I really think people are sleeping on the AMOC. The first season there isn't European wine/cheese/olives because of climate change is the first season European farmers probably literally declare war on their governments, to say nothing of the fact that almost no European homes can handle this level of cold.
And for some perspective, this is only one of many other huge changes that huge populations will react violently to in the next 20-50 years. Good luck to us all.
Meh who cares? Let it all burn and flood. Earth gets a fresh start, and hopefully whatever "intelligent" species evolves to be dominant in the next 5-10 million years is a better custodian. Rinse and repeat until that's the case. Heck, who knows if this is actually the 1st or 100th iteration...
From what I recall, there will be no easy energy once our civ dies out. Whichever civilization rises after us, it will face a limit to what heights it can reach.
It took roughly 5 billion years to get where we are now. The sun will die in another 5 billion years. I don't think there's that many rolls of the dice left.
On the one hand, we're probably not faced with rolling back 5 billion years. More likely a few tens of thousands to tens of millions.
On the other ... the End of Time on Earth is quite probably far less than 5 billion years in the future, and quite possibly only a few hundred millions. Given the regeneration time of fossil fuels (tens to hundreds of millions of years, and possibly not even then if, e.g., the lignan hypothesis of coal formation is correct), time to evolve a future technological civilisation might not exist.
That's still excluding recovery of other mineral wealth, e.g., iron, copper, and other resources, many of which do date back billions of years (e.g., BIFs, banded iron formations, which date to the Great Oxygenation Event or subsequent eras, 1--3 billion years ago. Fortunately, iron is abundant, but rich ores are useful. The scarcity of other metals, particularly high-efficiency conductors (copper, silver, gold), and low-prevalence alloying elements (e.g., tin) could be far more problematic.
I recently finished rewatching The Three Body Problem in which (spoilers follow) the world panics and goes into overdrive because an alien invasion is due in... 400 years. If the current climate trends continue, vast areas of the Earth may not be suitable for habitation within half that time, and we still can't seem to convince some people this is real. Granted I was a climate change skeptic myself until about 10 years ago, but right now the data seems indisputable. Even if we can't find a direct causal relationship between CO2 emissions and warming, we know the following very accurately (disclaimer: not a climate scientist): (1) amount of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere per year (2) concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (3) amount of extra energy that would be theoretically retained in the atmosphere via the green house effect, due to a given increment in CO2 concentration, (4) global temperatures within the past, say 30 years. Don't we know for a fact that (1) + (2) + (3) is very well correlated with (4), and that no other potential causes correlate as well with (4), and don't current computational models demonstrate an ability to predict (4) given (3). So, exactly what is the source of skepticism?
Something that would help a great deal would be some very public, clearly worded predictions about future events that should happen.
Climate scientists could help convince skeptics by correctly predicting future events. Skeptics could vet the predictions immediately to avoid late refutations. They’d look foolish if they tried to downplay the events if they didn’t raise concerns at the time they were predicted.
Looking fairly at things, predictions along the lines of ‘An inconvenient truth’ did not help. ( A UK high court ruling found at least 9 errors or exaggerations in the film. )
Demonstrating predictability should increase acceptance.
My source of climate skepticisms is based on the following:
1) We know that the Earth was much warmer in the past, including the Medieval Warming Period. We know that the Alps were warm enough so that the Iceman could pass through them without protection from the cold, and yet he was found encased in ice.
2) We know that the Earth is cooler now than in the past. And it's also hotter than it was in the past.
3) We know that previous historical temperatures had nothing to do with human-produced CO2.
Until someone can reconcile these facts, and they can say distinctively that the rise in temperature we see right now isn't the same reason as before, I'm going to believe that temperature will moderate and cool, just like it did in the past.
I live in California, where we were experienced a ~10 year drought. These same scientists claimed this was the "new normal" and everyone was in a panic. Then we had 2 years of rain and everything was back to normal for the last 4 years. In fact, it's better than normal. We are almost in summer, and there isn't a single area of California that is in drought conditions.
More importantly, no one is mentioning the "new normal" anymore. No one declared "we were wrong, sorry!" instead everyone is acting as if it never happened or that it's going to go back to drought conditions. The reaction is not scientific. It appears that climate science is driven by science fiction and ideology rather than actual science. And I'm quite sure there will be many people who comment "Just you wait and see!" but that's driven by ideology and not science. I prefer to follow actual science, and science to me suggests that climate will always continue to oscillate, on geological timeframes.
We also know very accurately that we're between two ice ages. Shall we manage to both not cook ourselves in the next few hundred years and master climate before the next ice age comes.
For only about 12 000 years ago you did not want to be anywhere in the northern hemisphere when, in a few decades, it cooled dramatically (may I add: not due to human activity):
Shall we be able to delay the next ice age? Should we just focus on the next 200 years or should be begin to think what we'll be able to do to prevent us from freezing to death in 10 000 years?
