Looking at the graph left me wondering just what it means exactly. I'm not well versed in statistics so "the standard deviation is 3.5°C" doesn't mean much. Also, what's up with that other line going down to -3.5°C? And what do the colors mean? In the sense that I'm not sure whether a darker blue means closer to or further from today.
my layman understanding, a real statistician will surely intervene.
standard deviation is a measure that informs about the distribution. A high standard deviation means a "wide bell curve". A low standard deviation means that all values are closely clustered around the middle of the curve.
So if your value is 2 x standard deviation (for example) that means it is a relatively rare outlier, since 2 x standard deviation covers 95% of the bell curve. In particle physics I believe they require 5 standard deviations to confirm an observation.
> Each blue line represents a different year since 1982. The red line is this year. It doesn't just set a new record. It has departed entirely from the range of previous observations.
I'm not an authority on this, but here's is my understanding - I'd appreciate if someone could correct my mistakes.
The baseline of 0.0 represents the average of all years. Anything above / below the baseline is a (standard) deviation from the average. The blue lines are the individual years since 1991 [1] while the red line is the year 2026.
If a line is above the baseline, then the sea-surface temperature was hotter on that day than average. If below, it was cooler than average.
The year 2026 is an outlier, dwarfing all the others starting around June / July. The Nino 3.4 sea-surface temperature is significantly hotter than any previous year during that time. New record, I guess?
[1]: I'm confused about the two date ranges given: 1982-2026 and 1991-2020. I'm assuming this graph is based on measurements from 1982-2026 to calculate the average, but the lines shown are only from 1991-2020, for some statistical reason I don't understand.
I think it is the other way around: SD is calculated from 1982-2020, while all measurement readings in the plot are 1982-2026. I believe this is meant to not introduce an unwanted shift but compare to sort of a 'stable process'. However, that should have been described and argued somewhere.
The graph has a key on the right hand side that clearly labels each colour of line, and the horizontal axis is scaled in months of each year. Scrolling down gets you notes and links to data sources.
In answer to another poster in this thread, the dataset only reaches back to 1983, I'm assuming because that is when they started monitoring these temperatures?
I had the same concerns and think the chart would benefit from color grading the individual years by age. If the other outlier in the opposite direction is equally likely then it should also be concerning (obviously it is not). My understanding is the deviation is from the 1991-2020 subset avg, so a warming trend would be indicated by relative drift towards positive in the std dev across years from 82-present
The title of the figure is ambiguous about what "SD" really means but I guess it is plotting the number of standard deviations of the 1991-2020 data measured from the mean of that data and plotted per day for the 1982-2026 data.
That shows measured temperature and 2026 as very hot (surprise) and in fact is the hottest to date for June+July. The standard deviation of that data is not 3.5 C but something less than 1.0 C. It is plausible that current temperature is about 3.5 sigma from the selected mean.
It's worth recognizing that the analysis is applying a biased conclusion prior to making the plot. It singles out post 2020 data to compare to pre-2020 data. and then concluding the held out data is a significant deviation with a cause. It almost certainly is but this is not a proper way to analyze data (unless one is pushing an agenda, be that for good or bad).
I think the sst_daily plot stands on its own without crafting this SD plot to emphasize the point. Especially when the accompanying text doesn't even explain it. It's a disingenuous message.
That was my first reaction too. A perfect fit for a cover image of a story. Also generally when referencing something within an article you want to display a figure before talking about it.
You react to a serious article rightfully pointing at civilization-ending developments by nitpicking about design choices.
Your likely intent is to signal indifference and dismissiveness towards the actual content. To deflect from the actual topic and derail the conversation.
Your likely motivation is lack of a ready-made remedy compatible with your premise of leaving your lifestyle untouched.
If you want to to down that road the article reads like AI slop which cooks the planet itself with energy use. Or, alternately, if the message is that important it is all the more important that it be communicated effectively.
That's a lot of assumptions about me based on "the important figure should be at the top of the page, not the bottom". Joe Average isn't going to want to read 14 paragraphs before getting to the actual graph the title mentions
It maybe would, if people were to read it in the first place.
But they don't: they go to the comments here first and try to get the gist of reactions, in order to save themselves the time to actually read the piece.
You pretend, it wasn't trivial for people to scroll down to the graph. Such things aren't the issue at all.
The reactions you cause with your comment above are.
I doubt my single comment about the design choices of the article is turning people off from seeing what the article is about. I'm stressing that the graph is actually important to see, not saying "the design is bad so you shouldn't read this article". And given people's attention spans these days, I'd imagine reading 14 paragraphs to find the graph the title talks about might be non-trivial
"The point isn't whether it's true about you in particular" - then wtf are you saying? That this person can say true things but is still wrong?
I agree with them, and I also agree with the concern in the article. Both can be right. And I think you're off base here with all your unfounded assumptions and straw-manning.
Communication about truth is also hard when against decades of industry, talk radio, right-wing media, and Republican propaganda lying about the climate. And humans, with very little scientific or critical thinking skills, felt comfort in the lie that "everything is ok!". Getting past a person's discomfort in order for them to accept truth is a high hill.
I'm not sure if you're being actively malicious or just a great example of how lies can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes, but your comment is a great example of what we're up against here.
If by "all snow would disappear forever from Earth" you meant "the Arctic could be seasonal-ice-free in the summer" by 2013, then, sure.
Plotting it this way is just a shift and rescaling. As the other commenter already showed this will lead to a plot that looks pretty much the same in terms of difference relative to the past data. I think standard deviation makes sense here since we don’t really have an innate sense of what is a meaningful change in ocean surface temperature and the point is to show that we are already far beyond normal here.
There are many thing people could do, eat less meat, smaller homes, electric cars, green energy, no flights etc. but the vast majority of people does exactly nothing.
"Eat less meat, smaller homes, no flights"? Sounds like an average person to me because of poverty, lol. Even my family, well above the threshold for poverty, has to do this.
"Electric cars" is less likely tho because having a car at all is a money drain.
Chinese and Indian CO2 emissions dwarf anything you mentioned. You can stop eating meat altogether and move to a small doghouse, it won’t make any global impact at all.
This line of "hurrr but they are doing it too so why should I stop!" reasoning constitutes a logical fallacy that a motivated 9 year old is probably already able to reason themselves out of
This is not what I'm saying. Telling people to eat less meat or live in smaller houses is not only inefficient, but a counterproductive way to protect environment. This is environmental protection theatre, if not circus. It makes environmental protection measures look laughable and ridiculous. Unless something is done against the biggest pollutors, eating less meat (now think about how dangerous this advice looks without taking into account who it's addressed at - stupid parents can stop feeding their children meat and cause them lifelong health problems) won't prevent environmental problems. Sorry, I'm interested in participating or endorsing environmenal protection circus.
Cool, so what have you personally done to reduce your co2 emissions? How do your co2 emissions compare to the global average? Or are you just pretending the problem is other people?
I agree that we should but rational individuals are not going to voluntarily lower their standard of living at any noticeable scale. Simply not going to happen.
That’s because those who (our countries that enforce it) eat less, have smaller properties, less productive cars and infrastructure etc, those are the countries that will have the short end of the stick in 10-20 years time - just look at Europe. The tragedy of the commons at a global scale.
Eat less and different meat with a smaller footprint. Mostly poultry, eggs, also more organ meats, etc. Also combat fertiliser runoff.
The methane output of a field of cattle isn't that dramatically different from a forest with decomposing wood, deer, etc.
Methane is also a potent but temporary actor and tackling it primarily just buys us very little time which will be used as an excuse to keep pumping co2.
However we grow a good chunch feed for that cattle and for ourselves with fossil fuel based fertilisers.
