I personally believe we're doomed. Even if there is a technological solution, as things get worse it gets harder to deploy it. If people are struggling with persistent climate driven change then they'll be using whatever is cheap and available.
I've accepted it though. I don't doomer at people unless they ask. I can't do anything about the situation. I've voted for green parties and politics my whole life. If I have blame it's not for denialists, it's for all those politicians who know and accept the science but did nothing, they didn't have the guts, being voted in again was more important.
It does make me sad to see so many HN comments rolling out the same stupid "I don't trust the data" arguments that were pretty thoroughly debunked within the scientific community 10 years ago, yet still feel the need to jump on every thread about it because the whole thing makes them so angry.
If there is a theory for how climate change will doom us, you should spend time talking about it. The threats people usually bring up are relatively mild. Eg, wet bulb events are pretty scary but are also sound relatively straightforward to mitigate if they start happening. Human societies deal with nasty weather events already.
I've heard scenarios put as mild as a reduction in real GDP growth, which is just a non-issue compared to the risks people want to shoulder to mitigate climate change.
> I've voted for green parties and politics my whole life
These people tend to be anti-nuclear in my experience; so I'm not sure from your comment if that strategy is a good idea. Environmentalists have been some of the more effective lobby groups for locking in fossil fuel use through 1980-2020 when we really should have been transitioning to nuclear power.
> they didn't have the guts, being voted in again was more important
Isn't this how democracy is supposed to work? Isn't it, as a general rule, preferable that politicians fear being voted out, and so do the things that the voters want, so they get reelected? The alternative seems to me for a politician to say one thing in the campaign - what the people want to hear, and then do something else when elected - what he thinks is best. Some do that, but they're not loved for it.
I am pretty sure that even when or if politicians do not care about the voters, they still do not do the right thing, but some other wrong thing, like enriching themselves.
What you are in fact complaining about is that politicians elected by other people did what those people wanted, instead of what you wanted. While not laying the same complaint on those you voted for - greens. They obviously did right to listen to their voters - you and people you agree with.
It's not about the guts of a chosen few. It's about humanity overall. If we do not care about the environment, billions of us, a handful who care will not, can not change much.
Greta Thinberg’s speech at the UN a few years ago is crystal clear. Climate is collapsing, it is an actionable situation, and we choose to do pretty much nothing about it.
> Even if there is a technological solution, as things get worse it gets harder to deploy it.
As the world gets hotter, some people will benefit. Those people will try to stop any serious attempts to reverse course, especially when the next generation comes (to them, the current climate is normal - why would we want to spend lots of money to revert it to the way it was hundreds of years ago).
A 2/3/4 C rise in global temperature is going to happen, and humans might put the brakes on, but they will never put it back the way it was.
You can do a lot of things about it. You can talk about it, you can gather data, you can vote politically and with your wallet, you can reduce your consumption, you can set the example for others, you can research, you can help in current organizations which are doing things about it... there is actually so much you can do if you really care. But people ale don't really care bc. putting in the work is harder than blindly consume and doom
The emissions trend is slowing. We have the technology we need in order to change course, we're just not deploying it fast enough.
The worst projections, at least, are off the table: we're not headed for 6 degrees of warming, we're on track for 3, and I strongly suspect we'll end up closer to 2 degrees of warming.
That is going to be terrible. People will die, wars will be fought, and we'll see the largest migrations in human history with all the attendant political upheaval and barbarity, but we'll still be here. Humans as a species are going to make it.
For me, I found it helpful to go and work in climate. So long as I wasn't actively working to solve the problem, I was driven mad by the knowledge that we were heading for disaster.
It might be two degrees warmer this century. Life will go on just fine. Possibly better in some ways and places. No problem, relatively speaking, compared to the hazards our ancestors face.
If it warms 5C, we might have a real problem on our hands. I don’t think we can predict that, and I don’t think it will happen over 100-200 year timescales.
Many people seem to think there will be mass die offs, the ocean will become unsurvivable acidic, and crops won’t grow. I don’t think any of that will happen anytime soon. I think there is a very strong “doom” instinct in humans to think this is the last generation, the end of times. This is just the latest manifestation.
> Many people seem to think there will be mass die offs
Humans have already caused many mass die offs. Go into a forest today and try to catch dinner with your bare hands and you'll find it is near impossible. Yet it used to be possible - that's how our ancestors lived.
Us inventing aids like the bow and arrow has depleted the wild animal population enough that we now couldn't survive without such aids.
And what exactly is preventing us from getting to 5C? We can squabble all we want about what temperature will be "problematic" and the timeline to get there but the trend is set and continuing.
One thing I realize is that of I have known that 20 years ago I would probably not have had children.
I am quite worried about the world we are leaving them and when they are about 80 in 2080 the world is predicted to be hell. I would not be surprised if they decided not to have children themselves.
I read that in France the number of vasectomies among 25-ish is exploding. This may not be a good indication, though, because vasectomy was not popular in France in the first place (and still requires z 4 month cool down time, by law)
I've never quite understood this worldview, my children are born _because_ the problems at hand are huge. The only chance the next generation has are educated, intelligent, hardworking people with enough grit and resources to take these matters into their own hands and continue executing on one of the most spectacular economical and technological turnarounds of all human history.
That and preparing them for it is exactly what I'm capable of. Kids from religious fundamentalists will come on their own, whether the worlds needs them or not.
I chose to have children despite reflecting long and hard on this question. I hope to raise children who become adults who can endure.
My ~recent ancestors endured hardship that would push me to my limits but it was their daily existence. They fought in the American Revolution, they fired the first shots at the Whiskey Rebellion, they were directly involved in the Civil War, and on it goes, up to my father and his brothers and my brother and myself. I hope that my own children can find resiliency. I'm not sure what the point is otherwise.
Interesting to read you say that, last time I posted on here that climate change was a major component of my wife and I deciding not to have children, a bunch of people pissed all over that, and I was surprised because It thought it was relatively pragmatic?
>>I read that in France the number of vasectomies among 25-ish is exploding. This may not be a good indication, though, because vasectomy was not popular in France in the first place (and still requires z 4 month cool down time, by law)
We will see how they'll will feel about it after they'll grow older and they will need help from other people and those people won't exist.
I like to think that in 50 million years when we're long gone, whatever has evolved from the burrowing mammal that survived the mess we've caused will be looking at a thin brown layer in the geological record and wondering quite what caused the mass extinction event.
One of the crackpot ideas will be that an earlier civilisation managed to mess up the entire planet, but that's so ludicrous that they will conclude it was most likely a weird asteroid impact or something like that.
My uncle bought me a book on climate change in the 90s when I was a kid. I have spent all my life knowing we are moving in the wrong direction and chose to use my voting power and my purse accordingly.
The issue we really face is that the needed change is fundamentally incompatible with the way wealth is accumulated on the top today, how growth is expected and required at every step.
That means the first change that needs to happen is purely mental: Either we march into doom to make a bit more money for the richest or we restructure our system so it doesn't need growth to provide wealth. And once we have that mental change the next harder step will be convincing the powers that be to implement it.
We are now farther in terms of the mental question than in say 2010, but things move too slow and many people have not fully realized the existential nature of the problem.
The Change needed is refused by the people. We would rather die and kill most of the biological world than face economic austerity, so we get what we order.
> In this study, we conducted a representative survey across 125 countries, interviewing nearly 130,000 individuals. Our findings reveal widespread support for climate action. Notably, 69% of the global population expresses a willingness to contribute 1% of their personal income, 86% endorse pro-climate social norms and 89% demand intensified political action.
It's not a matter of the environment vs economic austerity, rejected by the people, it's the environment vs corporate abuse, rejected by those in power.
