We were somehow on the good path after covid, then world leaders decided killing each other folks was more relevant goal, followed by making big tech bros even more rich with AI centers.
Meanwhile paperstraws, and glued bottle caps, are supposed to save the planet.
Nah. It's really as simple as this: Southern climates are moving north. (In the northern hemisphere.) If you want a vision of the future, consider a New England that looks more like the Southeast.
There will be winners and losers. As climate zones move toward the poles, weather patterns and agricultural viability will shift with them. This will eventually turn current breadbaskets into deserts while warming up northern/southern regions for longer growing seasons.
Various regions will cross ecological thresholds, causing sudden, dramatic shifts in local climates. For example, a warmer Earth could bring monsoon rains back to the Sahara and Arabian deserts, turning them green once again. In general, a warmer world is a wetter world due to increased oceanic evaporation.
Sea levels will gradually begin rising, but perhaps at a rate of 1-2" per year. It takes a lot of heat to melt glaciers.
Human existence is not in doubt on account of the climate alone -- our prehistoric forebears had a lot worse to deal with -- but there could be mass population movements and alterations in how agriculture is handled globally. Current political structures are not up to this challenge.
Give that state you described another 50 odd years again and things can get worse - the land based glaciers are already greatly reduced, almost gone. The bulky polar ice is retreating a little - but the warming sea surface is the thing, it'll carry warm water and melt more and more ice.
Now it's fun and games for predicting what comes next - the insulation in the atmosphere is still increasing and the same amount of trapped energy that now goes to turning a mass of ice to a mass of water (at much the same temperature) will now turn to raising that same mass of water from near 0 C to about 60 C (roughly IIRC) - speeding up ice melts.
There's also the increasing amounts of water and methane in the atmosphere that come along with rising temperatures, these are much much better insulators that measly old CO2 and will serve to trap ever more energy from the sun.
Geophysically that's how this all goes in the absence of any serious reduction of insulation in the atmosphere.
> the collapse of society due to the ensuing refugee crises
This is what worries me.
At some point more northern facing countries will decide enough is enough and start mass genocide of any population attempting to flee.
Europe will be ok with just killing a few hundred million trying to flee in boats, and the eastern frontier is securable, especially with drones, but even with conscripts. Hell Ukraine has done a solid job on its own against an organised army on its doorstep.
America will act as a buffer for Canada and will have no problem with wiping out refugees. Argentina will be interesting but it's too small and isolated to matter globally.
The big global risk is that India and Pakistan have nukes and will be trying to flee into China and central Asia.
Setting aside refugees, far bigger risk for Europe isn't reurbishment of housing, it's tropical diseases in the south, it's the collapse of food security, and the general collapse of society as the economy falls over.
I find it very difficult to maintain an even tone and address statements that posit climate change positive effects on society.
There are so many incredibly bad things about climate change it boggles the mind.
I try and believe people are burying their heads in the sand to avoid the pain of reckoning with the end of everything they hold dear. This ends up with punches being pulled.
Even anatomically modern humans have gone through similar events several times in the history of our species, let alone our ancestors. Climate change itself will not be the end of humanity, but it may be the end of the current civilisation.
There are several highly problematic areas, but they are local (very, very big, but local, not remotely close to covering the whole of human civilization).
You're shifting goalposts or misunderstanding the discussion. Up the comment chain, the conversation is specifically centered around "the end of humanity." As in, extinction.
You're driving at changes to how we live.
Changes to how we live, even large ones, does not equate to "the end of humanity."
> collapse of society due to the ensuing refugee crises
Society won't collapse. Humans will do amazingly evil things to survive. The British were happy to starved millions of Indians to death until the country gained independence. All to support the British empire. We live in an era of basically unprecedented niceness in the history of humanity. Even the great empires of the past oppressed and killed multitudes more through slavery or serfdom or constant expansionist wars or other such means.
> refurbishment of houses
Perfect work for refugees to do at gun point.
Billions may die but society will go on with a somewhat lower regard for life and a larger amount of nationalism. Arguably what we consider western society will collapse but that's only existed for under a century.
In some ways that is more depressing than society simply collapsing. We will leave behind a rotting zombified corpse of our society to future generations.
> Billions may die but society will go on with a somewhat lower regard for life and a larger amount of nationalism. Arguably what we consider western society will collapse but that's only existed for under a century.
It is easy to write provocative things when we do not let ourselves bear the weight of their implication. This is horror being outlined.
In earnest conversation, these are sombre and sobering implications, not frivolous or minor things.
This is a sea of humans, extending from one end of the horizon to the other, hungry, lost, frightened, confused, sad and angry. It is the loss of culture, history and fascinating things that one cherishes.
> In some ways that is more depressing than society simply collapsing.
The inability to discuss a horror in realistic terms is how you get a horror. Not exaggerated "society will collapse" but actually tangible realistic and terrible outcomes. Society collapsing is an abstract and nebulous thing. The thing we will get is much worse and unless we look it in the face we will get it.
