Even the crotchetiest and most out-of-touch people I know basically accept that the Earth is warming now. They just either disagree on the cause or proportion.
Some people just naturally resist hyperbole or sensationalist rhetoric, and I find it very helpful to reframe the argument from doom and gloom and fire and brimstone to something more realistic and grounded:
"The longer we put off doing something, the harder and more expensive it will be in the future. In a Pascal's Wager sort of way, many of the changes we are talking about don't even really cost us anything, and the potential that C02 is not a real culprit is more than made up by danger that it is. Making changes now is the prudent and financially sound decision."
In a large part, this is what the brief ESG trend on the stock market was briefly about before it got co-opted by a dozen different competing messages.
aeternum 1 days ago [-]
The problem with Pascal's wager logic is you have to change your behavior based on all kinds of crazy low-probability events. You must worship every god, be an AI-doomer, a climate-doomer, a nuclear-doomer.
Pascal's wager is generally agreed to be logically unsound, so it's somewhat insane that we've revived it in all these modern contexts. If you believe in it, at least be consistent and sacrifice a goat to Zeus every couple years.
pablomalo 14 hours ago [-]
Pascal's wager, as it relates to faith, is based on the premise that there is a lot to win in making the wager --but little to lose. In turn, that second part is grounded in the assumption (right or wrong, I won't judge) that living according to Christian principles brings benefits _in this life also_ to the individual who so chooses.
So it seems a mischaracterization to present the essence of the wager as going out of your way to perform random and costly rites in the hope of lifting any ill omen.
joquarky 30 minutes ago [-]
Exactly. For example, what if making such wagers is key in determining that you belong in "hell" for not being genuine?
I haven’t watched it back but from what I remember the main point of the video is that kind of situation happens when the probability involved is vanishingly small, and all the events you listed don’t have a vanishingly small probability, so they are not Pascal’s wager situations, just a normal rational safety concerns with particularly high consequences
legitster 1 days ago [-]
Yes, and no. I think we actually do this logic a lot in our lives. Do I actually believe whole wheat bread is better for me, or do I just buy it on the chance it is? Do I go with the cheapest toothpaste or spend money on something that might be better? Do I buy an AWD car on the chance I am stuck?
Sacrificing a goat, after all, does sound like a lot of work. But maybe I will wear a lucky hat to a baseball game?
conartist6 23 hours ago [-]
There has to be infinite torment in play for the wager to apply too! Thus by conclusion you should only give vengeful gods the benefit of the doubt
barbs 21 hours ago [-]
In this case, it's not exactly like Pascal's wager because there is plenty of scientific evidence of disastrous consequences of not believing in climate change (and preparing accordingly). There's no evidence to suggest that a non-belief in God will send you to hell.
zzrrt 24 hours ago [-]
> Even the crotchetiest and most out-of-touch people I know basically accept that the Earth is warming now.
POTUS tweeted "WHATEVER HAPPENED TO GLOBAL WARMING???" a few weeks ago when a record cold wave came in. I suppose you were talking about people you personally know, but it seems like there's a good chance many who voted for him would say it too.
Anyway, I guess there is a growing collective admission that the climate is changing even if the crotchety ones will still quip about it not being warmer at some given time and place. It's unfortunate that "global warming" caught on instead of "climate change."
ModernMech 23 hours ago [-]
> Anyway, I guess there is a growing collective admission that the climate is changing even if the crotchety ones will still quip about it not being warmer at some given time and place. It's unfortunate that "global warming" caught on instead of "climate change."
Rather than a collective admission, I feel what's happening is the crotchety people are dying off, leaving us millennials and GenZ to clean up the mess. Thinks won't change until a critical mass of them are dead and gone.
datsci_est_2015 10 hours ago [-]
You’re downvoted, but the demographics on this are clear. The younger you are, the more likely you are to take seriously the dire message that the scientific method has trivially produced.
scoofy 18 hours ago [-]
That was always the plan.
legitster 24 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
standardUser 23 hours ago [-]
> The issue seemed to completely drop from public discourse during the Biden presidency
Biden signed into law the largest investment in clean energy in US history, dwarfing everything that came before. Half the economy was trying to get their hands on some of that stimmy.
legitster 22 hours ago [-]
Both were true, the IRA handed out a lot of money to green projects at the same time the administration quietly greenlit a massive boom in oil production. (The Biden administration issued more new drilling permits than either Trump administration).
triceratops 18 hours ago [-]
> at the same time the administration quietly greenlit a massive boom in oil production
Hard to get re-elected when gas is expensive. Voters are uninformed but you have to work with what they are, not what you wish they would be.
perrygeo 24 hours ago [-]
> Even the crotchetiest and most out-of-touch people I know basically accept that the Earth is warming now
Same. Empirical evidence is just too hard to ignore.
It's quite amazing watching the "climate change isn't real" folks transition to "climate change is no big deal", then to "climate change is too hard/expensive to deal with".
legitster 23 hours ago [-]
> Empirical evidence is just too hard to ignore.
Except it's the opposite - empirical evidence is very easy to ignore. Between herding, the replication crisis, and the overall insularity of academia, trust in "studies" has never been lower.
But people still respond very well to demonstrative or pragmatic evidence. Empirically there's nothing special about a keto diet. But demonstratively the effects are very convincing.
justin66 19 hours ago [-]
People who know anything about the replication crisis are a single-digit percentage of the population. Doesn't help explain the public's attitudes.
mvdtnz 13 hours ago [-]
People just lived through a crisis in which public health officials were telling them to avoid a deadly virus by using glory holes[0]. Skepticism of institutions is at an all time high for good reason.
Thanks for that reminder of some cultural differences (!) between us and our friends across the pond. Hopefully it goes without saying, that rather colorful example is a few steps removed from the replication crisis, although the point about governing institutions spending their credibility in poor ways is taken.
georgemcbay 23 hours ago [-]
> It's quite amazing watching the "climate change isn't real" folks transition to "climate change is no big deal", then to "climate change is too hard/expensive to deal with".
At the top level (of government and corporate entities) those people always knew it was real, the messaging just changed as it became harder to keep a straight face while parroting the previous message in the face of overwhelming empirical evidence.
Exxon's (internal) research in the 1970s has been very accurate to the observed reality since then.
They just didn't care that it was real because they valued profits/power/etc in the moment over some difficult to quantify (but certainly not good) future calamity.
You would think they would care at least in the cases where they had children and grandchildren who will someday have to really reckon with the outcome, but you'd be wrong, they (still) don't give a shit.
pstuart 24 hours ago [-]
Playbook is The Narcissist's Prayer
That didn't happen.
And if it did, it wasn't that bad.
And if it was, that's not a big deal.
And if it is, that's not my fault.
And if it was, I didn't mean it.
And if I did, you deserved it.
datsci_est_2015 10 hours ago [-]
Narcissism is America’s greatest vice, imo. Not surprising to see it take center stage on what may be the nation’s greatest challenge: ensuring our future in the face of climate change.
darylteo 24 hours ago [-]
something something tilt of the earth.
peyton 24 hours ago [-]
Unaudited empirical evidence is easy to ignore. The problem is one of physics. It should be simple to show with napkin math.
gzread 23 hours ago [-]
Reminds me a bit of the Narcissist's Prayer:
That didn't happen.
And if it did, it wasn't that bad.
And if it was, that's not a big deal.
And if it is, that's not my fault.
And if it was, I didn't mean it.
And if I did, you deserved it.
CoastalCoder 1 days ago [-]
I'm a different kind of crotchety.
I think it's real and potentially catastrophic. But I see very little chance of (sufficient) coordinated action to mitigate it.
I.e., I think there's too much temptation for individual countries to pursue a competitive economic or military advantage by letting everyone but themselves make sacrifices.
I hope I'm wrong.
bryanlarsen 1 days ago [-]
Luckily the effect is much larger in the opposite direction: weaning oneself off of foreign oil is a huge advantage both economically and militarily.
nradov 24 hours ago [-]
Is it though? For developing countries, having a large supply of fossil fuels has always been a huge accelerator for industrialization and overall economic growth even if that fuel has to be imported. There really is no substitute, especially when you consider that it's not used only for transportation and power generation but also for manufacturing as an industrial heat source and chemical feed stock.
bryanlarsen 19 hours ago [-]
The cheapest mix of reliable power is 95% solar/battery and 5% natural gas. And that's in the US with its cheap gas and poor insolation. In the third world it'll be much higher than 95%.
gzread 23 hours ago [-]
Solar energy is cheaper than oil right now. On average. Too bad it's highly variable but if you can cope with extreme variability you can get extremely cheap energy.
nradov 23 hours ago [-]
Pretty tough to cope with variability if you want to build a modern industrial economy. I mean even with cheap labor it kind of kills your cost structure when capital intensive facilities have to shut down due to electricity shortage. Plus there are plenty of industrial processes that require fossil fuels as inputs separate from just electricity.
pstuart 24 hours ago [-]
China seems to think so. Their efforts to boost their non-carbon energy sources is going at an advanced clip, along with their advances in EVs.
Not saying they're above reproach, but their energy policy certainly trumps ours.
mikrotikker 14 hours ago [-]
Nuclear energy is our saviour it needs to be miniaturized and proliferated.
eldaisfish 24 hours ago [-]
fossil fuels were a proxy for energy. China continues to show the world that energy independence can come via electricity that you generate within your borders, and that it can be cheaper than importing foreign oil.
nradov 23 hours ago [-]
China is in no way energy independent. Their fossil fuel imports are extremely high and not decreasing.
bryanlarsen 22 hours ago [-]
China's gasoline use is down substantially. Industrial use is up, but much of that is re exported via plastic etc.
nradov 22 hours ago [-]
Right, that's exactly the point. Regardless of the consequences, worldwide fossil fuel consumption will continue increasing. Those stable organic molecules with energy rich chemical bonds are so damn useful for everything that enables modern industrial civilization and there is no substitute.
bryanlarsen 19 hours ago [-]
No, plastic usage world wide is less than 10% of fossil fuel usage. Only in China can the plastic increase compensate for lowering demand because they are the factory of the world.
nradov 19 hours ago [-]
Buddy you're really missing the point. Fossil fuels are used as inputs into a huge number of manufactured products, not just plastic.
bryanlarsen 11 hours ago [-]
All of which combined are well under 10%.
spwa4 4 hours ago [-]
India and China are doing just that.
How are they doing that, you ask? Switching to coal ... India's adding 80GW of coal, and China having 95GW planned and building.
guelo 1 days ago [-]
Trump is implementing multi decade right wing fantasies in many fronts. The idea that we can't achieve anything is limiting yourself when you're in a political arena. To win, like Trump, when you get power you have to attack on many fronts, cultural, capital, legal, and approach it as a zero sum scorched earth war where norms are another obstacle in your way.
rayiner 24 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
garte 14 hours ago [-]
thats a wild take... isnt this exactly the purpose of a dictionary: to reflect the words used in general language usage?
rayiner 3 hours ago [-]
Right, the definition should reflect general usage. Did the general usage here just coincidentally change days after a Republican appointee used a word in a hearing? That’s a heck of a coincidence! No, what happened was that liberals used their control over putatively neutral institutions like M-W to advance their position in a political dispute.
dctoedt 2 hours ago [-]
I'm very curious how you happened to have, seemingly at the ready, a cite to a 5.5-year-old Fox News piece.
rayiner 1 hours ago [-]
I have a very good memory for anything I’ve read.
pinkmuffinere 1 days ago [-]
> Even the crotchetiest and most out-of-touch people I know basically accept that the Earth is warming now
My family is fundamentalist protestant, very midwestern, and I think about half of them believe that the earth is warming. Not trying to "win", just trying to say that a lot of this depends on the crowd you interact with. I don't know the percentage, but certainly there are still way too many people that don't even believe it. The very tired response is "well i wish it would warm up here slaps knee". Using the phrase 'Climate Change' at least reduces that objection.
legitster 1 days ago [-]
My father in law was a massive climate change denier until some trees started dying on his property.
He called out an arborist, and the arborist clearly explained that there wasn't enough rain anymore to support the number of trees on his land, and that the forest was slowly receding as the older/bigger trees took all the water from the other trees.
It finally dawned on him that a place where trees used to happily live to hundreds of years old could no longer support trees.
Still, he thinks CO2 is a con job cooked up by China and that global warming is divine punishment. But it's a good reminder that a lot of denialists are waiting for a personal, practical reason to care.
Terretta 23 hours ago [-]
> But it's a good reminder that a lot of denialists are waiting for a personal, practical reason to care.
Four out of five denialists agree!
smitty1e 1 days ago [-]
"Climate Change" implies that some sort of "constant climate" is even attainable, irrespective of desirable.
mithr 1 days ago [-]
It doesn't; that's kind of a first-glance reading of the phrase without really thinking about it.
Something can said to change from a certain standard even if it wasn't perfectly constant to begin with. For example, if I always kept my house at 65-75 degrees for the past year, and now it's 85 degrees inside, I could certainly say that the temperature in my house recently changed and gotten warmer. That might lead me to check whether my AC's working, rather than say "well I guess the temperature has never really been constant, and 85 is within the range of possible non-constant temperatures, so everything's perfectly normal and nothing has changed."
alt227 1 days ago [-]
Your analogy doesnt work, becaue the earth has been warmer than it is now several times in the past. so the increased temperature is within the range of normal temperatures.
The problem is not that the earth is warming, it is that it is warming at an artificially increased rate.
larkost 23 hours ago [-]
The rate of warming is a problem (i.e.: it determines what generations of humans are going to see this), but the major problem is the warming itself, or rather the change.
