> The global average sea-surface temperature hit a record 70 degrees on Aug. 22, according to Europe’s Earth observation agency Copernicus, which has been tracking the metric daily since 1979. The previous single-day record was measured in March 2024.
Yes, but it’s not uniform at all. The paper shows cooling in some parts of the north, and heating in the southern latitudes, along with significant variations by depth.
There’s a lot of nuance in this stuff - far more than global average surface temperature (which is primarily good for scary headlines) and “fish don’t have AC”.
That's not the issue, though I recognise the poster above was remarking about fish. High surface temps means more cyclones / typhoons / hurricanes, more coral bleaching, lower fish breeding and feeding because reefs die, impacts out food chains and destroys our homes.
Im Australian, so it also means droughts, water restrictions, and significant increases in bushfire number and severity after a few years of drought. Drought followed by cyclone, or bulk rain events causes catastrophic flooding. Its a shit show.
That's like saying coastal sea level rise is nothing to worry about in places like Florida because that who area was at the bottom of an ocean 100 million years ago.
In any event, who cares what the climate was like before humans walked the planet? We do care about what it is like while we’re around because it puts significant constraints on our lives.
Maybe I am pessimistic but it seems no one cares about climate change these days. All of Los Angeles is sweltering now. Just pointing fingers and dropping individual names while the world continues to heat slowly. Any suggestions to get involved are welcome, I don’t want to be just a complainer.
Articles like this are probably not helping honestly.
A lot of excellent researcher have tried for a long time to correlate El Niño swings with climate change and there is as of yet no compelling evidence whatsoever they are related.
Claiming every natural event that has been going on for thousands of years is a sign of the apocalypse without evidence is a quick way to make people stop listening.
I'll go against the grain but our capitalist way of life is totally incompatible with solving climate change. Likewise one country can't solve this problem alone. You need the whole world on board. I truly think the only real solution is a one world government truly working toward for the betterment of the planet and it's occupants. We all know that ain't ever gonna happen though so we're hosed.
Hey I grew up super environmental and I have plenty of hippie cred, but this statement gave me shudders "the only real solution is a one world government". Yeesh, yeah a single government, surely nothing could go wrong.
The Savior fallacy. With power more concentrated, the ability to avoid being impacted for those in power rises and rises and rises. How are incentives then aligned? I'm sure that having 10 million governments would be much better than having one to solve the issue.
Let me guess, you think it’s somehow impossible that people like Trump and Musk would end up running this One World Government like Trey have done in the US because…reasons.
Are they led by Trump and Musk though? You've misinterpreted the meaning of the question. I didn't ask what countries would accept being led by a national demagogue. Also, would other countries accept being led by the leader of the countries you listed?
I've had this thought too. And when I think about it in the big picture way, I don't think it doesn't need to be all that hard to solve. It's not like we're talking about like, you know, some huge slice of GDP or something. Yes, the price of fossil fuels effectively doubles. But we can create lots of jobs to make solar and nuclear and all these other solutions in the meantime.
An economy that seizes climate solutions can zoom ahead in terms of innovation, manufacturing, and enforcement. The changing climate is one of the biggest economic opportunities we've ever seen in human history, but somehow we've convinced ourselves that it's not only the worst non-opportunity ever but somehow would break capitalism. The richest man on the planet makes electric cars.
I think that, if people who believe in climate change want to be convincing, it would be more effective to avoid blaming specific instances of weather on climate change without strong justification. Especially when the weather isn’t even abnormal.
Los Angeles, especially inland and in the valley, is hot in the summer. It was hot in the summer 30 years ago and it’s still hot in the summer. It’s the typical hot season right now, and the valley appears to be only slightly above season average temperatures today, and coastal LA seeks be slightly cooler than average. Apparently it will be unseasonably cool in a couple days.
You’re correct that LA is usually hot (95F+) this time of year, but the humidity is what’s abnormal. The dew point in Disneyland was higher than in Disney World yesterday due to a tropical storm that dissipated west of the LA basin.
More tropical storms are approaching LA and that’s increasing humidity is why it’s sweltering.
A separate LA Times article explained that the humidity is due to lingering effects of a recent hurricane/tropical storm.
"Forecasters attributed the punishing humidity to the remnants of Tropical Storm Iselle moving over the state, as well as unusually warm ocean temperatures due to a combination of a months-long marine heat wave, a powerful El Niño and climate change.
"Dew points in the Los Angeles Basin have been “really high,” hovering around 70 degrees in many places, with a few coastal areas like Redondo Beach and Torrance reaching a dew point of 73 to 75 on Friday, said Ryan Kittell, meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Oxnard. The metric measures the moisture content in the air."
Exactly! What a strange about what’s going on in the LA basin right now is the extremely high humidity for this time of year. A 69° dewpoint is unheard of in this region. And this is what’s associated with the El Niño and associated with climate change.
Renewable energy is expanding faster than ever. And it's hard for people to look at that and think we're moving too slowly. But we still are. That's the basic cultural disconnect.
When nuclear power became a thing in the seventies, there was massive planning around a presumed nuclear-powered future. The largest energy storage facilities in the US were all built around that time. This turned out to be a mirage as the cost of nuclear went up with the safety expectations of the electorate, while petrochemical prices dropped. But this time it's not prices we're predicting, it's temperature, which is much more reliable.
Nuclear has a lot of environmental impact too. You need to mine a lot of earth to get a little uranium, and a lot of that activity is very polluting and a lot of that activity is not climate neutral. Then you have the waste problem that's not figured out, proliferation etc.
We can't go cherrypicking environmental problems. That way we roll from one crisis into the next. There's so many issues we're causing, like entire ecosystems going extinct. Sooner or later that will lead to crises too. We have to stop externalising.
And yes the electorate wants to be safe and for good reason. Even Fukushima polluted a lot. It's not just about death tolls.
Uranium mining is a dirty business and if we're going to be needing a lot more of it due to expansion of nuclear and leaving the mining to the lowest bidder it will be very polluting.
I think it’s pretty questionable to suggest it’s easy to recycle, hence the mining of the material isn’t of consequence.
And if we’re just being offhanded then apparently thorium is a replacement for uranium, or there’s the ability to reprocess used fuel again for nuclear power.
I think you missed the point of the nuclear tangent. The point was that people might be reluctant to build out energy storage capacity before demand appears because of what happened last time. The difference is that climate change is more predictable than the economy.
If you're just gonna be replacing entire orders of magnitudes of difference with the word "too", then everything "has a lot of environmental impact too".
> We can't go cherrypicking environmental problems.
Huh? Local pollution with solid waste vs dispersing that waste into the global atmosphere is the same to you?
> Even Fukushima polluted a lot. It's not just about death tolls.
Right, 20_000 deaths from the tsunami is no big deal, the pollution is!
Since you're ignoring any and all statistics wholesale, I hope you never fly — 9/11 was terrible after all, so aviation is clearly unsafe.