We need to quit that. If we get rid of both that 8% co2 output for fertilisers and get rid of the manure as well....
Well we'll solve a lot of related problems by drastically reducing the world's population with a gigantic famine.
A collection of individuals, some of whose actions have a billion times more impact than others, and those powerful individuals hate human civilization.
Yes, I should recycle more. Meanwhile, it’s OK for politicians to invest in coal and build gas-powered datacenters, while the ultrabillionaires buy groceries in a private jet.
Don’t worry about that, just recycle more!
It is about time we stop blaming the individual at the bottom of the ladder for the problems of society. And let me preempt you: society isn’t made up of individuals, but it is much greater than the sum of its parts.
Why does it have to be one or the other? 7+ billion small actions add up; power plants and datacenters are still at least partly about fulfilling consumer demand.
Or to put it another way - which of those things is under our control? If one can do something more, then why not? Because billionaires? The climate doesn't blame anyone, it just exists; being to blame or not, doesn't matter when we're all in the same boat together.
It’s a tough sell. The impact of you turning your AC a little bit colder or having a bigger car is almost unmeasurable on a global basis yet the benefits to you personally are probably pretty big.
The reality is that what is in our control is very, very little, and we’re squabbling like mad among ourselves because I had a piece of beef for lunch.
I’m the first to recycle, so you’re preaching to the choir. What I’m saying if we could do better than self-flagellating. Or rather, there is nothing our self-flagellation will achieve in the end.
> power plants and datacenters are still at least partly about fulfilling consumer demand.
Consumer demand doesn't determine whether to build coal vs solar vs nuclear. Public policy does. No new oil/gas/coal plants, period, and start working to shut down the ones we have. Electricity generation is the source of about a third of all CO2 emissions.
Consumer demand doesn't determine whether we do carbon capture, or reforestation. Those require public policy.
I think that kind of breathless excited tone is justified by the subject matter. Unlike the usual LinkedIn posts this is actually about a pretty dire situation.
> Turn the volume on the typical El Niño impacts up to eleven, then watch the collective infrastructure of modern industrial civilization crumble. Watch as flooding storms wash away roads and cities. Watch as trailing storms create new inland lakes, swamping farmland. Watch as fires raze forests and grasslands. Watch as heatwaves turn temperate regions into unsurvivable hellscapes. Watch as crops fail and dams burst. Watch as the shelves of your local grocery store gradually, then suddenly, go empty.
The language is too strong for the context. Author uses religious imagery, prognosticates about an Armageddon scenario, and does so based on a relatively short time series.
This is intentional repetition. More specifically, anaphora [1]. You may not personally like it, but it is a rhetorical device used to emphasize a point. This one also comes with a nice progression: storms, storms, heat, heat, farmland, groceries.
This substack article also comes with additional graphs, a much better story flow (data is progressively introduced and explained before reaching the final plot), and was posted 2 days before the OP. I agree with GP that it is significantly superior to the OP (which is likely AI slop). Thanks for posting it.
The Forest of Fontainebleau, just 50 km south of Paris, is burning, with Canada it's on the scene trying to contain it. Nearby highways and trains - some of the busiest of France - are cut. It is a temperate European forest, oak trees and beech.
No AC is going to save European from that. In fact, it is American AC which is the main cause of it. They dumped all that energy and greenhouse gases and Europeans are the one impacted by these externalities.
For some context: the conversation about climate change in general, and the recent heatwaves in particular, has been (quite cynically, but cleverly) reframed by far-right parties to be all about "we need to put AC in France to survive heatwaves".
This is smart because it addresses on the physical sensations of people (it's the third heatwave since end of may, and counting), it has an element of truth (AC is critically lacking in schools), it seems much more "down to earth" than the grand plans of "decarbonization", and it makes other political parties look out of touch (the left and greens have been criticizing AC because of the energy impact.)
Of course, this is both "smart" and incredibly cynical, given that the far right has been on the edge (or not so much on the edge) of climate denial for years. So year, "climate changes is not real" turned into "why didn't they put AC everywhere ?" then "vote for us, we'll put AC everywhere !"
This is also very short sighted.
But I guess no one has found a way to ask our future president (Marine Le Pen, twice convicted of embezzlement, waiting to know if she will have to run for President with a "jail from home" tracker, etc...) what exact amount of "putting AC and kicking immigrants out" is going to avoid Fontainebleau forest from burning.
(Also, since those people are incredibly "lucky", I can only imagine what will happen if we learn that the fire was volontary, and the arsonist was an immigrant... )
The only "consolation" is that El Nino is coming back, and she takes office on the 15th of may, so _she_ will have to deal with at least a couple heatwaves between 2027 and 2037...
We do have quite a similar discussion here in Germany.
Back in the day, everyone used fossil fuels to heat their homes. Back in those days, AC was frowned upon as inefficient, wasteful and decadent. Something only Americans did. The greens despised them for ecological reasons. The right despised them for moral reasons.
Then the public came to know about climate change and it was decided that people should transition to using heat pumps for heating their homes. Because heat pumps are efficient, green and a necessary sacrifice of money you have to do to combat climate change.
Now with this year's heat wave, suddenly there was a discussion even among the greens about having AC in buildings as a necessary adaptation to rising temperatures. And demands by the right to get rid of the AC stigma and deploy AC everywhere. And back in the corner, there were experts laughing out loud, because a heat pump is just an "evil" AC running in reverse. Has been all along. The only problem is that usually heat pumps were deployed in such a way that you couldn't use them to cool in the summer...
Which imho goes to show that the public urgently needs more scientific and technical literacy.
> because a heat pump is just an "evil" AC running in reverse
I keep hearing that, and then I keep hearing people tell me that you can't just put an heat pump, run it in "reverse" and "pretend" to have AC. That seems to be a case where the theory is here, but in practice the applicances are just optimized for one part, or the other.
(Also, heating is often done by heating water in radiators, and cooling by cooling the air.
It may seems stupid, but I still can fathom whether the same applicance can do both ! Or, if I want to do the right thing, and replace both my no-very-old gas boiler AND my pretty-old AC, can I put a single heat pump ?)
In Australia we have had reverse cycle air conditioning for decades. These are heat pumps that both heat and cool. I have 15kW of installed heat pump tech at home and run my whole house off grid, despite mainta8ning a grid connection. The systems run as heaters in winter, and air conditioning in summer. They are very efficient, enough so that I dont worry about our solar and battery being able to keep up.
The appliances are very common, and Ive seen them throughout much of Asia, too. Its like Europe and the US are just discovering this tech, yet its been reachable by half the world's population for 30+ years, and continues to improve.
To be honest I suspect the tech has been available here too, but the marketing is just confusing. But again, "cooling your house to survive summer" is, for real, a pretty recent concern to have in Europe, as opposed to "heating and insulating your house to survive winter".
It's almost as if the climate is warming in accordance to what physicist have been saying for 30 years.
"Qui aurait pu prévoir ?", as the other one would have said (sorry for the franco-french reference. And I know we'll "regret" the guy next year...)
I make this prediction: In 5 years, we will have learned that the red line was in error, and the temperatures will be in the bottom half of the graph.
I know this because every prediction of climate doom turned out to be false.
Entire nations were going to disappear under rising sea levels. It has not happened. I'm not saying no land sinks, but sea levels are not rising rapidly enough to prevent Al Gore (author of "An Inconvenient Truth") from buying an ocean-front home. The same applies to John Kerry and dozens of other outspoken prophets of doom who warned us that rising sea levels would submerge entire nations. They used the proceeds of their fear-mongering to buy oceanfront homes.
I remember signs in Glacier National Park telling us the glaciers would be gone by the year 2,000. It has not happened.