It is actually worse than that. Even the relatively small amounts of money we are willing to spend to combat this are often not spent well.
One example, is rooftop solar. Rooftop solar is very, very, expensive compared to utility grade solar. A dollar that goes to subsidize residential rooftop solar is a dollar that would go much, much further if it was used to subsidize utility grade solar or wind.
Another example of poor decision making is Germany which decided to start shutting down nuclear power plants while they were still burning coal. So last year hard coal and lignite still produced 35.3 percent in German power production (compared to 35.2% from renewables. (https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/coal-germany). Before the phase out of nuclear, it generated about 25% of the electricity. It is all really hard to believe...
I think the return on investment on most proposed “changes” is negative. I don’t see any evidence that most of the biological world is hurdling towards destruction from climate.
If we turned off the fossil fuel tap today, I think life on earth would get markedly worse for humans, with negligible/no impact on fauna.
The people always do the right thing when it is almost too late. Same thing as World War II, we Americans ignored and avoided the war as long as we possibly could. I still wonder at the miracle of Japan attacking Pearl Harbor, had they not, it is likely that we'd be in the middle of a Nazi new world order. For this climate challenge, perhaps we can hope for some disastrous flood, or horrific hurricane, to help convince your average voter that this is not something that will just go away by itself and we need to take it seriously.
An optimistic outlook is that we have the knowledge and resources to adapt to a changing environment without loss of life. A realistic counter to that is if we were able to utilise these resources and knowledge effectively then we wouldn’t have found ourselves in this situation. An outlook that splits the difference is… we’ve made mistakes but maybe crisis is what’s required to get everyone working together using our resources and knowledge for the greater good.
A sad outlook is that we are all rich people living charmed lives that are not at risk so we can bury our heads in the sand. We aren’t the people who will die from our mistakes.
Not that I needed convincing but the Covid pandemic demonstrated how hard it is to fight nature. When nature decides to have a go at us, earthquakes, tsunamis, pandemics, technology always seems to be on the losing end. We think we're so powerful with our technology but compared to the forces of nature we are not.
EDIT: We also can't really seem to get our act together and collaborate across the planet.
The hope is that we don't get to a place where positive feedback really pummels us and find some sort of equilibrium. It's hard to say and these are the sorts of games we should not play. If the earth completely changes into a human or life unfriendly place our technology won't save us.
Another bit of hope is that the planet has been warmer in the more distant past. I think we're technically still in an ice age.
I feel the opposite regarding Covid. The world reacted pretty quickly and more or less rationally, solutions have been found and implemented with minimal delays, in a more or less coordinated fashion. All of this moved incredibly fast compared to the general pace.
A huge part of the economy has been voluntarily stopped, which is insane to think about, nobody would have thought that was possible before the pandemics happened.
I live up in the Alps in Switzerland. There is barely any snow this year. The rivers don't have as much water as usual but the real effects will only be visible later this year.
The water is missing in other places, Italy's north heavily depends on mountain water for their farming. This is going to be a very dry year. Either forcing them to lower the quality of real Italian pasta or again increasing the prices. Also wine from the whole region will not do well this year.
In french the fragil botanical environment is changing so much that their cheese doesn't reach the usual quality anymore.
This sounds like little things maybe, but those are huge traditional markets dying in front of our eyes.
Things are changing very rapidly. I don't know how or why there would be any optimism about this.
Similar thing happened where I live in Brisbane, Australia. A couple of weeks ago the Bureau of Meteorology (our government weather service) predicted 20mm of rain the next day. Instead we got 200mm. They are normally pretty good.
They explained the moisture in the air was at record levels this year because the sea surface temperature was 1.5 C above normal. We all knew the moisture was at record levels because Brisbane (in a temperate zone) was getting sustained levels of humidity that exceeded the levels experiences in the far northern tropics, 3000 km away. Even on a relatively mild day at say 30C, you could not walk up a hill without being drenched in your own sweat. Since their weather models had never see humidity like this sustained for weeks and weeks (it was an all-time record yesterday), they were wrong. It's doubly surprising because were in a El Nino, which should bring dry spells.
The result of all that rain was continuous storms lasting for week, at the peak bring category 3 cyclone winds (exceeding 130 km/hr), concrete power pylons being blown over (never happened before), power outages for weeks in some areas, flooding and deaths in metropolitan areas. Most of came without much warning because the aforementioned models were wrong. It's been a wild ride.
What blows me away is in West Asia the sea surface temperature was 5 C above normal this year, over three times what we are experiencing. I can't imagine what that is like.
You are of course entirely right. humanity will continue to exist. That is not what the people are saying.
What will happen, and what is in fact already happening : food gets more expensive, people have to migrate because their current location is no longer viable, more disasters, and more conflict resulting all of that.
Humanity is not going extinct any time soon. But what sort of world do you want to leave to our kids? Should our objectives be not a tad higher than “oh well, life will be worse but at least as a species well still exist”?
Also note that while we have only started “writing” since a couple of thousand years, and indeed keeping track for less than that, we do have the natural record. That may not be as precise as the written record, but there is a lot of it over a very long time. That natural record puts boundaries on previous temperatures.
You’re entitled to feel that you don’t want to change your ways for the benefit for others. That is not ideal but it’s the rules. Don’t deny and invent false narratives to prevent feeling guilty though.
There are people alive now who knew people born more than 150 years ago. Hell I'm in my forties and remember chats with my great grandmother born in the 1880's. And we've had writing for thousands of years, of course.
DACCCS is currently insufficiently mature to estimate how "reversible" any specific level of warming is, but current policies are expected to limit warming to 2 to 3 °C by 2100, compared to over 4 °C where no policies were implemented. Net zero emissions by 2050 would even be compatible with 1.5 °C, and that is well within what is achievable with current technology. Plus, with AR6, we have the first estimate of the zero emissions commitment over 50 years, and it is centred around zero, with a 90% CI of roughly ±0.3 °C, meaning it is likely (with "low confidence", meaning this is our first time doing it as part of CMIP) that changes in 20 year average temperatures will be quite small after complete cessation of emissions. That means assuming we ended up on a trajectory like 2 °C by 2100, if we wanted to reverse GSAT at least we would have a better than 66% chance of having another 5 decades of research and development and deployment (plus the 7 decades it took to get there), so once we get to zero emissions it becomes much less urgent.
There will still be permanent changes to the biosphere, but there is no reason to feel doomed.
China's climate change policies are largely about adaptation to climate change, not just mitigation or prevention[0] From the article on China's adaptation policies:
> As Freymann details, these efforts include “constructing the largest water transfer system in human history; expanding and raising nearly 6,000 miles of sea walls along its coasts; building a strategic grain reserve larger than the rest of the world’s combined; carving wetland flood basins in the centers of its largest cities; restoring coastal wetlands to act as buffers against storms; and relocating hundreds of thousands of ‘ecological migrants’ in low-lying areas.”
Reading your question made me think of this article.
It seems like a lot of time was wasted decades ago in the US on not transitioning away from fossil fuels or trying to become carbon neutral, but that's crying over spilled milk. I'm not going to doom about the effects of something that mostly happened before I was born; that's almost like becoming an alternate history theorist.
> I guess my real question is: how do you incorporate all of this change into your worldview and outlook?
To answer your question directly, I just hope more of my generation (generation Z) does less climate change denial or doomerism, and does more voting and climate change activism. And not just for feel-good policy like planting trees, but climate change adaptation, like China.
The positive feedback loop is very troubling to me. I don't know I believe humans are doomed, but I'm quite sure the earth will be a miserable place to reside in the no-so-distant future.
>how do you incorporate all of this change into your worldview and outlook?
This is going to be a cynical take by HN's standard. It actually reinforce some of the fundamentals of humans beings that our ancestors has somehow understood far better than we do today.
