If we ever manage to halt this accelerating crisis we should seriously consider a modern-day equivalent of the Nuremberg trials. Thousands upon thousands needlessly dead, https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/08/1152766 (from 2024)
The complicit parties of climate change are so wide you would probably have to try thousands and thousands of people across most of the developed world. The cohort is probably so large that it’s more a reflection of society generally than the malicious acts of a few.
> British military courts carried out proceedings against 1,085 persons
> About forty-five additional trials were held against an unknown number of
accused. [...] In all, French occupation courts passed 2,107 sentences [...]
> [I]n Poland alone 16,819 Germans were sentenced [...]
> In Czechoslovakia, about 16,000 German nationals received sentences. Exact figures are not available.
Oh believe me, there is a part of the political aisle which would be more than happy to put millions of people in forced labour camps, especially if they are wealthy. Any excuse is a good excuse.
People know who were salivating at the idea of devaluing labor while cutting social welfare programs, creating a pool of cheap labor too desperate to negotiate; these people now feel safe openly showing contempt and cruelty.
It strikes me that historically whenever one extremist side decides to pull the trigger and goes for a cult-of-personality power grab (because this is not a left/right exclusive thing); the really delusional stuff starts when those already in power trigger a vicious cycle of paranoia.
Nonsense. Anyone who wants forced labor camps is a fascist. I don't care what they call themselves. Once you stop caring about wellbeing for everyone you stop being a leftist. (Which is your insinuation.)
Also, there is more than one political aisle. The left (who broadly want to redistribute wealth) is distinct from democrats (who are capitalists) is distinct from the various parts of the GOP.
The US Constitution, specifically the 13th amendment, allows:
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall be duly convicted, shall exist within the United STates or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
So in fact, forced labor camps are totally legal and common in the United States. There are lots of private companies which operate these prison / factory systems and are quite profitable (unsurprisingly), such as NYSE:GEO.
All governments "redistribute wealth" friend, not just the left or right or up or down.
It all depends on which side of the bars you live on, amirite?
Do you think the left broadly supports prison labor or that carveout in the 13th Amendment? Personally I've never seen a leftist voice any feelings on them other than contempt.
You ain't disagreeing. Anyone who wants or engages in forced labor is fascist. Sounds like you found an example of that in the US. Yep. Many such cases.
We do not have infinite resources. Committing 7-11 years and countless billions to build a NPP leads to those funds and other resources to be unavailable elsewhere.
Each wind farm, each set of solar panels, each battery storage will begin to pay dividends immediately as each one is finished. While the huge plant will be nothing-nothing-nothing-... for years upon years.
Builders, engineers, capital, and such is better suited to be investing in other sources of energy.
We haven't reached peak coal because we did not start developing renewables earlier. We did waste a huge amount of resources in nuclear in the past, which still never became cheap enough. That we now see a transition away from fossil fuels in large parts of the word is thanks to wind and solar becoming very cheap.
Solar maybe NOW is, but this isn't a 5 or even 10 year old problem. And cost effective compared to what? We'll consider sending people to Mars to save humanity but reactors are "too expensive"?
Renewables is more economical than nuclear, so investing in nuclear is a waste of resources. This is also why nobody does it. And no, nobody who hasn't lost their marbles is seriously considering sending people to Mars to save humanity.
"Despite these drawbacks, AC remains crucial to protect populations at increased risk from high temperatures, as well as for refrigerating essential medicines and other health-protecting technologies. In the absence of other options, AC – or another equally effective active cooling technology – should be available to those who need it most as if it were a medical necessity."
Do you propose climate action with effects that we will see in decades, if not centuries, is going to save the vulnerable who are currently dying by the thousands?
I do not think that you believe so.
How is it acceptable that the actionable solution is entirely ignored in favor of performative speech?
You cannot talk about thousands dying today, neglect to mention the actionable solution, and talk only about climate action which will help on a time frame of decades to centuries.
I grew up in the 90s and there was a book in climate in my shelf that talked about thousands dying today, nearly three decades back. At some point we should stop pretending this is a new and surprising danger and start treating it as the risk we willingly steered ourselves into.
If you live next to a road and every other month a car crashed through your living room wall you'd probably fix the root cause after the first time it happened. If you are clever you fixed it even before it occurs. What you would not do is only deal with the damage caused month for month and pretend there is no need to address the root cause.
The reason why many pretend our only option is handing out band aids while the blade keeps spinning, is because it is hard to imagine anything else, if your salary depends on you not addressing the problem.
It feels more and more like watching a bus driver playing chicken against a solid, immovable concrete wall. It is obvious who wins, the only question is into which directions the scrap explodes most, while the driver eyes for the ejector seat. And all the kids pretend driving into the wall is the only reasonable option.
It is possible for humanity to create unsurvivable conditions in our earths atmosphere. Should we do that if there is enough profit in it? If not, where would you draw the line and how would you set/enforce the limits?
After a record year of traffic casualties, I suggest to remove regulation that commonly prevents installing seat belts in your car, mandate the presence of seat belts, and subsidize retrofitting older cars.
Instead, politicians talk at length about better education in primary school promoting safe driving later in life. Additionally they recommend to pay attention while driving, and they call this an "Action plan" to make driving safe. No word about seat belts.
You respond to my proposal, saying that seat belts are merely a band aid, that I pretend they are our only option, and that we better fix the root cause before an accident occurs.
When then someone talks about the thousands upon thousands needlessly dead while ignoring the existence of seat belts we could install today, it just drives me furious.
Great, you sucessfully showcased the idea that analogies can be bent around till they no longer reflect the scientifically measurable reality.
So again:
It is possible for humanity to create unsurvivable conditions in our earths athmosphere.
1. Should we create it if there is enough profit in it? Y/N
2. If not, where would you draw the line and how would you set/enforce the limits?
If your answer is Yes to (1) you are in a suicidal, planet killing cult. If your answer is No, you realize the simple fact there are limits to what can be done in a limited space. But then you have to draw a line and find a mechanism even if you don't like it from an ideological standpoint. And that is what I would be really, honestly be interested in.
I would simply not sacrifice hundreds of thousands of the most vulnerable (in Europe alone!) for unnecessary performative bullshit and let people install AC while massively subsidizing solar/wind/hydro/nuclear/etc.
What's interesting to me is that both of those options – accepting and perishing, or mitigating – would look no different than what we're doing right now. We've made remarkable progress with renewable energy since 2000 (my own state generates almost 70% of its energy from wind). The US isn't part of the climate accords, but the country is still embracing renewable energy at a breakneck pace despite the current admin's attempts to derail it. We need only compare our current emissions to those from 20 years ago to see the difference.
So what I propose is that we've already accepted it, and wringing our hands saying "if only you'd all repent your ways and admit you were wrong by ignoring Al Gore!" might feel cathartic, but ultimately wouldn't result in much change if people did, indeed, truly repent.
AI and bitcoin, regardless of what one thinks of them, have made negligible contributions to climate change. It is below the noise floor relative to other major industrial and commercial sources of atmospheric CO2.
Virtually all of the current conditions were in motion before bitcoin and AI were even a thing.
Sure. But you have to weigh any application relative to (1) how useful it is and (2) how easy it would be to rely on a carbon-neutral alternative.
And I would argue the usefulness of bitcoin is negative from the viewpoint of a free society.
AI is to a certain degree a different story, but also there it depends what you're doing.
We live in a thin atmospheric skin around the planet, and that skin has a finite volume. If earth was the size of an apple, the atmosphere is thinner than the Apple's skin in proportion.
Pretending we can do whatever we like for infinitly long inside an finite volume is completely unhinged. The financial and political elites, who some frame as the true geniuses point to technological solutions that are always "just around the corner" for the past decades with some of them even eying to leave the planet behind entirely.
All of that while we know how to address the issue.