Others have corrected your confusion between prediction and observation. Lets instead show what we have already seen, today, that was previously predicted.
Kiribati and Tuvalu have measurable loss of land due to rising sea levels that is impacting people today. About 80% of the Maldives Islands will likely be uninhabitable within the next 25 years. The Marshall Islands have lost 18 out of their average 200cm above mean sea level height - roughly 6% of its land.
We have seen massive glacial retreat even in just the past 10 years, let alone the past 50. This is happening the world over, and at a rate that is not previously seen in the geological record (happy to argue this, thats my background). We are seeing large ice loss and lack of matching accumulation over Antarctica and Greenland - two great places to observe large scale processes. We just saw the Arctic stay largely unlocked for sea ice/shipping last season. The sum of these will take a moment to kick in, but the failure of conveyor currents will kick us all in the arse quite significantly and likely within our lifetime, and we have already seen hiccups.
They often are not, because they highly distort shape and size. Values that are smaller than the mean occupy much less space (area-wise) and seem less significant than they really are, while values that are larger than the mean occupy much more space (area-wise) and seem more significant than they really are.
The climate spiral can be misleading though, because it's natural for a viewer to interpret the change in terms of area.
Then, the increase from 1.5° to 2° looks much, much larger than the increase from 0° to 0.5°.
So it's misleading in terms of making recent warming seem even worse than it is. Now, of course, you might argue that is justified in spirit because the negative consequences from warming grow faster than linear... but that doesn't make it any less misleading in terms of the temperature change it is communicating.
“wahhhh this is bad” ok sure but how. what will the downstream effects be. how can we model increased ocean temperatures and how they will affect weather patterns or whatever? gives me no info on the implications, let alone info on the implications with rigor.
It’s not spelled in nursery rhyme, but it literally does give info on the implications. As the article states, they are not as simple as A => B, so it provides general idea of the implications. The general idea being ecosystem destabilisation and intensification of extremes and their frequency.
> How they will affect weather patterns or whatever?
> This is why graphs like this matter. Not because they prove that catastrophe is inevitable, and not because they predict the precise sequence of events over coming years. Science rarely deals in absolutes. What they show is that Earth is moving beyond the range within which modern human civilisation developed. We’re entering climatic conditions that our infrastructure, ecosystems, economies and institutions were never designed to accommodate.
Reading helps. Also it's pretty clear from the "waaaaah" that you are not asking a good faith question but rather dismissing the article, without bringing any information or sources to back whatever point you are trying to make - ironic.
I just left a comment on this elsewhere, but are you using cloudflare or nextdns? They seem to block archive sites, especially archive.today (archive.is, etc)
The NextDNS (and others) blocking of archive.today goes back far beyond 2026 and this specific DDOS event. Perhaps that contributed to the hostility behind it, I don't know. But citing that event for other examples does not apply well.
Please do not misinterpret this as an excuse or pardon of anything. I love archive.today and all their subdomains. I use it regularly and have been having problems for years, especially with NextDNS. I am seriously disappointed to learn of the DDOS event, but there remain other angles on the topic in general. I am still struggling to process WTF they would do what you reported -- how could they think that would be worth the consequences, accomplish anything? Almost seems suspicious in itself.
Thanks for the info. But ever a shill for archive.is
The author of that Climate Casino post has some... strong views. So you might want to bear this in mind when reading his analysis:
"The human cancer is destructive to every living thing, as humans continue to eat the planet into oblivion. As someone who values “everything else,” I would be one of the first to rally behind the NTHE philosophy if it had any scientific basis at all. I want the human cancer gone from this planet."
People in the climate movement are rarely professional PR folks. Weaponizing their personal faults against the objective subject matter they talk about is disingenuous anyway?
You cannot deduce factual correctness from how "holy" the messenger is.
Wanting every living human being to die and our species to go extinct ("NTHE" stands for "near-term human extinction") is a little beyond not being professional PR folks.
Per the article, the NTHE "movement" are doom sayers, not doom pushers. That is, the NTHE people are people who predict that humanity and most complex life on Earth will be killed off by global warming by 2030 (used to be 2026), through a somewhat convoluted but unavoidable series of consequences of the polar ice cap melting completely (in their theory). There is no indication that the NTHE people want this outcome to happen, it's just the outcome they think is already unavoidable.
Now, the author's position is both more and less nihilistic. The author also seems to think that human extinction is unavoidable, but he thinks the timeline is much more dragged out. He also seems to think that this is actually the preferable outcome at this point, given that global warming is our own fault, and that the only thing we should do is try to make it so that the planet is as well as it can be after we are finally gone.
It's additionally not clear that TFA is a copy of the Climate Casino (CC) post.
It's on the same topic, possibly spurred by the CC. Yes it uses the same graph (which I presume CC also didn't make), but otherwise the content and writing is very different. It's less detailed, possibly LLM written, but also more approachable.
I guess re-posting about a salient topic is now just "AI copyright theft".
“Let's be clear. The planet is not in jeopardy. We are in jeopardy. We haven't got the power to destroy the planet - or to save it. But we might have the power to save ourselves.”
But I don't think it's all that interesting of an argument. When people say save/destroy the Earth, they mean humanity. Call that arrogance, but it's true.
So, because he's a nutter the graph shouldn't be front page news is the argument then? That'll teach him.
He will learn the regret the day he dared say "hey, this graph means we're all gonna die if we don't do something! Look at it!" because we outsmarted him by refusing to look.
Well before I knew he was a nutter, it strikes be that the graph starts in 1991. Feels like we should should have more data than that, and that the same graph would be more powerful if it started in 1800 and showed the same thing (or at least, earlier in the 20th century, surely we must have data from the 1950s at least? probably earlier?)
Not saying that the data is not concerning, or that climate warming isn't real, BTW. I'm just saying this particular graph feels fishy.
Because he's a nutter, you should not take his word for it that a 3.5 sigma event (1 in ~2000 for a normal distribution) in the temperature of a particular ocean region means we're all gonna die if we don't do something.
The most powerful humans, and human systems, often score very low on stewardship and empathy. While "cancer" triggers as opinionated, using a less-charged analogy I think should probably make a similar point.
Agent Smith: I'd like to share a revelation during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet.
One of my favorite worded bits of machine logic about humans. All of the sci-fi tropes have it. The "I, Robot" movie has similar "my logic is undeniable" comment about the same conclusion of the humans being the problem. I just really liked Agent Smith's specific comments
He is wrong, by the way. Most animals multiply until they exceed carrying capacity, then die off in massive numbers, then repeat. They may find a long-term equilibrium. The current boom in human population, and a subsequent die-off that has not yet happened, were predicted back in the 1970s.
This happened in rapid succession in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. First rodents and small scavengers multiplied rapidly, but then the easy food ran out and their predators showed up, and the cycle repeated. The zone is now roughly at equilibrium, we think, but it's isolated and surrounded by human activity so it's hard to be sure.
The Kaibab Plateau deer disaster from 1906 to 1939 also demonstrated boom and bust cycles.
Complexity resists reduction, yet fundamentals that affect change over time exist.
That said, growth seeks to shed restrictions upon it, but unrestricted growth has many suboptimal effects on the area it grows in.
If you propose a system growth effect thesis (established example: the iron law of oligarchy), it's not possible to show its influence both accurately, and in such a way that agrees with most observers. It may not even be useful; it might exist as a concept better in a group relation with other concepts, and focusing on the group might be most useful.
And responses to actions to display a system's properties tend to be about those actions, not about the system.
Some of the most popular responses re: growth are "the area doesn't have a beneficial significance equal to the beneficial significance of the growth", but one is measured essentially to support propaganda, and other is barely measured and poorly understood.