Also... We've got those AIs now (if I read HN correctly on a daily basis): how comes climate is not all solved already due to all the perfect apps and models AI generates for us?
The whole framing you’re using is wrong. If you can do climate modeling and math at the planet scale, you don’t need to be convinced you have read the research and you knew 30 years ago.
If you’re skeptical of scientific authority and lack those skills… as well as the critical thinking required to read the research and distill your own conclusions, there is basically no way to convince you. You can’t find objective truth yourself and you don’t trust the resources that can.
Doesn’t matter anyway, you as an ant in a large colony barely matter, no one needs to convince you. Capital needs to understand it’s in its interest to fix the problem and it will be fixed. Until that, get an A/C and contribute to the problem.
If I was a foreign adversary, I would be influencing elections to sabotage that tech tree as much as I could.
Brand climate science as “woke” and get the government to slash investment in non-performative research, monitoring, and development.
Instead, manipulate/lobby representatives into doubling or tripling investment in technologies that maintain the status quo, and incentivize/subsidize subpar solutions with public dollars.
All while your allies do the opposite and jump ahead.
If you do the calculation based on that stuff without feedback effects and CO2 goes from the present ~432 ppm to 600 ppm, then (disclaimer - AI used) you'd get approx 1.1 to 1.2C of warming based on basic radiative forcing alone. Which isn't really a lot to panic over in my opinion.
I mean you may get feedback making things worse or not as bad - that's a bit uncertain.
The sad thing about humans is that under capitalism, capital consumes public goods like nature. Then, when those public goods degrade and harm the human species, the capital class that actively consumed those public goods refuses to help restore them and instead cries that it's all a lie
Even if we didn't have capitalism, people would still need energy, for everything. It's unfortunate that fossil fuels were the easiest thing to use to generate energy over the last couple of centuries, and that it continues today. Maybe capitalism makes it easy for fossil fuels to remain entrenched, but I doubt any other kind of system would make fossil fuels less pervasive if it were the dominant energy source for over a century.
Well its funny. I remember reading years ago that the big problems in Europe would start when the Greenland glaciers started melting, adding significant cold water to the Labrador Current, and pushing the AMOC to the south. Never mind the sea level rise, the temperature in Europe would drop significantly.
Now, looking at the image in the article, there is a massive cold blob right there where the Labrador Current joins the Atlantic, but no mention of the theories that I've read about years ago, just that it is mysterious
Europe might have a hiccup until warming becomes more widespread and it goes back to 'normal'. The question is how long until Texas and Florida become uninhabitable because the heat isn't being shunted out to Europe, on top of the additional heat from global warming.
Any talk of the various climactic theorys is
very³ very³ likely to be wrong³.These systems are huge, interconected, and NOT UNDERSTOOD.
What we do have is some data that strongly suggests that the climate is changing, possibly at an unprecidented rate.Right now.
Record territory in fact.
> At South Carolina’s Fort Sumter National Monument, a sign that included details on the looming impacts of climate change, including information on how “rising seas could inundate most of the fort’s walls and flood the historic parade ground” was removed in its entirety.
I don't know if it's too late to stop the worst case scenarios of global warming yet or if there's still time, but it doesn't seem to be happening anyway. The world can't deal with something that requires global concentrated efforts.
However, I do think we have time to prepare for the worst case scenarios, and individual countries and states can do that efficiently on their own.
Improve evacuation routines in floodable areas, build greenhouses to deal with cold snaps, ensure there are air conditioned buildings to deal with heatwaves, have distributed local production of electricity, keep strategic food reserves stocked, and so on.
Edit: Not saying that such efforts are the solution by any means, but they will help.
> The world can't deal with something that requires global concentrated efforts
Historically, that's not correct. The Montreal Protocol to reduce CFCs in response to the hole in the ozone layer is a perfect example of us doing this.
I realize the world has changed and maybe it's not possible in our current political climate, but we have worked together as a planet to solve these type of global problems before.
Has anyone seen the news in India (that the Indian media for some reason is not covering)
It was 48 C this week in some cities. The power grid was not ready for the amount of AC power needed, and it turned into blackouts. You're sitting in a dark cube that has been cooking for 12 hours, hoping something might happen. A healthy 25 year old would die in 6 hours.
Even if you do not want to accept climate change is a thing, you can accept the current state of the world is affecting people.
> Even if you do not want to accept climate change is a thing, you can accept the current state of the world is affecting people
Or you could choose option three: do neither and go on Twitter to do some political point scoring: "The Democrat Party is going to use this three day Indian heatwave (they have one every summer) and their climate hoax to open our borders back up to illegal immigration! We must stop them! Vote against the Demonrats this November! MAGA!"
