Is the major issue here that 3 degrees Celsius is like an average so all the hot tropics places just become uninhabitable whereas temperature rises are more moderated in higher latitudes?
Also how much faster and higher will that number go with all the data centers? Can't imagine it not just getting worse.
This is the most important part most people don't get:
> And what would 3 °C mean for Germany?
> FB: In summer, meteorological records could reach up to 50 °C. Three degrees of global warming does not mean hot days will just be 3 or 4 degrees hotter. It could mean up to 10 degrees hotter. We would also face much longer droughts.
3°C warming implies summer days can get 10°C hotter. This is nightmare scenario.
EU has done its part, but all efforts are just drop in the ocean. Also, can these studies be trusted? EU basically throws money anything "green" (except buying forests and making them protected), so naturally these studies benefit from it.
UK official body of actuaries basically says we are on trajectory of "Extreme" rating:
> 3°C or more by 2050.
Multiple climate tipping
points triggered,
tipping cascade.
> over 4 billion
deaths
If so, big shifts would already be imminently felt within next 5-10 years.
Remember that there would basically be no place to hide from these direct or knock-on effects.
Not for any self sufficient "prepper with a Mac Studio" nor for any billionaire with their "Galapagos" private island data center come habitat or any other short-sighted fantasy escape scenarios.
Edit: "on trajectory" to "Extreme" was too strong; it’s the report’s worst case band and not a forecast. What they’re basically saying is that "the chance of this happening is way too high".
I swear to god there is not one single thread on HN about Germany where nuclear reactors aren’t brought up.
Nuclear reactors are not solving this problem. Period. The technology is too expensive, building them is too slow, and no one wants them.
It’s a smoke screen (that I think is) set up by big oil to distract the focus from renewables, which are cheaper, scale better, and actually endanger their business model.
If we coat and paint the entire human occupied land surface in white nano-diversely-sized barium sulfate paint, it will reflect the excess heat into space. Most people don't understand that this works or how it works, but science does. We will still have to lower our CO2 and emissions but we will get a break from warming.
Oil refineries, tankers burn in the open. Nuclear stations may get blown by drones / ballistic rockets any moment. Dead dolphins are all over Black sea. And yet ... let's put a price on carbon!
I wouldn't be too worried about it this century at least. if things look like they are going to get bad we will resort to geoengineering, and once we get a taste for it we will further optimize global temperatures to our liking.
perversely, global warming earlier than expected is a good thing [for us] as it will wipe away all meaningful opposition to geoengineering.
note how according to them having 50C days is a likely outcome. no one will tolerate this. sending the sulfur planes is assured at that point. you wouldn't even need to try and convince people with harvest yields.
This article sprinkles the word "risk" which people interpret as "bad things are coming" but actually means "there's some probability of the bad thing happening."
The probability is not quantified so it's impossible to react to. Over-protecting from a risk is as bad and under-protecting.
For example - something bad can happen to you any time you leave your house. However if you "protect" against that the risk by never leaving the house you are almost certainly worse off.
In case of climate the "thing to do" to protect from the risk is to minimize the economic activity that has improved life for everyone. Stopping that has an immediate "cost" which looks large compared to the unquantified risk it allegedly mitigates.
Encouraging people to eat more from aquafarming is better for the environment. Getting people to change culture and diet is never going to be easy, and the difficulty of getting people to eat more food from the ocean or plants will likely be very similar.
Note: a lot of the countries on this graph are quite famous for not only refusing to implement any climate policy, but not having the necessary government control (or will) to do it even when agreeing to it.
There was a report a few months ago predicting 4°C by 2080. It came to this figure by selecting the most likely emission scenario and warming scenario from the GIEC report.
In particular, it is hard to be optimistic on the emission scenario nowadays. So the report opted for emissions starting to drop around 2040, if I remember correctly.
That's my new baseline. Sorry I cannot find the report anymore. I am pretty sure it was posted on hacker news though.
Remember that IPCC's projection of 2.7C by 2100 is done by selectively ignoring a good quarter of the models which IPCC selected in the first place. So called "hot" models. So it's a very politically motivated number. I can totally see how a scientist not bound by pandering to the most insufferable crowd on the planet can project much worse future just by being unbiased.
A good book to read is The Ministry of the Future; yeah, parts could be better written, and I'm not hopeful things will turn out the way they do in the book, but what it did convince me of is that nothing substantial will happen until there is a catastrophic event along the lines of what happens in the beginning of the book -- and even then only if it happens in a "major" (by Western standards) country (i.e., all of the DRC could die and Americans would still happily drive their SUVs to McD for burgers).
The other interesting thing in the book is the emergence of radical groups fighting against who they see as responsible for the destruction of our planet and potentially even our civilizations. We could see a lot more social violence, assassinations (Mangione-style) etc. I'm fairly sure that's going to happen.
Maybe I've lost hope, but I honestly do not want my kids to have any kids of their own, as I'm afraid of the world they will inherit. (And I've been a confirmed techno-future-enthusiast my whole life until 5-10 years ago.)
It'll be fine, especially in EU. It's much easier to adapt and to make renewables more economically profitable than to accelerate decarbonization by raising cost of living.
Even if few days get 10C hotter in the summers, more and more houses will retrofit themsevles with ACs much like Singapore. I live in NL, and I can def see a future where District Cooling[1] becomes a thing.
If something is bound to happen, I think a better way to spend energy and money is to prepare for it. In that sense, I would like to see a study on which crops we as a human species could rotate too, what new lands could use investment and how should new housing and public infrastructure be built than constant articles like these which presents no realistic solution.
They claim to know the climate by 2050, but they struggle to forecast the weather for the upcoming week.
Don't trust German anxious alarmists. They are just fanatics.