> the usefulness of bitcoin is negative from the viewpoint of a free society
if you mean PoW mining instead of crypto in general then maybe. ethereum uses about as much power as a small village in europe so it should never be a target for climate action.
the public benefit of blockchains is real and it comes from the fact that no one controls them and they let users ignore the law. thats the part governments dont like. corporations also dont like it even if they work in the industry, coinbase and binance started their own chains so they would have full control over the way they evolve.
crypto is a cypherpunk/anarchist technology that got hijacked by investors to sell their scam coins and fake decentralized web services. without it your only option for buying things that are illegal in your country (weed, abortion pills, guns, hacking tools) is sending cash in paper mail or using some complicated scheme where you have to trust third parties. i think thats worth some tax evasion.
No. The societal impact of crypto currencies is net-negative.
I know the original idea. In 2009 I bought coffee using Bitcoin. I had to wait 30 minutes till it went through despite using a fee that back then mirrored what PayPal would take. Then I knew: OK this is not going to be used as a cash replacement.
Then it became clear that it was used as a way to pay for illegal shit on the internet, be it drugs, botnets or services of questionable ethical value. Of course also to speculate, to launder money, to blackmail, to extract ransom, to run ponzi schemes or rug pulls, which became a big driver by people who wanted to get the wealth without having to put in the legwork.
And these are still the main drivers behind crypto currencies today by a wide margin. So yes: Net-negative. Prove me wrong.
Not exactly background noise but totally incomparable to the normal CO2 outputs of major nations like the US or China. I.e. ~20 Million Tons CO2 vs 4 Trillion and 13 Trillion Tons respectively.
No, excessive fossil fuel use is the cause by an immense margin. It's completely dominated by commercial shipping (boats), followed by planes. Then I think it may actually be gas from cattle before cars. Bitcoin and AI are so recent and still relative to everything else small.
This is completely incorrect. Aviation contributes 2.5% of global emissions (but is terrible on a per capita basis, as only around 10% of the world's population travels on any given year). Global shipping accounts for 2.3% of global human-made emissions [1].
In transport emissions, passenger vehicles dominate by far (with around 12% of global GHG emissions), even more so in developed countries. Then freight by road with 7.5% of total emissions.
Maritime shipping is actually the least carbon intensive way to transport goods over long distances by at least two orders of magnitude [2].
Widespread use of nuclear power for civilian merchant shipping is a non-starter. It's simply too expensive to train and pay enough qualified nuclear engineers. The US Navy barely manages this for a few dozen nuclear powered vessels with a huge budget and limited concern for cost effectiveness.
Plus there are the security concerns. Every civilian nuclear power plant has armed guards on duty around the clock. Those guards have to also be trained and paid. Many foreign countries have laws against bringing weapons into their ports.
If we want to reduce CO2 emissions from merchant ships then use nuclear or renewable power on shore to manufacture carbon neutral synthetic liquid fuel. Use that to run the ship engines.
I really feel like if the US really wanted to support US shipbuilding (like what the Jones act was supposed to do) it would subsidize building a fleet of nuclear shipping boats.
Lots of manufacturing projects, lots of related industries boosted, a renewed investment in nuclear engineering bringing a lot of nuclear job experience, and a way to potentially dig deeper into the backbone of global trade again.
It would have sunk to the bottom and been of no immediate concern. The benefit of nuclear reactors on boats is that you can drown it out at anytime. The only real concern is a nuclear ship getting beached and not having the passive failsafe of sinking underwater.
Would Iran be as likely to have hit one of these ships if the result was potentially a nuclear meltdown close to their shoreline? It would pretty radically change the costs to them for such an attack, wouldn't it?
If you sink nuclear ship you won't get nuclear meltdown. You have enough thermal mass to cool down anything if you are underwater. Some level of loss of nuclear material would happen. But meltdown is not something that would happen.
Its not like all the ships hit by attacks in the Straight of Hormuz sank. A ship could potentially become critically damaged and become unable to operate the reactor and still be floating.
Either way, "loss of nuclear material" is the real concern isn't it, instead of just the nature of how that loss happened?
The question still stands. If a country knows they're potentially going to cause a nuclear disaster by hitting one of these ships on their shoreline, are they as likely to shoot at them?
The hardliners might want to cause a nuclear incident to keep the strait closed longer.
And even among the non-hardliners mistakes are rampant in war. It's not about what they're likely to rationally do, it's about what some local, demoralized missile officer who graduated in the bottom 20% of his class does when he's cut off from command and drinking too much.
Are there cultures out there which wish for important parts of their own country get turned into nuclear wastelands?
If Iran wants to make their country a nuclear wasteland, they don't need to blow up ships to do it. I'd imagine they probably don't want that outcome, but hey I'm not an Iranian so I can't speak for them.
I kind of figured that'd just be a "logical" thing and not necessarily a "cultural" thing, but I agree I don't know all cultures.
This is not an argument for global warming, but do bear in mind that cold kills far more and on balance global warming has saved lives here. The issue is going to cause worse problems than heat deaths though. However, a big wet bulb event could completely reverse that count.
Or Europe should just get air-conditioning and enjoy the beautiful weather. Can’t make it through the winter without heat. Why would you want to make it through the summer without air-conditioning?
That being said fuck pollution and the ruining of our environment.
Are you aware how different 40° weather can feel based on humidity? Because it doesn't take much humidity to make a walk at 40° deadly. You might be used to very dry heat.
Air conditioning the indoors doesn’t do anything to prevent the harm and damage to animals, agricultural land, infrastructure, and so many other things. It also, of course, can’t protect those who have to work or commute in the heat.
40°C with high humidity from 5am to 10am every day is not ‘beautiful weather’.
I think we should start charging the worst emitters with manslaughter now. We shouldn't wait for the crisis to be halted; the law should be part of how we force firms to recognize part of the harm.
How about large scale fossil fuel emitters (including power production) who have lobbied against their own clean replacements (e.g. solar, wind, weakening net metering)?
I do think that ICE car drivers who have ever, e.g. voted against public transit are guilty of _something_ but I don't think it's manslaughter.
I've been reading up on the inevitable collapse of the AMOC (the potsdam institute has a number of really good videos covering the subject).
Everyone hears 'winters will be up to 10C cooler', but few realize that this will also cause the jet stream to be more wavy, and exacerbate the number of heat waves as well.
Sad that europe's mild climate is about to get a whole lot worse...
I am just repeating the 'gist' I've gotten from my research on the topic, but the risk of AMOC shutdown has gone from a low probability / high impact prediction by 2100, to 'we think there's a strong chance of hitting a tipping point by 2060'. I wish I could point you to a specific paper, but I'm going entirely off memory, and that is fallible
The % likelyhood by x date predictions have swayed back and forth as we've adjusted our predictions of which emissions path we actually wind up following.
Took a min to read the link, that was a surprisingly good summary.
My whole concern with the AMOC is that given it's a non-linear system, and we've seen evidence of 'fast shutdowns' in the climate record before, I fear we are sleepwalking towards an event that could have catastrophic consequences for the global south, and problems there do not stay there. People flee rather than starve.
I also worry what happens to western liberal democracy under the weight of that influx if we're already seeing populism from today's level of migration.
If your country suddenly has hundreds of thousands (or even millions) of weather migrants from countries with vastly different cultures and values to yours, you'll be wishing that populism was your biggest concern.
