important to be clear that people do suffer for it. Not out of towners. Real Londoners - especially with the extension to the outer boroughs.
Taxes, debt, loss of shareholder value, and infrastructure buildouts are all highly visible to large swathes of the American population.
Republicans are an anti-tax and to some extent anti-debt constituency. Liberals are also fairly anti-tax, unless it’s limited to taxing the rich. There’s opposition now to all forms of new energy infrastructure: to oil/gas/nuclear from the left and many liberals, to wind/solar from the right.
There are no “easy ways.” Only hard fights, against both sometime allies and longtime political opponents.
The word is solar. Instant reduction in CO2 emissions, won't be a decade late, and won't be obsolete by the time it's finally ready. Nuclear is a politician's vanity project. And politicians do have a knack for choosing the wrong thing at the wrong time, by ignoring the market. Just let the engineers make the call.
I think the engineers tend to say nuclear makes much more sense than solar for baseload right? That, and “most of the cost and delay is in these obscenely overcautious regulations?”
As of today, batteries are on par with nuclear cost. And falling.
As for the "obscenely regulations", I had read this before, but nobody can tell me what are they referring to. Because not to long ago France had a massive problem of corrosion in half their nuclear plants, and currently is having a second one (https://balkangreenenergynews.com/french-power-prices-jump-a...). It seems that "obscenely overcautious regulations" still not enough to catch leaks on time, defects that now threat with a energy crisis in France (and secondarily in Europe).
> Nuclear is a politician's vanity project. And politicians do have a knack for choosing the wrong thing at the wrong time, by ignoring the market.
Nuclear benefits the politicians' vested supporters, major corporations. Renewables are smaller and not vested interests.
> Just let the engineers make the call.
That dangerously assumes that engineers don't have their own biases and corruption. It's hard to fathom that perspective given what everyone can see happening in Silicon Valley for years.
Unpopular opinion, but we need to start using hard and soft power if we want to fix this problem.
Europe cannot fix climate change on its own, and we already represent an increasingly small share of total emissions.
The question now is how we get other countries onboard fast, and if they continue to build out cheap coal-fired power stations what are we going to do about it? Something or nothing?
Unless we can get every nation onboard, we should switch strategies to one of managing the inevitable rather than hopeless trying to prevent it. Costly energy policies that reduce global emissions by roughly 0.5% (basically what will happen if the UK ever achieves net-zero) are a total waste of money and time.
Those who care about this issue need to get real and need to stop pretending that the solution is for a few more people in the UK putting solar panels on their roofs. Climate change is a global problem. If your solutions are domestic then they're not serious.
I've pitched this idea before. But instead of something like the Paris Climate Accords which were an agreement for people to self-regulate and reduce emissions. What is needed is an agreement that is a sort of cartel. Nations a,b,c agree on these policies (carbon per person, environmental regulations, etc), and any nation that wants to export services/goods to a,b,c they must enter the agreement or be subject to tariffs.
I would say that the EU is edging towards this idea. I don't say that to be negative. I support it. One idea: Create per-product, per-country tarrifs based upon their average carbon footprint. If foreign manufs reduce their carbon footprint for the product, then the tarrif is reduced. This creates a good incentive to progressively reduce carbon footprint.
Yeah, this is exactly the type of thing I'd support.
The UK (where I live) emits something like 0.5% of global CO2, but we're one of the largest economies in the world.
If we're going to do anything it seems we should really be doing everything we can to use our economic might to try to do something about that other 99.5%. Where as at the moment we're wasting our time obsessing about how we bring down that 0.5%, and providing an economic horror story for why no other country should replicate what we're doing.
Deindustrialization in the west is imo largely due to this. Pollution was bad. Trying to clean things up was good. But you can't increase the cost 10x, and then allow a company to set up shop across the border and ship things in doing those practices still. The local environment becomes cleaner, so you export that toxic part, but the global impacts are still bad AND you hollow out your industrial core.
The climate spiral can be misleading though, because it's natural for a viewer to interpret the change in terms of area.
Then, the increase from 1.5° to 2° looks much, much larger than the increase from 0° to 0.5°.
So it's misleading in terms of making recent warming seem even worse than it is. Now, of course, you might argue that is justified in spirit because the negative consequences from warming grow faster than linear... but that doesn't make it any less misleading in terms of the temperature change it is communicating.
They often are not, because they highly distort shape and size. Values that are smaller than the mean occupy much less space (area-wise) and seem less significant than they really are, while values that are larger than the mean occupy much more space (area-wise) and seem more significant than they really are.
the ignorance is a consequence of our societies system of incentives. everything keeps pointing back towards that each time theres an event like this. But if we aren't going to attach an economic price for emissions then it remains an externality and not a recognized reality to the economy. The current US administration is playing a leading role in keeping it that way. And voters keep voting for it. Incentives.
The economic system itself is incompatible with the physical reality of a finite planet.
The ones steering society choose to crash and ruin everything rather than to jeopardize their positions in power.
That obvious failure in morals and ethics, basic principles of adult responsibility really, is made possible by a lack of rational reflection in the populace.
Objective truth has to take precedence over subjective desires when it comes to existential questions. Currently it does not.
I'd push back.on blaming the populace for this: the widespread belief in general polls is that the climate situation is dire and that drastic measures need to be taken.
However, the constraints that most people have to contend with do not allow them to be more radical in their calls for change. You saw it in the Gilets Jaunes/Yellow Vests uprising in France, that was motivated not by the passion for IC engines but by the inability to weather the costs of taxation on older vehicles.
The real culprit is far and away corporations that benefit from activities that carry with them extreme effects on the climate, and who can influence both politics and media. The research (sorry for lack of link) that shows that political direction is largely controlled by moneyed interests is not ambiguous.
I do agree that the populace also deserves some of the blame however: regular renewals of electronic devices, and especially the continuing consumption of animal products, is a moral failure justified only by pleasure.
You're right about the general sentiment acknowledging the seriousness only when you look at the center and left of society. The majority in the US however supports or tolerates the actual political decisions made, contradicting that level of importance.
When you paint people as being "disallowed" from more radical actions, the same question of true importance arises? The current trajectory leads to Armageddon, plain and simple.
My point here thus is about the proper scale on which people place the topic.
It's not a "lifestyle choice" to doom humanity's children to ruin.
Placing responsibility with the irresponsible is a cop-out.
Throwing everything animal under the bus is not warranted. CAFOs and grain heavy operations certainly. Regenerative ag using animals on pasture is an amazing carbon sink. I agree that the factories using petroleum grown grains as feed are terrible.
I don't have data on the West specifically, but I'd be surprised if it's not 99%. "Free range" animals are largely a fiction.
Animals being used for pasture grazing, for the benefit of the climate, could be understandable, but I think enslavement and torture of 200+ billion animals annually is a moral failure that goes far beyond its effects on CO2 ppm.
Animal ag creates unnecessary risks of (viral) pandemics, antibiotic resistant bacteria, air pollution, water pollution, soil pollution, deforestation (for silage and feeder crops), caloric inefficiency, and animal cruelty. There are plenty of alternative plant-based protein and nutrients sources that could be grown instead.
> The economic system itself is incompatible with the physical reality of a finite planet.
„Infinite growth is impossible on planet with finite resources” is nice buzzphrase, but upon closer inspection it makes literally zero sense. Fortunately people will never accept degrowthers’ postulates.
You're making a very strong claim ("literally zero sense"), but you've provided no argument as to why. I don't believe that the economy can become arbitrarily decoupled from physical goods, which is a hard requirement for infinite growth with finite resources.
Because 1) growth is not directly linked to resources and the richer country is the less growth depends on resource-intensive areas such as farming or industry; 2) it’s absurd to think we are at the stage of growth where resource availability becomes constraint - I’d say it’s on the contrary and we are at the stage where we become far less dependent on resources than are on scarcer side (e.g. thanks to solar uptake).
But the claim must be that physical goods can become an arbitrarily small portion of the economy. Nobody would dispute that they've become smaller. Do you believe that food can become arbitrarily cheap relative to total wealth? Or steel, or silicon? In other words, can the food you eat require an arbitrarily small portion of your income? And looking at nation-states only is an accounting trick; the economy is global.
You again say "it's absurd" and provide no argument. I think the case is not as clear cut as you would like it to be. Solar energy is not an infinite resource.
> But the claim must be that physical goods can become an arbitrarily small portion of the economy.
Yes, if you actually mean infinite growth it’s true. And that’s what I find absurd - why would you care about infinite growth? If you actually care about infinity, then even if you degrowth you will run out of resources because guess what - resources are finite, so the use of resources will have to also be arbitrarily small and asymptotically approach zero!
What? Some resources are renewable. There's a finite amount of solar energy, but it doesn't "run out" (on human timescales). Growing food doesn't need to remove from the biosphere, even if the way we do it now does do significant damage. So we absolutely must stop using non-renewable resources (i.e. fossil fuels), but if we find an amount of renewable ones combined with recyclable non-renewables (like metal) that are sustainable then we can reach a steady state.
An economic system based on perpetual growth can never reach a steady state, unless you believe that physical goods can become an arbitrarily small portion of the economy.
You can’t reach steady state in ANY economic system because you can’t have 100% efficiency, that’s basic thermodynamics. Resources will keep decreasing no matter what you do. Hence argument about infinite growth is absurd - infinite existence without growth (or with degrowth) is also impossible.
You're right; sunlight will eventually run out. (Well, long before that the expanding Sun will boil the oceans). No, you couldn't have an economy in a closed system, but the Earth isn't a closed system (due to the aforementioned sunlight).
That's an absurd argument, though. The problem we have right here, right now, is capitalism destroying the habitability of our planet because its hunger for resources must always grow, so it's unable to handle the problem of fossil fuel use, or stop depleting soil, etc.
You're arguing against jumping out of the way of a moving train because we're not immortal.
You're arguing against "degrowthers", favouring the current growth-based system. What you're arguing for is a system that requires the infinite growth you don't want to think about. So in essence you're saying "looking at the consequences of my beliefs is absurd", which is hardly a compelling argument.
If my system requires infinity growth then yours also does require infinite resources by the logic outlines above. If you agree that your system does not require infinite resources because we should be talking only at timescales that are relevant to humans, then my system also does not require infinite growth. You can’t have it both ways, either you are ok with infinite timeframe (and then degrowth will eventually run out of resources) or you are not (but then the growth requires to sustain current system is obviously finite).
Nonsense, but you clearly either haven't read my replies or don't understand that capitalism requires growth while some other economic systems don't. Even 1% growth per year is exponential growth and quickly will run into limits (as we are currently experiencing!).
But let's grant "both systems eventually run out of resources" for the sake of argument. The rate at which that happens then becomes clearly relevant, and if staying alive is good (I hope we can at least agree on that), using resources slower is better. Capitalism is depleting resources on a human timescale (as, again, we are currently experiencing with climate change), so instead depleting them on longer-than-human timescales is clearly the better option.
> Nonsense, but you clearly either haven't read my replies or don't understand that capitalism requires growth while some other economic systems don't. Even 1% growth per year is exponential growth and quickly will run into limits (as we are currently experiencing!).
> But let's grant "both systems eventually run out of resources" for the sake of argument. The rate at which that happens then becomes clearly relevant, and if staying alive is good (I hope we can at least agree on that), using resources slower is better. Capitalism is depleting resources on a human timescale (as, again, we are currently experiencing with climate change), so instead depleting them on longer-than-human timescales is clearly the better option.
But you were talking about INFINITE growth, not exponential and those are two completely different things! Exponential growth will become infinite only if you have infinite time frame! So can we agree than "infinite growth is impossible on a planet with finite resources" is really dumb argument, because capitalism does not require infinite growth at all? Then we'll be able to move on to exponential growth.
To believe this, you must believe that the economy can become arbitrarily decoupled from any physical good. Do you believe that food can become an arbitrarily small proportion of the economy (and so arbitrarily cheap relative to income)? Steel? Purified silicon? Infrastructure like bridges?
I don't. Perpetual growth is incompatible with finite resources. Fortunately, human flourishing does not depend on infinite economic growth; there is, for example, enough food for everyone on the planet. Capitalism is just bad at allocating resources by any metric other than its own. (Yes yes, it's better that feudalism was. I think we can hold ourselves to a higher bar than that.)
> Do you believe that food can become an arbitrarily small proportion of the economy
This is not necessary at all for economic growth to be infinite. Food prices can "inflate" and so stay at, let's say 20%, of the economy while the amount of physical food being produced remains flat year after year. That's sort of what's happening with housing, education, and healthcare already.
I think seeing prices go up like this makes people unhappy, but what really matters is what portion of a person's income this stuff occupies.
If physical goods remain a constant proportion of the economy without having more of them but get more expensive, all that's happening is inflation, not economic growth.
We've built an economic system that latches on to scarce things and makes them less scarce. Now we need to make harmful activities scarce, and we can't.
We have to kill this thing before it kills us. There have to be better things to base an economy on (consent? reciprocity? Foresight?).
China ostensibly cares, their five year plans drawn up by committees of Engineers (Civil, Mechanical, Electrical) and Scientists are on an arc to minimise reliance on fossil fuels and transition to renewables (wind, solar), and nuclear.
There are strategic reasons for this, of course.
> Isnt China far worse thsn the US?
"It's complicated"
* Historically the US is responsible for a greater mass of the CO2 humans have added to the atmosphere.
* Currently, China is adding more per annum (and India is in the bleeding edge mix also, as is Australia) in absolute terms, but still less(?) in per capita terms (having a much much larger population).
* China is still using coal (although they are on the cusp of peaking their use) - that gets thrown at them a lot, the caveats are
-- China shut down a lot of badly polluting inefficient coal power plants.
-- China opened up a lot of more up to date less polluting but still coal power plants.
-- China is using these to power all manner of stuff including the build out of the largest renewable power components production line in the world.
-- Coal is set to be phased out "soon" (and it seems to be slowly going that way, see peaked comment above).
* A lot of China's CO2 emissions are a direct result of their mineral processing, production, and assembly of the rest of the world's consumption.
( eg: The case can be argued that the fall in US per capita CO2 emissions is a result of US consumption now being met by manufacturing that has moved from the US to China)
There are literal books and stacks of research papers arguing about each point mentioned above - and that's just skimming the surface.
China has a far lower per capita carbon emissions rate than the US. Has a growing share of energy produced by green technology. Is the world leader in manufacturing electric cars and using electric cars. Is the global leader in low cost solar panels and batteries among other green technology. Oh yeah, and a huge portion of their emissions go to making things that Americans consume. On top of all that, they have managed to stop growth in their carbon emissions and are on the cusp of reducing them.
I don’t know how China could possibly be considered worse except that they historically used coal, and are rapidly transitioning away.
When the per capita number applies to a billion people it sure makes a huge difference, or would it not matter to the earth if china doubled their per capita carbon numbers to be more like America? I'm not a climate scientist but I would bet my entire net worth it matters quite a bit if China doubles their carbon output per capita.
Right, so if someone was in the US and didn't think they should take action (because of China), then the obvious reply is that they should take action on the basis of being part of US+China, whose population is far greater than either US or China.
Then it doesn't matter if the US reduces emissions or China does. They all count. The US has more money to spend on reducing emissions. Ergo it makes sense for the US to go first.
Considering that it's thanks to China that even a 1% chance of avoiding this remains, I'd say so. Without their enormous investments in solar and batteries, it would be 0% rather than 1%.
If we assume that governments aren't going to address climate change and coordination between private citizens is unlikely to be enough to stop it, has anyone written anything on what individuals should do to avoid its effects?
It feels like we are at the point where we should be talking a lot more about how live decent lives assuming that prevention and mitigation are unlikely.
It’s going to be very hard to avoid global phenomena. On top of that, predicting higher order effects on a system this complex is hard.
I live in the PNW on the Canadian side of the border (PSW?) where people have argued that we might be a climate change safe haven due to plentiful water and a temperate climate. That hasn’t stopped us from having extreme weather events. In the past five years we have seen a heat wave that killed hundreds, floods that cut us off from the rest of Canada for weeks, concerns about water supply since our summer water supply relies on snowmelt, and we are getting less snow and more rain in the winter. Fire and dangerous smoke over huge parts of the province is now a given from mid July onwards.
The list goes on, but the point is that there is no avoiding its effects.
I know of people who bought property in western North Carolina with this mindset. It’s higher elevation, far from coasts, near fertile farm land, with lots of surface water to drink and use. And far from other geo hazards like volcanoes, earthquakes, etc. On paper it checked a lot of boxes for long-term safety.
Then a hurricane went where it had never gone before and wrecked their entire neighborhood.
It’s hard to know exactly how a complex chaotic system is going to react when inputs change. And it only takes one outlier to cause a lot of harm on a local human scale.
This is why so much effort goes into computer modeling of the climate BTW. We know our emissions are changing the climate. But predicting local effects is damn hard.
I think that kind of breathless excited tone is justified by the subject matter. Unlike the usual LinkedIn posts this is actually about a pretty dire situation.
People quibbling about whether TFA was written by an AI and why the chart is at the end of the article and what a standard deviation. Meanwhile the planet is simmering.
Graphs tell stories and the only story this one actually tells is "29-year high".
It doesn't do a good job of establishing trends and its sample size is too low to discern how significant of an outlier this is.
Actually there is a similar outlier on the bottom of the graph, which suggests the current outlier might not actually be that significant. And that's definitely not the story intended by the author.
Instead of arguing about this on the internet you could do what I’m doing: working to take carbon emissions off the board.
It’s not easy right now because of the funding and political climate, but you can find work where success is measured by metrics like “gallons of diesel not burned.”
This is a decidedly optimistic take given what we know about social media. HN may be a rare exception.
Rather than using reason to get people to surmount their "emotions" and to "think right", I'd argue we rather need to frame the issue in terms of their self-interest, and to try to persuade and convince not them but rather their tribal leaders.
I’m going to tell you, as a person whose path went from journalism to activism to engineering in climate tech and climate justice: persuasion isn’t going to get the goods. Changing the reality on the ground through R&D and deployment moves the needle. There are a lot of very good, very smart people who have been heads down since the 70s building the infrastructure for decarbonization, and we’re winning, even as we continue “losing” the political argument.
Yup. If solar panels are good enough and cheap enough, if grid storage and battery density improve fast enough, the economic costs of staying on fossil fuels will create huge pressure in the political space and economic competition. You can overwhelm the issue.
We shouldn’t HAVE to do this, our politicians should represent our desires and our long term necessities. But that’s clearly not an easy problem to solve, and it sure doesn’t seem to be going in the right direction.
So RND to push the economy makes perfect sense to me as a way to fight this from the other direction.
Hmmm, I remember what happened when we all got more 'free time' by using computers to do things that took us long doing manually.
Making electricity more 'green' is of course necessary but on the backdrop of the current capitalistic system, it will simply lead to more electricity being consumed. See current uptake by LLM data centers.
Yes, decarbonization necessarily means higher electricity consumption. Electrifying transportation, home heating, cooking, industrial processes, etc will mean an explosion of electricity demand. This means generating a lot more electricity without burning fossil fuels, and using that electricity more efficiently.
The good news: there’s a lot to build, a lot to invent, and a lot of work to do, and the solutions to these problems are not present in the training data. If you’re worried about how you’re going to pay the bills now that AI ate your job writing glue code for some niche subscription SaaS product, here’s your answer.
Looking at the graph left me wondering just what it means exactly. I'm not well versed in statistics so "the standard deviation is 3.5°C" doesn't mean much. Also, what's up with that other line going down to -3.5°C? And what do the colors mean? In the sense that I'm not sure whether a darker blue means closer to or further from today.
The graph has a key on the right hand side that clearly labels each colour of line, and the horizontal axis is scaled in months of each year. Scrolling down gets you notes and links to data sources.
In answer to another poster in this thread, the dataset only reaches back to 1983, I'm assuming because that is when they started monitoring these temperatures?