> Even if you do not want to accept climate change is a thing, you can accept the current state of the world is affecting people.
Ignoring the current state of the world is basically a sport for American Republicans, unfortunately. There's an entire political party, a news network, social media sites, and the worlds first trillionaire all aligned around the idea that the current state of the world isn't their problem and the ideal of "fuck those other people".
Pouring resources into pretending climate change doesn't exist has been a central goal of their movement.
Eh, let's just build more natural gas powered data centers. Maybe an LLM will tell us how to solve problems like this
I'm joking, but apparently there are influential people who really believe it's a good idea (see: governor or Utah and his statements on AI data centers recently)
I'm interested in AMOC and other aspects of the problem, and this recent video by RealLifeLore was very informative for me, unlike other;s like this OP article and the like. I definitely recommend it if previously you saw only two extreme points of view about AMOC. Basically the current is weakening, yes, but it's shutdown will happen neither soon nor unexpected. In fact there are several ocean wide monitoring stations which don't rely on a guess work that much and there is a clear data trend about AMOC power and shutdown requirements.
If you really want to save time on watching the video, stations began monitoring in 2004 and in 20 years since the AMOC current calculated "bandwidth" dropped from 18 points to 16 points and physicists estimate that the drop is about 1 point per decade, and that AMOC will begin shutdown phase only after dropping to 6 points or less. In about 100 years if the trend holds. Even assuming gigantic errors or extreme climate change acceleration , it still won't decrease 100 year time by x10-x20 times less to make it happen in one decade.
So in short, it's all bad and the trend is always bad to worse, just like the real emissions (unlike estimated PR "emissions" which are usually discussed by politicians). But AMOC specifically almost certainly won't stop in our lifetime. Our kids, though, won't be as lucky.
57 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 60.6 ms ] threadAnd for some perspective, this is only one of many other huge changes that huge populations will react violently to in the next 20-50 years. Good luck to us all.
On the other ... the End of Time on Earth is quite probably far less than 5 billion years in the future, and quite possibly only a few hundred millions. Given the regeneration time of fossil fuels (tens to hundreds of millions of years, and possibly not even then if, e.g., the lignan hypothesis of coal formation is correct), time to evolve a future technological civilisation might not exist.
That's still excluding recovery of other mineral wealth, e.g., iron, copper, and other resources, many of which do date back billions of years (e.g., BIFs, banded iron formations, which date to the Great Oxygenation Event or subsequent eras, 1--3 billion years ago. Fortunately, iron is abundant, but rich ores are useful. The scarcity of other metals, particularly high-efficiency conductors (copper, silver, gold), and low-prevalence alloying elements (e.g., tin) could be far more problematic.
Climate scientists could help convince skeptics by correctly predicting future events. Skeptics could vet the predictions immediately to avoid late refutations. They’d look foolish if they tried to downplay the events if they didn’t raise concerns at the time they were predicted.
Looking fairly at things, predictions along the lines of ‘An inconvenient truth’ did not help. ( A UK high court ruling found at least 9 errors or exaggerations in the film. )
Demonstrating predictability should increase acceptance.
1) We know that the Earth was much warmer in the past, including the Medieval Warming Period. We know that the Alps were warm enough so that the Iceman could pass through them without protection from the cold, and yet he was found encased in ice.
2) We know that the Earth is cooler now than in the past. And it's also hotter than it was in the past.
3) We know that previous historical temperatures had nothing to do with human-produced CO2.
Until someone can reconcile these facts, and they can say distinctively that the rise in temperature we see right now isn't the same reason as before, I'm going to believe that temperature will moderate and cool, just like it did in the past.
I live in California, where we were experienced a ~10 year drought. These same scientists claimed this was the "new normal" and everyone was in a panic. Then we had 2 years of rain and everything was back to normal for the last 4 years. In fact, it's better than normal. We are almost in summer, and there isn't a single area of California that is in drought conditions.
More importantly, no one is mentioning the "new normal" anymore. No one declared "we were wrong, sorry!" instead everyone is acting as if it never happened or that it's going to go back to drought conditions. The reaction is not scientific. It appears that climate science is driven by science fiction and ideology rather than actual science. And I'm quite sure there will be many people who comment "Just you wait and see!" but that's driven by ideology and not science. I prefer to follow actual science, and science to me suggests that climate will always continue to oscillate, on geological timeframes.
We also know very accurately that we're between two ice ages. Shall we manage to both not cook ourselves in the next few hundred years and master climate before the next ice age comes.
For only about 12 000 years ago you did not want to be anywhere in the northern hemisphere when, in a few decades, it cooled dramatically (may I add: not due to human activity):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas
Shall we be able to delay the next ice age? Should we just focus on the next 200 years or should be begin to think what we'll be able to do to prevent us from freezing to death in 10 000 years?