Once you narrow the framing, people criticize the framing as the reality, not its usefulness as a paradidm for the reality of the issue. The map is not the territory; we cannot "describe" reality. We can create interfaces to that reality, we can measure, discuss, theorize about cause and effect, attempt to emulate or simulate to better understand, but responses tend to focus on the interface instead of the reality, and then devolve to epistimelogical "statements about statements" type activity.
I can understand the desire to be concerned about the climate systems that keep earth habitable for humans starting to break down might come with some extreme views. It seems almost thinking we can continue as normal given the predictions of climate scientists are now coming true, is the extreme views. I worry that these climate scientists might have under egged their estimates due to a “sensible mindset” rather than following the data and we could be in for a horrifying next 30-50 years.
The data seem to suggest an urgent need for solar radiation management because reducing fossil fuel consumption to a negative value isn't really a viable plan, as it turns out. Instead, we will have to use technology to solve the problem, surprise surprise.
Calcium carbonate has the benefit of de acidifying the ocean.
Optimistic of you to assume it’ll only be fifty years. Do you expect humans to adapt that quickly? The climate will be messed up for centuries at least
Where do you get the "centuries at least" bit? The hole in the ozone layer "repaired itself" much faster after humans made changes. There's no more acid rain in Los Angeles after humans made changes. These all happened within my lifetime. We also saw during covid lock downs how quickly things changed from the sudden slow down in human activity.
Both of those problems you cited are far smaller and easier to fix than the ~1,500 gigatons of C02 humans have emitted in the past century. CFC's have a half life of only 50 years, C02 just persists now forever since we're dumping it faster than can be consumed. Acid rain was a mostly localized problem, not one spanning the entire Earth and affecting ocean temps, ocean currents, etc etc. The cited problems are insanely easy to solve compared to global climate change.
It's likely / probably unsolvable at this point as we're hitting tipping points for which there is no effective return such as permafrost melting and releasing more co2, causing more heating, melting more co2, etc and partial shutdowns of critical ocean currents. But yeah I know...MUH FREEDOM.
You can look up the carbon cycle on Wikipedia, it is fairly well understood where atmospheric carbon can go. Most processes that sequester carbon long term take geological time spans. So unless you think we engineer sequestration at a rate comparable to what we emit today, atmospheric carbon is here to stay for a really long time. Personally I think we won’t be able to scale sequestration technology sufficiently in the next decades to make a dent in the carbon levels.
the ignorance is a consequence of our societies system of incentives. everything keeps pointing back towards that each time theres an event like this. But if we aren't going to attach an economic price for emissions then it remains an externality and not a recognized reality to the economy. The USA is playing a leading role in keeping it that way.
The economic system itself is incompatible with the physical reality of a finite planet.
The ones steering society choose to crash and ruin everything rather than to jeopardize their positions in power.
That obvious failure in morals and ethics, basic principles of adult responsibility really, is made possible by a lack of rational reflection in the populace.
Objective truth has to take precedence over subjective desires when it comes to existential questions. Currently it does not.
I'd push back.on blaming the populace for this: the widespread belief in geberal polls is that the climate situation is dire and that measures need to be taken.
However, the constraints that most people have to contend with do not allow them to be more radical in their calls for change.
The real culprit is far and away corporations that benefit from activities that carry with them extreme effects on the climate, and who can influence both politics and media. The research (sorry for lack of link) that shows that political direction is largely controlled by moneyed interests is not ambiguous.
I do agree that the populace also deserves some of the blame however: regular renewals of electronic devices, and especially the continuing consumption of animal products, is a moral failure justified only by pleasure.
You're right about the general sentiment acknowledging the seriousness only when you look at the center and left of society. The majority in the US however supports or tolerates the actual political decisions made, contradicting that level of importance.
When you paint people as being "disallowed" from more radical actions, the same question of true importance arises? The current trajectory leads to Armageddon, plain and simple.
My point here thus is about the proper scale on which people place the topic.
It's not a "lifestyle choice" to doom humanity's children to ruin.
Placing responsibility with the irresponsible is a cop-out.
Throwing everything animal under the bus is not warranted. CAFOs and grain heavy operations certainly. Regenerative ag using animals on pasture is an amazing carbon sink. I agree that the factories using petroleum grown grains as feed are terrible.
I don't have data on the West specifically, but I'd be surprised if it's not 99%. "Free range" animals are largely a fiction.
Animals being used for pasture grazing, for the benefit of the climate, could be understandable, but I think enslavement and torture of 200+ billion animals annually is a moral failure that goes far beyond its effects on CO2 ppm.
Animal ag creates unnecessary risks of (viral) pandemics, antibiotic resistant bacteria, air pollution, water pollution, soil pollution, deforestation (for silage and feeder crops), caloric inefficiency, and animal cruelty. There are plenty of alternative plant-based protein and nutrients sources that could be grown instead.
To believe this, you must believe that the economy can become arbitrarily decoupled from any physical good. Do you believe that food can become an arbitrarily small proportion of the economy (and so arbitrarily cheap relative to income)? Steel? Purified silicon? Infrastructure like bridges?
I don't. Perpetual growth is incompatible with finite resources. Fortunately, human flourishing does not depend on infinite economic growth; there is, for example, enough food for everyone on the planet. Capitalism is just bad at allocating resources by any metric other than its own. (Yes yes, it's better that feudalism was. I think we can hold ourselves to a higher bar than that.)
> Do you believe that food can become an arbitrarily small proportion of the economy
This is not necessary at all for economic growth to be infinite. Food prices can "inflate" and so stay at, let's say 20%, of the economy while no additional physical food is being produced. That's exactly what's happening with housing and healthcare already.
I think seeing prices go up like this makes people unhappy, but what really matters is what portion of a person's income this stuff occupies.
If physical goods remain a constant proportion of the economy without having more of them but get more expensive, all that's happening is inflation, not economic growth.
> The economic system itself is incompatible with the physical reality of a finite planet.
„Infinite growth is impossible on planet with finite resources” is nice buzzphrase, but upon closer inspection it makes literally zero sense. Fortunately people will never accept degrowthers’ postulates.
China has a far lower per capita carbon emissions rate than the US. Has a growing share of energy produced by green technology. Is the world leader in manufacturing electric cars and using electric cars. Is the global leader in low cost solar panels and batteries among other green technology. Oh yeah, and a huge portion of their emissions go to making things that Americans consume. On top of all that, they have managed to stop growth in their carbon emissions and are on the cusp of reducing them.
I don’t know how China could possibly be considered worse except that they historically used coal, and are rapidly transitioning away.
Right, so if someone was in the US and didn't think they should take action (because of China), then the obvious reply is that they should take action on the basis of being part of US+China, whose population is far greater than either US or China.
Then it doesn't matter if the US reduces emissions or China does. They all count. The US has more money to spend on reducing emissions. Ergo it makes sense for the US to go first.
Considering that it's thanks to China that even a 1% chance of avoiding this remains, I'd say so. Without their enormous investments in solar and batteries, it would be 0% rather than 1%.
We've built an economic system that latches on to scarce things and makes them less scarce. Now we need to make harmful activities scarce, and we can't.
We have to kill this thing before it kills us. There have to be better things to base an economy on (consent? reciprocity?).
In a world where we have people like Trump, Musk, Thiel, et al, with extreme power and resources, why would we hope for something like climate change to be addressed?
What can scientists do? Even if they are 100% right and can prove it, they have no power to do anything. Governments of the top countries are puppets of the US, so there’s not much to do. Other governments are dealing with more mundane problems.