> our prehistoric forebears had a lot worse to deal with
Do you mean in terms of climate change? I know some temperatures were different but this was much more gradual afaik, which is no problem for anyone with two feet and a sense of where to go, but they were much more dependent on the ecosystem which struggles to keep up with the speed of today's changes
From what I hear, what we're causing is unprecedented for humans. Not dinosaur meteorite level of course (it's not an overnight change) but an ecosystem extinction event is nevertheless going on (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction)
I agree with the broader point that we'll survive and the question is more about the amount of suffering we inflict on ourselves and other animals along the way. Just curious if any old human (or even any great ape from the 'homo' genus) did experience worse
One thing. "Longer growing season" is not predicated upon temperature. Length of the day, sunlight, is a hard requirement for some plants. And the further north you go, the less the sun gets up over rhe horizon, even at noon.
So extending the time before frost, won't help many plants reach maturity. The days will be shorter, and when the sun comes up there is barely any light anyhow. Raw "daylight hours" are meaningless here, when the sun only gets barely over the norizon.
One month of June light is like 6 months of December light in much of Canada.
The prophecies always were about water stress and food security. How that plays out, I don't know.
If it's anything like the recent energy spikes it means burdening future generations of wealthy countries with subsidised amenities while others go without.
There is a lot of desertification of farmland going on, including in the USA.
It gets abstracted away for richer countries as they can outbid the poorer countries for food. In developed economies, most of a particular piece of food's price is not the costs that go to the farmer, but costs that come later in the process, so that cost increasing is also felt less.
Heatwaves on the other hand affect the western countries directly.
I’d assume lack of quality high resolution data. Weather stations all over the place, with records preserved indefinitely, is a relatively recent phenomenon.
If you’re wondering who to blame, as little as ten years ago:
“Republican Senate environment chief uses snowball as prop in climate rant”[0]
It’s an interesting plot twist in Termination Shock, where the popularist right shifts overnight from “it’s fake” to “real, but the liberals/globalists/experts betrayed us by doing nothing useful”. A reframe from environmentalism into grievance politics, which is already becoming real in France[1].
USA is around 18th country in CO2 emissions per capita, and has reduced emissions per capita around as much as the combined EU since 2000, or a little more.
Can't see how some random politician is "to blame", that's pretty absurd claim, and not supported by the claimed evidence.
The others above USA are tiny countries. USA is at 14, Saudi Arabia at 20, EU at 5, China at 9. The reductions in absolute tonnage for USA are big because there's a lot of low hanging fruit left. And it's partly a petrostate.
China produces far more absolute emissions than USA.
I love how the intelligentsia claim without evidence that that per-capita is the important and moral metric when you talk about total emissions, then all of a sudden absolute emissions are the important thing when you point out that western countries are not at the top of the per capita lists either!
It's not a fully invalid view in Europe to an outsider's eye. There is a world where nuclear power and ACs were built to prepare Europe for this without increasing global warming. That world was blocked by environmentalists. Now it's no ACs and russian natural gas imports anyways.
Because rich people want more money. They keep saying it's for the good of humanity and some useful idiots keep repeating that. A more balanced tax policy, regulation of financial markets, incentives to renewals, stopping investment in fossil fuels, increasing energy efficiency, and rewilding could all help, but we won't do a lick of it, because every single one of those things goes against the billionaires who own the political class.
There are literally hundreds of actions that could be (or in some cases have been) taken. I think the vast majority need to be taken by the government. Individuals mainly need to to support and demand these actions from the government, and punch climate change deniers in the face. E.g.
1. Stick to their plan to ban ICE car sales by 2030.
2. Unban on-shore wind power (Labour did this! Not that anyone noticed...)
3. Mandate solar panels and heat pumps for new houses.
4. Mandate bike lanes for new roads (blows my mind that this isn't a policy).
5. Take distribution into account when paying energy suppliers, so we aren't paying for a load of wind power in Scotland that we can't use (I believe this is being considered).
6. Upgrade the grid so we can get power from Scotland (I think this is in progress).
7. Make car charging infrastructure sane. No apps! Fines for broken chargers. More chargers along motorways. Street-side charging.
8. Stop freezing fuel duty.
9. Mandate OpenTherm (or similar) on boilers and thermostats.
10. Create an open, mandatory standard for remote adjustment of power consumption of things like air conditioners, freezers, car chargers and so on, that must be supported and can be used by power companies to optimise grid usage. Some large buildings do this but 99.99% of things that could do it don't.
11. Offer government backed loans for solar power. There are private companies that do it but they're seen as quite sketchy (e.g. if you sell your house...) so uptake is low.
12. Give office employees a right to work from home one day a week where it's possible (similar to how you have a right to change your hours).
13. Ban patio heaters.
14. Ban especially inefficient cars (e.g. less than 20 mpg).
15. Fix the railways... They are working on this tbf.
Then I think the answer to your question is that the government is corrupt and paid off by oil companies and other interests to not do these things. So they will not happen.
Wasn't my question, but no I don't think that's the reason. It's that ordinary people do not actually care about it that much. Plenty of people are still climate change deniers (yes even in the middle of an unprecedented heatwave in the UK which is relatively liberal).
Even the people that have brains are ostensibly do care about climate change... when push comes to shove and you try to increase petrol prices to the level that represents their true cost, or try to erect a wind turbine near them... They'll say "erm actually never mind".