We (humanity) have gotten comfortable with the way things are, and a change in that is going to mean that things are going to change for us, and we don't like change. Most of our biggest cities are all close to the coast and will be subject to massive flooding in the next 100 years (if not sooner). Much of those same large population centers are also fairly close to being too hot for general survival (without aggressive AC). Our agriculture is all setup for the temperatures we have now, and the rain patterns we are used to. So we are going to have to change both where we live, and how we grow our food (location and probably strains as well).
Global warming is (almost) definitely not going to destroy all life on earth, but many of the forecasts are in extinction-level for most of the large animals. So life in general will continue, and probably humanity (since we are so good at making environment for ourselves), but the (eventual) changes are going to make the world very different, in ways that we are not going to like.
alt227 4 hours ago [-]
The warming is definitely not the problem (for the earth itself), only for the human race of which I care very little for.
Many different groups of large animals have lived and died off over the ages. It will happen again many times after humans are gone.
I personally welcome nuclear war and anything else which will help wipe out the human race. In a few million years the earth will move on to its next rulers and we will be a distant memory.
smitty1e 7 hours ago [-]
> and we don't like change
Oh, hogwash. It's not the change as such; rather, lack of control of the change, that causes the blowback.
Thus, the overarching question is: "Who drives the bus?"
mithr 24 hours ago [-]
It's not meant as a perfect analogy for global warming, but rather an illustration of how a constant state isn't necessary for something to be said to be "changing", which was OP's claim.
triceratops 18 hours ago [-]
It implies change over a couple human lifetimes. Change faster than has ever occurred before, and due to human activity.
alt227 4 hours ago [-]
It doesnt really imply that though does it. It just means the climate is changing. IMO this is why there was a big pushback against it for a long time, the term used to describe it does not infer anything wrong.
triceratops 4 hours ago [-]
> IMO this is why there was a big pushback
No the pushback is because of money. The words don't matter when so much money is at stake.
alt227 3 hours ago [-]
Im refering to pushback of regular people who deny climate change like they do any other conspiracy theory.
triceratops 3 hours ago [-]
Why did regular people start thinking of climate change as a "conspiracy theory" in the first place? Money.
wat10000 1 days ago [-]
Only with an excessively literal interpretation.
If I pick up your house and drop it two streets over, that could be accurately described as a "location change" of your house. This is still true despite the fact that your house naturally moves some centimeters per year due to tectonic plates shifting around.
Similarly, when global average temperatures saw long term trends of a fraction of a degree of change per millennium, then suddenly started changing at multiple degrees per century, it's pretty reasonable to call that "climate change" despite the fact that it was not completely constant before.
ChrisClark 1 days ago [-]
And you're just like the deniers who pick apart irrelevant things, and then smugly smile.
pdonis 1 days ago [-]
> many of the changes we are talking about don't even really cost us anything
This is the part that seems to vary widely based on which warming alarmist you're talking to. Many of them are not saying there are things we could do that "don't even really cost us anything" that would deal with the problem--they're saying we need to devote a significant fraction of global GDP to CO2 mitigation.
Things that "don't really cost us anything" are probably happening already anyway, because, well, they don't really cost us anything.
Building a lot more nuclear power plants is the key thing that doesn't really seem to be happening right now, that would be an obvious way to eliminate a lot of CO2 emissions. But of course that does really cost us something. But it's probably the most cost effective thing we could do on a large scale.
nradov 1 days ago [-]
Among the large set of people who think we should take steps to reduce anthropogenic global warming there are at least two subsets who seem to oppose nuclear power. One is sort of pseudo-religious and believes that any disruption of the natural environment is a "sin" against Mother Nature. The other claims that nuclear power is too expensive and that we can solve the base load power problem more cheaply with battery storage, despite the lack of evidence that we'll be able to scale it up fast enough in the time available. And I have nothing against building more battery storage where it makes sense, but I don't think that's going to be sufficient by itself.
bryanlarsen 6 hours ago [-]
It's not a base load problem, it's an intermittency problem. Which you solve with dispatchable generation. Which nuclear is particularly ill suited for.
> in the time available.
Which also eliminates nuclear as an option; Ontario is building new nuclear power that is projected to become available in the late 2040's. After the inevitable delays that'll be the 2050's. Way too late.
The solution is simple & cheap, though nobody wants to admit it. Use paid-for existing zero-carbon generation first (aka existing nuclear, hydro, etc), then add solar & wind to cover ~60% of needs, then add batteries to cover ~95% of needs, and then use natgas peakers to cover the last ~5%.
Environmentalists don't like it because it's not 100% carbon free. Anti-environmentalists don't like it because it's 95% solar/wind/batteries.
Economists and pragmatists should love it because it's the cheapest.
legitster 1 days ago [-]
> Building a lot more nuclear power plants is the key thing that doesn't really seem to be happening right now
I mean, this is the clear and obvious one. Nuclear theoretically should be much, much cheaper than it is if it were not for the regulatory costs thrust upon it.
It also harrows out people who are legitimately concerned from "moralist concern junkies". You'd think climate change being a global existential crisis would make people open to nuclear energy or more drastic measures like geo-engineering, but the frequency with which people refuse to compromise undercuts the their legitimacy.
triceratops 18 hours ago [-]
> Nuclear theoretically should be much, much cheaper than it is if it were not for the regulatory costs thrust upon it
Solar and wind theoretically would also be much, much cheaper if not for the regulatory costs. [1]
Everything is regulated and all regulations have costs. I'm not morally opposed to nuclear energy. Is there a comprehensive study on which specific safety regulations are unnecessary and the LCOE if they were removed?
You can do a thought experiment. A nuclear plant and a coal generator are very similar. They heat water to turn turbines to generate electricity. So best case scenario a nuclear plant costs the same as a coal plant, and has negligible operating costs in comparison.
A coal plant costs $5B/GW to build, vs the > $20B/GW a nuclear plant costs.
Those massive turbines are really expensive.
OTOH solar + batteries is well under $1B / GW.
cosmic_cheese 1 days ago [-]
Another reframing that may be useful is energy security/redundancy.
If you have a cheap source of solar panels and batteries, the only downside to installing them all over the country is up-front cost (which pays itself off quickly). The upside you gain is a substantially more robust, less centralized power grid that can continue to operate if something happens to impede your supply of fossil fuels or part of the grid gets cut off.
Looking at how things have played out elsewhere in the world the past few years, that's powerful.
nradov 24 hours ago [-]
Where is this mythical cheap source of batteries? I mean you can go on Alibaba and order cheap 18650 cells in limited quantities but there's an enormous difference between doing that and having enough reliable battery power to keep a nationwide grid supplying a modern industrial economy through several days of bad weather.
adgjlsfhk1 23 hours ago [-]
The Alibaba rate is still ~20% margin (not including shipping costs which decrease as order size increases) over the wholesale rate. As a consumer you don't have the ability to buy batteries wholesale (similar to how you can't go purchase a combined cycle natural gas plant on Amazon)
adriand 23 hours ago [-]
> Where is this mythical cheap source of batteries?
They’re made out of rocks. Yes, you have to take steps to acquire and refine the materials, then turn them into batteries. However, the process for doing that is not mysterious.
nradov 22 hours ago [-]
Not mysterious, just slow and expensive.
defrost 21 hours ago [-]
Across the world, according to BNEF, the cost of grid scale battery packs has fallen another 45 per cent in 2025 following a 40 per cent fall in 2024. The UK-based energy think tank Ember has now also reached the same conclusion, underlying its unexpected impact on solar power.
Resource prices for batteries did spike at various times in the past, this had more to do with opening and then closing a lot of production sites by mining companies than with any real meaningful supply issue.
Urban grid scal battery parks are on the rise globally, industrial parks have always had special status and can still concentrate modern efficient peaker turbines and buffer storage to bridge, if applicable, and use any general daytime excess.
nradov 20 hours ago [-]
Rising from an extremely low baseline. Actual deployed grid scale battery storage worldwide remains minuscule in relation to daily electricity consumption. Sure let's deploy it where we can but it's delusional to believe that this represents a realistic alternative to nuclear or fossil fuel power for industrial base load requirements in most countries anytime soon. The numbers simply don't add up.
> many of the changes we are talking about don't even really cost us anything
I hear that often, but it's never followed by details about any of the actual changes that are being talked about. The ones I actually hear (especially politicians) advocate for are catastrophically expensive and dubious in their effectiveness. Banning coal or gas-powered cards might (might) be a good idea in the long run, but it definitely does cost us something.
wat10000 1 days ago [-]
Banning coal is a complete no-brainer at this point. Has been for quite a while. Never mind climate change, it's horribly polluting. The only reason it's still remotely economically viable is because the people who burn coal don't bear the costs of their pollution. If they actually had to compensate people for all the cancer, lung disease, poisoned ground water, contaminated seafood, and other such problems they cause, coal would vanish.
It's already to the point where the ridiculous coal fans who infest our government are forcing coal power plants to remain open when their operators want to close them because they're no longer profitable to operate.
adgjlsfhk1 23 hours ago [-]
banning coal is quite cheap even ignoring the emissions and pollution side effects. England has already shut down their last coal plant and without 6 years of Trump, the US likely would have or would be planning to within the next couple years. Coal is expensive, not flexible, and horribly polluting even compared to natural gas.
randusername 1 days ago [-]
I can understand people having their own reasons for dismissing the facts or the rhetoric.
What I can't wrap my head around is the conspiracy thinking around environmentalism.
What's so nefarious about clean air and water? I'll never forget when my grandmother walked out of WALL-E because she said it was government propaganda. She is a regular person, not a coal magnate or anything.
krapp 24 hours ago [-]
You need to understand the political and cultural history. Environmentalism has been associated with leftist, feminist and communist ideology going back to the hippies and the antiwar movement (which makes it easy for many Americans to mistrust by default.) When Trump said he believed global warming was a Chinese hoax (remember that?) he was echoing a belief amongst the right that environmentalism and "global warming" was a plot to undermine American business and sovereignty, and that climate science supporting anthropogenic climate change was manufactured by "cultural Marxist academics" to push that agenda.
This conspiracy thinking has been pushed by Republicans, right-wing think tanks, coal, oil, manufacturing and like industries attempting to undermine public trust in climate science since at least the 1970s.
Interesting. So it's a guilty by association thing. I get that propaganda plays a big role, it just never made sense to me why it worked.
So a green energy revolution sounds exciting to me, but to my grandma it would be a green energy _revolution_, the scary and unstable connotation.
worksonmine 15 hours ago [-]
> What's so nefarious about clean air and water?
Nothing, but what puts me off is the sale of emission rights etc. Is it a problem or not? I care more about deforestation than a warming climate. There is always some product to buy behind the headlines and it drives me crazy.
The same people asking me to pay climate taxes are trying to tell me infinite growth can exist. I already live like a hermit and if everyone lived like me we wouldn't have a problem. We can't pay our way out of the problem and anyone who tells me we can is only out to make money.
I'm not against a clean planet, I'm against the politicians and businesses finding another way to extract money from their worker bees.
burnte 24 hours ago [-]
> They just either disagree on the cause or proportion.
And for very specific reasons, too.
One reason is unwillingness to feel like they have to take responsibility.
Another is conceding that would mean they might have to make changes, and laziness is powerful.
The worst reason is that to acknowledge it would be to grant that an alternative political perspective is right about something, and one's own political identity is tied to that other political perspective being always wrong.
"It is easier to con a man than to convince him he has been conned." Too much emotional investment in being right and too much fear of social repercussions simply for changing one's mind. The reality is changing one's mind to new data is the hallmark of integrity.
IncreasePosts 1 days ago [-]
Yes, parts of my extended family who were anti-climate change and proud went from "Global warming is a hoax", to "So what if global warming is happening" over the past 10 years.
mikrotikker 14 hours ago [-]
Well if it was the E without the S and the G maybe it would have been harder to co opt.
canadiantim 1 days ago [-]
I don't think the issue was ever people doubting that the earth is warming. Especially considering we're coming out of an ice age, it would be extremely worrying if the earth wasn't warming!
The main point people disagree on is: how much are humans contributing to this global warming trend?
irthomasthomas 23 hours ago [-]
The earth did have warm periods before. it appears to be part of an mini-interglacial period which happens every few hundred years. We had the Medieval Warm Period, the Roman WP and Bronze age warm period. There is a vast body pf evidence in particular for the MWP showing that life on earth got better as the deserts retreated.
I accept radiative physics. I question whether we have correctly quantified the system's natural noise floor, and whether adaptation might outperform mitigation for human flourishing.
chasil 1 days ago [-]
Reposting a previous comment...
What is generally not understood is that our current icehouse phase is rare.
'A "greenhouse Earth" is a period during which no continental glaciers exist anywhere on the planet... Earth has been in a greenhouse state for about 85% of its history.
'Earth is now in an icehouse state, and ice sheets are present in both poles simultaneously... Earth's current icehouse state is known as the Quaternary Ice Age and began approximately 2.58 million years ago.'
Modern humans have existed for 60k years, all of which have been in this current icehouse.
To cast a different shade on the meaning, this climate period is rare, easily disturbed, and difficult to restore even with vastly more powerful technology.
The more common greenhouse state is unlikely to lead to a Venus runaway, but it will be hostile to us.
We might very well require the rare climate, and perish in the common.
Previous climate changes happened over tens of thousands of years. This one is happening in decades.
It's the speed, not the magnitude that matters. Change faster than evolution and migration will destroy ecosystems.
alt227 4 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I wonder how fast Chicxulub affected the earth when the majority of large dinosaurs were wiped out.