Check out 2015, it had way hotter temperatures in November, with higher temperatures than the average in this period, but I would like a climatologist to explain this, draw correlations etc. The original post is a weird LLM-mediated mix of vague scaremongering with some easy piling on journalism "just because". So what am I supposed to with it? Nothing, because it's written by an LLM, I guess.
> Check out 2015, it had way hotter temperatures in November
That's what El Niño is about: instead of declining after a peak in June, temperature plateaus and then rise again later in the year.
So the fact that the Pacific is much hotter than it was in 2015 is particularly scary, because it leads us to believe that it will also be this hotter than 2015 in November.
I'm not an authority on this, but here's is my understanding - I'd appreciate if someone could correct my mistakes.
The baseline of 0.0 represents the average of all years. Anything above / below the baseline is a (standard) deviation from the average. The blue lines are the individual years since 1991 [1] while the red line is the year 2026.
If a line is above the baseline, then the sea-surface temperature was hotter on that day than average. If below, it was cooler than average.
The year 2026 is an outlier, dwarfing all the others starting around June / July. The Nino 3.4 sea-surface temperature is significantly hotter than any previous year during that time. New record, I guess?
[1]: I'm confused about the two date ranges given: 1982-2026 and 1991-2020. I'm assuming this graph is based on measurements from 1982-2026 to calculate the average, but the lines shown are only from 1991-2020, for some statistical reason I don't understand.
I think it is the other way around: SD is calculated from 1982-2020, while all measurement readings in the plot are 1982-2026. I believe this is meant to not introduce an unwanted shift but compare to sort of a 'stable process'. However, that should have been described and argued somewhere.
> Each blue line represents a different year since 1982. The red line is this year. It doesn't just set a new record. It has departed entirely from the range of previous observations.
I had the same concerns and think the chart would benefit from color grading the individual years by age. If the other outlier in the opposite direction is equally likely then it should also be concerning (obviously it is not). My understanding is the deviation is from the 1991-2020 subset avg, so a warming trend would be indicated by relative drift towards positive in the std dev across years from 82-present
my layman understanding, a real statistician will surely intervene.
standard deviation is a measure that informs about the distribution. A high standard deviation means a "wide bell curve". A low standard deviation means that all values are closely clustered around the middle of the curve.
So if your value is 2 x standard deviation (for example) that means it is a relatively rare outlier, since 2 x standard deviation covers 95% of the bell curve. In particle physics I believe they require 5 standard deviations to confirm an observation.
Tend to follow climate-related news closely. But even then: eyebrows raised.
Heh.. Maybe in future we'll see wars being fought not over access to fossil fuels, but over attempts to stop other countries from pumping more fossils out of the ground.
"What the planet is going to experience over the next 12 months is just a preview of the movie that’s coming. Godzilla is going to return, and return, and return and return … and as bad as the movie gets, we won’t be able to walk out of the theater."
That's the scary bit: no escape hatch. We're all in this together.
That's why international co-operation on climate change should NOT be opt-in. Your countries' freedom to emit greenhouse gasses ends where my countries' (future) safety is at stake.
The nations with the strongest militaries are also the largest emitters. Attempting to force these countries into compliance might not be the smartest move.
In fact, any scheme like this will almost certainly be used to forcibly prevent development in already impoverished nations.
The title of the figure is ambiguous about what "SD" really means but I guess it is plotting the number of standard deviations of the 1991-2020 data measured from the mean of that data and plotted per day for the 1982-2026 data.
That shows measured temperature and 2026 as very hot (surprise) and in fact is the hottest to date for June+July. The standard deviation of that data is not 3.5 C but something less than 1.0 C. It is plausible that current temperature is about 3.5 sigma from the selected mean.
It's worth recognizing that the analysis is applying a biased conclusion prior to making the plot. It singles out post 2020 data to compare to pre-2020 data. and then concluding the held out data is a significant deviation with a cause. It almost certainly is but this is not a proper way to analyze data (unless one is pushing an agenda, be that for good or bad).
I think the sst_daily plot stands on its own without crafting this SD plot to emphasize the point. Especially when the accompanying text doesn't even explain it. It's a disingenuous message.
You're reading this graph wrong: we're currently 3.63 standard deviation above the mean.
It's clearer on the original article[1] that this AI-generated blog is taking the graph from, the average temperature on the period at this time of the year is around 27.5°, the ocean is almost at 29.5°, just short of 2°C above average, and the standard deviation is 0.55°C.
> Turn the volume on the typical El Niño impacts up to eleven, then watch the collective infrastructure of modern industrial civilization crumble. Watch as flooding storms wash away roads and cities. Watch as trailing storms create new inland lakes, swamping farmland. Watch as fires raze forests and grasslands. Watch as heatwaves turn temperate regions into unsurvivable hellscapes. Watch as crops fail and dams burst. Watch as the shelves of your local grocery store gradually, then suddenly, go empty.
The language is too strong for the context. Author uses religious imagery, prognosticates about an Armageddon scenario, and does so based on a relatively short time series.
This is intentional repetition. More specifically, anaphora [1]. You may not personally like it, but it is a rhetorical device used to emphasize a point. This one also comes with a nice progression: storms, storms, heat, heat, farmland, groceries.
This substack article also comes with additional graphs, a much better story flow (data is progressively introduced and explained before reaching the final plot), and was posted 2 days before the OP. I agree with GP that it is significantly superior to the OP (which is likely AI slop). Thanks for posting it.
> What is developing is so far beyond any global climate event that has impacted modern industrial civilization that predicting much of what’s coming is educated guesswork. Turn the volume on the typical El Niño impacts up to eleven, then watch the collective infrastructure of modern industrial civilization crumble. Watch as flooding storms wash away roads and cities. Watch as trailing storms create new inland lakes, swamping farmland. Watch as fires raze forests and grasslands. Watch as heatwaves turn temperate regions into unsurvivable hellscapes. Watch as crops fail and dams burst. Watch as the shelves of your local grocery store gradually, then suddenly, go empty.
"Earth is moving beyond the range within which modern human civilisation developed."
Way, way, way, way overstated. The graph shows a comparison to an average over a few decades. Human civilization is thousands of years old. Does anyone have a graph of what all the El Ninos since the last Ice Age ended have looked like? Of course not. Nobody has that kind of temperature data.
There is not a graph of prehistoric ocean surface temperatures (doesn’t seem possible to obtain this data other than collecting it as it happens as far as I can tell) but there is global historical temperature data. Here is an XKCD comic, scroll to the bottom and pay attention to the rate of change since 1850 vs the prior 20,000 years: https://xkcd.com/1732/
And yes, I am aware that earth has possibly been covered in ice/slush and also that the avg global temp has been 10C (or more) higher than it is now, but humans were not around for either scenario.
You are an engineer or programmer? Why are you working in this industry if you can't take the time to learn about how this system works. We are supposed to be systems thinkers with a scientific mindset. How can you make a statement like "Nobody has that kind of temperature data" without researching first?
I'm embarrassed for my industry. I'm shocked how many climate denialists there are among engineers and programmers.
The last 40 years is not "the range within which modern human civilisation developed". It's a very thin slice of time even on human scales. Let's try not to vastly overstate the data.
Yup. 20% of the population will look at the graph and scream about how we're all doomed and need to start executing people / nuking countries to fix it (seriously, comments from this very thread), 20% of the population will look at the graph and see the hilariously short timeframe, the carefully manipulated axes ranging, and instantly dismiss it as extremist climate doomer insanity and close out of it, and the remaining 60% of the population doesn't care one way or the other.
Yes I was wondering the same. Why is the mean using a different set of years than the total data set? There also seems to be a year where the swing was equally as extreme in the other direction, what year was this? Would be worth mentioning at least in the post.
I posted a comment earlier about how 1982-1983 (the start of the data) had a historically severe El Nino, and the comment got shadowbanned. I don't understand why that happens sometimes. Hasn't happened for months, but when it does it's always on innocuous factual comments, it's weird.
…as it looks pretty innocuous to me. And more importantly, your other comments aren’t obnoxious. :-) I’d love to know the heuristic that flipped that bit on that one comment.
Question to you, if they looked further back, do you think the variability would increase or decrease. Do you also believe the mean temperature would be lower or higher? Just want to understand your mental model of the climate.
So maybe the data starts there in order to distort it, or to balance it, or maybe we started recording data properly in that year because El Niño got alarming. Seems relevant somehow anyway.
Do we have reliable data that goes back a lot farther? I'm wondering what the graph would look like as extrapolated between ices ages / other large climate changes across Earth's history.
The same graph also shows a corresponding -3.5 STDEV below the mean temperature as well. It actually seems rather balanced. This year is hot, but we see similar abnormal jumps in other directions.
It will be front-page news if there are storms later this year. For now, ocean temperature readings far away are effectively a distant early warning of future weather. (Depending on your perspective about “distant” and “early.”)
It's not even the worse part. Journalists have used the "it is not A, it is B" for a while and it never was as bad as AI doing it.
The key problem is that AI have no “idea” of how to build an argument, so it just rephrases the same ideas over and over in different forms. There's no direction, no structure, it's just rambling.
Yes, it is worth looking at. My thinking was, how fast did that sequence revert back to the’mean’? It doesn’t take away from the author’s message though.
Assuming the measurements are independent samples from a normal distribution. Which they of course aren't, as measurements of adjacent days are obviously correlated (if they were independent, a 1-in-7000 event could be expected to happen on about 2 days within a 44-year span). Now the question is what the nature of the deviation is.
- How independent are measurements of different years?
- Has there been a systematic change in the distribution mean?
- Has there been a systematic change in the distribution variance?
- Was there a good reason to assume that the temperature distribution would be normally distributed to begin with? (Maybe there are strong non-additive effects.)
In any case, it's clear that assuming the observed temperatures in the 1991-2020 range follow a normal distribution and temperatures outside that date range will follow the same distribution is a bad model of reality.
Yes there are. Scientists compare the measurements from both methods in the time when there's data from both. For example ice cores formed last decade should match direct temperature measurements from last decade. It's the same way the oldest rings from living trees are matched against the newest rings from tree fossils, and radiocarbon dating is checked against all of that.
That does not look very reliable to me, because that implies certain things are only affected by ambient temperature.
Btw, Can you tell me how ancient temperature is measured from ice cores? My lookup only says we can detect atmospheric composition, and not temperatures from the ice cores.
>Past precipitation can be used to reconstruct past palaeoclimatic temperatures. δD and δ18O is related to surface temperature at middle and high latitudes. The relationship is consistent and linear over Antarctica[9]...
I think this is also flawed, because this computation requires the ratio of the isotopes in the atmosphere at the period of interest, which we don't have. And the people making this measurement just seem to assume it would certain value derived from the present, which is also unreliable...
So yea, all things considered, pretty unreliable..
See, since it seems that you are convinced yourselves, can you tell me how accurately the past temperature can be assessed by using this method? I mean +/- how many degrees?
Also share if this accuracy requires any implicit assumptions. For example, "If we assume that X today is true then it is true back then as well" where X is not a physical constant...
See, since it seems that you are convinced yourselves, can you tell me how accurately the past temperature can be assessed by using this method? I mean +/- how many degrees?
Can you tell me how many research papers on this specific subject you have read, before coming to that conclusion?
Hint: chances are you're correct (!). Size of the error bars, timeframe(s) talked about, how data was gathered, how results were processed etc, that is what such papers are about. Educate yourself! (Wikipedia is usually a good start)
None. It goes against my common sense. That is why I am asking what accuracy can this method give. I am asking that to people who are already seemingly convinced that the methods listed (fossil records, ice-cores) can be accurate..
> That applies to things you're experiencing on a daily basis.
That we cannot accurately look into the past unless we explicitly record it, is something that I experience on a daily basis.
Seriously, if you are so convinced, then why don't you just give me an accuracy measure and reasons to support it? I am not interested in anymore articles that does not contain an explicit accuracy claims and reasons to support the same.
So please understand this. It is not that I am questioning the existence of such techniques. I am questioning their accuracy/reliability..
> So please understand this. It is not that I am questioning the existence of such techniques. I am questioning their accuracy/reliability..
That is fine. Scientists do the same, all the time.
> we cannot accurately look into the past unless we explicitly record it
Please allow me an opportunity to enlighten you:
We cannot look into the past unless it is recorded somehow.
Note the absence of "we" in the recording part. Also note "somehow" may happen in many different ways.
Sensor data, satellite measurements, ice cores, fossilized creatures captured in stone, slices of tree trunks, samples of minerals whose radioactivity decayed over millenia, history books or landscape features, are just different types of records. Each with their own set of properties (accuracy being 1 of them).
So I am aware. The "we" is important because I said "accurately". When "we" set up the recording, we can make it to record with the required precision. Inferring measurements from incidental things can give the required precision, but it should be justified.
It seems like you're on the trajectory to refuting all historical measurements altogether. In that case, I can't help you. Good luck. I suggest the philosophy of Last Tuesdayism, it may interest you.
I only reject using them for certain things that require vastly more reliable data. And I am not making the mistake of relying on unreliable data just because it is the best we can manage.
Also why don't you answer my question about ice cores?
I'm not an ice core scientist. I suggest you ask them for detailed specifications. But the way you have posed the question strongly suggests that you will not be satisfied with any possible answer. Anything short of your eyes laying upon a thermometer will always be "not reliable enough", and thermometers only record the current temperature.
> I'm not sure how you can make that claim with only 29 years of data without making some pretty big assumptions about the underlying distribution.
Under what circumstances would 29 years be an insufficient mean to compare to the last few years? Precisely those circumstances in which the climate had changed.
Under any sane statistical model. If we assume that this is a naturally occurring once in century El Nino under an equal probability model we'd expect not to see it before we have 70 years of records.
Within the 1982-2026 span there is an equally negative 3.5 sigmas deviation somewhere (no year labels on the graph). The article doesn't touch on it at all so I have no context as to what it could be. But it definitely suggests 3.5 sigmas is not really 1 in 7000 years.
We migrate to renewables (solar, wind, geothermal, hydro) and less-polluting baseload (nuclear).
We run desalination plants with the energy.
We quit running farms in deserts (California almond farmers).
We take energy load and run CO2 scrubbers with leftover energy.
We put quotas on how much CO2 you can emit. None of this goofy selling CO2 credits. If you make more CO2, you buy local scrubbers and run them.
The problems aren't climate healing rules. The problem is governments and incumbent companies, and the idea we can't change things rapidly. Or the fact that a company might lose money (or make, GASP, less profit)
The now retired meteorologist at Iowa State, Elwin Taylor had been predicting for decades a dust-bowl level event to happen in 2025 as a result of an 89-ish year cycle. It didn't happen last year but this is a pretty clear signal for this year.
It takes the form of a super El Nino the likes of what is happening right now.
Yeah NZ national news has been going on about this for a couple of weeks. They're trying to scare everyone by saying what an extreme El Nino we're in for this summer with such devastating consequences as (let's see here) warm dry summer days.
> The question is whether we're willing to pay attention and act before the changes become too large, too rapid and too interconnected for us to manage.
> The question is whether we're willing to pay attention and act before the changes become too large, too rapid and too interconnected for us to manage.
I think I can guess the answer to this. It's an easy extrapolation of the past.
This graph shouldn't be front-page news. Why? Because it is a crappy graph that says nothing.
That there are deviations from the median is a normal statistical thing. Even deviations beyond 3 sigma. It happens. That's statistics. Those deviations might even be frequent more or less frequent than your statistics table says, because the data might not follow a gaussian normal distribution. See the graph, there is a -3.5 deviation in there...
What would be an interesting graph is: From 1982 to 2026 on the x-axis, plot the yearly maximum and minimum daily sigma and the median. Or just plot all the overlapping segments from the original graph as a continuous sequence. That way one could see periodicity, rising and falling of those values and the overall change over time. (Edit: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48890590 for much better graphs)
But that graph is useless to convey any information beyond "well this year the line goes up". The article also does nothing to really explain the statistical background. Quite the contrary.
The article shows things that the graph doesn't illustrate at all: Like "This is why graphs like this matter [...] What they show is that Earth is moving beyond the range within which modern human civilisation developed.". Like fucking hell it doesn't! The graph starts in 1982! Modern human civilization started in 1982?
Like "The tropical Pacific is thus no longer oscillating around a climate that existed a century ago. It's oscillating around a much warmer baseline.". Well, and why then does this graph start in 1982? Why can't you show that century?
Like "The red line is this year. It doesn't just set a new record. It has departed entirely from the range of previous observations.". No, it fucking doesn't!. Look at the graph, there is a line at -3.5 sigma! Well within range. And even so, it's statistics, outliers are to be expected.
What this article and this graph need is a permanent relocation to the trash can. And a lesson for the author in science. Real science, not misleading propaganda that hurts the cause more than it helps.
This happened a couple of El Niño cycles ago, in the 2015-2016 one:
> The City of Cape Town began experiencing a drought in 2015, the first of three consecutive years of dry winters brought on possibly by the El Niño weather pattern and perhaps by climate change
At that point it will be a self correcting issue when huge swaths of the human population dies from starvation due to not being able to produce enough food. It is preferable to do something prior to then.
The Forest of Fontainebleau, just 50 km south of Paris, is burning, with Canada it's on the scene trying to contain it. Nearby highways and trains - some of the busiest of France - are cut. It is a temperate European forest, oak trees and beech.
No AC is going to save European from that. In fact, it is American AC which is the main cause of it. They dumped all that energy and greenhouse gases and Europeans are the one impacted by these externalities.
For some context: the conversation about climate change in general, and the recent heatwaves in particular, has been (quite cynically, but cleverly) reframed by far-right parties to be all about "we need to put AC in France to survive heatwaves".
This is smart because it addresses on the physical sensations of people (it's the third heatwave since end of may, and counting), it has an element of truth (AC is critically lacking in schools), it seems much more "down to earth" than the grand plans of "decarbonization", and it makes other political parties look out of touch (the left and greens have been criticizing AC because of the energy impact.)
Of course, this is both "smart" and incredibly cynical, given that the far right has been on the edge (or not so much on the edge) of climate denial for years. So year, "climate changes is not real" turned into "why didn't they put AC everywhere ?" then "vote for us, we'll put AC everywhere !"
This is also very short sighted.
But I guess no one has found a way to ask our future president (Marine Le Pen, twice convicted of embezzlement, waiting to know if she will have to run for President with a "jail from home" tracker, etc...) what exact amount of "putting AC and kicking immigrants out" is going to avoid Fontainebleau forest from burning.
(Also, since those people are incredibly "lucky", I can only imagine what will happen if we learn that the fire was volontary, and the arsonist was an immigrant... )
The only "consolation" is that El Nino is coming back, and she takes office on the 15th of may, so _she_ will have to deal with at least a couple heatwaves between 2027 and 2037...
We do have quite a similar discussion here in Germany.
Back in the day, everyone used fossil fuels to heat their homes. Back in those days, AC was frowned upon as inefficient, wasteful and decadent. Something only Americans did. The greens despised them for ecological reasons. The right despised them for moral reasons.
Then the public came to know about climate change and it was decided that people should transition to using heat pumps for heating their homes. Because heat pumps are efficient, green and a necessary sacrifice of money you have to do to combat climate change.
Now with this year's heat wave, suddenly there was a discussion even among the greens about having AC in buildings as a necessary adaptation to rising temperatures. And demands by the right to get rid of the AC stigma and deploy AC everywhere. And back in the corner, there were experts laughing out loud, because a heat pump is just an "evil" AC running in reverse. Has been all along. The only problem is that usually heat pumps were deployed in such a way that you couldn't use them to cool in the summer...
Which imho goes to show that the public urgently needs more scientific and technical literacy.
> because a heat pump is just an "evil" AC running in reverse
I keep hearing that, and then I keep hearing people tell me that you can't just put an heat pump, run it in "reverse" and "pretend" to have AC. That seems to be a case where the theory is here, but in practice the applicances are just optimized for one part, or the other.