Actually it doesn't even need to be a wind turbine. There are many PV solar projects in the UK that get attacked by NIMBYs. Literally just solar panels in fields. The most low impact construction ever.
How could people possibly object to that, you ask? There are a variety of bullshit reasons they come up with e.g.
1. Extra lorry traffic during construction (a one-time minor inconvenience).
2. The applicants hadn't done a survey on how putting poles in the ground in the middle of a field might affect the habitats of newts, or some bollocks like that.
3. There's too much solar power already. I shit you not.
I am a bit lost though: the first global graphic shows a depressing increase of fossil fuel consumption, but the detailed graphics after either show a stagnation or a decrease (must be centered on electricity generation I guess).
The global picture seems very positive, reaching a plateau is a great achievement! Let's meet in 2026 to hopefully confirm this trend
> Why is it that aggressive climate action is not taken still?
We can't even have global peace around the world, some people are still starving daily despite the fact that there is plenty of food to feed everybody on the planet, and slavery is still a thing, who's going to do what climate action exactly?
Europe and the world in general obviously. 1000 people doed in France due to the heat wave.
Ignoring heat wave deaths, Hormuz crisis has shown us that oil cam be blockaded but the panels and windmills installed on our rooftops can't be blockaded
Even Cuba is setting up solar plants with the help of China.
Philippines is the highest importer of solar panels since Hormuz was blocked. Rest of South Asia is quickly following
> Europe and the world in general obviously. 1000 people doed in France due to the heat wave.
Way more died during the heat wave in France in 2003. What did France do? Nothing substantial, because nobody is willing to bear the cost of substantial policies to fight climate change.
In the US it's been turned into a culture war thing, because ignoring the problem benefits some already wealthy people who think they'll either be insulated by their wealth or they'll dead before it's time to face the consequences
And yet many Europeans will still argue that ACs are evil and they shouldn't have them despite an estimated 175k heat related deaths per year. Although maybe this heat wave will change some minds.
Always fun, having to fight a problem caused by X by doing more X. At least there’s the silver lining that solar production and the need for AC go hand in hand.
The problem wasn't caused by air conditioning, it was caused by burning fossil fuels. Perhaps we could find a way to have air conditioning without burning fossil fuels?
Obviously. But as of now, AC means burning carbon (~50% of Europe's electricity production). Demand for even more electricity may accelerate the transition, hopefully, but right now the projection is that all the extra capacity and much more will be taken by data centers and consumer electricity bills are going to double or triple. Hopefully that will never actually happen but who knows.
Obviously consuming even more should never be the solution to problems caused by overconsumption. We should be figuring out ways to keep electricity use in check rather than consuming more and more, but that's a fact that people would rather not accept.
Source? Where I live (NL) the electricity prices are very low on the days/times you’d need AC because of all the solar power generated then. I think you gotta back up your claim that 50% of electricity consumed by ACs comes from burning carbon. It strikes me as very counterintuitive (or dated)
It might be my bubble, but I see a lot more people complaining about anti-AC warriors than actual anti-AC warriors. Do you have an example?
I mean it also doesn't make much sense anymore does it? You turn the AC on when the sun is out and theres an energy surplus.
We got AC last year, and solar panels at the same time, so the AC climate impact is zero. All reactions from neighbours etc were either neutral or positive. (This is in the Netherlands, which frowned upon aircos until very recently)
> And yet many Europeans will still argue that ACs are evil
I have literally never met this straw man European (and I live here). Heat pumps are going in all over Europe at a rate of knots, and solar adoption rates in southern Europe mean that using those heat pumps to cool down in summer will be basically free
Lived in Europe all my life, never seen this, in the past 40 years. I think it’s more an American fantasy than anything else. Historically, aircon in Northern Europe was pointless except for large office blocks, so was rarely installed. It’s been common in much of Southern Europe for a while.
I think it’s still a _fairly_ hard sell in Northern Europe; you might be talking about a few days a year when it’s actually required, which will discourage people from putting it in. Thought about it myself when I was WFH during covid, but in Ireland in particular it really is just a few days a year, at worst.
What strikes me is the relative sharp change. CO2 has been rising since, what 250 years ? However real effects of global warming seems to be felt since, like 10 years old ?
CO2 and temperature track quite well. However, climate sensitivity actually says the relationship is not linear but logarithmic. Doubling CO2 increases temperature by 2-3 degrees.
The thing is, in the last decade or two we have firmly moved into the regime where we are out of the natural variability. If you get a 30 degree summer every five years instead of every ten that might be a very clear signal for warming, but is not as notable. If every summer is 30 degree and sometimes you get 40 you really feel the new climate normal.
it rises faster now because we have more co2-emitters today than we did 20 years ago. source: economy has grown. idc if this sounds rude, but honestly you shoulve guessed this
Don't worry. The AMOC is already collapsing. I live in Zurich, about the same latitude as the north tip of Maine. Winters here are pleasant - you have to go to the mountains to get snow. Once the Atlantic current that keeps Europe warm collapses maybe the glaciers can start growing again.