The earth survived and evolved another set of new large animal masters.
The beauty and diversity of nature we see around us has all evolved after several extinction level events which have all very rapidly killed ecosystems and changed the earths climate.
It will do the same again after all humans are gone. This is the outcome I am hoping comes sooner rather than later.
This only really matters if you think humans are really important and should exist forever no matter what.
I personally think that humans are a blot on the earths history, and soon should be wiped out to let nature and evolution retake its course. From this perspective we are just following the natural course of the earth, and will be made extinct just like other various groups of large animals on this planet in the past.
We may require the rare climate, but other species certainly dont and more will evolve to take the place of humans when we cannot survive on these planets conditions any longer.
seanw444 1 days ago [-]
Finally a human with a context window larger than a few hundred years.
gzread 23 hours ago [-]
Now do the average rate of change.
alt227 4 hours ago [-]
What was the average rate of change when Chicxulub hit?
jongjong 1 days ago [-]
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reverius42 1 days ago [-]
The dinosaurs did great with a bit of difficulty, too!
frutiger 22 hours ago [-]
They did so well, they lived to tell the tale. Or squawked.
jongjong 22 hours ago [-]
Yeah their descendants/relatives taste delicious. It worked out for the best.
22 hours ago [-]
nabbed 1 days ago [-]
>There is unequivocal evidence that Earth is warming at an unprecedented rate. Human activity is the principal cause.
This document was last updated in October 2024, but I am a little surprised to see this still available on a .gov site.
alt227 4 hours ago [-]
Why?
insane_dreamer 3 hours ago [-]
because the Trump admin has been scrubbing gov websites of any evidence in support of climate change; they're even defunding parts of NOAA that research it
it looks like this one slipped through the cracks
standardUser 23 hours ago [-]
Idiocy and incompetency tend to share the same bed.
0ckpuppet 11 hours ago [-]
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abcde666777 1 days ago [-]
One of the challenges in doing something about climate change is the significant (and not entirely unfounded) distrust growing between the public and the government.
Basically amounting to, "well, you say you're doing X to combat climate change, but is X actually a competent solution (I don't trust your competence), and are you doing it to actually help or just to line pockets (I don't trust your intent)".
The other challenge is that we as individual humans are loathe to give up our comfortable lifestyle if such turns out to be necessary.
e40 1 days ago [-]
We've already lost the battle to prevent catastrophic change:
This is starting to look more like the movie _Don't Look Up_.
netsharc 24 hours ago [-]
I agree, but it seems most of the "messaging" nowadays is "Well, the outlook is 'we're fucked', but we still need to do something, or the outlook will be 'we're very fucked!'", which still falls on deaf ears...
I remember someone saying another form of denial is the denial that "we" will be affected badly. A friend said "Well, I'll turn on my AC, I'll be fine!". Or "I'm sure some technological Deus ex Machina will save us! Any day now!".
NicuCalcea 23 hours ago [-]
Haven't heard the "it's fine to burn the planet for AI data centres because AI will eventually solve climate change" argument in a while, it was pretty common in the early days.
100721 1 days ago [-]
Wasn’t that film explicitly about climate change denial?
weirdmantis69 1 days ago [-]
Well it was a metaphor I guess but I certainly took it that way.
bokohut 20 hours ago [-]
I am fortunate to have lived on the water for over 20 years in a location, East Coast USA Chesapeake Bay, that has scientifically documented many aspects of the climate changes that my own eyes have witnessed and photographed here at my home. I can walk out in my back yard and see these changes in this moment of time as they now exist and all of these changes have only become visible to me here in the last 10 years.
Erosion is a significant aspect of what I have witnessed however the ying always has a yang. Just as significant archeological discoveries are being made around melting glaciers so too are such discoveries also being made along eroding shorelines. The known history of the Chesapeake Bay is extensive and the items washing out of its shoreline are too, both known and unknown. Many of the paleolithic/native artifacts I have found can be explained by experts while some I have discovered cannot.
Change is the only thing guaranteed in this life until your life too forces change at its end. Change requires change and that means you but as a species we are wired into our daily pattern and nearly all hate forced change. As the old saying goes: "Nothing stays the same forever."
Stay Healthy!
alt227 4 hours ago [-]
Change is good and healthy!
Trying to keep the planet exactly the same just because we want it to for the benefit of our delicately balanced societies is a futile task which will always end in catasrophe.
bvan 1 days ago [-]
Oops, someone forgot to delete or redact it.
lugu 24 hours ago [-]
The problem isn't technical in nature. We need a brand-new socioeconomic system that outcompete liberal democracies while reducing CO2 emissions.. We are in deep trouble.
insane_dreamer 3 hours ago [-]
Future humans (if we survive) will look back at climate denialists (or who agree it exists but don't want to do anything about it or refuse to believe it's accelerated by CO2 emissions or burning fossil fuels), the same way we look back at the Catholic Church during the inquisition era who stupidly refused to accept a heliocentric world (and imprisoned and sometimes burned at the stake those who did).
Except that today's denialists, and the politicians/governments who enact their policies, are much much stupider, and dangerously so, because 1) we have much more evidence than the Church had, and 2) while there was relatively little harm in believing the Earth was the center of the solar system, there is great harm in believing that burning more fossil fuels doesn't accelerate global warming.
jeisc 15 hours ago [-]
pessimistic view point worst case scenario: humanity will survive in plexiglass domes with underground bunkers and we will send out AI robots into space to seed humans on other likely planets
gaigalas 1 days ago [-]
Very exciting to live in an apocalyptical era. I'm looking forward to discover which one of the several global threats to humanity will put us down first.
randusername 1 days ago [-]
> Very exciting to live in an apocalyptical era
Reminds me of that advice about depression more generally. Something like
"If you can't be optimistic, settle for being curious about the way it all unfolds"
gaigalas 18 hours ago [-]
Given the known past history, I think this is one of the first times ever we can actually prevent an apocalypse-level event. I'm also looking forward to see amazing attempts at prevention of collapse and recovery.
Yizahi 22 hours ago [-]
Famine, the perennial classic. And after famine, the war to clean up the stragglers. Fun :)
excalibur 1 days ago [-]
I think the smart money is still on nuclear war, but the competition is getting fierce these days.
gaigalas 1 days ago [-]
I think there's a strong argument for generalized systems collapse. It's a silent civilization killer, could be happening right now!
gzread 23 hours ago [-]
But which system first? Could be climate, could be financial, could be political (as in "politics is the alternative to violence")
gaigalas 19 hours ago [-]
I'm talking more about a slow decay that is not obvious to a single generation. One person in one lifetime wouldn't even smell it, but everything would be slowly corroding underneath.
Definitely not a big single disaster scenario. More like a "wait, we don't fix things anymore" or "wait, we have way less food variety than before" realization when it hits.
Yizahi 22 hours ago [-]
Nuclear war is overrated. Too focused to really damage distributed systems, too hard to start, too few working nukes. Many of the old rockets on all sides likely won't even fly correctly. Now drop world shipping via blockades and active war zones, and the industry collapse would be worse than anything Sarah Connor saw.
barbazoo 1 days ago [-]
Kids alive today will get to see some wild shit toward the end of the century.
lwansbrough 1 days ago [-]
I wonder if we should move beyond this messaging. It’s well known to the smart half of the population that climate change is happening. There is apparently some debate on the cause. But this point is mostly irrelevant, it is problem-oriented thinking. By keeping the conversation in the problem-realm you invite troglodytes into the conversation to insert their bullshit. Instead, if we move forward with “presumption of truth” solutions-based messaging, we can start to talk about what we’re going to do.
Climate control is something more people will be on board with compared to trying to have a conversation about climate science to a person who didn’t graduate high school.
michaelmrose 1 days ago [-]
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Unearned5161 23 hours ago [-]
Presuming that you yourself have "graduated" (what from is unclear), it's particularly audacious that you make this claim because it shows rather cleanly how poor a marker of quality an education is.
The answer has never laid in ever more elaborate designs to disenfranchise particular members of the population. It's always been in building community.
A community is what helps stabilize, helps tighten up distributions, and wrestles most authentically with the general premise that we are social creatures and only as strong as our weakest link.
If you think you're going to build the perfect society by way of careful electorate curation, I have some unfortunate stories to tell you.
michaelmrose 23 hours ago [-]
The parent comment said high school which is compulsory, free, and a very low bar. Our nation and world is largely being wrecked by the malicious on behalf of the stupid. Having some bar doesn't seem unreasonable.
Unearned5161 22 hours ago [-]
The fact that you read my comment and decided to clarify and double down is immaculate for my point.
Have you taken any class ever on disenfranchising events in history?
Also worth mentioning for those in these neighboring threads, the impulse to blame dysfunction during hard times on a particular minority of society has a name, you can read more about it here
A very bad idea, leading to the authocracies and despotias like clockwork. A small relief is to see the authors of the initial segregation getting banned too eventually, but it is too late to fix anything. "Tovarisch Stalin, a terrible mistake has happened!"
weirdmantis69 1 days ago [-]
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k33n 23 hours ago [-]
Ironically, 99% of academics would have their right to vote stripped if we did that — with farmers, auto mechanics and soldiers becoming the primary voting bloc. It would be great for the world and country TBH.
michaelmrose 23 hours ago [-]
Why do you think that?
k33n 22 hours ago [-]
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gzread 23 hours ago [-]
With this administration? "To get your voting license, click on all the Nazis in this picture" (your click must be Biden and Hillary or your license is denied)
layer8 1 days ago [-]
Maybe they shouldn’t have the “Do scientists agree on climate change?” link go to 404. ;)
Havoc 1 days ago [-]
Can’t wait for trump and his gestapo to deport the entirety of nasa for telling the truth
declan_roberts 1 days ago [-]
Why does NASA even have to do this? Build some cool rockets and get us to mars.
Windchaser 1 days ago [-]
Among other objectives, NASA's 1958 mission statement includes conducting aeronautical and space activities of the US for "the expansion of human knowledge of phenomena in the atmosphere and space".
So: atmospheric climate science directly falls under NASA's responsibilities.
NASA launches and operates Earth-observing satellites for measuring the weather and climate.
SoftTalker 1 days ago [-]
Living on Mars long-term is a practical impossibility. Certainly much, much harder than living on even a climate-changed Earth.
charcircuit 1 days ago [-]
Humans have done a lot of things we once thought were impossible.
k33n 23 hours ago [-]
I’ve been living on a climate-changed earth for my entire life and it’s not been too difficult.
Fourier864 20 hours ago [-]
Almost everything? Most money for fundamental atmospheric research flows through NASA. People always forget that only half of NASA's budget is for rocketry and human space flight, and the other half is science.
metalman 23 hours ago [-]
Many small aircraft wings are held on with 4 small bolts, one one each spar, and one on each end of the strut, so as you might imagine that with the failure mode involved, they are damn good bolts, and they are, but unfortunately people look at our atmosphere are shrug, and refuse to consider the failure mode, especialy as we have only one atmosphere, which we benifit from in so many ways, like right now it is holding up hundreds of cessena's and everybody is breathing it, but it's like going along in a cessena, while watching the wing bolt stretch, bit by bit, it's only a little cracked. Which to my knowledge has never happened, no one has ever pulled the wings off a 150, simply because good as those bolts are, they get checked, and fussed over, and changed long long before anything gets troublesome, because simply, some things are unthinkable and there are no debates or opinions, something held to be self evident.
deadbabe 1 days ago [-]
I’ve given up. I’ve long assumed for a year now we are heading for warming that is even worse than the worst projections and it’s all over. This has given me some peace, like accepting you’re going to die.
girvo 1 days ago [-]
Same, sadly. I’ve done far more than my part, and even my direct family hasn’t, let alone the rest of the country, the world.
I only hope I can have a decent life until it ends, and I hope it takes slightly longer than I think it will.
raddan 1 days ago [-]
I still remain optimistic that the clever folks can avoid the absolute worst outcomes. However, I too am very frustrated that almost nobody gives a shit about the future. We are rapidly reaching the point where WE will live through the effects, and our own children will suffer much worse.
I basically see it as a moral wrong and a grave ethical failure to use fossil fuels at this point. Except for home heating, I am now close to directly powering my entire life with clean, renewable energy. It was not hard. It was expensive, but only in the short term; I have effectively prepaid for my power needs for at least the next 25 years, and over than span it is very inexpensive.
A modern EV is about the same price as any other car, goes about the same distance, and is only slightly more time to fuel in the worst case. In the typical case, you don’t think about charging at all. The fact that I can’t get my supposedly environmentally conscious family of scientists and engineers to care continues to stun me. Somehow saving money while improving the world is “a waste of money” while buying an expensive hobby vehicle or vacation home is not. Frustrating.
wiredpancake 23 hours ago [-]
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rolph 1 days ago [-]
you will age, you will weaken, you will cease, no choice or circumstance will change that. endeavor to create something that will persist through the eons, and that part of your mind will live forever.
deadbabe 9 hours ago [-]
The only people who created anything that will persist through eons are those who have launched objects into space, like Voyager 1.
There is zero hope I will even be remembered years after death.
rolph 2 hours ago [-]
im quite sure im going to remember your post for the rest of my life.
thats a start.
RIMR 1 days ago [-]
Oh wow, a true statement on a government website. I'm sure they'll take it down within a day.
gdulli 1 days ago [-]
Maybe a way to game the modern right is to draw attention to something true so that they remember it exists, then they try to censor it, thereby triggering a Streisand effect.
webdood90 1 days ago [-]
I've shifted my mindset to abandon this idea that humanity will survive forever, or that we should strive to live as long as we can.