And the “A fucked up planet affects everyone equally” is just not true. Billionaires can live in a fucked up planet just fine. They don’t even need people (as demonstrated by AI and its goal of replacing workers). They truly don’t care about us. And if the worst forecast for the planet is to come, they also won’t care (they would just live to their fullest while they can)
US Greenhouse gas emissions are down 18% from 2007 levels. CO2 emissions and electricity generation are no longer linked. You might not like them, but Trump, Musk, Thiel, et al (whoever the et al are) are doing a good job pushing nuclear power as well, which promises a more energy-rich future without greenhouse emissions.
The people who truly don't care are not in the US; they're China and India, whose per capita CO2 emissions are exploding to the upside. China alone makes up like a third of the world's emissions. They don't talk about cutting emissions but about slowing their growth, and yet people are upset at US politicians as the US is busy meeting climate goals it doesn't even profess (and which don't bind China). When you look at actual data, the people you're blaming aren't the ones you should be blaming.
As a European, we have the same thing going on, except we're usually saying "let the US and China do it first", but our cumulative baggage is also pretty big.
In some way, the US and EU are even MORE responsible for reducing emissions and cleaning up their mess, because they reaped all the benefits of a high GDP because of massive burning of fossil fuels without investing heavily into renewable infrastructure.
I can think of a nonfiction book whose title would get you rapidly banned from HN. A movie was made with the same subject and title, but because it was a drama and not a documentary, it's not really fair to say the movie is an adaptation of a book. In the movie, a small group does the thing that is extremely effective.
/The Ministy for the Future/ also contains a grassroots group that does something implementable by individuals and extremely effective.
I won't comment on the others you mentioned, but Musk has probably done more for reducing CO2 emissions than any other human on the planet by popularizing electric vehicles and making them 'cool'.
These are the types of solutions we should be cheering, because people voluntarily chose the less-CO2 product due to its appeal. No heavy handed laws required.
Tend to follow climate-related news closely. But even then: eyebrows raised.
Heh.. Maybe in future we'll see wars being fought not over access to fossil fuels, but over attempts to stop other countries from pumping more fossils out of the ground.
"What the planet is going to experience over the next 12 months is just a preview of the movie that’s coming. Godzilla is going to return, and return, and return and return … and as bad as the movie gets, we won’t be able to walk out of the theater."
That's the scary bit: no escape hatch. We're all in this together.
That's why international co-operation on climate change should NOT be opt-in. Your countries' freedom to emit greenhouse gasses ends where my countries' (future) safety is at stake.
The nations with the strongest militaries are also the largest emitters. Attempting to force these countries into compliance might not be the smartest move.
In fact, any scheme like this will almost certainly be used to forcibly prevent development in already impoverished nations.
Yes I was wondering the same. Why is the mean using a different set of years than the total data set? There also seems to be a year where the swing was equally as extreme in the other direction, what year was this? Would be worth mentioning at least in the post.
I posted a comment earlier about how 1982-1983 (the start of the data) had a historically severe El Nino, and the comment got shadowbanned. I don't understand why that happens sometimes. Hasn't happened for months, but when it does it's always on innocuous factual comments, it's weird.
…as it looks pretty innocuous to me. And more importantly, your other comments aren’t obnoxious. :-) I’d love to know the heuristic that flipped that bit on that one comment.
Yup. 20% of the population will look at the graph and scream about how we're all doomed and need to start executing people / nuking countries to fix it (seriously, comments from this very thread), 20% of the population will look at the graph and see the hilariously short timeframe, the carefully manipulated axes ranging, and instantly dismiss it as extremist climate doomer insanity and close out of it, and the remaining 60% of the population doesn't care one way or the other.
Question to you, if they looked further back, do you think the variability would increase or decrease. Do you also believe the mean temperature would be lower or higher? Just want to understand your mental model of the climate.
Yes, it is worth looking at. My thinking was, how fast did that sequence revert back to the’mean’? It doesn’t take away from the author’s message though.
This graph shouldn't be front-page news. Why? Because it is a crappy graph that says nothing.
That there are deviations from the median is a normal statistical thing. Even deviations beyond 3 sigma. It happens. That's statistics.
What would be an interesting graph is: From 1982 to 2026 on the x-axis, plot the yearly maximum and minimum daily sigma and the median. Or just plot all the overlapping segments from the original graph as a continuous sequence. That way one could see periodicity, rising and falling of those values and the overall change over time. (Edit: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48890590 for much better graphs)
But that graph is useless to convey any information beyond "well this year the line goes up". The article also does nothing to really explain the statistical background. Quite the contrary.
The article shows things that the graph doesn't illustrate at all: Like "This is why graphs like this matter [...] What they show is that Earth is moving beyond the range within which modern human civilisation developed.". Like fucking hell it doesn't! The graph starts in 1982! Modern human civilization started in 1982?
Like "The tropical Pacific is thus no longer oscillating around a climate that existed a century ago. It's oscillating around a much warmer baseline.". Well, and why then does this graph start in 1982? Why can't you show that century?
Like "The red line is this year. It doesn't just set a new record. It has departed entirely from the range of previous observations.". No, it fucking doesn't!. Look at the graph, there is a line at -3.5 sigma! Well within range. And even so, it's statistics, outliers are to be expected.
What this article and this graph need is a permanent relocation to the trash can. And a lesson for the author in science. Real science, not misleading propaganda that hurts the cause more than it helps.
Instead of arguing about this on the internet you could do what I’m doing: working to take carbon emissions off the board.
It’s not easy right now because of the funding and political climate, but you can find work where success is measured by metrics like “gallons of diesel not burned.”
This is a decidedly optimistic take given what we know about social media. HN may be a rare exception.
Rather than using reason to get people to surmount their "emotions" and to "think right", I'd argue we rather need to frame the issue in terms of their self-interest, and to try to persuade and convince not them but rather their tribal leaders.
I’m going to tell you, as a person whose path went from journalism to activism to engineering in climate tech and climate justice: persuasion isn’t going to get the goods. Changing the reality on the ground through R&D and deployment moves the needle. There are a lot of very good, very smart people who have been heads down since the 70s building the infrastructure for decarbonization, and we’re winning, even as we continue “losing” the political argument.
Yup. If solar panels are good enough and cheap enough, if grid storage and battery density improve fast enough, the economic costs of staying on fossil fuels will create huge pressure in the political space and economic competition. You can overwhelm the issue.
We shouldn’t HAVE to do this, our politicians should represent our desires and our long term necessities. But that’s clearly not an easy problem to solve, and it sure doesn’t seem to be going in the right direction.
So RND to push the economy makes perfect sense to me as a way to fight this from the other direction.
Hmmm, I remember what happened when we all got more 'free time' by using computers to do things that took us long doing manually.
Making electricity more 'green' is of course necessary but on the backdrop of the current capitalistic system, it will simply lead to more electricity being consumed. See current uptake by LLM data centers.
People quibbling about whether TFA was written by an AI and why the chart is at the end of the article and what a standard deviation. Meanwhile the planet is simmering.
Graphs tell stories and the only story this one actually tells is "29-year high".
It doesn't do a good job of establishing trends and its sample size is too low to discern how significant of an outlier this is.
Actually there is a similar outlier on the bottom of the graph, which suggests the current outlier might not actually be that significant. And that's definitely not the story intended by the author.
306 comments
[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 71.6 ms ] threadhttps://www.lyrebirddreaming.com/post/el-ni%C3%B1o-isn-t-an-...
standard deviation is a measure that informs about the distribution. A high standard deviation means a "wide bell curve". A low standard deviation means that all values are closely clustered around the middle of the curve.
So if your value is 2 x standard deviation (for example) that means it is a relatively rare outlier, since 2 x standard deviation covers 95% of the bell curve. In particle physics I believe they require 5 standard deviations to confirm an observation.
The baseline of 0.0 represents the average of all years. Anything above / below the baseline is a (standard) deviation from the average. The blue lines are the individual years since 1991 [1] while the red line is the year 2026.