It is that "Interest" matters. Needs are driven by interest. You cant just say the world is going to end in 100 years time and we need to stop eating meat and turn off all heaters etc etc. You also cant tell company to stop earning money or lower profits margin just because of "Good". What technology do however is that we innovate so others cant say NO.
We are now at a time where non-fossil fuels, or Wind and Solar is cheaper, and will continue to get cheaper in the future. The economy of scale is there. To the point unless the Government TAX on non-fossil fuels, the pure force of this momentum meant it is only a matter of time. I use the term non-fossil fuels because renewable doesn't include nuclear, personally I am a big fan of GE BWRX-300.
All in all in am actually quite optimistic. We are slowly solving it.
I don't feel any abnormal weather at all. Neither in Singapore, nor in Germany (both places where I have family and regularly stay). In my 40 years on this planet, we have always had winters with meters of snow and we have always had summers so hot that they closed schools.
Both of these events were rare and they were AMAZING and everyone was either taking out their sleds or spending the day at the beach.
We have also always had floods at the Rhine river.
I feel convinced to participate in climate change in my work. I don't know whether we can reverse it or whether tech will solve it, but I do believe in its importance, and I want to understand it. I have incorporated all of this change into my worldview by finding ways to improve morale in the community, and recently, by switching careers from software development into sustainable innovation.
I dont think we've taking into account climate change acceleration either. I believe the tipping point will come and go before people really accept its a problem and try to hit the brakes but by then it will be waaaaaaay past the reasonable time to change our ways. Within a generation whats left of us will be living underground and popping up at night to breathe some "fresh" hot air. Say sorry to your kids.
Yep. I’m old enough to know nothing will change and the shift hard right in politics all but guarantees it. Enjoy every moment you can while it lasts. Capitalism FTW BABY! There’s no going back.
22C here last weekend in southern Europe, and all I hear are people saying nice! We are doomed, and I already feel like a climate refugee trying to relocate to somewhere cooler. But then the gulf stream will probably fail! I feel like we cant solve this when there is no political/economical motive, or willingness for people to sacrifice.
I sincerely believe it’s just a matter of question of determination whether we want to solve this problem. If we were able to send people on the Moon as fast as we did, I don’t think we can’t do something in a decade to significantly reverse this trend. We clearly aren’t determined enough…
I feel dread for sure.. like plagues from the past may reappear. Especially famine. When I watch documentaries about disappeared civilisations, I now get vertigo.
I think the pressure for drastic, technical solutions will mount sharply and ideas like that solar shade will be seriously considered.
And it isn't so expensive to turn things around. An estimated 100-200% in global GDP is needed to reach carbon net zero by 2050. Annually we need to spend 2-6% of GDP to get there.
No, not at all. Trying to put a measurement on all of earth is nonsense and pretending that proxies allow us to extend it further back in time is even more hubris.
Since I don't have the resources or power to deal with the problem, I don't worry about it. Nothing I can do. My conscience is perfectly clean.
My only advice is that we need to fix the monetary system first or else we'll never be able to escape the cycle of deception.
We'll never know what is real or not real or who we can trust or not trust.
Once we have a functioning monetary system based on hard money, only then will we be able to see what problems are real and come up with innovations that solve humanity's real problems... Who knows, that might include climate change...
Our current political reality is fake and we can never get to the truth while our monetary policies distort incentives. Almost all narratives nowadays are founded on deception and they compete against each other for mindshare... Once they cross a certain threshold, it's too easy for certain narratives to use monetary incentives to reinforce their own propagation; a powerful ecosystem of government organizations develops around the narrative and then private companies follow suit to get their contracts.
There are literally no honest narratives even in the running at this point. Once honest people see how the sausage gets made in the centers of power, they lose the heart to push their honest agendas. Only deceptive agendas remain.
Today, I'm not even in a position to answer the question of whether or not climate change is real and caused by humans because I cannot trust the current system or the 'experts' in relevant fields to provide me with that information. For all I know, the promoted experts could be 'incentivized' to the eyeballs to lean in a certain direction.
I cannot trust them because I cannot trust the system which selected them. I'm an expert in my own field and I've seen how the sausage is made there. If that's how it works in my field, why wouldn't it work the same way in other fields?
If I am to go by my own experiences of modern political organizations, I should believe the opposite of what the experts say.
The trends are not reversible, but they may be attenuated if we don't adopt a "dooomed" worldview. In the french speaking world, there's a wave of eco-angriness starting to replace eco-anxiety and that's a welcome change.
People are getting involved and putting their ass on the line to stop this madness. At a great cost, given that cops regularly maim and sometimes murder ecological activists trying to stop ecocidal projects (see NDDL / Sivens / Sainte Soline).
We have a choice to make: destroy capitalism and its consumption lifestyle, or let it destroy humanity and millions of other species. I strongly recommend watching END:CIV, a 20-year-old documentary that hasn't aged a bit.
If it warms 2-3C as the IPCC predicts, humanity will still be thriving in the 2100s. Capitalism will still be kicking along just fine, and we ll probably be richer than ever.
I didn't need 12 months of record breaking world abnormal weather for that.
The previous, continuous trend upwards for decades was already bad enough, with extreme events becoming increasingly common and extremer. You have a complex system, you apply a continuous big enough pressure to it, and you get global average that is slowly rising up even if some days look normal, and, somewhere, somewhat, some days, weird things are happening. And the very concept of positive feedback loops causing that this problem is not worsening in a linear way. That is a very bad trend, that it would just take time to hit around me.
But the doomerism part doesn't come from just there. It comes from the human world. Not doing anything about it, big money making big disinformation campaings to avoid normal people to take action, big capital and top industrialized countries not doing anything about that, and adding even more disruptive activity (along with some token measures that are not in the same order than the others), official global climate organizations being taken over in front of everyone, smaller countries are being sued for taking measures to minimize impact. There is no will to fix this, to stop worsening the situation.
So you have a system that is being disrupted in big scale for decades, that is taken out of its inertia and balance by that continuous and increasing push, you start to see that it is slowly getting out of control. And there is no will to take out that push, at most you get some Newspeak way of ensuring people that something is being done. And when things really becomes desperate, we won't have decades to wait for a slow, orderly unwinding to have some effect. So some desperate extra push on a system that we still don't understand will be sold as idea of geoengineering, moving the system towards a new, even more unstable situation.
There is where my doomerism lies, not in the symptom of a string of broken records.
Someone I knew said "I'm an optimist because it's the only thing worth being." As much as anything, optimism is an act of will, because if things can't and won't get better, what the hell's the point of anything?
More concretely, though, I do think there's some technological levers that can be applied towards CO2 reduction & capture, bioremediation, and adaptation. I don't think they're the optimal answer - the optimal answer was us recognizing we're spending on credit a hundred years ago - but I think they're the answers we're going to use, so that's where most of my effort is.
I've mentioned this elsewhere, but - I got a job a while back that I think helps move the world in the right direction, and my god has it made a difference in my ability to handle all this. It's still not easy to look at, but it's easier when you're not burning all your energy on something orthogonal to what you actually care about. If you can live with the lower pay, I promise it's worth it for the improved ability to sleep at night.
"recorded history".. glacial maximums and minimums..
Also would be very helpful to look at the worst case predictions and what that would entail hundred years down the line.
Its not cool but it really not that bad. Definitely not apocalyptic.
Its also worth it to consider whats the alternative because every version of an alternative is exponentially worse (communism and/or luddite primitive feudalism).
I think it's fixable but, you know, not sure I much care anymore. I think most people don't want a fix. They want to publicly wring their hands, gnash their teeth and wail and moan.