We are actually fortunate. Folks from LATAM seem to have no problem integrating with US society. Europe seems to have a much harder time with their pool of migrants. Probably due to the lack of birthright citizenship
Even if you read just the conclusion at the bottom it seems obvious that there is no consensus about a collapse being inevitable:
> Overall though, there is some common ground in recent research: evidence for AMOC weakening having begun is growing, albeit is not clear in every AMOC metric; a substantial decline is expected with current emissions, that over centuries could potentially push the AMOC to a slow ‘shutdown’ state; and there remains a real but uncertain chance that this slowdown could pass a tipping point beyond which this shutdown is locked in, even if warming is halted or even declines. Exactly how much and quickly the AMOC is weakening, and the likelihood of it reaching a tipping point, remain much more uncertain, but what we do know is enough to justify concern and action to reduce the risk of AMOC shutdown
I don't know that there are any pop sci books on amoc collapse specifically, the more popular books on climate change acknowledge it's a possibility but do not really dig into the effects beyond the fact that it will chill europe in the winter and shift the monsoon rainfall belt (southward?). The potsdam institute has some good papers available, and of course, you can find others that ref it in google scholar.
Somehow, somehow, everyone’s heads are still in the sand. Desperately trying to bury them deeper. It’s like CICO denialism.
I expect this to be a deeply unpopular take here, but solutionism will fail. Magic technology will not come to save us. All of our industrial tekhne has been in the service of rolling down the stored-energy hill faster and faster. To put the genie back in the bottle, to take apart the CO2 and turn it back into hydrocarbons, we’d have to do more work than everything that was done in the last two centuries. And that’s an extremely conservative lower bound.
It’s so dire. I don’t think most people understand that everything around them is made out of petroleum. Not just your ability to travel, or your clothes. Your food is made of petroleum. Your institutions are made of petroleum. Your gender equality is made of petroleum. Your freedom is made of petroleum.
There is no putting this thing in reverse. If the AI doesn’t get us first, thermodynamics will topple all of this.
While it is true that reversing combustion would require more energy than was released burning it, I don't think anyone reasonable is proposing it. The proposal is to redirect future energy production away from fossil extraction and into cleaner sources (solar, wind, nuclear, geothermal) which is a completely different thermodynamic problem. The constraints are things like grid storage capacity, permitting timelines, and critical mineral supply chains - not physics.
If we overcome these very real contraints, we reduce the rate of new additions to atmospheric CO2. We will still need to do the thermodynamically hard work of removing CO2 at gigaton scale, but deferring that until removal tech is more mature is the right sequencing.
Of course, this assumes that we are actually working towards the CO2 output reductions right now and really committed to CO2 removal in the near future.
Sorry if this sounds like a dumb question, but I legitimately don't know: does the thermodynamic argument hold up? (Broadly, I agree that humanity needs a healthier relationship with industrialism before fixing this is possible).
A few ways I can imagine it doesn't:
- We can reduce warming by other means, like changing the Earth's albedo.
- A lot more energy falls to Earth every day from the sun than we use via petroleum; a good amount of solar/wind would let us climb back up the hill via sequestration.
- We don't need to sequester CO2/methane into high-energy-density hydrocarbons; could an efficient sequestration process yield eventually net positive energy per unit greenhouse gas from the burn -> sequester process?
Yeah, this is all true! All of these things are also insanely hard, like, orders of magnitude harder than what we usually mean by “insanely hard,” and might be near-impossible in a similar way that unburning all the carbon is near-impossible, only… somewhat less so. I only talk about unburning all the carbon to emphasize the sheer scale of the problem. There are things you can “fix” or “clean up” or “undo” like, surprisingly, the ozone hole. This is not something we can undo. We can at best halt it, and even slowing it would be (will be) historically traumatic.
I mean… I guess, sure. But on a scale of “heavier-than-air powered flight is impossible” to “superluminal signaling is impossible,” it’s like… realistically, about halfway in-between? Enough that I’d sooner start lifting weights and practicing my scary face than count on a third-act gizmotron.
I think the idea is that rights for women (along with other traditionally disadvantaged groups) are only sustainable in a prosperous society driven by cheap energy, and that as soon as resources become scarce, there will be a powerful revanchist backlash aimed at rolling things back to a more patriarchal and traditionalist way of life.
I agree that it’s a little weird, insofar as people don’t talk about it, but I’m not sure it’s very woke at all. It’s in a lot of tension with conventional woke ideas.
The usual way people talk about all this is more or less idealist (as opposed to materialist): people thought hard and got better morals (or worse morals, if you have a reactionary bent). The claim I’m making is that it’s not a coincidence that egalitarian norms happened to be correlated with the falling cost of energy. It’s basically the same idea as “God created men [and women]; Sam Colt made them equal.”
Sounds a little coloured by the blinkers of American Exceptionalism rooted in European Western culture.
Pre tech non petroleum communities like the Nagovisi in Papua New Guinea, the Khasi in India, the Mosuo people in southwestern China, the Minangkabau of West Sumatra, the Akan in Ghana, Bribri in Costa Rica, et al managed to avoid patriarchal society without possessing a Colt.
Trees are carbon neutral. They turn carbon into wood while they're growing and then release that carbon when they rot or burn or are eaten. Only a very small number of trees escape one of those fates.
Seems likely that within our lifetime multiple countries in europe may turn into deserts, and there is little we can do against it except for maybe attempt to terraform the climate by seeding clouds or changing ecosystem flora to something resilient in the face of 40C weather. Losing a huge amount of food production would be my greatest concern.
It will probably be warm but this is from the GFS model that was forecasting 50 degrees during the last heat wave. Apparently, it tends to "overegg temperature projections for Europe in the summer by around 2-2.5c. ... it dries out soil too fast in its models."
Exactly! The reddit link is from a run from one month ago, predicting that the previous heatwave will be 49 degrees. Now we know that it was "just" 43 or so. So we know that this model tends to overestimate the temperature
"2027 is likely to be WAY worse than this 2026 in terms of extreme heat, drought, fires, crop losses. WAY worse. In the Northern hemisphere, we have half a year to prepare for next summer and save some lives.
Everyone is acting like 2026 is a blip. No: far worse is to come."
As of now, our worst problem in Central Europe seems to be drought. Some of the mightiest rivers of the continent are barely there. You can walk across the Danube, the Rhine or the Wisla in some places, drenching yourself a bit, but never losing contact with the bottom.
The warming is terrible and deadly, AND ALSO Europeans are negligent in not protecting themselves however they can.
The idea that Europe could slow warming by not using air-conditioning is absurd, when the emissions mostly come from elsewhere. France, in particular, gets most of its energy from nuclear power, but also makes it very hard to get climatisation.
When I lived in a rather hot area of Spain for a year, I was shocked to find out that many apartments don't have an air conditioner. In a place where a similar heat wave happens every year, for months. A friend of mine moved there from Germany and being somewhat frugal, rented a place without and aircon. Let me just say that he didn't enjoy the summer nights one bit.
I myself had one, but I could probably rent a car for the cost of running it.
I will say this - air conditioning costs to establish room temperature are inversely proportional to the degree the building is insulated. If your whole country is comprised of uninsulated or barely insulated housing stock, you have a MUCH larger project than simply buying some small window units for a few hundred euro per person and then paying a few hundred euros extra per year in energy costs.
I believe many people do not know how effective air conditioning technology is.
A single portable monoblock unit with window exhaust pipe is plenty for all but the worst rooms if you target 26.5C while it is around 33C outside.
The air my portable unit emits is cooled to like ~5C.
Insulation does not even matter; the window is literally partially open. I can still cool a 70m2 room in the top floor of an ancient building, at least together with ventilating at night.
If the room was not on the top floor, or if it was only 35m2, I imagine I could comfortably cool it to 24.5 - 25C.
The only issue here is that it draws close to 1000W 24/7, it is loud, and the window has to stay open all the time.
With even just a portable split/window unit this could be much more effective and comfortable, but sadly it is not allowed for preservation reasons that make no sense.
Some of these places don't get very cold, others rely on coats, others south facing window solar gain. Very old buildings are common. I'm not claiming all of Europe is uninsulated, just a large enough portion to render heatwave safety a much bigger problem.
People live longer in many parts of Europe than the USA. Does that mean the USA is somehow negligent?
Excess deaths due to heat are primarily the in the elderly. The excess numbers we are seeing now are because the proportion of elderly people in France, Germany and Spain are higher than in the USA.
