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The 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-2030) outline draft has listed making new and significant progress in building a Beautiful China as one of its main objectives, with achieving the carbon peaking target on schedule being a crucial aspect of this goal.

In 2020, China made a commitment to the world: to peak carbon dioxide emissions before 2030 and strive to achieve carbon neutrality before 2060. Last year, China announced its 2035 Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) for addressing climate change.

"The outline draft clearly emphasizes actively and prudently advancing and achieving carbon peaking, proposing that during the 15th Five-Year Plan period, carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GDP will be reduced by 17%, and a preliminary clean, low-carbon, safe, and efficient new energy system will be established. This clear roadmap will help us achieve high-quality 'dual carbon' phase goals and lay a solid foundation for carbon neutrality," said Wei Yuansong, member of the CPPCC National Committee and Director of the Water Pollution Control Laboratory at the Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

from： https://www.news.cn/20260305/7ad8d5ee3a6d4b28b1b62230199f1d0...

this is in china's next 5 year plan

For those (like me) who don't know the authors, apparently they are well-published authors in the field of climate science whose work is very highly cited:

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C39&q=gra...

Not a perfect measure of whether this is a reputable article but at least readers should know this isn't from some randos in a basement somewhere.

Setting aside the names of the authors, this is a very bad paper. They take temperature data sets, "adjust" [1] them by attempting to remove the biggest recent factors (volcanism, solar and el nino cycles) affecting temperatures, then do a piece-wise regression analysis to look at trends in 10-year chunks. This is just bad methodology, akin to what a junior graduate student with a failing thesis might do to find signal in a dataset that isn't being cooperative to their hypothesis.

Climate data is inherently noisy, and there are multiple interconnected cyclic signals, ranging from the "adjusted" factors to cycles that span decades, which we don't understand at all. "Adjusting" for a few of these, then doing a regression over the subset of the data is classic cherry-picking in search of a pre-determined conclusion. The overall dubious nature of the conclusion is called out in the final paragraph of the text:

> Although the world may not continue warming at such a fast pace, it could likewise continue accelerating to even faster rates.

They're literally just extrapolating from an unknown point value that they synthesized from data massage, and telling you that's a coin toss as to whether the extrapolation will be valid.

I am not a climate scientist so you can ignore me if you like, but I am "a scientist" who believes the earth is warming, and that we are the primary cause. Nonetheless, if I saw this kind of thing in a paper in my own field, it would be immediately tossed in the trash.

[1] You can't actually adjust for these things, which the authors admit in the text. They just dance around it so that lay-readers won't understand:

> Our method of removing El Niño, volcanism, and solar variations is approximate but not perfect, so it is possible that e.g. the effect of El Niño on the 2023 and 2024 temperature is not completely eliminated.

Ironically, those still unconvinced of the human influence on climate change seem to be the sort that would trust the basement randos more than they would reputable scientists

Because they are practicing the reverse scientific method. They hold a conclusion in their hand, like, man-made climate change is a hoax, and seek to find any threads of "evidence" that support their foregone conclusion.

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That sounds like a perfect match for a meta study do you have any? I am very dubious about your conclusion. I am basing this on work I did in high school on this so I really have no sources for my claim.

EDIT did some more searching and have not been able to finding anything supporting you claim. People have not been very alarmist about sea levels.. 7500m by the year 2500 in Waterworld does not count.

In fact I remember reading the opposite recently, that IPCC sea level rise predictions from the 90s were actually pretty accurate given the limitations of the models at the time. And that a good bit of the error was underestimations of rise, not overestimations.

> Here we show that the mid-range projection from the Second Assessment Report of the IPCC (1995/1996) was strikingly close to what transpired over the next 30 years, with the magnitude of sea-level rise underestimated by only ∼1 cm.

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2025ef00...

People wouldn't just lie on the internet!

Systems are complicated. Given there are numerous predicted outcomes (it's not just about the actual measured sea-level rise, after all) and many of those predictions are coming to pass far earlier than hoped, it might be worth having an open mind to the fact that sometimes people who devote their lives to studying something might be worth listening to.

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Yes, of course there are bad actors, but this is false equivalence to equate science and the scientific method with basement randos.

Most importantly, most people don't understand scientific consensus vs. individual research papers or individual scientists. A major feature of the scientific method is that when an interesting result is published, it can be independently verified by lots of other researchers, and if they come to the same conclusion, that is excellent evidence that the result accurately describes the real world.

Scientists are people, and just like people everywhere they have biases and personal motivations. But again, the scientific method is much bigger than any individual or even group of scientists. If anything, being skeptical of unexpected results is a huge pillar of the scientific method. But skepticism alone is not enough - the next step is to look for validating research, not to say "hah, science is bullshit, let's trust this YouTube rando instead." As usual, I think Jessica Knurick does a great job explaining things: https://open.substack.com/pub/drjessicaknurick/p/trust-the-s...

True, and personally, I don't believe climate science is affected by bias to such a degree that the overall conclusion is wrong. But it absolutely does occur that a whole field can be biased, so the "independent verification by lots of other researchers" will cast unreasonable skepticism on results they dislike, while letting results they like pass with cursory examination. This is the case in e.g. social science:

The authors also submitted different test studies to different peer-review boards. The methodology was identical, and the variable was that the purported findings either went for, or against, the liberal worldview (for example, one found evidence of discrimination against minority groups, and another found evidence of "reverse discrimination" against straight white males). Despite equal methodological strengths, the studies that went against the liberal worldview were criticized and rejected, and those that went with it were not.

https://theweek.com/articles/441474/how-academias-liberal-bi...

https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1986-12806-001 (the study referenced in the article)

Man, if you are going to try to attack the credibility of the field of a hard science like climate science, try doing it with claims directly related to that field of science.

Substituting in social science as a proxy for your criticism takes the wind completely out of your sails.

"Physicists are super untrustworthy and biased, it's a cabal, I mean just look at astrology and these articles criticizing it!"

> if you are going to try to attack the credibility of the field of a hard science like climate science

But I'm not. In fact I said as much. If it'll stop you from fighting phantoms, I'll make it explicit: I'm quite certain anthropogenic climate change is real, and that climate science is broadly correct about it. Yet, not even physics is fully immune from such bias, according to Feynman: https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/264/timeline-of-meas...

(Though as the charts show, in physics it has a short half-life, at least for something as straightforward as the electron charge.)

What do you mean by these statements if not exactly to cast doubt on and paint the field of climate science and the consensus behind anthropogenic climate change as being the result of bias?

> affected by bias to such a degree

Implication that there is bias, and the degree to which is left up to the reader's imagination.

> the overall conclusion is wrong

What about the specifics of the conclusion, which specifics, what percentage of the assertions, 20%, 50%, 80%? This again allows the reader to fill in the blanks with their own biases which are likely far less rigorously tested than the conclusions of the field of climate science.

> it absolutely does occur that a whole field can be biased

This statement, on the topic of climate change and climate science, immediately following your above two statements, serves to further reinforce the idea that climate science is biased.

> the "independent verification by lots of other researchers" will cast unreasonable skepticism on results they dislike, while letting results they like pass with cursory examination.

The quotes around the independent verification of researchers serves to undermine their work and cast doubt on it. You then state they are unreasonable in their skepticism of results they "dislike", implying these are emotional decisions rather than empirical measurements of reality.

Of course, extremely ironic as the reader meant to consume this is of course the one actually looking for emotional reinforcement of their preconceptions, but in this framing gets to project that onto the scientists.

And yeah, "cursory exmination" of course in no way reflects the reality of the last several decades of climate science, but is added in as another unsubstantiated slight.

> case in e.g. social science

And then, the coup de grace, attempting to substitute the reputation of the famously soft and hard to replicate social sciences for climate science, in an attempt to equate the two and thus further degrade the perception of climate science.

> Implication that there is bias, and the degree to which is left up to the reader's imagination.

I would be shocked if there was zero bias - the field is staffed by humans, and has political implications. And no, I did not leave the degree of bias up to interpretation - I set an upper bound to it, that precludes global warming skepticism.

> What about the specifics of the conclusion

To date no field has been 100% correct in everything. I already told you I'm not a global warming skeptic - what do you want, for me to pretend climate science is infallible for the benefit of morons that want to twist my words?

> And then, the coup de grace, attempting to substitute the reputation of the famously soft and hard to replicate social sciences for climate science, in an attempt to equate the two and thus further degrade the perception of climate science.

On two separate occasions I explicitly wrote I believe climate science. Obviously my attempt at imparting a nuanced understanding of scientific fallibility is wasted on someone that doesn't even bother to read my posts. You want a PR statement aimed at reassuring the lowest common denominator that the scientists know what they're doing, not a discussion.

If this is how much you argue with someone who agrees with you, then, I don't know what to say. Good luck in life, man.

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My phenomenal observations are that it's been getting warmer during my lifetime, but as soon as I mention this in an online conversation I get slapped down with 'the climate is always changing' and 'n=1'.

Most climate change denial arguments eventually boil down to social assertions about the change believers having perverse incentives, like being greedy for grants to go on sailing vacations to Antartica or feather their academic nests.

What are the cycles called? How do they function? A lot of people use the world cycle like other people use the word magic. A mystery pretending to be an explanation.

The number of critics of Anthropogenic global warming who actually have expertise on climate change and actively publish on the subject can be counted on one hand. If 99.9% of astrophysicists agreed that a meteor was going to hit your house next Tuesday you wouldn't wait around for the few crackpot holdouts before you to agree to leave.

>that’s cute

Unnecessary but moving past that: I understand where you’re coming from but a hallmark of people like that is they are not willing to learn or be swayed no matter how you try to educate them. They have decided what is real and it often dovetails with their social/political views in a way that is very hard to disentangle.

You can apply that too to the “man-made climate change is real” argument.

Allegations of cherry-picking scant bits of evidence to support a claim are less effective when that claim is held up by vast quantities of distinct, high-quality evidence.

my wife is an actuary, and we always joke that you know climate change has real cause and effect because the actuaries are specifically monitoring and modeling for it lol

Can you apply that too to the "earth is round" argument?

The heliocentric model of our solar system "argument"?

I guess general relativity is only a "theory" in the end, geodude420 on twitter has an awesome thread debunking that Einstein schlub's whole career!

There’s actually research to support the claim you’re making here (Elaboration Likelihood Model).

When forming attitudes in an area where one doesn’t care, one tends to rely more on who is saying it than what is being said. The opposite is true, if you care about [climate change], you listen to the arguments regardless of who is presenting it.

Theres a mistrust of government and the establishment. Not saying fringe is better but the behavior of govts, corruption and influence by rich donors doesn't help

> Theres a mistrust of government and the establishment. Not saying fringe is better but the behavior of govts, corruption and influence by rich donors doesn't help

These are scientists, not the government, and the US government, at least, has long opposed or been ambivalent toward climate research.

I'm not sure how rich donor influence is involved. Rich donors generally have acted to oppose climate research.

It also doesn’t help that anyone with few scruples and a desire to make a buck can quickly monetize screaming about how up is down on YouTube

Also scientists generally suck at messaging and persuasion. They think if they just dial up the stakes and consequences a little more, it'll be compelling! Maybe if we make one more documentary with bad CGI disaster movie scenes, that'll do it! Same with the stupid "Doomsday clock" that is somehow always "the closest we've ever been to nuclear war!" whenever it gets trotted out. You'd think people who know what stochastic noise is would realize when they're producing it.

They would have made a lot more headway talking about clean air, clean water, jobs, and a bright prosperous future where we manufacture wind turbines, batteries and solar panels in deep red Missouri. A minority tried that, but most stuck with the catastrophizing for decades and now that they've ruined their social credit no one will listen to the message they should have opened with.

You need people emotionally invested, and it's a lot easier to get them invested in their lives than in the abstract consequences of computer models that are at least 100 years out if they're even accurate. And most people are not independent enough to direct their own lives. If they make the right decisions on abstract concepts, it was more because the incentives/disincentives in their environment were set up correctly than they actually understood the decision they were making. Message accordingly.

Every approach you've suggested above, and others besides, has been tried by scientists, NGOs and government agencies for the last few decades, and largely failed.

The IPCC has consistently DOWNPLAYED the negative consequences of climate change, and reality keeps outpacing their worst case predictions year after year.

Every attempt to message the reality and consequences of climate change, and the possible avenues for blunting it, has been tried. From the sugarcoating "everything will be rosy and great and abundant, look at all the benefits of green industry" to the milquetoast watered-down try-to-please-everyone messaging of the major political parties, to the desperate attempts to communicate the brutal reality of what we're facing (and still failing to match the reality that is consistently worse).

None of it works.

1) People are selfish, myopic, and stupid. They think about their short term personal needs and wants above all else. Large scale coordination on this issue is virtually impossible, see the Prisoner's Dilemma. Human psychology is simply not fit for this task.

The satisficing nature of evolution means we are the dumbest possible animal that could otherwise achieve the technological civilization that we have, and this is another example where it really shows.

2) The wealthiest and most powerful people and corporations on Earth have spent decades pushing propaganda attempting to sow doubt about climate change, because genuine action on it is directly against their interests.

Those poor multi-trillion dollar industries underpinning all modern society and power structures are the altruistic, honest bastions of truth, it's those evil corrupt post docs on minimum wage that are the truly corrupt and greedy ones, twisting the truth for their own financial gain and machiavellian ends!

And they've been far more effective than the cigarette companies of the early 20th century could have ever dreamed.

Also doesn’t help when hyperbolic predictions do not come true, such as Maldives being underwater by 2020

Certainly doesn't help that nobody made those predictions but denialists make up or intentionally misinterpret people making predictions so as to "prove" nothing is actually happening.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/nations-vanish-global-warm...

The widely-cited UNEP report where people get the supposed non-occuring Maldives prediction from suggested that half of the Maldives could be inundated by 2100 in a one-meter-rise scenario.

It depends if they can agree with what they are saying.

It's a culture thing, nobody on the right would ever be convinced by science, they will shop around until they find what they need to hear. My sister in law sent me a video and told me that she thought it was a really good explainer and had a lot of good facts and figures to support it. To humor her, I took a brief glance at it, and saw that it was produced by Dr. Shiva. I was thinking "no way, it can't be that Shiva, could it, email guy?" Yes, yes it was.

We are doomed.

Tell her that you have a greenfield synergistic solution to upscale her big tent.

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“reputable scientists” = tax plundered research for purposes of political power. Regardless of human effect it is china doing it.

While it's true that China is currently responsible for the largest share of CO2 emissions at least their output is trending down:

See https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-ha...

And, it's important to understand why they're emitting some of that CO2: Western wallets demanding foreign produced goods, because Western society collectively, and enthusiastically, pushed manufacturing to China.

It's more important to understand why they're emitting so much of that CO2 - because a lot of people in China need to eat and have a roof over their heads.

Any analysis that fails to take per-capita into account is not made in good faith.

China has a large population but so does India. Don't forget that China is the world's factory and that's where a very large chunk of CO2 emissions come from.

Worth also noting that on a per capita basis China aren't even in the top ten.

Tax plundering, really dude?

Quick guess, do you think more tax dollars have gone to the fossil fuel industry, or climate scientists?

Political power, just again, amazing.

Who do you think wields more political power in the world? The fossil fuel industry and petro states, or climate scientists?

It's such a blatant, weird attempt to invert reality. It's the whole "accuse your enemy of that which you are guilty" approach.

I don't understand how this propaganda talking point sticks in anyone's head and doesn't fall apart with two seconds of critical thought.

There are various levels of perspectives

- Climate Warming is a hoax

- Climate Warming is happening, but not Man Made and part of larger cycles

- Climate Warming is Man Made, but drastic De-growth strategies cause more harm.

- Climate Warming is Man Made, don't need de-growth strategies because Technology will solve energy efficiency, clean energy growth and carbon capture and humans adapt along the way

- Climate Warming is Man Made and we need drastic de-growth strategies and complete ban of fossil fuels.

For people in the last group, all other groups look like Climate Deniers because they don't agree to their de-growth/ban plans

Things must be bleak for climate deniers if they have to make an itemized list of strawman arguments to feel good about it.

You're missing: "Climate is warming, but this is a good thing because it means Jesus will come back sooner and I'll live in endless bliss and not have to go to work anymore, so I'm going to do my part by driving a huge truck and pretend like it's fake."

More commonly these days is the message that CO2 is plant food, and climate change is a nefarious plot to kill off the plants by starving them in order to reduce the Earth's population. I can dig up several tweets this week pushing that message.

It is a shame that Twitter's algorithm is so damn easy to manipulate that it's basically owned by propaganda firms now. Elon doesn't even care, more outrage == more engagement and that's what feeds the system. It's a feedback loop of crap.

It's not even that Elon doesn't care as in he is ambivalent about it, it directly feeds into reinforcing his political preferences.

Try to create a brand new twitter account, you'll find that 80+% of the accounts that get suggested to you are right wing propaganda with climate denial being one of their greatest hits.

Hypothetically speaking, if people in the last group were right, and that is the logical conclusion to be reached from careful evaluation of the evidence, wouldn’t the other positions indeed be ones of wilful denial of the state of the climate?

> de-growth

Associating action to prevent with 'de-growth' is disinformation from the deniers. Climate change itself is massively de-growth. The question is how to best prevent it.

- Climate Warming in the last ~200 and current years is Man Made, but given Man’s relative shortsightedness and propensity for becoming preoccupied, his ongoing impact on climate change will run its course to one end or another, probably redefining coastlines in the process and including other effects on agriculture, diversity of species, and so on. Much, much later the Earth will more than likely enter another Ice Age and most of the planet will be frozen over. Between the Man induced (relatively) extreme warm period and the next Ice Age, Man will find his way one way or another. Or Not.

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It says this in bold red at the top - "This is a preprint; it has not been peer reviewed by a journal."

I am not a climate scientist - how should I think about this statement? Normally I am looking for some statement that shows a document has been vetted.

For non-specialists, I think the most important view on papers is to not view them as nuggets of truth, but communications of a group of people who are trying to establish truth. No single paper is definitive!

Peer review is an important part of scientific publication, but it's also important for the general public to not view peer review as a full vetting. Peer reviewers look for things like reproducibility of the analysis, suitability of the conclusions given the methods, discussions of the limitations of the data and methods, appropriate statistical tests, correct approval from IRBs if there are humans or animals involved, and things like that. For many journals, the editors are also asking if the results are interesting and significant enough to meet the prestige of the journal.

Peer review misses things like intentional fraud, mistakes in computations, and of course any blind spots that the field has not yet acknowledged (for example, nearly every scientific specialty had to rediscover the important of splitting training and testing datasets for machine learning methods somewhat on their own, as new practitioners adopted new methods quickly and then some papers would slip through at the beginning when reviewers were not yet aware of the necessity of this split...)

Any single paper is not revealed truth, it's a step towards establishing truth, maybe. Science is supposed to be self-correcting, which also necessitates the mistakes that need correction. Climate science is one of the fields that gets the most attention and scrutiny, so a series of papers in that field goes a long ways towards establishing truth, much more so than, say, new MRI technology in psychology.

I'd say that for a non-scientist, you should treat it as a non-event -- a paper that hasn't happened yet.

The climate is not something for which you need daily, weekly, or even monthly updates. Rather, this paper is just one more on top of a gigantic pile of evidence that that climate change is serious, something that we can and should do something about.

If the paper passes muster, you'll hear about it then, though all it'll do is very slightly increase your confidence in something that is already very well confirmed. Or, the paper may not pass review, in which case it doesn't mean anything at all, and you fall back on the existing mountain of evidence.

If the paper had reached the opposite conclusion, that might merit more investigation by you now, since that would potentially be a significant update to your beliefs. And more importantly, it would certainly be presented as if it were a fait accompli, even before peer review.

Instead, you can simply say, "I don't know what this paper means, but I already have a very well-founded understanding of climate change and its significance."

Peer review is still very relevant in climate science. But given it is from well-respected authors, I am more inclined to trust the results at this stage.

It is already published at Geophysical Research Letters, a highly (if not the most) reputable source in the area. But that journal is behind a paywall: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/202...

Oh, that contains an ELI5:

> Plain Language Summary The rise in global temperature has been widely considered to be quite steady for several decades since the 1970s. Recently, however, scientists have started to debate whether global warming has accelerated since then. It is difficult to be sure of that because of natural fluctuations in the warming rate, and so far no statistical significance (meaning 95% certainty) of an acceleration (increase in warming rate) has been demonstrated. In this study we subtract the estimated influence of El Niño events, volcanic eruptions and solar variations from the data, which makes the global temperature curve less variable, and it then shows a statistically significant acceleration of global warming since about the year 2015. Warming proceeding faster is not unexpected by climate models, but it is a cause of concern and shows how insufficient the efforts to slow and eventually stop global warming under the Paris Climate Accord have so far been.

For one thing, some of the places which would publish this kind of thing will authorize authors to provide anybody and everybody pre-prints but not the final copy they published.

In principle you could go (pay to†) read the actual final published copy, maybe it's different, but almost always it's basically the same, the text is enough to qualify.

If you go to https://eel.is/c++draft/ you'll find the "Draft" C++ standard, and it has this text:

Note: this is an early draft. It's known to be incomplet and incorrekt, and it has lots of bad formatting.

Nevertheless, the people who wrote your C++ compiler used that "draft" document, because it isn't reasonable to wait a few years for ISO to publish the "real" document which is identical other than lacking that scary text and having a bunch of verbiage about how ISO owns this document and it mustn't be republished.

And you might be thinking "OK, I'm sure those GNU hippies don't pay for a real published copy, but surely the Microsoft Corporation buys their engineers a real one". Nope. Waste of money.

† If you have a relationship with a research institution it might have this or be willing to help you order it from somewhere else at no personal cost.

Are you? How many preprints are posted here every day?

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No, it really does not work like that, for reasons that should be obvious.