Intelligence is a scarcity and it cannot overcome the majority of people that are incredibly stupid or ignorant. So accepting that we are doomed relieves some of the stress. I won't have children to worry about their future, either.
I still live my life in such a way that minimizes my impact on the world as much as possible. I still surround myself with folks that want a better world. But there is no stopping the impending doom and I'm trying not to be miserable with the time I have.
alt227 4 hours ago [-]
Excellent attitude. This needs to be adopted by more people IMO.
Why are people trying to keep the earth the same as what they think it should be forever? We are a blot on the history of the earth, The human race will perish when considtions on the planet no longer suit us, just like many other large species before us. The planet will warm and cool over millions of years long after we are gone, and nature will continue to evolve many more wierd and wonderful things.
Humans need to hurry up and accept that they really dont matter at all to the planet.
izzydata 1 days ago [-]
Ultimately I think it will be a self correcting problem, but there is going to be an extremely long period of absolute hell. Global warming is eventually going to cause food and water scarcity on a level that will wipe out a huge percentage of the Earths population. Then the Earth will recover from there being fewer humans.
If in 3000 years we discover humans were completely wiped out to the last person I would be pretty surprised.
I agree that human extinction is very unlikely on anything like historical timespans. Maybe in a few million years, like any other species.
I do think there's a decent chance of civilizational collapse in the near to medium term. It seems like everything is getting very fragile. So much economic activity revolves around extremely sophisticated machines with many critical components that are manufactured in just a few locations, sometimes a single location. A major war could shatter that, or climate change could push us over a tipping point where those capabilities can no longer be maintained, or it might just be a cascading random breakdown due to the modern economy being so complicated.
If it happens, then I'm very pessimistic about the ability to ever come back from it. With all the easily accessible fossil fuels gone, getting industry going again is going to be a really tall order. So humanity might survive a long time, but it may consist of life the way it was in prehistory.
SoftTalker 1 days ago [-]
Agree, this is how excesses always get corrected in nature.
hiccuphippo 1 days ago [-]
I mean, all of humanity has lived in the period between two glacial eras, I don't expect us to go beyond that. This should be clear even to people who choose to ignore the facts about climate change.
maxerickson 1 days ago [-]
We are currently in an ice age.
hiccuphippo 6 hours ago [-]
Thanks. I confused period and era. What I meant is we are in the interglacial period between two glacial periods.
Humans need to hurry up and die, and let the planet and nature take its course.
dyauspitr 1 days ago [-]
Humans won’t get wiped out, not by global warming atleast. It’s just going to suck and a lot of us will die.
danny_codes 21 hours ago [-]
Eh, I’m not convinced it won’t be an extinction event. We need a pretty narrow band of CO2 and Oxygen to live. Unclear if a lot of plant life dies off if it takes us with it
tim-tday 1 days ago [-]
Everyone who can hear this has already heard it. Those who continue to pretend it is not happening are either deliberately deceptive so they can continue to make money from fossil fuels or unable to change their minds when faced by evidence due to identity politics.
mr_mitm 1 days ago [-]
My impression is that almost no one denies the warming itself, just the link to greenhouse gasses. That link is unfortunately much harder to prove than rising temperatures by itself. The proof is there nonetheless, but it's easier to cast doubt on it, and that's what certain groups have been doing.
Windchaser 1 days ago [-]
I've seen the full-court denial:
- it's not warming, or not significantly
- if it's warming, it's not because of humans, (or)
- if it's warming, it's beneficial
- if it's warming because of humans and that's bad, there's nothing we can do about it
ETA: honorary mention for "what about China?"
People I've argued about this with will switch interchangeably between these. Press them hard enough on one issue, and they'll just switch to another. It's a game of whack-a-mole.
tencentshill 1 days ago [-]
Or "Why does 2 degrees matter?"
Because when were 4 degrees cooler, NYC was under 1000 feet of ice. We really don't want to find out what 4 degrees hotter is like.
dyauspitr 1 days ago [-]
Wait really? 1000 feet is insane.
mikkupikku 1 days ago [-]
It was actually about 2000 feet. The Laurentide ice sheet, it was 3 kilometers / ten thousand feet thick in some parts.
1 days ago [-]
wat10000 1 days ago [-]
Same here. I'd also add "It's warming, caused by humans, harmful, but mitigating it would be even more harmful."
Basically, anyone capable of thinking about it logically has at this point reached the conclusion that it's real. Anyone arguing otherwise is therefore necessarily not thinking about it logically, and you have to expect things like shifting claims.
0ckpuppet 11 hours ago [-]
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degobah 1 days ago [-]
But POTUS 5 months ago:
"If you look back years ago in the 1920s and the 1930s, they said global cooling will kill the world. We have to do something. Then they said global warming will kill the world, but then it started getting cooler. So now they just call it climate change because that way they can't miss. Climate change because if it goes higher or lower, whatever the hell happens, there's climate change. It's the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion. Climate change, no matter what happens, you're involved in that. No more global warming, no more global cooling. All of these predictions made by the United Nations and many others, often for bad reasons, were wrong. They were made by stupid people that have cost their country's fortunes and given those same countries no chance for success."
> "that have cost their country's fortunes and given those same countries no chance for success."
This is a weird statement coming from Trump. I wouldn't think his base would care for improving the lives and economies of other countries, specially undeveloped countries.
stevenwoo 1 days ago [-]
He frequently has campaign rallies and press conferences where he makes statements on both sides of the issue, though if the audience is limited he will tailor the message so only the side present hears the argument in their favor. Every post speech interview I've seen and heard from Trump supporters discount every thing he says that they personally disagree with and heartily approve everything he says that they agree with. Somehow he has insulated his own actions/words and his supporters, and it makes it difficult to reason with these supporters when you bring it up to them - it's quite uncanny.
toast0 1 days ago [-]
I mean, he's saying everyone else who tried to do something about climate change had bad results, so let's do nothing and we'll be better off.
Doesn't seem weird to say that if you want to do nothing.
tzs 22 hours ago [-]
> My impression is that almost no one denies the warming itself, just the link to greenhouse gasses. That link is unfortunately much harder to prove than rising temperatures by itself.
The link to greenhouse gases is not hard to prove. We've got satellites that can measure global radiation inflow and outflow and see what the difference is. We can also measure this at various levels within the atmosphere, and at the surface of the land and oceans. We can see where outgoing radiation is getting caught and we can see what frequency bands of outgoing radiation is getting caught.
We know the frequency bands that get reflected, absorbed, or pass through for all the gases in the atmosphere and can see that the gases causing the problem are the greenhouse gases.
We can also see that the increase in greenhouse gases is mostly from burning fossil fuels. We can see this by looking at the isotope ratios in the C in greenhouse gases.
Cosmic ray bombardment in the upper atmosphere produces carbon 14, which is radioactive with a half live of 5730 years. It disperses throughout the atmosphere and becomes part of anything that regularly incorporates atmospheric carbon or exchanges its carbon with atmospheric carbon, including all living things.
Everything humans do in significant amounts that puts greenhouse gases in the atmosphere other than burning fossil fuels has carbon with about the same isotope ratio as that of the carbon in living things. Even when we burn a dead forest to clear it out the isotope ratio is close to that of living things, because of that 5730 year half life for carbon 14.
It is only when we burn fossil fuels that we put carbon into the atmosphere with almost no carbon 14. They came from living things but have been dead long enough for hundreds of half lives to pass.
The isotope ratios in the excess greenhouse gases show that it is mostly carbon 14 free. There are natural processes that can dump carbon 14 free carbon into the atmosphere such as volcanoes and other geological processes. However, (1) the increases in carbon 14 free greenhouse gases matches very closely with the amount of carbon we've been emitting from fossil fuels, and (2) and monitoring of volcanoes and other natural sources doesn't find nearly enough to account for more than a small amount of the increase.
mattgrice 1 days ago [-]
I didn't even think the link to greenhouse gases is denied any more.
The merchants of doubt ran out the clock and what I hear from the former deniers I know is that it is too expensive and too late to do anything now, being warmer will be nicer, and CO2 is a fertilizer.
There are people that believe the warming, but don't believe it matters because the Earth used to be much hotter at some point in the past so it is a natural cycle. Yet they fail to realize that humans didn't exist then so there is no good reason to believe an Earth that hot can support human life.
tonylemesmer 1 days ago [-]
Even the qualification "in the last 10,000" years gives the doubters something else to dismiss global warming.
phkahler 1 days ago [-]
>> My impression is that almost no one denies the warming itself, just the link to greenhouse gasses.
I fall in that category. My suspicion is that water vapor from air travel is by far the biggest contributor. I saw the blue skys after 9/11. I read the NASA guys that said daily temperature range increased measurably. I saw the blue skys again during Covid19.
I'm also of the opinion that anyone looking at historical data only going back 200,000 years or less is missing the larger picture. Sea levels are NOT at historic highs, we should expect them to rise further before receeding. We should expect glaciation again if we don't do anything, but speeding up warming IMHO is more likely to trigger glaciation that to "push through" whatever causes it and break the cycle (which would be a good thing).
So as a long-term thinker all this hype is just that. If you don't have a plan to end the glacier cycle you're just making a big deal out of a small change in time-scale due to reasons (CO2 vs H2O) that may well be the wrong ones.
16bytes 1 days ago [-]
Not to be contrarian, but if you cared, you could easily rule out your suspicions.
It's not even worth it to say why or how, since not even doing rudimentary research means that you aren't interested in developing a well-informed opinion.
phkahler 1 days ago [-]
>> Not to be contrarian, but if you cared, you could easily rule out your suspicions.
That's just false. You might try to rule it out yourself to see. My comments here and the responses demonstrate that it's a waste of time to argue against people in the purity cycle of global warming. My position is one of moderation not denial - and I'm downvoted, told I don't care, and I haven't done even the minimum of research. Pffft. HN is not what it used to be.
16bytes 1 days ago [-]
You are being down-voted not because of some imaginary "purity cycle", but because you discard without reasoning a vast amount of evidence to the contrary of your hypothesis.
You've heard of the saying that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence? Holding a hypothesis of water-vapor from air travel being the primary driver of warming trends is extraordinary.
Invoking the oft-repeated "do your own research" rhetorical crutch and referring to scientific consensus as "hype" doesn't help your case.
Do you have any reason to believe otherwise besides a couple of anecdotes about looking at the sky and short-term temperature variations?
Windchaser 1 days ago [-]
> My suspicion is that water vapor from air travel is by far the biggest contributor.
Have you calculated the water vapor generated from air travel, and compared that to the water vapor already generated by the water cycle? (just normal evaporation from lakes/rivers/oceans/plants)
Even as back-of-napkin math, this should be a pretty easy sanity check.
I think you're off by a few orders of magnitude here, but I also don't want to discourage you from adopting a "check for yourself" mindset.
phkahler 1 days ago [-]
>> Have you calculated the water vapor generated from air travel, and compared that to the water vapor already generated by the water cycle?
I've SEEN the effects with my own eyes. You can also see contrails seeding cloud formation on some days. Then there's the fact that these extra clouds are formed and dissipate on a 24 hour cycle, so part of the day they let in sunlight and part of the night they trap heat. These effects are significant and there is little research on the bigger picture effects of this (that I've seen).
kibibu 1 days ago [-]
Clouds reflect radiant heat back into space. Contrary to your claim, "global dimming" was a very active research space for a long time, and in fact the water vapour and other airborne pollutants likely masked the impact of global warming.
gzread 23 hours ago [-]
How significant? Give me a number. What percentage of all the clouds in a day come from planes?
kittikitti 23 hours ago [-]
Thank you for sharing this. I think it's important to take a step back and consider the real existential threats that humanity faces like climate change. I am hoping for similar evidence of the doom from AI, but I have a feeling that the AI doomers have ulterior motives.
Whatarethese 15 hours ago [-]
I honestly expect this article to be taken down in if the wrong people see it.
doener 1 days ago [-]
Why did the Trump regime not discover and eradicate this heretical sentence?
rebolek 1 days ago [-]
It will now.
hxbdg 1 days ago [-]
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shoobiedoo 1 days ago [-]
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josh_today 23 hours ago [-]
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grigio 24 hours ago [-]
I just follow BlackRock if they stopped to fund green tech, it means the global warming is fixed /s
almosthere 1 days ago [-]
I think many people are unwilling to accept "climate change" or "global warming" because of the following:
a) china is unwilling to do anything, and if that's the case, America shouldn't empty its pocket books on this issue.
b) this climate change alarmist stuff has caused a climate disaster in the US because all the migration to Electric Only is causing us to use generators all over the place, which is crazy. We should instead focus on making clean nuclear and expanding solar. PG&E (in CA) has decided to cancel this migration because CPUC (or whatever their called) is in Newsome's pocket who is in PG&Es pocket.
c) climate change extremists are unwilling to both hear yes it's happening and no we're not going to do anything about it, so the people responding are simply saying, no it's not happening.
tzs 22 hours ago [-]
China is massively building solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear, and also has by far the largest network of UHV transmission lines (and are building many more) so that they can get electricity from the regions with the most solar and wind to the more northern heavy industrial areas.
They are also the leader in producing and exporting solar and wind equipment, and in driving the prices down, to make it easier for other countries to address climate change.
They are also the biggest producer of EVs in the world, and the biggest exporter of EVs.
They are doing better at doing something about climate change than any other country, both due to what they are currently doing for themselves and for the countries they export to and in their ability to make long term plans and reasonably stick to them.