If a line is above the baseline, then the sea-surface temperature was hotter on that day than average. If below, it was cooler than average.
The year 2026 is an outlier, dwarfing all the others starting around June / July. The Nino 3.4 sea-surface temperature is significantly hotter than any previous year during that time. New record, I guess?
[1]: I'm confused about the two date ranges given: 1982-2026 and 1991-2020. I'm assuming this graph is based on measurements from 1982-2026 to calculate the average, but the lines shown are only from 1991-2020, for some statistical reason I don't understand.
There's is an interactive chart that's easier to understand
The graph has a key on the right hand side that clearly labels each colour of line, and the horizontal axis is scaled in months of each year. Scrolling down gets you notes and links to data sources.
In answer to another poster in this thread, the dataset only reaches back to 1983, I'm assuming because that is when they started monitoring these temperatures?
According to one comment on the site, the 3.5 means "3.5 times the SD", which makes much more sense to me.
I initially tried to make sense of "SD being 3.5 on that day of the year", which seems to be a wrong interpretation.
The title of the figure is ambiguous about what "SD" really means but I guess it is plotting the number of standard deviations of the 1991-2020 data measured from the mean of that data and plotted per day for the 1982-2026 data.
Here's the link that I read off the figure.
https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/json_2clim/oiss...
Going up the URL path I get redirected to here:
https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/?dm_id=world2
That shows measured temperature and 2026 as very hot (surprise) and in fact is the hottest to date for June+July. The standard deviation of that data is not 3.5 C but something less than 1.0 C. It is plausible that current temperature is about 3.5 sigma from the selected mean.
It's worth recognizing that the analysis is applying a biased conclusion prior to making the plot. It singles out post 2020 data to compare to pre-2020 data. and then concluding the held out data is a significant deviation with a cause. It almost certainly is but this is not a proper way to analyze data (unless one is pushing an agenda, be that for good or bad).
I think the sst_daily plot stands on its own without crafting this SD plot to emphasize the point. Especially when the accompanying text doesn't even explain it. It's a disingenuous message.
Your likely intent is to signal indifference and dismissiveness towards the actual content. To deflect from the actual topic and derail the conversation.
Your likely motivation is lack of a ready-made remedy compatible with your premise of leaving your lifestyle untouched.
Improving the design of that article will do absolutely nothing for its public reception.
Voicing reasonable reactions to the salient content actually helps furthering the discussion. Nitpicking does the opposite.
But they don't: they go to the comments here first and try to get the gist of reactions, in order to save themselves the time to actually read the piece.
You pretend, it wasn't trivial for people to scroll down to the graph. Such things aren't the issue at all.
The reactions you cause with your comment above are.
I agree with them, and I also agree with the concern in the article. Both can be right. And I think you're off base here with all your unfounded assumptions and straw-manning.
An Inconvenient Truth and other media formats are very well made.
If by "all snow would disappear forever from Earth" you meant "the Arctic could be seasonal-ice-free in the summer" by 2013, then, sure.
And expressing a number as some percentage more or less than another number is a great way to make it meaningless.
https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/?dm_id=nino3.4
I must have confused it with another article, sorry.
How much % of the world's population would have to do those things, for the graph to show a reversal of the trend? 10%? 50%? Everyone?
"Electric cars" is less likely tho because having a car at all is a money drain.
Even if you don't take it as prescriptive, it would be dumb not to take it as descriptive (i.e. what the other player will do in a situation)
Policy changes are needed to address this problem. It’s a political problem that needs a political solution.
How does enforcing emissions regulations result in less productive cars?
Cars move about 1.5 people per trip on average. A big pickup or SUV is not any more productive doing this task than a mid sized car.
Eat less and different meat with a smaller footprint. Mostly poultry, eggs, also more organ meats, etc. Also combat fertiliser runoff.
The methane output of a field of cattle isn't that dramatically different from a forest with decomposing wood, deer, etc. Methane is also a potent but temporary actor and tackling it primarily just buys us very little time which will be used as an excuse to keep pumping co2.
However we grow a good chunch feed for that cattle and for ourselves with fossil fuel based fertilisers. We need to quit that. If we get rid of both that 8% co2 output for fertilisers and get rid of the manure as well....
Well we'll solve a lot of related problems by drastically reducing the world's population with a gigantic famine.
Don’t worry about that, just recycle more!
It is about time we stop blaming the individual at the bottom of the ladder for the problems of society. And let me preempt you: society isn’t made up of individuals, but it is much greater than the sum of its parts.
Or to put it another way - which of those things is under our control? If one can do something more, then why not? Because billionaires? The climate doesn't blame anyone, it just exists; being to blame or not, doesn't matter when we're all in the same boat together.
I’m the first to recycle, so you’re preaching to the choir. What I’m saying if we could do better than self-flagellating. Or rather, there is nothing our self-flagellation will achieve in the end.
Consumer demand doesn't determine whether to build coal vs solar vs nuclear. Public policy does. No new oil/gas/coal plants, period, and start working to shut down the ones we have. Electricity generation is the source of about a third of all CO2 emissions.
Consumer demand doesn't determine whether we do carbon capture, or reforestation. Those require public policy.
> It's not a forecast. It's not a simulation of what might happen decades from now. These are...
I think this kind of writing is low quality.
The language is too strong for the context. Author uses religious imagery, prognosticates about an Armageddon scenario, and does so based on a relatively short time series.
This substack article also comes with additional graphs, a much better story flow (data is progressively introduced and explained before reaching the final plot), and was posted 2 days before the OP. I agree with GP that it is significantly superior to the OP (which is likely AI slop). Thanks for posting it.
1: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/anaphora
No AC is going to save European from that. In fact, it is American AC which is the main cause of it. They dumped all that energy and greenhouse gases and Europeans are the one impacted by these externalities.
For some context: the conversation about climate change in general, and the recent heatwaves in particular, has been (quite cynically, but cleverly) reframed by far-right parties to be all about "we need to put AC in France to survive heatwaves".
This is smart because it addresses on the physical sensations of people (it's the third heatwave since end of may, and counting), it has an element of truth (AC is critically lacking in schools), it seems much more "down to earth" than the grand plans of "decarbonization", and it makes other political parties look out of touch (the left and greens have been criticizing AC because of the energy impact.)
Of course, this is both "smart" and incredibly cynical, given that the far right has been on the edge (or not so much on the edge) of climate denial for years. So year, "climate changes is not real" turned into "why didn't they put AC everywhere ?" then "vote for us, we'll put AC everywhere !"
This is also very short sighted.
But I guess no one has found a way to ask our future president (Marine Le Pen, twice convicted of embezzlement, waiting to know if she will have to run for President with a "jail from home" tracker, etc...) what exact amount of "putting AC and kicking immigrants out" is going to avoid Fontainebleau forest from burning.
(Also, since those people are incredibly "lucky", I can only imagine what will happen if we learn that the fire was volontary, and the arsonist was an immigrant... )
The only "consolation" is that El Nino is coming back, and she takes office on the 15th of may, so _she_ will have to deal with at least a couple heatwaves between 2027 and 2037...
Back in the day, everyone used fossil fuels to heat their homes. Back in those days, AC was frowned upon as inefficient, wasteful and decadent. Something only Americans did. The greens despised them for ecological reasons. The right despised them for moral reasons.
Then the public came to know about climate change and it was decided that people should transition to using heat pumps for heating their homes. Because heat pumps are efficient, green and a necessary sacrifice of money you have to do to combat climate change.