“Both-sides”ing this is ridiculous. Certain leftists might sometimes disproportionally blame corporations for the issue rhetorically but they aren’t broadly opposed to the kinds of taxes and regulations - on corporations or individuals - that would be needed to bring carbon emissions down.
If you insist on finding a way to criticize leftists on the climate file, a much better tack would be pointing out how some environmentalists have opposed nuclear power or densification.
The next two replys are people telling me it's corporations...
Maybe 10ish years ago the left was all on board with individual action, but now it has heavily shifted to "I can drive my SUV because it's on Big Oil to fix the climate"
For most individuals there is no lifestyle change they can make that will matter. Fixing it requires collective action.
The way individuals can meaningfully contribute is by supporting politicians that will make policies and rules and regulations the meaningfully encourage that collective action, and when they have a choice between more than one corporation for some product or service that are not too different as far as impact on the lifestyle goes choosing the one that is better from a climate change point of view.
The politicians and the corporations (encouraged by incentives and regulations by the politicians) can then bring about changes that will make it so the lifestyle changes for individuals that help with climate change also improve the individual's situations so people voluntarily make them in large numbers.
For example there are a lot of people in the US who would be better off if their next car was an EV except the public charging infrastructure isn't good enough for their needs. Build a lot more public chargers that support 800V cars and many of these people will pick an EV. This is something government can bring about.
For an average individual it is perfectly fine, to use a sports analogy, to play the game as it is now while supporting league wide changes to the rules to make it a better game in the future.
> For most individuals there is no lifestyle change they can make that will matter. Fixing it requires collective action.
Sorry but this is absolute nonsense.
What we eat matters. A huge amount of what people eat is unnecessarily excessive in terms of resources required to create it. Beef and dairy, most meat, are good examples of this.
An individual can reduce their contribution to climate change by up to 30% by simply forgoing meat and dairy. That percentage obviously varies quite a lot, but it can be huge.
Add in that food waste is a huge problem and this makes more sense.
> An individual can reduce their contribution to climate change by up to 30% by simply forgoing meat and dairy
So they go from their contribution to climate change being completely insignificant to it being 70% of completely insignificant.
If I dropped all meat and dairy it would reduce the world's annual emissions by 0.0000000026% (if we are optimists [1]).
This level of reduction only matters is a very large number of other people do it too, and getting that to happen requires a lot of top down effort.
[1] Realistically cows are produced in integer amounts. My foregoing burgers and steaks would not reduce the number of cows. At most have a minuscule affect on prices too low to be detected. Same for other meats and dairy.
> and the left thinks it's on corporations (not themselves)
Of course... Every year where the consequences weren't in sight, saying we should consume less, buy less, eat less meat, I have been called 'degrowther' and it has been explained to me that I would increase human suffering because it would reduce the economy size. Ok, fair, I just wanted to help future human, but if you don't plan to have any, you do you.
Now I'm told I think it's corporations that should fix it. Of course.
By the way, I still think it's consumerism (and consumption capitalism) the reason we can't deal with the issue. That corporations are the biggest voice that push for this system is incidental, but yes, breaking big corps in smaller entities would probably help solve the problem. A bit too late now, but better than never.
Also, who on the left think that corpos will do anything to help humanity? Really? I think at most, some thinks it's the government to do everything but corpo? Really? Your friends on the left seems to me very, very much in the center, center right to be exact.
And we do feel hopeless and helpless. And the only thing we can do is to promote and advocate for science. It was a scientist who made us stop adding lead to gasoline. It was because of scientists we were able to stop ozone layer destruction. It was a scientist who invented the catalytic converter. It was a scientist who broke the asbestos industry's decades of denial and a scientist who broke big tobacco.
We didn't have to "change our lifestyle" - scientists proved bad things happening and politicians listened. The current imbalance in the political system is that the right simply just wants to ignore the science. And even half the country shitting their souls out in explosive diarrhea won't change it. Therefore the right have no right to representation, because the survival of our species is at stake. We need to vote them out.
My best advice is not to approach people with numbers and figures and all the danger, start with saying you’re concerned about the future. It’s kind of an open ended conversation starter.
The big problem is this is all driven by consumption and it’s hard for people to cut back on consumption. I don’t know how to explain to people how a simple life is much easier than the complicated life of the rich and famous they see every day on the Internet.
I don’t think there is an answer for this, I think there’s way too much propaganda on the other side of the equation. My only hope from this El Niño is that it creates such damage and disaster that it starts waking people up. I think if it affects the ranchers and farmers that will be a big plus because they are usually on the side of not believing in climate change.
What I do right now is just keep talking to people and preparing, but I’m lucky since I live in a minivan full-time. I mean, I can drive anywhere. The weather suits me.
Sf Bay Area didn’t have a single day above 100 this year. Not counting Livermore etc. it’s the first time in a long time I can remember the entire summer being so nice and relatively cool.
We're getting cooked. I'm already paying 10-times more for water usage than I spend on gas, and 5-times more on electricity bills - AC's running non-stop. That's crazy, because I live in the area where you can't even walk to buy a piece of bread - we drive all the time. I fully expect for businesses very soon to operate at night. Costco, Walmart, groceries, even libraries will be working all night in places like Arizona, Texas and some parts of California.
Even if you’re driving a Prius and getting 50mpg, if you’re “driving all the time” you’re spending at least $100 a month in gas. There’s nowhere in the country where a water bill is $1000 a month unless you’re doing a lot of irrigation.
No, I meant exactly in the petrol sense. Darn americanims - you never know if gas is gasoline, or poison, anesthetic, or flatulence, or you're just being gaslighted.
Haha. I guess you imagined "Deep Dive Dubai" or something? My pool is basically an oversized bathtub. We would've called it exactly that if it was installed inside the house.
Yes, let's look at "Asia" (as if that's some meaningful grouping in this context when the countries are so different culturally, geographically, and economically).
Since 2005, a huge amount of US manufacturing and resource processing (both large emitters) have been outsourced (largely to Asia, and more specifically China). Our economy doesn't function without these imported emissions, yet they don't count as "US emissions". Even excluding these emissions, the US makes up 4% of the world population and emits 13% of world emissions. Asia makes up 60% of the world's population and emits 52% (more than 3x less per-capita than the US). If you actually consider that the countries in Asia are vastly diverse, you'll find the large majority of these emissions are from China (from said manufacturing and resource processing), and India for example emits far less than its share of the population.
This also completely ignores that the effects of warming are from cumulative emissions (not just point-in-time emissions) because CO2 doesn't just disappear every year. As a share of historical emissions, Europe comes off far worse than Asia per capita, and the US even worse than Europe.
Even despite this, at least China (and the rest of Asia to a lesser extent) is investing in clean energy. China produces > 80% of the world's solar panels and > 70% of the world's lithium batteries. Meanwhile, in the US the administration is doubling down on subsidies for fossil fuels and issuing stop-work orders on renewable energy projects already under construction.