We should be doing more about wetlands restoration. I think it's a no brainer that a substantial part of the problem is the eradication of 85 percent of global wetlands since the 1700s but it largely goes unnoticed because, I don't know, not enough hopelessness and sense of personal guilt to relate to?
I don't get it. But my life sucks and refuses to stop sucking and I am unlikely to live too much longer, so whatevs. Y'all run around screaming and flailing your arms like Kermit the frog if that's what floats your boat.
I have children and I'm freaking out for their future. Really really not a good situation. I'm pissed off we have Putin being a dick face rather than all world "leaders" working together to save the planet for the sake of their offspring's futures. Billionaires building apocalypse bunkers and then, the biggest concern of all, another potential term of "why don't we just nuke the hurricanes?" I mean, not looking great.
I think the panic will come soon though then it will just be too hard to ignore. Might be too late to do much about it by then.
Yeah, denialism is definitely one way to keep one's mood up. The problem is that we, and our children, have to live in the resulting world, and that reality will be worse if we don't act today.
The vast, vast majority of people who are better equipped than myself - and likely you - disagree.
But let's put that aside. Let's put aside the fact that the mechanisms involved are demonstrable and simple enough for children to understand.
Even as laypeople, we can observe that in the past ten years there's been year after year after year of once-in-a-century catastrophic weather events. The odds of these being unrelated anomalies decrease every time. Unprecedented heat waves and forest fires across the North America, all the way up into the arctic, with entire towns burning to the ground. Deadly ice storms in Texas. God-sized hurricanes. In isolation these could be hand-waved away - in aggregate, they clearly point towards catastrophe.
No one really ever wants to discuss this, the issues with the data, the missing data, the statistical techniques used to fill in that data, how the models are derived, the funding situation with climate research and the quality issues with all of it.
It seems like the only acceptable answer is the sky is falling and we're all going to die.
Maybe both things can be true: there is a man made effect on the climate and it's difficult to measure and a lot of the research quality is poor.
Perhaps humans have adapted to difficult climates throughout our entire existence.
Perhaps the models that predict the end of the world are a bit extreme, and there are conflicting interests.
I’ve yet to find it again, but I read an interesting commentary recently noting that the bulk of enthusiasm in press coverage, and for spending money, is on the long term prevention side (“decarbonization” etc), while no real press or spending is directed at the survival/relocation side, and this is an interesting data point to some.
The amount of climate change denial in these comments is both concerning and absurd.
Anthropogenic climate change is real. It sucks, and we’re experiencing the results of it today. If you do not believe this, please consider who the experts on this very complex topic would be (climatologists, meteorologists, etc), and listen to what 99% of them are saying.
Can you provide a single link to a professional organization or group of relevant scientists that states humans are not causing global warming, or states that we cannot affect change? If there is “broad disagreement” it should be easy.
Why is it concerning? Why is what other people think a concern to you? No need to answer, its rhetorical, some non confrontational phrasing of "because I need them to behave the way I want them to behave in order to achieve my noble goals."
So you can't solve the problem yourself, you need the help of people who are uninterested in helping you or catastrophe awaits. There's no more perfect rationale as precursor to authoritarianism today.
Why cry over spilt milk? Go outside, enjoy life, the weather is nice. You can show me a million graphs from authoritative sources that demand respect in academic circles, so long as me and my lover can prance through a meadow picking wildflowers I'm not worried about it. I'd like to live in the real world for as much time as I have on this earth as I can. I can't save the world, I'd rather not get my blood pressure up looking at pie charts telling me I'm doomed, all I can do is accept that I live in a changing environment and enjoy the beauty of the world. It is still really beautiful out there you know.
When I see others buying into propaganda, and then voting for policy that will hasten the end of human kind, I get concerned. We're not crying over spilled milk; we're actively trying to stop the milk from continuing to pour all over the floor.
Your passive attitude, which equates to plugging your ears, closing your eyes, and shutting off your mind, is the same attitude that allows genocides to be committed while you "prance through a meadow".
To be clear, I go outside and enjoy life daily. The difference is that I accept the mountains of evidence that say we must, individually and collectively, adjust our way of living to preserve this benefit for our children. And no, the weather isn't always nice; the last several summers have been choked with wildfire smoke.
When you look at the chart, it's odd that the temperature rise started only in the 1980s. Or at least what you can see in the chart. People have been burning wood and coal for centuries. The industrial revolution happened in the 19th century. There were railroads and airplanes. And big industry in the 1950s and 60s. So it's what we are seeing there. Just the delayed reaction toall of that? Or is there something especially grave that happened immediately before the 1980s?
World population was 2 billion in 1930, 3 billion in 1960, and 4.5 billion in 1980. Today the world population is a bit under 8 billion. The Earth could easily support many more than 8 billion people with the right technology install base, I don't want to give the impression that population is an issue in itself, it isn't. However, with the predominant technologies being oil-based transportation, coal-based power, and carbon intensive agriculture throughout that period and continuing today, the size of our economy (enabled by the size of our population) is capable of a much greater degree of warming through GHG emissions than we were in the 1960s, let alone the 1800s.
This is such a terrible situation. We need depopulation but every country's economy seems to be based on infinite growth and can't deal with an aging population.
I'm scared the best case scenario will end up being "the world gets so hot it kills enough people to stop getting hotter." I don't know a lot about climate change but I don't thing the Earth will simply reset when enough people die, considering the melting ice caps won't just unmelt because of that.
Part of the dramatic rise occurring after the 1970s is a direct response to the clean air / pollution legislation that started getting passed in western countries. Pollution seeds the air with potent cloud condensation nuclei, creating a higher average cloud cover, and reflecting more shortwave solar radiation. We've got cleaner healthier air, but less cloudy.
I believe there was also a noticeable effect from the pollution decrease when global shipping dropped during covid, you had less cloud cover from ship trails, and more solar radiation reaching the surface.
There are many counteracting natural processes on Earth that keep the climate relatively stable in all directions. For instance, oceans can just absorb quite a large amount of CO2, thus preventing a greenhouse gas effect from occurring in the atmosphere. Polar icecaps also melt and that absorbs a huge amount of energy, stabilizing the temperature.
Eventually, many of these processes become depleted and global average temperature starts to rise.
The chart is relative to the 20th century average, so even though values before 1980 are less than 0, it doesn’t mean warming hadn’t started. It is just that around 1980 we got clearly above the average of the 20th century.
Imagine this wasn’t deviation from average, but absolute values and ignore the blue/red colors. Then notice the trend — it is getting warmer through all the 20th century. I think, I can easily see a trend line already from 1910.
That's just the point that it crosses the average temp for the 20th century and crosses over to being above that average. It's climbing before that too.
The number of people burning wood and oil has increased during that time, the total volume of CO2 released by human activity has steadily increased since the industrial revolution.
If you look at the charts again you'll see the temp. has been rising more and more in response since the industrial revolution.
As a peer comment noted, you can ignore the 0 degree line, the article uses two different epoch markers, these are just arbitary convention.
I think that’s because that’s when we started having weather satellites that could take consistent measurements.
I really find it hard to believe you can compare temperature measurements “globally” before 1950s with any sort of consistency or accuracy. Today’s infrared thermometers for fevers have a 2F accuracy. You’re telling me that you can calculate temperatures from around the world pre-1950s and trust that it’s consistent and accurate?
> You’re telling me that you can calculate temperatures from around the world pre-1950s and trust that it’s consistent and accurate?
Consistent and within an envelope of accuracy, sure.
Today we can even compare high resolution, many measurement point global tempreture distributions against what would be projected if we only had the same stations from the 1850s - 1950s.
Recall that pre GPS navigation was highly reliant on accurate time pieces which were highly reliant on accurate tempreture, humidity, air pressure readings. From the 1850s onward there are highly reliable records from scientific grade instruments at trading ports about the globe.