Yes, credibility is one component of evaluating conclusions from evidence.

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Their credibility and experience makes it more likely that they will have followed scientific procedures correctly, that their measuring techniques will not have obvious flaws and their findings reflect the evidence.

This is not an appeal to authority: the paper will be examined thoroughly by peer reviewers and likely by academics across the world, in part because of their credibility. That will take time. Meanwhile it should be taken seriously.

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The issue with any significant steps to curbing the climate or environmental impacts with laws or treaties is always: But the economy. It creates an incentive where someone doesn't follow the laws, burn everything they can to accelerate their economy, and take industry from other countries.

My proposal is thus: create a supranational treaty organization with a EPA like authority(or whatever the European equivalent is) that can inspect and fine companies in member organizations. Then any treaty members agree with the following conditions: The EPA can enter their nation freely, inspect, and are able to fine companies that break rules. Members send delegates to a session to create new rules democratically. And most importantly all members act as a cartel, imposing large tariffs on any country outside of the organization. So if US was in and Mexico was out, you couldn't just pollute in Mexico, without some massive tariff. This creates an economic incentive to be in and clean.

"But the economy" is an out-of-date framing. The cost of renewables has been plummeting for well over a decade. New renewables are now cheaper than new fossil fuel plants in most of the world, and in many regions they're already competitive with or cheaper than simply running existing fossil fuel infrastructure. As modern wars in Ukraine and now Iran are increasingly demonstrating, they are not only cost effective but rapidly a matter of energy sovereignty and national security.

That's not to say we won't need treaties and supranational entities for some aspects of decarbonization. Methane emissions outside of agriculture are notably a problem of enforcement.

We're badly in need of a collective update to our priors regarding renewables. In the US, a hostile policy toward renewables is not only shooting ourselves in the foot environmentally, we are now actively impoverishing ourselves due to entrenched economic interests across the fossil fuel industry and the cultural inertia they actively worked to develop.

In principle, you are right. Cheaper than coal renewables are winning. Don't forget though, that fighter jets can't operate on batteries.

> fighter jets can't operate on batteries

Gas turbines can run on a variety of fuels, natural, synthetic or a mixture of both. It’s actually one of the reasons that a turbine was chosen for the M1.

Yeah but gas turbines by definitions run on "gas" kerosene based fuel. If you're talking about a battery powered fan or prop that's very different.

They don’t contribute enough to matter

And using more electrics powered transport in other sectors frees up fossil fuels for other sectors.

That’s a red herring. It’s not worth mentioning.

Except for the industries where it does matter. Trivializing the needs of complex and energy hungry supply chains, is bad faith. They are one of the many reasons fossil fuels are so widely used.

It's not really bad faith when we could make enormous progress in an enormous number of industries, and this in no way stops any of that progress in those economies.

It's specifically bad faith to say it as if it does somehow matter in the grand conversation, when the actual fallout is extremely small. Pretty much nobody is saying we must remove 100 PER CENT OF ALL FOSSIL FUEL USAGE EVERYWHERE FOREVER, just that we need to move off it.

In the end, the industries that cannot run on biofuels are rare to non-existant. It's not fuel which is the problem, but fossil fuel!

You totally can fly on biofuel, but it is not cheap compared to fossil fuel without externalized costs.

If we stop using fossil fuels for the >90% of usage where fossil fuels are easy to replace, it'll make it much easier & cheaper for the <10% where it's difficult.

So we won't be able to fight air wars over the last remaining pieces of arable land.

I'm convinced.

A new US administration and Congress need to be voted in. There is one party who backs fossil fuel interests and denies anthropogenic climate change. They're currently in charge. The American public didn't see that as an important enough issue in 2024.

They are forcing power companies to run coal plants that they don’t want to run (at a loss).

>"But the economy" is an out-of-date framing.

Then why is my electricity and gasoline both so much more expensive than they used to be?

We have needed tariffs for many years now. The EU has some tariffs on imports, but they are only used to level the playing field for companies in EU countries with emission rules against companies in countries without, and only in some select industries.

They need to apply overall, on all goods and services.

And emission limits need to be progressive over time, with a limit for each year, not just "x% at year 2030".

Recycling someone else's quote:

"The economy is a wholly owner subsidiary of the environment"

Many people use the 'but the economy' argument (including my mother in law, maddeningly) without seeming to have any remote clue as to the truth of the quote above.

There is a Nobel memorial prize winning plan to do something like this in a more elegant, voluntary fashion. Nordhaus' Climate Club.

https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257%2Faer.15000001

It's essentially a carbon tax on local production and a corresponding carbon tariff on imports. Countries that already have a carbon tax or equivalent don't get tariffed. IOW, they're part of the club.

Usually a carbon rebate is also included in the plan, although that's not strictly necessary.

Germany was spear-heading an effort to create a carbon club, but it fell apart, unfortunately. At the time a club that didn't include the US seemed infeasible.

In 2026 a club that doesn't include Trump's America is a good thing, not a bad thing IMO.

And why would countries adopt this? So that other countries can use this cartel to push their own agenda? If anything it seems like it would be in every country's best interests to make sure such an organization doesn't exist.

In my opinion one of the reasons why European economies have been struggling for a long time is because energy has been much more expensive than elsewhere. Part of it is the excise tax on gasoline because it drives up the price of everything.

Even to this day EU countries where people earn less than a third of what Americans earn still pay more for gasoline.

All while India and China build coal power plants at record pace

The real problem is that everyone has to sacrifice, but half the people think there is no problem and then other half thinks only corporations need to sacrifice (and are unwilling to sacrifice themselves).

No one thinks only corporations have to sacrifice; they do think that it's folly to ask individual members of society, who on average contribute the smallest overall proportion to global warming, to sacrifice while corporations continue to squander away our natural resources. And the pareto principle agrees.

Yeah but there's a lot of individual members of society, and nearly all of them benefit from supply chains that emit CO2 and would have to stop doing so in order to not emit the CO2.

If gasoline in the US cost $20/gallon this would reduce the amount of CO2 emissions because suddenly driving a gasoline-powered car is much more expensive for everyone. This would make a lot of ordinary Americans very upset.

No, that's insufficient. Yes, corporations that cause the most warming will need to be curtailed if we're to survive. But those corporations are in the act externalizing costs. Once you force them to internalize those costs, the visible costs to consumers will increase, meaning less consumption overall. If you can't convince those consumers that less consumption is a good thing if it's in the service of saving the biosphere, then they're going to rebel against your efforts to properly force companies to account for the environmental costs of their products. There's no either/or here, it's the responsibility of both corporations and individuals.

I think the problem may be that consumerism is the only thing most people have left. Capitalism has already comodified culture, ground workers down to replacable cogs, and put home ownership out of reach. I think its reasonable for people to demand that some of those things be given back in exchange for abandoning consumerism.

Oil companies sell you gasoline that you burn.

One rule which always holds true in life: people who ask for sacrifice will never sacrifice an inch themselves. No matter what cause.

People love to point out a hypocrite but math and statistics are rarely kind to laws that always hold true.

> It creates an incentive where someone doesn't follow the laws, burn everything they can to accelerate their economy, and take industry from other countries.

I think the flaw in this thinking is thinking that burning things is the cheapest way to get energy.

Oil processing and extraction is a complex industry which requires a huge continued investment. Coal requires massive mining operations. Natural gas is probably the least intensive of the burny things, and it still requires a pretty advanced pipeline to be competitive.

Renewables are relatively cheap one time purchases. Save energy storage, the economy that is most competitive at this point is one powered by renewables.

That transition is already happening in the US without a massive government regulation/mandate. In china, it's happening a whole lot faster because the government is pushing it. And the chinese economy is at no risk of being outbid by smaller economies burning fuel.

The main reason burning remains a major source of fuel is that for most nations, the infrastructure to consume it has already been built. It's not because it's cheap.

The issue with any significant steps to curbing the climate or environmental impacts with laws or treaties is always: But the economy. It creates an incentive where someone doesn't follow the laws, burn everything they can to accelerate their economy, and take industry from other countries.

Or quickly develop to the point where solar, wind, and hydro is cheaper than getting dead fossils out of the ground and processing them.

I am not familiar enough with the economics of this to know whether we are close to that point, but I can imagine once we cross it, combustible fuel burners will be at a disadvantage if they haven't invested in infrastructure needed for renewables.

Solar plus batteries is the cheapest form of energy now as of 2025

The technical term for what you're broadly describing is Jevons Paradox.

And what exactly would prevent a country like the United States to use its outsize resources to moot this org?

Ideally I would want the US to be a leader and cheerleader of such an organization.

If the US refuses to participate in the energy revolution, then it'll be a Russia-tier power within a generation.

Empirically, Europe's embrace of the "energy revolution" has done far more to bring it closer to Russia, making energy 2-3x more expensive and gradually destroying Germany's industrial base. So much so that it can't even produce as many munitions as Russia, in spite of a GDP around ten times larger.

No, the energy revolution in question is renewables, specifically solar plus batteries. In no sense has any European embrace of renewables (to the extent that it exists (or does not exist)) in any given country pushed them further towards Russia, the run-down gas station of the world. It is pushing them closer toward China, which is almost certainly as bad for Europe in the long run as relying on Russia or the US, but it's not like Europe was competitive in the non-renewable energy sector either, outside of Norway.

Give Germany time. The US and Russia have forced them to rearm.

My country mines rare earth metals. Your country processes them into computer chips. Joe and Jane's country want those computer chips to fuel their economy.

Who's getting fined, here? Me, because mining the stuff is inherently dirty (without, probably, significant research and capital investment)? You, because you need the stuff to build other stuff? Joe and Jane because they're the ones ultimately driving the production of the stuff? If you fine me into not producing the raw materials, what, ultimately happens to your economy and Joe and Jane's? If I don't sign up, where are you going to get the raw materials, if I'm tariffed into oblivion?

Sorry, I'm not trying to like, doom this away - but there are so many interconnected pieces, that I don't think it's a problem that can even start to be solved from an internet comment. At some point, voters in democratic societies need to decide that they care as much about the world their children will inherit as they do a ten cent difference in gas prices ten minutes from now. It's unclear that they ever will on a long term, consistent basis.

Nobel memorial prize winning solution: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257%2Faer.15000001

Rationally, you apply fines as close to the source as possible. Because they will pass those costs up the stack.

But the source could be the most likely place for corrupt reporting. Or: Maybe the source element is not dangerous but downstream by-products are.

Like you’ve said: It’s a problem.

Honestly, if the economy is killing us all, then screw the economy.

The way our economic systems are set up is inherently anti-human and only benefits a tiny fraction of the population anyways.

It's time for a fundamental rethink.

Bu-bu-b-bu-b-b-b-bu-bu-bu-but supply and demand bro!!!! It's the free market bro! If people are buying, the free market has decided the planet is right to be destroyed!!

The economy is an abstraction. Millions of individual consumers are concerned with the environment and have demonstrated that they're willing to take individual actions to reduce their environment impact. However, individual consumers are not in charge of the economy, which is increasingly consolidated and monopolistic. The majority of pollution is coming from industrial activity, not from consumer activity, not even auto exhaust, and the most important decisions are made by wealthy industrialists who seem to care only about unlimited growth of their own wealth and power, at the expense of the planet. (Even if we're talking only about auto exhaust, think about how return-to-office was forced on workers against their will after the pandemic. Non-wealthy individuals simply don't have the leverage over mega-corps.)

From a political perspective, I think the problems of global warming and wealth disparity go hand-in-hand. It's difficult to solve one without solving the other. To the extent that the ultra-wealthy own the politicians, or actually become politicians themselves, there is little hope for environmental regulation.

Consumers don't need or necessarily even want unlimited economic growth. That only "helps" consumers if they're relying essentially on trickle-down economics, where we have to allow the ultra-wealthy everything they want in the hope that they'll spare us some change. A more equitable distribution of the current wealth would reduce the pressure to produce ever more, more, more.

Consumers usually want products that they own, not rent, products that last for a long time and don't need to be constantly updated or upgraded. Coincidentally, this is also better for the environment. Producers often want the opposite of that, in order to maximize profit. So what we get depends crucially on the power balance or imbalance between consumers and producers. This is where consolidation and monopolization become a major factor.

A lot of the "convenience economy," dominated by temporary, disposable goods, is predicted on consumers having no free time, because they're constantly working. Despite vast improvements in worker "efficiency," we haven't seen comcomitant reductions in the number of hours worked. The future of leisure facilitated by technological advances, which everyone was imagining 50-60 years ago, never became a reality. The technology did advance, but the leisure did not. The other day (or night) I noticed Amazon delivery drivers arriving for neighbors after 9pm; this is a dystopia.

> So what we get depends crucially on the power balance or imbalance between consumers and producers.

Gosh, if only consumers and producers were the same people. What could we call this new economic paradigm?

But no, economic monarchy is the only way to have Freedom (TM)(R), so let's slap on some easily-sidestepped regulations and keep going the same direction! It'll probably turn out fine.

Don't kid yourself - we closed this one with "Won't Fix" a while ago.

"But what about <technology/option>?"

No. Full stop. We're not going to do it, and we're not even going to apologize for it either.

All we can do now is prepare, not that I've seen a lot on this front either.

Worse, even if we’re going to do it, the next idiot in power is going to roll it back and declare to big fanfare and applause that coal is back.

You can’t change the world with plans that last no longer than a presidential term.

Thankfully most of the world ignores America and does their own thing.

There are plenty of people who find it convenient to listen to the current administration, and these people vote. I just hope they remain in a minority in my country. It's always a close run race though...

And a 'more conservative than conservative' party is getting increased media attention here at the moment, which could do serious damage.

the chinese can

Don’t give up!

I have this gut feeling the world had finally got to the point it decided to fix this pesky warming issue among other things, with a nice and cozy nuclear winter.

(/s, obviously)

"But what about <technology/option>?"

That blank will not be filled in with today's technologies, but with technologies we cannot conceive of today and with an energy abundance that we can hardly imagine.

Even in this apparently dire predicament, optimism is warranted.

We'll fix it if it become cost effective. It might, but probably won't because if the scale.

we're going to chose the most convenient path. if climate disaster becomes inconvenient, we'll attempt to do something about it.

it will be a disaster.

In the immortal words of Zapp Brannigan:

https://youtu.be/DH_gPGl5FF4

Nothing can be done about it. If you leave it up to the market it will spiral away forever since the cost of dealing with the problem always increases both due to the size of the problem growing and the cost to insure solutions compounding.

The "obstructionist" greens understand that the system is flawed and needs a structural change. We don't live in capitalist fairyland, there are baseline energy costs that can't be inflated away and our ability to work on the problem degrades after every disaster.

Just need a map for all the bunkers. It's gonna be the future version of open-world video games.

Let’s not pretend anymore.

The uncomfortable truth is that that people in affluent countries don’t want to change their lifestyle. Affluent countries are less affected by global warming than countries responsible for a fraction of global emissions. All the emissions from manufacturing follow suit.

It's not primarily a lifestyle issue, and the problem is no longer primarily developed countries. Per-capita carbon emissions in developed countries have decreased 30% in the past 20 years, and energy demand has remained relatively constant, in fact decreasing slightly in some places due to increases in efficiency. Meanwhile, developing countries like China and India are projected to account for 35-40% of total global emissions in the next decade, far outweighing the impact of individual lifestyle choices in the West.

Of course, people should do everything they can to reduce or offset their own emissions. But the solution is going to have to be societal, keeping up with energy demand by adding more nuclear, solar, and wind to the grid.

> Meanwhile, developing countries like China and India are projected to account for 35-40% of total global emissions in the next decade, far outweighing the impact of individual lifestyle choices in the West.

Sure, but that's still mostly driven by Western demand for... Stuff. I'd like to see that share of global emissions if the West was still industrialised and didnt rely on China to be its factory

It also includes social pressure, try to have a kid and no car, people will look at you like you are crazy. I even live in a country with great public transportation.

As a nomad, can confirm. Coming back to America, the scale and quality of materials is remarkable.

Could you elaborate on your observations?

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> India and China’s contribution to CO2 emissions dwarfs the rest of the world

Such brazen, bald-faced lies. How do you sleep at night?

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co2-emissions-...

Is China often moved by western ire?

Saying "The West has deindustrialised" is incredibly disingenuous. The west's consumerism has driven a race-to-the-bottom for pricing of products in China and India.

This is open access. No need to post a researchgate link.

Here's the original: https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-6079807/v1

Ok, we've changed the URL from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/389855619_Global_Wa... to what that doi.org link redirects to. Is it better now?

Cool, thanks. I approve!

In a pure world everyone would use DOIs to refer to published literature. This would give two benefits: first, always link to the current version. Second, be a persistent identifier for the content.

But HN isn't a specialist scholarly content platform, so it's practical to link to the landing page.

Hi, unrelated:

Your personal website has an expired certificate.

Seems like it expired end of Feb.

Thanks! Certbot did renew it but looks like something went wrong.

I’m out of the loop on researchgate, when you say “No need” is it like an archive.is? Why is it less desirable or, if I’m reading your tone correctly, a “backup option”?

I'm a bit of a scholarly infrastructure purist. The paper has a DOI, it leads to a landing page that has the full text, and the content is open licensed.

Like if someone posted a link to an archive.is version of a Wikipedia page, you'd probably prefer to get the canonical link to that content.

ResearchGate is a bit of commercial enclosure of infrastructure that is, and should be, open. Who knows, maybe it has other value. I'm not an academic so I don't know.

My position is that when it’s open access, we might as well link the primary source. ResearchGate is generally legal. It’s the responsibility of the authors to upload accepted manuscripts if the final document is not open access. AFAIK it does not do anything dodgy like archive.is does.

They're a user hostile attempt to extract money from people. They make their website hard to use.

How so? I am not paying anything and I don’t have any problem getting full texts when the authors uploaded them. In fact, I just logged in and don’t see even the possibility to pay for anything there. I assume they monetise their database, but everything there is supposed to be publicly accessible anyway.

If I am not mistaken we can get documents without an account as well, unlike others.

If the original is available, posting anything else is by definition less desirable.

ResearchGate isn't open access.

ResearchGate isn’t a journal, right? I think it is some sort of… pseudo-social-networking site for papers.

Right, it's not a journal.

How so? I don't have an account but I am able to read the entire paper directly from the OP's link, is there some sort of free limit or something that I have yet to hit? I get some banner ads served on their site but I'm not seeing how it isn't open access.

You may be arguing that ResearchGate allows free access to its articles in general. If so, I believe there's a logical fallacy in your argument. But I've been warned that naming that logical fallacy is a ban-able offense on HN. (Surreal but true.)

Ah, gotcha - yes that explains my misunderstanding. I was equating "open access" to free access to the content via website. Thanks for clarifying.

Some content on ResearchGate can be downloaded for free. Some can't.

Researchgate has nothing to do with OA. Its a social media page for researchers. OA is open licensing that give the reader the rights to download, distribute, etc.

As far as I understand this is a pre-print under CC-BY license, if this answers your question?

The researchgate link has for me a deceptive ad at the bottom: it has a PDF logo and says "download now", suggesting that this will download the paper. It then links to a download page which in the fine print says it will actually download some kind of ebook collection which costs 30 bucks per month. That's a scam.

The clue is in the name, research "gate"

The main driver of this is human-produced CO2, and there are meaningful ways to reduce usage.

-Switch to an electric vehicle -Migrate from gas appliances (range, furnace, water heater) to electric (induction, heat pumps) -If your power grid isn’t clean, add rooftop or balcony solar -Encourage friends and family to do the same

Prices are a great incentive.

In Germany, 1 kWh of electricity costs roughly 3x as much as 1 kWh of gas. That doesn't make heat pumps very attractive. Historically the differences were even worse.

Relying on people individually making choices that are better for the environment at a disadvantage for themselves is not going to work.

The way a good heat pump works is that you can get about 3-5kwh of heat out of 1 kwh of electricity. So, they can save money over gas even though electricity is more expensive per kwh. And of course gas prices fluctuate quite a bit. Right now Germany is low on gas and gas prices are going through the roof because of the situation in the middle east.

Here in Germany this issue is lack of policy, financing, and a lot of people are renting. I actually pay about > 100/month for gas. I live in a 20 apartment building with a big furnace in the basement for the whole building. A heat pump would be cheaper to run but you'd have to do a big one for the whole building. This is actually a good thing. Big heat pumps can be quite efficient. It's probably cheaper than having to install 20 heatpumps for 20 apartments.

But buying and installing heat pumps costs money. Technically, it is actually an investment (i.e. it has an ROI). If you do this collectively as a building, you'd do it to lower your monthly bills. This is something that should be possible to finance out of those savings (at least partially). That's literally why private home owners install heat pumps and get their money back in 6-10 years typically. Faster if they also invest in solar. And get an EV that also powers from those panels.

But this where things break down in Germany. You need consensus. And financing. And there are home owners that can block things and it's their renters that pay the heating bill so the owners don't care. And so on. And if you are renting, you are not going to pay for this either. So, everybody just coughs up the money every month without even questioning it. My apartment doesn't even have a thermostat or a smart meter for electricity. Apparently that's normal in this country. Germany is just deeply bureaucratic and inefficient. For all the talk about environment, they can't be arsed to do what the rest of the world did decades ago: save some energy with smart meters.

Policy could help here. Mainly clearing up bureaucracy. And maybe some more subsidies/incentives (those already exist) or low interest financing. And a clear political goal to vastly reduce expensive gas imports. Even if the electricity for powering these heat pumps would come from gas powered electricity plants, it would still require a lot less gas. And of course Germany has lots of wind power. I think other countries in the EU are a bit further with their thinking than Germany on this front. On paper it having lots of apartment buildings like mine actually means it is fairly straight forward from a technical point of view to upgrade these buildings.

A gas furnace produces at most 1 kWh of heat from 1 kWh of gas. A heat pumps produces 3-4 kWh of heat from 1 kWh of electricity. If electricity is 3x as much as gas per kWh the heat pump should be less expensive to operate.