And because I know I have to give this disclaimer these days: I am no apologist for everything else wrong with China and their authoritarian government. But I can't bear this attitude of absolving ourselves of blame for climate change because some other continent has a bigger number than us.
The population in the US has grown 17%, but emissions have reduced 18%. I think it's doing a good job and merely needs to continue that trajectory. The Trump administration is making some poor decisions there, but won't last much longer, it matters more if that's a long-term Republican position or merely an aberation.
That's less an issue than the new emissions going forward from Asia and Africa.
We can't very well tell them to stay poor. They're going to increase their energy usage and they're right to do so.
Hopefully renewables and EVs are competitive enough to reduce the impact of the rest of the world developing to Western levels. Which they may well, thanks to China and Elon Musk's Tesla for jump starting that transition.
The US is still one of the leading CO2 emitters, both per capita and in absolute terms. And for cumulative past emissions, it's not even close.
The expectation is not a mere 18% decrease but something closer to halving emissions just to be on a per capita level comparable to the EU or China.
It doesn't mean China doesn't need to make efforts. China's emissions are yet to be stabilized.
But the US need to make their share, and at least honors and (re-)ratify past climate agreements, if anything to dampen the economic arms race between China and the US.
Sorry, but, at this point ... why? Oil will run out before 2070 (read a bit of peak oil talk, oil running out doesn't mean zero oil pumped up, it means zero used for transport. There will still be reasons to dig up a little bit of oil). The strongest climate agreement was essentially status-quo in 2050, which now seems unlikely to actually happen, for 2 different reasons.
First, the very very bad news: the most recent climate agreement was less ambitious (because Russia, China, India and essentially all of Africa refused, even more than the US did under Trump). The secretary general of the UN got accused of joining oil trade deal meetings at the climate conference in Azerbaijan. At this point, a political solution is just not going to happen, nobody wants to make it happen. The other side of the equation, oil producers, Russia, Saudi Arabia refused to even discuss any kind of limits AT ALL, an even more extreme position than the US. So there's no political options there either.
What the EU decides to do or not do is a rounding error, every European country except Russia (insofar they're European) just can't do anything, and even the US matters less and less.
But the good news: if you look at production quotas and solar replacement, ie. the economics of oil, oil should run out sooner (because the maximum price anyone will pay will drop, but of course same caveat, run out does not mean 0) than the agreement puts in place.
So why do anything at this point? God, so to speak, will interfere. By that I mean digging up oil will become difficult/expensive while solar and batteries becomes cheaper, which will result in a faster drop in oil use than actually respecting the most recent agreement.
So, no, nothing needs to happen.
And now we are in the situation we are already in for 50+ years: You want to help climate change? Go study chemistry. Find new energy conversions that work. Find new battery chemistry that works better. Find a way to carry electrical energy with 10x the density of the best batteries (so even militaries have zero reason to get away from oil, ie. this is the only way to convince China and India to use less oil). THAT will accelerate oil's decline.
Politically? There is no reason here whatsoever for political change in Europe. And while I want Trump gone, so far he's by far the politician pushing the hardest for solar, despite his rhetoric.
Asia does about 50% the global emissions while having 60% of the world's population. The US alone does about 12% being 5% of global population.
US approaches 15t/CO2 per capita. Every single country in Asia is under 9t. This is despite the US having outsourced most of its heavy manufacturing to, of course Asia.
Per capita is rather pointless when talking about climate change, but yes, it doesn't absolve responsibility.
You'll note that's not what I said, just that the US is doing well at reducing CO2 emissions. The population has grown 17%, but emissions have reduced 18%. That's a good job.
US manufacturing has not decreased either, it has just not increased while offshoring elsewhere. So for the most part that decrease in CO2 is not simply moving the problem elsewhere.
American gas is not cheap. In absolute-numbers-sense, it's comparable to the current prices in Russia. And by all means and for all the different reasons, one would expect gasoline to be enormously expensive there right now. Far more expensive than in the States. It doesn't seem to be the case.
A few years ago (before wildfires forced us to move), we were in the East Bay of San Francisco. East Bay gets unusually hot - the mountain range prevents cool winds from the ocean passing over. Summer was extreme, the AC couldn't keep up, we had to hose the outer walls every evening, just to cool it a bit.
One day we woke up, had breakfast and the power line had failed. I quickly imagined what happens if it lasts more than a few hours, checked the heatmap, found an area that wasn't dark orange, and told everyone to pack - we're leaving. We headed towards Half Moon Bay. It's a little over an hour drive, but it took us another forty minutes to find a beach with a room for parking - entire coast was packed with the heat escapees like us. The beach was full of stinking kelp, there were tons of flies - they've tormented our stay, but we had little choice. We thought we were lucky to find a spot with not too many people, only to realize there was a carcass of a dead sea lion and it was dead-cat-stenchy. At least, being next to the ocean offered some relief from the heat. Later that afternoon, our neighbors called us to tell us that they were sitting in their minivan, at an empty parking lot. The power was still out, and to have a dignified dinner, they've grabbed some food and convened in the car, which had a working AC. But they didn't want it to look weird, so they drove away from their street, away from curious neighbors and friends.
Next summer wildfires came back. This time bigger than ever. Dealing with both smoke and COVID restrictions together felt like too much, and we decided to move. We headed East, our first stop was Barstow, CA - we decided to rest a night. It's pretty far from where the actual fires were raging, yet when we woke up, we were greeted with what looked like snow at first. It was ash. Our car was covered with it. We kept driving. The sky was black from the smoke. It only started clearing out when we crossed into New Mexico. We were all terrified to realize the scale of that disastrous event. Which has now become "a seasonal climate occurrence" - it's almost guaranteed that each year something will massively burn somewhere in the West Coast. And the fuck are we doing about that? Entertaining a clown with renaming a lake.
It is alarming, but what's truly insane is that every single year something huge now burns on the West Coast: 2018 Mendocino, 2020 August Complex and Creek Fire, 2021 Dixie Fire and Bootleg Fire, there are countless more - Domino, Dulce, Timber, Twin Big Sur, Dillon. Don't even try to collect the comprehensive list of them - you'll have nightmares. West of the States is actively burning, East is drowning in hurricanes, the middle is in drought, mega tornadoes and golf-ball-sized hailstorms. We are all in "Don't look up", but worse - at least, in the movie people died instantly. For us, it's going to be suffering for many years, and it's gonna progressively get worse. What just happened in Nepal is not an isolated incident. AMOC is slowing down and our weather becoming volatile, chaotic and extreme and we're not only not doing enough - often we don't even want to talk about it at all.
> I'm already paying 10-times more for water usage than I spend on gas, and 5-times more on electricity bills
Comparing ratios of bills is confusing. This statement would be unsurprising if you drove 10 miles per week in a Prius. It would be very confusing if you were filling up your tank every week and spending $1000/month on a water bill.