(Also, heating is often done by heating water in radiators, and cooling by cooling the air.
It may seems stupid, but I still can fathom whether the same applicance can do both ! Or, if I want to do the right thing, and replace both my no-very-old gas boiler AND my pretty-old AC, can I put a single heat pump ?)
In Australia we have had reverse cycle air conditioning for decades. These are heat pumps that both heat and cool. I have 15kW of installed heat pump tech at home and run my whole house off grid, despite mainta8ning a grid connection. The systems run as heaters in winter, and air conditioning in summer. They are very efficient, enough so that I dont worry about our solar and battery being able to keep up.
The appliances are very common, and Ive seen them throughout much of Asia, too. Its like Europe and the US are just discovering this tech, yet its been reachable by half the world's population for 30+ years, and continues to improve.
To be honest I suspect the tech has been available here too, but the marketing is just confusing. But again, "cooling your house to survive summer" is, for real, a pretty recent concern to have in Europe, as opposed to "heating and insulating your house to survive winter".
It's almost as if the climate is warming in accordance to what physicist have been saying for 30 years.
"Qui aurait pu prévoir ?", as the other one would have said (sorry for the franco-french reference. And I know we'll "regret" the guy next year...)
It is also a construction thing. Air ducting is very rare in German homes. AC is also rare because frowned upon. And heating is usually provided by warm-water radiators or in-floor loops. But those radiators and in-floor loops are usually unsuited for cooling.
What's more, most heating techs only know about water heating and are unable to solder a refrigerant pipe. So it is hard to find someone to install a split AC or split heatpump, and your average heating tech won't even mention anything about cooling because he can't install it and your existing setup might have to be redone anyways.
You can get an appliance that can do both, well and efficiently. Every modern AC has a reverting valve that changes the flow direction of liquid and gas, such that the liquifier and gasifier change places. For cooling, the liquifier is in the outdoor unit, for heating it is in the indoor unit. Common refrigerants (for new units, the choice is R32 or R290) have a temperature range that works for both functions. Depending on the refrigerant the efficiency will differ, but in both cases it will be above 250% to 350%. Meaning for every kWh of electricity, you get at least 2.5 to 3.5 kWh of heating. Or cooling.
The easiest and cheapest way to get such a device is to get an air-air AC unit. More than 90% do have a reverting valve and can heat and cool. All of them will be efficient in both functions. Just look at the SEER and COOP values or the A+/A++/A+++/A+++++++ ridiculousness/efficiency scales ;)
Those air-air heatpumps/AC units can do both because they basically have the same radiator on both sides, and the same condensation removal system. Sometimes the cooling is a little more efficient, sometimes the heating is. This basically depends on the refrigerant used and on the local climate you are using the unit in.
Condensate is the reason that at least in Germany, you sometimes cannot do both. The usual heatpump you buy around here is an air-water heatpump. Meaning the outdoor unit is coupled via outdoor air. The indoor unit distributes it's energy through water, usually in water radiators or in-floor heating. Problem with that is that those water radiators are not suited to be run with cold water for cooling, and those in-floor heating systems usually aren't as well. Why? Because water will condense on those cold surfaces during summer, run off into your flooring and cause rot there. If you paid attention to make your flooring condensate-proof or have even more cooling surfaces from in-wall or in-ceiling loops, you can also run cooling this way. But most people can't.
So yes, you could do both if you put in a single air-air heatpump / AC. In certain rare circumstances you might also do it with an air-water heatpump.
Oh, and there is the theoretical option to do air-air and air-water with the same single outdoor unit and multiple air-based indoor units and one or two water-based indoor units that create warm water for heating and piping. Look for multi-split systems. But for the usual small single-family homes, those aren't cost efficient. They are therefore usually only offered for commercial applications such as hotels. But they have nice advantages like using the heat produced from the AC to heat the water used for the showers and stuff.
The message of article was great, but I wish it was written by a human.
Yeah we are on track to get to a point where Earth heating up is irreversible before Artificial super intelligence can come to aid to solve it. In fact, our datacenter buildout using gas and coal as primary energy makes this worse.
I think about Fermi Paradox a lot. The tragedy of commons when it comes to capitalism may very well one of the reasons why Dinosaurs may have a longer species lifespan than Homosapiens.
The change happens too slowly, but reversal takes global coordination which humans as a species aren't great at. Especially when anyone not coordinating may be economically advantaged.
tldr: Deploy a TON of solar. Use the excess production to charge batteries (EVs, BESS), chemical storage (Ammonia), green hydrogen for industrial uses, heat pump for HVAC, CO2 as refrigerant.
Deploy solar everywhere. On roofs (inefficient), plug in solar, vertical solar, solar on reservoirs, highways. Everywhere. Use excess production!
Phase 1
1) Buy only EVs[1]
2) Use EVs as energy storage. Pay the EV owners because power price goes negative (or worst case charge at no cost).
3) This will immediately capture clean energy that is being curtailed (~20% or more)
4) Without 3 in place, we can't accelerate clean energy, because curtailment will increase, making it unproductive.
5) Pay the EV owners to supply power back to the grid. They now replace peaker plants, which is the most expensive part of electricity bills.
6) EV storage becomes the new grid, creating a gigantic energy reservoir. Extremely resilient energy storage. (think just like the kube/containers, cattle/pets, etc)
With the scale of EV car adoption, we'll get better and better at batteries, making them significantly cheaper. This will allow us to build battery swapping infrastructure for big vehicles. Most likely, this will be sodium or solid state.
Phase 2: All big vehicles (trucks/buses) can use battery swapping stations spread out everywhere. The battery swapping stations serve multiple functions, they are an essential part of the short term battery storage (multi-day), a layer above the EV storage. And they also provide the battery swap infrastructure. They get paid for being charged (negative price) and then again for the trucks using them. We shouln't build charging infrastructure for big vehicles, it is capital intensive, requires a lot of expensive machinery, real-time transmission capacity, real estate, wasted time, etc.
Long term/seasonal: Build Ammonia --> electricity emergency plants. We need ammonia at a massive scale anyways for fertilizer. The best outcome would be green ammonia (green hydrogen), using excess power from clean energy.
Industrial uses (heat): Green hydrogen on demand, freshly produced from solar. Hydrogen is the smallest molecule, explosive and corrosive, won't work with any storage.
All heating and cooling: Use heat pumps. Use CO2 as refrigerant and ban everything else. We are going to see 100x deployment of ACs everywhere, all of the third world will buy AC as their incomes increase.
[1] Govts could ban all ICE vehicles, but they wont. Fossil fuel lobby wont let them. For the fossil fuel shills who are invitably going to comment that EV doesn't work for them, please continue using your EV for your daily commute from Alberta to San Diego. There will be enough used ICE cars for the next 20 years.
In a world where we have people like Trump, Musk, Thiel, et al, with extreme power and resources, why would we hope for something like climate change to be addressed?
What can scientists do? Even if they are 100% right and can prove it, they have no power to do anything. Governments of the top countries are puppets of the US, so there’s not much to do. Other governments are dealing with more mundane problems.
And the “A fucked up planet affects everyone equally” is just not true. Billionaires can live in a fucked up planet just fine. They don’t even need people (as demonstrated by AI and its goal of replacing workers). They truly don’t care about us. And if the worst forecast for the planet is to come, they also won’t care (they would just live to their fullest while they can)
I won't comment on the others you mentioned, but Musk has probably done more for reducing CO2 emissions than any other human on the planet by popularizing electric vehicles and making them 'cool'.
These are the types of solutions we should be cheering, because people voluntarily chose the less-CO2 product due to its appeal. No heavy handed laws required.
I can think of a nonfiction book whose title would get you rapidly banned from HN. A movie was made with the same subject and title, but because it was a drama and not a documentary, it's not really fair to say the movie is an adaptation of a book. In the movie, a small group does the thing that is extremely effective.
/The Ministy for the Future/ also contains a grassroots group that does something implementable by individuals and extremely effective.
US Greenhouse gas emissions are down 18% from 2007 levels. CO2 emissions and electricity generation are no longer linked. You might not like them, but Trump, Musk, Thiel, et al (whoever the et al are) are doing a good job pushing nuclear power as well, which promises a more energy-rich future without greenhouse emissions.
The people who truly don't care are not in the US; they're China and India, whose per capita CO2 emissions are exploding to the upside. China alone makes up like a third of the world's emissions. They don't talk about cutting emissions but about slowing their growth, and yet people are upset at US politicians as the US is busy meeting climate goals it doesn't even profess (and which don't bind China). When you look at actual data, the people you're blaming aren't the ones you should be blaming.
As a European, we have the same thing going on, except we're usually saying "let the US and China do it first", but our cumulative baggage is also pretty big.
In some way, the US and EU are even MORE responsible for reducing emissions and cleaning up their mess, because they reaped all the benefits of a high GDP because of massive burning of fossil fuels without investing heavily into renewable infrastructure.
An American and a European sit at a bar drinking. Their Chinese friend, who had been detained by business, comes and joins them. After he's started his drink, the bartender warns them all that it's dangerous to drink and drive. The American and European stop drinking and sit around chatting, hoping to pass enough time to sober up before heading home. The Chinese man, however, reasons that the American and European have cumulatively consumed more distilled pleasure than he has, and so it is his right to keep indulging, despite having been warned about the danger that drunk driving poses to himself and others.
In the face of what is advertised as an existential global threat, the argument that the Chinese should be excused for failing to curb their emissions, on the grounds that others in the past also emitted, contradicts the idea that emissions pose an existential global threat.
I make this prediction: In 5 years, we will have learned that the red line was in error, and the temperatures will be in the bottom half of the graph.
I know this because every prediction of climate doom turned out to be false.
Entire nations were going to disappear under rising sea levels. It has not happened. I'm not saying no land sinks, but sea levels are not rising rapidly enough to prevent Al Gore (author of "An Inconvenient Truth") from buying an ocean-front home. The same applies to John Kerry and dozens of other outspoken prophets of doom who warned us that rising sea levels would submerge entire nations. They used the proceeds of their fear-mongering to buy oceanfront homes.
I remember signs in Glacier National Park telling us the glaciers would be gone by the year 2,000. It has not happened.
Others have corrected your confusion between prediction and observation. Lets instead show what we have already seen, today, that was previously predicted.
Kiribati and Tuvalu have measurable loss of land due to rising sea levels that is impacting people today. About 80% of the Maldives Islands will likely be uninhabitable within the next 25 years. The Marshall Islands have lost 18 out of their average 200cm above mean sea level height - roughly 6% of its land.
We have seen massive glacial retreat even in just the past 10 years, let alone the past 50. This is happening the world over, and at a rate that is not previously seen in the geological record (happy to argue this, thats my background). We are seeing large ice loss and lack of matching accumulation over Antarctica and Greenland - two great places to observe large scale processes. We just saw the Arctic stay largely unlocked for sea ice/shipping last season. The sum of these will take a moment to kick in, but the failure of conveyor currents will kick us all in the arse quite significantly and likely within our lifetime, and we have already seen hiccups.
We are experiencing record heat in northern Europe, with temperatures in line with what a couple of decades ago would be expected in north Africa during the summer.
Southern Europe is already experiencing massive droughts in major urban centers.
“wahhhh this is bad” ok sure but how. what will the downstream effects be. how can we model increased ocean temperatures and how they will affect weather patterns or whatever? gives me no info on the implications, let alone info on the implications with rigor.
It’s not spelled in nursery rhyme, but it literally does give info on the implications. As the article states, they are not as simple as A => B, so it provides general idea of the implications. The general idea being ecosystem destabilisation and intensification of extremes and their frequency.
> How they will affect weather patterns or whatever?
> This is why graphs like this matter. Not because they prove that catastrophe is inevitable, and not because they predict the precise sequence of events over coming years. Science rarely deals in absolutes. What they show is that Earth is moving beyond the range within which modern human civilisation developed. We’re entering climatic conditions that our infrastructure, ecosystems, economies and institutions were never designed to accommodate.
Reading helps. Also it's pretty clear from the "waaaaah" that you are not asking a good faith question but rather dismissing the article, without bringing any information or sources to back whatever point you are trying to make - ironic.
There are many thing people could do, eat less meat, smaller homes, electric cars, green energy, no flights etc. but the vast majority of people does exactly nothing.
"Eat less meat, smaller homes, no flights"? Sounds like an average person to me because of poverty, lol. Even my family, well above the threshold for poverty, has to do this.
"Electric cars" is less likely tho because having a car at all is a money drain.
I agree that we should but rational individuals are not going to voluntarily lower their standard of living at any noticeable scale. Simply not going to happen.
That’s because those who (our countries that enforce it) eat less, have smaller properties, less productive cars and infrastructure etc, those are the countries that will have the short end of the stick in 10-20 years time - just look at Europe. The tragedy of the commons at a global scale.
Yes, I should recycle more. Meanwhile, it’s OK for politicians to invest in coal and build gas-powered datacenters, while the ultrabillionaires buy groceries in a private jet.
Don’t worry about that, just recycle more!
It is about time we stop blaming the individual at the bottom of the ladder for the problems of society. And let me preempt you: society isn’t made up of individuals, but it is much greater than the sum of its parts.
Why does it have to be one or the other? 7+ billion small actions add up; power plants and datacenters are still at least partly about fulfilling consumer demand.
Or to put it another way - which of those things is under our control? If one can do something more, then why not? Because billionaires? The climate doesn't blame anyone, it just exists; being to blame or not, doesn't matter when we're all in the same boat together.
> power plants and datacenters are still at least partly about fulfilling consumer demand.
Consumer demand doesn't determine whether to build coal vs solar vs nuclear. Public policy does. No new oil/gas/coal plants, period, and start working to shut down the ones we have. Electricity generation is the source of about a third of all CO2 emissions.
Consumer demand doesn't determine whether we do carbon capture, or reforestation. Those require public policy.
It’s a tough sell. The impact of you turning your AC a little bit colder or having a bigger car is almost unmeasurable on a global basis yet the benefits to you personally are probably pretty big.
The reality is that what is in our control is very, very little, and we’re squabbling like mad among ourselves because I had a piece of beef for lunch.
I’m the first to recycle, so you’re preaching to the choir. What I’m saying if we could do better than self-flagellating. Or rather, there is nothing our self-flagellation will achieve in the end.
We keep focusing on things that are easy to measure like how much meat does one person eat, rather than the real numbers that are effectively immeasurable. Am I a worse person for eating beef, yet not using LLMs nor driving a car, than a vegan would might do all those things? Only for my conscience to know. In the end, it all amounts to hypocrisy, and squabbling among the plebes, while the rich keep polluting the planet.
Chinese and Indian CO2 emissions dwarf anything you mentioned. You can stop eating meat altogether and move to a small doghouse, it won’t make any global impact at all.
This line of "hurrr but they are doing it too so why should I stop!" reasoning constitutes a logical fallacy that a motivated 9 year old is probably already able to reason themselves out of
The large industry largely emits to help us build and maintain our too-large homes, and fill our large houses with junk. So it would help reduce those, too.
This is not what I'm saying. Telling people to eat less meat or live in smaller houses is not only inefficient, but a counterproductive way to protect environment. This is environmental protection theatre, if not circus. It makes environmental protection measures look laughable and ridiculous. Unless something is done against the biggest pollutors, eating less meat (now think about how dangerous this advice looks without taking into account who it's addressed at - stupid parents can stop feeding their children meat and cause them lifelong health problems) won't prevent environmental problems. Sorry, I'm interested in participating or endorsing environmenal protection circus.
Cool, so what have you personally done to reduce your co2 emissions? How do your co2 emissions compare to the global average? Or are you just pretending the problem is other people?
A collection of individuals, some of whose actions have a billion times more impact than others, and those powerful individuals hate human civilization.
Eat less and different meat with a smaller footprint. Mostly poultry, eggs, also more organ meats, etc. Also combat fertiliser runoff, etc.
The methane output of a field of cattle isn't that dramatically different from a forest with deer, decomposing wood, etc.
Methane is also a potent but temporary actor and tackling it primarily just buys us very little time which will be used as an excuse to keep pumping co2.
However we grow a good bhunch of the feed for that cattle and for ourselves with fossil fuel based fertilisers.
We need to quit that. If we get rid of both that 8% co2 output for fertilisers and get rid of the manure as well because we ditch meat too much...
Well we'll solve a lot of related problems by drastically reducing the world's population with a gigantic famine.
With a headline like that the graph should be at the beginning. Usually you'd put it up front and then talk about the graph, not put it at the bottom and talk about how people aren't talking about it.
Anyway, I scrolled down to the graph and skipped the text. We are currently 4 std deviations above the mean with respect to El Niño temperature.
But there's also a historical line -4 std deviations from the mean. Was that an eventful year too? I can't tell and the graph is at such low resolution that the source URL isn't visible. If the graph and data is so important, shouldn't we care more about presentation? This is either super sloppy or deliberate obfuscation.
Look, I'm all for good reporting on climate. This just doesn't feel like it.
The graph represents 44 years of statistics, and shouldn't be dismissed out of hand. But you can not determine how these stats relate to longer term time frames such as a 100 years or more. Obviously the article wants you to believe the absolute worst about how these modern indicators compare back even further than the data shows, but how much of that is confirmation bias, and how much is actual science?
It seems like you are ignoring the hundreds of other signals that tell a similar story to this graph?
Not ignoring anything, just commenting on what the graph says as a singular piece of evidence. And it's "the hundreds of other signals that tell a similar story" that can lead to confirmation bias (ie. following a narrative arc) and potentially interpreting this piece of evidence more strongly than it actually deserves.
Ah yes, the classic case of additional independent evidence making the claim less likely! How could I forget…
See, you're part of the problem. This perfectly demonstrates the point of confirmation bias. You've already decided what the evidence shows, so you don't need to analyze it independently and objectively. "We already know what it means! Stop thinking!"
I don't feel you are engaging me in good faith. You are misinterpreting what I'm saying. Good luck to you.
confirmation bias, how?
they gradually swapped in biased thermometers, or the thermometers were always biased to start showing temperature rise around 2026? what motivates thermometers to commit confirmation bias?
By choosing what data to show. There is a lot of data to choose from in climate science. How do you think we end up with such strong arguments on the issue? Cherry picking is as big a problem in climate science as anything else.
a lot of those thermometers have been operating for years or decades, in order to cherry pick each year again, you'd have to censor traces that were still used the year before, so at least such cherry picking should leave measurable traces
can you identify cherry-picked "retired thermometers" from this dataset and earlier ones by the same source(s)?
I believe they were responding to your "confirmation bias, how?" question, rather than the narrative around thermometers. So from that lens, the confirmation bias is choosing to show temperature (objectively measured with assumed-reliable instruments / thermometers), but arguably choosing to hide other kinds/categories of data.
Fwiw, I am not backing them up, since I do not know what other data they might be referring to (and I am not very knowledgeable in topics within climate science).
You're surprised in the context of global warming that the physical quantity of temperature was selected? The temperature quantity itself was cherry-picked?
Does anyone besides you expect them to demonstrate global warming but please without mentioning temperature - that's obviously cherry-picked of course... /s
1 - the area was cherry picked. 2 - only this year's data is highlighted in red - the data from last year wasn't highlighted. It's hard to know if this is a trend or it's just a weird year. 3 - the time horizon is cherry picked. Why mean on a given day rather than the mean for a week?
Imagine someone else cherry picks the line that is really low and highlights it. Or they pick a different area which shows cooling. Now you have some idiot claiming global cooling.
The thing about cherry picking is that it works so well. When someone pointed out the cherry picked data, you couldn't even come to the conclusion it was cherry picked. And you are on hacker news. Imagine the really really silly people.
I didn't find the source URL unreadable. It's here: https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/?dm_id=nino3.4 The lowest ones were 1988 and 1989.