My expectation is that it will be worse than this analysis implies.
The world energy mafia, primarily petroleum, but also nuclear and coal, will not give up their revenue streams.
Carbon concentrations will continue to rise, and quite likely accelerate.
The overwhelming majority of sustainable generation is in large, regional scale projects, because this keeps the profit in the hands of the established energy utilities.
Nuclear... nuclear... I would pose a question to every bone head here who advocates it: Can we start storing the spent waste in YOUR garage?
The profit motive loves nuclear energy, because tax payers pay to build and decommission it, while industrial scale utilities get to operate it while money is popping out.
Nuclear is the most expensive form of electricity generation, by far. By very very far.
Distributed generation and storage is advocated by no one with an equity stake in the status quo.
The fundamental problem, is that the world economy is run by organized crime.
The US whitehouse has now made this explicit, however the situation has existed in this context since the invention of distributing petroleum and electricity.
29 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 62.8 ms ] threadAlso how much faster and higher will that number go with all the data centers? Can't imagine it not just getting worse.
we were sorta going to do something about it, but then we invented LLMs and now nobody cares because $$$ and AI is shiny
> I fear future generations will not view us in a positive light.
you can be sure that they already will curse us
> And what would 3 °C mean for Germany?
> FB: In summer, meteorological records could reach up to 50 °C. Three degrees of global warming does not mean hot days will just be 3 or 4 degrees hotter. It could mean up to 10 degrees hotter. We would also face much longer droughts.
3°C warming implies summer days can get 10°C hotter. This is nightmare scenario.
We would, quite literally, be cooked. That'd leave us with summers around 140-150F.
> 3°C or more by 2050. Multiple climate tipping points triggered, tipping cascade.
> over 4 billion deaths
If so, big shifts would already be imminently felt within next 5-10 years.
Remember that there would basically be no place to hide from these direct or knock-on effects.
Not for any self sufficient "prepper with a Mac Studio" nor for any billionaire with their "Galapagos" private island data center come habitat or any other short-sighted fantasy escape scenarios.
https://actuaries.org.uk/media/ni4erlna/planetary-solvency.p...
Edit: "on trajectory" to "Extreme" was too strong; it’s the report’s worst case band and not a forecast. What they’re basically saying is that "the chance of this happening is way too high".
Nuclear reactors are not solving this problem. Period. The technology is too expensive, building them is too slow, and no one wants them.
It’s a smoke screen (that I think is) set up by big oil to distract the focus from renewables, which are cheaper, scale better, and actually endanger their business model.
perversely, global warming earlier than expected is a good thing [for us] as it will wipe away all meaningful opposition to geoengineering.
note how according to them having 50C days is a likely outcome. no one will tolerate this. sending the sulfur planes is assured at that point. you wouldn't even need to try and convince people with harvest yields.
They need to look inward before pointing outward.
In Europe. Still cleaner than the US, China, India, Japan, and the world avg:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electric...
Coal and gas are down 50% compared to 10 years ago despite the shut-down. Nevertheless, shutting down the last few ones was bad.
The probability is not quantified so it's impossible to react to. Over-protecting from a risk is as bad and under-protecting.
For example - something bad can happen to you any time you leave your house. However if you "protect" against that the risk by never leaving the house you are almost certainly worse off.
In case of climate the "thing to do" to protect from the risk is to minimize the economic activity that has improved life for everyone. Stopping that has an immediate "cost" which looks large compared to the unquantified risk it allegedly mitigates.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-world-carbon-emissio...
Note: a lot of the countries on this graph are quite famous for not only refusing to implement any climate policy, but not having the necessary government control (or will) to do it even when agreeing to it.
In particular, it is hard to be optimistic on the emission scenario nowadays. So the report opted for emissions starting to drop around 2040, if I remember correctly.
That's my new baseline. Sorry I cannot find the report anymore. I am pretty sure it was posted on hacker news though.
The other interesting thing in the book is the emergence of radical groups fighting against who they see as responsible for the destruction of our planet and potentially even our civilizations. We could see a lot more social violence, assassinations (Mangione-style) etc. I'm fairly sure that's going to happen.
Maybe I've lost hope, but I honestly do not want my kids to have any kids of their own, as I'm afraid of the world they will inherit. (And I've been a confirmed techno-future-enthusiast my whole life until 5-10 years ago.)
Even if few days get 10C hotter in the summers, more and more houses will retrofit themsevles with ACs much like Singapore. I live in NL, and I can def see a future where District Cooling[1] becomes a thing.
If something is bound to happen, I think a better way to spend energy and money is to prepare for it. In that sense, I would like to see a study on which crops we as a human species could rotate too, what new lands could use investment and how should new housing and public infrastructure be built than constant articles like these which presents no realistic solution.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_cooling
https://zeihan.com/the-end-of-germany-as-a-modern-economy/
FTFA:
"Three unsolvable problems will lead to Germany’s collapse as a modern economy over 20 – 30 years."
The world energy mafia, primarily petroleum, but also nuclear and coal, will not give up their revenue streams.
Carbon concentrations will continue to rise, and quite likely accelerate.
The overwhelming majority of sustainable generation is in large, regional scale projects, because this keeps the profit in the hands of the established energy utilities.
Nuclear... nuclear... I would pose a question to every bone head here who advocates it: Can we start storing the spent waste in YOUR garage?
The profit motive loves nuclear energy, because tax payers pay to build and decommission it, while industrial scale utilities get to operate it while money is popping out.
Nuclear is the most expensive form of electricity generation, by far. By very very far.
Distributed generation and storage is advocated by no one with an equity stake in the status quo.
The fundamental problem, is that the world economy is run by organized crime.
The US whitehouse has now made this explicit, however the situation has existed in this context since the invention of distributing petroleum and electricity.