Plus, it also gives you AC which comes in handy if you live someplace where you want AC.

> If electricity is 3x as much as gas per kWh the heat pump should be less expensive to operate.

This would be true if heat pumps were free. But "less expensive to operate" needs to justify cost of installation over some measurable period of time. If electricity is 3x more expensive than gas, and the heat pump is 3-4x (2.5-3.5x realistically) then you're barely squeeking by except on the days when the pump is most efficient (when it's already warm out). That 3.5 - 3 leaves 0.5, amortized over the lifetime of the heat pump...might not even pay for installation.

So, make heat pumps free or energy cheaper, I guess.

If only the German infrastructure hadn’t been built for Nordstream…

In France, with Nuclear power and renewable it’s 20% lower.

Prices also depends on who you want to give power.

What we should do is make gas four times more expensive through taxes to guarantee the poor never vote for the progressives again. Unironically.

It's the year of our Lord 2026 and people are still making personal responsibility pitches to fix the CO2 levels which haven't been seen in 300 million years

And don't fly

I think there should be a progressive flight tax. The more flights you've taken, the more the next flight should be taxed.

That should allow anyone to do that once-in-a-lifetime trip to a far-away country they've always dreamed of, but discourage people from flying often.

A lot more fuel is needed during take-off and landing than during cruising, making the number and frequency of flights more significant than the distance.

COVID proved that not flying barely made a dent in the global emissions.

Sure, if we never fly again and reverted to living like a medieval peasant, maybe things will kinda work out.

During COVID, airlines flew empty planes back and forth at a loss just to keep the right to their established routes and air ports.

My impression is that flying on a commercial plane produces less CO2 than driving? So if your only options are drive vs fly, I think flying is the correct choice -- is that right?

It's about 60 mpg per passenger to fly domestically and 90 mpg per passenger to fly internationally.

If you have a family of 4, you can think of it as the equivalent of a 15 mpg vehicle for domestic flight and 22 mpg vehicle for international flight. So somewhere in the range of a full-size pickup truck.

But -- when you fly, you go very far. If you go on vacation to Hawaii from San Francisco once a year with your family, that's the equivalent of driving a Ford F-150 for 5000 miles. If you visit India or China that's 15,000 Ford F-150 miles! In a single trip, more than what most people drive in an entire year!

So you can make a big difference just preferring local vacations instead of remote ones.

It's code for "don't travel, especially long distance"... because most people would simply not be willing to make many trips if the trips took as long as the non-flight option would require.

And eat vegan and regional produce

And don't build things out of concrete

And better get a few room mates

Reduce consumption of farmed animal products to zero.

> Switch to EV

Most people can't afford one

> -Migrate from gas appliances (range, furnace, water heater) to electric (induction, heat pumps)

Electricity is considerably more expensive, people that leave paycheck to paycheck would not be able to afford it

Here are somethings YOU can do personally to help:

- Never fly in an airplane again

- Never use ANY vehicle again, walk everywhere(yes EVs also pollute)

- In the winter, don't turn on the heat.

- Eat only vegetables and things you don't need to cook

- etc

If you are not doing ALL OF THESE you have no right on telling other people how they produce their CO2.

FWIW my personal assessment is that this acceleration is both real and largely out of our control. Models in the past did not attempt to account for non-anthropogenic carbon emissions, but as we experience further warming, most especially in the Arctic, feedback loops and tipping points mean that this (carbon emissions caused by “natural” processes) are becoming more evident. This is especially sensitive because a large proportion of such emissions are methane, which is a much more powerful greenhouse gas vs CO2, albeit with a much shorter expected effect time once airborne (~12 years). Consider also that warming is not uniform and the polar regions are warming significantly faster (3x) than lower latitudes, making permafrost melting a very significant climate tipping point. The last point I’ll mention is not about non-anthropogenic emissions but rather absorption. The world’s oceans have been a significant absorber of CO2 however that process is sensitive to temperature and is less effective as the planet warms, not to mention acidic ocean waters prevent shell formation, which is a minor but meaningful carbon sink all by itself.

I’m of the opinion that direct air capture is the primary escape hatch we have for not hitting 3 or even 4C warming in the next 100-200 years, which mean major dieoffs in warm latitudes, even for humans, due to exceeding wet bulb limits. Oh and roughly 65M of sea level rise as the planet shifts to a snow/ice-free mode.

> Models in the past did not attempt to account for non-anthropogenic carbon emissions

They're literally mentioned by the first IPCC report already.

Early IPCC reports, all the way up to AR5 basically threw their hands up when it came to permafrost emissions. They admitted we didn't have the necessary data yet and for the most part didn't account for it at all in their models

Check out the 1.5C special report. Go to section 2.2.1.2, last paragraph says

> The reduced complexity climate models employed in this assessment do not take into account permafrost or non-CO2 Earth system feedbacks, although the MAGICC model has a permafrost module that can be enabled. Taking the current climate and Earth system feedbacks understanding together, there is a possibility that these models would underestimate the longer-term future temperature response to stringent emission pathways

https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/chapter-2/#:~:text=Geophysi...

The claim being discussed is not that they didn’t account for it, but that they didn’t attempt to account for it. Reading that text, I think they did, but chose not to include it (I guess because they didn’t need to to make their point and, by not including it, avoided opponents from arguing about the validity of the result based on uncertainties in those models)

I don't get the distinction you're trying to make. It seems to me they considered it, but did not even attempt to account for it.

They admitted limitations of the data/research they had available. Their model explicitly does not attempt to account for it.

Is it fair to say they account for it, but don’t try to quantify if?

it did not factor into their models at all. They simply mentioned it. Mostly as an asterisk for why their models are likely an underestimation

> major dieoffs in warm latitudes, even for humans, due to exceeding wet bulb limits

my extremely pessimistic position is nothing will happen systemically even after the first few such events, and they'll take tens if not hundreds of thousands of lives.

I hope writing this out jinxes it.

You saw our reaction to covid. Millions. It will take millions of deaths in a nuclear armed country. See 'The ministry for the future'

I generally endorse that book but I am not sure we are quite so short-sighted. What's necessary is for the people who have power (not just billionaires and politicians, but even the middle class in democracies) to feel that they are in danger. A heat wave with a million casualties might do it, but I'm not sure it's the only way.

The ingredients for the Syrian conflict came about because of climate change (dried up farms - farmers moving to cities to find jobs - social tension). The last 10+ years has shown that the relatively well-off Europeans would rather watch the Syrians drown rather than "pollute" their luxury enclaves...

We'd rather kill everyone else rather than give up our luxuries...

Are you kidding? It will be Millions easily. It will just take 1 or two blackouts in wet bulb conditions to cause that

We are already far past the point of mere thousands of lives. Entire cities have been wiped off the map by floods.

It will take millions, if not close to a billion lives before we get serious

> Entire cities have been wiped off the map by floods.

Could you name some?

I wish it were different but I would not be surprised if it’s billions before anything changes. And even then there will be a major proportion of people that celebrate it as the second coming.

Billions? Sounds optimistic. Try trillions or quadrillions before anything really changes. Orders of magnitude are just a dime a dozen after all.

Are we still taking about human deaths here? Confusing…

Albedo modification (stratospheric aerosols) seems much cheaper than direct air capture, as a stopgap.

That unfortunately doesn’t help with ocean acidification.

We simply drop a giant tub of baking soda into the ocean every now and then.

Thus solving the problem once and for all

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VW66EX75jIY

So what? You still save millions of lives.

The research isn't there. Jury is still out on whether the long term consequences are a net benefit. In the end you're talking about increasing emissions for a temporary decrease in temperatures. And the chemicals we have that are good candidates for albedo modification are quite toxic. Today more than 10% of deaths globally can already be attributed to air quality

If India is experiencing large scale mortality from warming, they aren't going to give a damn about your concerns. They're just going to inject aerosols into the stratosphere.

India especially is experiencing many more deaths from air quality than from warming

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Besides the well-documented increases in PM2.5 concentrations at ground level we already have clear research on we'd also face

- ozone layer depletion

- reduced precipitation in an area already drought-stricken. As well as other difficult to predict effects on local climate and weather

- alteration of many stratospheric chemical cycles. We're talking changes to nitrogen oxide chemistry and even impacts on hydroxyl radicals which drive atmospheric cleansing capacity

- increased risk of acid rain from sulfuric acid

Like I said. The research is not there. There are many many side effects we haven't worked out yet.

And spare me the personal attacks about dishonesty, jackass

Humans tend to not breathe in a lot of stratospheric aerosols, on account of that being pretty high up.

As they sink down, they grow larger (condensation & coagulation). Once they reach the troposphere, they usually get down via precipitation, which also isn't really affecting a lot of breathing.

They can absolutely have other effects (see SO2/acidification, e.g), but air quality isn't really the main concern. For SO2 specifically, there's actually very little mortality sensitivity: https://www.giss.nasa.gov/pubs/abs/wa01010x.html

You're right that the research isn't there yet to make statements with confidence, but that applies to the air quality claim as well.

Re carbon capture -- we can cut trees and dump them in "carbon storage" places like the bottom of some water bodies where due to lack of oxygen no rotting happens, like peats and e.g. Black Sea.

And grow new trees in their place of course.

Considering the scale that we are burning oil and gas, our sequestration efforts would have to be comparable. Continuing to burn oil and gas and trying to recapture it is madness, like realizing you are driving way too fast and instead of taking your foot off the gas, you keep flooring it but start applying the brakes.

If we could actually grow trees to capture carbon equivalent to 250M+ barrel of oil per day, it would be better to just grow trees and burn them for energy.

If we just could stop burning that oil, that would be great.

It’s difficult to scale this to the levels we would need to make a difference.

Yes, agree. But I'm not sure direct air capture is more scalable than trees. Yes trees need to be moved, but at least they grow by themselves.

IMO DAC promises are either wishful thinking or a deliberate attempt to sabotage more aggressive climate policies.

Depending on the tree, freshly cut wood can have anywhere from 1:3 to 2:1 ratio of water to actual wood fiber.

So, unless we want to remove a massive amount of fresh water from the ecosystem, we also need to invest energy in drying out the wood well below natural humidity levels (transport to a desert maybe?) on top of electrifying what is currently a diesel and gas heavy industry (cutting and transporting logs with heavy machinery).

There's definitely lower hanging fruit for getting C02 out of the cycle.

Dumping wet wood--even very, very wet wood in a lake and sinking it to the bottom does not "remove a massive amount of fresh water from the ecosystem". It does not remove any fresh water from the ecosystem.

Sinking wood into a lake won't remove the carbon unless you have a very deep lake, and you'd need many, many of them to have any impact on the CO2 levels whatsoever. The scale of wood that would need to be harvested is far beyond dropping some logs in a lake.

They need to go into a deep enough pit where the methane produced from anerobic breakdown won't reach the atmosphere.

The conditions that created the lignite coal and peat simply aren't that easily reproducible, especially with large volume of wood (rather than ferns over thousands and millions of years).

So sink them in the ocean. Or better, burn off the hydrogen and use the energy to dry the wood, leaving the bulk of the carbon, and then mix that in with the soil.

Recreating the lignite era process could be as easy as genetically engineering an alternative,presently indigestable version of lignin.

But my point is that the claim above that sequestering wet wood will somehow take meaningful quantities of water (fresh or otherwise) out of the ecosystem is just plain silly.

> Recreating the lignite era process could be as easy as genetically engineering an alternative,presently indigestable version of lignin.

Ah yes, so easy. Why on earth have we been treating wood with chemicals to prevent rot in our structures when we could have just engineered them to not rot all along?

"Easy" is relative. If the comparison is completely abandoning fossil fuels, launching continent sized parasols into space, running a significant fraction of the atmosphere through a magic filter, etc. the bar is quite different than your moved-goalposts of "compared to spraying something on some fraction of our lumber".

The more likely candidate is mineral based, because yes trees are hard to scale this way.

Excellent comment. I would only add two points.

I think it's important to mention the effects we're seeing today are caused by the emissions from decades ago.

Second, not sure if the paper in the OP touches this but we've reduced aerosols in the atmosphere. These previously were masking the effects of climate change by cooling the temperature.

The paper states it adjusts for "ENSO, volcanic eruptions, and solar variations" and not (afaict) the changes in shipping bunker fuel that reduced atmospheric SO2 (if that is what you mean by "reduced aerosols"). Below is a summary of the topic for those who are unaware. I withhold any opinion of validity of mechanism or effect.

  Sulphur particles contained in ships' exhaust fumes had been counteracting 
  some of the warming coming from greenhouse gases. Lowering the sulfur content 
  of marine fuel weakened this masking effect, effectively giving a boost to 
  warming.

> Oh and roughly 65M of sea level rise as the planet shifts to a snow/ice-free mode.

Current rates of sea level rise are still in single digit millimetres per year (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_level_rise), so that would take millennia. If there's even enough ice in the caps to get that far. Pre-historically, vast ice sheets covered broad swaths of regions now considered "temperate" (per the famous XKCD, "Boston [was] buried under almost a mile of ice"); what remains is a tiny portion and it's simply hard to imagine that it could fill the seas to such an extent.

If you have detailed calculations, please feel free to cite them. But my back-of-the-envelope reasoning: NOAA gives an average sea depth (https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/oceandepth.html) of 3,682 meters. You propose that this could increase by nearly 2%. But the density of water only exceeds that of ice by about 9% (via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice); the thickness of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctic_ice_sheet is only about half that average sea depth; and it covers only about 4% of the water-covered area of the planet (14 million km^2 vs. 361 million km^2, per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth) which is not even all oceanic.

This is a very common figure you can find much support for. Here’s one legitimate source: Ice Melt | Global Sea Level – NASA Sea Level Change Portal — https://sealevel.nasa.gov/understanding-sea-level/global-sea...

Okay, so they say it, but they don't appear to show their work.

What about solar shades? Seems like a relatively quick and easy way to regulate solar input. It's nice too because you can quickly remove it if necessary.

How long would a single cargo-load of shades have to be operational just to offset the amount of CO2 emitted by its launch?

What percentage of the 128-million-square-km cross-sectional area of the earth are you proposing to shade?

kinda obvious, the wealthy parts?

Only becomes viable if you have things like Starship online and fully operational, with launch rates at the level of Falcon 9 today. At the minimum.

Still a more viable option than bringing greenhouse gas emissions into the negatives globally, by the way. But that's a low bar. Nuking the ocean floor is probably a better call.

I'm confident that pushing everyone involved with Starship into the ocean would be a better and faster and more ethical green transition.

Reducing sunlight to the surface means we lose solar power effectiveness and we need to use more power for artificial lighting to grow plants.

Not to a significant degree.

Preventing 1% of sunlight from hitting Earth is more than enough to offset climate change heating. It's not enough to make agriculture or photovoltaics uneconomical. In many regions, it might make agriculture more viable on the net, not less - by reducing climate risks.

Most of the surface of the earth is covered with water...

What if we cover the ice caps, and cover parts of the ocean instead of messing with grow cycles of plants on land...

No reduction in solar power, no artificial lights to grow plants. What effects might that have on ocean life? (below a certain depth - probably nothing, so surface ocean life is what we need to look at).

Just my two cents... we got plenty of surface area we can cover and potentially not affect much at all for day to day for animals, plants, and humans.

Plankton in the ocean produce our oxygen via photosynthesis.

Yep, and those need sunlight, silly oversight.

Regarding carbon capture, it will take more energy to capture the carbon than we burned putting it up there in the first place. Alan Kay, who actually did some systems work on the environment, explained it to me that the climate system is like an upside down coke bottle. It doesn't take much energy to tip it over, but it takes a lot more to put it back up.

In other words, we shouldn't have tipped it over in the first place. We may not have the energy to put things back to a habitable place.

Physically that’s not the case.

Scaled up nuclear power could be had for $3-4B a gigawatt/h. We waste say $1T a year on basic things, like not having universal healthcare. So a simple policy change would let us build about 300 reactors a years, after some scaling period. The excess energy can be used to turn C02 back into oil.

It’s not technically that difficult, we just chose to waste money on stupid things and rich people toys instead.

Energy abundance is simply the choose to build nuclear power plants at scale

Since the industrial revolution we've emitted about 1.5 trillion tonnes of CO2. Direct air capture requires roughly 1,500 kWh per tonne, so recapturing all of it would take around 2,250,000 TWh. Current global electricity production is about 30,000 TWh/year. That's 75 years of the entire world's electricity output just for capture, before you even convert it back to fuel, which costs even more energy. And thermodynamically you can never break even: we only extracted maybe 30-40% of fossil fuel energy as useful work, but reversing the dispersal of CO2 from 420ppm in the atmosphere fights entropy all the way back. It will always cost more energy to put back than we got taking it out. As for the nuclear numbers: Vogtle, the only recent US build, came in at ~$16B/GW, not $3-4B. The world started construction on 9 reactors total in 2024. The all time peak was ~30/year in the 1980s. 300/year has never been close to reality. Average build time is about 9 years per reactor. I'm not anti-nuclear but you can't hand-wave your way past thermodynamics and industrial scaling with "it's just a policy choice."

This is simply saying “current tech doesn’t allow for this”. True. However there are potential avenues That will greatly increase the efficiency, and there are many companies pursuing these avenues so I don’t expect current tech to remain such forever.

What if global warming is beneficial to keep the next ice age at bay?

> Oh and roughly 65M of sea level rise as the planet shifts to a snow/ice-free mode

65M seems a lot bigger than the 3.6mm/year rise we are seeing today (with +1.5C in warming already happening). Where did you read that we will get 65M of sea level rise with 1.5-2.5C more warming?

Can't wait until the arctic unwinds and releases massive amounts of methane into the air, then in the hot hell that earth becomes, all the fucking idiots saying "See I told those stupid liberals that the warming process was natural and not from my truck!!!1!1"

> Oh and roughly 65M of sea level rise as the planet shifts to a snow/ice-free mode.

Where is this new figure coming from? It seems about 60X what's being published elsewhere.

If all glaciers and ice sheets on Earth melted, sea levels would rise roughly 65–70 meters (about 210–230 feet). It’s worth noting that a full melt of Antarctica alone would take many thousands of years even under extreme warming scenarios, so this is more of a thought experiment than a near-term risk. Current projections for this century focus on partial contributions, with estimates ranging from roughly 0.3 to over 1 meter of rise by 2100 depending on emissions pathways.

That's been known for a long time - it just hasn't been considered a likely scenario. It's the rise we'd expect if all the ice on Greenland and Antarctica were to melt:

https://sealevel.nasa.gov/understanding-sea-level/global-sea...

> direct air capture is the primary escape hatch

We MUST MUST MUST stop burning things. Stop it.

- We are still mining and burning coal. This is incomprehensible. US, AU, etc Eg: https://www.nacoal.com/our-operations

- We are still subsidizing oil to around $1T/year, not counting oil wars.

Yes it will take some grid and storage upgrades (US) and continue to embrace renewables. It would be cheaper than the oil subsidy.

Otherwise it doesn't make sense to put CO2 into the air with one hand and take it out with another.

This is why it's clear we will never do anything to slow the progression of climate change.

By far the most effective an immediate solution to limiting the damage of climate change is to simply to keep fossil fuels in the ground.

People talk about the economic pain of doing this, but that economic pain is nothing compared to the impact of unmitigated climate change.

Even though this would be painful, it is also by far the easiest and fastest to implement solution. It would take fantastically more time and resources to scale up direct air capture (even if it existed in a scalable format today) to come anywhere near addressing this problem.

> Yes it will take some grid and storage upgrades (US) and continue to embrace renewables

This is not exactly true, we would have to experience global economic collapse in order to reduce our fossil fuel use. 80% of energy is not spent on electricity globally and this is non-electricity usage is where most of the fossil fuels are consumed and this drives most of the global economy. There's a good reason there are multiple wars being fought over for oil.

The economic pain is current. The impact of unmitigated climate change will happen in the future. Thus, the ingrained short-term thinking of the markets and politicians makes this sort of planning ahead difficult.

It seems like the whole economic system runs on a quarterly time scale - just look at all the times negligent maintenance to improve profits in the short term have caused disasters in the long term.

Not sure what the solution is though, so I won't complain too much.

> Thus, the ingrained short-term thinking of the markets and politicians

I don't think they're the only ones to blame. People want what's cheaper/keeps their standard of living the same. Any of these changes temporality upset and outright destroy large portions of the economy. You would be kicking the silent majority right in the wallet, who doesn't care all that much about any of this.

> the ingrained short-term thinking of the markets and politicians

Honestly, if we made even a step towards the changes necessary to limit the current damage most of HN readership, especially the "green" ones that don't seem to understand global energy usage, would be revolting as well.

The pandemic was a great example of what this would look like as a first step. If we even cared a tiny bit about slowing climate change, there would have been at least some amount of people voicing that we should actually continue to follow early pandemic economic restrictions since it did impact global oil usage.

I pointed this out pretty frequently at the time and was nearly always down voted for it. People want "green" to mean "buying the right thing", they don't want "green" to mean "slicing my annual pay to 1/3, never using Amazon or large retail company to purchase thing, no fruit in the winter, and expensive locally woven clothes".

Yeah, I don’t want that world.

And more to the point, there is literally no way to make that happen. None. It’s as pointless as suggesting we summon magic fairies to cool the earth.

The totalitarian government required to get humanity to return to the lifestyle you’re suggesting here would itself consume vast amounts of energy and resources.

We can’t go back, and almost none of us even want to. We have to figure this out with the tools we have now.

Genuinely not being snide, I really do not know.

Is it possible to produce steel on industrial scales without coal?

I know early ironmaking (I live fairly close to Coalbrookdale!) used charcoal, but is that possible at a large scale?

It’s complicated: https://news.mit.edu/2025/decarbonizing-steel-tough-as-steel...