Fair, I had to click into the full size (I pinch zoomed on my phone). But now the fact that 1988/1989 are outliers raise a few more questions about the variance calculation. In particular, the title suggests that those weren't included in the variance calculation.
A 3.5-sigma event is a 1-in-1000 chance. Yet we have 2 of them in our data set that goes back only 40ish years? Something is suspect. Maybe I'm not accounting for the likelihood of a random walk excursion probability, but if a 3.5 sigma event isn't a 1-in-1000 event I have difficulty interpreting.
I think a 3.5-sigma event being a 1/1000 probability is only under the assumption of random data - a constant climate would deliver more-or-less random data around some mean.
The appearance of two 3.5-sigma events suggests that the data is no longer being randomly generated around that mean, but is instead drifting away from that mean.
More concretely, if all the data were within 2-sigma, then you could invoke the null-hypothesis and refute climate change. Beyond 2-sigma (and even worse two 3.5-sigma events) refuting climate change becomes (much) less reasonable.
> The appearance of two 3.5-sigma events suggests that the data is no longer being randomly generated around that mean, but is instead drifting away from that mean.
Not if the two 3.5-sigma events are in opposite directions, as in this case.
> ... opposite directions ...
Yes, I'd forgotten that detail. Still, though, chaotic bifurcation could be present with Il Niño and La Niña driving high & low extremes. Same mean, maybe, but with a bimodal distribution?
The event in this case is a daily observation, so in the last 45 years there have been 16k events. Under Gaussian assumption, 3.5 sigma outliers in positive direction are 1 in ~4,000 events, in either direction 1 in ~2,000, so approx. 8 days would be outliers in the recorded period. Judging by the looks, it's pretty close. And the data is absolutely not Gaussian: at best it's the result of a Gaussian process, as the daily recordings are not independent, but dependent on the previous day.
Why are you assuming gaussianity?
The tails could be heavy, it's true. This could make my usual 1-in-1000 heuristic overly conservative. Let's go with that, heavy tails. The data shows we are at something between a 1-in40 and 1-in-20 deviation. Normally (pun intended) that's ~2-sigma deviation. So... I guess it doesn't really seem like an epoch defining El Niño.
This website is making heavy use of IP range blocking. Here's an uncensored link: https://web.archive.org/web/20260713092155/https://www.lyreb...
Alternatively, since the link that was posted is just an AI copyright theft site, use the original instead: https://climatecasino.substack.com/p/some-monsters-are-real
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48890533
The author of that Climate Casino post has some... strong views. So you might want to bear this in mind when reading his analysis:
"The human cancer is destructive to every living thing, as humans continue to eat the planet into oblivion. As someone who values “everything else,” I would be one of the first to rally behind the NTHE philosophy if it had any scientific basis at all. I want the human cancer gone from this planet."
https://climatecasino.substack.com/p/unfortunately-the-end-o...
It's additionally not clear that TFA is a copy of the Climate Casino (CC) post.
It's on the same topic, possibly spurred by the CC. Yes it uses the same graph (which I presume CC also didn't make), but otherwise the content and writing is very different. It's less detailed, possibly LLM written, but also more approachable.
I guess re-posting about a salient topic is now just "AI copyright theft".
To be fair, the planet is gonna be fine in the long term. It's the human race that's in danger... so maybe a win-win from his perspective??
Hey, that's Ian Malcolm's line in Jurassic Park!
“Let's be clear. The planet is not in jeopardy. We are in jeopardy. We haven't got the power to destroy the planet - or to save it. But we might have the power to save ourselves.”
But I don't think it's all that interesting of an argument. When people say save/destroy the Earth, they mean humanity. Call that arrogance, but it's true.
The planet as a rock in space is not something they care about (and you know it).
Life (especially sentient animals), on the other hand…
Right. Specifically, "I want the human cancer gone from this planet."
That's a kind of caring, but probably not the sort you were trying to imply.
The most powerful humans, and human systems, often score very low on stewardship and empathy. While "cancer" triggers as opinionated, using a less-charged analogy I think should probably make a similar point.
What analogy might work better, i.e., be less charged but as precise?
Agent Smith: I'd like to share a revelation during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet.
One of my favorite worded bits of machine logic about humans. All of the sci-fi tropes have it. The "I, Robot" movie has similar "my logic is undeniable" comment about the same conclusion of the humans being the problem. I just really liked Agent Smith's specific comments
He is wrong, by the way. Most animals multiply until they exceed carrying capacity, then die off in massive numbers, then repeat. They may find a long-term equilibrium. The current boom in human population, and a subsequent die-off that has not yet happened, were predicted back in the 1970s.
It is also probably BS to assume a periodical die-off for humans in the near future. At the moment, humans are not showing any signs of a die-off, they are just not multiplying anymore. Humans do have something that animals do not, a culture. And this culture seems to have induced a downward variation in population.
This happened in rapid succession in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. First rodents and small scavengers multiplied rapidly, but then the easy food ran out and their predators showed up, and the cycle repeated. The zone is now roughly at equilibrium, we think, but it's isolated and surrounded by human activity so it's hard to be sure.
The Kaibab Plateau deer disaster from 1906 to 1939 also demonstrated boom and bust cycles.
We will reach some kind of equilibrium. It is literally impossible for things to continue as they are.
TLDR; hard to resolve that question with dialog.
Complexity resists reduction, yet fundamentals that affect change over time exist.
That said, growth seeks to shed restrictions upon it, but unrestricted growth has many suboptimal effects on the area it grows in.
If you propose a system growth effect thesis (established example: the iron law of oligarchy), it's not possible to show its influence both accurately, and in such a way that agrees with most observers. It may not even be useful; it might exist as a concept better in a group relation with other concepts, and focusing on the group might be most useful.
And responses to actions to display a system's properties tend to be about those actions, not about the system.
Some of the most popular responses re: growth are "the area doesn't have a beneficial significance equal to the beneficial significance of the growth", but one is measured essentially to support propaganda, and other is barely measured and poorly understood.
Once you narrow the framing, people criticize the framing as the reality, not its usefulness as a paradidm for the reality of the issue. The map is not the territory; we cannot "describe" reality. We can create interfaces to that reality, we can measure, discuss, theorize about cause and effect, attempt to emulate or simulate to better understand, but responses tend to focus on the interface instead of the reality, and then devolve to epistimelogical "statements about statements" type activity.
So, because he's a nutter the graph shouldn't be front page news is the argument then? That'll teach him.
He will learn the regret the day he dared say "hey, this graph means we're all gonna die if we don't do something! Look at it!" because we outsmarted him by refusing to look.
The argument is that when a data point comes from a source with such an obvious bias, the data point is called into question.
The beautiful thing about evidence is that it's able to be evaluated on its own merit.
Adding heuristics trades accuracy for speed. It's fine to be overloaded and rely on heuristics, but let's call them what they are, shortcuts.
You seem to be projecting onto me far more than my words literally state. I neither stated nor insinuated anything of the sort.
Well before I knew he was a nutter, it strikes be that the graph starts in 1991. Feels like we should should have more data than that, and that the same graph would be more powerful if it started in 1800 and showed the same thing (or at least, earlier in the 20th century, surely we must have data from the 1950s at least? probably earlier?)
Not saying that the data is not concerning, or that climate warming isn't real, BTW. I'm just saying this particular graph feels fishy.
Because he's a nutter, you should not take his word for it that a 3.5 sigma event (1 in ~2000 for a normal distribution) in the temperature of a particular ocean region means we're all gonna die if we don't do something.
I can understand the desire to be concerned about the climate systems that keep earth habitable for humans starting to break down might come with some extreme views. It seems almost thinking we can continue as normal given the predictions of climate scientists are now coming true, is the extreme views. I worry that these climate scientists might have under egged their estimates due to a “sensible mindset” rather than following the data and we could be in for a horrifying next 30-50 years.
The data seem to suggest an urgent need for solar radiation management because reducing fossil fuel consumption to a negative value isn't really a viable plan, as it turns out. Instead, we will have to use technology to solve the problem, surprise surprise.
Calcium carbonate has the benefit of de acidifying the ocean.
Nobody tried planet-scale geo engineering before, as far as I understand the opinions on it's effectiveness vary.
We did try planet-scale geo engineering. It has worked so far, predictions were met. Heating through CO_2 and other heavy molecules works as predicted. Cooling through Sulfur compounds works even better than predicted, as evidenced by the sudden rise in temperatures after cessation of sulfur-rich fuels.
And in the end, all solutions we can attempt are technical and in some aspect untested. We just assume that the consequences of some of those solutions are small enough, but none have really been tested at scale.
> reducing fossil fuel consumption to a negative value isn't really a viable plan, as it turns out
That seems to be the case politically. Technically it could be done with the only variable being the time to do so.
Optimistic of you to assume it’ll only be fifty years. Do you expect humans to adapt that quickly? The climate will be messed up for centuries at least
Where do you get the "centuries at least" bit? The hole in the ozone layer "repaired itself" much faster after humans made changes. There's no more acid rain in Los Angeles after humans made changes. These all happened within my lifetime. We also saw during covid lock downs how quickly things changed from the sudden slow down in human activity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipping_points_in_the_climate_...
You can look up the carbon cycle on Wikipedia, it is fairly well understood where atmospheric carbon can go. Most processes that sequester carbon long term take geological time spans. So unless you think we engineer sequestration at a rate comparable to what we emit today, atmospheric carbon is here to stay for a really long time. Personally I think we won’t be able to scale sequestration technology sufficiently in the next decades to make a dent in the carbon levels.
Carbon sequestration through plant-life seems to increase more than expected with rising atmospheric CO_2 levels. We are currently seeing increased global plant mass.
Both of those problems you cited are far smaller and easier to fix than the ~1,500 gigatons of C02 humans have emitted in the past century. CFC's have a half life of only 50 years, C02 just persists now forever since we're dumping it faster than can be consumed. Acid rain was a mostly localized problem, not one spanning the entire Earth and affecting ocean temps, ocean currents, etc etc. The cited problems are insanely easy to solve compared to global climate change.
It's likely / probably unsolvable at this point as we're hitting tipping points for which there is no effective return such as permafrost melting and releasing more co2, causing more heating, melting more co2, etc and partial shutdowns of critical ocean currents. But yeah I know...MUH FREEDOM.
Changing refrigerants and propellants away from fluorine chemistry and installing desulfurization equipment on coal plants are both many orders of magnitude easier than reducing the amount of hydrocarbons we burn globally to the point where the temperature increasing is stopped or reversed.
One of them requires the entire global population cooperate to burn fewer hydrocarbons. The examples you mentioned were handled in the US by regulating power plant operators and chemical manufacturers.
The point is that if humans would change, the Earth would change quickly. The way the first comment was worded made it sound like the Earth would need that time and not that humans will drag it out that long. That's a given. The Earth will snap back fairly quickly if the pesky humans would just get their shit together.
There are some positive feedbacks that once triggered could not be reverted for millenia. For example a potential stop of the AMOC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_meridional_overturnin...
Melting glaciers and ice caps is another such thing. As soon as the polar albedo changes because there is no more snow and ice, temperatures will stay elevated for a far longer time than it took to melt those caps.
People in the climate movement are rarely professional PR folks. Weaponizing their personal faults against the objective subject matter they talk about is disingenuous anyway?
You cannot deduce factual correctness from how "holy" the messenger is.
Wanting every living human being to die and our species to go extinct ("NTHE" stands for "near-term human extinction") is a little beyond not being professional PR folks.
Per the article, the NTHE "movement" are doom sayers, not doom pushers. That is, the NTHE people are people who predict that humanity and most complex life on Earth will be killed off by global warming by 2030 (used to be 2026), through a somewhat convoluted but unavoidable series of consequences of the polar ice cap melting completely (in their theory). There is no indication that the NTHE people want this outcome to happen, it's just the outcome they think is already unavoidable.
Now, the author's position is both more and less nihilistic. The author also seems to think that human extinction is unavoidable, but he thinks the timeline is much more dragged out. He also seems to think that this is actually the preferable outcome at this point, given that global warming is our own fault, and that the only thing we should do is try to make it so that the planet is as well as it can be after we are finally gone.
It reads to me as a prediction, not a desire: if we don't prevent NTHE then NTHE will happen.
In the context of "I want the human cancer gone from this planet" and the rest of that blog post, I am confident that it's a desire.
Probably a desire for a peaceful fading out of the human species rather than a violent one, but it's still far beyond PR naivety.
Human cancer certainly means careless humans.
It's humans who are doing this to themself and every other species on earth. So it's true.
I wasn't aware I had weaponised their personal faults, or indeed claimed that what they said was indicative of being a personal fault. I read his post, and then read some more of his writing, and simply felt it would be worth posting what I read in this thread. For me at least, it was a useful experience that changed some of what I was reading into the commentary surrounding the data. YMMV.
Glad you did. It’s just reasonable behavior to me
Interestingly web.archive.org is blocked for me but TFA isn't.
I just left a comment on this elsewhere, but are you using cloudflare or nextdns? They seem to block archive sites, especially archive.today (archive.is, etc)
Yes because they were running a DDOS attack off their CAPTCHA page.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48894441
The NextDNS (and others) blocking of archive.today goes back far beyond 2026 and this specific DDOS event. Perhaps that contributed to the hostility behind it, I don't know. But citing that event for other examples does not apply well.
Please do not misinterpret this as an excuse or pardon of anything. I love archive.today and all their subdomains. I use it regularly and have been having problems for years, especially with NextDNS. I am seriously disappointed to learn of the DDOS event, but there remain other angles on the topic in general. I am still struggling to process WTF they would do what you reported -- how could they think that would be worth the consequences, accomplish anything? Almost seems suspicious in itself.
Thanks for the info. But ever a shill for archive.is
It's because I live in the UK
You should immediately switch your internet provider to Andrews & Arnold https://aa.net.uk/ - every HN reader from the UK should. I'm certain they won't censor you any more than required by law.
Disclaimer: I'm not sponsored by them, nor am I their customer. They just seem cool.
web.archive.org being blocked is alarming! Which ISP? (I'm also in the UK, with Virgin Media, and it isn't blocked for me)
If it should be front-page news, shouldn't it also be at the top of the article, rather than right at the bottom?
That was my first reaction too. A perfect fit for a cover image of a story. Also generally when referencing something within an article you want to display a figure before talking about it.
I thought it was quite effective. I read the whole thing in anticipation, and was still shocked by the graph.
Most people are not going to do that though :/
They should also plot the lines on actual temperature, instead of std. dev.
And expressing a number as some percentage more or less than another number is a great way to make it meaningless.
Plotting it this way is just a shift and rescaling. As the other commenter already showed this will lead to a plot that looks pretty much the same in terms of difference relative to the past data. I think standard deviation makes sense here since we don’t really have an innate sense of what is a meaningful change in ocean surface temperature and the point is to show that we are already far beyond normal here.
Like this?
https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/?dm_id=nino3.4
Yes, I find that much more compelling as it clearly shows temperature.
There's probably an economic incentive to get visitors to read past the show more button?
There is no show more button and scroling to the graph takes less than half a second.
Oops you're right. I double-checked both from the hacker News app preview (Harmonic), and mobile Chrome. No "show more."
I must have confused it with another article, sorry.
[flagged]
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. It's a hallmark of a low-effort comment that it is not even terminated with a period, and this is the case with many of your comments.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
[flagged]
Please don't post flame bait on HN, including population-wide swipes like “the ignorance of the common human being”. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
But in this particular case its true and the fundamental issue we have?
"Ignorance is the fundamental lack of knowledge, information, or awareness about a particular subject."
Its not even an evaluation of my side.
I'm fine with accepting that people have to work, are busy with other things, struggle in live etc.
But the sentence in itself is not bad? And it directly references op.
Isn't that the documentary that cited a study saying all snow would disappear forever from Earth by the year 2013?
They had a scientist saying the Arctic could be "ice-free" in the summer by 2013. The new forecast is for that to happen sometime mid-century.
No
I'm not sure if you're being actively malicious or just a great example of how lies can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes, but your comment is a great example of what we're up against here.
If by "all snow would disappear forever from Earth" you meant "the Arctic could be seasonal-ice-free in the summer" by 2013, then, sure.
Communication about truth is also hard when against decades of industry, talk radio, right-wing media, and Republican propaganda lying about the climate. And humans, with very little scientific or critical thinking skills, felt comfort in the lie that "everything is ok!". Getting past a person's discomfort in order for them to accept truth is a high hill.
okay sure, but also put the fucking graph at the top come on
the problem with this kind of article is half of them push a doom angle and the other half talk about carbon footprint. both of them have the same effect making people give up or do useless lifestyle changes that do nothing for the environment.
we should be pushing for backend changes that are invisible but actually make things better. that means massive subsidies to build out clean power and electrify everything. politicians right now are either doing "think of the corporations we need to leave it up to the market" or insane degrowth proposals or straight climate denial.
the only reason people hate some environmental policies is because they are the wrong ones. we need a wave of green populism thats been missing for decades to scrap unpopular things like ulez, combustion engine bans or individual carbon tax and focus on positive changes people want.
that could be: give away solar panels and two way heat pumps to low-income families, tax the profits of oil and gas companies, enforce right to repair, remove tariffs on chinese car makers if they create jobs in europe, fund train networks to get tickets cheaper than flying, invest in renewable energy to make electricity cheap. theres a lot of options. all of them will lead to some inflation and public debt but there are easy ways to offload that to the rich.
the point is changes that are good for the climate and good for (ordinary, working and middle class) people are better than changes that hurt or just appear to hurt people, even if they are a bit less effective.
Or -- hear me out on this one -- we could ban wind energy, raise costs for electric vehicles, and use government resources to promote increased use of coal and oil.
That would have a bunch of advantages such as sounding familiar to leaders whose heyday was in the 1970s, of not making us feel bad about the state of the world, and occasionally giving financial kickbacks to government leaders.
Or... if you don't like this approach, maybe making changes in political leadership is the single most important thing to do.
Texas, with their evil leadership, generates significantly more solar and wind energy than California, and has significantly more energy storage.
So maybe just blaming this on a political viewpoint you don't like doesn't actually help anything?
https://www.reddit.com/r/charts/comments/1t5ud20/texas_vs_ca...
I feel like you're not actually engaging with GP's point, Jonathan Swift.
Their point is that unpopular climate policies are exactly what is pushing the general populace towards this sort of regressive climate policy you're describing. "Maybe we should make a change in political leadership" is not a productive contribution when the current leadership is the result of bad policy messaging. GP isn't opposing leadership change, they're explaining how to move towards it.
(As much as I'd like to believe that people will just gain an educated understanding of the issues and choose correctly, the unfortunate fact is that real-world politics doesn't work like that, and has to contend with the fact that populism is what wins elections)
> That would have a bunch of advantages such as sounding familiar to leaders whose heyday was in the 1970s, of not making us feel bad about the state of the world, and occasionally giving financial kickbacks to government leaders.
Besides 'kickbacks' I don't think those reasons have much to do with it. The policy benefits the fossil fuel industries' investors / owners, and follows the rent-seeking, anti-free market theory and practice of many current capitalists (specifically, that's not about capitalism but a current powerful group of capitalists). Those capitalists strongly influence government.
The other effects you mention persuade the public.
EDIT: We might ask, if the above theory is true, why the same rent-seeking capitalists do use that strategy for renewable energy? Maybe those industries, dominated by many non-American companies, are hard to monopolize? But I'm wandering far into speculation.
> give away solar panels and two way heat pumps to low-income families
There's no need to caveat benefits like this by income - the most popular social programs are almost always universal. Also the added bureaucracy of validating that someone lands in a category isn't worth the overhead. Why wouldn't we want everyone to install more solar panels and two way heat pumps?