I can explain. I work from home - no commute. Yes, I don't have to drive as much as the average person has to in my area. This summer has been extremely hot, hotter than any previous - seems that's becoming a new normal. Past couple of weeks the heat remained in the 90s, even around midnight. Water district installed big banners with warnings "draught stages in effect", there's a penalty for irrigating at certain hours - it gets added to the bill. These banners getting erected for the past three years.
Don’t you think this was important information to include in your post? Your whole point was built on spending more on water than gas, but then we had to read the comments to discover that you don’t commute and you have water-hungry situations like a pool and HOA mandated landscaping?
I'm not trying to deceive anyone - no matter how anyone could twist it, it is true - the heat is real, the water shortages are the new reality, and I am in fact spending more on water than gas. And it's not because I don't have to drive at all - I do, just not as much as the average person who needs to go to the office every single day. I still need to drive daily.
I'm not moaning and not accusing anyone, but you. You, specifically you, making the living unsustainable. Who the hell taught you the letters and how to type? Check on them, I think they just died out of shame. Honestly, I think the world would've been a better place if you stayed uneducated. Go back to whatever kindergarten you came from, being so mean.
Better solution would be migration and building and expanding cities. I have huge doubts current systems will be able to or even consider to tackle catastrophic problems that are 10-20-30 years ahead, huge public investments, forcing capital to share too, drain dry all the oil biz. Instead it will be free for all
But what will be the safe places people could migrate to? I'm not sure we can really predict this, especially since the least affected locations are going to be the ones everybody will be interested in. And given the ramping-up xenophobia I can't imagine climate refugees suddenly being welcomed with open arms...
This can be read rather directly from the UN's prediction maps. But essentially: anything northeast-US will be fine, anything Paris and north from there will be fine, in fact, probably better than today.
The big problem starting in the South Of France, or in the US south, especially Nevada and Arizona. Intolerable temperatures a few weeks every year, not a constant problem.
Note: the general consensus is that the 2026-2036 period will see little if any warming (meaning currently El Nino is pushing hard, but that will stop, and then it'll be dragging the temperature down for a while, which won't cause a drop, but will keep things more-or-less constant). So you have time to decide.
I am currently in London. I have run AC every night since May in order to sleep. The interior of my new build luxury apartment in the financial district is routinely over 30°C during the day and can’t be cooled below that even with the windows covered and the (portable) AC running.
At the turn of the century the CIA predicted climate change and water being the primary drivers of conflict in the 20s.
We are already seeing the US deposing Venezuela’s government and taking their energy as US’s intentional fossil fuel dependency bites.
Things will only get worse unless radical changes are made. We have to move faster than the skeptics and entrenched interests desire.
To save the planet some people are going to lose their wealth power and position. Despite their protestations it’s entirely logical, just and necessary.
> The interior of my new build luxury apartment in the financial district is routinely over 30°C
That's not a well built building though. Our flat in warmer location in Europe does not get over 27C unless it's over 33C outside, and that withou the AC active.
You can’t get a more direct example of failure of collective action.
I’m not sure the human species has the capacity to actually coordinate behavior at the scale needed, irrespective of any future warning etc…, to be able to combat this
All that does is drive up prices which cause other users to cut back. Total oil consumption is directly tied to production. Oil production is stalled right now so less is being used, and the high prices are speeding up the electrification of everything.
Sometimes I wonder if the anti-immigrant rhetoric that has been growing more popular is a tactical tool used by smart individuals who don't actually believe in it but instead have accepted that they would rather be wealthy and destroy the planet and are pricing in the consequences of that decision.
There's also a prisoner's dilemma situation. Suppose you're some wealthy media magnate promoting culture war distractions from your portfolio of asset strippers and polluters, thinking of defecting to team decency.
That hypothetical you can look around at the rest of the global political class and see that the rest of the establishment will destroy the livability of the biosphere whether that hypothetical you starts putting all of your money into unions, green technology and BECCs or not and conclude that the only available choice is whether to be poor in a collapsing world or rich in a collapsing world.
Why would investing in green tech make you poor? That's what's wrong with that argument.
Moving away from fossil fuels is cheaper. Green energy is very cheap, it just misses a base load component right now. It's just that the people benefiting are different ones. And those people are going to lose sooner or later anyway, because in addition to climate change, fossil fuels are also finite.
The only reason trump is on the oil bandwagon is because many of his buddies are benefiting from it. And probably because he's still pissed at the Scotland windmill thing.
But doing the right thing doesn't have to make you poor. It will benefit everyone including the investors.
The optimal strategy for short term oligarchic revenue maximisation is a mixed strategy of mostly fossil fuels with some green tech.
The optimal strategy for long term biosphere habitability is a mixed strategy of mostly green tech with a tiny amount of fossil fuels exclusively for those metal smelting roles where arc furnaces and biofuels are unsuitable.
Investment portfolios dominated by technology that lifts everybody up are less profitable than greedy choices of risky investment, per some of the finer details of the mutual fund separation theorem.
"Hello, is this the Murdoch family office? I'd like to speak to your team's permanent director of assets strategy about how wonderful it would be for your income to drop by ten to fifteen percent."
You could do the same with the accounting team on retainer for the US Commerce Secretary's family portfolio, or the US Education Secretary's family portfolio, or the US Interior Secretary's family portfolio, or the head of NASA's family portfolio, or the Middle East Special Envoy's family portfolio, or the Administrator-in-Chief of the Small Business Administration's family portfolio.
These are all individuals with a net worth of over a billion dollars who each separately employ a full time accounting and financial team with its own IT and HR just to maximise family income. What's ten million a year in operating costs versus at least sextuple that in return?
Each oligarch of size is the figurehead of a corporation dedicated to number go up.
I’m sympathetic to the intent of your argument, but man, that’s a hallava gotcha there. Other than nuclear there isn’t a compelling story for a base load source of green energy. And all the new-gen nuclear tech is a long shot for safe, cost efficient, rapid scaling right now.
Or they live in a border city and had to deal with years and years of complete chaos while others in blue cities far far away had no ill effects (and preached to them at the same time?)
I thought the narrative was that it was the blue cities that were the chaotic hellholes, specifically because of all the minorities that live there? Can you try to keep your stories straight?
And I think the artificially created right wing shift was to enable Israel to do a lot of killing without the rest world being united to tell them to stop with this.
Obviously anything unhappy that happens anywhere in the world is because of Israel. If you stub your toe, it’s probably on something a Jew placed there somehow.
That, or there’s been a naturally shift to the right as a reaction to the left going to irrational extremes and aligning themselves hypocritically with groups that suppress women and hate the USA and the freedoms we have fought for and won.
The planet started out a ball of molten stardust, completely inhospitable to life as we know it. But then there was not only life, but life detached from the ground too. Then K-T event wiped out almost all of it. But the planet kept going! It can be argued it got better and more diverse.
Are people in trouble? Perhaps. If we stop technological achievement in the name of a few degrees centigrade, then definitely.