A lot of older building worked a lot better. The downstairs of my Victorian terraced house in Cheshire stayed cool throughout the heatwave. A friend's far older house with very thick walls is extremely good at maintaining comfortable temperature in the summer.
Time to get AC in homes. Especially in the Uk Where homes are generally terraced/attached, small, and decently insulated. The costs to operate wouldn’t be too painful.
Secondly, much of Western Europe (except Norway) needs to figure out how to bring energy costs way down. It’s so expensive compared to the USA and Canada and people take home significantly less money.
"Europe's rapid warming is partly the result of [...] a drop in the number of tiny polluting particles in the air. This means that less of the Sun's energy is reflected back into space, leaving more energy to heat the Earth's surface."
This is now quite well-studied because we have had two periods in our own lifetimes (OK I guess maybe not in the lifetimes of some HN readers!), where we have cut air pollution radically almost overnight. 9/11 and the COVID pandemic transport shutdown.
In both cases, the pan evaporation rate went up; in the case of 9/11 it went up very noticeably in a short period of time.
Essentially: clean air == less "global dimming". Whether any really recent changes like the increasingly successful rollout of electric cars is yet having an effect, I don't know.
It's hard to compare a shift in a probability distribution because people will hang on to outliers. We hear this every winter: "all I hear about is Global Warming but look at this record snow". But I do believe the empirical evidence for all this has gone well beyond statistical significance.
The Wire is one of my all-time favorite shows in part because it's a story of institutional failure at every level. The police, the ports, the media, the schools and the city government. That's really what's going on here. Utility companies (in the US at least) prefer fossil fuels because they're more profitable. The wealthy prefer fossil fuels because a mine or an oil well is and always has been a massive wealth concentrator. Build a solar farm and it... just produces electricity. There are far fewer profit opportunities so it doesn't happen. So fossil fuel companies have money to throw at politicians to enshrine their rent-seeking behavior. But most depressing is how many ordinary people buy into this system with some hand-waving about "jobs" even though renewables will be strictly better in basically every way at this point.
Spain could become the energy powerhouse of Europe here. It's one of the most southernmost European countries and has plentiful sunshine. Additionally it has a lot of otherwise degraded land. According to Google, 200,000+ square kilometers. You build endless solar farms and UHVDC transmission lines across the continent and you could massively diminish the dependence on natural gas. All the tech for all of this already exists. It can be added incrementally. There's no 20+ year construction cycle like there is for any nuclear project.
As an added benefit, this would likely help regenerate the soil as China has done.
It's worth adding that the privatization era of the 1980s and 1990s was a massive problem. Every utility in Europe should be nationalized. It's easier to subsidize energy shocks when you own the companies that are profiting from them.
> The wealthy prefer fossil fuels because a mine or an oil well is and always has been a massive wealth concentrator.
lots of wealthy people are anti-fossil fuel.
> Build a solar farm and it... just produces electricity.
it needs land. It increases the value of land. Wealthy people own lots of land.
The main objections for switching to wind and solar are variability in output and the cost of building all the new stuff.
> Spain could become the energy powerhouse of Europe here. It's one of the most southernmost European countries and has plentiful sunshine.
Fine if you are Spanish. Not so good if you are from the north of Europe or somewhere with less spare land.
> It's worth adding that the privatization era of the 1980s and 1990s was a massive problem. Every utility in Europe should be nationalized. It's easier to subsidize energy shocks when you own the companies that are profiting from them.
I think it would have the opposite effect. Its tempting to sustain the profits when you get them.
I wonder whether the British government would be so keen on moving away from fossil fuels if it still owned BP?
They're really not. Or it's just perfrmative environmentalism. Because they continue to support to politicians and the system that maintains the status quo.
> Fine if you are Spanish.
Please read the whole paragraph. Transmitting power, which is what UHVDC lines are for and something China builds to transmit power thousands of kilometers from the Western half of the country to the Eastern half where everybody lives, exists [1]. Standard transmission lines lose 4-10%/1000km. UHVDC loses 1-3%/1000km.
Europe loves importing electricity. It's the key to greenwashing. Why not build solar where it's most efficient and import that instead?
> I wonder whether the British government would be so keen on moving away from fossil fuels if it still owned BP?
The UK has spent hudnreds of billions of pounds subsidizing electricity that goes straight into the pockets of the shareholders of natural gas companies and private utilities. Is that better?
> They're really not. Or it's just perfrmative environmentalism. Because they continue to support to politicians and the system that maintains the status quo.
There are a lot of wealthy people spending serious money on lobbying against fossil fuels:
> Europe loves importing electricity. It's the key to greenwashing
Yes, its also a potential problem transmitting .
> The UK has spent hudnreds of billions of pounds subsidizing electricity that goes straight into the pockets of the shareholders of natural gas companies and private utilities.
Oh... I understand now. You're right wing and quoting a right-wing dish rag like the Spectator to play into a conspiracy that "dark money" is pushing some "net zero" agenda, somehow at the expense of the UK. Got it.
According to one study, the UK's investments in wind power have saved consumers 100 billion pounds since 2010 [1] all while spending 16-20 billion pounds a year on subsiizing natural gas [2] plus more on an emergency energy bill in 2020-2022.