First off. Richer people tend to have larger houses, so use more energy. In the UK the grants are such that for me in a smaller house. A heat pump is the same price as a replacement boiler. You could up the grant amount but unless you're going to have a regressive policy of giving more to the rich you aren't going to give the rich all the heat pump and solar they need/can install.
Personally rather than giving someone benefits to pay for electricity I'd rather install solar on their roof.
So for a government, this needs not cost more than what they are doing now.
> that could be: give away solar panels and two way heat pumps to low-income families, tax the profits of oil and gas companies, enforce right to repair, remove tariffs on chinese car makers if they create jobs in europe, fund train networks to get tickets cheaper than flying, invest in renewable energy to make electricity cheap. theres a lot of options. all of them will lead to some inflation and public debt but there are easy ways to offload that to the rich.
The problem is that most of these (and potentially all of these) ideas sound good, but achieve very little. Some (e.g. right to repair, sadly) will achieve almost nothing at all. This would be a scatter-gun approach at best; at worst, it creates the impression of doing something while actually doing very little.
I don't know what the best solution is. Arguably a genuine carbon tax (one that taxes large producers for the previously-externalised costs of greenhouse gas production, while providing tax cuts to the general population) is the single most effect means of enacting real change. However, Australia demonstrated that even a scheme that results in real, substantial income tax cuts while generating measurable, real reductions in emissions is vulnerable to a scare campaign by a committed, ultra-right attack dog politician.
I strongly suspect that our only potential way out of this now is via geoengineering, and that's fraught with dangers. I am also worried that a lack of government interest in climate change will eventually induce a highly wealthy individual to undertake geoengineering privately, without oversight, scientific input or regulation. But I cannot see the world stopping this any other way, other than by reversing the effects of climate change via nuclear winter.
> Some (e.g. right to repair, sadly) will achieve almost nothing at all.
I'd be curious as to why you say that. I feel that, right now, you would be correct. But if we could move society to a new paradigm where right-to-repair were the default, then cheap non-OEM parts manufacturers would bloom and repairing something would become much cheaper than replacing. Imagine if every object sold had to come with a manual describing how to repair common failures, and a support department to answer for other components.
Personal anecdote: My $700 oven has a microswitch that broke. The oven wouldn't work without it but the replacement part was all of $5. However the vast majority wouldn't know how to repair it.
Expand this to cellphones, computers, tables, wardrobes, cars, tractors and I feel it would have an impact. And... I suppose... my gut feeling is the biggest part of the problem is psychological. People are overwhelmed and don't know what they can do to help. Raising awareness is crucial, but just raising awareness obviously does nothing to reduce CO2 emissions - it's in second order effects when people start thinking harder about what they can do.
Another anecdote: I gave a seminar recently about energy to a small local environmental conference in a nearby town. My starting point was that nobody knows how to talk about energy - we can talk about length, size, weight, cost, speed, age, price, longevity and so, because we know the units - feet or meters, pounds or kilograms, dollars/euros/yen/etc, mph/kph/mps/etc and so on. But ask someone what is a "Joule" or what can you do with a "kilowatt-hour" and you get blank stares. The outcome? I learned of an attendee who drew lines on his kettle for 1-cup, 2-cups, and so on, and now boils only the necessary amount of water. That won't really move the needle on CO2, but it will raise awareness.
> if we could move society to a new paradigm
That's the reason why. That's just too big of an "if".
Any premise that is predicated on an artificially-induced complete paradigm (counter to the interests of capital, no less) shift to bear significant fruit is pretty much a non-starter. You need incredible buy in for that (which right-to-repair is just too niche to have), and established interests will still push against it every step of the way.
Maybe the EU could do it, but even then I'm skeptical.
No matter how bad the climate crisis gets, those who have the power to change it (heads of state/capital) will never abandon their lifestyles which expend 1000x more energy and fossil fuels than the average person. Pushing for voluntary, individual reductions in consumption is pointless and insulting to the average person.
> enforce right to repair
How much would this change Niño surface temperatures, you reckon?
> to scrap unpopular things like ulez
How is ulez unpopular? Its geographical, age or class axis. In some places: like the cities, its extremely popular and extremely unpopular in other places: just outside the cities, especially for people who can't afford electric vehicles. Just cos some people vandalise the cameras, don't make it inherently popular or not. Its just that a very few _really_ don't like it, to the extent they're willing to smash stuff up.
> give away solar panels and two way heat pumps to low-income families, tax the profits of oil and gas companies, enforce right to repair, remove tariffs on chinese car makers if they create jobs in europe, fund train networks to get tickets cheaper than flying, invest in renewable energy to make electricity cheap... there are easy ways to offload that to the rich.
The basic issue remains that if we don't punish people relative to their burning of carbon then we're never gonna deal with climate change. One human can undo the hard work of many in one casual or selfish act. By the sound of international debate on the subject we should probably be investing in geo-engineering instead if we care for outcomes.
For all the presumed benefits of a populist green movement, I doubt it would actually care enough about the root issue and easily yield to self-interest. Every electorate-level conversation about climate change always starts and ends with talking about someone _else's_ carbon usage, never our own. As a species we're simply not mature enough to note what habits we've deeply embedded in our culture that are inherently problematic, like supermarkets.
I agree - I think we really need to encourage reduction in the obvious negative habits and encourage people to take up more positive habits. eg.
- Use car less; walk, cycle, or use public transport more - Eat meat & air-freighted food less; eat local/seasonal produce more - Treat household items as disposable less; repair what breaks and buy for longevity more
I am sure there are plenty more, but how to incentivise these things is a hard problem. One exception being food, where you could easily shift agricultural subsidies away from intensive factory farming and towards local/seasonal food (details may be more complex, but it's do-able!)
> How is ulez unpopular?
As a rule most people with a ~10 year old car which runs fine at low cost are going to be frustrated at an extra tax on their vehicle. (It is not like the manufacture of a new electric car is green.)
Ordinary People always were going to have to suffer to migrate off fossil fuels. Expecting them to like it is somewhat hopeful!
The ULEZ in London was first discussed in 2014, so the writing was on the wall for diesel cars since then.
sure, but air quality is noticeably better in cities, so I can't let it stand that its just inherently unpopular. Some people like the benefits and enjoy them, those who don't like the downsides express that loudly.
It's not just a talking point (see ded comment below), every time we try to publicly survey to implement traffic calming ideas in our city (UK) its a stalemate between in towners and out of towners. Usually the crowds turn up to alternating ballots which is fun. Only thing that upsets me is out of towners talking like literally nobody wants it, which clearly isn't true.
I mean if your commitment to climate change or air quality in cities ends at charging people with vehicles that pollute more to enter the city: then did you have any in the first place?
You say "entering the city" but it literally applies to people who live there. My old car would have cost me every use even if all I did was move it to respect a temporary parking restriction. It isn't about dislike, it is financial hardship largely affecting those of more limited means (hint, old cars).
I am fine with ulez, but it is really important to be clear that people do suffer for it. Not out of towners. Real Londoners - especially with the extension to the outer boroughs.
Taxes, debt, loss of shareholder value, and infrastructure buildouts are all highly visible to large swathes of the American population.
Republicans are an anti-tax and to some extent anti-debt constituency. Liberals are also fairly anti-tax, unless it’s limited to taxing the rich. There’s opposition now to all forms of new energy infrastructure: to oil/gas/nuclear from the left and many liberals, to wind/solar from the right.
There are no “easy ways.” Only hard fights, against both sometime allies and longtime political opponents.
> there are easy ways to offload that to the rich.
Oh? Do tell.
We have plenty of centi-millionaire individuals in the world. Over ten thousand in the USA alone.
You got my vote!
>combustion engine bans
You think that won't do anything?
Riots
The word you're looking for is nuclear. Everywhere.
The word is solar. Instant reduction in CO2 emissions, won't be a decade late, and won't be obsolete by the time it's finally ready. Nuclear is a politician's vanity project. And politicians do have a knack for choosing the wrong thing at the wrong time, by ignoring the market. Just let the engineers make the call.
I think the engineers tend to say nuclear makes much more sense than solar for baseload right? That, and “most of the cost and delay is in these obscenely overcautious regulations?”
As of today, batteries are on par with nuclear cost. And falling.
As for the "obscenely regulations", I had read this before, but nobody can tell me what are they referring to. Because not to long ago France had a massive problem of corrosion in half their nuclear plants, and currently is having a second one (https://balkangreenenergynews.com/french-power-prices-jump-a...). It seems that "obscenely overcautious regulations" still not enough to catch leaks on time, defects that now threat with a energy crisis in France (and secondarily in Europe).
Not really, there a lot of factors making nuclear expensive apart from regulations. And is also clear that you need some regulations.
> Nuclear is a politician's vanity project. And politicians do have a knack for choosing the wrong thing at the wrong time, by ignoring the market.
Nuclear benefits the politicians' vested supporters, major corporations. Renewables are smaller and not vested interests.
> Just let the engineers make the call.
That dangerously assumes that engineers don't have their own biases and corruption. It's hard to fathom that perspective given what everyone can see happening in Silicon Valley for years.
And we should have started at least 30 years ago. But better late than never?
Backend changes? The world should have a revolution as our leaders have completely failed us.
Remember when the Obama and Biden admins started a bunch of solar incentives and Trump rolled them back?
Unpopular opinion, but we need to start using hard and soft power if we want to fix this problem.
Europe cannot fix climate change on its own, and we already represent an increasingly small share of total emissions.
The question now is how we get other countries onboard fast, and if they continue to build out cheap coal-fired power stations what are we going to do about it? Something or nothing?
Unless we can get every nation onboard, we should switch strategies to one of managing the inevitable rather than hopeless trying to prevent it. Costly energy policies that reduce global emissions by roughly 0.5% (basically what will happen if the UK ever achieves net-zero) are a total waste of money and time.
Those who care about this issue need to get real and need to stop pretending that the solution is for a few more people in the UK putting solar panels on their roofs. Climate change is a global problem. If your solutions are domestic then they're not serious.
I've pitched this idea before. But instead of something like the Paris Climate Accords which were an agreement for people to self-regulate and reduce emissions. What is needed is an agreement that is a sort of cartel. Nations a,b,c agree on these policies (carbon per person, environmental regulations, etc), and any nation that wants to export services/goods to a,b,c they must enter the agreement or be subject to tariffs.
I would say that the EU is edging towards this idea. I don't say that to be negative. I support it. One idea: Create per-product, per-country tarrifs based upon their average carbon footprint. If foreign manufs reduce their carbon footprint for the product, then the tarrif is reduced. This creates a good incentive to progressively reduce carbon footprint.
Yeah, this is exactly the type of thing I'd support.
The UK (where I live) emits something like 0.5% of global CO2, but we're one of the largest economies in the world.
If we're going to do anything it seems we should really be doing everything we can to use our economic might to try to do something about that other 99.5%. Where as at the moment we're wasting our time obsessing about how we bring down that 0.5%, and providing an economic horror story for why no other country should replicate what we're doing.
Deindustrialization in the west is imo largely due to this. Pollution was bad. Trying to clean things up was good. But you can't increase the cost 10x, and then allow a company to set up shop across the border and ship things in doing those practices still. The local environment becomes cleaner, so you export that toxic part, but the global impacts are still bad AND you hollow out your industrial core.
I'm not sure what you're talking about.
Europe dismantled their own nuclear plants and are actively trying to ban electric vehicles from China.
Getting the rest of the world on board would be much easier when you (presumably are in Europe) are getting your domestic policies right.
Representing that as a "climate spiral" would make it unnecessary to adjust for the seasons, and the original data could be used instead of a statistical view. It makes it easy for anyone to see the trend. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_spiral - https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/visualizing-daily-global-t... - https://www.climate-lab-book.ac.uk/spirals/
The climate spiral can be misleading though, because it's natural for a viewer to interpret the change in terms of area.
Then, the increase from 1.5° to 2° looks much, much larger than the increase from 0° to 0.5°.
So it's misleading in terms of making recent warming seem even worse than it is. Now, of course, you might argue that is justified in spirit because the negative consequences from warming grow faster than linear... but that doesn't make it any less misleading in terms of the temperature change it is communicating.
It would be easy to adjust the radius so that the area increase is proportional to the temperature increase.
It would be, but humans are famously bad at judging relative areas at all, which is a problem for data visualisation everywhere.
0° is not zero. Your premise would be true if we were using the Kelvin temperature scale.
Polar coordinates are such a nice way to visualise periodic data.
They often are not, because they highly distort shape and size. Values that are smaller than the mean occupy much less space (area-wise) and seem less significant than they really are, while values that are larger than the mean occupy much more space (area-wise) and seem more significant than they really are.
Thanks. Those are much better than the graph trash in the original article.
Though the graph is ten years old. Why is it so hard to find recent data? :-(
This is the most recent version I have found:
https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/5190/
this is incredible graph work (despite the bleak subject)
The final rotation around the horizontal axis was brilliant.
These are nice if you are scientifically literate but I suspect not so great for the lay
For those wondering, I found a post with a graph showing actual temperature rather than std dev from mean
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/tompickerell_this-graph-shoul...
This was very helpful. Thanks
the ignorance is a consequence of our societies system of incentives. everything keeps pointing back towards that each time theres an event like this. But if we aren't going to attach an economic price for emissions then it remains an externality and not a recognized reality to the economy. The current US administration is playing a leading role in keeping it that way. And voters keep voting for it. Incentives.
The economic system itself is incompatible with the physical reality of a finite planet.
The ones steering society choose to crash and ruin everything rather than to jeopardize their positions in power.
That obvious failure in morals and ethics, basic principles of adult responsibility really, is made possible by a lack of rational reflection in the populace.
Objective truth has to take precedence over subjective desires when it comes to existential questions. Currently it does not.
I'd push back.on blaming the populace for this: the widespread belief in general polls is that the climate situation is dire and that drastic measures need to be taken.
However, the constraints that most people have to contend with do not allow them to be more radical in their calls for change. You saw it in the Gilets Jaunes/Yellow Vests uprising in France, that was motivated not by the passion for IC engines but by the inability to weather the costs of taxation on older vehicles.
The real culprit is far and away corporations that benefit from activities that carry with them extreme effects on the climate, and who can influence both politics and media. The research (sorry for lack of link) that shows that political direction is largely controlled by moneyed interests is not ambiguous.
I do agree that the populace also deserves some of the blame however: regular renewals of electronic devices, and especially the continuing consumption of animal products, is a moral failure justified only by pleasure.
You're right about the general sentiment acknowledging the seriousness only when you look at the center and left of society. The majority in the US however supports or tolerates the actual political decisions made, contradicting that level of importance.
When you paint people as being "disallowed" from more radical actions, the same question of true importance arises? The current trajectory leads to Armageddon, plain and simple.
My point here thus is about the proper scale on which people place the topic.
It's not a "lifestyle choice" to doom humanity's children to ruin.
Placing responsibility with the irresponsible is a cop-out.
The culprit behind corporations is politicians who allow them to get away with what they do, and the culprit behind this nexus is game theory.
Throwing everything animal under the bus is not warranted. CAFOs and grain heavy operations certainly. Regenerative ag using animals on pasture is an amazing carbon sink. I agree that the factories using petroleum grown grains as feed are terrible.
90% of farmed animals globally are in factory farms: https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/global-animal-farming-est...
I don't have data on the West specifically, but I'd be surprised if it's not 99%. "Free range" animals are largely a fiction.
Animals being used for pasture grazing, for the benefit of the climate, could be understandable, but I think enslavement and torture of 200+ billion animals annually is a moral failure that goes far beyond its effects on CO2 ppm.
Animal ag creates unnecessary risks of (viral) pandemics, antibiotic resistant bacteria, air pollution, water pollution, soil pollution, deforestation (for silage and feeder crops), caloric inefficiency, and animal cruelty. There are plenty of alternative plant-based protein and nutrients sources that could be grown instead.
> The economic system itself is incompatible with the physical reality of a finite planet.
„Infinite growth is impossible on planet with finite resources” is nice buzzphrase, but upon closer inspection it makes literally zero sense. Fortunately people will never accept degrowthers’ postulates.
You're making a very strong claim ("literally zero sense"), but you've provided no argument as to why. I don't believe that the economy can become arbitrarily decoupled from physical goods, which is a hard requirement for infinite growth with finite resources.
Because 1) growth is not directly linked to resources and the richer country is the less growth depends on resource-intensive areas such as farming or industry; 2) it’s absurd to think we are at the stage of growth where resource availability becomes constraint - I’d say it’s on the contrary and we are at the stage where we become far less dependent on resources than are on scarcer side (e.g. thanks to solar uptake).
But the claim must be that physical goods can become an arbitrarily small portion of the economy. Nobody would dispute that they've become smaller. Do you believe that food can become arbitrarily cheap relative to total wealth? Or steel, or silicon? In other words, can the food you eat require an arbitrarily small portion of your income? And looking at nation-states only is an accounting trick; the economy is global.
You again say "it's absurd" and provide no argument. I think the case is not as clear cut as you would like it to be. Solar energy is not an infinite resource.
> But the claim must be that physical goods can become an arbitrarily small portion of the economy.
Yes, if you actually mean infinite growth it’s true. And that’s what I find absurd - why would you care about infinite growth? If you actually care about infinity, then even if you degrowth you will run out of resources because guess what - resources are finite, so the use of resources will have to also be arbitrarily small and asymptotically approach zero!
What? Some resources are renewable. There's a finite amount of solar energy, but it doesn't "run out" (on human timescales). Growing food doesn't need to remove from the biosphere, even if the way we do it now does do significant damage. So we absolutely must stop using non-renewable resources (i.e. fossil fuels), but if we find an amount of renewable ones combined with recyclable non-renewables (like metal) that are sustainable then we can reach a steady state.
An economic system based on perpetual growth can never reach a steady state, unless you believe that physical goods can become an arbitrarily small portion of the economy.
You can’t reach steady state in ANY economic system because you can’t have 100% efficiency, that’s basic thermodynamics. Resources will keep decreasing no matter what you do. Hence argument about infinite growth is absurd - infinite existence without growth (or with degrowth) is also impossible.
You're right; sunlight will eventually run out. (Well, long before that the expanding Sun will boil the oceans). No, you couldn't have an economy in a closed system, but the Earth isn't a closed system (due to the aforementioned sunlight).
That's an absurd argument, though. The problem we have right here, right now, is capitalism destroying the habitability of our planet because its hunger for resources must always grow, so it's unable to handle the problem of fossil fuel use, or stop depleting soil, etc.
You're arguing against jumping out of the way of a moving train because we're not immortal.
> That's an absurd argument, though.
Yes, exactly! Talking about infinite growth or infinite existence is really stupid and that’s my point!
You're arguing against "degrowthers", favouring the current growth-based system. What you're arguing for is a system that requires the infinite growth you don't want to think about. So in essence you're saying "looking at the consequences of my beliefs is absurd", which is hardly a compelling argument.
If my system requires infinity growth then yours also does require infinite resources by the logic outlines above. If you agree that your system does not require infinite resources because we should be talking only at timescales that are relevant to humans, then my system also does not require infinite growth. You can’t have it both ways, either you are ok with infinite timeframe (and then degrowth will eventually run out of resources) or you are not (but then the growth requires to sustain current system is obviously finite).
Nonsense, but you clearly either haven't read my replies or don't understand that capitalism requires growth while some other economic systems don't. Even 1% growth per year is exponential growth and quickly will run into limits (as we are currently experiencing!).
But let's grant "both systems eventually run out of resources" for the sake of argument. The rate at which that happens then becomes clearly relevant, and if staying alive is good (I hope we can at least agree on that), using resources slower is better. Capitalism is depleting resources on a human timescale (as, again, we are currently experiencing with climate change), so instead depleting them on longer-than-human timescales is clearly the better option.
> Nonsense, but you clearly either haven't read my replies or don't understand that capitalism requires growth while some other economic systems don't. Even 1% growth per year is exponential growth and quickly will run into limits (as we are currently experiencing!).