Now with this year's heat wave, suddenly there was a discussion even among the greens about having AC in buildings as a necessary adaptation to rising temperatures. And demands by the right to get rid of the AC stigma and deploy AC everywhere. And back in the corner, there were experts laughing out loud, because a heat pump is just an "evil" AC running in reverse. Has been all along. The only problem is that usually heat pumps were deployed in such a way that you couldn't use them to cool in the summer...
Which imho goes to show that the public urgently needs more scientific and technical literacy.
I keep hearing that, and then I keep hearing people tell me that you can't just put an heat pump, run it in "reverse" and "pretend" to have AC. That seems to be a case where the theory is here, but in practice the applicances are just optimized for one part, or the other.
(Also, heating is often done by heating water in radiators, and cooling by cooling the air.
It may seems stupid, but I still can fathom whether the same applicance can do both ! Or, if I want to do the right thing, and replace both my no-very-old gas boiler AND my pretty-old AC, can I put a single heat pump ?)
In Australia we have had reverse cycle air conditioning for decades. These are heat pumps that both heat and cool. I have 15kW of installed heat pump tech at home and run my whole house off grid, despite mainta8ning a grid connection. The systems run as heaters in winter, and air conditioning in summer. They are very efficient, enough so that I dont worry about our solar and battery being able to keep up.
The appliances are very common, and Ive seen them throughout much of Asia, too. Its like Europe and the US are just discovering this tech, yet its been reachable by half the world's population for 30+ years, and continues to improve.
It's almost as if the climate is warming in accordance to what physicist have been saying for 30 years.
"Qui aurait pu prévoir ?", as the other one would have said (sorry for the franco-french reference. And I know we'll "regret" the guy next year...)
Europeans dumped plenty of greenhouse gases themselves.
I know this because every prediction of climate doom turned out to be false.
Entire nations were going to disappear under rising sea levels. It has not happened. I'm not saying no land sinks, but sea levels are not rising rapidly enough to prevent Al Gore (author of "An Inconvenient Truth") from buying an ocean-front home. The same applies to John Kerry and dozens of other outspoken prophets of doom who warned us that rising sea levels would submerge entire nations. They used the proceeds of their fear-mongering to buy oceanfront homes.
I remember signs in Glacier National Park telling us the glaciers would be gone by the year 2,000. It has not happened.
This "signal" too will pass.
Kiribati and Tuvalu have measurable loss of land due to rising sea levels that is impacting people today. About 80% of the Maldives Islands will likely be uninhabitable within the next 25 years. The Marshall Islands have lost 18 out of their average 200cm above mean sea level height - roughly 6% of its land.
We have seen massive glacial retreat even in just the past 10 years, let alone the past 50. This is happening the world over, and at a rate that is not previously seen in the geological record (happy to argue this, thats my background). We are seeing large ice loss and lack of matching accumulation over Antarctica and Greenland - two great places to observe large scale processes. We just saw the Arctic stay largely unlocked for sea ice/shipping last season. The sum of these will take a moment to kick in, but the failure of conveyor currents will kick us all in the arse quite significantly and likely within our lifetime, and we have already seen hiccups.
https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/5190/
Then, the increase from 1.5° to 2° looks much, much larger than the increase from 0° to 0.5°.
So it's misleading in terms of making recent warming seem even worse than it is. Now, of course, you might argue that is justified in spirit because the negative consequences from warming grow faster than linear... but that doesn't make it any less misleading in terms of the temperature change it is communicating.
> This is why graphs like this matter. Not because they prove that catastrophe is inevitable, and not because they predict the precise sequence of events over coming years. Science rarely deals in absolutes. What they show is that Earth is moving beyond the range within which modern human civilisation developed. We’re entering climatic conditions that our infrastructure, ecosystems, economies and institutions were never designed to accommodate.
Reading helps. Also it's pretty clear from the "waaaaah" that you are not asking a good faith question but rather dismissing the article, without bringing any information or sources to back whatever point you are trying to make - ironic.
Alternatively, since the link that was posted is just an AI copyright theft site, use the original instead: https://climatecasino.substack.com/p/some-monsters-are-real
The NextDNS (and others) blocking of archive.today goes back far beyond 2026 and this specific DDOS event. Perhaps that contributed to the hostility behind it, I don't know. But citing that event for other examples does not apply well.
Please do not misinterpret this as an excuse or pardon of anything. I love archive.today and all their subdomains. I use it regularly and have been having problems for years, especially with NextDNS. I am seriously disappointed to learn of the DDOS event, but there remain other angles on the topic in general. I am still struggling to process WTF they would do what you reported -- how could they think that would be worth the consequences, accomplish anything? Almost seems suspicious in itself.
Thanks for the info. But ever a shill for archive.is
"The human cancer is destructive to every living thing, as humans continue to eat the planet into oblivion. As someone who values “everything else,” I would be one of the first to rally behind the NTHE philosophy if it had any scientific basis at all. I want the human cancer gone from this planet."
You cannot deduce factual correctness from how "holy" the messenger is.
Probably a desire for a peaceful fading out of the human species rather than a violent one, but it's still far beyond PR naivety.
Now, the author's position is both more and less nihilistic. The author also seems to think that human extinction is unavoidable, but he thinks the timeline is much more dragged out. He also seems to think that this is actually the preferable outcome at this point, given that global warming is our own fault, and that the only thing we should do is try to make it so that the planet is as well as it can be after we are finally gone.
It's on the same topic, possibly spurred by the CC. Yes it uses the same graph (which I presume CC also didn't make), but otherwise the content and writing is very different. It's less detailed, possibly LLM written, but also more approachable.
I guess re-posting about a salient topic is now just "AI copyright theft".
Life (especially sentient animals), on the other hand…
That's a kind of caring, but probably not the sort you were trying to imply.
“Let's be clear. The planet is not in jeopardy. We are in jeopardy. We haven't got the power to destroy the planet - or to save it. But we might have the power to save ourselves.”
But I don't think it's all that interesting of an argument. When people say save/destroy the Earth, they mean humanity. Call that arrogance, but it's true.
He will learn the regret the day he dared say "hey, this graph means we're all gonna die if we don't do something! Look at it!" because we outsmarted him by refusing to look.
Adding heuristics trade accuracy for speed. It's fine to be overloaded and rely on heuristics, but let's call them what they are, shortcuts.
Not saying that the data is not concerning, or that climate warming isn't real, BTW. I'm just saying this particular graph feels fishy.
The Kaibab Plateau deer disaster from 1906 to 1939 also demonstrated boom and bust cycles.
Complexity resists reduction, yet fundamentals that affect change over time exist.
That said, growth seeks to shed restrictions upon it, but unrestricted growth has many suboptimal effects on the area it grows in.
If you propose a system growth effect thesis (established example: the iron law of oligarchy), it's not possible to show its influence both accurately, and in such a way that agrees with most observers. It may not even be useful; it might exist as a concept better in a group relation with other concepts, and focusing on the group might be most useful.
And responses to actions to display a system's properties tend to be about those actions, not about the system.
Some of the most popular responses re: growth are "the area doesn't have a beneficial significance equal to the beneficial significance of the growth", but one is measured essentially to support propaganda, and other is barely measured and poorly understood.
Once you narrow the framing, people criticize the framing as the reality, not its usefulness as a paradidm for the reality of the issue. The map is not the territory; we cannot "describe" reality. We can create interfaces to that reality, we can measure, discuss, theorize about cause and effect, attempt to emulate or simulate to better understand, but responses tend to focus on the interface instead of the reality, and then devolve to epistimelogical "statements about statements" type activity.
Calcium carbonate has the benefit of de acidifying the ocean.
It's likely / probably unsolvable at this point as we're hitting tipping points for which there is no effective return such as permafrost melting and releasing more co2, causing more heating, melting more co2, etc and partial shutdowns of critical ocean currents. But yeah I know...MUH FREEDOM.