China is building clean energy for a good chunk of the world, including itself.
A better question may be: What is the US going to do to make up for its historical emissions? The US got wealthy by creating far more emissions than China, and all those historical emissions are now a problem for the rest of the world.
If people in the US try to turn climate action into a blame game, it will end very very poorly for the US.
ahmeneeroe-v2 1 days ago [-]
>If people in the US try to turn climate action into a blame game, it will end very very poorly for the US.
Pure fantasy. What will happen to the US and who will do it to us?
epistasis 1 days ago [-]
The US can't even get countries to enter trade agreements anymore, because it's throwing around threats of large tariffs and annexation of others' lands. The world could drop the dollar as the reserve currency, something that was gradually happening but is now accelerating.
If the US starts trying to force other countries into climate action without taking into account its own contributions, the US will likely cut out of the global economy, and become far poorer as the rest of the world surpasses its wealth through vigorous trade.
The US was the sole remaining superpower, but has recently decided to only occupy a much weaker position with a mere "sphere of influence" and ceding leadership in other parts of the world to others. The US is signalling to allies in Europe that it will no longer lead, that the prior world is over and the US is bugging out, meaning Europe will gain far more influence.
The more that the US attacks others without providing any leadership, the less that the US will be able to take from the world. Up until recently, the US's position of massive economic strength was largely due to it's dominant position among nations and the goodwill that others had towards it. Turning the climate problem into a blame game on other countries would further weaken the US's position and options.
k33n 23 hours ago [-]
The US defines the terms of the vast majority of global trade agreements and there’s no indication that will ever change. Americans get it — global academia hates Trump and to some extent America itself. In a way it’s understandable because you all seem to believe in your “right” to pick winners and losers. The world doesn’t actually work that way.
epistasis 20 hours ago [-]
Trump in his first term gave the Pacific over to China, who now defines terms over there. In his second term, Trump is cutting the US out of leadership in Europe, leading to growing economic trade agreements that exclude the US.
You seem to think these solid critiques about the inherent weakness of Trump are somehow mere partisanship, rather than the actual unwinding of US leadership around the world.
I'm not part of global academia, I'm just a consumer of news that is willing to listen to things outside of a partisan bubble. The world is shifting away from the US, to the US's detriment. We have an exceptionally weak president who acts like what a weak person imagines a strong person is like, and it's scaring off all our allies.
> In a way it’s understandable because you all seem to believe in your “right” to pick winners and losers. The world doesn’t actually work that way.
I do not know whatyou mean by this, you think I'm picking winners and losers? The US is picking winners and losers? Global academia is picking?Picking either antecedent does not allow me to find any meaning in your sentence.
k33n 18 hours ago [-]
If you think the world is shifting away from the United States, or that Trump isn’t having his way with virtually every trading partner on the map, then it seems you are falling victim to strong anti-US rhetoric. This rhetoric isn’t based in reality. The US leads the defense strategy of the entirety of Europe, and Europe has no other alternative. There may be some politicians that want to choose the US as “the loser”. But that’s just not really an option given the size of our economy and the size of our military.
TDS inspires people to blurt out the types of statements you’re making.
epistasis 6 hours ago [-]
You throw around insults like "TDS," and try to say that a plain and calm stating of facts is "blurting," but is there even a single trading partner where Trump is having his way? He makes ridiculous demands, throws around tariffs, and at most he extracts a memorandum of understanding that maybe there will be a trade deal in the future. Trump promised something like 100 new trade deals last year in a matter of months, and long after the deadline where are the deals?
The clear facts are that the US has cheapened its word and made itself an embarrassment around the globe. China has completely dog walked Trump on tariffs and trade, devastating US farmers, and leading to far stronger ties between China and the rest of the world, not just with our former tight trading partner Canada, but with all the emerging economies around the world. The US is cutting itself out of the new economic order that is emerging from the energy transition to cheaper renewable energy, which will leave the US with sky-high energy prices while the rest of the world runs their economies cheaper, and with less inflation-inducing price shocks, on solar and grid storage.
I respond with these basic facts not because I think that you will believe anything, but because the obvious falsehoods that you are repeating should not stand unanswered by the reality that we can all see in the world.
> There may be some politicians that want to choose the US as “the loser”. But that’s just not really an option given the size of our economy and the size of our military.
The only politicians that wants to choose the US as the loser are those following the dictates of Trump, by weakening our gloabl position. The size of our economy and military are not enough of a draw to keep us as the leader through sheer domination. And in fact pretending that "domination" is what made the US strong is the exact sort of weak person's idea of a strong man. The US is handing away all its leadership and power by trying to force what it does not have the ability to force, trying to force what would instead be freely given! It's utter insane behavior of a nation, and indicates just how little the Trump administration understands of US power around the world. The US is not a mob boss, we are (were?) a leader that attracted support because we were a shining example of what a country could be. When we act like bullies we throw away all that power, because we can not fight the entire world with our military, and our economy is not nearly big enough to overcome bullying behavior.
Edit: an as for an example just this morning of how Trump is making the US weaker, the UK is not allowing the US to use bases for attacks on Iran, which is leading to other threats from Trump that further push the UK away and make the US weaker on the global stage. Nearly every single day the US is becoming weaker because of this sort of weak behavior.
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/trump-chagos-is...
seanw444 1 days ago [-]
Climate reparations now!
hannob 1 days ago [-]
If the rest of the world wants to still have an industry once we finally decide to seriously use green technology, they should quickly catch up to China - if that's still possible.
While China is still very reliant on fossil-fuels, and particularly dirty coal, they're at the same time working on dominating the post-fossil age at astonishing speed. After they already dominate solar and batteries, they're working on doing the same for a number of other future green industries. They are already dominating future technologies like Green Methanol that most people in Europe or the US have never heard of.
doug_durham 1 days ago [-]
A troll response I presume. Or perhaps sarcasm without the indicator.
declan_roberts 1 days ago [-]
Not a troll comment. China produces as much or more CO2 as much as the next 5 countries combined.
It's logical to start with the king of greenhouse emissions if you want to stop global warming.
renjimen 1 days ago [-]
Not per capita. The US is still the worst large country. If you account for offshoring manufacturing then the US looks even worse.
Pretend China is 20 countries. Each country now has lower emissions than the US. Anyone can play that stupid game. Give up the games, think about solutions. China is working hard. Are we?
renjimen 1 days ago [-]
Climate doesn't care about political borders either.
But per capita is more informative when thinking about policy for curbing emissions, which is how we actually change our effect on the climate.
Hikikomori 24 hours ago [-]
The rest of the world produces more than china. Checkmate.
reducesuffering 1 days ago [-]
Why should should per-capita be most important? If country A keeps their population stable and emissions under control, but country B of the same starting population, keeps doubling their population and doubling their emissions, why should country A have an increasingly declined allowance of emissions when they were more responsible in keeping their total emissions down (by not having as many people)?
Scarblac 1 days ago [-]
Because per capita is the only thing that makes sense.
If China were to split into 10 countries each emitting 10% of what they do now it'd be the exact same emissions, but according to you it would be much better.
Similarly if the EU would become one country, that country would be high up on the list, much higher than member countries now! Oh no!
Looking at per capita emissions is much more fair.
It can't realistically be solved at a per capita level though
renjimen 1 days ago [-]
Individuals can of course make choices to reduce their emissions, Americans more than most since they're starting higher. Buy less new stuff, eat less meat, fly less, etc.
But policy is where real change needs to be made, and the effects of policy still scale with population in most cases.
Scarblac 1 days ago [-]
Maybe we should start trying before we conclude that.
shoxidizer 1 days ago [-]
If country B splits into countries C, D, E and F, all of which emit less than country A, has it found an effective way to reduce emissions? Should all countries adopt the Monaco lifestyle to defeat global warming? I guess if you want to find a fair way to measure administration of land you could emmisions per hectare or rainfall.
layer8 1 days ago [-]
China has a declining population, and had a one-child policy for many years.
Also, you don’t want all the low-population countries to each start contributing as much to global warming as the US.
hiccuphippo 1 days ago [-]
Because some countries pay others to pollute in their stead?
markdown 1 days ago [-]
Because country A just outsourced their emission production to country B.
China's emissions were 10 billion tons CO2 in 2017 and have increased every single year to 12.29 billion tons CO2 in 2024. Meanwhile, US decreased from 5.22 to 4.9 in the same time
1/4 the population. Per capita we are 65% worse not considering how much of China's pollution is on our behalf
Windchaser 1 days ago [-]
Yeah, and don't even get me started on historic emissions.
China has only produced significant CO2/capita in the last decade. The US and Europe are responsible for the accumulated GHG that have gotten us into the current mess. We blew nearly the entire CO2 "budget" for keeping us under 2C of warming, just by ourselves, so it's kinda odd to be pointing fingers at the foreigners who are just now halfway catching up to what we're emitting now.
reducesuffering 5 hours ago [-]
But those historic emissions have also produced scientific and engineering progress that other developing nations got to piggyback off of for their development.
Windchaser 4 hours ago [-]
Aye, true, but we also then have a responsibility to produce scientific and engineering progress to get off of fossil fuels. And then to follow through, and get off fossil fuels.
laffOr 1 days ago [-]
There is no need for ordering right? All countries can start acting at the same time.
danny_codes 21 hours ago [-]
China is bringing online a stupendous amount of renewables. They’ve blown through their own targets on solar energy deployments. With where batteries are headed I suspect their CO2 emissions will drop much faster than expected. Already they’ve hit peak coal and it’s on the way down
smt88 1 days ago [-]
You can't really isolate China's emissions. They manufacture a huge proportion of the goods the rest of the world needs to operate. The green countries are essentially outsourcing their pollution to China.
throwerxyz 22 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
legitster 1 days ago [-]
The plan was always to put economic pressure on China to catch up to the rest of the developed world, but we can't exactly tell someone else to stop crapping their pants while we are still crapping our pants.
anonymousiam 20 hours ago [-]
2030 is just around the corner. China has pledged to cap their CO2 emissions at 2030 levels. If they're trying to meet this goal, it would explain the thousands of new coal-fired plants they're building right now.
They build new coal plants but those either replace old ones or are idle. Nearly 90% of all new electricity comes from solar and wind.
BigTTYGothGF 1 days ago [-]
The same China that, added more new solar capacity in 2024 than the US currently has total? And is currently at 36% of its total energy use from renewable sources compared to the US's 23%? And has ~32GW of nuclear plants in construction compared to the US's 2.5GW?
I hope we steal their playbook.
maxglute 1 days ago [-]
Emulate them?
PRC solar power production last year conservatively will diplace ~45 billion barrels of oil, or 10%-20% more than total global consumption per year. It's just retarded eco accounting that attributes emissions to renewable manufacturers while fossil exporters don't get any penalties for extracting emissions.
Every year of PRC solar prevents doubling of oil, basically they're like the only significant country whose net contribution is negative for how much carbon sinks they manufacture. So the answer for US+co is obviously stop exporting oil and lng, and start exporting renewables.
idiotsecant 1 days ago [-]
Nothing? China is solving the problem on their own. They already make substantially less carbon per person that most of the west. If we want to be like China it's a simple proposition: be OK with Manhattan project level investments in power transmission from places that have lots of renewables to places that need renewables.
rayiner 1 days ago [-]
Climate is determined by total CO2 output, not per capita.
That’s a real problem, because China, and all the poor countries in Asia and Africa aren’t going to stop increasing their CO2 output per capita until they reach western standards of living.
triceratops 18 hours ago [-]
Actually climate is determined by cumulative CO2 emitted. The US and Europe have emitted far more than China ever has.
As of today, solar and batteries are the cheapest source of electricity. All the "poor countries in Asia and Africa", except the ones that have oil and gas, will leapfrog straight to renewables. It just makes good sense, unless your politicians are paid off by the fossil fuel lobby.
Windchaser 1 days ago [-]
Sounds like we should pioneer better low-emissions tech, then, and pass it along to them. We've got more expendable income and a better tech base from which to do that.
danny_codes 21 hours ago [-]
Except that they will stop. China has already stopped, because they’re bringing up renewables for new capacity. In 5, max 10 years it will be ludicrous to spin up a fossil fuel power plant. Solar power is already cheaper than coal and prices are dropping like a stone as China ramps production capacity / techniques/ process.
throwerxyz 22 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
dang 20 hours ago [-]
We've banned this account for breaking the site guidelines. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.
Edit: Ah ok an IP ban. I guess time to use a proxy. Moderation has rules. Censorship does not.
Censorship is bad dang mmmkay?
Editing again to post later cause you nuked replies for some reason:
Sorry I don't conduct in personal attacks. I think you're confused. Feel free to list whom I attacked and where.
No, censorship doesn't change definitions based on who uses it. Unless you want to pretend like you're not censoring. You seem to have convinced yourself that your censorship is a form of moderation, very sad. You're free to censor whom and what you want, it's your site. Don't pretend it's moderation though.
Your guidelines are meaningless if censorship is so heavy handed and moderation non-existant. It's hard to moderate. It's easy to censor.
Anyway you have curated, through censorship, a place where people are afraid to share valid opinions that break no guidelines (except those magical ones you can produce in order to censor). You can congratulate yourself on that if you want. You've got a ghost town, whether you like it or not.
dang 19 hours ago [-]
An entire thwack of personal attacks, for starters. Not allowed here. I don't think that's so confusing.
> Censorship is bad dang mmmkay?