> But let's grant "both systems eventually run out of resources" for the sake of argument. The rate at which that happens then becomes clearly relevant, and if staying alive is good (I hope we can at least agree on that), using resources slower is better. Capitalism is depleting resources on a human timescale (as, again, we are currently experiencing with climate change), so instead depleting them on longer-than-human timescales is clearly the better option.
But you were talking about INFINITE growth, not exponential and those are two completely different things! Exponential growth will become infinite only if you have infinite time frame! So can we agree than "infinite growth is impossible on a planet with finite resources" is really dumb argument, because capitalism does not require infinite growth at all? Then we'll be able to move on to exponential growth.
It appears that they believe you can eat emails (according to the substitutability principle).
It appears that parent comment believes that there’s infinite amount of food and once you degrowth you will never run out of it.
> The economic system itself is incompatible with the physical reality of a finite planet
The economic reality is perfectly compatible with finite reality, because growth is not a function of resources.
An email is more economically valuable than a paper mail despite requiring much less resources (and leading to a much less CO2 emission)
> growth is not a function of resources
This is a bold claim: I do not believe that if all remaining fossil fuels had vanished overnight that growth would remain identical.
To believe this, you must believe that the economy can become arbitrarily decoupled from any physical good. Do you believe that food can become an arbitrarily small proportion of the economy (and so arbitrarily cheap relative to income)? Steel? Purified silicon? Infrastructure like bridges?
I don't. Perpetual growth is incompatible with finite resources. Fortunately, human flourishing does not depend on infinite economic growth; there is, for example, enough food for everyone on the planet. Capitalism is just bad at allocating resources by any metric other than its own. (Yes yes, it's better that feudalism was. I think we can hold ourselves to a higher bar than that.)
> Do you believe that food can become an arbitrarily small proportion of the economy
This is not necessary at all for economic growth to be infinite. Food prices can "inflate" and so stay at, let's say 20%, of the economy while the amount of physical food being produced remains flat year after year. That's sort of what's happening with housing, education, and healthcare already.
I think seeing prices go up like this makes people unhappy, but what really matters is what portion of a person's income this stuff occupies.
If physical goods remain a constant proportion of the economy without having more of them but get more expensive, all that's happening is inflation, not economic growth.
We've built an economic system that latches on to scarce things and makes them less scarce. Now we need to make harmful activities scarce, and we can't.
We have to kill this thing before it kills us. There have to be better things to base an economy on (consent? reciprocity? Foresight?).
Does any country care? Isnt China far worse thsn the US?
> Does any country care?
China ostensibly cares, their five year plans drawn up by committees of Engineers (Civil, Mechanical, Electrical) and Scientists are on an arc to minimise reliance on fossil fuels and transition to renewables (wind, solar), and nuclear.
There are strategic reasons for this, of course.
> Isnt China far worse thsn the US?
"It's complicated"
* Historically the US is responsible for a greater mass of the CO2 humans have added to the atmosphere.
* Currently, China is adding more per annum (and India is in the bleeding edge mix also, as is Australia) in absolute terms, but still less(?) in per capita terms (having a much much larger population).
* China is still using coal (although they are on the cusp of peaking their use) - that gets thrown at them a lot, the caveats are
-- China shut down a lot of badly polluting inefficient coal power plants.
-- China opened up a lot of more up to date less polluting but still coal power plants.
-- China is using these to power all manner of stuff including the build out of the largest renewable power components production line in the world.
-- Coal is set to be phased out "soon" (and it seems to be slowly going that way, see peaked comment above).
* A lot of China's CO2 emissions are a direct result of their mineral processing, production, and assembly of the rest of the world's consumption.
( eg: The case can be argued that the fall in US per capita CO2 emissions is a result of US consumption now being met by manufacturing that has moved from the US to China)
There are literal books and stacks of research papers arguing about each point mentioned above - and that's just skimming the surface.
> although they are on the cusp of peaking their use
That’s a really nice way of saying “their usage is currently at an all time high and will go up further”.
They don’t get to take credit for a potential future action.
Their carbon emissions in 2025 were lower than 2024. The peak was years ago. Same is true of coal usage.
So no, their usage is not at an all time high. It is below the high and on trend to continue falling.
They can take credit for past and current actions that are part of a long term plan that includes future action.
I think you've made up your mind regardless of facts or data.
China has a far lower per capita carbon emissions rate than the US. Has a growing share of energy produced by green technology. Is the world leader in manufacturing electric cars and using electric cars. Is the global leader in low cost solar panels and batteries among other green technology. Oh yeah, and a huge portion of their emissions go to making things that Americans consume. On top of all that, they have managed to stop growth in their carbon emissions and are on the cusp of reducing them.
I don’t know how China could possibly be considered worse except that they historically used coal, and are rapidly transitioning away.
The problem is that the earth doesn’t care about a per capita denominator.
When the per capita number applies to a billion people it sure makes a huge difference, or would it not matter to the earth if china doubled their per capita carbon numbers to be more like America? I'm not a climate scientist but I would bet my entire net worth it matters quite a bit if China doubles their carbon output per capita.
Right, so if someone was in the US and didn't think they should take action (because of China), then the obvious reply is that they should take action on the basis of being part of US+China, whose population is far greater than either US or China.
Then it doesn't matter if the US reduces emissions or China does. They all count. The US has more money to spend on reducing emissions. Ergo it makes sense for the US to go first.
Considering that it's thanks to China that even a 1% chance of avoiding this remains, I'd say so. Without their enormous investments in solar and batteries, it would be 0% rather than 1%.
> Isnt China far worse thsn the US?
That's fossil fuel industry funded psyops.
I always feel obliged to link to this when contextually appropriate:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
If we assume that governments aren't going to address climate change and coordination between private citizens is unlikely to be enough to stop it, has anyone written anything on what individuals should do to avoid its effects?
It feels like we are at the point where we should be talking a lot more about how live decent lives assuming that prevention and mitigation are unlikely.
It’s going to be very hard to avoid global phenomena. On top of that, predicting higher order effects on a system this complex is hard.
I live in the PNW on the Canadian side of the border (PSW?) where people have argued that we might be a climate change safe haven due to plentiful water and a temperate climate. That hasn’t stopped us from having extreme weather events. In the past five years we have seen a heat wave that killed hundreds, floods that cut us off from the rest of Canada for weeks, concerns about water supply since our summer water supply relies on snowmelt, and we are getting less snow and more rain in the winter. Fire and dangerous smoke over huge parts of the province is now a given from mid July onwards.
The list goes on, but the point is that there is no avoiding its effects.
I know of people who bought property in western North Carolina with this mindset. It’s higher elevation, far from coasts, near fertile farm land, with lots of surface water to drink and use. And far from other geo hazards like volcanoes, earthquakes, etc. On paper it checked a lot of boxes for long-term safety.
Then a hurricane went where it had never gone before and wrecked their entire neighborhood.
It’s hard to know exactly how a complex chaotic system is going to react when inputs change. And it only takes one outlier to cause a lot of harm on a local human scale.
This is why so much effort goes into computer modeling of the climate BTW. We know our emissions are changing the climate. But predicting local effects is damn hard.
You're looking for "deep adaptation"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Adaptation
Lots of AI tells in this article. Ironic?
> It's not a forecast. It's not a simulation of what might happen decades from now. These are...
I think that kind of breathless excited tone is justified by the subject matter. Unlike the usual LinkedIn posts this is actually about a pretty dire situation.
The site is apparently one of those AI generated bait traps. The link to the original article is in the (current) top comment.
A lot of people mistake basic literacy for AI. Don't forget that LLMs are trained on human texts and replicate patterns within them.
People quibbling about whether TFA was written by an AI and why the chart is at the end of the article and what a standard deviation. Meanwhile the planet is simmering.
When the substance of an article is accurate, the best people can do is argue over the presentation.
The article is crap as well as the graph. And the author made the planet simmer even more to produce this crap.
Data visualization is hard, but what do you think is wrong with the graph?
Graphs tell stories and the only story this one actually tells is "29-year high".
It doesn't do a good job of establishing trends and its sample size is too low to discern how significant of an outlier this is.
Actually there is a similar outlier on the bottom of the graph, which suggests the current outlier might not actually be that significant. And that's definitely not the story intended by the author.
Most crap thing here is this species.
Is there a graph starting from the 1950s?
https://www.lyrebirddreaming.com/post/el-ni%C3%B1o-isn-t-an-...
Instead of arguing about this on the internet you could do what I’m doing: working to take carbon emissions off the board.
It’s not easy right now because of the funding and political climate, but you can find work where success is measured by metrics like “gallons of diesel not burned.”
Start here: https://climatebase.org
Only, while such work is necessary it's also insufficient.
You point at the actual problem yourself: political obstruction and funding going to the opposite.
The relevant issues here are ironically precisely those you can solve by discussing them on the internet.
They are caused by people not thinking right and having their emotions cross-wired.
They can be solved by correcting those errors in reasoning and setting evaluations right. Via discussion.
This is a decidedly optimistic take given what we know about social media. HN may be a rare exception.
Rather than using reason to get people to surmount their "emotions" and to "think right", I'd argue we rather need to frame the issue in terms of their self-interest, and to try to persuade and convince not them but rather their tribal leaders.
I’m going to tell you, as a person whose path went from journalism to activism to engineering in climate tech and climate justice: persuasion isn’t going to get the goods. Changing the reality on the ground through R&D and deployment moves the needle. There are a lot of very good, very smart people who have been heads down since the 70s building the infrastructure for decarbonization, and we’re winning, even as we continue “losing” the political argument.
Yup. If solar panels are good enough and cheap enough, if grid storage and battery density improve fast enough, the economic costs of staying on fossil fuels will create huge pressure in the political space and economic competition. You can overwhelm the issue.
We shouldn’t HAVE to do this, our politicians should represent our desires and our long term necessities. But that’s clearly not an easy problem to solve, and it sure doesn’t seem to be going in the right direction.
So RND to push the economy makes perfect sense to me as a way to fight this from the other direction.
Hmmm, I remember what happened when we all got more 'free time' by using computers to do things that took us long doing manually.
Making electricity more 'green' is of course necessary but on the backdrop of the current capitalistic system, it will simply lead to more electricity being consumed. See current uptake by LLM data centers.
Yes, decarbonization necessarily means higher electricity consumption. Electrifying transportation, home heating, cooking, industrial processes, etc will mean an explosion of electricity demand. This means generating a lot more electricity without burning fossil fuels, and using that electricity more efficiently.
The good news: there’s a lot to build, a lot to invent, and a lot of work to do, and the solutions to these problems are not present in the training data. If you’re worried about how you’re going to pay the bills now that AI ate your job writing glue code for some niche subscription SaaS product, here’s your answer.
Sanction Reality: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F--SWFQ6M9c
[instrumental intro]
[bridge]
[VERSE 1: judges] Sanction the judges War crimes didn’t happen That’s all you need to know In this controversial matter.
Sanction the judges War crimes disappear Livestreamed in 4K Still don't see clear
[bridge] [instrumental]
[REFRAIN] That was a verse Now this is refrain Follow the narrative From truth refrain.
[bridge] [instrumental]
[VERSE 2: reality] Sanction reality It’s easier that way Moral clarity Concerns go away
Sanction reality Money will follow Don’t follow the money Morality hollow
[bridge] [instrumental]
[REFRAIN] That was a verse Now this is refrain Follow the narrative From truth refrain.
[bridge] [instrumental]
[VERSE 3: Albanese]
Sanction Albanese Her weapon is a pen Research and legalese Her reports contain
Sanction Albanese Political tool Rubio by Chinese He is sanctioned too
[bridge] [instrumental]
[REFRAIN] That was a verse Now this is refrain Follow the narrative From truth refrain.
[bridge] [instrumental]
[VERSE 4: Climate]
Sanction the climate But climate doesn’t care No speech, no objections It just comes in waves
Sanction the climate NASA is wrong Moon sixty nine Now facts are gone
[bridge] [instrumental]
[REFRAIN] That was a verse Now this is refrain Follow the narrative From truth refrain.
[bridge] [instrumental]
[Final verse]
The system was broke Sanctions were a joke Reality arrives Humanity thrives Your heart knows the truth It's beyond the proof
[bridge] [instrumental]
Your heart knows the truth It's beyond the proof
[bridge] [instrumental]
[instrumental drum and bass]
[outro]
Looking at the graph left me wondering just what it means exactly. I'm not well versed in statistics so "the standard deviation is 3.5°C" doesn't mean much. Also, what's up with that other line going down to -3.5°C? And what do the colors mean? In the sense that I'm not sure whether a darker blue means closer to or further from today.
You can go to the source website https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/?dm_id=nino3.4
There's is an interactive chart that's easier to understand
Thanks for posting that link.
The graph has a key on the right hand side that clearly labels each colour of line, and the horizontal axis is scaled in months of each year. Scrolling down gets you notes and links to data sources.
In answer to another poster in this thread, the dataset only reaches back to 1983, I'm assuming because that is when they started monitoring these temperatures?
Check out 2015, it had way hotter temperatures in November, with higher temperatures than the average in this period, but I would like a climatologist to explain this, draw correlations etc. The original post is a weird LLM-mediated mix of vague scaremongering with some easy piling on journalism "just because". So what am I supposed to with it? Nothing, because it's written by an LLM, I guess.
> Check out 2015, it had way hotter temperatures in November
That's what El Niño is about: instead of declining after a peak in June, temperature plateaus and then rise again later in the year.
So the fact that the Pacific is much hotter than it was in 2015 is particularly scary, because it leads us to believe that it will also be this hotter than 2015 in November.
I'm not an authority on this, but here's is my understanding - I'd appreciate if someone could correct my mistakes.
The baseline of 0.0 represents the average of all years. Anything above / below the baseline is a (standard) deviation from the average. The blue lines are the individual years since 1991 [1] while the red line is the year 2026.
If a line is above the baseline, then the sea-surface temperature was hotter on that day than average. If below, it was cooler than average.
The year 2026 is an outlier, dwarfing all the others starting around June / July. The Nino 3.4 sea-surface temperature is significantly hotter than any previous year during that time. New record, I guess?
[1]: I'm confused about the two date ranges given: 1982-2026 and 1991-2020. I'm assuming this graph is based on measurements from 1982-2026 to calculate the average, but the lines shown are only from 1991-2020, for some statistical reason I don't understand.
I think it is the other way around: SD is calculated from 1982-2020, while all measurement readings in the plot are 1982-2026. I believe this is meant to not introduce an unwanted shift but compare to sort of a 'stable process'. However, that should have been described and argued somewhere.
> Each blue line represents a different year since 1982. The red line is this year. It doesn't just set a new record. It has departed entirely from the range of previous observations.
I had the same concerns and think the chart would benefit from color grading the individual years by age. If the other outlier in the opposite direction is equally likely then it should also be concerning (obviously it is not). My understanding is the deviation is from the 1991-2020 subset avg, so a warming trend would be indicated by relative drift towards positive in the std dev across years from 82-present
my layman understanding, a real statistician will surely intervene.
standard deviation is a measure that informs about the distribution. A high standard deviation means a "wide bell curve". A low standard deviation means that all values are closely clustered around the middle of the curve.
So if your value is 2 x standard deviation (for example) that means it is a relatively rare outlier, since 2 x standard deviation covers 95% of the bell curve. In particle physics I believe they require 5 standard deviations to confirm an observation.
Tend to follow climate-related news closely. But even then: eyebrows raised.
Heh.. Maybe in future we'll see wars being fought not over access to fossil fuels, but over attempts to stop other countries from pumping more fossils out of the ground.
"What the planet is going to experience over the next 12 months is just a preview of the movie that’s coming. Godzilla is going to return, and return, and return and return … and as bad as the movie gets, we won’t be able to walk out of the theater."
That's the scary bit: no escape hatch. We're all in this together.
That's why international co-operation on climate change should NOT be opt-in. Your countries' freedom to emit greenhouse gasses ends where my countries' (future) safety is at stake.
The nations with the strongest militaries are also the largest emitters. Attempting to force these countries into compliance might not be the smartest move.
In fact, any scheme like this will almost certainly be used to forcibly prevent development in already impoverished nations.
War is one of the biggest emitter of co2 though.
Ok then we should focus on eco-friendly ways to stop each other from pumping fossils.
Like state-sponsored sabotage? Like whoever blew up the Nordstream pipeline?
There have been arrests in that one, so we might find out reasonably soon.
Technically, could be negated if enough people who are projected to consume above a certain amount over the course of their lifetimes are killed.
In that case you can just throw in a couple of nukes. If you choose the location and the yield just right, you can also buy a few years of cooling.
You just reminded of the term Nuclear Winter. Is that still a thing?
Shouldn't the y-axis better be called "Standard DeviationS"?
According to one comment on the site, the 3.5 means "3.5 times the SD", which makes much more sense to me.
I initially tried to make sense of "SD being 3.5 on that day of the year", which seems to be a wrong interpretation.
I think you are right.
The title of the figure is ambiguous about what "SD" really means but I guess it is plotting the number of standard deviations of the 1991-2020 data measured from the mean of that data and plotted per day for the 1982-2026 data.
Here's the link that I read off the figure.
https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/json_2clim/oiss...
Going up the URL path I get redirected to here:
https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/?dm_id=world2
That shows measured temperature and 2026 as very hot (surprise) and in fact is the hottest to date for June+July. The standard deviation of that data is not 3.5 C but something less than 1.0 C. It is plausible that current temperature is about 3.5 sigma from the selected mean.
It's worth recognizing that the analysis is applying a biased conclusion prior to making the plot. It singles out post 2020 data to compare to pre-2020 data. and then concluding the held out data is a significant deviation with a cause. It almost certainly is but this is not a proper way to analyze data (unless one is pushing an agenda, be that for good or bad).
I think the sst_daily plot stands on its own without crafting this SD plot to emphasize the point. Especially when the accompanying text doesn't even explain it. It's a disingenuous message.
No. The (standard) deviation is 3.5.
> No. The (standard) deviation is 3.5.
3.5 what, according to you?
You're reading this graph wrong: we're currently 3.63 standard deviation above the mean.
It's clearer on the original article[1] that this AI-generated blog is taking the graph from, the average temperature on the period at this time of the year is around 27.5°, the ocean is almost at 29.5°, just short of 2°C above average, and the standard deviation is 0.55°C.
[1]: https://climatecasino.substack.com/p/some-monsters-are-real
Edit: note that the original article is 6 days old, and we've unfortunately crossed the 2°C threshold right after it was posted, so the situation of even direr than described: https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/?dm_id=nino3.4
Where I live, it was front page news four weeks ago.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-16/nsw-bureau-of-meterol...
Not that it lead to any particular action or recognition.
This blog post is pure slop, stealing from this one: https://climatecasino.substack.com/p/some-monsters-are-real the submission should be updated to link to the original instead.
That article is vastly superior and is the one that should be being discussed, not this.
> Turn the volume on the typical El Niño impacts up to eleven, then watch the collective infrastructure of modern industrial civilization crumble. Watch as flooding storms wash away roads and cities. Watch as trailing storms create new inland lakes, swamping farmland. Watch as fires raze forests and grasslands. Watch as heatwaves turn temperate regions into unsurvivable hellscapes. Watch as crops fail and dams burst. Watch as the shelves of your local grocery store gradually, then suddenly, go empty.
I think this kind of writing is low quality.
What about it reads to you as low quality? The intention seems to be to convey alarm through description of catastrophe, which was effective for me.
Disclaimer: this is only an opinion.
The language is too strong for the context. Author uses religious imagery, prognosticates about an Armageddon scenario, and does so based on a relatively short time series.
Maybe, but it's refreshingly different from the industrialized junk prose we get to read more and more.
This is intentional repetition. More specifically, anaphora [1]. You may not personally like it, but it is a rhetorical device used to emphasize a point. This one also comes with a nice progression: storms, storms, heat, heat, farmland, groceries.