The ones steering society choose to crash and ruin everything rather than to jeopardize their positions in power.
That obvious failure in morals and ethics, basic principles of adult responsibility really, is made possible by a lack of rational reflection in the populace.
Objective truth has to take precedence over subjective desires when it comes to existential questions. Currently it does not.
However, the constraints that most people have to contend with do not allow them to be more radical in their calls for change.
The real culprit is far and away corporations that benefit from activities that carry with them extreme effects on the climate, and who can influence both politics and media. The research (sorry for lack of link) that shows that political direction is largely controlled by moneyed interests is not ambiguous.
I do agree that the populace also deserves some of the blame however: regular renewals of electronic devices, and especially the continuing consumption of animal products, is a moral failure justified only by pleasure.
When you paint people as being "disallowed" from more radical actions, the same question of true importance arises? The current trajectory leads to Armageddon, plain and simple.
My point here thus is about the proper scale on which people place the topic.
It's not a "lifestyle choice" to doom humanity's children to ruin.
Placing responsibility with the irresponsible is a cop-out.
I don't have data on the West specifically, but I'd be surprised if it's not 99%. "Free range" animals are largely a fiction.
Animals being used for pasture grazing, for the benefit of the climate, could be understandable, but I think enslavement and torture of 200+ billion animals annually is a moral failure that goes far beyond its effects on CO2 ppm.
The economic reality is perfectly compatible with finite reality, because growth is not a function of resources.
An email is more economically valuable than a paper mail despite requiring much less resources (and leading to a much less CO2 emission)
I don't. Perpetual growth is incompatible with finite resources. Fortunately, human flourishing does not depend on infinite economic growth; there is, for example, enough food for everyone on the planet. Capitalism is just bad at allocating resources by any metric other than its own. (Yes yes, it's better that feudalism was. I think we can hold ourselves to a higher bar than that.)
This is not necessary at all for economic growth to be infinite. Food prices can "inflate" and so stay at, let's say 20%, of the economy while no additional physical food is being produced. That's exactly what's happening with housing and healthcare already.
I think seeing prices go up like this makes people unhappy, but what really matters is what portion of a person's income this stuff occupies.
This is a bold claim: I do not believe that if all remaining fossil fuels had vanished overnight that growth would remain identical.
„Infinite growth is impossible on planet with finite resources” is nice buzzphrase, but upon closer inspection it makes literally zero sense. Fortunately people will never accept degrowthers’ postulates.
I don’t know how China could possibly be considered worse except that they historically used coal, and are rapidly transitioning away.
That's fossil fuel industry funded psyops.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
We have to kill this thing before it kills us. There have to be better things to base an economy on (consent? reciprocity?).
What can scientists do? Even if they are 100% right and can prove it, they have no power to do anything. Governments of the top countries are puppets of the US, so there’s not much to do. Other governments are dealing with more mundane problems. And the “A fucked up planet affects everyone equally” is just not true. Billionaires can live in a fucked up planet just fine. They don’t even need people (as demonstrated by AI and its goal of replacing workers). They truly don’t care about us. And if the worst forecast for the planet is to come, they also won’t care (they would just live to their fullest while they can)
The people who truly don't care are not in the US; they're China and India, whose per capita CO2 emissions are exploding to the upside. China alone makes up like a third of the world's emissions. They don't talk about cutting emissions but about slowing their growth, and yet people are upset at US politicians as the US is busy meeting climate goals it doesn't even profess (and which don't bind China). When you look at actual data, the people you're blaming aren't the ones you should be blaming.
- Per capita: US has the highest emissions: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita
- Cumulative, US has the highest emissions: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co-emissions?c...
As a European, we have the same thing going on, except we're usually saying "let the US and China do it first", but our cumulative baggage is also pretty big.
In some way, the US and EU are even MORE responsible for reducing emissions and cleaning up their mess, because they reaped all the benefits of a high GDP because of massive burning of fossil fuels without investing heavily into renewable infrastructure.
/The Ministy for the Future/ also contains a grassroots group that does something implementable by individuals and extremely effective.
These are the types of solutions we should be cheering, because people voluntarily chose the less-CO2 product due to its appeal. No heavy handed laws required.
Heh.. Maybe in future we'll see wars being fought not over access to fossil fuels, but over attempts to stop other countries from pumping more fossils out of the ground.
"What the planet is going to experience over the next 12 months is just a preview of the movie that’s coming. Godzilla is going to return, and return, and return and return … and as bad as the movie gets, we won’t be able to walk out of the theater."
That's the scary bit: no escape hatch. We're all in this together.
That's why international co-operation on climate change should NOT be opt-in. Your countries' freedom to emit greenhouse gasses ends where my countries' (future) safety is at stake.
In fact, any scheme like this will almost certainly be used to forcibly prevent development in already impoverished nations.
But I tend to dismiss findings like this that don't explain why they chose a very specific dates as the baseline.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48891223
…as it looks pretty innocuous to me. And more importantly, your other comments aren’t obnoxious. :-) I’d love to know the heuristic that flipped that bit on that one comment.
That there are deviations from the median is a normal statistical thing. Even deviations beyond 3 sigma. It happens. That's statistics.
What would be an interesting graph is: From 1982 to 2026 on the x-axis, plot the yearly maximum and minimum daily sigma and the median. Or just plot all the overlapping segments from the original graph as a continuous sequence. That way one could see periodicity, rising and falling of those values and the overall change over time. (Edit: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48890590 for much better graphs)
But that graph is useless to convey any information beyond "well this year the line goes up". The article also does nothing to really explain the statistical background. Quite the contrary.
The article shows things that the graph doesn't illustrate at all: Like "This is why graphs like this matter [...] What they show is that Earth is moving beyond the range within which modern human civilisation developed.". Like fucking hell it doesn't! The graph starts in 1982! Modern human civilization started in 1982?
Like "The tropical Pacific is thus no longer oscillating around a climate that existed a century ago. It's oscillating around a much warmer baseline.". Well, and why then does this graph start in 1982? Why can't you show that century?
Like "The red line is this year. It doesn't just set a new record. It has departed entirely from the range of previous observations.". No, it fucking doesn't!. Look at the graph, there is a line at -3.5 sigma! Well within range. And even so, it's statistics, outliers are to be expected.
What this article and this graph need is a permanent relocation to the trash can. And a lesson for the author in science. Real science, not misleading propaganda that hurts the cause more than it helps.
It’s not easy right now because of the funding and political climate, but you can find work where success is measured by metrics like “gallons of diesel not burned.”
Start here: https://climatebase.org
You point at the actual problem yourself: political obstruction and funding going to the opposite.
The relevant issues here are ironically precisely those you can solve by discussing them on the internet.
They are caused by people not thinking right and having their emotions cross-wired.
They can be solved by correcting those errors in reasoning and setting evaluations right. Via discussion.
Rather than using reason to get people to surmount their "emotions" and to "think right", I'd argue we rather need to frame the issue in terms of their self-interest, and to try to persuade and convince not them but rather their tribal leaders.
We shouldn’t HAVE to do this, our politicians should represent our desires and our long term necessities. But that’s clearly not an easy problem to solve, and it sure doesn’t seem to be going in the right direction.
So RND to push the economy makes perfect sense to me as a way to fight this from the other direction.
Making electricity more 'green' is of course necessary but on the backdrop of the current capitalistic system, it will simply lead to more electricity being consumed. See current uptake by LLM data centers.
It doesn't do a good job of establishing trends and its sample size is too low to discern how significant of an outlier this is.
Actually there is a similar outlier on the bottom of the graph, which suggests the current outlier might not actually be that significant. And that's definitely not the story intended by the author.