Absolutely.. but, sith are property of abcdisney. People are property of the Earth, until such a time we prove otherwise. We are less the landlords and more the squatters, with all sorts of events trying to evict us.[1][2][3]
I scuba dive in Monterey, CA every other weekend, and just came back from a liveaboard in Galapagos in May. The water is much warmer this year, and it is very noticeable because usually in Galapagos, divers are expected to wear 8mm wetsuit or dry suit to be comfortable in the water, but this year even a 5mm made me feel too warm. In Monterey, water temp used to be around 11-13°C but this year it’s easily above 16°C, divers also reported more sightings of spiny lobsters which were rare in Monterey because water was too cold for them.
Stripe's climate researcher Zeke Hausfather is coming to AirMiners this Wednesday to share about El Niño climate science, the impacts, and then we're going to work on what we can do to avert the worst impacts of this storm.
I lean towards agreeing with you. That said, people often confuse carbon dioxide removal with CCS. Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) generally refers to "carbon neutral" technologies to pull carbon dioxide out of emissions. At some kind of theoretical best, CCS is carbon neutral, so the best CCS can ever hope to offer is being neutral like solar, wind, or nuclear.
Carbon dioxide removal refers to a different process. Carbon dioxide removal is the process to pull carbon dioxide back out of the air itself. It's not a supplement or replacement for carbon neutral technologies. Every model proposed by the IPCC to stay at 1.5C of warming requires billions of tons of carbon dioxide, alongside zeroing out new emissions.
I can’t overstate how it is. And you will need to be prepared. Be prepared for floods and just weird weather. While we humans are adaptable to these weather changes, plants and animals are not. This is going to affect feed crops for both humans and animals. So I would expect some inflation because of this.
I also want to state for those of you living in Southern California to be prepared for a possible earthquake. It’s a salton sea fills up with a lot of water quickly It could most likely trigger an earthquake.
But those are the impacts just in the United States. We might be looking at food price shocks in combination with the ongoing war in Iran.
By the way for those of you complaining about the heat in Los Angeles, it’s not really the heat. It’s the humidity. The LA basin has had record high dewpoint temperatures. That’s why it’s so uncomfortable.
How do we fix this? The only thing I can think of is a spiritual awakening where owning and doing less is more attractive than flying around in jets and building AI data centers.
So, any legit climate scientists or oceanographers here? Or agronomists? How abnormal (and not just, the climate graphs for the last century say this is bad) is this on a longer timescale. Like, when was the water this warm last?
I feel this is going to be a "big one" this year? And probably the culmination of extreme heat, crop failures, and high diesel prices are going to trigger more conflict too? To be clear, I'm an optimist, I think things will be "good" in the long run, but I have a feeling the next 12-24 months are going to be a doozie with the 4 or 5 things converging...
Like, I don't want to have this crazy flamewar thing, but like, what do the numbers say, how fucked is this particular one?
Could we stop chopping down trees from primary forests in the Amazon to save the planet for us humans? Could we manage with a little less beef and soy?
> Could we stop chopping down trees from primary forests in the Amazon to save the planet for us humans?
Keep the Amazon out of this. From whichever country you are, you should demand your government to grow and keep some forest carrying the economic burden for that. It's too easy to point to poor countries so the rich ones can keep consuming like kings without guilty.
Just 5 days ago the news was https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62m4gpnp78o. Different wording, few measurements later, this will run that way til December at the very least. We can shout another bird most days till there, or discuss the projections to the peak of the event (and how they usually correcting it upwards), that may give a better warning.
Forget about global trends, forget "unprecedented events", this isn’t rocket science, I’ve seen the climate shift myself, in my lifetime, and I’m not even that old. It’s difficult to imagine how people elsewhere aren’t seeing the same, like we aren’t inhabiting the same reality somehow?
In Continental Europe we used to have winters with regular snow even in large cities. I know, I really liked playing in the snow as a kid. It was cold. For the past dozen or so years, there is less and less snowfall, with milder and milder winters. Snow in the cities amounts to maybe a week or three of weak drizzle. Forget about what my grandpa remembered about how the Danube used to freeze over so you could walk across the river. What we do seem to get more of is wild, torrential rainfall in sudden bursts amid long dry spells. Bad for infrastructure, even worse for agriculture.
The climate is changing here, and it’s getting hotter, not colder or more balanced. Wildfires are increasing in frequency, and God knows what’s going on with the country’s underground aquifers, we never seem to care about those, because we’ve always just had plenty, so why worry. Of course all this is easily dismissed as anecdata. But when I read about the research labelling Europe the fastest warming continent, I don’t have trouble believing it. Sure, someone living in the northernmost reaches of Europe might not see anything, yet, this doesn’t mean the research is wrong.
Worse yet, the infrastructure for dealing with this simply isn’t there in most countries, and I’m not talking about stuff that will "reverse global warming" or whatever, I’m talking steps that will keep cities livable in the short to medium time-span. Most societies are unwilling to mentally deal with or consider what might happen two, three decades down the line. They aren’t willing to contend with a future where their children will have to endure water rationing, curfews, economic and other hardship, mass migration or any number of scenarios that will affect their wellbeing.
We have to greenify the streets, reduce the number of heat-producing vehicles, upgrade the pipelines, irrigation, water collection, and other systems across European cities... I have a sneaking suspicion it will take some massive, un-ignorable crisis, like a record number of elderly people dying from heat exposure to actually start investing in any of this. And by then it might be too late.
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[ 0.33 ms ] story [ 55.8 ms ] thread70°F is 21°C
Fish don't have AC.
Spitting facts, over there. I fear a "So long, and thanks for all the fish" moment is impending.
There’s a lot of nuance in this stuff - far more than global average surface temperature (which is primarily good for scary headlines) and “fish don’t have AC”.
Translation: "I expect all areas to be affected the same, despite axial tilt, fluid dynamics, etc."
Im Australian, so it also means droughts, water restrictions, and significant increases in bushfire number and severity after a few years of drought. Drought followed by cyclone, or bulk rain events causes catastrophic flooding. Its a shit show.
And what about the years before that?
In any event, who cares what the climate was like before humans walked the planet? We do care about what it is like while we’re around because it puts significant constraints on our lives.
[1]J. E. Cole et al., Recent strengthening of eastern Pacific ENSO in the last millennium paleorecord. Science DOI:10.1126/science.ady2660
How many children do you have?
A lot of excellent researcher have tried for a long time to correlate El Niño swings with climate change and there is as of yet no compelling evidence whatsoever they are related.
Claiming every natural event that has been going on for thousands of years is a sign of the apocalypse without evidence is a quick way to make people stop listening.
An economy that seizes climate solutions can zoom ahead in terms of innovation, manufacturing, and enforcement. The changing climate is one of the biggest economic opportunities we've ever seen in human history, but somehow we've convinced ourselves that it's not only the worst non-opportunity ever but somehow would break capitalism. The richest man on the planet makes electric cars.