This is one of the stronger arguments for a carbon tax: if you can’t ignore externalities, people have strong incentives to use less (e.g. buying a car instead of an SUV or biking) and all of the alternative fuel and process work is going to be easier if the cost comparison is more even.

Thanks for the link. I read about electric arc furnaces reprocessing scrap steel somewhere else recently. Do we really never need virgin steel again, we already have all we need?

> We MUST MUST stop burning things.

Yes, we must. It is so rare to see someone saying this in public. Thank you for this simple clarity.

Stop burning everything! Fossil fuel, wood, plastic, garbage, paper. Stop making methane.

We only need solar energy at 1 dollarcent or eurocent (it will get much cheaper still!!) and a little batteries for the convenience of using electricity when the sun does not shine.

In the north and south you need more solar panels in the winter than in the summer by a factor of 50. But that pays it back in summer when you have a squanderable abundance of free and clean energy. We can store that surplus energy in purifying drinking water, melting iron ore or aluminum [5], melting reusable plastics or purifying silicon ingots.

Storing surplus heat or cold in the ground is another luxury, because it is more expensive than 1 dollarcent or eurocent solar running a heatpump.

Wind and hydro are also more costly than solar so they are another luxury with worse environmental costs than pure solar cells.

We need to build Enernet, a peer to peer electricity net and internet between all buildings with power routers. for around 100 dollar per building. You buy and sell your house surplus solar electricity to the neighborhood where it can be stored in car batteries. See my Fiberhood white paper [2].

[1] Enernet: Squanderable abundance of free and clean energy - Bob Metcalfe https://youtu.be/axfsqdpHVFU?t=1565

[2] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Merik-Voswinkel/publica...

[3] Amory Lovins https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v02BNSUxxEA

[4] Saul Griffith on the one billion machines that will electrify America https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEOPx2X-EtE

[5] 101 million machines away from a zero emission Australia https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQ8-uAhG-zs

> Stop burning everything! Fossil fuel, wood, plastic, garbage.

I don't understand the wood argument. Isn't it widely accepted we need to do burns to manage forests? Wood is a short-term cycle of carbon. It releases when it burns but frees up space to capture it right after. When people live on rural plots and trees fall, should they burn for heat (and lessen needing other energy sources) or let it decompose and cause the same thing? It's not the same as extracting deeply embedded carbon sources that won't make it to the atmosphere if untouched (fossil fuels)

Wood and plant burning requires a longer nuanced answer than the Hacker News format allows. Humanity must not cut forests or grow plants unnecessarily. If you must use wood to build a house -(there are better and cheaper materials in terms of energy and climate change enhancing emissions, see for examples Amory Lovins book Reinventing Fire or his lectures on Youtube) - then first grow those trees in a place that has no natural forest. And then do not burn the wood after you demolish the house. Do not use wood from forest, humans should let the forest manage itself.

Same with clearing the underbush of Meditaranian and hotter climate forest to prevent forest fires. If humanity had not managed those forest (grazing animals, building roads, harvesting) in the first place than there would have been no buildup of excess material that sustain wildfires past its natural rate.

The trick to forest management is allow or create small, frequent burns that clean up dry, overgrown understories. Nature does this without our help and some species even depend on it. If we interfere with this, eventually there's a big fire instead that levels the place.

US, AU?

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/coal-consumption-by-count...

Yeah true. I was just giving western examples.

To be fair, CN is known for exploring all avenues and are deploying a ton of solar and nuclear. http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2022/ph241/patel2/images/f...

It's commendable relative to other countries not deploying much, but nonetheless, CO2 cares only about totals. See consumption by source:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...

> Otherwise it doesn't make sense to put CO2 into the air with one hand and take it out with another.

I agree that it doesn't make sense, but I also want to challenge the engineering assumption that an extremely relatively inefficient solution should be ruled out.

If direct air capture worked and simply required absurd amounts of carbon-free power, say from nuclear, it would mean that we no longer have to fight political battles against the entrenched incumbents. They could simply emit whatever our elected politicians let them get away with, and DAC would soak it up.

I completely acknowledge that it seems somehow egregious to do it this way. I am an efficiency-minded person and would hope that we could do it the efficient way. But given all the ugly constraints and lack of progress so far, should we really expect this to be solved the way an efficency-minded engineer might prefer?

If we get to that level of desperation though, I would hope that we could simply pay the emitters to install carbon capture.

What I don't think will work is a politics of rage, righteous or otherwise. I don't recall any incidents in history where a politics of rage led to cool-headed, efficient technocratic solutions. The perennial problem is that the same politics of rage is equally accessible to your opponents, and it spirals down from there towards disorder and violence.

Stopping burning fuel now will return us centuries in the past, I suppose to about 1700. Twenty years ago it would return us to 1500. Then a handful of people had heating in their homes and a horse to travel. This will happen again if we stop burning now.

Such claims are ridiculous. Nobody needs burning fuel. Everybody just needs energy and it does not matter which is its source.

If enough energy is produced by other means than burning fossil fuel, nobody will return to the past.

I happen to be one of those who does not use directly any kind of energy, except electrical. Despite the fact that I am still connected to methane gas distribution, I have never burned it for already around a decade. (And unlike most, I cook myself from raw ingredients everything that I eat, but I stopped using flames for that many years ago.)

If burning fossil fuel would stop completely right now, that would not affect me at all, much less would return me centuries in the past, as long as the electrical energy supplier has enough sources in its hydroelectric, solar, wind and nuclear plants, all of which are abundant where I live.

For aircraft and spacecraft, hydrocarbon fuel will remain the best solution, but synthesizing hydrocarbons was already possible at large scale before WWII and it could solve easily this problem in a CO2-neutral manner, if a fraction of the money wasted for various useless or harmful things would be invested in improving the efficiency of such critical technologies.

Most people can't afford to go 100% electric.

Many of them are already sacrificing health care to afford food and shelter.

Bro what are you talking about. Nuclear power exists. You simply scale one we have now by 10x and buy BYDs EV capacity for 5 years and you’re done.

It’s not even particularly expensive relative to GDP.

No offense, but internet opinions are a dime a dozen -- do you have some special experience / credentials in this area? The arguments you provide are all just the sort of thing that PhD students would study, and incorporate into their models. I'm inclined to believe the experts, but if you _are_ one, and are saying with authority that these effects are missed, that is a much more interesting story.

The question is not if the commenter is an expert, but if they are correct.

The claim that some models didn't take larger systems into account is also because an expert in the arctic wasn't an expert in oceans. And the expert in biodiversity isn't an expert in food supply chains. Expertise isn't the question. Instead it is - do all of us who are non experts (all of us) have enough expert data to have a systemic understanding of an accelerating trend?

Ya, I agree, but I am not familiar with the intimate details of present climate models, nor am I planning to be. I can't/won't directly evaluate whether the argument they present is correct. But if _they_ are familiar with the intimate details of present climate models (ie, if they are an expert), I will tend to trust them more.

I’m not a modeler but I have directly asked modelers if clathrates, permafrost melting, wildfire incidence and ocean drawdown responses to warming was incorporated in the major models. 5 years ago the answer was no. Today the answer might be yes, but this is not really the point I’m trying to make. It’s really that we should expect to see acceleration in warming as the natural environment responds to anthropogenic (“forced”) climate change.

The models don't consider these because there's considerable uncertainty as to the size of these effects and potential countervailing forces of similar magnitudes.

The fact is, for all of these other secondary effects etc... we just don't know. It's too complicated of a system.

So as a result, we've got a prediction of something between "somewhat bad" and "catastrophically-is-an-understatement bad" with a maximum likelihood estimate of "really really bad."

> ... we just don't know. It's too complicated of a system.

I wish this comment was higher up.

The big thing under-discussed about climate change is that the deeper we get into it, the harder it is to predict and understand.

I recall Dr. Richard Alley discussing how Thwaites Glacier collapsing wasn't factored into any IPCC reports; but ultimately pointed out it was for good reason because it's simply not possible to model these things and their consequences accurately.

I don't do any climate modeling, but I do a lot of other modeling and forecasting: the biggest assumption we make in all statistical models is that the system itself more or less stays statistically similar to what it currently is and what we have seen in past. As soon as you drop that assumption you're increasingly in the world of wild guessing. If you wanted me to build you a RAM price prediction model 2 years ago, I could have done a pretty good job. Ask for one today and your better off asking someone with industry but no modeling experience what they think might happen.

This is the hidden threat of climate change most people are completely unaware of: we can know it will be bad when certain things happen, we know they will happen in the nearish future, but we can't really say exactly how and when they'll unfold with any meaningful confidence.

And yet we can still say something simple that is true: warming will accelerate due to non-human greenhouse gas emissions as the planet continues to warm, due to feedback loops and tipping points in the natural carbon cycle. This is an unassailable statement.

> This is an unassailable statement.

No. I believe what you're saying is very likely to be true, but we know there's both positive and negative feedback and we don't really know how they really will interplay and where all the tipping points are.

There may even be significant phase delay in these mechanisms and so we could even get oscillation.

Over time periods in excess of 10K years this is a reasonable caveat. For more human-oriented timelines, there's no negative feedback mechanism I'm aware of that would do anything close to producing an actual oscillation.

Edit: I'd be happy for you to educate me how I'm wrong btw, since that would mean I've missed something significant, which would make me happy! So please do tell me if you know of such a mechanism.

I really meant to say that there's no way to really know of any region of the CO2 vs. temperature graph if there's positive or negative feedback dominating. You're proposing it all runs away in one lump, and I'm saying that there can be chunks of runaway and then damping. An extreme case would be if things are really underdamped somewhere and we spiral down to one of these points.

There are all kinds of things that have time lags from years to centuries, though, that could cause ringing (ocean heat uptake, rates of carbon uptake as the biosphere adapts and shifts, etc).

Indeed, we have evidence of ringing in the geologic climate record-- like Dansgaard-Oeschger events. We also live with ringing in weather systems like El Nino. Warming intensifying or creating new modes of oscillation would not be that surprising.

On the internet the default pisition is not true/untrue; its, why should I acknowledge you?

If you are still trying to gauge truth before this, you are poisoning your mental heuristics. Thats why propaganda are ao effecfive: you can be told something is either, and it can still be effective.

Humans and LLMs are similar: the separation between input and commands is not a hard barrier.

So, back to GP: CLIMATE CHANGE is reversible. It just depends on whether we are talking about socipecnomics or physical processes.

2 years ago this was hard won knowledge, searching for papers and then putting it all together in survey form for analysis. Today I can tell you: feel free to ask Deep Research or another LLM you trust to do that work for you, generating citations along the way. You can convince yourself vs me having to convince you. It will take about 15 minutes.

I do not trust any LLM. But I am with the other person, the intention is not to discredit you or make you convince us - you are doing exactly what a comment section is designed for. Your comment is so good, in fact, that we want to trust it more than a comment in general deserves to be trusted.

while i agree its better to go off and prove it to ourselves, there is merit in having a conversation here

For better or worse, I don't trust an LLM to give me a correct answer in this space. But you've kindof dodged the question by recommending LLM's -- do you have special experience / credentials in this area?

I answered elsewhere. I’ve been doing research on this topic for about 10 years, but I am not a climate modeler. I have spoken to people who are climate modelers and, at the time, these non-anthropogenic factors were not controlled for. They acknowledged that this was a blind spot that needed more research. At the time Arctic warming was only just beginning to be recognized as happening more quickly than the rest of the planet and the implications of that were concerning but unclear. There is still some acknowledged lack of understanding for just why the polar regions are warming so much faster (it’s not all melting / albedo feedback, because it’s happening in Antarctica too). What is less debated at this point is that permafrost comprises a truly mammoth proportion of CO2/CH4 reserves that are on an accelerated melting path (~1000Gt was the last estimate I saw, although it’s not all likely to go up at once of course).

If they said yes, would you blindly trust them? They told you to "do your own research" effectively and you punted. That would arguably be a more reassuring path for you I assume.

Truthfully, because they dodged the question I am now a bit suspicious of everything they say. It just seems a bit deceitful. I explicitly called out the dodging not because I wanted to hear from them after they'd dodged it, but because I want to make it clear to GP that their answer is not sufficient, and highlight to others that they maybe shouldn't trust GP.

If they had answered my first question in the affirmative (something like "I am a researcher at X institute on this topic"), ya, I think I would have trusted them.

I don’t type fast on my phone, so you’re getting responses as I can give them. I think I’ve answered your questions sufficiently to draw your own conclusions at this point. Feel free to ignore me. Physics doesn’t care.

The people who say the Earth is flat have been "searching for papers" too.

No offense, but you sound like an oil shill.

Surely the children churning out papers in a memey field, with no real special insight into computational modeling, are the real ones to trust! Their papers are in Nature!

Ridiculous take, and you’d know that the OP was correct if you cared enough to know what researchers were actually saying.

Climate arguments devolve into appeals to impact claimed by authorities rather than any examination of what they’ve said.

Would a PhD student incorporate something into their model that flipped their results from agreeing to disagreeing with the premise that has not only practically become a religion, but forms the foundation for more and more funding flowing into their field each year?

Would they really want to risk being basically excommunicated from their area of research for daring to provide ammo to “climate change deniers”?

> I’m of the opinion that direct air capture is the primary escape hatch

Great! That means we dont need to reduce emissions, cuz the magic bullet will just take care of everything. No need to change anything.

Relying on DAC is putting our fate in the hands of a technology we've never deployed beyond some pitifully small pilot projects, and expecting that we're going to be able to deploy that at a larger scale than we've deployed any technology since electricity itself.

We're going to have to resort to geoengineering alright, but it's gonna likely be stratospheric sulfate injection given how cheaply that can be done. Is it ideal? Nope. Better than global warming itself? Time will tell.

It's going to have to be a mixture of approaches. Stratospheric injection buys time for more holistic solutions.

The prospect that the future we're headed for will be one where the survival of civilization (and much of humanity) depends on a massive, ongoing industrial process of upper atmosphere pollution, in order to counteract the massive, ongoing industrial process of CO2 pollution we can't be arsed to rein in, leaves me feeling relieved to be mortal.

I don't disagree. At this point, I'm thankful I never wanted kids.

> I’m of the opinion that direct air capture is the primary escape hatch we have for not hitting 3 or even 4C warming in the next 100-200 years

Why is it always never 'burn less fossil fuels'.

Anything but the oil company bottom line huh?

We could cease burning all fossil fuels tomorrow and we'd still have to resort to geoengineering. Read the IPCC projections. All of the ones that keep us below 3c require 'negative emissions'. That's code for DAC, a technology that we've only ever deployed to small pilot projects, deployed more widely, more quickly, than we've deployed any technology ever.

TLDR: We're gonna have to use sulfate injection until we can transition our economy

Yes. And if we don't also stop burning fossil fuels then we'll never even break even.

nobody will champion degrowth because it means less profits

> Our data is "approximate"

> and there can be "no longer any doubt".

Who has written this?

The paper doesn't seem to account for the reduction in sulfur emissions from ships, which was widely reported to be the cause for some of the recent warming?

The worst thing you can do when you're actively geoengineering is to abruptly stop doing it. So naturally we found a way we were already doing it and cut it immediately to make sure we fuck ourselves as much as possible :)

I'm almost convinced it's intentional at this point, the rich are busy building their offbrand vault tec bunkers and starting random wars for no real reason. Longtermism nonsense over the today.

Airborne sulfur comes with its own negative environmental consequences, though.

To be honest, looking at Paleogene climate reconstruction I believe it was the best time in earth history. The way things go shows us that all attempts to resist burning fossils are quite futile. It takes some kind of catastrophe to change people habits. The level of coordination required to achive the goal of lowering emissions looks unachievable to humanity. We have enough time to adapt, adaptation is more reasonable and pragmatic approach.

During the Paleogene, the terrestrial plants and animals were very different from those of today.

Now on all continents and islands most of the big animals and plants are humans, domestic animals and cultivated plants. The wild animals and plants, even if they are much more varied, with many thousands times more species than the domestic ones, are much smaller in quantities, with only a few kinds that are non-negligible, e.g. ants, termites, rodents.

So if we will return in a short time to the Paleogene climate, the main question is how this will affect the few dominant animal species, like chicken, humans, pigs, sheep, cattle, dogs and the main cultivated plants, all of which are not adapted to a Paleogene climate and which will not be able to adapt in such a short time.

It is likely that places like Canada, Alaska, Greenland, Siberia, Antarctica might become nicer places where to live and practice agriculture, but the few people who live now there would not welcome invaders coming from places that are no longer habitable.

I don't see that everything except Canada, Alaska, Greenland, Siberia and Antarctica was inhabitable. For instance in Eocene the climate remained fairly warm and homogeneous (the most uniform in the Cenozoic).

From the equator to the poles, forests grew. Fossilized remains of cypress and sequoia have been found on the Arctic Ellesmere Island, and palms — in Alaska and northern Europe.

Equatorial and tropical forests (with palms, fig trees, and sandalwood trees) persisted in Africa, South America, India, and Australia.

Eucalypts, sequoias spread widely, and new types of broad‑leaved trees appeared.

By the end of the Eocene, rainforests were preserved only in the equatorial parts of South America, Africa, India, and Australia — due to the onset of cooling.

The only outcome is advanced human civilization will go extinct, with the carrying capacity of the world to support enough humans to specialize. Maybe that's the AI rush and drive to distract everyone with divisive presidents and pointless wars.

Wasn't this attributed pretty much directly to cleaning of the shipping lanes? With more direct sunlight on the ocean, we are getting warmer oceans. With warmer oceans, we get everything that goes along with that.

I didn't see it mentioned in the article, though I did do a very brief read through. And it has been a while since I looked at the shipping lanes thing.

I hasten to add this is not to claim we should not have cleaned the shipping lanes. I don't know enough to say on that front. My gut would be that it was still the correct move.

It's my understanding that if you look at a large enough historical time window, although warming has accelerated recently (and we are in part to blame); the Earth is still relatively cool compared to historical averages.

Of course, the relevant thing for us as a species is whether or not the forecast temperatures are sustainable for us.

The planet as a whole will do just fine. We're not going to break the planet. The reason that people bring up the huge anthropogenic spike in temperature is because us anthropoids evolved in the context of a narrow band, and it would seem as though we're moving the global climate out of that band.

We aren't hunter gather's, mammals have been around for hundreds of millions of years, and

Modern Humans can just use air conditioning tech, most people in india already have a tanki, people will just dig as far as they need to keep their water cool like they already do. Irronically the people most affected are the affluent in places like dubia, if the grid fails and they don't have backups.

> just use air conditioning tech

> the people most affected are the affluent in places like dubia, if the grid fails

Just use that noodle a little more. Connect the dots.

That is very true, but the issue really is the speed of change not the total amount of it. If we were to raise 2c over 10,000 years, that would be a non issue for the most part, adaption time would be so slow that many civilisations will come and fall between then. That it is happening over a hundred or so years, that is a huge whip lash and thats where the problem lay. We built a large but somewhat fragil industrial system assuming continued stability. Dumping 2 trillion tons of CO2 into an already barely stable system will not go down as the brightest idea we have had.

If you go from the top of a building to the bottom, it isnt the height that is the issue but the speed of change. You take the lift, not jump of the side of the building.

Milankovitch cycles? What time frame? Did humans live in the same areas during that time? At -4C cooler new york city was under 2000 feet of ice. +4C would be devastating for most of humanity.

I don't know why you are getting downvoted, you are absolutely correct: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/09/1...

Because from a human perspective, it doesn't matter. The planet used to be a ball of molten rock at one point, it doesn't mean we should shrug our shoulders at the thought of it returning to a molten state. It may be "natural" but it's not suitable for humans.

It’s a common fossil fuel industry talking point, which hopes that the listener doesn’t realize that the climate changes in the past which weren’t deadly happened on much slower time scales. We have a much larger human population now so if you’re saying “nature will survive” you’re also saying that you’re okay with millions of people dying or becoming refugees.

People like to get worked up about this topic haha. All I'm sayin' is, it might get a lot hotter. Or maybe it will get cooler? I think it's important to put things in context because it's not some monotonically increasing function even if there is a local trend. I'm pro doing what we can to correct our impact on the environment; I'm even pro going beyond and attempting to control for other non-human externalities. My point is actually that nature doesn't care, but I think we should. Although, even if we try our hardest, we still might not like the outcome.

Look at all the comments under your original comment.

Their point is very valid. Geologic scales are extremely long and the planet does not care.

Humans, on the other hand would physically not be able to survive in most climates going back 100 million years or more. Too little or too much oxygen. Temperatures too high or too low, etc.

We cannot compare this event, which is much, much, much faster than any natural warming, to natural warming events. Those generally take tens to hundreds of thousands of years to shift as much as we're moving things in under 200 years.

Hundreds of thousands of years ago we were basically apes living in caves that could barely speak.

I never said their (or your) points weren't valid. In fact, I think they are quite self-evident and well known. People are assuming in bad faith that I'm unaware of these facts or that I sought to mislead with my original comment.

Companies are setting up constantly running gas turbines for powering AI datacenters - insanity.

Billionaires just ignore any laws in place to stop it. Fines don't affect them.

Nothing will change until developed rich countries are starting to hurt.

And I don't think it's going to hurt enough in 10 or 20 years.

The pain will come slowly, people won't see it.

It's like going back to the middle age so slowly, that the population don't realize or feel it.

And honestly, wars and trump are making climate concerns so difficult to think about.

> Nothing will change until developed rich countries are starting to hurt.

Ironic OECD countries actually REDUCED their emissions based on a peak in 2007 and continue to do so. Not reduced as a percentage of GDP or adjusted for population growth, but reduced in absolute levels. It's all China, but I guess it's cool to blame things on developed countries.

There are literally 100k deaths in Europe that can be prevented if they lifted restrictions on AC so that they can feel good about making a negligible effect on carbon emissions. So I think you have it opposite, how much pain do rich countries have to endure before they realize that their efforts are in vain.