>I really find it hard to believe you can compare temperature measurements “globally” before 1950s with any sort of consistency
You're right to be skeptical and we can't. There isn't even a single "global temperature" today. There is, for example, a global surface temperature measured by satellites and ground stations, except where there is cloud cover and no ground stations. It is extrapolated in such places based on mathematical models. Also a satellite passes only so often across certain area (or takes low resolutions photos if at geostationary orbit) so data is further extrapolated in time. And that is only the surface. What about the depths of the oceans and the thickness of the atmosphere? Is this what is meant when they make claims like "hottest 12 months" on record? If yes, it tells you nothing about true "global temperature".
"Global temperature" today is a mathematical construct, a model based on limited sensor data. A LOT is extrapolated in that model. How exactly you do that affects the results you get.
We don't have consistent measurements across the thickness of the atmosphere and depth of the oceans. There are sporadic measurements, like satellite measurement of cloud cover temperature and knowing how high this cloud cover is, but what's going on below and above? It's all filled in by "the models". Models people wrote to behave how they expect they should behave.
Capacities of your specific chinese broken thermometer doesn't tell much about how scientists measured temperatures decades ago, does it.
And 2F spread ain't right, doctors use rather precise instruments that need some experience to be used correctly though, we have one at home too for kids since wife is a doctor (not a pediatrician but its manageable).
> Today’s infrared thermometers for fevers have a 2F accuracy. You’re telling me that you can calculate temperatures from around the world pre-1950s and trust that it’s consistent and accurate?
Yes. Believe it or not, the average of multiple calibrated measurements is more accurate than some random off the shelf consumer electronics. My laptop display has a delta E of about 20 out of the box. If someone calibrates it they could bring it down to 5, most likely. I have no trouble believing an actually decent panel can achieve less than 3.
I can probably finagle a way of measuring haemoglobin with my kitchen equipment and some reagents I order off eBay. I might even get one sig fig out of that. That doesn't mean the literal bottom shelf crap I use is going to be the absolute limit of possible precision.
I mean, what kind of argument even is that? "I can't make similar measurements using the equipment I have at home, therefore climate scientists must have either no idea what error bars are or are lying"?
My first guess is that Mao Tse Tung basically kept China in a pre-industrial communist fever dream until he died and the reformers, like Deng Xiaopeng, took over in the late 70s. Then China, a nation of 1 billion people, did a speed-run on the last 300 years of Western industrial history in about 30 years. At the same time the US underwent a mass de-regulation and neo-Globalization was off to the races.
edit - good example, Toyota. Right around the 70s/80s they became a massive multinational exporter. This is enabled by pax Americana and neo-liberal free trade policies which, for example, allowed Toyota to import to the US in large numbers and also build factories inside the US itself, multiply by several other companies in several other countries, massive growth. Before this time global trade was far more limited.
If we take the stock market as an analogy for energy (and hence pollution) there is just a massive explosion starting around 1980. people forget that the stock market used to be kind of boring and went down alot. https://www.macrotrends.net/1319/dow-jones-100-year-historic...
edit - another good one. The US trade balance. I.e. the rise of the foreign nations who had "interesting" currency policies and manufacturing exports designed for the US, in order to get USD so they could participate in globalism, buy oil (sold mostly in USD), and modernize. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globalization#/media/File:U.S....
In Greece we practically didn't have a winter this year. Temperatures are above 15 degrees Celcius for most months since November. On the other hand we had a catastrophic rain of epic proportions that flooded an entire county. As I speak I sit in my office with the windows open since it's 18 degrees outside. I dread of what might come during summer.
The climate change pattern (for now) seems to be a steady anthropogenic long term rise of average temperatures, overlaid by a pattern of natural fluctuations (El Nino etc.). This leads to new highs with some periodicity.
It is not clear for how long this pattern will persist. There is the issue of tipping points in what is a very complex dynamic system (atmosphere, oceans, permafrost, polar regions etc.)
The everyday analogy is boiling water in a pot. As we slowly inject heat at the bottom of the pot, the patterns of water motion change a lot as the temperature rises. First some occasional air bubble, then some visible currents, eventually just a chaotic, unstable, mess.
Now if only the frogs inside the pot would stop gazing at the gently rising air bubbles and realise that this is not all there is to it, future frogs might be very deeply inconvenienced...
I'm far more concerned with plastics, forever chemicals, highly processed foods that didn't exist a century or so ago. Dramatic hormone shifts as a result of that last bit.
Not to mention desertification and a lack of regenerative farming practices.
There's also pollution in general.
While climate change is concerning, recorded history is a pretty narrow window and there's evidence to support warmer periods in Earth history.
The effects of proposed measures are also very concerning and are pretty warped to outright insane. Especially the bits intertwined with the cult of vegan.
> Dramatic hormone shifts as a result of that last bit.
A result of the foods or a result of obesity facilitated by them? What is the evidence basis for there being clinically significant changes in hormone levels in the population at large?
Sperm counts have been dripping precipitously, even when you control for BMI and other factors. I don’t believe it’s a coincidence it’s occurred at the same time as many people deciding they don’t want children along with a bunch of other possibly related societal shifts.
I myself am on testosterone replacement therapy, though my low levels were probably from a brain injury. I’m a very different man when my levels are correct, and have straight up embarrassed myself when they haven’t been with how I’ve acted.
I agree with the person above, it’s a much bigger problem for the human race itself than global warming and nobody seems to give a damn.
I've seen fairly compelling evidence of hormone level change in the Western world, though it seems unclear what the exact causes are. An accessible reference is Count Down -- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50892327-count-down
The "good news" is that it's been an El Niño season, so temperatures are elevated by it anyway. The next couple of years should be cooler, until we start breaking records again.
Readit News
Do others here feel similarly? Do you think these trends are reversible? Is technology the solution? Something else?
I guess my real question is: how do you incorporate all of this change into your worldview and outlook?
I've accepted it though. I don't doomer at people unless they ask. I can't do anything about the situation. I've voted for green parties and politics my whole life. If I have blame it's not for denialists, it's for all those politicians who know and accept the science but did nothing, they didn't have the guts, being voted in again was more important.
It does make me sad to see so many HN comments rolling out the same stupid "I don't trust the data" arguments that were pretty thoroughly debunked within the scientific community 10 years ago, yet still feel the need to jump on every thread about it because the whole thing makes them so angry.
I've heard scenarios put as mild as a reduction in real GDP growth, which is just a non-issue compared to the risks people want to shoulder to mitigate climate change.
> I've voted for green parties and politics my whole life
These people tend to be anti-nuclear in my experience; so I'm not sure from your comment if that strategy is a good idea. Environmentalists have been some of the more effective lobby groups for locking in fossil fuel use through 1980-2020 when we really should have been transitioning to nuclear power.
Green party in Germany forced the country to close down its nuclear reactors and use coal instead, increasing the emissions.
Isn't this how democracy is supposed to work? Isn't it, as a general rule, preferable that politicians fear being voted out, and so do the things that the voters want, so they get reelected? The alternative seems to me for a politician to say one thing in the campaign - what the people want to hear, and then do something else when elected - what he thinks is best. Some do that, but they're not loved for it.
I am pretty sure that even when or if politicians do not care about the voters, they still do not do the right thing, but some other wrong thing, like enriching themselves.
What you are in fact complaining about is that politicians elected by other people did what those people wanted, instead of what you wanted. While not laying the same complaint on those you voted for - greens. They obviously did right to listen to their voters - you and people you agree with.