This substack article also comes with additional graphs, a much better story flow (data is progressively introduced and explained before reaching the final plot), and was posted 2 days before the OP. I agree with GP that it is significantly superior to the OP (which is likely AI slop). Thanks for posting it.
1: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/anaphora
> What is developing is so far beyond any global climate event that has impacted modern industrial civilization that predicting much of what’s coming is educated guesswork. Turn the volume on the typical El Niño impacts up to eleven, then watch the collective infrastructure of modern industrial civilization crumble. Watch as flooding storms wash away roads and cities. Watch as trailing storms create new inland lakes, swamping farmland. Watch as fires raze forests and grasslands. Watch as heatwaves turn temperate regions into unsurvivable hellscapes. Watch as crops fail and dams burst. Watch as the shelves of your local grocery store gradually, then suddenly, go empty.
From: https://climatecasino.substack.com/p/some-monsters-are-real
"Earth is moving beyond the range within which modern human civilisation developed."
Way, way, way, way overstated. The graph shows a comparison to an average over a few decades. Human civilization is thousands of years old. Does anyone have a graph of what all the El Ninos since the last Ice Age ended have looked like? Of course not. Nobody has that kind of temperature data.
so do you not know what the word "modern" means? or did you just choose to ignore it?
You can't be serious. Modern civilization is not just the past few decades.
There is not a graph of prehistoric ocean surface temperatures (doesn’t seem possible to obtain this data other than collecting it as it happens as far as I can tell) but there is global historical temperature data. Here is an XKCD comic, scroll to the bottom and pay attention to the rate of change since 1850 vs the prior 20,000 years: https://xkcd.com/1732/
This Wikipedia article has a graph of the last 2000 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_surface_temperature
And yes, I am aware that earth has possibly been covered in ice/slush and also that the avg global temp has been 10C (or more) higher than it is now, but humans were not around for either scenario.
> there is global historical temperature data
Reconstructed from proxies. Not all experts in the field agree on how reliable the proxies actually are, especially over such long time periods.
How does the global temperature relate to El Nino temperature? Do we know without having El Nino data?
You are an engineer or programmer? Why are you working in this industry if you can't take the time to learn about how this system works. We are supposed to be systems thinkers with a scientific mindset. How can you make a statement like "Nobody has that kind of temperature data" without researching first?
I'm embarrassed for my industry. I'm shocked how many climate denialists there are among engineers and programmers.
The last 40 years is not "the range within which modern human civilisation developed". It's a very thin slice of time even on human scales. Let's try not to vastly overstate the data.
The mean is created using 29 years of data. Why those particular 29 years? IDK.
But I tend to dismiss findings like this that don't explain why they chose a very specific dates as the baseline.
Yup. 20% of the population will look at the graph and scream about how we're all doomed and need to start executing people / nuking countries to fix it (seriously, comments from this very thread), 20% of the population will look at the graph and see the hilariously short timeframe, the carefully manipulated axes ranging, and instantly dismiss it as extremist climate doomer insanity and close out of it, and the remaining 60% of the population doesn't care one way or the other.
Yes I was wondering the same. Why is the mean using a different set of years than the total data set? There also seems to be a year where the swing was equally as extreme in the other direction, what year was this? Would be worth mentioning at least in the post.
Based on https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/?dm_id=nino3.4, 1988 is the year from the dataset with the lowest temperature throughout June and July.
I posted a comment earlier about how 1982-1983 (the start of the data) had a historically severe El Nino, and the comment got shadowbanned. I don't understand why that happens sometimes. Hasn't happened for months, but when it does it's always on innocuous factual comments, it's weird.
I vouched for this comment:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48891223
…as it looks pretty innocuous to me. And more importantly, your other comments aren’t obnoxious. :-) I’d love to know the heuristic that flipped that bit on that one comment.
Question to you, if they looked further back, do you think the variability would increase or decrease. Do you also believe the mean temperature would be lower or higher? Just want to understand your mental model of the climate.
Hmm. "The 1982-1983 El Niño was the strongest and most devastating of the century, perhaps the worst in recorded history."
https://www.whoi.edu/science/B/people/kamaral/1982-1983ElNin...
So maybe the data starts there in order to distort it, or to balance it, or maybe we started recording data properly in that year because El Niño got alarming. Seems relevant somehow anyway.
Do we have reliable data that goes back a lot farther? I'm wondering what the graph would look like as extrapolated between ices ages / other large climate changes across Earth's history.
We don't, sadly
The same graph also shows a corresponding -3.5 STDEV below the mean temperature as well. It actually seems rather balanced. This year is hot, but we see similar abnormal jumps in other directions.
Graphs centred around the mean do tend to look pretty balanced.
It will be front-page news if there are storms later this year. For now, ocean temperature readings far away are effectively a distant early warning of future weather. (Depending on your perspective about “distant” and “early.”)
Maybe it becomes headline when the Gulf Stream collapses; but until then: Climate Change does not exist. And actually I read about it a while ago.
- When I read an article that goes like "it is not A, it is B" i know for a fact that someone used an trash LLM to generate it
It's not even the worse part. Journalists have used the "it is not A, it is B" for a while and it never was as bad as AI doing it.
The key problem is that AI have no “idea” of how to build an argument, so it just rephrases the same ideas over and over in different forms. There's no direction, no structure, it's just rambling.
Observations like this is why the Trump administration is dismantling instruments that can observe the effects.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/01/climate/ocean-observatori...
Don't worry, just a few more months until we get AGI and all of our problems magically disappear as the singularity changes everything forever.
Why care for current iterations of nature, when we will all get to experience infinite varities of it as immortal digital consciousnesses?
Forgot the /s tag
Climate change is a political problem, not an informational problem.
I see a negative outlier equal in magnitude to the positive outlier the author is drawing our attention to. What should we make of that data point?
Yes, it is worth looking at. My thinking was, how fast did that sequence revert back to the’mean’? It doesn’t take away from the author’s message though.
You also need to ask what is the likelihood you get this move just by chance
According to https://climatecasino.substack.com/p/some-monsters-are-real, this is a 1 in 7000 years event (i.e. 3.5 sigmas).
Assuming the measurements are independent samples from a normal distribution. Which they of course aren't, as measurements of adjacent days are obviously correlated (if they were independent, a 1-in-7000 event could be expected to happen on about 2 days within a 44-year span). Now the question is what the nature of the deviation is.
- How independent are measurements of different years?
- Has there been a systematic change in the distribution mean?
- Has there been a systematic change in the distribution variance?
- Was there a good reason to assume that the temperature distribution would be normally distributed to begin with? (Maybe there are strong non-additive effects.)
In any case, it's clear that assuming the observed temperatures in the 1991-2020 range follow a normal distribution and temperatures outside that date range will follow the same distribution is a bad model of reality.
I'm not sure how you can make that claim with only 29 years of data without making some pretty big assumptions about the underlying distribution.
We have ways to determine the past climate without having access to direct measurements.
But there is no way to confirm that those methods are accurate...
Yes there are. Scientists compare the measurements from both methods in the time when there's data from both. For example ice cores formed last decade should match direct temperature measurements from last decade. It's the same way the oldest rings from living trees are matched against the newest rings from tree fossils, and radiocarbon dating is checked against all of that.
That does not look very reliable to me, because that implies certain things are only affected by ambient temperature.
Btw, Can you tell me how ancient temperature is measured from ice cores? My lookup only says we can detect atmospheric composition, and not temperatures from the ice cores.
> Btw, Can you tell me how ancient temperature is measured from ice cores?
https://www.antarcticglaciers.org/glaciers-and-climate/ice-c...
>Past precipitation can be used to reconstruct past palaeoclimatic temperatures. δD and δ18O is related to surface temperature at middle and high latitudes. The relationship is consistent and linear over Antarctica[9]...
I think this is also flawed, because this computation requires the ratio of the isotopes in the atmosphere at the period of interest, which we don't have. And the people making this measurement just seem to assume it would certain value derived from the present, which is also unreliable...
So yea, all things considered, pretty unreliable..
https://science.nasa.gov/earth/earth-observatory/paleoclimat...
See, since it seems that you are convinced yourselves, can you tell me how accurately the past temperature can be assessed by using this method? I mean +/- how many degrees?
Also share if this accuracy requires any implicit assumptions. For example, "If we assume that X today is true then it is true back then as well" where X is not a physical constant...
Air bubbles from ancient atmosphere caught in ice -> historic CO2 levels -> historic average global temps.
This is fairly 1:1 linkage, and the Earth-heating effect of atmospheric CO2 was established in what, early 20th century or so?
>historic CO2 levels -> historic average global temps
But this seems to imply that global temperatures are only dependent on CO2 levels. That is a pretty flawed assumption...
No this is 'calibrated' against other research like fossils (indicating which species were living where & when) & probably more.
It's called science for a reason... (not back-of-a-napkin stuff)
But those are unreliable as well...
See, since it seems that you are convinced yourselves, can you tell me how accurately the past temperature can be assessed by using this method? I mean +/- how many degrees?
Can you tell me any answer you'd accept?
Accept? Why should any one "accept" anything without good reason?
It sounds like you wouldn't accept any answer. Why ask the question, then?
> without good reason
What would a good reason look like to you?
One that makes sense.
> But those are unreliable as well...
Can you tell me how many research papers on this specific subject you have read, before coming to that conclusion?
Hint: chances are you're correct (!). Size of the error bars, timeframe(s) talked about, how data was gathered, how results were processed etc, that is what such papers are about. Educate yourself! (Wikipedia is usually a good start)
None. It goes against my common sense. That is why I am asking what accuracy can this method give. I am asking that to people who are already seemingly convinced that the methods listed (fossil records, ice-cores) can be accurate..
Common sense?!? That applies to things you're experiencing on a daily basis. That you're intimately familiar with.
Not to things occurring when your great-great-great-great... (repeat a couple 1000x) ...great-great-great-grandparents were around.
Maybe you'd be so kind & at least check part of a Wikipedia article?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleoclimatology#Reconstructin...
10min to go from clueless to "I've read something about how this knowledge came about".
> That applies to things you're experiencing on a daily basis.
That we cannot accurately look into the past unless we explicitly record it, is something that I experience on a daily basis.
Seriously, if you are so convinced, then why don't you just give me an accuracy measure and reasons to support it? I am not interested in anymore articles that does not contain an explicit accuracy claims and reasons to support the same.
So please understand this. It is not that I am questioning the existence of such techniques. I am questioning their accuracy/reliability..
> So please understand this. It is not that I am questioning the existence of such techniques. I am questioning their accuracy/reliability..
That is fine. Scientists do the same, all the time.
> we cannot accurately look into the past unless we explicitly record it
Please allow me an opportunity to enlighten you:
We cannot look into the past unless it is recorded somehow.
Note the absence of "we" in the recording part. Also note "somehow" may happen in many different ways.
Sensor data, satellite measurements, ice cores, fossilized creatures captured in stone, slices of tree trunks, samples of minerals whose radioactivity decayed over millenia, history books or landscape features, are just different types of records. Each with their own set of properties (accuracy being 1 of them).
>Please allow me an opportunity to enlighten you:
So I am aware. The "we" is important because I said "accurately". When "we" set up the recording, we can make it to record with the required precision. Inferring measurements from incidental things can give the required precision, but it should be justified.
It seems like you're on the trajectory to refuting all historical measurements altogether. In that case, I can't help you. Good luck. I suggest the philosophy of Last Tuesdayism, it may interest you.
Not really.
I only reject using them for certain things that require vastly more reliable data. And I am not making the mistake of relying on unreliable data just because it is the best we can manage.
Also why don't you answer my question about ice cores?
I'm not an ice core scientist. I suggest you ask them for detailed specifications. But the way you have posed the question strongly suggests that you will not be satisfied with any possible answer. Anything short of your eyes laying upon a thermometer will always be "not reliable enough", and thermometers only record the current temperature.
It is not really surprising that skeptics exist when the answers they get are of these sort...
This isn't climate, it's weather.
There are no proxies that record monthly water temperature. Only second order effects that are at best weakly correlated with water temperature.
> I'm not sure how you can make that claim with only 29 years of data without making some pretty big assumptions about the underlying distribution.
Under what circumstances would 29 years be an insufficient mean to compare to the last few years? Precisely those circumstances in which the climate had changed.
> This isn't climate, it's weather.
Under any sane statistical model. If we assume that this is a naturally occurring once in century El Nino under an equal probability model we'd expect not to see it before we have 70 years of records.
Within the 1982-2026 span there is an equally negative 3.5 sigmas deviation somewhere (no year labels on the graph). The article doesn't touch on it at all so I have no context as to what it could be. But it definitely suggests 3.5 sigmas is not really 1 in 7000 years.
The right comparison is previous El Nino?
Haven't you heard -- it's all about building bigger and better AI now. Nobody GAF about warming temps anymore.
And the band played on.
We know how to fix climate devastation.
We migrate to renewables (solar, wind, geothermal, hydro) and less-polluting baseload (nuclear).
We run desalination plants with the energy.
We quit running farms in deserts (California almond farmers).
We take energy load and run CO2 scrubbers with leftover energy.
We put quotas on how much CO2 you can emit. None of this goofy selling CO2 credits. If you make more CO2, you buy local scrubbers and run them.
The problems aren't climate healing rules. The problem is governments and incumbent companies, and the idea we can't change things rapidly. Or the fact that a company might lose money (or make, GASP, less profit)
Here's a related chart with a bit more context. Check out the different ocean regions as well as the air temp anomoly charts:
https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/?dm_id=nino3.4
The now retired meteorologist at Iowa State, Elwin Taylor had been predicting for decades a dust-bowl level event to happen in 2025 as a result of an 89-ish year cycle. It didn't happen last year but this is a pretty clear signal for this year.
It takes the form of a super El Nino the likes of what is happening right now.
https://www.agriculture.com/weather/news/dust-bowl-coming-in...
Yeah NZ national news has been going on about this for a couple of weeks. They're trying to scare everyone by saying what an extreme El Nino we're in for this summer with such devastating consequences as (let's see here) warm dry summer days.
It's going to be a good summer, I can't wait.
> The question is whether we're willing to pay attention and act before the changes become too large, too rapid and too interconnected for us to manage.
Stopped asking this question a long time ago.
It’s over.
> The question is whether we're willing to pay attention and act before the changes become too large, too rapid and too interconnected for us to manage.
I think I can guess the answer to this. It's an easy extrapolation of the past.
Apparently El Nino reduces Gulf of Mexico hurricanes.
So being in New Orleans is a mixed bag for me.
This graph shouldn't be front-page news. Why? Because it is a crappy graph that says nothing.
That there are deviations from the median is a normal statistical thing. Even deviations beyond 3 sigma. It happens. That's statistics. Those deviations might even be frequent more or less frequent than your statistics table says, because the data might not follow a gaussian normal distribution. See the graph, there is a -3.5 deviation in there...
What would be an interesting graph is: From 1982 to 2026 on the x-axis, plot the yearly maximum and minimum daily sigma and the median. Or just plot all the overlapping segments from the original graph as a continuous sequence. That way one could see periodicity, rising and falling of those values and the overall change over time. (Edit: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48890590 for much better graphs)
But that graph is useless to convey any information beyond "well this year the line goes up". The article also does nothing to really explain the statistical background. Quite the contrary.
The article shows things that the graph doesn't illustrate at all: Like "This is why graphs like this matter [...] What they show is that Earth is moving beyond the range within which modern human civilisation developed.". Like fucking hell it doesn't! The graph starts in 1982! Modern human civilization started in 1982?
Like "The tropical Pacific is thus no longer oscillating around a climate that existed a century ago. It's oscillating around a much warmer baseline.". Well, and why then does this graph start in 1982? Why can't you show that century?
Like "The red line is this year. It doesn't just set a new record. It has departed entirely from the range of previous observations.". No, it fucking doesn't!. Look at the graph, there is a line at -3.5 sigma! Well within range. And even so, it's statistics, outliers are to be expected.
What this article and this graph need is a permanent relocation to the trash can. And a lesson for the author in science. Real science, not misleading propaganda that hurts the cause more than it helps.
You’re welcome to go get the data and chart it the way you think it should be charted, and then we can have a conversation.
This happened a couple of El Niño cycles ago, in the 2015-2016 one:
> The City of Cape Town began experiencing a drought in 2015, the first of three consecutive years of dry winters brought on possibly by the El Niño weather pattern and perhaps by climate change
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Town_water_crisis
It's quite possible that this one could worse.
I believe this post was written with some heavy help of an LLM. I hope the irony is not lost on the author, nor the readers here.
Their daily shower used more energy than generating the article, it doesn’t invalidate the article.
LLM or not, I absolutely hate the "not X but Y" writing pattern
Blame the parrot feed.
Tjanara Goreng Goreng did nothing rong.
#LiarDreaming
It's going to have to be like 20C hotter before some people will accept that it isn't "just summer".
At that point it will be a self correcting issue when huge swaths of the human population dies from starvation due to not being able to produce enough food. It is preferable to do something prior to then.
Unfortunately it's not going to selectively kill reality-deniers.
The Forest of Fontainebleau, just 50 km south of Paris, is burning, with Canada it's on the scene trying to contain it. Nearby highways and trains - some of the busiest of France - are cut. It is a temperate European forest, oak trees and beech.
No AC is going to save European from that. In fact, it is American AC which is the main cause of it. They dumped all that energy and greenhouse gases and Europeans are the one impacted by these externalities.
That’s tragic, I love Fontainebleau. But it’s industrial civilization as a whole, not American AC. Cement is a larger contributor, for example.
It is not "American AC" that is a serious contributing factor, much less the "main cause"(???).
> They dumped all that energy and greenhouse gases and Europeans are the one impacted
Europeans dumped plenty of greenhouse gases themselves.
AC?
Air Conditioning. Aka "La clim'" in France.
For some context: the conversation about climate change in general, and the recent heatwaves in particular, has been (quite cynically, but cleverly) reframed by far-right parties to be all about "we need to put AC in France to survive heatwaves".
This is smart because it addresses on the physical sensations of people (it's the third heatwave since end of may, and counting), it has an element of truth (AC is critically lacking in schools), it seems much more "down to earth" than the grand plans of "decarbonization", and it makes other political parties look out of touch (the left and greens have been criticizing AC because of the energy impact.)
Of course, this is both "smart" and incredibly cynical, given that the far right has been on the edge (or not so much on the edge) of climate denial for years. So year, "climate changes is not real" turned into "why didn't they put AC everywhere ?" then "vote for us, we'll put AC everywhere !"
This is also very short sighted.
But I guess no one has found a way to ask our future president (Marine Le Pen, twice convicted of embezzlement, waiting to know if she will have to run for President with a "jail from home" tracker, etc...) what exact amount of "putting AC and kicking immigrants out" is going to avoid Fontainebleau forest from burning.
(Also, since those people are incredibly "lucky", I can only imagine what will happen if we learn that the fire was volontary, and the arsonist was an immigrant... )
The only "consolation" is that El Nino is coming back, and she takes office on the 15th of may, so _she_ will have to deal with at least a couple heatwaves between 2027 and 2037...
We do have quite a similar discussion here in Germany.
Back in the day, everyone used fossil fuels to heat their homes. Back in those days, AC was frowned upon as inefficient, wasteful and decadent. Something only Americans did. The greens despised them for ecological reasons. The right despised them for moral reasons.
Then the public came to know about climate change and it was decided that people should transition to using heat pumps for heating their homes. Because heat pumps are efficient, green and a necessary sacrifice of money you have to do to combat climate change.
Now with this year's heat wave, suddenly there was a discussion even among the greens about having AC in buildings as a necessary adaptation to rising temperatures. And demands by the right to get rid of the AC stigma and deploy AC everywhere. And back in the corner, there were experts laughing out loud, because a heat pump is just an "evil" AC running in reverse. Has been all along. The only problem is that usually heat pumps were deployed in such a way that you couldn't use them to cool in the summer...