If the population pyramid in the EU was more similar to that of the USA the number of excess deaths would be lower. I'm not sure negligent is the correct word to use. Climate change will reduce quality of life. Because of these changes people will not live as long.
Having more old people is even more of a reason to make it easy to get air conditioning.
I live in the USA, and there are certainly many ways in which the USA is negligent on health care, but making sure people can stay cool in hot weather isn't one of them.
In any case, this isn't a zero sum game, where the USA's negligence in one area negates Europes negligence in another.
I think you may have missed the point. It's not a matter of more old people, it's more old people relative to the rest of the population.
The excess death numbers reported will happen because more people live longer in the EU than in other places. Those excess death numbers can't be sustained over time, because our population pyramid will gradually resemble something more like yours.
Alternatively put, if the EU population pyramid resembled the US population pyramid we wouldn't have the excess death numbers that have been reported during the heatwaves (because most of those people would have already been dead).
It's not the case that people are boiling in the streets. It's more similar to COVID-19. People who were going to die relatively soon die earlier. That's what excess deaths is.
If you can't run one fifth of your nuclear plants, because the water levels are to low or the water temperatures too high in the rivers used to cool them, you may want to reconsider whether that is truly the best choice here¹
In the meantime my fathers solar roof allows him free AC cooling, because as it turns out AC generally needs most energy when the sun shines the most.
I am not arguing nuclear plants do not have benefits, I just argue that solar with storage may be a much better fit for powering ACs.
>Europeans are negligent in not protecting themselves however they can.
Well, if the people in charge say or think global warming isn't real, that's what you get: not "other" solutions to the "unacceptable propositions" the Green parties suggest, but no proposition at all, as there is no problem.
The current situation is a direct consequence of pure negationism from conservative parties, not a disagreement on how to deal with climate change between the Right and the Left. The Left proposed solutions you may not agree with, but the Right has been completely rejecting the reality of climate change.
BTW, how do you propose Europe protect not only people from the heat, but also forests from burning, rivers from drying up, fields from being unfit for cows and sheep, lakes from blooming with algae, nuclear plants from being shut down due to river water being too hot and seawater being full of jellyfish, etc, etc, etc? In the end, there are so many things to "adapt" that it would cost less to try to organize a global effort to lower CO2.
[H]ow do you propose Europe protect not only people from the heat, but [all these other things]?
Why does it have to be framed as all-or-nothing? I agree that using air conditioning to reduce the number of people who die from the heat does nothing to help with the problem of jellyfish, but how is that relevant, exactly?
Put a significant price on CO2 emissions (think like $300+/ton, instead of <$100), then tax every import from countries that take insufficient actions (or run a low CO2 emission price). Likewise, tax any export into countries that take no action.
Electrify everything where possible (especially transport and heating), get electricity CO2 neutral, get concrete and steel production CO2 neutral (lots of those would be an inevitable consequence of the emission pricing).
This would allow western democracies to basically fix the global situation on their own, by exerting economic pressure on developing countries (those want/need market access, like China).
It would make goods (and especially individual transport!) more expensive though (even if you re-emit the tax income), so you can be sure it's not gonna happen, because too many people are too selfish.
Stop listening to billionaires who don't want to pay - not to lose - a single cent to help reduce CO2 emissions, but are ready to pay millions to lobby against.
First the UK, then leadership of Europe via behind-closed-doors politics, then a gentle colonization of both the east and the west using our amazing cheese, bread that is baked rather than synthesized from fossil fuels, and 30 days of paid vacations per year. The path forward is clear.
This is a harbinger for insane weather in the United States this fall and winter.
I am expecting my homeless life in in minivan to be choatic trying to chase where the weather will be favorable.
My main concern if is there is heavy rains in California after the drought of rain they have had this summer. The Salton Sea is at an all time low[1] and many people do not know that a rapid fill of water into the Salton Sea from the Cochella Valley is a known trigger for earthquakes on the San Jacinto and San Andreas Faults[2][3].
Erasing any datacenter ever built (and planned) would do almost nothing to stop climate change.
What we need is (global) electrification of transport and heating, CO2 free electricity and CO2 neutral concrete and steel.
Very effective ways to make this happen would be high prices on emissions, enforced on every local industry and all imports.
But too many people love their cheap fossil-based transport too much and are unwilling to make even small sacrifices to keep the climate stable; sad reality.
Thinking these are at their current level relevant to climate change, is a level of ignorance that I'd almost put on a tin-foil hat to discuss how the fossil industry is feeding an anti-AI campaign of ignorance.
If we ever manage to halt this accelerating crisis we should seriously consider a modern-day equivalent of the Nuremberg trials. Thousands upon thousands needlessly dead, https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/08/1152766 (from 2024)
The complicit parties of climate change are so wide you would probably have to try thousands and thousands of people across most of the developed world. The cohort is probably so large that it’s more a reflection of society generally than the malicious acts of a few.
Got to start somewhere. Let's start at the top and work ourselves down. If we could do it with over 100 000 persons back then, we could do it again.
> But while in West Germany and united Germany between 1946 and 2005, cases were brought against 140,000 individuals
https://www.timesofisrael.com/historian-examines-germanys-mi...
> British military courts carried out proceedings against 1,085 persons
> About forty-five additional trials were held against an unknown number of accused. [...] In all, French occupation courts passed 2,107 sentences [...]
> [I]n Poland alone 16,819 Germans were sentenced [...]
> In Czechoslovakia, about 16,000 German nationals received sentences. Exact figures are not available.
https://digitallibrary.un.org/nanna/record/627806/files/A_80...
Oh believe me, there is a part of the political aisle which would be more than happy to put millions of people in forced labour camps, especially if they are wealthy. Any excuse is a good excuse.
People know who were salivating at the idea of devaluing labor while cutting social welfare programs, creating a pool of cheap labor too desperate to negotiate; these people now feel safe openly showing contempt and cruelty.
It strikes me that historically whenever one extremist side decides to pull the trigger and goes for a cult-of-personality power grab (because this is not a left/right exclusive thing); the really delusional stuff starts when those already in power trigger a vicious cycle of paranoia.
Nonsense. Anyone who wants forced labor camps is a fascist. I don't care what they call themselves. Once you stop caring about wellbeing for everyone you stop being a leftist. (Which is your insinuation.)
Also, there is more than one political aisle. The left (who broadly want to redistribute wealth) is distinct from democrats (who are capitalists) is distinct from the various parts of the GOP.
The US Constitution, specifically the 13th amendment, allows:
So in fact, forced labor camps are totally legal and common in the United States. There are lots of private companies which operate these prison / factory systems and are quite profitable (unsurprisingly), such as NYSE:GEO.All governments "redistribute wealth" friend, not just the left or right or up or down.
It all depends on which side of the bars you live on, amirite?
Do you think the left broadly supports prison labor or that carveout in the 13th Amendment? Personally I've never seen a leftist voice any feelings on them other than contempt.
Don't even need bars, "subsidies" are just another word for redistribution.
You ain't disagreeing. Anyone who wants or engages in forced labor is fascist. Sounds like you found an example of that in the US. Yep. Many such cases.
Would opposing nuclear energy qualify as such action? The emission difference was well known and fully scientifically provable at time.
No, because nuclear energy is not a cost effective measure against climate change. Solar is.
If climate change is indeed an existential threat, then by definition nuclear is cost-effective.
And at any rate, why not both?
We do not have infinite resources. Committing 7-11 years and countless billions to build a NPP leads to those funds and other resources to be unavailable elsewhere.
Each wind farm, each set of solar panels, each battery storage will begin to pay dividends immediately as each one is finished. While the huge plant will be nothing-nothing-nothing-... for years upon years.
Builders, engineers, capital, and such is better suited to be investing in other sources of energy.
That’s exactly what people said 10 years ago…and 10 years before that.