And before you say "that's because the West outsources all the dirty production to China", even trade adjusted emissions are down considerably and continue to be down.

Please do some research if you're interested in this topic, it's not hard to do. Just follow the logical steps.

1. What causes global warming

2. Who produces most of these chemicals

3. Are there any global trends over the last 20 years in production of these chemicals

https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions

https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/europes-crusade-against-air-co...

> It's all China, but I guess it's cool to blame things on developed countries.

This is just a naive take. You'd obviously expect chinese emissions to be higher (than the US) assuming similar industrialization, because you are counting emissions for like triple the amount of people.

What you conveniently fail to mention: US citizens still emit over 50% more CO2 each, and China basically just caught up to emission levels of developed countries (EU, Japan), while still being significantly below US levels. High income countries combined still emit more than China, too (richest ~15% globally).

If your argument would make any sense, then the obvious solution would be to split China into 3 countries, making the emissions instantly negligible compared to the EU/US. Problem solved?!

There is no reality where we make good progress toward climate change without the "main culprits" (=> nations with highest historical and per-capita emissions) making the first steps.

Why would a country like India pay/sacrifice to reduce emissions while western citizens still pollute at much higher levels after reaping all the spoils from historical pollution?

You could argue that wind/solar is a huge success story in this regard already, with western nations driving lots of the research/development/commercialization efforts (over the previous decades) and now indirectly causing much bigger nations like China to transition onto those very quickly instead of basically fully relying on fossils for decades to come.

> Why would a country like India pay/sacrifice to reduce emissions while western citizens still pollute at much higher levels after reaping all the spoils from historical pollution?

To avoid their country having large regions become uninhabitable?

Even for a giant country like India you control <20% of global population, and you are responsible for much less than 20% of the effect (climate change).

So why would India take more expensive and painful steps than say, the US or EU, or Japan? India both indisputably affects and controls climate change less then the US or EU, so why would they put in completely outsized amounts of effort to fight it?

Because much more of their land will become uninhabitable.

And also we should be helping them.

Which leader do you think is more likely to get elected by the populace? The one who tells the destitute Indians they must suffer more, lest their home be lost, or the one who says it’s America’s fault, and that they should pay in MANY ways for what they’re doing to the Indians’ home?

And besides, what do you think they’re going to do? Give up their highly efficient motor bikes? Destroy their personal businesses and starve? How far do you think we could push them? Maybe we could convince them all to just die to make room for our pollution and their nuclear-backed army will agree happily.

I swear half the arguments I see are just completely lacking in regard for the fact that this is happening in the real world, and not a vacuum.

You miss the fact that China's GDP per capita is 1/6th the US. So to produce 1/6th per person they emits 2/3rds the CO2. Which means in total, the thing that matters, is that china produces 4 times the CO2 with no end in sight. They are 99% to blame for the current situation.

No they're 15% to blame for the current situation: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co2-emissions-...

The EU-27 is 17% to blame.

The US is 24% to blame.

Yesterday's CO2 emissions cause today's problems. Today's CO2 emissions will cause tomorrow's problems.

If total matters then it's historic total per capita where US is (far) ahead, "current" is 100s of years on climate scale. Unless one insists on only stats that makes PRC to blame. All per capita GDP vs per captial emissions reflects is PRC gdp per capita (btw PPP is 1/3 US) is massively underreported, i.e. comports with other proxy indicators like how PRC consume a lot of goods at per capita rates higher than 1/6 nominal and 1/3 per capita would suggest.

... so if you are some poor rice farmer, you should be forbidden from even heating in winter, but if you're rich enough, flying around the globe all day is a-ok?

I'm not sure exactly how this sounds like a good argument to you, but I can assure you most certainly that less wealthy persons will not find it convincing.

[flagged]

What do you even mean by "arguing at scale"?

I have a point and numbers to back it up, I don't see either on your side.

> US citizens still emit over 50% more CO2 each

The problem the US has per-capita is lower population density. The majority of the US population lives in suburban or rural areas without mass transit and changing that on the relevant timescale is not feasible. It also has major population centers in areas that experience winter and thereby have higher energy costs for heating, exacerbated by the lower population density (more square feet of indoor space to heat per capita), with the same infeasible timescale for changing that.

As a result, the only way to fix it is to switch to other forms of energy rather than having any real hope of significantly reducing consumption in terms of GWh. Use more electric cars and hybrids, generate electricity using solar, wind and nuclear, switch from fossil fuels to electric heat pumps for heating, etc. But that's largely what's happening. The percentage of hybrid vehicles goes up, despite Trump's posturing nobody actually wants coal, ~100% of net new generation capacity in recent years is solar and wind and even when new natural gas plants are built, they're displacing old coal fired ones, which results in a net reduction in CO2. It would be nice if this would happen faster, but at least the number is going in the right direction.

The problem China has is that they've been building brand new coal fired power plants at scale. WTF.

Assume the avg. home will last 50 years. Limit construction on new suburban developments, problem solved in 50+ years. It would be unpopular, but you claimed it wouldn't be possible, very different. The latter is denying agency in the situation.

> Assume the avg. home will last 50 years. Limit construction on new suburban developments, problem solved in 50+ years. It would be unpopular, but you claimed it wouldn't be possible, very different.

The impossible part of "problem solved in 50+ years" is the 50+ years when you need it to be solved sooner than that, and it can be solved sooner than that by doing something else, namely electrifying heating and transportation and using renewables and nuclear to generate electricity.

We're kinda doing that, through zoning requirements and NIMBY politics. It is, as predicted, very unpopular, and has a number of unfortunate side effects like rising homelessness, declining fertility, and increasing inflation.

On the plus side, we're going to have many fewer people in 50 years, which will lead to correspondingly less CO2 emissions.

You listed out a whole lot of excuses for America, suburbia this, heating that, etc etc, etc...

Now an assignment - you are Chinese and you have 1.5bn people in your country, lets hear it? You think you can't reasonably list 100x "excuses" for their "issues" and "reasons" for CO2 consumption?

They are working a lot harder than pretty much all other countries combined to usher in renewables and many other things while we elect people who don't know what wind is/does and stare at the Sun during the eclipse.

What excuse actually is there for building new coal plants instead of directing the same labor to building more nuclear or renewable generation? There is no reason to build coal, Trump is a schmuck for proposing it but China have been the ones actually doing it.

Chinese demand is increasing just like everyone else's, and they're both retiring older less efficient plants and using fossil fuels as both peaker and baseline generation. But coal utilization overall, despite massive growth in energy demand, is basically flat in China. There's plenty of reason to build out coal capacity to keep grids stabilized while you transition to solar and wind (China finished their 2030 1200GW solar capacity target 6 years early in 2024 and continue to grow that number at an incredible rate).

I agree that new coal sucks but it's a very easy talking point for westerners like us to latch onto when our own contributions to emissions remain way over 50% higher per capita - despite much of the manufacturing and such not happening in our countries.

> But coal utilization overall, despite massive growth in energy demand, is basically flat in China.

"Basically flat" only after running up an exponential curve so that coal consumption is now higher per capita in China than it is in the US and China is generating ~60% of its electricity from coal compared to ~16% in the US.

> I agree that new coal sucks but it's a very easy talking point for westerners like us to latch onto when our own contributions to emissions remain way over 50% higher per capita

You don't even get to say "westerners" anymore. CO2 emissions are higher per capita in China than they are in Europe because they burn such a disproportionate amount of coal, and are only lower than the US and Canada because the US and Canada burn more oil per capita from being so spread out.

The difference in coal power for china is basically purely from them using coal instead of gas, see comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47276338

Despite higher carbon intensity (for now), they still emit less Co2 per person on electricity than the US (because they need/use less).

Sure but they don't burn oil because they don't have oil. So focus on fossil fuels in general, or emissions rather than just coal specifically - again it's not good to add new coal plants but they're growth negative. And EU has done an admirable job of reducing their emissions, with help of course from Chinese manufacturing of pv cells etc.

They are also building more solar panels and wind turbines than the rest of the world combined, and are the biggest investor in renewables. Their emission of CO2 just recently peaked. But they need a lot of power, and most of the new coal plants are there for days when there’s neither sun or wind.

> They are also building more solar panels and wind turbines than the rest of the world combined

All the more reason they have no excuse for building coal. Yet they're also burning more coal than the rest of the world combined.

> most of the new coal plants are there for days when there’s neither sun or wind.

If that was actually the case they wouldn't need to build new coal plants because renewable generation at 40% of normal plus the existing traditional power plants that used to be enough to supply 100% of power by themselves would be more than sufficient. More to the point, if that was actually the case then their emissions would be way down because they'd only be burning coal for something like one week every two years.

China needs some form of dispatchable power and is basically using coal instead of gas because they have none. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47276338 for numbers/more detail.

Japan, Spain and France also have negligible oil and gas production and didn't go all-in on coal as a result. Spain is 0.32% coal and 22.5% natural gas. France is 0.31% coal and 5.7% natural gas.

They are building coal for things that cannot yet be handled by renewables because coal is the fossil fuel natural resource they have the most of.

It's the same reason it was the dominant fossil fuel for electricity in the US until the shale revolution made natural gas cheap and abundant.

The reasons Trump is a schmuck for pushing coal are (1) he wants it instead of renewals rather than as a way to help fill the gap between renewables and what we need until we can build enough renewables and storage, and (2) in the US that makes no sense because because natural gas can fulfill that role and is better in pretty much every way that coal.

Compare to China which is putting vast amounts of resources into building renewables, storage, and also a nationwide UHV distribution network (currently 40-50000 km compared to ~0 in the US) which means local variations in solar/wind can increasingly be covered by non-local renewables, which should reduce the need to fire up those new local coal plants.

> What excuse actually is there for building new coal plants

Just that they're still 'developing' and aren't even close to the historical contributions of the US?

Assuming you're American, it's a bit rich to have contributed more in absolute terms and then tell other countries what they can't do.

Explain me why the average car in the US is a tank with horrible fuel economy? In rural I can sorta see it. But in cities, why drive a truck? These are all choices that America makes.

> Just that they're still 'developing' and aren't even close to the historical contributions of the US?

This is a sham excuse. Building coal power plants before solar or nuclear were viable or even existed is not the same as choosing to do it in modern day.

> Explain me why the average car in the US is a tank with horrible fuel economy?

The "best selling" light vehicles in the US are pickup trucks because the sales numbers aren't divided out into personal and business purchases and businesses buy a lot of trucks. The best selling non-pickup is the Toyota RAV4, which gets better than 30 MPG in the non-hybrid version and better than 40 MPG in the hybrid version.

Come on. This is bullshit and you know it. There's >10M light trucks sold each year and <3M passenger cars.

This is not because most of those trucks are used by some business, this is because people like to drive around in them.

The 40+ MPG Hybrid Toyota RAV4 is a "light truck" in those numbers.

⬆ what he said

> Ironic OECD countries actually REDUCED their emissions based on a peak in 2007 and continue to do so.

Our economies are built on oil burning somewhere else in the world. You can try to point the blame at China, but the wealth generated in the middle east selling them oil is a major part of the reason why US stock markets keep going up.

If you forced China to use less fossil fuels you would personally feel a much larger hit to your quality of life.

We in the developed world love to outsource the violence and environmental damage we cause. It's one thing to wash your hands, but quite another to then try to point the finger.

That's a bit out of date, it's likely that China has already peaked. And it's not oil but coal that they tend to burn.

Renewables are cheaper than coal and oil energy, so we will see an increase in quality of life as China electrifies, at least for those of us that import Chinese manufactured goods.

Oil is mostly for people's cars, for an unsustainable transit system that locks us in little boxes and kills all our salmon and is one of the greatest threats to the lives of our children. Getting rid of oil and coal is going to be a loooot easier than getting rid of our car infrastructure.

> If you forced China to use less fossil fuels you would personally feel a much larger hit to your quality of life.

America imports more from Mexico, Canada, and the EU than China which ranks as #4 when you consider EU as a single entity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_trading_pa...

Imports from China are a small fraction of GDP and offset by exports to other countries. OECD countries are largely exporting labor not the kind of heavy industry associated with heavy CO2 emissions. Which makes sense as China has relatively cheap labor, but they don’t get a discount on Oil.

> Mexico, Canada, and the EU

Do you want to take a wild guess as to which country is a top 3 importer to all of these countries/regions?

Here's a clue: it's the same country that is a major exporter of oil from GCC countries, and the wealth from those GCC countries is a major contributor of investment to US industry/financial sector.

The correct answer, is of course: China

The global is economy is very tightly interconnected and still very much driven by oil and fossil fuels in general. You can do all the accounting tricks you want, but developed Western lifestyles, especially in the US, are entirely supported and made possible by growing global fossil fuel usage.

> Do you want to take a wild guess as to which country is a top 3 importer to all of these countries/regions?

Canada imports 377 Billion from America and only 88 Billion from China. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_trading_pa...

So you clearly don’t actually understand global trade if you think being top 3 trading partner somehow drastically changes the equation here. China is a massive economy with 1/6th of the worlds population and a top 3 economy, so yes it does a lot of trade but economies are a lot more than just trade.

I think you're missing the point. A large part of the things we import from those countries indirectly come from China, so it's disingenuous to claim that China is not a major contributor to the US economy based solely on what we import directly from them.

For example the US's top product imported from Mexico are vehicles, electrical equipment and machinery. But those things are assembled from parts produced in China. So if you reduce China's use of energy you not only impact the direct trade that we benefit from but also the indirect trade.

And you still haven't addressed the way the global financial system is so tightly interconnected. GCC countries invest an estimated $1 trillion in the US, but a large chunk of that wealth comes from oil being sold to Asia, with China being one of the major purchasers.

The point stands that you can't meaningfully disconnect US energy usage from Chinese energy usage. If, for example, we were to stop GCC export to China (and not sell that oil in order to fight climate change) the US economy would ultimately collapse (this is in fact one of the major strategic levers that Iran has right now).

> A large part of the things we import from those countries indirectly come from China

88B can’t be a particularly large part of 377B even before you consider that 88B is largely used domestically not for exports to the US and Canada also exports to China.

Fundamentally something that costs 1$ can’t require more than 1$ of fossil fuels to produce without someone losing money on the transaction. Most goods do embody some carbon, but US agricultural goods being exported actually embody a much larger fraction of CO2 than most goods due to the nature of farming and the vast agricultural subsidies. This alone offsets the trade imbalance rendering US trade very close to carbon neutral.

As to your specific point, product from Canada, Mexico etc, may have parts from China. But Canada isn’t simply redirecting 100% of its Chinese imports to the US. Further Canada, Mexico, and the EU and the US are also exporting goods to China directly and indirectly.

Again, calculate the actual CO2 involved trade with China is basically irrelevant from a CO2 perspective relative to domestic emissions.

> global financial system is so tightly interconnected

We’re talking actual emissions which sums to 100% of global emissions. The environment doesn’t somehow double count pollution because it’s the result of the financial system. Thus the impact of the global financial system and everything else is already being accounted for.

tl;dr The amount of fossil fuels it takes to make stuff is not nearly as big as the amount of fossil fuels we use to transport ourselves in cars.

Consumption-based accounting of CO2 emissions is harder than production-based accounting, but it allows us to see more clearly what the CO2 cost of our lifestyle is. It's been ~5 years since I looked at one of those in detail, but I don't think it's changed much since then. The big takeaway for me was that for the US, which has massive emissions compared to Europe countries, urban/suburban design and land use was by far the biggest determinant of CO2 consumption, followed by income/wealth. Despite their higher wealth and ability to spend more, residents of urban areas have for lower emissions than suburban residents.

See, for example, https://coolclimate.org/maps

There's a tendency to think of consumption in zero-sum terms, but it turns out that energy efficiency has a massive impact on emissions, and also that intuition about quantities of emissions is really hard to gain without a lot of study.

> Ironic OECD countries actually REDUCED their emissions based on a peak in 2007

OECD countries' past emissions are causing the warming we see today.

> and continue to do so

China's emissions declined last year. The US's increased.

> It's all China, but I guess it's cool to blame things on developed countries.

China used their emissions to make solar and batteries the cheapest source of electricity today.

> OECD countries' past emissions are causing the warming we see today.

China passed EU's cumulative emissions in 2014, if I remember correctly. It's totally fair to blame industrialised countries for their share in causing global warming, irrespective if that happened in the early days of industrialisation and was propped up by dirty energy sources. Though, it's morally much harder to give a pass to countries polluting now using the same sources.

> China passed EU's cumulative emissions in 2014

Not yet according to https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co2-emissions-....

> it's morally much harder to give a pass to countries polluting now using the same sources

Developed countries should subsidize their use of cleaner energy sources. That balances things out, morally speaking.

Don't do the AC thing, it is a stupid trope under blogfluencers. There are no restrictions (besides positioning the outer unit in such a way that you cause your neighbors to lose sleep). As the summers get more extreme in Europe, more residents decide getting one is starting to pay off, so you see more AC's, but many people think they are doing fine without.

Yeah, never heard of such a thing. The restrictions are placing the units in common areas of the buildings -- in that case you need permission -- and external walls are usually common parts. Placing them in the façade may have additional restrictions.

But, if anything, energy efficiency standards for new construction are so strict that heat is becoming less of a problem.

I can easily google restrictions and share them, and I have in other comments but let me throw it back at you.

Why do 90% of Americans have AC while only 20% of Europeans do?

Why does US have ~4 heat related deaths per million while Europe has ~235 per million?

Do you think it's just stupidity (Europeans don't know the relationship between heat and AC)? Or poverty? Any other explanation?

https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/08/1152766

> Why do 90% of Americans have AC while only 20% of Europeans do?

Maybe because the majority of Europe is closer to Canada, latitude-wise, than to Phoenix, AZ, and there is simply less demand? Less wealth is certainly a factor, too, especially considering how the warmest nations in Europe all tend to be weaker economically.

> Why does US have ~4 heat related deaths per million while Europe has ~235 per million?

Maybe its just the higher life expectancy increasing susceptibility? Everyone has to die of something at some point.

> Maybe its just the higher life expectancy increasing susceptibility? Everyone has to die of something at some point.

Ah yes, heat death, essentially "natural causes". Never mind what's obviously in front of your face.

It is a statistic, 'treacherous' is a word often lurking around the corner.

No healthy person all of a sudden dies from heat, I am sorry to tell. If that would be the case, everyone would be as panicked as you are. Europe has comparatively older demographics. Heat risk mainly affects infants and the elderly.

Most EU countries have free health care, so even people not caring enough for themselves will have a comparatively higher chance to survive into an old age. But also those who didn't die because of a bad lifestyle are part of this demographic. Like I said, treacherous, because you should look at this demographic and start to ask how many hours of life expectancy is lost. Healthcare keeps finding that the elder people just don't drink enough during these warm days.

I guess that if you want to win back these hours, you have to convince those elderly people to install AC or get them to drink enough during hot days. At this age people have a certain flexibility of mind, complicated by the fact that heat waves these days are really more severe than in their lived past.

Let me assure you: if people think it is too hot for them at home and they don't see an alternative, they will install AC. It is affordable enough. But there might be a cultural difference, people don't think of AC as the first line of defense against the hot days. Environmental awareness is higher; AC's contribute to global warming. Anecdotally, looking around I see there is a preference for sun protection over AC's.

> Why do 90% of Americans have AC while only 20% of Europeans do?

Because Rome is further north than New York and Paris is just south of Ottawa/Montreal.

Raw latitude hardly tells the entire story.

Most of Europe simply doesn't need an AC. Spain, south of Italy, south of France, parts of the Balkans. But in countries like UK, the Nordics, Germany, etc. you'd need something more than "open windows" for mere days of the year, if that. The people who live in the places that need AC usually have AC. It's actually pretty damn simple.

Got it, it's cooler, no one needs AC. Next question, why are there a lot more heat deaths per capita. I mean, a lot more (4/million vs 235/million)

Should be simple

Could be lot of reason. Older European cities with high-density stone buildings and less green space often trap heat more effectively than typical U.S. suburban layouts. Europe has a larger proportion of elderly residents (aged 80+), who are the most susceptible to heat stress. You just picked a data and are trying to fit your narrative on top of it without really considering all possible aspects.

> Older European cities with high-density stone buildings and less green space often trap heat more effectively than typical U.S. suburban layouts.

Doesn't that mean that they would need AC, then? At least for those specific buildings.

However, as a European living in Paris, one of the densest cities in the world, I only feel the need for AC like 2-3 weeks a year. I think the issue is that most people dying of heath are already very old and much more sensitive to it.

But if you live in any kind of share building, you can't just go and set up a split. If it is outside the building, you need permits, both from the architects, so that you don't deface your ugly concrete building, and from your fellow residents, who usually vote "no" by default.

You make a lot of great points. You know what would be great for helping those elderly residence prone to heat strokes living in high-density stone buildings with less green space? Air conditioners! In face, I think EU should mandate air conditioners in every home.

Because 'global warming has accelerated significantly'?

then it wouldnt be cooler would it

> 100k deaths in Europe that can be prevented if they lifted restrictions on AC

Please don’t repeat this anti-Europe myth. Anyone applying a bit of common sense should realize how improbable that claim is.

China is some years behind our industrial development then undevelopment, and is building an entire USA of solar panels every year or whatever - can we expect them to quickly reduce emissions soon?

A year ago, the IEA thought China's emissions had peaked:

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/chinas-fuel-demand-m...

And this recent assessment puts emissions from China at "flat or falling" for the past 21 months:

https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-ha...

I thought the world and civilization would collapse because of carbon emissions. It's either serious or it's not. If it's serious then it doesn't really matter right?

It's like you're on a boat that sprung a leak and everyone grabs a bucket. But a few people choose to not help because it's not fair for whatever reason.