It's one of those words that mean different things depending on how people want to use it. I wouldn't personally use that word as opposed to moderation, curation, etc., but then I would say that wouldn't I. In any case, HN isn't an anything-goes site and never has been. If we didn't do some version of moderation/curation/censorship/befugioning, it would be an entirely different place. Probably not one even you would enjoy—I don't suppose you like ghost towns or scorched earth any more than the rest of us.
throwerxyz 25 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
rayiner 20 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately, I can imagine the ignorant Americans who don’t realize that all those poor people want SUVs too. You know who doesn’t talk about climate change? Anybody in my family in Bangladesh. They want to live like Americans.
dyauspitr 1 days ago [-]
China is going to be fully green in a decade or two. India in 3 or 4.
TiredOfLife 14 hours ago [-]
Is posting about global warming during the coldest winter in recent history intentional?
The anomaly for the first two weeks of February 2026 was greater still, at +1.69°C. Perhaps the last few days have been incredibly cold, but until then we were on course for it to be the third warmest February in recorded history.
You were talking about "global warming" in a thread explicitly discussing how "Earth is warming".
Variations in regional weather are something else entirely.
0ckpuppet 1 days ago [-]
we don't need evidence Earth is warming, because it's happened before humanity, and it will happen after we're gone. We need evidence that we're poisoning ourselves and the planet. Global warming's only accomplishment is giving the poisoners a pass when it was debunked. Private jets and climate change, choose one.
softwaredoug 1 days ago [-]
They predicted a warming planet based on human activity as long ago as the 50s
We’ve known about the mechanisms of CO2 leading to atmospheric warming since the 19th century.
We know humans are adding CO2 to the atmosphere.
We observe higher CO2 and warmer temps
The evidence isn’t that complicated.
Windchaser 1 days ago [-]
I know you're getting dogpiled, but global warming has been validated, not debunked.
The science behind it really got going in the 1890s, with Arrhenius' paper predicting climate sensitivity to CO2. That was bounced back and forth with rebuttals and counter-rebuttals until about 1950. Major debate points were how much role water vapor played, how this varied with temperature/altitude/pressure. (You can trace each part of the argument if you're so inclined; there's lots of neat science in there. The concept of "pressure broadening" was my favorite; it explores how spectral bands change with pressure).
Around 1950, the science started settling out. Spectrometers had improved, we had clearer view that CO2 and H2O don't fully overlap in their spectra bands through the atmosphere, and we had the computing to do better calculations. By the 1970s, we were getting ice core data showing that the world had gone through huge temperature swings, and how this changed with CO2. Enough data had accumulated that a consensus was forming. In the 1980s, scientists were now concerned enough to form a large body to inform policymakers on this issue (IPCC; 1988). And in the 40 years since then, we've mostly sat on our hands, even as the science just gets clearer and clearer.
I share all this long history to explain that the science went through nearly a century of rigorous debate even before politicians got involved. This a scientific issue, not a political one. And I'm glossing over 99.9999% of the detail here. There was an extensive literature debate between the scientists, hashing out any point you can think of. You just have to go to your local uni library and start reading.
TL;DR: saying that global warming is debunked is about as incorrect as saying that the Earth is flat. We have extensive evidence showing otherwise.
mempko 1 days ago [-]
I'm pretty sure global warming isn't debunked. Yes, we should worry about all the other pollution too. But global warming is happening and we are causing it. What's different than nature doing it is the rate of change. Yes the earth was warmer in the past and would be in the future, but it has never warmed as fast as it is now.
danny_codes 21 hours ago [-]
No need to troll here, HN crowd can read so it’s not going to be effective.
You are welcome to read.. any paper on the subject and educate yourself.
tim333 12 hours ago [-]
>There is unequivocal evidence that Earth is warming at an unprecedented rate.
I don't believe climate denial as in saying its not warming but I'm also skeptical of exaggerating the problem by ignoring most climate history. I guess the idea is to panic people into changing behaviour but it doesn't seem to work very well - co2 emissions are higher than ever and a lot of the population think we are doomed when we are not. Unbiased science is better in my opinion.
Simply on a factual basis, the data we have from previous extinction events does not have the temporal resolution needed for us to determine how quickly the temperature increased/decreased. E.g., "how quickly did the atmospheric temperature change after the Chicxulub event?" We don't know. Decent-quality global paleoclimate proxies only extend back ~15k years or so. It's possible that there was rapid global climate change in the past outside of major extinction events; we genuinely don't have the data to tell.
This also doesn't really tell us much about how the modern Earth and its ecosystems would handle those old climate shifts, because there is much much less wild lands (and so, less resilience within natural ecosystems). It's true from a climate science perspective, but not useful for assessing the damage that climate change can cause to modern society.
And: to the best of our knowledge, the current rate of warming is fast enough to cause major issues. Civilization only arose once we had relatively stable and moderate temperatures, and stable temperatures may be needed to maintain civilization under present technology. Ecological and glaciological studies back this up. And no, scientists are not looking to just scare us into action; the evidence itself should be alarming.
Rendered at 22:43:07 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Some people just naturally resist hyperbole or sensationalist rhetoric, and I find it very helpful to reframe the argument from doom and gloom and fire and brimstone to something more realistic and grounded:
"The longer we put off doing something, the harder and more expensive it will be in the future. In a Pascal's Wager sort of way, many of the changes we are talking about don't even really cost us anything, and the potential that C02 is not a real culprit is more than made up by danger that it is. Making changes now is the prudent and financially sound decision."
In a large part, this is what the brief ESG trend on the stock market was briefly about before it got co-opted by a dozen different competing messages.
Pascal's wager is generally agreed to be logically unsound, so it's somewhat insane that we've revived it in all these modern contexts. If you believe in it, at least be consistent and sacrifice a goat to Zeus every couple years.
So it seems a mischaracterization to present the essence of the wager as going out of your way to perform random and costly rites in the hope of lifting any ill omen.
I haven’t watched it back but from what I remember the main point of the video is that kind of situation happens when the probability involved is vanishingly small, and all the events you listed don’t have a vanishingly small probability, so they are not Pascal’s wager situations, just a normal rational safety concerns with particularly high consequences
Sacrificing a goat, after all, does sound like a lot of work. But maybe I will wear a lucky hat to a baseball game?
POTUS tweeted "WHATEVER HAPPENED TO GLOBAL WARMING???" a few weeks ago when a record cold wave came in. I suppose you were talking about people you personally know, but it seems like there's a good chance many who voted for him would say it too.
Anyway, I guess there is a growing collective admission that the climate is changing even if the crotchety ones will still quip about it not being warmer at some given time and place. It's unfortunate that "global warming" caught on instead of "climate change."
Rather than a collective admission, I feel what's happening is the crotchety people are dying off, leaving us millennials and GenZ to clean up the mess. Thinks won't change until a critical mass of them are dead and gone.
Biden signed into law the largest investment in clean energy in US history, dwarfing everything that came before. Half the economy was trying to get their hands on some of that stimmy.
Hard to get re-elected when gas is expensive. Voters are uninformed but you have to work with what they are, not what you wish they would be.
Same. Empirical evidence is just too hard to ignore.
It's quite amazing watching the "climate change isn't real" folks transition to "climate change is no big deal", then to "climate change is too hard/expensive to deal with".
Except it's the opposite - empirical evidence is very easy to ignore. Between herding, the replication crisis, and the overall insularity of academia, trust in "studies" has never been lower.
But people still respond very well to demonstrative or pragmatic evidence. Empirically there's nothing special about a keto diet. But demonstratively the effects are very convincing.
[0] https://metro.co.uk/2020/07/23/health-officials-recommend-gl...
At the top level (of government and corporate entities) those people always knew it was real, the messaging just changed as it became harder to keep a straight face while parroting the previous message in the face of overwhelming empirical evidence.
Exxon's (internal) research in the 1970s has been very accurate to the observed reality since then.
They just didn't care that it was real because they valued profits/power/etc in the moment over some difficult to quantify (but certainly not good) future calamity.
You would think they would care at least in the cases where they had children and grandchildren who will someday have to really reckon with the outcome, but you'd be wrong, they (still) don't give a shit.
That didn't happen. And if it did, it wasn't that bad. And if it was, that's not a big deal. And if it is, that's not my fault. And if it was, I didn't mean it. And if I did, you deserved it.
I think it's real and potentially catastrophic. But I see very little chance of (sufficient) coordinated action to mitigate it.
I.e., I think there's too much temptation for individual countries to pursue a competitive economic or military advantage by letting everyone but themselves make sacrifices.
I hope I'm wrong.
Not saying they're above reproach, but their energy policy certainly trumps ours.
How are they doing that, you ask? Switching to coal ... India's adding 80GW of coal, and China having 95GW planned and building.
My family is fundamentalist protestant, very midwestern, and I think about half of them believe that the earth is warming. Not trying to "win", just trying to say that a lot of this depends on the crowd you interact with. I don't know the percentage, but certainly there are still way too many people that don't even believe it. The very tired response is "well i wish it would warm up here slaps knee". Using the phrase 'Climate Change' at least reduces that objection.
He called out an arborist, and the arborist clearly explained that there wasn't enough rain anymore to support the number of trees on his land, and that the forest was slowly receding as the older/bigger trees took all the water from the other trees.
It finally dawned on him that a place where trees used to happily live to hundreds of years old could no longer support trees.
Still, he thinks CO2 is a con job cooked up by China and that global warming is divine punishment. But it's a good reminder that a lot of denialists are waiting for a personal, practical reason to care.
Four out of five denialists agree!
Something can said to change from a certain standard even if it wasn't perfectly constant to begin with. For example, if I always kept my house at 65-75 degrees for the past year, and now it's 85 degrees inside, I could certainly say that the temperature in my house recently changed and gotten warmer. That might lead me to check whether my AC's working, rather than say "well I guess the temperature has never really been constant, and 85 is within the range of possible non-constant temperatures, so everything's perfectly normal and nothing has changed."
The problem is not that the earth is warming, it is that it is warming at an artificially increased rate.
We (humanity) have gotten comfortable with the way things are, and a change in that is going to mean that things are going to change for us, and we don't like change. Most of our biggest cities are all close to the coast and will be subject to massive flooding in the next 100 years (if not sooner). Much of those same large population centers are also fairly close to being too hot for general survival (without aggressive AC). Our agriculture is all setup for the temperatures we have now, and the rain patterns we are used to. So we are going to have to change both where we live, and how we grow our food (location and probably strains as well).
Global warming is (almost) definitely not going to destroy all life on earth, but many of the forecasts are in extinction-level for most of the large animals. So life in general will continue, and probably humanity (since we are so good at making environment for ourselves), but the (eventual) changes are going to make the world very different, in ways that we are not going to like.
Many different groups of large animals have lived and died off over the ages. It will happen again many times after humans are gone.
I personally welcome nuclear war and anything else which will help wipe out the human race. In a few million years the earth will move on to its next rulers and we will be a distant memory.
Oh, hogwash. It's not the change as such; rather, lack of control of the change, that causes the blowback.
Thus, the overarching question is: "Who drives the bus?"
No the pushback is because of money. The words don't matter when so much money is at stake.
If I pick up your house and drop it two streets over, that could be accurately described as a "location change" of your house. This is still true despite the fact that your house naturally moves some centimeters per year due to tectonic plates shifting around.
Similarly, when global average temperatures saw long term trends of a fraction of a degree of change per millennium, then suddenly started changing at multiple degrees per century, it's pretty reasonable to call that "climate change" despite the fact that it was not completely constant before.
This is the part that seems to vary widely based on which warming alarmist you're talking to. Many of them are not saying there are things we could do that "don't even really cost us anything" that would deal with the problem--they're saying we need to devote a significant fraction of global GDP to CO2 mitigation.
Things that "don't really cost us anything" are probably happening already anyway, because, well, they don't really cost us anything.
Building a lot more nuclear power plants is the key thing that doesn't really seem to be happening right now, that would be an obvious way to eliminate a lot of CO2 emissions. But of course that does really cost us something. But it's probably the most cost effective thing we could do on a large scale.
> in the time available.
Which also eliminates nuclear as an option; Ontario is building new nuclear power that is projected to become available in the late 2040's. After the inevitable delays that'll be the 2050's. Way too late.
The solution is simple & cheap, though nobody wants to admit it. Use paid-for existing zero-carbon generation first (aka existing nuclear, hydro, etc), then add solar & wind to cover ~60% of needs, then add batteries to cover ~95% of needs, and then use natgas peakers to cover the last ~5%.
Environmentalists don't like it because it's not 100% carbon free. Anti-environmentalists don't like it because it's 95% solar/wind/batteries.
Economists and pragmatists should love it because it's the cheapest.
I mean, this is the clear and obvious one. Nuclear theoretically should be much, much cheaper than it is if it were not for the regulatory costs thrust upon it.
It also harrows out people who are legitimately concerned from "moralist concern junkies". You'd think climate change being a global existential crisis would make people open to nuclear energy or more drastic measures like geo-engineering, but the frequency with which people refuse to compromise undercuts the their legitimacy.
Solar and wind theoretically would also be much, much cheaper if not for the regulatory costs. [1]
Everything is regulated and all regulations have costs. I'm not morally opposed to nuclear energy. Is there a comprehensive study on which specific safety regulations are unnecessary and the LCOE if they were removed?
1. https://www.volts.wtf/p/how-to-make-rooftop-solar-power-as
A coal plant costs $5B/GW to build, vs the > $20B/GW a nuclear plant costs.
Those massive turbines are really expensive.
OTOH solar + batteries is well under $1B / GW.