Listen to Ken Griffin explain why we need nuclear.
https://youtube.com/shorts/yu1UJ1JPjpw?is=etcYMpudQPZRZQQw
Exactly the reason NPP will not save us, no matter how much I (and you, probably?) like it. All the numbers are still better for other solutions.
That’s how we got to 2026 and we still haven’t reached peak coal.
We haven't reached peak coal because we did not start developing renewables earlier. We did waste a huge amount of resources in nuclear in the past, which still never became cheap enough. That we now see a transition away from fossil fuels in large parts of the word is thanks to wind and solar becoming very cheap.
Solar maybe NOW is, but this isn't a 5 or even 10 year old problem. And cost effective compared to what? We'll consider sending people to Mars to save humanity but reactors are "too expensive"?
Renewables is more economical than nuclear, so investing in nuclear is a waste of resources. This is also why nobody does it. And no, nobody who hasn't lost their marbles is seriously considering sending people to Mars to save humanity.
We should start with all the people on HN who told us we didn’t need nuclear power.
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=nuclear+climate+change
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Start 11 years ago and go backwards
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1439337600&dateRange=custom&...
On the topic of thousands needlessly dead, look at the UN's suggestions:
Useless yapping about opening windows at night, protecting the vulnerable, limiting global warming to 1.5C, and not drinking caffeine.
Is any of this "Call to Action" actually actionable?
Obviously not; and it is pathetic.
What should be actioned:
- remove regulatory hurdles to AC installation
- mandate such installation in residences that otherwise reach unbearable temperatures
- make funds available to subsidize the installation or train more workers for AC installation
That would 'protect the vulnerable'.
Talking about opening windows at night or climate change does nothing, and is performative only.
The UN suggestions [1] are pretty unambiguous.
"Despite these drawbacks, AC remains crucial to protect populations at increased risk from high temperatures, as well as for refrigerating essential medicines and other health-protecting technologies. In the absence of other options, AC – or another equally effective active cooling technology – should be available to those who need it most as if it were a medical necessity."
[1] https://mb.cision.com/Public/15083/4360202/b9c9bce2cff90dee....
Big AC strikes again.
I think we can all agree that if we just stop talking about climate change, maybe it will go away.
Do you propose climate action with effects that we will see in decades, if not centuries, is going to save the vulnerable who are currently dying by the thousands?
I do not think that you believe so.
How is it acceptable that the actionable solution is entirely ignored in favor of performative speech?
Yes and: doing things that fight the cause of the warming?
Sure, but this should be an afterthought here.
You cannot talk about thousands dying today, neglect to mention the actionable solution, and talk only about climate action which will help on a time frame of decades to centuries.
I grew up in the 90s and there was a book in climate in my shelf that talked about thousands dying today, nearly three decades back. At some point we should stop pretending this is a new and surprising danger and start treating it as the risk we willingly steered ourselves into.
If you live next to a road and every other month a car crashed through your living room wall you'd probably fix the root cause after the first time it happened. If you are clever you fixed it even before it occurs. What you would not do is only deal with the damage caused month for month and pretend there is no need to address the root cause.
The reason why many pretend our only option is handing out band aids while the blade keeps spinning, is because it is hard to imagine anything else, if your salary depends on you not addressing the problem.
It feels more and more like watching a bus driver playing chicken against a solid, immovable concrete wall. It is obvious who wins, the only question is into which directions the scrap explodes most, while the driver eyes for the ejector seat. And all the kids pretend driving into the wall is the only reasonable option.
It is possible for humanity to create unsurvivable conditions in our earths atmosphere. Should we do that if there is enough profit in it? If not, where would you draw the line and how would you set/enforce the limits?
Let me also invoke an analogy:
After a record year of traffic casualties, I suggest to remove regulation that commonly prevents installing seat belts in your car, mandate the presence of seat belts, and subsidize retrofitting older cars.
Instead, politicians talk at length about better education in primary school promoting safe driving later in life. Additionally they recommend to pay attention while driving, and they call this an "Action plan" to make driving safe. No word about seat belts.
You respond to my proposal, saying that seat belts are merely a band aid, that I pretend they are our only option, and that we better fix the root cause before an accident occurs.
When then someone talks about the thousands upon thousands needlessly dead while ignoring the existence of seat belts we could install today, it just drives me furious.
Great, you sucessfully showcased the idea that analogies can be bent around till they no longer reflect the scientifically measurable reality.
So again:
It is possible for humanity to create unsurvivable conditions in our earths athmosphere.
1. Should we create it if there is enough profit in it? Y/N
2. If not, where would you draw the line and how would you set/enforce the limits?
If your answer is Yes to (1) you are in a suicidal, planet killing cult. If your answer is No, you realize the simple fact there are limits to what can be done in a limited space. But then you have to draw a line and find a mechanism even if you don't like it from an ideological standpoint. And that is what I would be really, honestly be interested in.
I would simply not sacrifice hundreds of thousands of the most vulnerable (in Europe alone!) for unnecessary performative bullshit and let people install AC while massively subsidizing solar/wind/hydro/nuclear/etc.
Ah yeah, the myth that a society can't walk and chew gum at the same time. Do you really belive we can't both address the root causes and install AC?
Which other things do you believe a society can't do at the same time? Taxes and waste managment? Breathing and thinking?
I think you misunderstood me lol.
I'm saying we can easily do both.
The only obstacle is morons.
> At some point we should stop pretending this is a new and surprising danger and start treating it as the risk we willingly steered ourselves into.
And then what?
Either accept it and perish or mitigate it obviously? What would you propose?
What's interesting to me is that both of those options – accepting and perishing, or mitigating – would look no different than what we're doing right now. We've made remarkable progress with renewable energy since 2000 (my own state generates almost 70% of its energy from wind). The US isn't part of the climate accords, but the country is still embracing renewable energy at a breakneck pace despite the current admin's attempts to derail it. We need only compare our current emissions to those from 20 years ago to see the difference.
So what I propose is that we've already accepted it, and wringing our hands saying "if only you'd all repent your ways and admit you were wrong by ignoring Al Gore!" might feel cathartic, but ultimately wouldn't result in much change if people did, indeed, truly repent.
The thousands dying are just a means to an end. They don't really care about them.
Satoshi would be first in line?
AI and bitcoin, regardless of what one thinks of them, have made negligible contributions to climate change. It is below the noise floor relative to other major industrial and commercial sources of atmospheric CO2.
Virtually all of the current conditions were in motion before bitcoin and AI were even a thing.
Sure. But you have to weigh any application relative to (1) how useful it is and (2) how easy it would be to rely on a carbon-neutral alternative.
And I would argue the usefulness of bitcoin is negative from the viewpoint of a free society.
AI is to a certain degree a different story, but also there it depends what you're doing.
We live in a thin atmospheric skin around the planet, and that skin has a finite volume. If earth was the size of an apple, the atmosphere is thinner than the Apple's skin in proportion.
Pretending we can do whatever we like for infinitly long inside an finite volume is completely unhinged. The financial and political elites, who some frame as the true geniuses point to technological solutions that are always "just around the corner" for the past decades with some of them even eying to leave the planet behind entirely.
All of that while we know how to address the issue.
> the usefulness of bitcoin is negative from the viewpoint of a free society
if you mean PoW mining instead of crypto in general then maybe. ethereum uses about as much power as a small village in europe so it should never be a target for climate action.
the public benefit of blockchains is real and it comes from the fact that no one controls them and they let users ignore the law. thats the part governments dont like. corporations also dont like it even if they work in the industry, coinbase and binance started their own chains so they would have full control over the way they evolve.
crypto is a cypherpunk/anarchist technology that got hijacked by investors to sell their scam coins and fake decentralized web services. without it your only option for buying things that are illegal in your country (weed, abortion pills, guns, hacking tools) is sending cash in paper mail or using some complicated scheme where you have to trust third parties. i think thats worth some tax evasion.