Are you a climate change doesn't matter guy or a china is the climate change causer guy? You can't do both at once.

To deniers both arguments are valid - just use whichever one is more convincing to the person you're talking to. The objective is continue using fossil fuels no matter what.

To "alarmists" both "climate change does matter" and "China isn't the only problem" are valid arguments because that's a logical AND: "it's a problem and we're causing it, so we should do something". When you inverse it you use DeMorgan's law and you have to disprove one, either "it's not a problem" or "we can't do anything to stop it" but they typically do it in a way where one purported disproof invalidates the other, for some reason. They argue both "it's not a problem" and "it's a problem but we can't do anything to stop it".

Did you mean to respond to the other person who responded to me?

To alarmists both arguments are valid - just use whichever one is more convincing to the person you're talking to. The objective is stop using fossil fuels no matter what.

Im not sure what is this type of debate good for.

What "both" arguments are so-called alarmists using? What's an alarmist, exactly?

And yes, the objective is to stop using fossil fuels. That's not exactly a secret agenda, it's the whole fucking point.

What is denier, exactly?

Seriously, there is no debate with this rethoric.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_denial

You didn't answer either of my questions. Even though I asked first.

You missing the point, again.

Do you have a point? Please communicate better. I may well be speaking to a bot.

I'm pointing out the hypocrisy and the focus people have on developed countries is just signaling. A weird anti-west sentiment from people who almost exclusively live a wealthy life in the west.

I'm not an expert, but from what I have read I believe humans do have an effect on climate. However this doesn't mean that any draconian measure that would essentially impose one world government and population control (which is the inevitable outcome of all of this) is preferable. But more importantly I'm anti stupid measures like restricting air-conditioning because they make a negligible impact and literally kill 100k+ people a year.

China has roughly .4 AC units per person while the USA has roughly 1 AC unit per person. You are simultaneously arguing everyone should have an AC, and that China should stop expanding their usage of AC.

I'd argue everyone should have an AC if they need one (probably China needs more than they have.) But we shouldn't build any more fossil fuel extraction, people who need AC should figure out how to do it with batteries and renewable energy. (Nuclear is fine, if it makes sense economically.) We don't need population control, we just need to add sufficiently large taxes on things we want less of. AC isn't a thing we want less of, it's carbon emissions.

Nah, the analogy for your argument is:

Two Americans and ten Chinese are on a lifeboat. The Americans are each eating two sandwiches a day and the Chinese are eating one. Supplies are low. You do the math and note that the Chinese sure are eating a lot of sandwiches.

To your metaphor, their point is that if everyone is grabbing buckets while someone else is working to spring more leaks, maybe someone needs to set aside their bucket & stop the person springing leaks

What?

The point is that China is the only thing that matters at this point. It's a lot bigger, has surpassed OECD and is growing quickly. Every decline of emissions by developed countries is more than made up for by growing China emissions

https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-ha...

Chinese emissions have peaked and are now falling.

Emissions in China are not growing, and Chinese manufacturing is largely responsible for falling emissions in developed countries

> It's a lot bigger, has surpassed OECD and is growing quickly

Please stop lying. It hasn't cumulatively emitted as much as the OECD [1], and cumulative emissions are the cause of our current predicament.

It's also doing the opposite of growing.

1. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co2-emissions-...

> can we expect [China] to quickly reduce emissions soon?

They did, last year.

they continue to build more solar, more wind, but also more coal power plants.

No, they are not building new coal fired power plants at the same rate they are expanding renewables. This is several years out of date.

China is also replacing old, inefficient coal power plants with new ones.

The "Our World in Data" citation cuts off right as China's emissions started to decline. More recent data [1] indicates that China's emissions have been flat or falling since the beginning of 2024, and falling fast in the last quarter of 2025 (1%, which is huge on a quarterly basis).

China's decarbonization & renewable efforts have been paying off in a big way. EVs now have a 51% market share among new vehicles [2], exceeding every single major city in the U.S [3] (though the SF Bay Area comes close). Likewise, renewables are 84.4% of its new power plants in 2025 [4].

[1] https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-ha...

[2] https://electrek.co/2025/08/29/electric-vehicles-reach-tippi...

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/03/06/climate/hybri...

[4] https://en.cnesa.org/latest-news/2025/11/4/chinas-newly-inst...

> There are literally 100k deaths in Europe that can be prevented if they lifted restrictions on AC so that they can feel good about making a negligible effect on carbon emissions.

Which restrictions on AC? I know that Europeans don't use AC as much as the US because of a mixture of historical and cultural reasons, but I wasn't aware of any restrictions. What prevents someone in Europe from buying and installing an AC unit in their own home?

Here in France, where you need a bureaucrat to sign off some paper for another bureaucrat, and where we levy taxes on taxes, I'm not aware of any restriction on AC from the state. Sure, the politicians say we should put up with sweltering heat, unlike them who have reasons to run their cars' engines for hours while they sit around in useless committees inside air-conditioned historical buildings. But there's no law against AC yet.

What usually happens, is that most people live in cities. And in cities, they have to get a permit from the HOA and from the city, lest the outside unit deface some historically significant square concrete building (yeah, I know there are actually historically significant buildings, ugly concrete ones built after 1950 aren't among them, though they're where the majority of the people live).

> Ironic OECD countries actually REDUCED their emissions based on a peak in 2007 and continue to do so

Any idea what percentage of this reduction is due to offshoring manufacturing?

Keep reading the comment, pretty much the same.

> https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2

The IEA says China’s CO₂ emissions rose by 565 Mt in 2023 to 12.6 Gt, which it states was a 4.7% increase from 2022.

So any emission reduction done by developed countries is offset by China.

And then China's emissions declined in 2025. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45108292

> There are literally 100k deaths in Europe that can be prevented if they lifted restrictions on AC so that they can feel good about making a negligible effect on carbon emissions

Where in Europe are ACs restricted because of carbon emissions? Even in France with very strong building codes (you can't just plop an AC on your own, you need approvals), ACs are the standard in the south where they are needed for long periods of the year.

> There are literally 100k deaths in Europe that can be prevented if they lifted restrictions on AC so that they can feel good about making a negligible effect on carbon emissions.

What restrictions are there on AC?

Several EU countries have mandatory temperature limits for air conditioning in public buildings. Spain, Italy, and Greece have all announced that A/C in public buildings cannot be set lower than 27C (80F) in summer Some exceptions allow up to 25C like restaurants and some work places.

The EU's F-Gas Regulation creates significant restrictions on refrigerants used in air conditioning

There's significant red tape when installing AC due to building regulations

90% of US homes have AC while only 20% of European homes have it, I don't think that's by accident.

Fun fact, some EU countries even have laws telling you how much you can open your windows! In the UK, there is a law that in any public building, windows must not open more than 100mm (about 4 inches).

Newer refrigerants with lower GWP are great actually. That’s not a restriction on installing AC.

Your mentions PUBLIC building policies are irrelevant

Are you claiming there are restrictions on installing ACs, or there are restrictions on how those installed are used? The two are quite different arguments.

And 27C is a completely normal temperature. When it's 35C outside, you're better off with a minimised thermal shock with a small difference, instead of going at it the US South or Dubai style where inside it's 18C, so all everyone does is move from one air conditioned place to another (home to car to office to car to mall to home).

> Spain, Italy, and Greece have all announced that A/C in public buildings cannot be set lower than 27C (80F) in summer

So?

Euro intransience about AC is confusing.

As for PRC, they brrrted out enough solar last year to replace about 40 billion barrels of oil over their life time, or about annual global consumption of oil @100m barrels per day. They have enough renewable manufacturing capacity to displace global oil, lng and good chunk of coal.

PRC is basically manufacturing the largest carbon displacement, i.e. emission avoidance system in the world, and if not for them, global fossil consumption would double+.

It's even more retarded accounting that taxes PRC manufacturing renewables as generation emissions while fossils extractors, i.e. US whose massively increased oil/lng exports do not count towards US emissions.

At the end of the day, PRC's balance of emissions vs how much they displace via renewable manufacturing makes their emission contribution net negative, by a large margin. OCED countries reducing their emissions don't even compare in terms of contribution, it's borderline performative. OCED need to be reducing emissions and generating equivalent displacement to be net negative. It doesn't have to be domestic net negative, simply export/fund enough renewables to developing countries whose power consumption and downstream emissions will increase by magnitudes... you know subsidize them like OECD was suppose to do. Reality is rich countries don't want to do shit about the "global" emission problem, at least PRC selling renewables at commodity pricing to displace velocity of fossil consumption increase. Ultimately, 4 billion developing people going to 10/100x their energy consumption, which like AC is net moral good over net emissions. The real battle is how to keep new power use as emission free as possible, and only PRC is doing that in numbers that matter.

Wanking over OCED reducing their emissions is overlooking OCED was suppose to help developing countries minimize (not reduce) as they grow. All OCED has to do is give PRC renewables the 100b they once pledged on to help developing countries transition for PRC to run renewables manufacturing at 100% utilization (or even expand) so significant % of new power generation is renewables. 100b at current PRC prices of $0.1O/watt buys about 1000GW of panels (enough to power all of Africa & India and more). Or OECD can manufacture at sell at/below cost themselves.

A reminder that reducing emissions isn't enough. We actually need them to be net-negative.

Eventually we want to get there, post 2050, but at a very low rate compared to our net emissions right now. Still, it's far cheaper to avoid emitting now than it is to pull it down later, so every time you drive your kids to school remember the debt you are saddling them with.

To add to this, no matter what countries do, we can make our local environments nicer to live in by reducing pollution but across the globe, solar activity has exponentially more, and the ultimate impact. With the magnetic field weakening, it's going to continue going in this direction as it has throughout history.

I'm not saying we shouldn't do what we can to make our local environment better and protect and Preserve what we have. We absolutely should. I'm just stating that this is not the first time the Earth has heated or cooled and nothing that we do will ultimately stop it from this cycle from continuing.

You’ve been misinformed. Yes solar activity fluctuates. Human induced climate change is still real and affecting temperatures much more rapidly.

The initial pain will be diffuse and not obviously caused by global warming.

For example, destabilization of equatorial countries due to wet bulb temperatures, through multiple causal paths: worse education outcomes (many days off school during hot months), worse economy (can't work outside), worse life satisfaction -> more autocracies, more water scarcity.

Then you get more emigration to the colder north, more conflict and more suffering. But not much of it is easily and directly attributable to temperatures.

Much of it is foregone upside, like GDP growth that's 3% instead of 5%.

That's the sum of climate change. "GDP growth of 3% instead of 5%."

Severe enough to be noticeable, but not severe enough to warrant radical climate action. Not an extinction threat. A "slow trickle of economic damage, some amount of otherwise preventable death and suffering, diffused across the entire world, applied unevenly, and spread thin across many decades" threat.

And stopping the GHG emissions demands radical, coordinated global action. Major emitters would have to pay local costs now - for the sake of global benefits many decades down the line. And those emitters are not the countries that face the worst climate risks. Global superpowers can tolerate climate change - it's countries that already struggle as it is, that don't have the resources to adapt or mitigate damage, that can face a significant uptick in death and suffering rather than damage in the realm of economics.

That makes climate action a very hard sell for the politicians. Thus the tepid response.

By now, I'm convinced that the only viable approaches to climate change lie in the realm of geoengineering. Which does not require multilateral coordinated action against a "tragedy of commons" scenario, and is cheaper than forcing local GHG emissions into negatives.

Even non-permanent geoengineering solutions offset impacts here and now - thus buying time for fossil fuel energy to succumb to the economic advantage of renewables. And geoengineering measures can be enacted unilaterally by many powers - as long as the political will is there to absorb a few strongly worded condemnation letters.

And then when the GDP finally collapses, there will have been nothing that could be done about it for the last 50 years and they'll ask wtf we were doing in 2040, why we didn't stop it then.

That's the nasty thing. It doesn't "finally collapse".

The world just eats the climate costs and keeps going.

There's no global catastrophe. No single moment when the magnitude of your folly is revealed to you a blinding flash. Just a slow trickle of "2% worse". A loss of what could have been.

Whether there will be a global catastrophe or not, it is unknown yet and unpredictable.

There are many mechanisms of positive feedback that can accelerate global warming instead of just reaching an equilibrium at a higher average temperature than now.

If some of those mechanisms of positive feedback would be triggered, a global catastrophe would be possible, due to the excessive speed of the climate change, which does not give enough time for the biosphere to adapt to it.

Instead of hoping that we will be lucky, it would have been much better to avoid such risks and prevent further increases in CO2 concentration and average temperature.

I am old enough to have seen a dramatic change in climate from the time when I was a child, when the seasons were still exactly as they had been described for centuries and millennia at that location in Europe, to the present time, when winters are no colder than autumns were before and I have never used again my winter clothes and boots for about 15 years.

I find such a radical change during my lifetime quite scary and I see no evidence for claims that "the world will keep going". The truth is that nobody knows whether this will be true and hoping that this will happen without doing anything to guarantee such an outcome is reckless.

There is not enough "positive feedback" going around in the system to do anything of the sort.

Plenty of feedback mechanisms were proposed, investigated, and found lacking. It's a "makes climate change 10% worse than it would otherwise have been" kind of thing, not a "makes climate change 1000% worse than it would otherwise have been" kind of thing.

Making the temperature rise 10% worse doesn't mean the GDP impact won't be 1000% worse.

There's only so much worse things can get before the fundamentals of civilization aren't there any more. 3 meals a day from anarchy.

The world got hit with WW2 and moved on. It takes a lot to destroy "the fundamentals of civilization" on a global level. Climate change is woefully insufficient.

The problem is that we will not move on from WW3, and famine, water depletion, resource exhaustion etc. are all existential problems for individual countries that will cause conflicts between previously peaceful nations. At some point the nations in conflict will have alliances and nuclear weapons, and people will use them when the choice is between that or starving to death by the millions. I would be somewhat more optimistic about humanity's ability to weather worsening circumstances if we didn't develop the human extinction button in all of our grand technological wisdom.

Climate change is not the great equalizer people want it to be.

Nuclear superpowers are among the least likely countries to actually collapse from climate damage.

US isn't Syria, and it's Syria that's at risk.

First world countries like France can absorb a +30% spike to food prices. Countries where the same food price spike would come with a major death toll don't have the tools to kick off WW3.

Pakistan and North Korea have nuclear weapons. What makes you think that other countries won't develop them when push comes to shove? Right now the status quo is such that smaller countries find violating international sanctions on nuclear weapon development to be disadvantageous (no immediate benefit from having them; expensive to have them; economic punishment for having them). The calculus on the status quo changes considerably when famine or other ecological disasters are threatening to wipe out half your population. Is the US going to invade all potential nuclear weapons developers like it did with Iran? Do you have complete confidence that will always work and never escalate towards anything larger?

You know it. The country that was probably the closest to "developing nuclear weapons" is currently in the process of being bombed to shit for it.

Not the only reason, no. But their nuclear ambitions certainly did contribute to their current predicament.

Nuclear weapons take time, expertize, resources and sustained political will to develop and deploy. If you have all of that, you might be able to put all of that towards climate adaptation instead. Or: go for the nukes and bet hard that you aren't going to get bombed to shit for it. Worked out for NK, but doesn't seem to have worked for Iran.

I think the level of tolerance US has for marginally stable autocracies with nuclear weapons has receded permanently.

Not to mention that merely having a nuclear bomb doesn't automatically allow one to cause WW3. Nuclear weapons were used in a world war already, and that didn't even destroy a single country - let alone the world. It takes a lot of nukes, and a lot of delivery mechanisms, to actually move the needle on the matter of human civilization existing.

> Is the US going to invade all potential nuclear weapons developers like it did with Iran?

Invade? No. Bomb? Probably. Same if for India if e.g. Sri Lanka decides it wants nuclear weapons.

Global warming will unfortunately disproportionately hit poor, equatorial countries. (Also, starving countries can’t afford a nuclear programme. There is no breakout risk in Sudan.)

> US isn't Syria, and it's Syria that's at risk. First world countries like France can absorb a +30% spike to food prices

And you think a second, much larger Syrian refugee migration will have 0 impact on France?

Nothing happens in a vacuum. Everything and everyone is connected.

WW2 hit the higher layers of abstraction. You could still grow food plants in those countries during and after the war, but the governance structures were bombed. Climate change is the opposite. If you can't grow food, you're fucked.

I am not sure how not directly linked to global warming. I am currently on the phone but I remember a study that mentioned that Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh would see a deadly heat (wet bulb temperatures) from basically 0 as it is right now to 30 days/year by 2050 or 2060. I can't remember right now.

If that is not linkable to global warming I am not sure what is. And that is a huge event. In Europe we are struggling with accomodating perhaps 10M people. What happens when 1.5B come knocking because if they stay they die?

Chapter 1 of "The Ministry of the Future" describes a fictional wet bulb event. It's grisly and horrific and I highly recommend you read this chapter, it changed my view on climate change.

https://books.rockslide.ca/read/780/epub#epubcfi(/6/14!/4/2/...

Thank you. I will

> What happens when 1.5B come knocking because if they stay they die?

We sink the boats.

Indeed, no reason to expect anything will happen differently from what is currently happening, but on a 150x bigger scale.

Y E S

Are you that excited to see innocent people die?

Or am I misunderstanding your comment?

There are also statistics showing that mortality because of cold is much higher than mortality because of heat.

About 9 times higher.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254251962...

"What happens when 1.5B come knocking because if they stay they die?"

More taxes go to ammunition for autonomous border guard systems.

> "What happens when 1.5B come knocking because if they stay they die?"

You think that’s bad... Up here in Canada we’ll have to deal with Murican immigrants as things heat up. Talk about killing the vibe.

I think the least of your worries will be immigrants when an imperialistic nation with superior military power realizes that the annexation of your land is necessary for its survival.

I actually am moderately concerned with that to be honest. If the US doesn't have free and fair midterms I don't think it's really that paranoid to be worried about it.

This is why it's so important we pass the America SAVE Act. We have to stop MAGA from cheating in 2026.

Why would the US annex canada? It is already in the american hegemony.

To distract from the Epstein files.

I'm surprised even the smarter democrats are saying that stupid line. Distraction would imply there are still to be people who have not yet learned and formed an opinion on the Epstein files. Everyone knows about these already and made their positions about it.

As it turns out the most abhorrent things can come out with those Epstein files and it doesn't seem to hurt Trumps support among his base any. Doesn't seem to be threatening any legal action for him or implicated parties. Once again only Maxwell is in jail, somehow, with dozens and dozens of witnesses stepping forward. Democrats have been grandstanding on this man for 10 years now and haven't been able to stop him. I think by this point it is clear he is going to get away with everything even if people want to write about him "flailing." Him flailing is literally him achieving all his domestic and foreign policy goals right now and his base couldn't be more pleased...

This is not inevitable. We have time, now, to prepare for the future, which doesn't have to be a carbon copy of today.

Unfortunately most political systems around the world reward short term results, not long term thinking.

Just look here in the USA -- the Democrats tried to do some forward thinking things like subsidizing solar and wind, and they were rewarded by losing at the ballot box (of course that isn't the only reason, but it's one of many).

There are no rewards for long term thinking, so it's hard to get anyone to do it.

> (of course that isn't the only reason, but it's one of many).

This is disingenuous. It's one of many in that it may have contributed 0.0001%. If they wouldn't have done that, would they currently have more power? Absolutely not, believing otherwise means being clueless about what has motivated people to vote in certain ways.

It's definitely more than .0001%. Look at the campaigns. How much time did the GOP spend harping on windmills and solar subsidies and "clean coal". Calling out democrats for trying to make the environment better at extra cost to US citizens was a huge part of their campaign.

I expected you to say this, but hoped you wouldn't. Of course I know they talk about it. GOP campaigns say and do a lot of things, there's dozens of topics they shout about. From Benghazi to Hillary's Emails to gender-neutral emails to immigrants to indeed coal/renewables and so on. You could easily name 30 topics.

The topics have different purposes. Fossil fuels vs renewables in particular hasn't won the reps a single race, I repeat. Every race they've won, they would've won without it. And every race they've lost, they would've lost without it. The purpose of bringing up that particular topic for them isn't to help win close races.

> The purpose of bringing up that particular topic for them isn't to help win close races.

How can you possibly know this? How could you know what is in the mind of every voter and why they make the choice they do?

They bring it up for a reason -- because their research says talking about helps them win elections.

So, those of us with no suede in this race, who will see no reward from the system anyway, are the only people who can be trusted to make change. That means you and I (and I dare say a significant portion of the populace).

It's not obvious what we can do (individual actions taken within the context of a system are dwarfed by structural forces of the system), but we're the only ones who are going to do it. So, let's assume we did fix things, and we're looking back from 2050, doing a retrospective. What things did we end up doing, that got us to that point?

There's nothing you as an individual can do, or even a small group of individuals. This is where government is supposed to work. Using its power to force everyone to do something for the collective good that isn't profitable.

Almost all emissions come from factories. There are only two ways to reduce that -- a global set of rules that increases costs to reduce emissions, and an overall reduction in consumption, via a carbon tax.

> Almost all emissions come from factories.

industry, transport and home use (heating & A/C mostly) are all roughly 30% of emissions.

(another way of splitting it says electricity, industry, heating, and transport are roughly almost 25% each. It depends whether you count electricity on its own or bundle it with how its used)

But I agree with you about solutions. The market will quickly bankrupt any companies that induce extra costs to decarbonify. It's the governments job to ensure that externalized costs like CO2 emissions are internalized via carbon taxes. (or alternatives to carbon taxes, which are worse)

Factories are staffed by people. Those people have the physical capability to change the way the factories operate. Any individual person attempting to modify / replace the factory equipment against their line manager's will would quickly find themselves out of a job, but collective action among factory workers (e.g. unions) might work. So might getting the line managers on board with the proposal, if you can get enough buy-in that "we used our discretion" is an acceptable answer: it's not like most companies actively want to pollute, rather that it's usually cheaper to do so, and they don't care about not. Being able to say "this move reduces turnover among our workers, slashing training costs; and you can probably use it in the B2B / B2C [delete as appropriate] marketing, since environmentalism sells in some markets; and this way, we're prepared for future legislation expected in jurisdictions A, B and C" may be sufficient justification. Alternatively, there may be ways to exploit the principal-agent problem.