If you have a cheap source of solar panels and batteries, the only downside to installing them all over the country is up-front cost (which pays itself off quickly). The upside you gain is a substantially more robust, less centralized power grid that can continue to operate if something happens to impede your supply of fossil fuels or part of the grid gets cut off.
Looking at how things have played out elsewhere in the world the past few years, that's powerful.
They’re made out of rocks. Yes, you have to take steps to acquire and refine the materials, then turn them into batteries. However, the process for doing that is not mysterious.
citing: https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/global-electricity-... and similar reports.
Resource prices for batteries did spike at various times in the past, this had more to do with opening and then closing a lot of production sites by mining companies than with any real meaningful supply issue.
Urban grid scal battery parks are on the rise globally, industrial parks have always had special status and can still concentrate modern efficient peaker turbines and buffer storage to bridge, if applicable, and use any general daytime excess.
https://theconversation.com/big-batteries-are-now-outcompeti...
I hear that often, but it's never followed by details about any of the actual changes that are being talked about. The ones I actually hear (especially politicians) advocate for are catastrophically expensive and dubious in their effectiveness. Banning coal or gas-powered cards might (might) be a good idea in the long run, but it definitely does cost us something.
It's already to the point where the ridiculous coal fans who infest our government are forcing coal power plants to remain open when their operators want to close them because they're no longer profitable to operate.
What I can't wrap my head around is the conspiracy thinking around environmentalism.
What's so nefarious about clean air and water? I'll never forget when my grandmother walked out of WALL-E because she said it was government propaganda. She is a regular person, not a coal magnate or anything.
This conspiracy thinking has been pushed by Republicans, right-wing think tanks, coal, oil, manufacturing and like industries attempting to undermine public trust in climate science since at least the 1970s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_denial
So a green energy revolution sounds exciting to me, but to my grandma it would be a green energy _revolution_, the scary and unstable connotation.
Nothing, but what puts me off is the sale of emission rights etc. Is it a problem or not? I care more about deforestation than a warming climate. There is always some product to buy behind the headlines and it drives me crazy.
The same people asking me to pay climate taxes are trying to tell me infinite growth can exist. I already live like a hermit and if everyone lived like me we wouldn't have a problem. We can't pay our way out of the problem and anyone who tells me we can is only out to make money.
I'm not against a clean planet, I'm against the politicians and businesses finding another way to extract money from their worker bees.
And for very specific reasons, too.
One reason is unwillingness to feel like they have to take responsibility.
Another is conceding that would mean they might have to make changes, and laziness is powerful.
The worst reason is that to acknowledge it would be to grant that an alternative political perspective is right about something, and one's own political identity is tied to that other political perspective being always wrong.
"It is easier to con a man than to convince him he has been conned." Too much emotional investment in being right and too much fear of social repercussions simply for changing one's mind. The reality is changing one's mind to new data is the hallmark of integrity.
The main point people disagree on is: how much are humans contributing to this global warming trend?
What is generally not understood is that our current icehouse phase is rare.
'A "greenhouse Earth" is a period during which no continental glaciers exist anywhere on the planet... Earth has been in a greenhouse state for about 85% of its history.
'Earth is now in an icehouse state, and ice sheets are present in both poles simultaneously... Earth's current icehouse state is known as the Quaternary Ice Age and began approximately 2.58 million years ago.'
Modern humans have existed for 60k years, all of which have been in this current icehouse.
To cast a different shade on the meaning, this climate period is rare, easily disturbed, and difficult to restore even with vastly more powerful technology. The more common greenhouse state is unlikely to lead to a Venus runaway, but it will be hostile to us.
We might very well require the rare climate, and perish in the common.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_and_icehouse_Earthh...
It's the speed, not the magnitude that matters. Change faster than evolution and migration will destroy ecosystems.
The earth survived and evolved another set of new large animal masters. The beauty and diversity of nature we see around us has all evolved after several extinction level events which have all very rapidly killed ecosystems and changed the earths climate.
It will do the same again after all humans are gone. This is the outcome I am hoping comes sooner rather than later.
I personally think that humans are a blot on the earths history, and soon should be wiped out to let nature and evolution retake its course. From this perspective we are just following the natural course of the earth, and will be made extinct just like other various groups of large animals on this planet in the past.
We may require the rare climate, but other species certainly dont and more will evolve to take the place of humans when we cannot survive on these planets conditions any longer.
This document was last updated in October 2024, but I am a little surprised to see this still available on a .gov site.
it looks like this one slipped through the cracks
Basically amounting to, "well, you say you're doing X to combat climate change, but is X actually a competent solution (I don't trust your competence), and are you doing it to actually help or just to line pockets (I don't trust your intent)".
The other challenge is that we as individual humans are loathe to give up our comfortable lifestyle if such turns out to be necessary.
https://davidsuzuki.org/story/is-it-too-late-to-escape-clima...
And 7 of 9 boundaries have been crossed?
https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-bound...
This is starting to look more like the movie _Don't Look Up_.
I remember someone saying another form of denial is the denial that "we" will be affected badly. A friend said "Well, I'll turn on my AC, I'll be fine!". Or "I'm sure some technological Deus ex Machina will save us! Any day now!".
Erosion is a significant aspect of what I have witnessed however the ying always has a yang. Just as significant archeological discoveries are being made around melting glaciers so too are such discoveries also being made along eroding shorelines. The known history of the Chesapeake Bay is extensive and the items washing out of its shoreline are too, both known and unknown. Many of the paleolithic/native artifacts I have found can be explained by experts while some I have discovered cannot.
Change is the only thing guaranteed in this life until your life too forces change at its end. Change requires change and that means you but as a species we are wired into our daily pattern and nearly all hate forced change. As the old saying goes: "Nothing stays the same forever."
Stay Healthy!
Trying to keep the planet exactly the same just because we want it to for the benefit of our delicately balanced societies is a futile task which will always end in catasrophe.
Except that today's denialists, and the politicians/governments who enact their policies, are much much stupider, and dangerously so, because 1) we have much more evidence than the Church had, and 2) while there was relatively little harm in believing the Earth was the center of the solar system, there is great harm in believing that burning more fossil fuels doesn't accelerate global warming.
Reminds me of that advice about depression more generally. Something like
"If you can't be optimistic, settle for being curious about the way it all unfolds"
Definitely not a big single disaster scenario. More like a "wait, we don't fix things anymore" or "wait, we have way less food variety than before" realization when it hits.
Climate control is something more people will be on board with compared to trying to have a conversation about climate science to a person who didn’t graduate high school.
The answer has never laid in ever more elaborate designs to disenfranchise particular members of the population. It's always been in building community.
A community is what helps stabilize, helps tighten up distributions, and wrestles most authentically with the general premise that we are social creatures and only as strong as our weakest link.
If you think you're going to build the perfect society by way of careful electorate curation, I have some unfortunate stories to tell you.
Have you taken any class ever on disenfranchising events in history?
Also worth mentioning for those in these neighboring threads, the impulse to blame dysfunction during hard times on a particular minority of society has a name, you can read more about it here
https://dictionary.apa.org/scapegoat-theory
So: atmospheric climate science directly falls under NASA's responsibilities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Aeronautics_and_Space...
I only hope I can have a decent life until it ends, and I hope it takes slightly longer than I think it will.
I basically see it as a moral wrong and a grave ethical failure to use fossil fuels at this point. Except for home heating, I am now close to directly powering my entire life with clean, renewable energy. It was not hard. It was expensive, but only in the short term; I have effectively prepaid for my power needs for at least the next 25 years, and over than span it is very inexpensive.
A modern EV is about the same price as any other car, goes about the same distance, and is only slightly more time to fuel in the worst case. In the typical case, you don’t think about charging at all. The fact that I can’t get my supposedly environmentally conscious family of scientists and engineers to care continues to stun me. Somehow saving money while improving the world is “a waste of money” while buying an expensive hobby vehicle or vacation home is not. Frustrating.
There is zero hope I will even be remembered years after death.
thats a start.
Intelligence is a scarcity and it cannot overcome the majority of people that are incredibly stupid or ignorant. So accepting that we are doomed relieves some of the stress. I won't have children to worry about their future, either.
I still live my life in such a way that minimizes my impact on the world as much as possible. I still surround myself with folks that want a better world. But there is no stopping the impending doom and I'm trying not to be miserable with the time I have.
Why are people trying to keep the earth the same as what they think it should be forever? We are a blot on the history of the earth, The human race will perish when considtions on the planet no longer suit us, just like many other large species before us. The planet will warm and cool over millions of years long after we are gone, and nature will continue to evolve many more wierd and wonderful things.
Humans need to hurry up and accept that they really dont matter at all to the planet.
If in 3000 years we discover humans were completely wiped out to the last person I would be pretty surprised.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youngest_Toba_eruption#Toba_ca...
I do think there's a decent chance of civilizational collapse in the near to medium term. It seems like everything is getting very fragile. So much economic activity revolves around extremely sophisticated machines with many critical components that are manufactured in just a few locations, sometimes a single location. A major war could shatter that, or climate change could push us over a tipping point where those capabilities can no longer be maintained, or it might just be a cascading random breakdown due to the modern economy being so complicated.
If it happens, then I'm very pessimistic about the ability to ever come back from it. With all the easily accessible fossil fuels gone, getting industry going again is going to be a really tall order. So humanity might survive a long time, but it may consist of life the way it was in prehistory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interglacial
Oh yeah, we'd all die.
Maybe we shouldn't cause that to happen.
- it's not warming, or not significantly
- if it's warming, it's not because of humans, (or)
- if it's warming, it's beneficial
- if it's warming because of humans and that's bad, there's nothing we can do about it
ETA: honorary mention for "what about China?"
People I've argued about this with will switch interchangeably between these. Press them hard enough on one issue, and they'll just switch to another. It's a game of whack-a-mole.
Because when were 4 degrees cooler, NYC was under 1000 feet of ice. We really don't want to find out what 4 degrees hotter is like.
Basically, anyone capable of thinking about it logically has at this point reached the conclusion that it's real. Anyone arguing otherwise is therefore necessarily not thinking about it logically, and you have to expect things like shifting claims.
"If you look back years ago in the 1920s and the 1930s, they said global cooling will kill the world. We have to do something. Then they said global warming will kill the world, but then it started getting cooler. So now they just call it climate change because that way they can't miss. Climate change because if it goes higher or lower, whatever the hell happens, there's climate change. It's the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion. Climate change, no matter what happens, you're involved in that. No more global warming, no more global cooling. All of these predictions made by the United Nations and many others, often for bad reasons, were wrong. They were made by stupid people that have cost their country's fortunes and given those same countries no chance for success."
https://rollcall.com/factbase/trump/transcript/donald-trump-...
This is a weird statement coming from Trump. I wouldn't think his base would care for improving the lives and economies of other countries, specially undeveloped countries.
Doesn't seem weird to say that if you want to do nothing.
The link to greenhouse gases is not hard to prove. We've got satellites that can measure global radiation inflow and outflow and see what the difference is. We can also measure this at various levels within the atmosphere, and at the surface of the land and oceans. We can see where outgoing radiation is getting caught and we can see what frequency bands of outgoing radiation is getting caught.
We know the frequency bands that get reflected, absorbed, or pass through for all the gases in the atmosphere and can see that the gases causing the problem are the greenhouse gases.
We can also see that the increase in greenhouse gases is mostly from burning fossil fuels. We can see this by looking at the isotope ratios in the C in greenhouse gases.
Cosmic ray bombardment in the upper atmosphere produces carbon 14, which is radioactive with a half live of 5730 years. It disperses throughout the atmosphere and becomes part of anything that regularly incorporates atmospheric carbon or exchanges its carbon with atmospheric carbon, including all living things.
Everything humans do in significant amounts that puts greenhouse gases in the atmosphere other than burning fossil fuels has carbon with about the same isotope ratio as that of the carbon in living things. Even when we burn a dead forest to clear it out the isotope ratio is close to that of living things, because of that 5730 year half life for carbon 14.
It is only when we burn fossil fuels that we put carbon into the atmosphere with almost no carbon 14. They came from living things but have been dead long enough for hundreds of half lives to pass.
The isotope ratios in the excess greenhouse gases show that it is mostly carbon 14 free. There are natural processes that can dump carbon 14 free carbon into the atmosphere such as volcanoes and other geological processes. However, (1) the increases in carbon 14 free greenhouse gases matches very closely with the amount of carbon we've been emitting from fossil fuels, and (2) and monitoring of volcanoes and other natural sources doesn't find nearly enough to account for more than a small amount of the increase.
The merchants of doubt ran out the clock and what I hear from the former deniers I know is that it is too expensive and too late to do anything now, being warmer will be nicer, and CO2 is a fertilizer.
I fall in that category. My suspicion is that water vapor from air travel is by far the biggest contributor. I saw the blue skys after 9/11. I read the NASA guys that said daily temperature range increased measurably. I saw the blue skys again during Covid19.
I'm also of the opinion that anyone looking at historical data only going back 200,000 years or less is missing the larger picture. Sea levels are NOT at historic highs, we should expect them to rise further before receeding. We should expect glaciation again if we don't do anything, but speeding up warming IMHO is more likely to trigger glaciation that to "push through" whatever causes it and break the cycle (which would be a good thing).
So as a long-term thinker all this hype is just that. If you don't have a plan to end the glacier cycle you're just making a big deal out of a small change in time-scale due to reasons (CO2 vs H2O) that may well be the wrong ones.
It's not even worth it to say why or how, since not even doing rudimentary research means that you aren't interested in developing a well-informed opinion.