No. The societal impact of crypto currencies is net-negative.
I know the original idea. In 2009 I bought coffee using Bitcoin. I had to wait 30 minutes till it went through despite using a fee that back then mirrored what PayPal would take. Then I knew: OK this is not going to be used as a cash replacement.
Then it became clear that it was used as a way to pay for illegal shit on the internet, be it drugs, botnets or services of questionable ethical value. Of course also to speculate, to launder money, to blackmail, to extract ransom, to run ponzi schemes or rug pulls, which became a big driver by people who wanted to get the wealth without having to put in the legwork.
And these are still the main drivers behind crypto currencies today by a wide margin. So yes: Net-negative. Prove me wrong.
Opinion stated as fact
Its a well trod problem: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243511...
Not exactly background noise but totally incomparable to the normal CO2 outputs of major nations like the US or China. I.e. ~20 Million Tons CO2 vs 4 Trillion and 13 Trillion Tons respectively.
No, excessive fossil fuel use is the cause by an immense margin. It's completely dominated by commercial shipping (boats), followed by planes. Then I think it may actually be gas from cattle before cars. Bitcoin and AI are so recent and still relative to everything else small.
This is completely incorrect. Aviation contributes 2.5% of global emissions (but is terrible on a per capita basis, as only around 10% of the world's population travels on any given year). Global shipping accounts for 2.3% of global human-made emissions [1].
In transport emissions, passenger vehicles dominate by far (with around 12% of global GHG emissions), even more so in developed countries. Then freight by road with 7.5% of total emissions.
Maritime shipping is actually the least carbon intensive way to transport goods over long distances by at least two orders of magnitude [2].
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions-from-transport
[2] https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg3/transport/06_figure_8-6/
Electricity (including heating) is actually the single biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions, but transport is indeed number 2: https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector
Followed by agriculture & manufacturing.
Is that so? Too bad nuclear civilian ships are not common. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_marine_propulsion
Widespread use of nuclear power for civilian merchant shipping is a non-starter. It's simply too expensive to train and pay enough qualified nuclear engineers. The US Navy barely manages this for a few dozen nuclear powered vessels with a huge budget and limited concern for cost effectiveness.
Plus there are the security concerns. Every civilian nuclear power plant has armed guards on duty around the clock. Those guards have to also be trained and paid. Many foreign countries have laws against bringing weapons into their ports.
If we want to reduce CO2 emissions from merchant ships then use nuclear or renewable power on shore to manufacture carbon neutral synthetic liquid fuel. Use that to run the ship engines.
I really feel like if the US really wanted to support US shipbuilding (like what the Jones act was supposed to do) it would subsidize building a fleet of nuclear shipping boats.
Lots of manufacturing projects, lots of related industries boosted, a renewed investment in nuclear engineering bringing a lot of nuclear job experience, and a way to potentially dig deeper into the backbone of global trade again.
I love the theory, but the security concerns around nuclear anything are a big deal when we're talking ships that sail around the world.
Imagine if even one of the tankers hit in the strait of Hormuz was nuclear.
It would have sunk to the bottom and been of no immediate concern. The benefit of nuclear reactors on boats is that you can drown it out at anytime. The only real concern is a nuclear ship getting beached and not having the passive failsafe of sinking underwater.
Would Iran be as likely to have hit one of these ships if the result was potentially a nuclear meltdown close to their shoreline? It would pretty radically change the costs to them for such an attack, wouldn't it?
If you sink nuclear ship you won't get nuclear meltdown. You have enough thermal mass to cool down anything if you are underwater. Some level of loss of nuclear material would happen. But meltdown is not something that would happen.
Its not like all the ships hit by attacks in the Straight of Hormuz sank. A ship could potentially become critically damaged and become unable to operate the reactor and still be floating.
Either way, "loss of nuclear material" is the real concern isn't it, instead of just the nature of how that loss happened?
The question still stands. If a country knows they're potentially going to cause a nuclear disaster by hitting one of these ships on their shoreline, are they as likely to shoot at them?
The hardliners might want to cause a nuclear incident to keep the strait closed longer.
And even among the non-hardliners mistakes are rampant in war. It's not about what they're likely to rationally do, it's about what some local, demoralized missile officer who graduated in the bottom 20% of his class does when he's cut off from command and drinking too much.
Not every culture encourages the same principles or values as yours. I'd say they possibly would.
Are there cultures out there which wish for important parts of their own country get turned into nuclear wastelands?
If Iran wants to make their country a nuclear wasteland, they don't need to blow up ships to do it. I'd imagine they probably don't want that outcome, but hey I'm not an Iranian so I can't speak for them.
I kind of figured that'd just be a "logical" thing and not necessarily a "cultural" thing, but I agree I don't know all cultures.
I’d put people who have maliciously and intentionally undermined action on climate change first. Donald Trump comes to mind.
This is not an argument for global warming, but do bear in mind that cold kills far more and on balance global warming has saved lives here. The issue is going to cause worse problems than heat deaths though. However, a big wet bulb event could completely reverse that count.
Or Europe should just get air-conditioning and enjoy the beautiful weather. Can’t make it through the winter without heat. Why would you want to make it through the summer without air-conditioning?
That being said fuck pollution and the ruining of our environment.
Walking outside with 40°C is not "enjoying the beautiful weather", it is miserable. Air conditioning only solves part of the problem.
Walking outside in 40° weather is enjoyable
Are you aware how different 40° weather can feel based on humidity? Because it doesn't take much humidity to make a walk at 40° deadly. You might be used to very dry heat.
Air conditioning the indoors doesn’t do anything to prevent the harm and damage to animals, agricultural land, infrastructure, and so many other things. It also, of course, can’t protect those who have to work or commute in the heat.
40°C with high humidity from 5am to 10am every day is not ‘beautiful weather’.
I think we should start charging the worst emitters with manslaughter now. We shouldn't wait for the crisis to be halted; the law should be part of how we force firms to recognize part of the harm.
The largest emitters are electricity generation and personal transport. So... Heads of power companies and everybody that drives a car?
How about large scale fossil fuel emitters (including power production) who have lobbied against their own clean replacements (e.g. solar, wind, weakening net metering)?
I do think that ICE car drivers who have ever, e.g. voted against public transit are guilty of _something_ but I don't think it's manslaughter.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/05/opinion/utility-bills-cle...
I've been reading up on the inevitable collapse of the AMOC (the potsdam institute has a number of really good videos covering the subject).
Everyone hears 'winters will be up to 10C cooler', but few realize that this will also cause the jet stream to be more wavy, and exacerbate the number of heat waves as well.
Sad that europe's mild climate is about to get a whole lot worse...
I do not think a collapse is inevitable, see:
https://climatetippingpoints.info/2026/05/06/news-explainer-...
I am just repeating the 'gist' I've gotten from my research on the topic, but the risk of AMOC shutdown has gone from a low probability / high impact prediction by 2100, to 'we think there's a strong chance of hitting a tipping point by 2060'. I wish I could point you to a specific paper, but I'm going entirely off memory, and that is fallible
The % likelyhood by x date predictions have swayed back and forth as we've adjusted our predictions of which emissions path we actually wind up following.
I'd highly recommend the analysis I linked if you did not yet check it, he discusses various papers and differences in definitions.
Last updated in June.
Took a min to read the link, that was a surprisingly good summary.
My whole concern with the AMOC is that given it's a non-linear system, and we've seen evidence of 'fast shutdowns' in the climate record before, I fear we are sleepwalking towards an event that could have catastrophic consequences for the global south, and problems there do not stay there. People flee rather than starve.
I also worry what happens to western liberal democracy under the weight of that influx if we're already seeing populism from today's level of migration.
If your country suddenly has hundreds of thousands (or even millions) of weather migrants from countries with vastly different cultures and values to yours, you'll be wishing that populism was your biggest concern.