I think that, if people who believe in climate change want to be convincing, it would be more effective to avoid blaming specific instances of weather on climate change without strong justification. Especially when the weather isn’t even abnormal.
Los Angeles, especially inland and in the valley, is hot in the summer. It was hot in the summer 30 years ago and it’s still hot in the summer. It’s the typical hot season right now, and the valley appears to be only slightly above season average temperatures today, and coastal LA seeks be slightly cooler than average. Apparently it will be unseasonably cool in a couple days.
More tropical storms are approaching LA and that’s increasing humidity is why it’s sweltering.
"Forecasters attributed the punishing humidity to the remnants of Tropical Storm Iselle moving over the state, as well as unusually warm ocean temperatures due to a combination of a months-long marine heat wave, a powerful El Niño and climate change.
"Dew points in the Los Angeles Basin have been “really high,” hovering around 70 degrees in many places, with a few coastal areas like Redondo Beach and Torrance reaching a dew point of 73 to 75 on Friday, said Ryan Kittell, meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Oxnard. The metric measures the moisture content in the air."
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-08-28/forget-f...
When nuclear power became a thing in the seventies, there was massive planning around a presumed nuclear-powered future. The largest energy storage facilities in the US were all built around that time. This turned out to be a mirage as the cost of nuclear went up with the safety expectations of the electorate, while petrochemical prices dropped. But this time it's not prices we're predicting, it's temperature, which is much more reliable.
We can't go cherrypicking environmental problems. That way we roll from one crisis into the next. There's so many issues we're causing, like entire ecosystems going extinct. Sooner or later that will lead to crises too. We have to stop externalising.
And yes the electorate wants to be safe and for good reason. Even Fukushima polluted a lot. It's not just about death tolls.
Those materials are mined also. At least forethought is given to handling/disposal.
See how the soviets destroyed half the Czech countryside looking for Uranium for their bombs and power plants: https://www.rferl.org/a/soviet-uranium-mines-explored-abando...
Uranium mining is a dirty business and if we're going to be needing a lot more of it due to expansion of nuclear and leaving the mining to the lowest bidder it will be very polluting.
And if we’re just being offhanded then apparently thorium is a replacement for uranium, or there’s the ability to reprocess used fuel again for nuclear power.
> We can't go cherrypicking environmental problems.
Huh? Local pollution with solid waste vs dispersing that waste into the global atmosphere is the same to you?
> Even Fukushima polluted a lot. It's not just about death tolls.
Right, 20_000 deaths from the tsunami is no big deal, the pollution is!
Since you're ignoring any and all statistics wholesale, I hope you never fly — 9/11 was terrible after all, so aviation is clearly unsafe.
To put it plainly, everyone wants the problem to go away without having to change anything about their lifestyle.
If you insist on finding a way to criticize leftists on the climate file, a much better tack would be pointing out how some environmentalists have opposed nuclear power or densification.
Maybe 10ish years ago the left was all on board with individual action, but now it has heavily shifted to "I can drive my SUV because it's on Big Oil to fix the climate"
The way individuals can meaningfully contribute is by supporting politicians that will make policies and rules and regulations the meaningfully encourage that collective action, and when they have a choice between more than one corporation for some product or service that are not too different as far as impact on the lifestyle goes choosing the one that is better from a climate change point of view.
The politicians and the corporations (encouraged by incentives and regulations by the politicians) can then bring about changes that will make it so the lifestyle changes for individuals that help with climate change also improve the individual's situations so people voluntarily make them in large numbers.
For example there are a lot of people in the US who would be better off if their next car was an EV except the public charging infrastructure isn't good enough for their needs. Build a lot more public chargers that support 800V cars and many of these people will pick an EV. This is something government can bring about.
For an average individual it is perfectly fine, to use a sports analogy, to play the game as it is now while supporting league wide changes to the rules to make it a better game in the future.
Sorry but this is absolute nonsense.
What we eat matters. A huge amount of what people eat is unnecessarily excessive in terms of resources required to create it. Beef and dairy, most meat, are good examples of this.
An individual can reduce their contribution to climate change by up to 30% by simply forgoing meat and dairy. That percentage obviously varies quite a lot, but it can be huge.
Add in that food waste is a huge problem and this makes more sense.
So they go from their contribution to climate change being completely insignificant to it being 70% of completely insignificant.
If I dropped all meat and dairy it would reduce the world's annual emissions by 0.0000000026% (if we are optimists [1]).
This level of reduction only matters is a very large number of other people do it too, and getting that to happen requires a lot of top down effort.
[1] Realistically cows are produced in integer amounts. My foregoing burgers and steaks would not reduce the number of cows. At most have a minuscule affect on prices too low to be detected. Same for other meats and dairy.
Of course... Every year where the consequences weren't in sight, saying we should consume less, buy less, eat less meat, I have been called 'degrowther' and it has been explained to me that I would increase human suffering because it would reduce the economy size. Ok, fair, I just wanted to help future human, but if you don't plan to have any, you do you.
Now I'm told I think it's corporations that should fix it. Of course.
By the way, I still think it's consumerism (and consumption capitalism) the reason we can't deal with the issue. That corporations are the biggest voice that push for this system is incidental, but yes, breaking big corps in smaller entities would probably help solve the problem. A bit too late now, but better than never.
Also, who on the left think that corpos will do anything to help humanity? Really? I think at most, some thinks it's the government to do everything but corpo? Really? Your friends on the left seems to me very, very much in the center, center right to be exact.
And we do feel hopeless and helpless. And the only thing we can do is to promote and advocate for science. It was a scientist who made us stop adding lead to gasoline. It was because of scientists we were able to stop ozone layer destruction. It was a scientist who invented the catalytic converter. It was a scientist who broke the asbestos industry's decades of denial and a scientist who broke big tobacco.
We didn't have to "change our lifestyle" - scientists proved bad things happening and politicians listened. The current imbalance in the political system is that the right simply just wants to ignore the science. And even half the country shitting their souls out in explosive diarrhea won't change it. Therefore the right have no right to representation, because the survival of our species is at stake. We need to vote them out.
We'll talk climate science, impacts, and what we can do to avert the worst impacts of the worst El Niño in human history.
The big problem is this is all driven by consumption and it’s hard for people to cut back on consumption. I don’t know how to explain to people how a simple life is much easier than the complicated life of the rich and famous they see every day on the Internet.
I don’t think there is an answer for this, I think there’s way too much propaganda on the other side of the equation. My only hope from this El Niño is that it creates such damage and disaster that it starts waking people up. I think if it affects the ranchers and farmers that will be a big plus because they are usually on the side of not believing in climate change.
What I do right now is just keep talking to people and preparing, but I’m lucky since I live in a minivan full-time. I mean, I can drive anywhere. The weather suits me.
Tell us more
Are you irrigating an enormous yard?
It's not just you. It's you + the millions of people using the same "I'm a unique snowflake" logic.
If 8 billion people can't do it, maybe consider not doing it.
Look at Asia.