Your first link (the credible one) says "This massive expansion of UK offshore wind is partly due to UK government subsidies." so it proves me right.
The other one is a campaign group who say there are subsidies but fail to name a single specific one.
Insulting people who come up with facts that do not suit your case does not prove anything, and there are guidelines on HN about personal attacks and assuming bad faith. Saying "Spectator bad" does not disprove anything it says either. Believing publications that take a line you agree with and disbelieving those that disagree with you is not a great way of learning facts.
> The other one is a campaign group who say there are subsidies but fail to name a single specific one.
It seems deliberately obtuse to try and deny there are significant energy (and thus natural gas) subsidies in the UK. Ok, try the Office of Budget Responsibility [1]:
> By the time of our November 2022 forecast, the Government announced a series of additional measures to support households and business, which increased our forecast of the total cost of energy support in 2022-23 to £67.1 billion (2.7 per cent of GDP).
> Insulting people who come up with facts
So you're not right wing? Cry-bullying about "personal attacks" for using an accurate political label correctly isn't helping your defense.
Pushing a conspiracy theory that a cabal of dark money is pushign renewable power and using The Spectator as a source is the UK equivalent of quoting Sean Hannity.
Solar doesn't need a lot of land. If we used all the land we currently use to grow biofuels for solar instead we'd be able to cover most of our energy needs already.
And yet there are still climate change deniers here. Look at any BBC article about this where they enable comments and about a quarter of the upvotes are for denier comments. Absolutely insane.
It's a damn shame that the EU's plan to reduce our already low emissions to zero by 2050, at great cost to our collective wealth, will result in a reduction in global warming of less than 0.02 C. That is if industry doesn't just move to India, China, Indonesia, etc.
Unfortunately, the headline, like ALL of the rest for decades, is woefully conservative and fails to address the real situation, and more probmilmaticaly the failure modes of intense climate change.
The current (daily) charts and maps as all in record teritory, with changes so extream as to suggest that there could be unmanageable conditions in our imediate future.
It is not as if there was a heat dome that is specifically sitting on the cities. It is more because the cities are so bad in heat control that they get tropical night via inertia.
Humanity has decided we can't be bothered with this climate thing. We are busy making money and can't be distracted. So welcome everyone! I'll be a hell of a ride.
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[ 5.9 ms ] story [ 25.0 ms ] threadMeanwhile paperstraws, and glued bottle caps, are supposed to save the planet.
There will be winners and losers. As climate zones move toward the poles, weather patterns and agricultural viability will shift with them. This will eventually turn current breadbaskets into deserts while warming up northern/southern regions for longer growing seasons.
Various regions will cross ecological thresholds, causing sudden, dramatic shifts in local climates. For example, a warmer Earth could bring monsoon rains back to the Sahara and Arabian deserts, turning them green once again. In general, a warmer world is a wetter world due to increased oceanic evaporation.
Sea levels will gradually begin rising, but perhaps at a rate of 1-2" per year. It takes a lot of heat to melt glaciers.
Human existence is not in doubt on account of the climate alone -- our prehistoric forebears had a lot worse to deal with -- but there could be mass population movements and alterations in how agriculture is handled globally. Current political structures are not up to this challenge.
Give that state you described another 50 odd years again and things can get worse - the land based glaciers are already greatly reduced, almost gone. The bulky polar ice is retreating a little - but the warming sea surface is the thing, it'll carry warm water and melt more and more ice.
Now it's fun and games for predicting what comes next - the insulation in the atmosphere is still increasing and the same amount of trapped energy that now goes to turning a mass of ice to a mass of water (at much the same temperature) will now turn to raising that same mass of water from near 0 C to about 60 C (roughly IIRC) - speeding up ice melts.
There's also the increasing amounts of water and methane in the atmosphere that come along with rising temperatures, these are much much better insulators that measly old CO2 and will serve to trap ever more energy from the sun.
Geophysically that's how this all goes in the absence of any serious reduction of insulation in the atmosphere.
Not to forget, we are dependent on the food web. These changes mean species will be wiped out, fishing stocks will crash, and invasive will spread.
Since you are likely in the developed world, tropical temps in Europe would mean refurbishment of houses.
People won’t remember things like the lakes freezing over or ice skating.
This is what worries me.
At some point more northern facing countries will decide enough is enough and start mass genocide of any population attempting to flee.
Europe will be ok with just killing a few hundred million trying to flee in boats, and the eastern frontier is securable, especially with drones, but even with conscripts. Hell Ukraine has done a solid job on its own against an organised army on its doorstep.
America will act as a buffer for Canada and will have no problem with wiping out refugees. Argentina will be interesting but it's too small and isolated to matter globally.
The big global risk is that India and Pakistan have nukes and will be trying to flee into China and central Asia.
Setting aside refugees, far bigger risk for Europe isn't reurbishment of housing, it's tropical diseases in the south, it's the collapse of food security, and the general collapse of society as the economy falls over.
I find it very difficult to maintain an even tone and address statements that posit climate change positive effects on society.
There are so many incredibly bad things about climate change it boggles the mind.