It's not about the guts of a chosen few. It's about humanity overall. If we do not care about the environment, billions of us, a handful who care will not, can not change much.
https://youtu.be/KAJsdgTPJpU?si=WvYvu1eTcEqztYtq
As the world gets hotter, some people will benefit. Those people will try to stop any serious attempts to reverse course, especially when the next generation comes (to them, the current climate is normal - why would we want to spend lots of money to revert it to the way it was hundreds of years ago).
A 2/3/4 C rise in global temperature is going to happen, and humans might put the brakes on, but they will never put it back the way it was.
Our ancestors survived ice ages.
>> I've voted for green parties and politics my whole life.
You are part of the problem why we are burning coal instead of using nuclear power.
The worst projections, at least, are off the table: we're not headed for 6 degrees of warming, we're on track for 3, and I strongly suspect we'll end up closer to 2 degrees of warming.
That is going to be terrible. People will die, wars will be fought, and we'll see the largest migrations in human history with all the attendant political upheaval and barbarity, but we'll still be here. Humans as a species are going to make it.
For me, I found it helpful to go and work in climate. So long as I wasn't actively working to solve the problem, I was driven mad by the knowledge that we were heading for disaster.
Curious, can you say what you switched from and to?
It might be two degrees warmer this century. Life will go on just fine. Possibly better in some ways and places. No problem, relatively speaking, compared to the hazards our ancestors face.
If it warms 5C, we might have a real problem on our hands. I don’t think we can predict that, and I don’t think it will happen over 100-200 year timescales.
Many people seem to think there will be mass die offs, the ocean will become unsurvivable acidic, and crops won’t grow. I don’t think any of that will happen anytime soon. I think there is a very strong “doom” instinct in humans to think this is the last generation, the end of times. This is just the latest manifestation.
Humans have already caused many mass die offs. Go into a forest today and try to catch dinner with your bare hands and you'll find it is near impossible. Yet it used to be possible - that's how our ancestors lived.
Us inventing aids like the bow and arrow has depleted the wild animal population enough that we now couldn't survive without such aids.
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I am quite worried about the world we are leaving them and when they are about 80 in 2080 the world is predicted to be hell. I would not be surprised if they decided not to have children themselves.
I read that in France the number of vasectomies among 25-ish is exploding. This may not be a good indication, though, because vasectomy was not popular in France in the first place (and still requires z 4 month cool down time, by law)
That and preparing them for it is exactly what I'm capable of. Kids from religious fundamentalists will come on their own, whether the worlds needs them or not.
My ~recent ancestors endured hardship that would push me to my limits but it was their daily existence. They fought in the American Revolution, they fired the first shots at the Whiskey Rebellion, they were directly involved in the Civil War, and on it goes, up to my father and his brothers and my brother and myself. I hope that my own children can find resiliency. I'm not sure what the point is otherwise.
We will see how they'll will feel about it after they'll grow older and they will need help from other people and those people won't exist.
Look at the warming forecasts and how accurate they’ve been (they haven’t).
Then look at the error bars on predicting the impact to weather (they are all over the place).
A reaction like not having kids because the world will end places way to much confidence in predictions that little probability of being correct.
One of the crackpot ideas will be that an earlier civilisation managed to mess up the entire planet, but that's so ludicrous that they will conclude it was most likely a weird asteroid impact or something like that.
The issue we really face is that the needed change is fundamentally incompatible with the way wealth is accumulated on the top today, how growth is expected and required at every step.
That means the first change that needs to happen is purely mental: Either we march into doom to make a bit more money for the richest or we restructure our system so it doesn't need growth to provide wealth. And once we have that mental change the next harder step will be convincing the powers that be to implement it.
We are now farther in terms of the mental question than in say 2010, but things move too slow and many people have not fully realized the existential nature of the problem.
> In this study, we conducted a representative survey across 125 countries, interviewing nearly 130,000 individuals. Our findings reveal widespread support for climate action. Notably, 69% of the global population expresses a willingness to contribute 1% of their personal income, 86% endorse pro-climate social norms and 89% demand intensified political action.
And an interview of the authors [2]
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-024-01925-3
[2] https://www.carbonbrief.org/interview-why-global-support-for...
One example, is rooftop solar. Rooftop solar is very, very, expensive compared to utility grade solar. A dollar that goes to subsidize residential rooftop solar is a dollar that would go much, much further if it was used to subsidize utility grade solar or wind.
Another example of poor decision making is Germany which decided to start shutting down nuclear power plants while they were still burning coal. So last year hard coal and lignite still produced 35.3 percent in German power production (compared to 35.2% from renewables. (https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/coal-germany). Before the phase out of nuclear, it generated about 25% of the electricity. It is all really hard to believe...
If we turned off the fossil fuel tap today, I think life on earth would get markedly worse for humans, with negligible/no impact on fauna.
A sad outlook is that we are all rich people living charmed lives that are not at risk so we can bury our heads in the sand. We aren’t the people who will die from our mistakes.
Well my bills will be glad to know this, although it's news to me.
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EDIT: We also can't really seem to get our act together and collaborate across the planet.
The hope is that we don't get to a place where positive feedback really pummels us and find some sort of equilibrium. It's hard to say and these are the sorts of games we should not play. If the earth completely changes into a human or life unfriendly place our technology won't save us.
Another bit of hope is that the planet has been warmer in the more distant past. I think we're technically still in an ice age.
A huge part of the economy has been voluntarily stopped, which is insane to think about, nobody would have thought that was possible before the pandemics happened.
The water is missing in other places, Italy's north heavily depends on mountain water for their farming. This is going to be a very dry year. Either forcing them to lower the quality of real Italian pasta or again increasing the prices. Also wine from the whole region will not do well this year.
In french the fragil botanical environment is changing so much that their cheese doesn't reach the usual quality anymore.
This sounds like little things maybe, but those are huge traditional markets dying in front of our eyes.
Things are changing very rapidly. I don't know how or why there would be any optimism about this.
They explained the moisture in the air was at record levels this year because the sea surface temperature was 1.5 C above normal. We all knew the moisture was at record levels because Brisbane (in a temperate zone) was getting sustained levels of humidity that exceeded the levels experiences in the far northern tropics, 3000 km away. Even on a relatively mild day at say 30C, you could not walk up a hill without being drenched in your own sweat. Since their weather models had never see humidity like this sustained for weeks and weeks (it was an all-time record yesterday), they were wrong. It's doubly surprising because were in a El Nino, which should bring dry spells.
The result of all that rain was continuous storms lasting for week, at the peak bring category 3 cyclone winds (exceeding 130 km/hr), concrete power pylons being blown over (never happened before), power outages for weeks in some areas, flooding and deaths in metropolitan areas. Most of came without much warning because the aforementioned models were wrong. It's been a wild ride.
What blows me away is in West Asia the sea surface temperature was 5 C above normal this year, over three times what we are experiencing. I can't imagine what that is like.
We will find ways to adapt and survive.
What will happen, and what is in fact already happening : food gets more expensive, people have to migrate because their current location is no longer viable, more disasters, and more conflict resulting all of that.
Humanity is not going extinct any time soon. But what sort of world do you want to leave to our kids? Should our objectives be not a tad higher than “oh well, life will be worse but at least as a species well still exist”?
Also note that while we have only started “writing” since a couple of thousand years, and indeed keeping track for less than that, we do have the natural record. That may not be as precise as the written record, but there is a lot of it over a very long time. That natural record puts boundaries on previous temperatures.
You’re entitled to feel that you don’t want to change your ways for the benefit for others. That is not ideal but it’s the rules. Don’t deny and invent false narratives to prevent feeling guilty though.
Where does someone get the courage to just lie like this?
There will still be permanent changes to the biosphere, but there is no reason to feel doomed.