Since 2005, a huge amount of US manufacturing and resource processing (both large emitters) have been outsourced (largely to Asia, and more specifically China). Our economy doesn't function without these imported emissions, yet they don't count as "US emissions". Even excluding these emissions, the US makes up 4% of the world population and emits 13% of world emissions. Asia makes up 60% of the world's population and emits 52% (more than 3x less per-capita than the US). If you actually consider that the countries in Asia are vastly diverse, you'll find the large majority of these emissions are from China (from said manufacturing and resource processing), and India for example emits far less than its share of the population.
This also completely ignores that the effects of warming are from cumulative emissions (not just point-in-time emissions) because CO2 doesn't just disappear every year. As a share of historical emissions, Europe comes off far worse than Asia per capita, and the US even worse than Europe.
Even despite this, at least China (and the rest of Asia to a lesser extent) is investing in clean energy. China produces > 80% of the world's solar panels and > 70% of the world's lithium batteries. Meanwhile, in the US the administration is doubling down on subsidies for fossil fuels and issuing stop-work orders on renewable energy projects already under construction.
And because I know I have to give this disclaimer these days: I am no apologist for everything else wrong with China and their authoritarian government. But I can't bear this attitude of absolving ourselves of blame for climate change because some other continent has a bigger number than us.
But yes, it's sad to see America about face on climate change under Trump.
We can't very well tell them to stay poor. They're going to increase their energy usage and they're right to do so.
Hopefully renewables and EVs are competitive enough to reduce the impact of the rest of the world developing to Western levels. Which they may well, thanks to China and Elon Musk's Tesla for jump starting that transition.
The US is still one of the leading CO2 emitters, both per capita and in absolute terms. And for cumulative past emissions, it's not even close.
The expectation is not a mere 18% decrease but something closer to halving emissions just to be on a per capita level comparable to the EU or China.
It doesn't mean China doesn't need to make efforts. China's emissions are yet to be stabilized.
But the US need to make their share, and at least honors and (re-)ratify past climate agreements, if anything to dampen the economic arms race between China and the US.
Sorry, but, at this point ... why? Oil will run out before 2070 (read a bit of peak oil talk, oil running out doesn't mean zero oil pumped up, it means zero used for transport. There will still be reasons to dig up a little bit of oil). The strongest climate agreement was essentially status-quo in 2050, which now seems unlikely to actually happen, for 2 different reasons.
First, the very very bad news: the most recent climate agreement was less ambitious (because Russia, China, India and essentially all of Africa refused, even more than the US did under Trump). The secretary general of the UN got accused of joining oil trade deal meetings at the climate conference in Azerbaijan. At this point, a political solution is just not going to happen, nobody wants to make it happen. The other side of the equation, oil producers, Russia, Saudi Arabia refused to even discuss any kind of limits AT ALL, an even more extreme position than the US. So there's no political options there either.
What the EU decides to do or not do is a rounding error, every European country except Russia (insofar they're European) just can't do anything, and even the US matters less and less.
But the good news: if you look at production quotas and solar replacement, ie. the economics of oil, oil should run out sooner (because the maximum price anyone will pay will drop, but of course same caveat, run out does not mean 0) than the agreement puts in place.
So why do anything at this point? God, so to speak, will interfere. By that I mean digging up oil will become difficult/expensive while solar and batteries becomes cheaper, which will result in a faster drop in oil use than actually respecting the most recent agreement.
So, no, nothing needs to happen.
And now we are in the situation we are already in for 50+ years: You want to help climate change? Go study chemistry. Find new energy conversions that work. Find new battery chemistry that works better. Find a way to carry electrical energy with 10x the density of the best batteries (so even militaries have zero reason to get away from oil, ie. this is the only way to convince China and India to use less oil). THAT will accelerate oil's decline.
Politically? There is no reason here whatsoever for political change in Europe. And while I want Trump gone, so far he's by far the politician pushing the hardest for solar, despite his rhetoric.
US approaches 15t/CO2 per capita. Every single country in Asia is under 9t. This is despite the US having outsourced most of its heavy manufacturing to, of course Asia.
Blaming Asia is a massive cop out.
You'll note that's not what I said, just that the US is doing well at reducing CO2 emissions. The population has grown 17%, but emissions have reduced 18%. That's a good job.
US manufacturing has not decreased either, it has just not increased while offshoring elsewhere. So for the most part that decrease in CO2 is not simply moving the problem elsewhere.
One day we woke up, had breakfast and the power line had failed. I quickly imagined what happens if it lasts more than a few hours, checked the heatmap, found an area that wasn't dark orange, and told everyone to pack - we're leaving. We headed towards Half Moon Bay. It's a little over an hour drive, but it took us another forty minutes to find a beach with a room for parking - entire coast was packed with the heat escapees like us. The beach was full of stinking kelp, there were tons of flies - they've tormented our stay, but we had little choice. We thought we were lucky to find a spot with not too many people, only to realize there was a carcass of a dead sea lion and it was dead-cat-stenchy. At least, being next to the ocean offered some relief from the heat. Later that afternoon, our neighbors called us to tell us that they were sitting in their minivan, at an empty parking lot. The power was still out, and to have a dignified dinner, they've grabbed some food and convened in the car, which had a working AC. But they didn't want it to look weird, so they drove away from their street, away from curious neighbors and friends.
Next summer wildfires came back. This time bigger than ever. Dealing with both smoke and COVID restrictions together felt like too much, and we decided to move. We headed East, our first stop was Barstow, CA - we decided to rest a night. It's pretty far from where the actual fires were raging, yet when we woke up, we were greeted with what looked like snow at first. It was ash. Our car was covered with it. We kept driving. The sky was black from the smoke. It only started clearing out when we crossed into New Mexico. We were all terrified to realize the scale of that disastrous event. Which has now become "a seasonal climate occurrence" - it's almost guaranteed that each year something will massively burn somewhere in the West Coast. And the fuck are we doing about that? Entertaining a clown with renaming a lake.
Comparing ratios of bills is confusing. This statement would be unsurprising if you drove 10 miles per week in a Prius. It would be very confusing if you were filling up your tank every week and spending $1000/month on a water bill.
Don’t you think this was important information to include in your post? Your whole point was built on spending more on water than gas, but then we had to read the comments to discover that you don’t commute and you have water-hungry situations like a pool and HOA mandated landscaping?
The funniest thing here is you barking unexplained natural oscillation that people knew for millennia.
The big problem starting in the South Of France, or in the US south, especially Nevada and Arizona. Intolerable temperatures a few weeks every year, not a constant problem.
Note: the general consensus is that the 2026-2036 period will see little if any warming (meaning currently El Nino is pushing hard, but that will stop, and then it'll be dragging the temperature down for a while, which won't cause a drop, but will keep things more-or-less constant). So you have time to decide.
https://interactive-atlas.ipcc.ch
At the turn of the century the CIA predicted climate change and water being the primary drivers of conflict in the 20s.