I try and believe people are burying their heads in the sand to avoid the pain of reckoning with the end of everything they hold dear. This ends up with punches being pulled.
You already said these are massive geographic issues.
Yet these different, large, geographic problems are of a size that doesn’t end up having even a remote effect on human civilization?
How? Is there some geography which is not impacted at all? A geography where a massive portion of human civilization is situated?
You're driving at changes to how we live.
Changes to how we live, even large ones, does not equate to "the end of humanity."
Society won't collapse. Humans will do amazingly evil things to survive. The British were happy to starved millions of Indians to death until the country gained independence. All to support the British empire. We live in an era of basically unprecedented niceness in the history of humanity. Even the great empires of the past oppressed and killed multitudes more through slavery or serfdom or constant expansionist wars or other such means.
> refurbishment of houses
Perfect work for refugees to do at gun point.
Billions may die but society will go on with a somewhat lower regard for life and a larger amount of nationalism. Arguably what we consider western society will collapse but that's only existed for under a century.
In some ways that is more depressing than society simply collapsing. We will leave behind a rotting zombified corpse of our society to future generations.
It is easy to write provocative things when we do not let ourselves bear the weight of their implication. This is horror being outlined.
In earnest conversation, these are sombre and sobering implications, not frivolous or minor things.
This is a sea of humans, extending from one end of the horizon to the other, hungry, lost, frightened, confused, sad and angry. It is the loss of culture, history and fascinating things that one cherishes.
> In some ways that is more depressing than society simply collapsing.
The inability to discuss a horror in realistic terms is how you get a horror. Not exaggerated "society will collapse" but actually tangible realistic and terrible outcomes. Society collapsing is an abstract and nebulous thing. The thing we will get is much worse and unless we look it in the face we will get it.
Do you mean in terms of climate change? I know some temperatures were different but this was much more gradual afaik, which is no problem for anyone with two feet and a sense of where to go, but they were much more dependent on the ecosystem which struggles to keep up with the speed of today's changes
From what I hear, what we're causing is unprecedented for humans. Not dinosaur meteorite level of course (it's not an overnight change) but an ecosystem extinction event is nevertheless going on (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction)
I agree with the broader point that we'll survive and the question is more about the amount of suffering we inflict on ourselves and other animals along the way. Just curious if any old human (or even any great ape from the 'homo' genus) did experience worse
So extending the time before frost, won't help many plants reach maturity. The days will be shorter, and when the sun comes up there is barely any light anyhow. Raw "daylight hours" are meaningless here, when the sun only gets barely over the norizon.
One month of June light is like 6 months of December light in much of Canada.
If it's anything like the recent energy spikes it means burdening future generations of wealthy countries with subsidised amenities while others go without.
It gets abstracted away for richer countries as they can outbid the poorer countries for food. In developed economies, most of a particular piece of food's price is not the costs that go to the farmer, but costs that come later in the process, so that cost increasing is also felt less.
Heatwaves on the other hand affect the western countries directly.
Let's go back... ah, I see mile-high glaciers over London.
Global warming did occur in the past as well.
“Republican Senate environment chief uses snowball as prop in climate rant”[0]
It’s an interesting plot twist in Termination Shock, where the popularist right shifts overnight from “it’s fake” to “real, but the liberals/globalists/experts betrayed us by doing nothing useful”. A reframe from environmentalism into grievance politics, which is already becoming real in France[1].
0: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/26/senate-james...
1: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gyqldl3p5o
Can't see how some random politician is "to blame", that's pretty absurd claim, and not supported by the claimed evidence.
I love how the intelligentsia claim without evidence that that per-capita is the important and moral metric when you talk about total emissions, then all of a sudden absolute emissions are the important thing when you point out that western countries are not at the top of the per capita lists either!
The 2050 temp they had predicted was less than the current heat wave
1. Stick to their plan to ban ICE car sales by 2030.
2. Unban on-shore wind power (Labour did this! Not that anyone noticed...)
3. Mandate solar panels and heat pumps for new houses.
4. Mandate bike lanes for new roads (blows my mind that this isn't a policy).
5. Take distribution into account when paying energy suppliers, so we aren't paying for a load of wind power in Scotland that we can't use (I believe this is being considered).
6. Upgrade the grid so we can get power from Scotland (I think this is in progress).
7. Make car charging infrastructure sane. No apps! Fines for broken chargers. More chargers along motorways. Street-side charging.
8. Stop freezing fuel duty.
9. Mandate OpenTherm (or similar) on boilers and thermostats.
10. Create an open, mandatory standard for remote adjustment of power consumption of things like air conditioners, freezers, car chargers and so on, that must be supported and can be used by power companies to optimise grid usage. Some large buildings do this but 99.99% of things that could do it don't.
11. Offer government backed loans for solar power. There are private companies that do it but they're seen as quite sketchy (e.g. if you sell your house...) so uptake is low.
12. Give office employees a right to work from home one day a week where it's possible (similar to how you have a right to change your hours).
13. Ban patio heaters.
14. Ban especially inefficient cars (e.g. less than 20 mpg).
15. Fix the railways... They are working on this tbf.
Even the people that have brains are ostensibly do care about climate change... when push comes to shove and you try to increase petrol prices to the level that represents their true cost, or try to erect a wind turbine near them... They'll say "erm actually never mind".