> As Freymann details, these efforts include “constructing the largest water transfer system in human history; expanding and raising nearly 6,000 miles of sea walls along its coasts; building a strategic grain reserve larger than the rest of the world’s combined; carving wetland flood basins in the centers of its largest cities; restoring coastal wetlands to act as buffers against storms; and relocating hundreds of thousands of ‘ecological migrants’ in low-lying areas.”
Reading your question made me think of this article.
It seems like a lot of time was wasted decades ago in the US on not transitioning away from fossil fuels or trying to become carbon neutral, but that's crying over spilled milk. I'm not going to doom about the effects of something that mostly happened before I was born; that's almost like becoming an alternate history theorist.
> I guess my real question is: how do you incorporate all of this change into your worldview and outlook?
To answer your question directly, I just hope more of my generation (generation Z) does less climate change denial or doomerism, and does more voting and climate change activism. And not just for feel-good policy like planting trees, but climate change adaptation, like China.
[0]: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/unpacking-chinas-climate-...
This is going to be a cynical take by HN's standard. It actually reinforce some of the fundamentals of humans beings that our ancestors has somehow understood far better than we do today.
It is that "Interest" matters. Needs are driven by interest. You cant just say the world is going to end in 100 years time and we need to stop eating meat and turn off all heaters etc etc. You also cant tell company to stop earning money or lower profits margin just because of "Good". What technology do however is that we innovate so others cant say NO.
We are now at a time where non-fossil fuels, or Wind and Solar is cheaper, and will continue to get cheaper in the future. The economy of scale is there. To the point unless the Government TAX on non-fossil fuels, the pure force of this momentum meant it is only a matter of time. I use the term non-fossil fuels because renewable doesn't include nuclear, personally I am a big fan of GE BWRX-300.
All in all in am actually quite optimistic. We are slowly solving it.
Both of these events were rare and they were AMAZING and everyone was either taking out their sleds or spending the day at the beach.
We have also always had floods at the Rhine river.
How do you even know what is normal weather? Can you specify an exact time when you think the weather was normal?
>> Do others here feel similarly?
No.
>> Do you think these trends are reversible?
Reversible to what? Like it was 50 years ago or 5000 years ago or 50 million years ago?
>> Is technology the solution? Something else?
People have been living anywhere from freezing arctic to hot arid deserts. We seem to be good at adapting to our environment.
Sure, humans can survive without agriculture but not billions of them.
I think the pressure for drastic, technical solutions will mount sharply and ideas like that solar shade will be seriously considered.
Two questions:
1. Is climate change averted, and a non-issue? Or has it just been pushed back for a little while?
2. What does life on earth look like, when 90% of the people you know and depend on today are just gone?
And it isn't so expensive to turn things around. An estimated 100-200% in global GDP is needed to reach carbon net zero by 2050. Annually we need to spend 2-6% of GDP to get there.
Remember every bit of Co2 not emitted counts
My only advice is that we need to fix the monetary system first or else we'll never be able to escape the cycle of deception. We'll never know what is real or not real or who we can trust or not trust.
Once we have a functioning monetary system based on hard money, only then will we be able to see what problems are real and come up with innovations that solve humanity's real problems... Who knows, that might include climate change...
Our current political reality is fake and we can never get to the truth while our monetary policies distort incentives. Almost all narratives nowadays are founded on deception and they compete against each other for mindshare... Once they cross a certain threshold, it's too easy for certain narratives to use monetary incentives to reinforce their own propagation; a powerful ecosystem of government organizations develops around the narrative and then private companies follow suit to get their contracts.
There are literally no honest narratives even in the running at this point. Once honest people see how the sausage gets made in the centers of power, they lose the heart to push their honest agendas. Only deceptive agendas remain.
Today, I'm not even in a position to answer the question of whether or not climate change is real and caused by humans because I cannot trust the current system or the 'experts' in relevant fields to provide me with that information. For all I know, the promoted experts could be 'incentivized' to the eyeballs to lean in a certain direction.
I cannot trust them because I cannot trust the system which selected them. I'm an expert in my own field and I've seen how the sausage is made there. If that's how it works in my field, why wouldn't it work the same way in other fields?
If I am to go by my own experiences of modern political organizations, I should believe the opposite of what the experts say.
People are getting involved and putting their ass on the line to stop this madness. At a great cost, given that cops regularly maim and sometimes murder ecological activists trying to stop ecocidal projects (see NDDL / Sivens / Sainte Soline).
We have a choice to make: destroy capitalism and its consumption lifestyle, or let it destroy humanity and millions of other species. I strongly recommend watching END:CIV, a 20-year-old documentary that hasn't aged a bit.
The previous, continuous trend upwards for decades was already bad enough, with extreme events becoming increasingly common and extremer. You have a complex system, you apply a continuous big enough pressure to it, and you get global average that is slowly rising up even if some days look normal, and, somewhere, somewhat, some days, weird things are happening. And the very concept of positive feedback loops causing that this problem is not worsening in a linear way. That is a very bad trend, that it would just take time to hit around me.
But the doomerism part doesn't come from just there. It comes from the human world. Not doing anything about it, big money making big disinformation campaings to avoid normal people to take action, big capital and top industrialized countries not doing anything about that, and adding even more disruptive activity (along with some token measures that are not in the same order than the others), official global climate organizations being taken over in front of everyone, smaller countries are being sued for taking measures to minimize impact. There is no will to fix this, to stop worsening the situation.
So you have a system that is being disrupted in big scale for decades, that is taken out of its inertia and balance by that continuous and increasing push, you start to see that it is slowly getting out of control. And there is no will to take out that push, at most you get some Newspeak way of ensuring people that something is being done. And when things really becomes desperate, we won't have decades to wait for a slow, orderly unwinding to have some effect. So some desperate extra push on a system that we still don't understand will be sold as idea of geoengineering, moving the system towards a new, even more unstable situation.
There is where my doomerism lies, not in the symptom of a string of broken records.
More concretely, though, I do think there's some technological levers that can be applied towards CO2 reduction & capture, bioremediation, and adaptation. I don't think they're the optimal answer - the optimal answer was us recognizing we're spending on credit a hundred years ago - but I think they're the answers we're going to use, so that's where most of my effort is.
I've mentioned this elsewhere, but - I got a job a while back that I think helps move the world in the right direction, and my god has it made a difference in my ability to handle all this. It's still not easy to look at, but it's easier when you're not burning all your energy on something orthogonal to what you actually care about. If you can live with the lower pay, I promise it's worth it for the improved ability to sleep at night.
Also would be very helpful to look at the worst case predictions and what that would entail hundred years down the line.
Its not cool but it really not that bad. Definitely not apocalyptic.
Its also worth it to consider whats the alternative because every version of an alternative is exponentially worse (communism and/or luddite primitive feudalism).
We should be doing more about wetlands restoration. I think it's a no brainer that a substantial part of the problem is the eradication of 85 percent of global wetlands since the 1700s but it largely goes unnoticed because, I don't know, not enough hopelessness and sense of personal guilt to relate to?
I don't get it. But my life sucks and refuses to stop sucking and I am unlikely to live too much longer, so whatevs. Y'all run around screaming and flailing your arms like Kermit the frog if that's what floats your boat.
Only if mosquitoes are eradicated.
I think the panic will come soon though then it will just be too hard to ignore. Might be too late to do much about it by then.
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But let's put that aside. Let's put aside the fact that the mechanisms involved are demonstrable and simple enough for children to understand.
Even as laypeople, we can observe that in the past ten years there's been year after year after year of once-in-a-century catastrophic weather events. The odds of these being unrelated anomalies decrease every time. Unprecedented heat waves and forest fires across the North America, all the way up into the arctic, with entire towns burning to the ground. Deadly ice storms in Texas. God-sized hurricanes. In isolation these could be hand-waved away - in aggregate, they clearly point towards catastrophe.