We are actually fortunate. Folks from LATAM seem to have no problem integrating with US society. Europe seems to have a much harder time with their pool of migrants. Probably due to the lack of birthright citizenship
What in that link do you think is saying it is not inevitable?
Even if you read just the conclusion at the bottom it seems obvious that there is no consensus about a collapse being inevitable:
> Overall though, there is some common ground in recent research: evidence for AMOC weakening having begun is growing, albeit is not clear in every AMOC metric; a substantial decline is expected with current emissions, that over centuries could potentially push the AMOC to a slow ‘shutdown’ state; and there remains a real but uncertain chance that this slowdown could pass a tipping point beyond which this shutdown is locked in, even if warming is halted or even declines. Exactly how much and quickly the AMOC is weakening, and the likelihood of it reaching a tipping point, remain much more uncertain, but what we do know is enough to justify concern and action to reduce the risk of AMOC shutdown
Any good books on the subject you'd recommend?
I don't know that there are any pop sci books on amoc collapse specifically, the more popular books on climate change acknowledge it's a possibility but do not really dig into the effects beyond the fact that it will chill europe in the winter and shift the monsoon rainfall belt (southward?). The potsdam institute has some good papers available, and of course, you can find others that ref it in google scholar.
Somehow, somehow, everyone’s heads are still in the sand. Desperately trying to bury them deeper. It’s like CICO denialism.
I expect this to be a deeply unpopular take here, but solutionism will fail. Magic technology will not come to save us. All of our industrial tekhne has been in the service of rolling down the stored-energy hill faster and faster. To put the genie back in the bottle, to take apart the CO2 and turn it back into hydrocarbons, we’d have to do more work than everything that was done in the last two centuries. And that’s an extremely conservative lower bound.
It’s so dire. I don’t think most people understand that everything around them is made out of petroleum. Not just your ability to travel, or your clothes. Your food is made of petroleum. Your institutions are made of petroleum. Your gender equality is made of petroleum. Your freedom is made of petroleum.
There is no putting this thing in reverse. If the AI doesn’t get us first, thermodynamics will topple all of this.
While it is true that reversing combustion would require more energy than was released burning it, I don't think anyone reasonable is proposing it. The proposal is to redirect future energy production away from fossil extraction and into cleaner sources (solar, wind, nuclear, geothermal) which is a completely different thermodynamic problem. The constraints are things like grid storage capacity, permitting timelines, and critical mineral supply chains - not physics.
If we overcome these very real contraints, we reduce the rate of new additions to atmospheric CO2. We will still need to do the thermodynamically hard work of removing CO2 at gigaton scale, but deferring that until removal tech is more mature is the right sequencing.
Of course, this assumes that we are actually working towards the CO2 output reductions right now and really committed to CO2 removal in the near future.
Sorry if this sounds like a dumb question, but I legitimately don't know: does the thermodynamic argument hold up? (Broadly, I agree that humanity needs a healthier relationship with industrialism before fixing this is possible).
A few ways I can imagine it doesn't:
- We can reduce warming by other means, like changing the Earth's albedo.
- A lot more energy falls to Earth every day from the sun than we use via petroleum; a good amount of solar/wind would let us climb back up the hill via sequestration.
- We don't need to sequester CO2/methane into high-energy-density hydrocarbons; could an efficient sequestration process yield eventually net positive energy per unit greenhouse gas from the burn -> sequester process?
Yeah, this is all true! All of these things are also insanely hard, like, orders of magnitude harder than what we usually mean by “insanely hard,” and might be near-impossible in a similar way that unburning all the carbon is near-impossible, only… somewhat less so. I only talk about unburning all the carbon to emphasize the sheer scale of the problem. There are things you can “fix” or “clean up” or “undo” like, surprisingly, the ozone hole. This is not something we can undo. We can at best halt it, and even slowing it would be (will be) historically traumatic.
Not a dumb question at all.
You are right, except: "solutionism will fail. Magic technology will not come to save us."
You just can't know this. It might be true. But it might not. That's the thing about the future, it is fundamentally alien.
I mean… I guess, sure. But on a scale of “heavier-than-air powered flight is impossible” to “superluminal signaling is impossible,” it’s like… realistically, about halfway in-between? Enough that I’d sooner start lifting weights and practicing my scary face than count on a third-act gizmotron.
> Your gender equality is made of petroleum.
That is the weirdest and wokest comment I read this year on the internet. Could you please explain?
I think the idea is that rights for women (along with other traditionally disadvantaged groups) are only sustainable in a prosperous society driven by cheap energy, and that as soon as resources become scarce, there will be a powerful revanchist backlash aimed at rolling things back to a more patriarchal and traditionalist way of life.
I agree that it’s a little weird, insofar as people don’t talk about it, but I’m not sure it’s very woke at all. It’s in a lot of tension with conventional woke ideas.
The usual way people talk about all this is more or less idealist (as opposed to materialist): people thought hard and got better morals (or worse morals, if you have a reactionary bent). The claim I’m making is that it’s not a coincidence that egalitarian norms happened to be correlated with the falling cost of energy. It’s basically the same idea as “God created men [and women]; Sam Colt made them equal.”
Sounds a little coloured by the blinkers of American Exceptionalism rooted in European Western culture.
Pre tech non petroleum communities like the Nagovisi in Papua New Guinea, the Khasi in India, the Mosuo people in southwestern China, the Minangkabau of West Sumatra, the Akan in Ghana, Bribri in Costa Rica, et al managed to avoid patriarchal society without possessing a Colt.
Yeah, it's contextual. Of course. There's context in everything.
All we have to do is plant trees. Millions of trees, and reduce beef farming.
Trees are carbon neutral. They turn carbon into wood while they're growing and then release that carbon when they rot or burn or are eaten. Only a very small number of trees escape one of those fates.
If you increase the amount of wood in existence, that is not carbon neutral, if you can maintain the increased level.
Then it'd be a one-time carbon removal, not a continuous carbon removal like is required.
With what water? Trees are dying because of heat or burning in flames.
The desertification of Europe has already started.
Seems likely that within our lifetime multiple countries in europe may turn into deserts, and there is little we can do against it except for maybe attempt to terraform the climate by seeding clouds or changing ecosystem flora to something resilient in the face of 40C weather. Losing a huge amount of food production would be my greatest concern.
The thing is, we could survive with a lot less food production. We just don't want to, since animal flesh is so tasty.
Just in France, cost of this year heat waves has been estimated between 10 and 15 billion euros (figure shared by a ministre today).
Not to mention the cost of premature deaths of children and the elderly who don't deal with heat as well
That's the value of a single third-tier AI startup.
It will probably be warm but this is from the GFS model that was forecasting 50 degrees during the last heat wave. Apparently, it tends to "overegg temperature projections for Europe in the summer by around 2-2.5c. ... it dries out soil too fast in its models."
https://www.reddit.com/r/weather/comments/1um7tyn/sometimes_...
This is a two week forecast, one month ago. There is no good two week forecast.
There is a heat wave right now, again.
Exactly! The reddit link is from a run from one month ago, predicting that the previous heatwave will be 49 degrees. Now we know that it was "just" 43 or so. So we know that this model tends to overestimate the temperature
The soil is quite dry already.
"2027 is likely to be WAY worse than this 2026 in terms of extreme heat, drought, fires, crop losses. WAY worse. In the Northern hemisphere, we have half a year to prepare for next summer and save some lives. Everyone is acting like 2026 is a blip. No: far worse is to come."
https://nitter.catsarch.com/JKSteinberger/status/20874034329...
As of now, our worst problem in Central Europe seems to be drought. Some of the mightiest rivers of the continent are barely there. You can walk across the Danube, the Rhine or the Wisla in some places, drenching yourself a bit, but never losing contact with the bottom.
The Po River is drying up as well...
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/environment/2026/08/10/climate-...