I'm sure there are people who've specced out detailed proposals for this sort of thing. There might even be previous cases where they've succeeded, which we can learn from. Neither of those "two ways" you mentioned are things that I can do, but I may be able to slightly reduce the intensity of the opposition. (Companies tend to like when regulations require their competitors to do things they're already doing, after all.)

Right now things are getting worse in that regard, not better

Sure, but if you were to make that concrete, what would you recommend and where do you see potential for it to be implemented?

Patricia Anthony published a novel about this in '93. Cold Allies. It's good military sci fi. Doesn't pretend to offer answers.

> What happens when 1.5B come knocking because if they stay they die?

Like let them build few of those sci-fi domes and let them keep buying disposable bottled oxygen? I don't get the pessimism. India makes its own rockets. Pakistan has nukes. Why are they supposed to be incapable of holding the nation together on Mars-like Earth?

Tokyo is already hitting 40C/100F at >90% RH during summers. It's already mildly unsurvivable. Nobody cares. Maybe in 10-20 years we'd be wearing spacesuits, but do anyone seriously think the equatorial regions will be uninhabitable and land prices on northern Europe is going to skyrocket???

The fact people already live in some of the hottest places in the world today should speak a little to human resiliency.

We can live in hot places if the air stays dry, which it usually does or historically did. If the air gets more humid we cannot anymore.

> Humans may also experience lethal hyperthermia when the wet bulb temperature is sustained above 35 °C (95 °F) for six hours.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoregulation

"Migration to the colder north..."

Maybe that's why the Trump regime wants so badly to invade Canada and the Groenland?

Wasn't a drought originally part of the cause of Syria's collapse into civil war? Climate change is already causing unrest in equitorial countries, mass migration and a corresponding rise in authoritarianism / right wing populism in Europe.

You're making the "It's snowing there can't be global warming" argument in reverse.

One local drought can't be attributed to or be proof of global warming.

It's like smoking causing lung cancer; (the following numbers are made up) 5 in 100 non-smokers might get lung cancer but 20 in 100 smokers do. 5 of those smokers would have gotten lung cancer anyway and 15 wouldn't have but there's no way to know which individuals are in which cohort.

Not necessarily. Climate change means there will be more droughts; and if droughts cause civil war, there will be more civil war (that's the GP's relevance); even if we can't tell which ones were caused by global warming, that's still bad.

Oh no, on the contrary, I'm saying it's already started and people aren't paying attention.

Developed rich countries are hurting. See the wildfires across North America, massive amounts of flooding across Europe, etc.

Nothing will change until many of the global electorate stop burying their heads in the sand. These people don't change their minds until things affect them specifically. Then they change their mind, and all their former fellows tell them they're brainwashed.

This doesn't change until nearly everyone is affected, and by then we're so far into the catastrophe that the consequences don't even bear thinking about.

I have a different take: Things will change once a big part of the electorate no longer feels like climate change policies will hurt their pocket. A lot of the opposition to the policies are from people who aren't in the richer percentiles and probably work in a field that's related to fossil fuels (like heating engineers, car mechanics, etc.). They fear job losses and that their commute and heating bills go up.

I have a different different take. It's not the electorate's pocketbook that matters, it's the political donors pocketbook that matters.

"Drill baby drill" will be echoed so long as petroleum companies and petroleum rich nations dump billions into propaganda outlets, politician campaigns, and in the US, PAC groups to support "drill baby drill" friendly politicians.

So long as that dynamic exists, it doesn't matter if 80% of the electorate screams for change. So long as the incumbent advantage exists forcing people to vote mostly on social issues, these sorts of economic and world affecting issues will simply be ignored.

There's a reason, to this day, you'll find Democrats talk about the wonders of fracking, clean coal, and carbon capture.

IDK how to change this other than first identifying the issue. Our politicians are mostly captured by their donors. That's the only will they really care about enacting.

Not sharing your take of the electorate's powerlessness at all. It's not an overwhelming majority (only 57% of voters in the US: https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/54124-nearly-half-american...) which thinks they need to do more about climate change. I think most politicians are in tune with their voters - you need to change the people's minds if you want stricter policies. Refine the question a bit more and ask people if they still want to do more against climate change if some basic necessities in their life will get more expensive and you will likely even drop below 50%.

Well part of that 43% I think have their opinions primarily because of propaganda from the same donors who are buying off the politicians.

But also, I'd point out that even in the Democrat party where this is more of an 80:20 issue with their constituents, the democrats are still far too friendly to fossil fuels (Biden, for example, specifically campaigned on how much he loves natural gas, fracking, and carbon capture).

This isn't the only 80:20 issue where democrat politicians are out of alignment with their base. That's also what informs my pessimism.

> Biden, for example, specifically campaigned on how much he loves natural gas, fracking, and carbon capture

Can't win elections when gas is expensive. I still remember the "I did that" stickers at gas pumps.

Biden also signed the largest climate change bill in history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_Reduction_Act#Energy...

When voters are heavily propagandized it's an uphill battle to keep fossil fuels cheap, so you can win elections and phase out those same cheap fuels.

Solar power is cheaper than oil, but it doesn't work 24/7. If you can find a way to work with that, switching to solar is already financially incentivised. Even if you can't, we're already seeing whole countries and regions saturating at 100% solar electricity during daylight hours, significantly reducing oil usage. It doesn't matter what the oil sellers want, because it's a buyer's market for energy when the sun is out, and they're not going to throw extra money at oil companies just because.

The universe was not built to cater to our desires. We can't have our cake and eat it too.

Virtually all economic activity consumes resources and energy, directly or indirectly, and in the process creates ghg emissions.

If we want to curb climate change and our emissions, it necessarily means we're going to take an economic hit.

We either do that willingly with some degree of ability to exercise control along the way, or be forced by physics to take an even worse economic hit and face vastly more death and suffering without our hands on the wheel.

There's no option where we don't get our pockets hurt.

Same reply to you as the other commentator: Fully agree that not doing anything will hurt more. The hard part is finding policies that actually work without costing the lower and middle class more right now. The conservatives basically everywhere around the world are against redistribution - so they ideologically oppose anything that looks like it. At the same time if we just enact policies that limit CO2 the rich people won't really care that flying, heating, driving and some foods have gotten a bit more expensive. But the poor people will. And of the ones who would get hurt by the higher prices a lot of them are ideologically opposed to any kind of redistributing policies. So you are kind of stuck in a catch-22 for now.

An interesting policy proposal is negative tax. Basically take the carbon cap, divide by the number of people, and give the equivalent carbon tax price to each person. A person who uses exactly average carbon sees no change, while a person who uses less gets a tax rebate, and a person who uses more pays more. You can charge it at the source, tariffing oil by its carbon content and then reducing taxes by that amount for everyone.

Again - poor people, which:

- still drive old cars with lots of CO2 emissions

- live far away from their workplace

- probably have a poorly isolated home with oil or gas heating

will be the ones with higher than average emissions. And the rich people who do will just shrug at this minor extra expense. I feel like this is not mentioned enough in discussions (probably because wealth disparity is such a touchy subject) but your ability to reduce your carbon footprint is also directly tied to your wealth.

Rich people, even with electric cars and solar panels, are responsible for far greater emissions than poor people even with their old beaters and longer commutes. Far, far greater.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/this-study-calculated-t...

The average would also include rich people - if rich people are using far above average and poor people are using slightly above average, who's below average?

> The hard part is finding policies that actually work without costing the lower and middle class more right now

You imprison the current administration for treason, seize their ill-gotten gains and there you go, hundreds of billions of dollars.

It's absolutely trivial. There's just a group of people that doesn't want it.

Simultaneously institute an inheritance tax as well as an exit tax of 90% of assets above $1+ billion, at time of death or leaving. That's a cool $1+ trillion in revenue for the next few decades. Both exit taxes and inheritance taxes are very established and work fine in plenty of countries, FYI. Not like yearly wealth taxes that are always criticized as not working or untested.

It's trivial to come up with policies that don't hurt the lower nor the middle class. Laughably easy. There's however a group of people that are blocking them. Those people are the problem and their blocks need to be removed to get closer to preventing then oncoming extinction event (which has complete scientific consesus). These policies work, and what needa to be done is removing of their blockers.

Come on now everyone, at least give an argument before you downvote. Warren Buffet is set to give away 99% of his wealth, so it's clearly possible. Humanity can no longer depend on the others to have the same basic decency as he does - clearly he's the exception, the others don't have it.

Not responding to climate change is hurting everyone's pocket. Home insurance premiums are obscene in some places. Energy insecurity due to reliance on fossil fuels sourced from overseas (particularly relevant right now with the US war on Iran and Russian war on Ukraine). Extreme temperatures mean we either spend more money on heating/cooling our homes or, if you're not wealthy enough to pay, you pay by having to endure the temperature extremes.

Not disputing that it will hurt everyone's pocket. But politically it is very fraught to push for policies that will benefit a new group of people (wind turbine engineers, solar cell installers) at the expense of an established group (gas turbine mechanics, fuel truck drivers). And for the home owners: It's not hurting them on a broad enough level - people who oppose climate change policies probably just don't care about homes in the coastal areas getting flooded - maybe because most of the opposition lives further inland.

> Not responding to climate change is hurting everyone's pocket

No it's not. There's a large group of people whose pockets are being lined by it. A large group of billionaires.

Until climate plans align with short-term personal incentives, I don't see how there's going to be any serious persistent fight against climate change.

People might feel benevolent one day and do something good, but the next day when they are faced with a problem and the environment is a convenient trash can or resource bin, they'll go right back to those bad habits.

The only way things will change is if everyone's life gets made miserable by the effects.

Eh, until “owning the libs” stops being a very valid electoral strategy, I think that’s optimistic.

Not sure how we fix that either.

Wildfires across North America really scare me. I live in a valley in the west where wildfire smoke from not only our state but surrounding states comes in and settles, leaving an AQI over 150 for most of late July through September.

Not only climate change, but aggressive firefighting over the past 50 or more years has caused a lot of material low in the fire ladder to accumulate, which in natural or at least pre-Columbian forests would be cleared out by routine fires. Brush and deadfall for example. The larger trees in healthy forests don't succumb to fire, but these fires have been decimating whole stands of trees. Pair that with almost zero snowpack this year, the only positive thing I can say is that I'm glad I can enjoy spring a bit earlier this year.

I agree. Also, we already tried to rely on the goodwill of the people and here we are with warming speeding up.

We need some mechanism that penalizes polluters, benefits low emitters, and stops/limits/taxes/... worldwide shipping when local alternatives are available to avoid these [1] abominations.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/1e4zl...

The problem is humans are really bad at perceiving externalities at this scale, cause / effect between small actions and large effects, and effects that play out over the span of their lifetime rather than the span of their day. The denialist rationale shifted over the years from doubting the very basis of the science, to claiming its just a short term blip, to its natural long term cycles, to … everything that involves not looking up.

I think the truth is we won’t really take this seriously globally until the changes are so severe that it’ll take generations to undo if ever.

The wild fires are entirely because of lack of management. This is why insurance companies noped out. The crazies believe it is an environment impact to manage the lands and then it all burns down. At least someone can blame the fires on something else. I guess it’s a win?

Politicians, at least freely elected, are a symptom of given population at given time. Don't blame trump for trump, he made it painfully obvious to whole world who he is and who he certainly is not, sort of kudos to him for being consistent.

Blame fully the people who saw all this and voted for him twice. At least if you care about root of the problems and not just venting off. I am not offering a solution to educating half of US population which clearly doesn't care about facts, or lacks any basic moral compass... I don't have a practical solution.

US 'special' form of voted democracy failed and failed hard, lets see how far this gets in next 3 years and if any actual lessons learned happen afterwards (I don't hold my breath since reality doesn't behave just because it would be nice and viable time to act is gone I think).

> Blame fully the people who saw all this and voted for him twice

Thrice actually

Aren’t all these developed countries voluntarily self-depopulating by way of having birth rates below replacement? Seems like the problem will sort itself out if we can resist the urge to invite the entire third world to come in and instantly raise their carbon footprint to first world levels.

That effect is much too slow.

What have you done? Why is it someone else’s problem?

It's a collective problem that we all have to solve together. I'm doing my part. What have YOU done?

I don't know how much surface area you consume, but the single biggest cause of energy use is spread out living in detached single family homes in the USA and other developed countries.

All the recycling, solar panels, electric cars, whatever don't come close to making up for the fact that each family of 4 living on a 0.1+ acre lot with all the various setbacks and whatnot, commuting many miles to work and school and grocery stores and the gym, moving all that mass of people, students, workers, food, water, sewage, trash, gas, etc is orders more consumption than if people were living in dense arrangements such as apartments in 4 and 5 story buildings.

Energy = Force * distance

From what I can tell, none of it means anything as long as detached single family homes are still the expected lifestyle, at current populations. Might as well consume as much as we can while we ride into the sunset, or cull the population quickly.

I've voted for parties that care about addressing the climate catastrophe.

It's obviously someone else's problem if that someone refuses to accept there's a climate catastrophe.

That's great but sounds about as effective as slacktivism.

> What have you done?

Made a shitload of sacrifices, how about you?

The top three emissions sources are industry, electricity, and transportation. There have been important federal and state-wide attempts to address these, but Trump guts regulation every time he's in office. Chevron is dead, SCOTUS repeatedly rules to let big business do whatever they want, and we're now burning even more coal to meet AI energy demand.

Compare this to China, where the government is aggressively promoting green energy and electric car tech.

> Industry, electricity, and transportation

This is deflecting the problem. All of those are in response to demand. People live in suburbs instead of centrally so they need all their own personal transportation and product transportation. They want all their clothing, toys, BBQs, lawn chairs, smokers, jacuzzis, tents, gadgets, etc so both demand for industry and demand for transportation to bring that stuff to them from all over the world. And, they want all the electricity for their large 2200 sq houses (double the size of many other countries).

China is the number one burner of coal and other dirty fuels and only growing. This type of disingenuous analysis really sets the wrong understanding of the world.

China has 4x our population and emits 1/3 less per capita. They've also been flat or falling for the last 21 months. US emissions rose by 2.4% last year.

Furthermore, because carbon emissions stay trapped in the atmosphere for hundreds or thousands of years, one should also note that the US is responsible for more than a quarter of cumulative emissions, twice as much as China.

I'm more interested in solving the problem than assigning blame, but it baffles me when people argue that we shouldn't need to focus on this because it's really China's fault.

> only growing

This is wrong. It isn't burning more coal.

It's also the number one producer of solar energy and growing. It's just a huge country with a lot of everything. Can we help them use more solar?

How does he has the power to change it?

What an odd question. Is this just the "and yet you participate in society" meme trying to act as insightful conversation, or did you have something to actually say?

The majority of people sacrifice nothing. They won't move to a 1000sq or less apartment but instead want their 2200sqft suburban house. They won't move the place where they can use public transportation, they just keep driving their car everywhere. They won't stop flying around the world on vacation. They won't give up upgrading their phone every year or stop owning tons of clothing. They won't change their diet to eat whatever is most environmentally friendly.

Instead, they just blame the electorate. The electorate just responds to demand. Same as industry. Stop buying beef there will be no beef industry. Stop buying cars there will be no car industry. Stop buying things from the other side of the world there will be no shipping industry.

People keep expecting politicians to somehow magically do something but are usually unwilling to do anything more than separate their trash or once in a while, bring a bag to the grocery store they just drove too.

Yea, all of that is hard. But if you're not willing to do it, what makes you think the electorate could possibly pass anything no of their constituents is willing to do?

> See the wildfires across North America

I asked Gemini, "How long have wildfires across North America happened and are they truly any worse now?"

"Wildfires have occurred across North America for millions of years, predating humans entirely." It also had some very detailed information backing that up.

I then asked, "Were any of those fires in the past 20 years started by arsonists?"

"Yes, arson is a significant factor in North American wildfires, though it is often overshadowed by accidental human causes (like downed power lines or unattended campfires) and natural causes like lightning."

Well if Gemini says fires have existed, that's enough proof!!!!

I've been mentally tabulating a list of reasons rich (and/or older) people should care about climate change, even if you're only looking out for your own interests:

- Your children and younger family members will have to deal with this

- Climate change is causing increasingly worse turbulence for airplanes

- It will disproportionately affect your favorite vacation spots

- Probably something about stock markets and pensions - a world constantly wracked with increasingly severe natural disasters isn't the most economically productive one

"Your children and younger family members will have to deal with this."

If my 50 years on the planet has taught me anything, it's that this is not a sufficient motivation the current generation in power.

Yeah, they’ll just close their eyes and say our kids will figure something out.

- The availability of food that you use often to get through your day, such as Arabica coffee and chocolate.

Wildfires have to be a big one as well, the time range and geographic range is growing on a seemingly yearly basis.

Related, home insurance cost increases (and, in places, unavailability) from wildfires & worsening storms hits the pocketbook directly.

You should consider it's much easier rich people to deal with the fallout from climate change (or living in a failed/failing state for that matter) than for poor people. Plus they often have interests in the things that are causing the issue(s) in the first place. Additionally, the children argument is probably the most powerful, but they would probably expect their children to be rich too. All in all I'm doubtful the arguments you are providing have any effect.

I think there is a level of working class poor where it hardly makes a difference what goes on to the world around your life as you are working paycheck to paycheck with much of your available time regardless. How worse it could get doesn’t look appreciably different than how bad it can get already.

A little higher up the economic pole is who stands to lose the most. Those are the people who will see actual quality of life reductions and not be able to afford to return to old norms.

> - Climate change is causing increasingly worse turbulence for airplanes

Cutting out air travel is the single most accessible and impactful thing an individual can do with respect to climate change. You can stop turbulence from getting worse, but since you won't be flying in the first place...

None of that would matter. Farmers are going bankrupt and losing family land and yet...

There are a certain number of people who just cannot change. There are large numbers of diabetics who die despite an enormous number of warnings.

Climate change is not the main cause for turbulence.

In an indirect way it kind of is though. At the end of the day there’s more energy trapped in the atmosphere (stronger jet streams, more frequent and stronger frontal weather)

As you are probably aware, the op didn't say that it was

And since perhaps a source would be helpful, here's the research saying climate change is having a significant effect:

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2023gl10...

BBC reporting:

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240524-severe-turbulenc...

This is why I think the middle strength Global South countries, who hurt the most in the near term and have the necessary resources, will unilaterally start albedo modification. They don't need permission of rich nations and it will become an existential issue that they might risk sanctions and war over. That's when it will become "our problem" (in the eyes of the extremely selfish and/or stupid members).

I think it'll start hurting sooner than that. We're already seeing property insurance rates spiking, and in some places it's even impossible to get property insurance. We could well be up for a 2008-level real estate crash. That should get Americans' attention.

I feel like the possible real estate crash could be really interesting.

Even different parts of a city would likely be affected very differently, where the edges near the fire risks crash, and the even mildly safer areas boom with high demand

Soon, we'll have millions of climate change refugees, battles over resources, regular once-in-a-century storms, more wars. We're close to the point where we'll be too busy thrashing to address the root cause.

This isn't a powerful motivator to people who think they will win those wars.

No one wins in a protracted war.

The leadership can. And the shareholders of the military industrial complex. Not always but they can.

China creates about 30–35% of global emissions. India about 8% but it is climbing fast.

What rich countries do is they just export their factories to other countries and say: look we do not pollute.

CA buying gasoline from Bermuda, shipped via the Panama Canal, because it refuses to allow new refineries is the perfect demonstration of this.

That's also kind of a pigovian tax though, right? By making gasoline more expensive they discourage its use. I guess they're chicken to make it an actual tax

Also why wouldn't it come from other US states? Seems easier

Sadly, it does not come from other states. It comes from other countries which, amazingly, tend to have much less strict environmental regulations.

Yes, California is a little cleaner because we have fewer refineries and gas is more expensive, but globally we are probably about even.

Pipelines, the Jones Act and CA blend requirements prevent CA from getting much gas from other states.

Just for reference China has about 17% of the world's population, and India has about 18%.

China has also been deploying lots of renewable and nuclear energy, and their carbon emissions actually falling.

Solar and wind have gotten so cheap we should be able to forgo more fossil fuel deployment in developing nations.

China CO2 emission increased a lot over the last 20 years and it is growing every years. Not decreasing but increasing. The IEA estimate says China’s CO₂ emissions reached 12.6 Gt in 2023, up 4.7% from 2022.

On the other hand U.S. CO₂ emissions decreased slightly between 2022 and 2023. About 2–3% (from 4.79 to 4.68 Gt)

[1] https://www.iea.org/countries/china/emissions

And then in 2025 it was exactly the other way around. China's emissions decreased, the US's increased.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45108292

Would someone like to explain why the Chinese (if as you say produce 30-35% of global emissions) don't appear to see a problem or at least if alluding to it as they do, fail to do much about it as major contributors of emissions? And then of course there are the countries proud of a relative lack of emissions who are merely exporting the problem to somewhere else, often enough, China.

They absolutely are. You just haven't paid any attention.

Yes, they're still burning coal and gas but China are making huge strides in non CO2 intensive electricity generation

China are the reason solar has become so affordable for the rest of the world

The latest major IEA estimate says China’s CO₂ emissions reached 12.6 Gt in 2023, up 4.7% from 2022.

On the other hand U.S. CO₂ emissions decreased slightly between 2022 and 2023. About 2–3% (from 4.79 to 4.68 Gt)

I just do not understand how we can claim any kind of progress here.