No one really ever wants to discuss this, the issues with the data, the missing data, the statistical techniques used to fill in that data, how the models are derived, the funding situation with climate research and the quality issues with all of it.
It seems like the only acceptable answer is the sky is falling and we're all going to die.
Maybe both things can be true: there is a man made effect on the climate and it's difficult to measure and a lot of the research quality is poor.
Perhaps humans have adapted to difficult climates throughout our entire existence.
Perhaps the models that predict the end of the world are a bit extreme, and there are conflicting interests.
Maybe, just maybe - everything will be ok.
Anthropogenic climate change is real. It sucks, and we’re experiencing the results of it today. If you do not believe this, please consider who the experts on this very complex topic would be (climatologists, meteorologists, etc), and listen to what 99% of them are saying.
There's broad disagreement about the role humans play in this process, and our ability to influence it one way or another in any meaningful way.
There's also broad disagreement about the efficacy and implementation of policies aimed at tackling climate change.
So you can't solve the problem yourself, you need the help of people who are uninterested in helping you or catastrophe awaits. There's no more perfect rationale as precursor to authoritarianism today.
Why cry over spilt milk? Go outside, enjoy life, the weather is nice. You can show me a million graphs from authoritative sources that demand respect in academic circles, so long as me and my lover can prance through a meadow picking wildflowers I'm not worried about it. I'd like to live in the real world for as much time as I have on this earth as I can. I can't save the world, I'd rather not get my blood pressure up looking at pie charts telling me I'm doomed, all I can do is accept that I live in a changing environment and enjoy the beauty of the world. It is still really beautiful out there you know.
Your passive attitude, which equates to plugging your ears, closing your eyes, and shutting off your mind, is the same attitude that allows genocides to be committed while you "prance through a meadow".
To be clear, I go outside and enjoy life daily. The difference is that I accept the mountains of evidence that say we must, individually and collectively, adjust our way of living to preserve this benefit for our children. And no, the weather isn't always nice; the last several summers have been choked with wildfire smoke.
Most of the companies that HN looks up to are fueled by consumerism.
I'm scared the best case scenario will end up being "the world gets so hot it kills enough people to stop getting hotter." I don't know a lot about climate change but I don't thing the Earth will simply reset when enough people die, considering the melting ice caps won't just unmelt because of that.
I believe there was also a noticeable effect from the pollution decrease when global shipping dropped during covid, you had less cloud cover from ship trails, and more solar radiation reaching the surface.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05122-0
2022 Nature article on the phenomena.
Eventually, many of these processes become depleted and global average temperature starts to rise.
Imagine this wasn’t deviation from average, but absolute values and ignore the blue/red colors. Then notice the trend — it is getting warmer through all the 20th century. I think, I can easily see a trend line already from 1910.
If you look at the charts again you'll see the temp. has been rising more and more in response since the industrial revolution.
As a peer comment noted, you can ignore the 0 degree line, the article uses two different epoch markers, these are just arbitary convention.
The red portion of the graph starts later because of the arbitrary temperature they decided to use as the 0 point.
I really find it hard to believe you can compare temperature measurements “globally” before 1950s with any sort of consistency or accuracy. Today’s infrared thermometers for fevers have a 2F accuracy. You’re telling me that you can calculate temperatures from around the world pre-1950s and trust that it’s consistent and accurate?
Consistent and within an envelope of accuracy, sure.
Today we can even compare high resolution, many measurement point global tempreture distributions against what would be projected if we only had the same stations from the 1850s - 1950s.
Recall that pre GPS navigation was highly reliant on accurate time pieces which were highly reliant on accurate tempreture, humidity, air pressure readings. From the 1850s onward there are highly reliable records from scientific grade instruments at trading ports about the globe.
You're right to be skeptical and we can't. There isn't even a single "global temperature" today. There is, for example, a global surface temperature measured by satellites and ground stations, except where there is cloud cover and no ground stations. It is extrapolated in such places based on mathematical models. Also a satellite passes only so often across certain area (or takes low resolutions photos if at geostationary orbit) so data is further extrapolated in time. And that is only the surface. What about the depths of the oceans and the thickness of the atmosphere? Is this what is meant when they make claims like "hottest 12 months" on record? If yes, it tells you nothing about true "global temperature".
"Global temperature" today is a mathematical construct, a model based on limited sensor data. A LOT is extrapolated in that model. How exactly you do that affects the results you get.
We don't have consistent measurements across the thickness of the atmosphere and depth of the oceans. There are sporadic measurements, like satellite measurement of cloud cover temperature and knowing how high this cloud cover is, but what's going on below and above? It's all filled in by "the models". Models people wrote to behave how they expect they should behave.
And 2F spread ain't right, doctors use rather precise instruments that need some experience to be used correctly though, we have one at home too for kids since wife is a doctor (not a pediatrician but its manageable).
Yes. Believe it or not, the average of multiple calibrated measurements is more accurate than some random off the shelf consumer electronics. My laptop display has a delta E of about 20 out of the box. If someone calibrates it they could bring it down to 5, most likely. I have no trouble believing an actually decent panel can achieve less than 3.
I can probably finagle a way of measuring haemoglobin with my kitchen equipment and some reagents I order off eBay. I might even get one sig fig out of that. That doesn't mean the literal bottom shelf crap I use is going to be the absolute limit of possible precision.
I mean, what kind of argument even is that? "I can't make similar measurements using the equipment I have at home, therefore climate scientists must have either no idea what error bars are or are lying"?
edit - good example, Toyota. Right around the 70s/80s they became a massive multinational exporter. This is enabled by pax Americana and neo-liberal free trade policies which, for example, allowed Toyota to import to the US in large numbers and also build factories inside the US itself, multiply by several other companies in several other countries, massive growth. Before this time global trade was far more limited.
https://www.toyota-global.com/company/history_of_toyota/75ye...
If we take the stock market as an analogy for energy (and hence pollution) there is just a massive explosion starting around 1980. people forget that the stock market used to be kind of boring and went down alot. https://www.macrotrends.net/1319/dow-jones-100-year-historic...
edit - another good one. The US trade balance. I.e. the rise of the foreign nations who had "interesting" currency policies and manufacturing exports designed for the US, in order to get USD so they could participate in globalism, buy oil (sold mostly in USD), and modernize. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globalization#/media/File:U.S....
Also GDP of the Asian Tigers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Asian_Tigers
Dead Comment
It is not clear for how long this pattern will persist. There is the issue of tipping points in what is a very complex dynamic system (atmosphere, oceans, permafrost, polar regions etc.)
The everyday analogy is boiling water in a pot. As we slowly inject heat at the bottom of the pot, the patterns of water motion change a lot as the temperature rises. First some occasional air bubble, then some visible currents, eventually just a chaotic, unstable, mess.
Now if only the frogs inside the pot would stop gazing at the gently rising air bubbles and realise that this is not all there is to it, future frogs might be very deeply inconvenienced...
Not to mention desertification and a lack of regenerative farming practices.
There's also pollution in general.
While climate change is concerning, recorded history is a pretty narrow window and there's evidence to support warmer periods in Earth history.
The effects of proposed measures are also very concerning and are pretty warped to outright insane. Especially the bits intertwined with the cult of vegan.
A result of the foods or a result of obesity facilitated by them? What is the evidence basis for there being clinically significant changes in hormone levels in the population at large?
I myself am on testosterone replacement therapy, though my low levels were probably from a brain injury. I’m a very different man when my levels are correct, and have straight up embarrassed myself when they haven’t been with how I’ve acted.
I agree with the person above, it’s a much bigger problem for the human race itself than global warming and nobody seems to give a damn.