Also... We've got those AIs now (if I read HN correctly on a daily basis): how comes climate is not all solved already due to all the perfect apps and models AI generates for us?
If you’re skeptical of scientific authority and lack those skills… as well as the critical thinking required to read the research and distill your own conclusions, there is basically no way to convince you. You can’t find objective truth yourself and you don’t trust the resources that can.
Doesn’t matter anyway, you as an ant in a large colony barely matter, no one needs to convince you. Capital needs to understand it’s in its interest to fix the problem and it will be fixed. Until that, get an A/C and contribute to the problem.
OTOH to actually solve the problem we'd need geoengineering and cheap energy e.g. from fission.
Just spamming more solar does not help during winter, and EU solution seems to be "maybe you should just die".
Getting anyone to look beyond the next quarter or year is almost impossible. Decades out ?
fuhgedaboudit …
Brand climate science as “woke” and get the government to slash investment in non-performative research, monitoring, and development.
Instead, manipulate/lobby representatives into doubling or tripling investment in technologies that maintain the status quo, and incentivize/subsidize subpar solutions with public dollars.
All while your allies do the opposite and jump ahead.
You were a skeptic; you tell us?
https://youtu.be/I9M3go2bAIE
I mean you may get feedback making things worse or not as bad - that's a bit uncertain.
Now, looking at the image in the article, there is a massive cold blob right there where the Labrador Current joins the Atlantic, but no mention of the theories that I've read about years ago, just that it is mysterious
https://www.ospo.noaa.gov/data/sst/contour/global_small.cf.g...
https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/seaice_daily/?nhsh=nh
https://nsidc.org/sea-ice-today
https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/13/politics/judge-ruling-nationa...
> At South Carolina’s Fort Sumter National Monument, a sign that included details on the looming impacts of climate change, including information on how “rising seas could inundate most of the fort’s walls and flood the historic parade ground” was removed in its entirety.
However, I do think we have time to prepare for the worst case scenarios, and individual countries and states can do that efficiently on their own.
Improve evacuation routines in floodable areas, build greenhouses to deal with cold snaps, ensure there are air conditioned buildings to deal with heatwaves, have distributed local production of electricity, keep strategic food reserves stocked, and so on.
Edit: Not saying that such efforts are the solution by any means, but they will help.
Historically, that's not correct. The Montreal Protocol to reduce CFCs in response to the hole in the ozone layer is a perfect example of us doing this.
I realize the world has changed and maybe it's not possible in our current political climate, but we have worked together as a planet to solve these type of global problems before.
Saddest part is that it used to
The Ozone layer problem was exactly this: coordinated global concentrated effort.
I doubt we can do that again though.
It was 48 C this week in some cities. The power grid was not ready for the amount of AC power needed, and it turned into blackouts. You're sitting in a dark cube that has been cooking for 12 hours, hoping something might happen. A healthy 25 year old would die in 6 hours.
Even if you do not want to accept climate change is a thing, you can accept the current state of the world is affecting people.
https://www.indiatoday.in/science/story/north-india-heatwave... for anyone curious, and that was almost a month ago. Pakistan is also very vulnerable.
Or you could choose option three: do neither and go on Twitter to do some political point scoring: "The Democrat Party is going to use this three day Indian heatwave (they have one every summer) and their climate hoax to open our borders back up to illegal immigration! We must stop them! Vote against the Demonrats this November! MAGA!"
No point in letting a good crisis go to waste.
Ignoring the current state of the world is basically a sport for American Republicans, unfortunately. There's an entire political party, a news network, social media sites, and the worlds first trillionaire all aligned around the idea that the current state of the world isn't their problem and the ideal of "fuck those other people".
Pouring resources into pretending climate change doesn't exist has been a central goal of their movement.
I'm joking, but apparently there are influential people who really believe it's a good idea (see: governor or Utah and his statements on AI data centers recently)
If you really want to save time on watching the video, stations began monitoring in 2004 and in 20 years since the AMOC current calculated "bandwidth" dropped from 18 points to 16 points and physicists estimate that the drop is about 1 point per decade, and that AMOC will begin shutdown phase only after dropping to 6 points or less. In about 100 years if the trend holds. Even assuming gigantic errors or extreme climate change acceleration , it still won't decrease 100 year time by x10-x20 times less to make it happen in one decade.
So in short, it's all bad and the trend is always bad to worse, just like the real emissions (unlike estimated PR "emissions" which are usually discussed by politicians). But AMOC specifically almost certainly won't stop in our lifetime. Our kids, though, won't be as lucky.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkYWW95eSLs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_meridional_overturnin...
If the evidence on worrying climatic events does not exist, we don't have to ignore and discredit it.
https://oceanographicmagazine.com/news/trump-administration-...