We are already seeing the US deposing Venezuela’s government and taking their energy as US’s intentional fossil fuel dependency bites.
Things will only get worse unless radical changes are made. We have to move faster than the skeptics and entrenched interests desire.
To save the planet some people are going to lose their wealth power and position. Despite their protestations it’s entirely logical, just and necessary.
That's not a well built building though. Our flat in warmer location in Europe does not get over 27C unless it's over 33C outside, and that withou the AC active.
I’m not sure the human species has the capacity to actually coordinate behavior at the scale needed, irrespective of any future warning etc…, to be able to combat this
That hypothetical you can look around at the rest of the global political class and see that the rest of the establishment will destroy the livability of the biosphere whether that hypothetical you starts putting all of your money into unions, green technology and BECCs or not and conclude that the only available choice is whether to be poor in a collapsing world or rich in a collapsing world.
Moving away from fossil fuels is cheaper. Green energy is very cheap, it just misses a base load component right now. It's just that the people benefiting are different ones. And those people are going to lose sooner or later anyway, because in addition to climate change, fossil fuels are also finite.
The only reason trump is on the oil bandwagon is because many of his buddies are benefiting from it. And probably because he's still pissed at the Scotland windmill thing.
But doing the right thing doesn't have to make you poor. It will benefit everyone including the investors.
The optimal strategy for long term biosphere habitability is a mixed strategy of mostly green tech with a tiny amount of fossil fuels exclusively for those metal smelting roles where arc furnaces and biofuels are unsuitable.
Investment portfolios dominated by technology that lifts everybody up are less profitable than greedy choices of risky investment, per some of the finer details of the mutual fund separation theorem.
And oligarchs have kids too, don't they want them to live in a world worth living in?
You could do the same with the accounting team on retainer for the US Commerce Secretary's family portfolio, or the US Education Secretary's family portfolio, or the US Interior Secretary's family portfolio, or the head of NASA's family portfolio, or the Middle East Special Envoy's family portfolio, or the Administrator-in-Chief of the Small Business Administration's family portfolio.
These are all individuals with a net worth of over a billion dollars who each separately employ a full time accounting and financial team with its own IT and HR just to maximise family income. What's ten million a year in operating costs versus at least sextuple that in return?
Each oligarch of size is the figurehead of a corporation dedicated to number go up.
I’m sympathetic to the intent of your argument, but man, that’s a hallava gotcha there. Other than nuclear there isn’t a compelling story for a base load source of green energy. And all the new-gen nuclear tech is a long shot for safe, cost efficient, rapid scaling right now.
hmmmmmm.
Yet I can walk here in the city at night without getting robbed at gunpoint. Or any point really. Pickpockets are a pest here but that's about it.
That, or there’s been a naturally shift to the right as a reaction to the left going to irrational extremes and aligning themselves hypocritically with groups that suppress women and hate the USA and the freedoms we have fought for and won.
Are people in trouble? Perhaps. If we stop technological achievement in the name of a few degrees centigrade, then definitely.
specifically, can you identify a technological advancement that you question the sustainability of?
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_winter_of_536
Come join! https://luma.com/tu0uvbx1
Carbon dioxide removal refers to a different process. Carbon dioxide removal is the process to pull carbon dioxide back out of the air itself. It's not a supplement or replacement for carbon neutral technologies. Every model proposed by the IPCC to stay at 1.5C of warming requires billions of tons of carbon dioxide, alongside zeroing out new emissions.
Also, this event is about El Niño.
Oceans hit highest temperature on record
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49424606
and Related:
The Strongest El Niño Ever Forecast and the Hunger It Will Leave Behind
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49281960
Super El Niño Keeps Growing as New Forecasts Reach Record Territory Ahead Winter
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49313428
Climate change is strengthening El Niño, coral records suggest
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49475404
I also want to state for those of you living in Southern California to be prepared for a possible earthquake. It’s a salton sea fills up with a lot of water quickly It could most likely trigger an earthquake.
But those are the impacts just in the United States. We might be looking at food price shocks in combination with the ongoing war in Iran.
By the way for those of you complaining about the heat in Los Angeles, it’s not really the heat. It’s the humidity. The LA basin has had record high dewpoint temperatures. That’s why it’s so uncomfortable.
How do we fix this? The only thing I can think of is a spiritual awakening where owning and doing less is more attractive than flying around in jets and building AI data centers.
I feel this is going to be a "big one" this year? And probably the culmination of extreme heat, crop failures, and high diesel prices are going to trigger more conflict too? To be clear, I'm an optimist, I think things will be "good" in the long run, but I have a feeling the next 12-24 months are going to be a doozie with the 4 or 5 things converging...
Like, I don't want to have this crazy flamewar thing, but like, what do the numbers say, how fucked is this particular one?
"When you are confined within the civilized scientific discourse and can't cry out 'It's the biosphere, stupid!'"
Please read what Anastassia Makarieva had to say on "the kid" 2 years ago: https://bioticregulation.substack.com/p/seeing-forests-throu...
Could we stop chopping down trees from primary forests in the Amazon to save the planet for us humans? Could we manage with a little less beef and soy?
Keep the Amazon out of this. From whichever country you are, you should demand your government to grow and keep some forest carrying the economic burden for that. It's too easy to point to poor countries so the rich ones can keep consuming like kings without guilty.
In Continental Europe we used to have winters with regular snow even in large cities. I know, I really liked playing in the snow as a kid. It was cold. For the past dozen or so years, there is less and less snowfall, with milder and milder winters. Snow in the cities amounts to maybe a week or three of weak drizzle. Forget about what my grandpa remembered about how the Danube used to freeze over so you could walk across the river. What we do seem to get more of is wild, torrential rainfall in sudden bursts amid long dry spells. Bad for infrastructure, even worse for agriculture.
The climate is changing here, and it’s getting hotter, not colder or more balanced. Wildfires are increasing in frequency, and God knows what’s going on with the country’s underground aquifers, we never seem to care about those, because we’ve always just had plenty, so why worry. Of course all this is easily dismissed as anecdata. But when I read about the research labelling Europe the fastest warming continent, I don’t have trouble believing it. Sure, someone living in the northernmost reaches of Europe might not see anything, yet, this doesn’t mean the research is wrong.
Worse yet, the infrastructure for dealing with this simply isn’t there in most countries, and I’m not talking about stuff that will "reverse global warming" or whatever, I’m talking steps that will keep cities livable in the short to medium time-span. Most societies are unwilling to mentally deal with or consider what might happen two, three decades down the line. They aren’t willing to contend with a future where their children will have to endure water rationing, curfews, economic and other hardship, mass migration or any number of scenarios that will affect their wellbeing.
We have to greenify the streets, reduce the number of heat-producing vehicles, upgrade the pipelines, irrigation, water collection, and other systems across European cities... I have a sneaking suspicion it will take some massive, un-ignorable crisis, like a record number of elderly people dying from heat exposure to actually start investing in any of this. And by then it might be too late.