Exactly, this was the whole point of Trump calling climate change a hoax to benefit China, but somehow this got twisted by the media into not denying climate change being an anti-Trump position.

The base then started demanding this from their reps and Trump almost picked up on this himself. It took years to undo that damage and even now we're barely back at a pro-clean air, pro-solar and pro nuclear position...

This is why politicians are usually expected to choose their words carefully. Most of them know that what they say matters and has effects on the real world.

US is the largest historical emitter… responsible for something like 25% of all man made CO2 emissions

The entire west world contributes 28.8%. US is about 11%. [1]

[1] https://www.iea.org/reports/global-energy-review-2025/co2-em...

> Nothing will change until developed rich countries are starting to hurt.

There are two clear parallel points to this:

   1. Over the time frames we're discussing (even the next 50 years) how many "poor" countries will there be left? We're seeing substantial progress on economic, educational, and other fronts over the past 50 years.
   2. Will there ever be a time when the change occurring is direct and over a short enough time frame to matter to "rich" countries? Yes, it will suck if most of Florida is underwater, but this process has already started, and has been going on for 20, 30, 50 years? And most people care very little. If it takes a century for the state to completely submerge, that apathy will continue.

The bottle is half full: https://youtu.be/CFyOw9IgtjY?list=PL3A647D3FD57E0F96&t=205

A lot HAS changed. Europe even has a tax on CO2 emissions.

It's just not enough and it's very hard to convince the public to accelerate when the US not only gave up but it actively reversing to fossil fuels.

At what European tax rate will China and India work on reducing their CO2 emissions?

China has now had flat CO2 emissions for two years, and experienced a decline in overall CO2 emissions during 2025[1]. Part of this is that they're deploying way more renewables than basically any other large economy [2].

They've also pivoted their industrial strategy so that basically the entire green energy sector depends on Chinese supply chains. This is significantly contributing to their economic growth [3].

I don't know to what extent taxation in Europe contributed to China's decision making here, but it presumably created an market for green energy and therefore helped solidify the economics.

This is of course not to say that there's nothing to criticize in China's environmental policies; there certainly is. But the trope of "why should we do anything because China won't" turns out to be spectacularly ill-informed. Indeed I think it makes more sense to ask the opposite: what are the likely consequences now that China has positioned itself as the global centre of green energy, and what should other countries be doing to ensure that they're not left behind?

[1] https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-ha... [2] https://www.carbonbrief.org/g7-falling-behind-china-as-world... [3] https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-clean-energy-drove-more...

>people won't see it.

You are correct because it's happening already (massive wildfires burning down cities, 100 year floods every year, mass migration out of hot, dry climates) and the news will state something like "scientists are 85% certain this fire was accelerated by climate change" and then will move onto the next story. Climate change is all around us, but we refuse to see it.

Look at the Colorado River situation to see how it's affected the US already. Now that hasn't really impacted consumers per say other than through indirect water conservation and higher consumer grocery prices (slightly not a primary driver on the latter). But it's a massive deal that will ripple out more and more in the coming years.

Not even countries, but rich/influential people on them. And they must be hit hard to be concerned enough about it.

If some extreme weather event hits you you may lose your only house, your savings, your health, maybe a good percent of the population of rich countries are vulnerable ot that. In the other hand if someone rich and powerful in those or even somewhat poorer countries, they may buy another house, have more already, lose some money and goods but that's it.

Until those extreme weather events, floods and so on affect enough of the people those people have around, to eventually affect their business and them. But by then it will be far too late.

> The pain will come slowly, people won't see it.

I'd argue that many lower and middle class folks already feel the effects of GW, even if they may not be able to articulate it. The flip side is that developed rich countries will hurt because of this but the people in power won't care because it probably only (visibly) affects the lower class, and they can always take their jets and rockets to countries (and eventually planets!) that haven't been fucked.

And they'll spin it to blame it on immigrants somehow.

> (and eventually planets!)

This particular point is remarkably optimistic on the part of our ruling elites who genuinely seem to think they'll be abandoning Earth like the Titanic and running off to Mars or whatever. I wonder if it's just wishful thinking or if they genuinely believe living off-terra would be a luxury experience, and not what it far more likely would be, which is hurtling through a void separated from instant death by nothing more than sheet metal, and after months of that, living inside a specially pressurized biosphere on an alien world that is, at all times, trying to kill them. And is almost guaranteed to succeed if nothing else by attrition.

I wonder if any will think as they prepare to die whichever death comes to them first that maybe just paying taxes and not having a private jet wasn't that steep of an ask after all.

Lol. Yeah I actually hope they aren't serious about it and are just using it as an excuse to send things to space because it's cool. Because I do not foresee us colonizing Mars in our lifetimes. I'd be happy for them to test the waters for us though.

Oh they're more than welcome to go. Everyone who signs up is basically volunteering to die for science, there is simply no other end to that.

I initially supported this comment but no, I think it's worse than this. As rich countries cut back, dirty energy becomes cheaper and developing nations just use more. They'll need to use more just to fight the climate. India, for instance, is going to need a whole lot of air conditioning just to survive.

Sure, blame developed nations for getting us here, but the path forward isn't solely in the hands of those developed nations.

it depends where you live... I live in Japan now. One comment I hear often and see reflected in old TV shows is how different summers are already. 20-25 years ago it would have been considered a hot summer day around 30c.

Now every summer day is 30c+.

Also, a comment I hear often is that people didn't really need air conditioners back then. You definitely cannot get away with living in Tokyo without an air conditioners these days!

Same with Los Angeles. In the 1950s, when my parents were young, you didn't need AC in LA. You just opened a window on the few hot days, and those were like high 70s/low 80s.

By the 1990s, you didn't need AC, but your home/rental was more appealing if it had one, because there were a few hot days a year that were pretty uncomfortable otherwise.

Now, you can't not have it. There are far too many hot days to live without it.

Additionally:

- cherry blossoms have been consistently blooming earlier each year

- some areas have been breaking historic high temperatures over the past 3 years (e.g. 伊勢崎市)

- even this year, there were several 20C days in Tokyo where the climate felt more like spring than winter

- 気象庁 is surveying for a new word to describe days with temperature exceeding 40C, since they are now becoming common in some areas.

Lastly, one joke my friends say is "In Japan there are four seasons: rainy season, summer, midsummer, and winter."

Same thing here in Vancouver. I took a picture of my car's dash display reading 43*C during the heat dome in 2021!

We are already seeing it in Colorado. Record low snowfall, record heat, record winds; which are a very bad set of conditions for fires.

The power company is now preemptively shutting off our power. Which is really fun in the winter.

I’m honestly not sure about the future of my hometown Boulder. The odds of it fully burning to the ground seem to increase significantly every year.

It will take a few fires like the one in LA, but eventually even the USians will learn it's not a good idea to build cities out of wooden houses.

Get your own solar and batteries.

I think it will change when the people that don't believe in global warming die off, ala 'Science progresses one funeral at a time'. For the US, that's basically Boomers and Gen X [1], so I still think your 10 - 20 years estimate is decent (they don't have to _all_ die, but as more pass away I expect progress)

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/05/26/key-findi...

> until developed rich countries are starting to hurt.

Well Spain, 12th largest by nominal GDP and the fourth-largest in Europe, isn't exactly poor and yet seems to hurt quite a bit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_in_Spain#Impact... ... but I bet the wealthiest Spaniards have air conditioning, heating, bottled water delivered at home by staff, etc to isolate themselves. That does include politicians.

So... IMHO until the richest of the rich countries hurt, then nothing will change. They (we?) are very sheltered precisely by leveraging their wealth to abstract away from the lowly difficulties of life, like the weather.

TL;DR : yes, but the more insulated feel it less and consequently, rationally, think they have more time thus postponing the process.

I don’t know, was in Haiti a few months ago and they burn all kinds of shit there. Gotta get them on solar and wind. Whatever happened to the Clinton foundation’s billions?

Nothing will happen until the super rich who define policy begin to hurt. And they won't hurt because they can exploit the situation to become even richer.

> Nothing will change until developed rich countries are starting to hurt.

The EU reduced their emissions by over a third from their peak. Their emissions per capita is less than that of China (not meant to be a dig at China who is the leader the development of renewables). Even Americans reduced their CO2 emissions by 15% in absolute terms and by about 30% per capita as well.

Why is it so hard to understand that individual people, let alone hundreds of millions of people in aggregate, can have multiple priorities? This whole doomerist attitude doesn't help anyone. If anything, it contributes to the erosion of the good things we already have. Nobody gave a damn about USAID saving millions of people until it could be weaponized against Trump/Elon for taking it away.

It's going to cause slow, constant refugee crises, which will affect everyone.

I wonder if the current war will significantly accelerate the roll out of non-fossil energy. If the Strait of Hormuz stays closed for a few more weeks there's going to be significant pain, not just for energy but things like fertilizer etc. Once you deploy a solar panel it works for 20+ years, conflict doesn't cut you off from energy.

Nothing will change until billionaires start losing money over it. Then it will be a national priority.

It's also why I've sort of resigned myself to a cynical optimism that the worst won't come to pass. The rich are not going to tolerate losing money. They will force through geoengineering stopgap measures that will save us from catastrophic warming, at the cost of unknown consequences.

This is why I vehemently disagree with those who say we shouldn't be conducting research on geoengineering. It will be done. The only question is, will we have done enough research to understand the potential consequences, or not?

Don’t get cynic. The good news is: the worse it gets, the more impact every single .1 degree of prevented climate change has.

I’m with you in the billionaires. Research has shown again and again that people do care about climate change and want it to be stopped - but only if they have the socioeconomic status to actually care.

If, as so many people on this planet, you are living paycheck to paycheck, and the social security nets are being dismantled by the uber rich, you instead switch into a „protect what’s mine“ mindset. This further exacerbates the tragedy of the commons.

So I am of the following opinion: fix wealth inequality; which will give people their actual lives back; and will reduce the political power of the sociopathic billionaire class.

Then, the rest almost takes care of itself.

Yeah just fix that already, how hard could it be?

The problem is human, not society, I don't any any -ism can fix human.

Why would something "change" because "developed rich countries" hurt? Why wouldn't those leaders just roll with it and see it as inevitable, or a purification of their degenerate populations, or just another day in the end times, or whatever?

I expect "change" when people form unions or union like organisations and withhold or redistribute their labour, both waged and in more subtle forms, such as attention, and unwaged but socially important labour (e.g. women refusing to be servile homemakers and instead get guns and start soup kitchens).

> Nothing will change until developed rich countries are starting to hurt.

More specifically, nothing will change until the politicians and billionaires personally get hurt.

The negative effects of climate change need to come for them personally for them to care.

>Nothing will change until developed rich countries are starting to hurt.

They already are. China does whatever it wants en mass meanwhile.

> Nothing will change

Things have already changed!

They are already in pain but are blaming immigrants instead of trusting science.

True or false: a person in a third world country has a lower carbon footprint than someone in a developed country.

Also true or false: an immigrant from a third world country will have a higher carbon footprint if they emigrate to a developed country.

Maybe they are part of the problem.

Chaos is extactly where fascism thrives. Expect to see more trumps, not less.

Rich countries will never feel it. Look at the middle east. Already scorching desert, they build indoor ski hills...

On the plus side, I think we'll solve global warming, with technology, in a few generations.

> And honestly, wars and trump are making climate concerns so difficult to think about.

These are all related. All of them are connected to humans pushing the planetary resource limits from various directions. We're attacking Iran now in part because climate change has dramatically increased the water stress conditions making the population more susceptible to political collapse. It's also happening because it puts energy stress on our geopolitical adversaries (same with Venezuela). Trump emerged in the first place because declining American prosperity (despite GPD numbers) drove a large portion of the population to nihilism.

Well, most deforestation happens in poor underdeveloped countries. Yes, they hurt, but keep doing it.

For the UK at least, this must be in a large part because we already cut our forests down. We simply couldn't deforest at a high rate, because there aren't enough trees left to go at.

> Nothing will change.

Fixed

The energy situation is actually changing very quickly precisely because renewables and storage are so cheap. Building a new natural gas plant today is really hard to justify in most places in the world.

Capitalism will actually save the day, because a bunch of capitalists advanced renewable technology to the point where it was cheap.

The biggest impediment to change right now is actually political interference in deployment of cheaper renewables. You see this all across the US both in intentional and unintentional ways. Trump explicitly cancels permits for wind, tries to ban solar on federal lands, and forces coal plants to keep running even when they are super expensive and raise the cost electricity.

Unintentional political impediments are also endemic in the US; permitting and interconnection of residential solar makes it 5x-6x more expensive than places like Australia, even in places like California that should be accelerating residential solar and storage.

There's a lot to be hopeful about when it comes to climate change, in addition a lot to be scared about.

> Capitalism will actually save the day, because a bunch of capitalists advanced renewable technology to the point where it was cheap.

That "bunch of capitalists"... why are you avoiding the true word: "China"?

That's not the true word though, is it? It's an effort of capitalists the world over. And crucially, German government incentives when solar was still very expensive.

I can't say anything about the German gov. I don't live there and I have no info. But I wouldn't call bureaucrats "capitalists" either.

The majority of pollution is caused by 3rd world/ eastern countries.

Do you want to go to war with China to enforce an environmentalist agenda?

Over the past century, the US has produced more cumulative carbon emissions than any other country, and it's not even close.

China is in the middle of a massive expansion in wind, solar, and electric vehicles. The US is burning even more coal to support AI, and has gutted much of its federal emission reduction efforts.

This changed on the last decade or so. It's close now.

Of course, China has 5 times more people than the US, so they get a little bit of leeway. But they are close, and their emissions are growing.

That said, yes, they are investing more than anybody else. And they are improving the technology we need more than anybody else. People talking about military intervention are full of shit, but we could use some diplomatic collaboration.

It's still not that close. 15% for China vs 24% for just the US. Add in the EU-27 and it's 41%.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co2-emissions-...

> and their emissions are growing.

I know nothing about it. I have read comments on this very comments section, with references, that say China's emissions are not growing. This is what makes this subject so hard for the average numbskull like me, so much misinformation.

https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions

The discussion is about what happened last year. We don't have the last year's data assembled yet.

There's a real possibility it changed.

If this was the stated rationale and goal of the trade war, I'd be all for it. This is exactly the kind of situation tariffs are for.

Tariffs on goods the world pays China to make which drives up emissions?

I don't see why war is necessary. There could be something like the Space Race, where nations flex their technological skills at producing solutions to environmental problems.

That race already started, but China is the only one participating at the moment. The US has been running backwards, though.

China produces a lot less carbon per capita than we do

Global warming doesn't care about 'per capita'.

Edit: Individuals do not build coal power plants, utilities (and therefore, governments) do. India and China are continuing to build fossil fuel power generation. Global warming does not care about 'fairness', global warming cares about co2 PPM in the atmosphere. When we address climate change, we have to do so at the government level, or we mine as well not bother.

The whole idea that we should look at 'emissions per capita' or 'historical emissions' in the interest of fairness is simply giving a license to governments to kill genuinely poor people in the third world.

There is literally no charitable interpretation of this point.

How much of a problem any individuals CO2 emissions are is completely decoupled from what nation they live in, or how many people live in that nation specifically.

If you hypothetically split up Asia or the US into 100 smaller countries then local emissions are not suddenly more (or less) of a problem than the are now (duh).

And of course more people have more of an influence on global outcomes.

This whole argument makes about as much sense as demanding that black people in Europe should not pay any income tax, because the total tax income from black people in Europe is very low, and "national budget does not care about per capita".

This is so disingenuous. Individuals do not build coal power plants, utilities (and therefore, governments) do. India and China are continuing to build fossil fuel power generation. Global warming does not care about 'fairness', global warming cares about co2 PPM in the atmosphere. When we address climate change, we have to do so at the government level, or we mine as well not bother.

The whole idea that we should look at 'emissions per capita' or 'historical emissions' in the interest of fairness is simply giving a license to governments to kill genuinely poor people in the third world.

> India and China are continuing to build fossil fuel power generation

Power plants are not built for specific national governments, they are built because individual people need and use the energy. More people => more powerplants (number of governments is completely irrelevant, this is purely a per-capita thing).

> When we address climate change, we have to do so at the government level

Yes. For example by setting somewhat coherent CO2/capita emission targets.

> Global warming does not care about 'fairness'

Irrelevant, because anyone affected does.

If you want a global reduction in emissions, how would you ever convince a poorer nation (like India) to change anything while your own citizens are jet-travelling around the globe multiple times per year?

It is obviously much easier and more effective to reduce emissions by limiting a family to a single cruise vacation per year (or only two cars) than to convince 10 rice farmers to stop firing their oven for heat during winter...

If rich nations can not get their emissions even close to a sustainable level, why would any developing nation sacrifice growth, wealth or anything, really, to make the attempt?

I never said rich nations shouldn't cut their emissions. If I were king, I'd enact a heavy carbon tax, and I'd tell every country I traded with that they could either do the same, or face tariffs and sanctions weighted by emissions that would have basically the same effect on their economy. I'd also insist that the institute the same tariffs and sanctions on economies they trade with.

All of a sudden, you'd have the world's short term self interest aligned with solving the long term problem.

China is building more renewables than anyone else. They produce less co2 per capita despite doing like 80% of all the manufacturing.

You simply can't point fingers at them.

India, fine. But it's the US driving the planet off a cliff first and foremost

> Global warming does not care about 'fairness', global warming cares about co2 PPM in the atmosphere. When we address climate change, we have to do so at the government level, or we mine as well not bother.

That is why per capita is the correct measure.

The atmosphere is very good at mixing CO2 so a given amount of emissions anywhere has the same impact anywhere as the same amount of emissions from anywhere else.

Whatever we decide the limit on atmospheric CO2 needs to be to address warming needs to be converted into a quota for each country, since enforcement has to be done at the country level.

We can't just take the total and divide it by the number of countries. That would mean that Vatican City would have the same quota as the US. Regionally it would mean that the EU would have 27 times the quota of the US.

The only sensible initial allocation is to divide the total allowed by the world population, and assign each individuals share to whatever country has the power to regulate them.

> global warming cares about co2 PPM in the atmosphere

And yet you say "historical emissions" is bullshit. How do you think we got to the current co2 PPM level?

And it also doesn’t care about arbitrary country boundaries. But it is affected by total emissions, and per-capita measurements is one fair way to judge how a country is doing

It also doesn't care about arbitrary groupings of humans (a.k.a countries).

The fairest system would be for each human being to have an equal amount of pollution they are allowed to emit.

The comment i replied to does

And they make most of the stuff we buy, including the climate emissions involved in making them.

I am in Wuhan, China. This past winter, I was able to bike along the lake all day. In previous winters, due to the cold and strong winds, we rarely exercised by the lake. This has had the biggest impact on me, and it's still a positive one.

Isn't this like a frog in a pot saying, ah the water was cold but now it's warm!, moments before getting cooked?

Some say that when encountering difficulties, one should either change them or adapt to them, and be able to distinguish between the two. It is obvious that we cannot change climate change, and even if individuals can do some environmental protection, they still cannot change it.

This ship has sailed, warming is irreversible. Developing nations mainly in Asia (China, India etc) are, well, developing and burn like there is no tomorrow. But they are not to blame. It is their turn to live nicely, like the US and Europe did for decades. Nobody can remove this right from them.

I don't think that's fair to say; the USA's CO2 emissions per capita are roughly 150% of China's, and the average Canadian emits more than 7x as much as an Indian citizen.

The entire EU produces only about half of the USA's total emissions, despite having a population of over 100 million more people.

Fair? Maybe not, but IMO it doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is gross emissions. The effects of a warming planet will not be fair. We should be looking to reduce/eliminate emissions wherever they are happening.

I don't think it's fair to look only at gross emissions by country. How can we demand that India drastically cut its emissions when its per capita output is already so low? Forcing reductions there effectively caps their living standards while developed nations continue to enjoy the benefits of much higher individual carbon footprints.

China's actively fixing the problem. [0]

Why aren't we?

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/11/china-co2-emis...

U.S. and EU CO₂ emissions have been actively dropping for the last ~20 years [0]. (Of course, it's different question how quickly they ought to be dropping.)

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-...

That’s because we’ve outsourced so much of our manufacturing to China. Of course ours is going down while theirs is going up.

Good. They should keep doing it and faster.

> The only thing that matters is gross emissions

Which is why, unless you can come up with a good argument that some people have some kind of divine or natural right to a bigger share of whatever global emissions budget we decide we need to stick to, per capita is the correct way to compare countries.

Fairness matters because the only way we can collectively decide to reduce emissions is if people everywhere feel its fair.

Lol. Not exactly an apt comparison.

"Average" Canadian. A lot of the population lives in a climate where half the year more energy is required to survive the climate. And the population is exponentially smaller than the United States, India, or China.

That's like calling out the guy in the mountains burning a campfire to stay warm at night when the guy sleeping on the beach in Hawaii requires none.

Point being, brand new account, if we want solutions it needs to be done without such angling or it all reduces to absurdities and jabs instead of cooperation. It needs to be realistic in terms of where people are being absurdly wasteful, but also sympathetic that we do not all face the same circumstances.

It's a hole and we don't get out by digging downward.

I agree that climate is a factor, but the survival argument only goes so far. Finland, Sweden and Norway face similar sub-zero winters but maintain a higher standard of living with less than half the per capita emissions of Canada.

> This ship has sailed, warming is irreversible.

Nobody who understands the subject claims that it is reversible on a human life scale. In the realistic best cases, it’d stabilise in a couple of decades and slowly decrease from there.

The real question is not whether it is reversible, but how high it will go and how we are going to deal with it.

No only that, but per capita emissions of developed countries still remains higher. For example I found that US/Russia have 6x per capita emissions compared to India

This perspective is so important. The wealthy in western society are responsible for a massively disproportionate amount of emissions.