That's just false. You might try to rule it out yourself to see. My comments here and the responses demonstrate that it's a waste of time to argue against people in the purity cycle of global warming. My position is one of moderation not denial - and I'm downvoted, told I don't care, and I haven't done even the minimum of research. Pffft. HN is not what it used to be.
You've heard of the saying that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence? Holding a hypothesis of water-vapor from air travel being the primary driver of warming trends is extraordinary.
Invoking the oft-repeated "do your own research" rhetorical crutch and referring to scientific consensus as "hype" doesn't help your case.
Do you have any reason to believe otherwise besides a couple of anecdotes about looking at the sky and short-term temperature variations?
Have you calculated the water vapor generated from air travel, and compared that to the water vapor already generated by the water cycle? (just normal evaporation from lakes/rivers/oceans/plants)
Even as back-of-napkin math, this should be a pretty easy sanity check.
I think you're off by a few orders of magnitude here, but I also don't want to discourage you from adopting a "check for yourself" mindset.
I've SEEN the effects with my own eyes. You can also see contrails seeding cloud formation on some days. Then there's the fact that these extra clouds are formed and dissipate on a 24 hour cycle, so part of the day they let in sunlight and part of the night they trap heat. These effects are significant and there is little research on the bigger picture effects of this (that I've seen).
a) china is unwilling to do anything, and if that's the case, America shouldn't empty its pocket books on this issue.
b) this climate change alarmist stuff has caused a climate disaster in the US because all the migration to Electric Only is causing us to use generators all over the place, which is crazy. We should instead focus on making clean nuclear and expanding solar. PG&E (in CA) has decided to cancel this migration because CPUC (or whatever their called) is in Newsome's pocket who is in PG&Es pocket.
c) climate change extremists are unwilling to both hear yes it's happening and no we're not going to do anything about it, so the people responding are simply saying, no it's not happening.
They are also the leader in producing and exporting solar and wind equipment, and in driving the prices down, to make it easier for other countries to address climate change.
They are also the biggest producer of EVs in the world, and the biggest exporter of EVs.
They are doing better at doing something about climate change than any other country, both due to what they are currently doing for themselves and for the countries they export to and in their ability to make long term plans and reasonably stick to them.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/270499/co2-emissions-in-...
https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-pe...
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-ha...
China is building clean energy for a good chunk of the world, including itself.
A better question may be: What is the US going to do to make up for its historical emissions? The US got wealthy by creating far more emissions than China, and all those historical emissions are now a problem for the rest of the world.
If people in the US try to turn climate action into a blame game, it will end very very poorly for the US.
Pure fantasy. What will happen to the US and who will do it to us?
If the US starts trying to force other countries into climate action without taking into account its own contributions, the US will likely cut out of the global economy, and become far poorer as the rest of the world surpasses its wealth through vigorous trade.
The US was the sole remaining superpower, but has recently decided to only occupy a much weaker position with a mere "sphere of influence" and ceding leadership in other parts of the world to others. The US is signalling to allies in Europe that it will no longer lead, that the prior world is over and the US is bugging out, meaning Europe will gain far more influence.
The more that the US attacks others without providing any leadership, the less that the US will be able to take from the world. Up until recently, the US's position of massive economic strength was largely due to it's dominant position among nations and the goodwill that others had towards it. Turning the climate problem into a blame game on other countries would further weaken the US's position and options.
You seem to think these solid critiques about the inherent weakness of Trump are somehow mere partisanship, rather than the actual unwinding of US leadership around the world.
I'm not part of global academia, I'm just a consumer of news that is willing to listen to things outside of a partisan bubble. The world is shifting away from the US, to the US's detriment. We have an exceptionally weak president who acts like what a weak person imagines a strong person is like, and it's scaring off all our allies.
> In a way it’s understandable because you all seem to believe in your “right” to pick winners and losers. The world doesn’t actually work that way.
I do not know whatyou mean by this, you think I'm picking winners and losers? The US is picking winners and losers? Global academia is picking?Picking either antecedent does not allow me to find any meaning in your sentence.
TDS inspires people to blurt out the types of statements you’re making.
The clear facts are that the US has cheapened its word and made itself an embarrassment around the globe. China has completely dog walked Trump on tariffs and trade, devastating US farmers, and leading to far stronger ties between China and the rest of the world, not just with our former tight trading partner Canada, but with all the emerging economies around the world. The US is cutting itself out of the new economic order that is emerging from the energy transition to cheaper renewable energy, which will leave the US with sky-high energy prices while the rest of the world runs their economies cheaper, and with less inflation-inducing price shocks, on solar and grid storage.
I respond with these basic facts not because I think that you will believe anything, but because the obvious falsehoods that you are repeating should not stand unanswered by the reality that we can all see in the world.
> There may be some politicians that want to choose the US as “the loser”. But that’s just not really an option given the size of our economy and the size of our military.
The only politicians that wants to choose the US as the loser are those following the dictates of Trump, by weakening our gloabl position. The size of our economy and military are not enough of a draw to keep us as the leader through sheer domination. And in fact pretending that "domination" is what made the US strong is the exact sort of weak person's idea of a strong man. The US is handing away all its leadership and power by trying to force what it does not have the ability to force, trying to force what would instead be freely given! It's utter insane behavior of a nation, and indicates just how little the Trump administration understands of US power around the world. The US is not a mob boss, we are (were?) a leader that attracted support because we were a shining example of what a country could be. When we act like bullies we throw away all that power, because we can not fight the entire world with our military, and our economy is not nearly big enough to overcome bullying behavior.
Edit: an as for an example just this morning of how Trump is making the US weaker, the UK is not allowing the US to use bases for attacks on Iran, which is leading to other threats from Trump that further push the UK away and make the US weaker on the global stage. Nearly every single day the US is becoming weaker because of this sort of weak behavior. https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/trump-chagos-is...
While China is still very reliant on fossil-fuels, and particularly dirty coal, they're at the same time working on dominating the post-fossil age at astonishing speed. After they already dominate solar and batteries, they're working on doing the same for a number of other future green industries. They are already dominating future technologies like Green Methanol that most people in Europe or the US have never heard of.
It's logical to start with the king of greenhouse emissions if you want to stop global warming.
https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-greenhouse-gas-emissions
The climate "cares" about cumulative emissions. On that score the US is by far the leader. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co-emissions It's not even close.
Pretend China is 20 countries. Each country now has lower emissions than the US. Anyone can play that stupid game. Give up the games, think about solutions. China is working hard. Are we?
But per capita is more informative when thinking about policy for curbing emissions, which is how we actually change our effect on the climate.
If China were to split into 10 countries each emitting 10% of what they do now it'd be the exact same emissions, but according to you it would be much better.
Similarly if the EU would become one country, that country would be high up on the list, much higher than member countries now! Oh no!
Looking at per capita emissions is much more fair.
Anyway, China's emissions are falling since last year ( https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-ha... ). What's the US doing?
But policy is where real change needs to be made, and the effects of policy still scale with population in most cases.
Also, you don’t want all the low-population countries to each start contributing as much to global warming as the US.
China's emissions were 10 billion tons CO2 in 2017 and have increased every single year to 12.29 billion tons CO2 in 2024. Meanwhile, US decreased from 5.22 to 4.9 in the same time
US emissions icreased by 2.5% https://rhg.com/research/us-greenhouse-gas-emissions-2025/
China's emmisions have decreased by <1% https://e360.yale.edu/digest/china-emissions-decline
China has only produced significant CO2/capita in the last decade. The US and Europe are responsible for the accumulated GHG that have gotten us into the current mess. We blew nearly the entire CO2 "budget" for keeping us under 2C of warming, just by ourselves, so it's kinda odd to be pointing fingers at the foreigners who are just now halfway catching up to what we're emitting now.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj4y159190go
https://www.carbonbrief.org/chinas-construction-of-new-coal-...
I hope we steal their playbook.
PRC solar power production last year conservatively will diplace ~45 billion barrels of oil, or 10%-20% more than total global consumption per year. It's just retarded eco accounting that attributes emissions to renewable manufacturers while fossil exporters don't get any penalties for extracting emissions.
Every year of PRC solar prevents doubling of oil, basically they're like the only significant country whose net contribution is negative for how much carbon sinks they manufacture. So the answer for US+co is obviously stop exporting oil and lng, and start exporting renewables.
That’s a real problem, because China, and all the poor countries in Asia and Africa aren’t going to stop increasing their CO2 output per capita until they reach western standards of living.
As of today, solar and batteries are the cheapest source of electricity. All the "poor countries in Asia and Africa", except the ones that have oil and gas, will leapfrog straight to renewables. It just makes good sense, unless your politicians are paid off by the fossil fuel lobby.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: Ah ok an IP ban. I guess time to use a proxy. Moderation has rules. Censorship does not.
Censorship is bad dang mmmkay?
Editing again to post later cause you nuked replies for some reason:
Sorry I don't conduct in personal attacks. I think you're confused. Feel free to list whom I attacked and where.
No, censorship doesn't change definitions based on who uses it. Unless you want to pretend like you're not censoring. You seem to have convinced yourself that your censorship is a form of moderation, very sad. You're free to censor whom and what you want, it's your site. Don't pretend it's moderation though.
Your guidelines are meaningless if censorship is so heavy handed and moderation non-existant. It's hard to moderate. It's easy to censor.
Anyway you have curated, through censorship, a place where people are afraid to share valid opinions that break no guidelines (except those magical ones you can produce in order to censor). You can congratulate yourself on that if you want. You've got a ghost town, whether you like it or not.
> Censorship is bad dang mmmkay?
It's one of those words that mean different things depending on how people want to use it. I wouldn't personally use that word as opposed to moderation, curation, etc., but then I would say that wouldn't I. In any case, HN isn't an anything-goes site and never has been. If we didn't do some version of moderation/curation/censorship/befugioning, it would be an entirely different place. Probably not one even you would enjoy—I don't suppose you like ghost towns or scorched earth any more than the rest of us.
January 2026 was the 5th warmest January since records began in 1850, with an anomaly of +1.12°C above the C20th baseline: https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/news/global-climate-202601
The anomaly for the first two weeks of February 2026 was greater still, at +1.69°C. Perhaps the last few days have been incredibly cold, but until then we were on course for it to be the third warmest February in recorded history.
Variations in regional weather are something else entirely.
We’ve known about the mechanisms of CO2 leading to atmospheric warming since the 19th century.
We know humans are adding CO2 to the atmosphere.
We observe higher CO2 and warmer temps
The evidence isn’t that complicated.
The science behind it really got going in the 1890s, with Arrhenius' paper predicting climate sensitivity to CO2. That was bounced back and forth with rebuttals and counter-rebuttals until about 1950. Major debate points were how much role water vapor played, how this varied with temperature/altitude/pressure. (You can trace each part of the argument if you're so inclined; there's lots of neat science in there. The concept of "pressure broadening" was my favorite; it explores how spectral bands change with pressure).
Around 1950, the science started settling out. Spectrometers had improved, we had clearer view that CO2 and H2O don't fully overlap in their spectra bands through the atmosphere, and we had the computing to do better calculations. By the 1970s, we were getting ice core data showing that the world had gone through huge temperature swings, and how this changed with CO2. Enough data had accumulated that a consensus was forming. In the 1980s, scientists were now concerned enough to form a large body to inform policymakers on this issue (IPCC; 1988). And in the 40 years since then, we've mostly sat on our hands, even as the science just gets clearer and clearer.
I share all this long history to explain that the science went through nearly a century of rigorous debate even before politicians got involved. This a scientific issue, not a political one. And I'm glossing over 99.9999% of the detail here. There was an extensive literature debate between the scientists, hashing out any point you can think of. You just have to go to your local uni library and start reading.
TL;DR: saying that global warming is debunked is about as incorrect as saying that the Earth is flat. We have extensive evidence showing otherwise.
You are welcome to read.. any paper on the subject and educate yourself.
I agree it's warming but unequivocally at an unprecedented rate is iffy. For the article they cherry picked a stable period but if you look at the full temperature history as shown here https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2014/05/05/can-make-b...
there has been loads of instability and heating and cooling.
Also while CO2 levels are up from about 280 ppm in 1600 to about 430 now, for most of the history of life on earth they were more in the 500 to 5000 range https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_the_atmosphe...
I don't believe climate denial as in saying its not warming but I'm also skeptical of exaggerating the problem by ignoring most climate history. I guess the idea is to panic people into changing behaviour but it doesn't seem to work very well - co2 emissions are higher than ever and a lot of the population think we are doomed when we are not. Unbiased science is better in my opinion.
https://thecottonwoodpost.net/2019/12/10/modern-climate-chan...
Simply on a factual basis, the data we have from previous extinction events does not have the temporal resolution needed for us to determine how quickly the temperature increased/decreased. E.g., "how quickly did the atmospheric temperature change after the Chicxulub event?" We don't know. Decent-quality global paleoclimate proxies only extend back ~15k years or so. It's possible that there was rapid global climate change in the past outside of major extinction events; we genuinely don't have the data to tell.
This also doesn't really tell us much about how the modern Earth and its ecosystems would handle those old climate shifts, because there is much much less wild lands (and so, less resilience within natural ecosystems). It's true from a climate science perspective, but not useful for assessing the damage that climate change can cause to modern society.
And: to the best of our knowledge, the current rate of warming is fast enough to cause major issues. Civilization only arose once we had relatively stable and moderate temperatures, and stable temperatures may be needed to maintain civilization under present technology. Ecological and glaciological studies back this up. And no, scientists are not looking to just scare us into action; the evidence itself should be alarming.