Actually it doesn't even need to be a wind turbine. There are many PV solar projects in the UK that get attacked by NIMBYs. Literally just solar panels in fields. The most low impact construction ever.
How could people possibly object to that, you ask? There are a variety of bullshit reasons they come up with e.g.
1. Extra lorry traffic during construction (a one-time minor inconvenience).
2. The applicants hadn't done a survey on how putting poles in the ground in the middle of a field might affect the habitats of newts, or some bollocks like that.
3. There's too much solar power already. I shit you not.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd0vyv7rejlo
If the west de-industrializes then our enemies will destroy us... Russia's literally invading Europe right now (albeit poorly).
India is doing industrialisation via solar. Massive solar arrays on top of factories and warehouses.
How the heck is installing solar panels to generate green electricity de-industrilaize?!
Total and cumulative numbers are all that matter for global warming.
I am a bit lost though: the first global graphic shows a depressing increase of fossil fuel consumption, but the detailed graphics after either show a stagnation or a decrease (must be centered on electricity generation I guess).
The global picture seems very positive, reaching a plateau is a great achievement! Let's meet in 2026 to hopefully confirm this trend
We can't even have global peace around the world, some people are still starving daily despite the fact that there is plenty of food to feed everybody on the planet, and slavery is still a thing, who's going to do what climate action exactly?
Ignoring heat wave deaths, Hormuz crisis has shown us that oil cam be blockaded but the panels and windmills installed on our rooftops can't be blockaded
Even Cuba is setting up solar plants with the help of China.
Philippines is the highest importer of solar panels since Hormuz was blocked. Rest of South Asia is quickly following
Way more died during the heat wave in France in 2003. What did France do? Nothing substantial, because nobody is willing to bear the cost of substantial policies to fight climate change.
From that day to today's heat dome, things have changed a lot
Obviously consuming even more should never be the solution to problems caused by overconsumption. We should be figuring out ways to keep electricity use in check rather than consuming more and more, but that's a fact that people would rather not accept.
Source? Where I live (NL) the electricity prices are very low on the days/times you’d need AC because of all the solar power generated then. I think you gotta back up your claim that 50% of electricity consumed by ACs comes from burning carbon. It strikes me as very counterintuitive (or dated)
It might be my bubble, but I see a lot more people complaining about anti-AC warriors than actual anti-AC warriors. Do you have an example?
I mean it also doesn't make much sense anymore does it? You turn the AC on when the sun is out and theres an energy surplus.
We got AC last year, and solar panels at the same time, so the AC climate impact is zero. All reactions from neighbours etc were either neutral or positive. (This is in the Netherlands, which frowned upon aircos until very recently)
I have literally never met this straw man European (and I live here). Heat pumps are going in all over Europe at a rate of knots, and solar adoption rates in southern Europe mean that using those heat pumps to cool down in summer will be basically free
Lived in Europe all my life, never seen this, in the past 40 years. I think it’s more an American fantasy than anything else. Historically, aircon in Northern Europe was pointless except for large office blocks, so was rarely installed. It’s been common in much of Southern Europe for a while.
I think it’s still a _fairly_ hard sell in Northern Europe; you might be talking about a few days a year when it’s actually required, which will discourage people from putting it in. Thought about it myself when I was WFH during covid, but in Ireland in particular it really is just a few days a year, at worst.
The first response to my post was one. Last post that touched on this a couple weeks ago had a number of them as well.
CO2 and temperature track quite well. However, climate sensitivity actually says the relationship is not linear but logarithmic. Doubling CO2 increases temperature by 2-3 degrees.
The thing is, in the last decade or two we have firmly moved into the regime where we are out of the natural variability. If you get a 30 degree summer every five years instead of every ten that might be a very clear signal for warming, but is not as notable. If every summer is 30 degree and sometimes you get 40 you really feel the new climate normal.
It has been rising exponentially.
> However real effects of global warming seems to be felt since, like 10 years old ?
Look up glacier timelapses. More vulnerable ecosystems have visibly reflected climate change for far longer than 10 years now.
it rises faster now because we have more co2-emitters today than we did 20 years ago. source: economy has grown. idc if this sounds rude, but honestly you shoulve guessed this
Secondly, much of Western Europe (except Norway) needs to figure out how to bring energy costs way down. It’s so expensive compared to the USA and Canada and people take home significantly less money.
Hmmm...
"But ..."
Revs the engine again. "ONCE AND FOR ALL!"
In both cases, the pan evaporation rate went up; in the case of 9/11 it went up very noticeably in a short period of time.
Essentially: clean air == less "global dimming". Whether any really recent changes like the increasingly successful rollout of electric cars is yet having an effect, I don't know.
This reduced SO2 emissions by about 80%, which improved human health, but also caused an increase in short-term atmospheric warming.
> Europe's rapid warming is partly the result of the melting of bright snow and ice, and a drop in the number of tiny polluting particles in the air.