The warming is terrible and deadly, AND ALSO Europeans are negligent in not protecting themselves however they can.
The idea that Europe could slow warming by not using air-conditioning is absurd, when the emissions mostly come from elsewhere. France, in particular, gets most of its energy from nuclear power, but also makes it very hard to get climatisation.
When I lived in a rather hot area of Spain for a year, I was shocked to find out that many apartments don't have an air conditioner. In a place where a similar heat wave happens every year, for months. A friend of mine moved there from Germany and being somewhat frugal, rented a place without and aircon. Let me just say that he didn't enjoy the summer nights one bit.
I myself had one, but I could probably rent a car for the cost of running it.
I will say this - air conditioning costs to establish room temperature are inversely proportional to the degree the building is insulated. If your whole country is comprised of uninsulated or barely insulated housing stock, you have a MUCH larger project than simply buying some small window units for a few hundred euro per person and then paying a few hundred euros extra per year in energy costs.
I believe many people do not know how effective air conditioning technology is.
A single portable monoblock unit with window exhaust pipe is plenty for all but the worst rooms if you target 26.5C while it is around 33C outside.
The air my portable unit emits is cooled to like ~5C.
Insulation does not even matter; the window is literally partially open. I can still cool a 70m2 room in the top floor of an ancient building, at least together with ventilating at night.
If the room was not on the top floor, or if it was only 35m2, I imagine I could comfortably cool it to 24.5 - 25C.
The only issue here is that it draws close to 1000W 24/7, it is loud, and the window has to stay open all the time.
With even just a portable split/window unit this could be much more effective and comfortable, but sadly it is not allowed for preservation reasons that make no sense.
Don't they have to heat them in the winter too? That also costs more and creates more emissions without insulation.
Some of these places don't get very cold, others rely on coats, others south facing window solar gain. Very old buildings are common. I'm not claiming all of Europe is uninsulated, just a large enough portion to render heatwave safety a much bigger problem.
People live longer in many parts of Europe than the USA. Does that mean the USA is somehow negligent?
Excess deaths due to heat are primarily the in the elderly. The excess numbers we are seeing now are because the proportion of elderly people in France, Germany and Spain are higher than in the USA.
If the population pyramid in the EU was more similar to that of the USA the number of excess deaths would be lower. I'm not sure negligent is the correct word to use. Climate change will reduce quality of life. Because of these changes people will not live as long.
That's how excess deaths work.
Having more old people is even more of a reason to make it easy to get air conditioning.
I live in the USA, and there are certainly many ways in which the USA is negligent on health care, but making sure people can stay cool in hot weather isn't one of them.
In any case, this isn't a zero sum game, where the USA's negligence in one area negates Europes negligence in another.
I think you may have missed the point. It's not a matter of more old people, it's more old people relative to the rest of the population.
The excess death numbers reported will happen because more people live longer in the EU than in other places. Those excess death numbers can't be sustained over time, because our population pyramid will gradually resemble something more like yours.
Alternatively put, if the EU population pyramid resembled the US population pyramid we wouldn't have the excess death numbers that have been reported during the heatwaves (because most of those people would have already been dead).
It's not the case that people are boiling in the streets. It's more similar to COVID-19. People who were going to die relatively soon die earlier. That's what excess deaths is.
If you can't run one fifth of your nuclear plants, because the water levels are to low or the water temperatures too high in the rivers used to cool them, you may want to reconsider whether that is truly the best choice here¹
In the meantime my fathers solar roof allows him free AC cooling, because as it turns out AC generally needs most energy when the sun shines the most.
I am not arguing nuclear plants do not have benefits, I just argue that solar with storage may be a much better fit for powering ACs.
¹: https://www.euronews.com/2026/08/12/heatwave-and-jellyfish-a...
>Europeans are negligent in not protecting themselves however they can.
Well, if the people in charge say or think global warming isn't real, that's what you get: not "other" solutions to the "unacceptable propositions" the Green parties suggest, but no proposition at all, as there is no problem.
The current situation is a direct consequence of pure negationism from conservative parties, not a disagreement on how to deal with climate change between the Right and the Left. The Left proposed solutions you may not agree with, but the Right has been completely rejecting the reality of climate change.
BTW, how do you propose Europe protect not only people from the heat, but also forests from burning, rivers from drying up, fields from being unfit for cows and sheep, lakes from blooming with algae, nuclear plants from being shut down due to river water being too hot and seawater being full of jellyfish, etc, etc, etc? In the end, there are so many things to "adapt" that it would cost less to try to organize a global effort to lower CO2.
[H]ow do you propose Europe protect not only people from the heat, but [all these other things]?
Why does it have to be framed as all-or-nothing? I agree that using air conditioning to reduce the number of people who die from the heat does nothing to help with the problem of jellyfish, but how is that relevant, exactly?
Your AC isn't going to work when your power plants are stuffed with jellyfish and have to shut down.
We need a grassroots Tiktok campaign against Big Jellyfish
Honest question. How could effective global climate action look?
Put a significant price on CO2 emissions (think like $300+/ton, instead of <$100), then tax every import from countries that take insufficient actions (or run a low CO2 emission price). Likewise, tax any export into countries that take no action.
Electrify everything where possible (especially transport and heating), get electricity CO2 neutral, get concrete and steel production CO2 neutral (lots of those would be an inevitable consequence of the emission pricing).
This would allow western democracies to basically fix the global situation on their own, by exerting economic pressure on developing countries (those want/need market access, like China).
It would make goods (and especially individual transport!) more expensive though (even if you re-emit the tax income), so you can be sure it's not gonna happen, because too many people are too selfish.
To add to the other replies, stopping animal agriculture would be a huge step forward.
Stop electing climate change deniers.
Stop listening to billionaires who don't want to pay - not to lose - a single cent to help reduce CO2 emissions, but are ready to pay millions to lobby against.
Enjoy it while it lasts; it'll never be this cool again.
Not if Count Binface wins the elections.
First the UK, then leadership of Europe via behind-closed-doors politics, then a gentle colonization of both the east and the west using our amazing cheese, bread that is baked rather than synthesized from fossil fuels, and 30 days of paid vacations per year. The path forward is clear.
And he'll pay for this by "putting up everyone's taxes except yours"!
This is a harbinger for insane weather in the United States this fall and winter.
I am expecting my homeless life in in minivan to be choatic trying to chase where the weather will be favorable.
My main concern if is there is heavy rains in California after the drought of rain they have had this summer. The Salton Sea is at an all time low[1] and many people do not know that a rapid fill of water into the Salton Sea from the Cochella Valley is a known trigger for earthquakes on the San Jacinto and San Andreas Faults[2][3].
[1] https://waterdata.usgs.gov/monitoring-location/USGS-10254005...
[2] https://www.sdsu.edu/news/2023/07/drying-salton-sea-has-stav...
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXqOn0GILtA
Adding...
https://subjecttoclimate.org/news/study-las-earthquake-risk-...
More data centers for plagiarizing code and solving 10 unimportant Erdos problems per year will fix this!
Erasing any datacenter ever built (and planned) would do almost nothing to stop climate change.
What we need is (global) electrification of transport and heating, CO2 free electricity and CO2 neutral concrete and steel.
Very effective ways to make this happen would be high prices on emissions, enforced on every local industry and all imports.
But too many people love their cheap fossil-based transport too much and are unwilling to make even small sacrifices to keep the climate stable; sad reality.
If only Al Gore warned us about AI as well! /s
Thinking these are at their current level relevant to climate change, is a level of ignorance that I'd almost put on a tin-foil hat to discuss how the fossil industry is feeding an anti-AI campaign of ignorance.
Just ask yourself if your wealth was tied to sp500 would you be ok with it dropping? Well then green house gases rising I don’t give a shit
It's not targeting the area though is it? It's not like someone is moving this dome across to Europe and saying "Yeah, take that, that'll show 'em".