Which imho goes to show that the public urgently needs more scientific and technical literacy.
> because a heat pump is just an "evil" AC running in reverse
I keep hearing that, and then I keep hearing people tell me that you can't just put an heat pump, run it in "reverse" and "pretend" to have AC. That seems to be a case where the theory is here, but in practice the applicances are just optimized for one part, or the other.
(Also, heating is often done by heating water in radiators, and cooling by cooling the air.
It may seems stupid, but I still can fathom whether the same applicance can do both ! Or, if I want to do the right thing, and replace both my no-very-old gas boiler AND my pretty-old AC, can I put a single heat pump ?)
I dont get this.
In Australia we have had reverse cycle air conditioning for decades. These are heat pumps that both heat and cool. I have 15kW of installed heat pump tech at home and run my whole house off grid, despite mainta8ning a grid connection. The systems run as heaters in winter, and air conditioning in summer. They are very efficient, enough so that I dont worry about our solar and battery being able to keep up.
The appliances are very common, and Ive seen them throughout much of Asia, too. Its like Europe and the US are just discovering this tech, yet its been reachable by half the world's population for 30+ years, and continues to improve.
To be honest I suspect the tech has been available here too, but the marketing is just confusing. But again, "cooling your house to survive summer" is, for real, a pretty recent concern to have in Europe, as opposed to "heating and insulating your house to survive winter".
It's almost as if the climate is warming in accordance to what physicist have been saying for 30 years.
"Qui aurait pu prévoir ?", as the other one would have said (sorry for the franco-french reference. And I know we'll "regret" the guy next year...)
It is also a construction thing. Air ducting is very rare in German homes. AC is also rare because frowned upon. And heating is usually provided by warm-water radiators or in-floor loops. But those radiators and in-floor loops are usually unsuited for cooling.
What's more, most heating techs only know about water heating and are unable to solder a refrigerant pipe. So it is hard to find someone to install a split AC or split heatpump, and your average heating tech won't even mention anything about cooling because he can't install it and your existing setup might have to be redone anyways.
>The appliances are very common, and Ive seen them throughout much of Asia, too. Its like Europe and the US are just discovering this tech
It's almost as if the Australian and Asian climate are different from the European one...
Fontainebleau forest, vs. the Australian Outback, what's the difference, really?
You can get an appliance that can do both, well and efficiently. Every modern AC has a reverting valve that changes the flow direction of liquid and gas, such that the liquifier and gasifier change places. For cooling, the liquifier is in the outdoor unit, for heating it is in the indoor unit. Common refrigerants (for new units, the choice is R32 or R290) have a temperature range that works for both functions. Depending on the refrigerant the efficiency will differ, but in both cases it will be above 250% to 350%. Meaning for every kWh of electricity, you get at least 2.5 to 3.5 kWh of heating. Or cooling.
The easiest and cheapest way to get such a device is to get an air-air AC unit. More than 90% do have a reverting valve and can heat and cool. All of them will be efficient in both functions. Just look at the SEER and COOP values or the A+/A++/A+++/A+++++++ ridiculousness/efficiency scales ;)
Those air-air heatpumps/AC units can do both because they basically have the same radiator on both sides, and the same condensation removal system. Sometimes the cooling is a little more efficient, sometimes the heating is. This basically depends on the refrigerant used and on the local climate you are using the unit in.
Condensate is the reason that at least in Germany, you sometimes cannot do both. The usual heatpump you buy around here is an air-water heatpump. Meaning the outdoor unit is coupled via outdoor air. The indoor unit distributes it's energy through water, usually in water radiators or in-floor heating. Problem with that is that those water radiators are not suited to be run with cold water for cooling, and those in-floor heating systems usually aren't as well. Why? Because water will condense on those cold surfaces during summer, run off into your flooring and cause rot there. If you paid attention to make your flooring condensate-proof or have even more cooling surfaces from in-wall or in-ceiling loops, you can also run cooling this way. But most people can't.
So yes, you could do both if you put in a single air-air heatpump / AC. In certain rare circumstances you might also do it with an air-water heatpump.
Oh, and there is the theoretical option to do air-air and air-water with the same single outdoor unit and multiple air-based indoor units and one or two water-based indoor units that create warm water for heating and piping. Look for multi-split systems. But for the usual small single-family homes, those aren't cost efficient. They are therefore usually only offered for commercial applications such as hotels. But they have nice advantages like using the heat produced from the AC to heat the water used for the showers and stuff.
Shit, I missed that my home town was burning
The message of article was great, but I wish it was written by a human.
Yeah we are on track to get to a point where Earth heating up is irreversible before Artificial super intelligence can come to aid to solve it. In fact, our datacenter buildout using gas and coal as primary energy makes this worse.
I think about Fermi Paradox a lot. The tragedy of commons when it comes to capitalism may very well one of the reasons why Dinosaurs may have a longer species lifespan than Homosapiens.
The change happens too slowly, but reversal takes global coordination which humans as a species aren't great at. Especially when anyone not coordinating may be economically advantaged.
tldr: Deploy a TON of solar. Use the excess production to charge batteries (EVs, BESS), chemical storage (Ammonia), green hydrogen for industrial uses, heat pump for HVAC, CO2 as refrigerant.
Deploy solar everywhere. On roofs (inefficient), plug in solar, vertical solar, solar on reservoirs, highways. Everywhere. Use excess production!
Phase 1
1) Buy only EVs[1]
2) Use EVs as energy storage. Pay the EV owners because power price goes negative (or worst case charge at no cost).
3) This will immediately capture clean energy that is being curtailed (~20% or more)
4) Without 3 in place, we can't accelerate clean energy, because curtailment will increase, making it unproductive.
5) Pay the EV owners to supply power back to the grid. They now replace peaker plants, which is the most expensive part of electricity bills.
6) EV storage becomes the new grid, creating a gigantic energy reservoir. Extremely resilient energy storage. (think just like the kube/containers, cattle/pets, etc)
With the scale of EV car adoption, we'll get better and better at batteries, making them significantly cheaper. This will allow us to build battery swapping infrastructure for big vehicles. Most likely, this will be sodium or solid state.
Phase 2: All big vehicles (trucks/buses) can use battery swapping stations spread out everywhere. The battery swapping stations serve multiple functions, they are an essential part of the short term battery storage (multi-day), a layer above the EV storage. And they also provide the battery swap infrastructure. They get paid for being charged (negative price) and then again for the trucks using them. We shouln't build charging infrastructure for big vehicles, it is capital intensive, requires a lot of expensive machinery, real-time transmission capacity, real estate, wasted time, etc.
Long term/seasonal: Build Ammonia --> electricity emergency plants. We need ammonia at a massive scale anyways for fertilizer. The best outcome would be green ammonia (green hydrogen), using excess power from clean energy.
Industrial uses (heat): Green hydrogen on demand, freshly produced from solar. Hydrogen is the smallest molecule, explosive and corrosive, won't work with any storage.
All heating and cooling: Use heat pumps. Use CO2 as refrigerant and ban everything else. We are going to see 100x deployment of ACs everywhere, all of the third world will buy AC as their incomes increase.
[1] Govts could ban all ICE vehicles, but they wont. Fossil fuel lobby wont let them. For the fossil fuel shills who are invitably going to comment that EV doesn't work for them, please continue using your EV for your daily commute from Alberta to San Diego. There will be enough used ICE cars for the next 20 years.
Now write a blog post about that line at the bottom with comparable magnitude in the other direction.
there is another like that reaches similar deviation, but negative (~ -3.5 degree celsius).
it doesn't say what year is that though.
In a world where we have people like Trump, Musk, Thiel, et al, with extreme power and resources, why would we hope for something like climate change to be addressed?
What can scientists do? Even if they are 100% right and can prove it, they have no power to do anything. Governments of the top countries are puppets of the US, so there’s not much to do. Other governments are dealing with more mundane problems. And the “A fucked up planet affects everyone equally” is just not true. Billionaires can live in a fucked up planet just fine. They don’t even need people (as demonstrated by AI and its goal of replacing workers). They truly don’t care about us. And if the worst forecast for the planet is to come, they also won’t care (they would just live to their fullest while they can)
I won't comment on the others you mentioned, but Musk has probably done more for reducing CO2 emissions than any other human on the planet by popularizing electric vehicles and making them 'cool'.
These are the types of solutions we should be cheering, because people voluntarily chose the less-CO2 product due to its appeal. No heavy handed laws required.
Note that anyone who suggested actions that would be both implementable by an individual and extremely effective would be rapidly banned from HN.
We could build out private solar farms though.
I can think of a nonfiction book whose title would get you rapidly banned from HN. A movie was made with the same subject and title, but because it was a drama and not a documentary, it's not really fair to say the movie is an adaptation of a book. In the movie, a small group does the thing that is extremely effective.
/The Ministy for the Future/ also contains a grassroots group that does something implementable by individuals and extremely effective.
US Greenhouse gas emissions are down 18% from 2007 levels. CO2 emissions and electricity generation are no longer linked. You might not like them, but Trump, Musk, Thiel, et al (whoever the et al are) are doing a good job pushing nuclear power as well, which promises a more energy-rich future without greenhouse emissions.
The people who truly don't care are not in the US; they're China and India, whose per capita CO2 emissions are exploding to the upside. China alone makes up like a third of the world's emissions. They don't talk about cutting emissions but about slowing their growth, and yet people are upset at US politicians as the US is busy meeting climate goals it doesn't even profess (and which don't bind China). When you look at actual data, the people you're blaming aren't the ones you should be blaming.
Your post is the typical "it's not us, it's them".
- Per capita: US has the highest emissions: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita
- Cumulative, US has the highest emissions: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co-emissions?c...
As a European, we have the same thing going on, except we're usually saying "let the US and China do it first", but our cumulative baggage is also pretty big.
In some way, the US and EU are even MORE responsible for reducing emissions and cleaning up their mess, because they reaped all the benefits of a high GDP because of massive burning of fossil fuels without investing heavily into renewable infrastructure.
An American and a European sit at a bar drinking. Their Chinese friend, who had been detained by business, comes and joins them. After he's started his drink, the bartender warns them all that it's dangerous to drink and drive. The American and European stop drinking and sit around chatting, hoping to pass enough time to sober up before heading home. The Chinese man, however, reasons that the American and European have cumulatively consumed more distilled pleasure than he has, and so it is his right to keep indulging, despite having been warned about the danger that drunk driving poses to himself and others.
In the face of what is advertised as an existential global threat, the argument that the Chinese should be excused for failing to curb their emissions, on the grounds that others in the past also emitted, contradicts the idea that emissions pose an existential global threat.
not really understanding why the SD graph for the year drops below zero at some points.
It needs to by mathematical definition. Half of everything is below average.
(Ignoring the complaints of others that they didn't calculate the mean from the whole graph).
I make this prediction: In 5 years, we will have learned that the red line was in error, and the temperatures will be in the bottom half of the graph.
I know this because every prediction of climate doom turned out to be false.
Entire nations were going to disappear under rising sea levels. It has not happened. I'm not saying no land sinks, but sea levels are not rising rapidly enough to prevent Al Gore (author of "An Inconvenient Truth") from buying an ocean-front home. The same applies to John Kerry and dozens of other outspoken prophets of doom who warned us that rising sea levels would submerge entire nations. They used the proceeds of their fear-mongering to buy oceanfront homes.
I remember signs in Glacier National Park telling us the glaciers would be gone by the year 2,000. It has not happened.
This "signal" too will pass.
Others have corrected your confusion between prediction and observation. Lets instead show what we have already seen, today, that was previously predicted.
Kiribati and Tuvalu have measurable loss of land due to rising sea levels that is impacting people today. About 80% of the Maldives Islands will likely be uninhabitable within the next 25 years. The Marshall Islands have lost 18 out of their average 200cm above mean sea level height - roughly 6% of its land.
We have seen massive glacial retreat even in just the past 10 years, let alone the past 50. This is happening the world over, and at a rate that is not previously seen in the geological record (happy to argue this, thats my background). We are seeing large ice loss and lack of matching accumulation over Antarctica and Greenland - two great places to observe large scale processes. We just saw the Arctic stay largely unlocked for sea ice/shipping last season. The sum of these will take a moment to kick in, but the failure of conveyor currents will kick us all in the arse quite significantly and likely within our lifetime, and we have already seen hiccups.
Please check back in 5 years.
The red line is not a prediction, it is a measurement.
1 in every 100 measurements will give a 1-in-100 result.
Please check back in 5 years.
You seem to be deep in denial.
These are not projections. These are measurements.
These are known trends from the past century. The trend is accelerating in what seems to be an exponential pattern.
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...
We are experiencing record heat in northern Europe, with temperatures in line with what a couple of decades ago would be expected in north Africa during the summer.
Southern Europe is already experiencing massive droughts in major urban centers.
Glacier park had 150 glaciers in the mid 1800s. Today it has 26. No crisis to see: we still have nearly 20% of what we once had /s
i have seen this couple of times here and there. with eu melting looks concerning. i guess build more data centers
Conspicuous that the X axis is missing numbers ... weeks, days, or months ....
I couldn’t help but notice that there was an equally cold spike at the bottom.
Can you please define "equal"? (and exactly which pic you're referring to?)
-3.5 sigma in the middle of the year in the only graph the article has.
It's one year, from left to right. The termination of the red line is in the middle because it's the middle of the year.
The range is provided in the title. Presumably it's just regularly sampled over that range.
It is labelled "Day of Year".
“wahhhh this is bad” ok sure but how. what will the downstream effects be. how can we model increased ocean temperatures and how they will affect weather patterns or whatever? gives me no info on the implications, let alone info on the implications with rigor.
It’s not spelled in nursery rhyme, but it literally does give info on the implications. As the article states, they are not as simple as A => B, so it provides general idea of the implications. The general idea being ecosystem destabilisation and intensification of extremes and their frequency.
> How they will affect weather patterns or whatever?
> This is why graphs like this matter. Not because they prove that catastrophe is inevitable, and not because they predict the precise sequence of events over coming years. Science rarely deals in absolutes. What they show is that Earth is moving beyond the range within which modern human civilisation developed. We’re entering climatic conditions that our infrastructure, ecosystems, economies and institutions were never designed to accommodate.
Reading helps. Also it's pretty clear from the "waaaaah" that you are not asking a good faith question but rather dismissing the article, without bringing any information or sources to back whatever point you are trying to make - ironic.
There are many thing people could do, eat less meat, smaller homes, electric cars, green energy, no flights etc. but the vast majority of people does exactly nothing.
"Eat less meat, smaller homes, no flights"? Sounds like an average person to me because of poverty, lol. Even my family, well above the threshold for poverty, has to do this.
"Electric cars" is less likely tho because having a car at all is a money drain.
Changing your own behavior is certainly not wrong but also not a solution.
Policy changes are needed to address this problem. It’s a political problem that needs a political solution.
> eat less meat, smaller homes, electric cars, green energy, no flights etc.
How much % of the world's population would have to do those things, for the graph to show a reversal of the trend? 10%? 50%? Everyone?
I agree that we should but rational individuals are not going to voluntarily lower their standard of living at any noticeable scale. Simply not going to happen.
That’s because those who (our countries that enforce it) eat less, have smaller properties, less productive cars and infrastructure etc, those are the countries that will have the short end of the stick in 10-20 years time - just look at Europe. The tragedy of the commons at a global scale.
> less productive cars
How does enforcing emissions regulations result in less productive cars?
Cars move about 1.5 people per trip on average. A big pickup or SUV is not any more productive doing this task than a mid sized car.
Yes, I should recycle more. Meanwhile, it’s OK for politicians to invest in coal and build gas-powered datacenters, while the ultrabillionaires buy groceries in a private jet.
Don’t worry about that, just recycle more!
It is about time we stop blaming the individual at the bottom of the ladder for the problems of society. And let me preempt you: society isn’t made up of individuals, but it is much greater than the sum of its parts.
Why does it have to be one or the other? 7+ billion small actions add up; power plants and datacenters are still at least partly about fulfilling consumer demand.
Or to put it another way - which of those things is under our control? If one can do something more, then why not? Because billionaires? The climate doesn't blame anyone, it just exists; being to blame or not, doesn't matter when we're all in the same boat together.
> power plants and datacenters are still at least partly about fulfilling consumer demand.
Consumer demand doesn't determine whether to build coal vs solar vs nuclear. Public policy does. No new oil/gas/coal plants, period, and start working to shut down the ones we have. Electricity generation is the source of about a third of all CO2 emissions.
Consumer demand doesn't determine whether we do carbon capture, or reforestation. Those require public policy.
It’s a tough sell. The impact of you turning your AC a little bit colder or having a bigger car is almost unmeasurable on a global basis yet the benefits to you personally are probably pretty big.
The reality is that what is in our control is very, very little, and we’re squabbling like mad among ourselves because I had a piece of beef for lunch.
I’m the first to recycle, so you’re preaching to the choir. What I’m saying if we could do better than self-flagellating. Or rather, there is nothing our self-flagellation will achieve in the end.
We keep focusing on things that are easy to measure like how much meat does one person eat, rather than the real numbers that are effectively immeasurable. Am I a worse person for eating beef, yet not using LLMs nor driving a car, than a vegan would might do all those things? Only for my conscience to know. In the end, it all amounts to hypocrisy, and squabbling among the plebes, while the rich keep polluting the planet.
Chinese and Indian CO2 emissions dwarf anything you mentioned. You can stop eating meat altogether and move to a small doghouse, it won’t make any global impact at all.
This line of "hurrr but they are doing it too so why should I stop!" reasoning constitutes a logical fallacy that a motivated 9 year old is probably already able to reason themselves out of
Another name for that 'logical fallacy' is prisoners' dilemma and "never play a dominated strategy".
Even if you don't take it as prescriptive, it would be dumb not to take it as descriptive (i.e. what the other player will do in a situation)
How many people living in doghouses does it take to offset emissions from large industry?
The large industry largely emits to help us build and maintain our too-large homes, and fill our large houses with junk. So it would help reduce those, too.
This is not what I'm saying. Telling people to eat less meat or live in smaller houses is not only inefficient, but a counterproductive way to protect environment. This is environmental protection theatre, if not circus. It makes environmental protection measures look laughable and ridiculous. Unless something is done against the biggest pollutors, eating less meat (now think about how dangerous this advice looks without taking into account who it's addressed at - stupid parents can stop feeding their children meat and cause them lifelong health problems) won't prevent environmental problems. Sorry, I'm interested in participating or endorsing environmenal protection circus.
Cool, so what have you personally done to reduce your co2 emissions? How do your co2 emissions compare to the global average? Or are you just pretending the problem is other people?
If the factory is in China but the product is consumed in the US who should the CO2 emissions be attributed to?
Irrelevant anyway, because USA consumption is on the decline and China consumption is on the rise.
Individual action is not the solution
What is the collective if not a collection of individuals?
A collection of individuals, some of whose actions have a billion times more impact than others, and those powerful individuals hate human civilization.
Collective action requires coordination among those individuals.
A drop in the ocean vs an ocean.
It can be, but not in the usual way.
> eat less meat
Eat less and different meat with a smaller footprint. Mostly poultry, eggs, also more organ meats, etc. Also combat fertiliser runoff, etc.
The methane output of a field of cattle isn't that dramatically different from a forest with deer, decomposing wood, etc. Methane is also a potent but temporary actor and tackling it primarily just buys us very little time which will be used as an excuse to keep pumping co2.
However we grow a good bhunch of the feed for that cattle and for ourselves with fossil fuel based fertilisers. We need to quit that. If we get rid of both that 8% co2 output for fertilisers and get rid of the manure as well because we ditch meat too much...
Well we'll solve a lot of related problems by drastically reducing the world's population with a gigantic famine.