That first one is kind of important and it seems intentionally misleading to omit it
The Wire is one of my all-time favorite shows in part because it's a story of institutional failure at every level. The police, the ports, the media, the schools and the city government. That's really what's going on here. Utility companies (in the US at least) prefer fossil fuels because they're more profitable. The wealthy prefer fossil fuels because a mine or an oil well is and always has been a massive wealth concentrator. Build a solar farm and it... just produces electricity. There are far fewer profit opportunities so it doesn't happen. So fossil fuel companies have money to throw at politicians to enshrine their rent-seeking behavior. But most depressing is how many ordinary people buy into this system with some hand-waving about "jobs" even though renewables will be strictly better in basically every way at this point.
Spain could become the energy powerhouse of Europe here. It's one of the most southernmost European countries and has plentiful sunshine. Additionally it has a lot of otherwise degraded land. According to Google, 200,000+ square kilometers. You build endless solar farms and UHVDC transmission lines across the continent and you could massively diminish the dependence on natural gas. All the tech for all of this already exists. It can be added incrementally. There's no 20+ year construction cycle like there is for any nuclear project.
As an added benefit, this would likely help regenerate the soil as China has done.
It's worth adding that the privatization era of the 1980s and 1990s was a massive problem. Every utility in Europe should be nationalized. It's easier to subsidize energy shocks when you own the companies that are profiting from them.
lots of wealthy people are anti-fossil fuel.
> Build a solar farm and it... just produces electricity.
it needs land. It increases the value of land. Wealthy people own lots of land.
The main objections for switching to wind and solar are variability in output and the cost of building all the new stuff.
> Spain could become the energy powerhouse of Europe here. It's one of the most southernmost European countries and has plentiful sunshine.
Fine if you are Spanish. Not so good if you are from the north of Europe or somewhere with less spare land.
> It's worth adding that the privatization era of the 1980s and 1990s was a massive problem. Every utility in Europe should be nationalized. It's easier to subsidize energy shocks when you own the companies that are profiting from them.
I think it would have the opposite effect. Its tempting to sustain the profits when you get them.
I wonder whether the British government would be so keen on moving away from fossil fuels if it still owned BP?
They're really not. Or it's just perfrmative environmentalism. Because they continue to support to politicians and the system that maintains the status quo.
> Fine if you are Spanish.
Please read the whole paragraph. Transmitting power, which is what UHVDC lines are for and something China builds to transmit power thousands of kilometers from the Western half of the country to the Eastern half where everybody lives, exists [1]. Standard transmission lines lose 4-10%/1000km. UHVDC loses 1-3%/1000km.
Europe loves importing electricity. It's the key to greenwashing. Why not build solar where it's most efficient and import that instead?
> I wonder whether the British government would be so keen on moving away from fossil fuels if it still owned BP?
The UK has spent hudnreds of billions of pounds subsidizing electricity that goes straight into the pockets of the shareholders of natural gas companies and private utilities. Is that better?
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9OcsvNZeB0
There are a lot of wealthy people spending serious money on lobbying against fossil fuels:
https://spectator.com/article/revealed-the-shady-funding-of-...
> Europe loves importing electricity. It's the key to greenwashing
Yes, its also a potential problem transmitting .
> The UK has spent hudnreds of billions of pounds subsidizing electricity that goes straight into the pockets of the shareholders of natural gas companies and private utilities.
It has spent a lot of money subsidising wind power. The UK has hugely cut its CO2 emissions. https://ourworldindata.org/profile/co2/united-kingdom
According to one study, the UK's investments in wind power have saved consumers 100 billion pounds since 2010 [1] all while spending 16-20 billion pounds a year on subsiizing natural gas [2] plus more on an emergency energy bill in 2020-2022.
[1]: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2025/oct/analysis-wind-power-has-...
[2]: https://www.globaljustice.org.uk/news/uk-government-subsidis...
The other one is a campaign group who say there are subsidies but fail to name a single specific one.
Insulting people who come up with facts that do not suit your case does not prove anything, and there are guidelines on HN about personal attacks and assuming bad faith. Saying "Spectator bad" does not disprove anything it says either. Believing publications that take a line you agree with and disbelieving those that disagree with you is not a great way of learning facts.
It seems deliberately obtuse to try and deny there are significant energy (and thus natural gas) subsidies in the UK. Ok, try the Office of Budget Responsibility [1]:
> By the time of our November 2022 forecast, the Government announced a series of additional measures to support households and business, which increased our forecast of the total cost of energy support in 2022-23 to £67.1 billion (2.7 per cent of GDP).
> Insulting people who come up with facts
So you're not right wing? Cry-bullying about "personal attacks" for using an accurate political label correctly isn't helping your defense.
Pushing a conspiracy theory that a cabal of dark money is pushign renewable power and using The Spectator as a source is the UK equivalent of quoting Sean Hannity.
[1]: https://obr.uk/box/the-cost-of-the-governments-energy-suppor...
https://www.ospo.noaa.gov/products/ocean/sst/contour/
https://nsidc.org/sea-ice-today
https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/seaice_daily/
It is not as if there was a heat dome that is specifically sitting on the cities. It is more because the cities are so bad in heat control that they get tropical night via inertia.
https://www.chmi.cz/namerena-data/historicka-data/historicke...