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Global warming will exceed 1.5-degree limit, UN says

340 points by ijidak 12d ago

ssearyus 12d ago
[dead]
multiplegeorges 12d ago
Not much of a surprise. Government action has been anemic at best. Industry action (overall) has been net negative. The only hope now is exponential growth of (solar and wind)+batteries making other sources uneconomic. This seems to be slowly happening, so I hope we hit the exponential curve soon and we're there quicker than we expect. This only stops it. Then, to fix it, we'll need a massive Direct Air Capture industry that will have to operate for a century, and probably past that so we can hit and maintain a CO2 level of 250ppm.
- WarmWash 12d ago
  >Not much of a surprise. Government action has been anemic at best. Industry action (overall) has been net negative. And individual action has switched to just holding governments and industry responsible. Which basically amounts to giving up. "Welp, just gonna buy this truck, enjoy my burgers, set the AC at 68 and fly on all vacations this year because it's nothing compared to Big Oil."
  - jkahrs595 12d ago
    Don’t forget eating meat, the easiest thing to stop doing (people needs cars and trucks for work, they don’t need cheeseburgers). People can’t be bothered to make any changes, it’s always someone else’s problem. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/sep/27/meat-gas-emissions-reporting https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/sep/27/meat-gas...
    - deleted 12d ago
      [deleted]
    - benfortuna 12d ago
      Even cutting back on meat can have an impact. Halving quantities in cooking etc. really is hardly noticeable.
      - tyre 12d ago
        Yeah I think this is a much better path. If you mix chicken with jackfruit 50/50 in tacos, for example, it’s barely noticeable. We’re not going to convince Americans to give up meat, but if we can reduce consumption when they do eat it, we can make incremental change.
    - WarmWash 12d ago
      Yeah, good catch, thanks.
    - jezzamon 12d ago
      People need cars... But not trucks for work :)
      - sagarm 12d ago
        People need cars because we designed our environments to require them. It was a choice, not an inevitability.
        drfloyd51 12d ago
        And here we are. Needing cars. Unless you want to spend the big money of rebuilding cities.
        chrisnight 12d ago
        To be clear, the money is already being spent, it’s just a question of what we make the priority. Even just keeping the current roads useable costs billions of dollars, let alone the amount of money spent on highway expansion (which, due to induced demand, causes even more traffic). In 30 years, every road that exists currently will have been replaced. The question is if it should be replaced with another road, or should some of them have larger sidewalks, bike lanes, bus lanes. Amsterdam has been doing this for decades and it’s going very well. They spent money that would’ve been spent rebuilding a road on making it a better general transportation option.
  - zhann_dc 12d ago
    Well, truth be told.. It _is_ nothing compared to Big Oil.
    - WarmWash 12d ago
      Spoiler: It's individuals who are driving that demand. The impact of the decisions of big oil are nothing compared to the collective decisions of individuals. Big oil isn't going to kick down your door when you buy an EV and switch to solar. There is no rancher in the grocery aisle slipping steaks in your cart.
      - collingreen 12d ago
        Spoiler, the oil and other energy industries have done a world changing amount of lobbying and regulatory capture in order to drive decisions that cause more and more fossil fuel use. This includes everything from subsidies to industry stagnating regulations to reduced enforcement to suburban sprawl. Look at how the current US administration shills for big coal. Pretending they haven't shaped the world around the consumers is either naive or bad faith. Yes, consumers have to stop funding these companies and behaviors. Also, the governments that operate on behalf of those consumers have to drop their corruption and start protecting those people they represent. Both virtuous and nonvirtuous conservatives know neither of these are going to happen, which is why they see massive terraforming technology as the only way out - if someone with power can't get rich(er) fixing it then it won't get fixed.
        tekla 12d ago
        Spoiler, you exist in incredible luxury because YOU benefited from paying for goods and services made extremely cheap from oil. You also have the oil on your hands, and its not washing off easily.
        WarmWash 12d ago
        >The impact of the decisions of big oil are nothing compared to the collective decisions of individuals.
      - 12d ago
  - dreamworld 12d ago
    Acting politically for what matters is not giving up :) Though, as always, we can and really should do both.
  - nkohari 12d ago
    Governments and industry are responsible. Personal consumption/waste is not the primary driver of climate change, no matter how much corporations tell us that using paper straws is the solution. It's tough to expect average people to take major action when corporations are essentially given carte blanche.
    - WarmWash 12d ago
      And who is buying all that stuff from corporations? Who is actually the one consuming? We can quibble about edge effects like "induced demand", but by and large, people just love cheap energy, cheap calories, and can shift the moral burden by playing "not my responsibility" games.
    - myaccountonhn 12d ago
      From the IPCC report, 2/3rds of all global emissions are directly tied to consumption.
      - nkohari 11d ago
        Well, yeah. Corporations aren't just nefarious evil entities, dumping carbon into the atmosphere for no reason. They're doing it to sell goods. The problem is that a lot of the environmental costs for the manufacture and transport of those goods are externalized and go unpaid. It's difficult to put the blame for that on the consumer, who has no visibility into manufacturing or logistics, and who has vanishingly-small options for not participating. Buying domestic goods is very difficult or impossible, and goods which are manufactured in more environmentally-safe ways are significantly more expensive (because the costs I mentioned earlier weren't externalized). If a consumer is presented with two options, one that costs $X and has unknown environmental costs, and one that costs $2X and is marketed as being environmentally safe, the majority will choose the first. This is especially true as economic forces continue to squeeze average people. Consumers absolutely participate in the problem, but the only process by which it could be corrected is regulation, and the only entity capable of that is the government. (Democracy being what it is, you can however place more blame at the feet of voters.)
  - sagarm 12d ago
    Government is the means by which the electorate acts collectively. Pushing for policy changes is not giving up.
  - jmclnx 12d ago
    If the Gov stopped Oil Subsidizes, incentivize the move to renewals and nuclear instead of promoting Oil say 20 years ago, we could keep our A/Cs and 60 degrees (~16C) if we wanted to. The sames goes to flying and beef, make it expensive. So yes, Governments share by far most of the blame for this. A specific individual is not going to change their life stye unless forced to, that is human nature. Instead we have had governments in the US being too afraid to do the right thing. The only possible US President that was willing to make big changes climate wise had his election stolen by the Supreme Court in the year 2000. So here we are still with no politician willing to really force changes on people's life style in the "first world". All they are doing is trying to keep the price of oil low. One final thing, in the US, if you try to use electricity from all renewals, the price is much higher. And in some cases electricity you receive is still generated from fossil fuels.
- ThrowawayIP 12d ago
  The technology-will-save-us mentality is part of the reason we are here. We live in a society that doesn't do anything unless it makes money for some set of decrepit old men. We had the means to avoid this (strict vegan diets, ground based mass transit, dense development & re-wilding, energy transition) but people made money doing the opposite. And more people made money sabotaging solar+battery pricing in the US. So we get to watch the world burn down around us.
  - baq 12d ago
    Just like it isn’t possible to get politicians to stop spending other people’s money, it isn’t possible to stop enterprises from making as much money as possible while spending as little as possible on a global scale (it may work locally!) Thus, technology-will-save-us is the rational choice. Drill all the oil, build the biggest datacenters and speedrun to fusion before the collapse so we can sequester the carbon back into the ground and still have energy left to run Haber-Bosch, ideally with hydrolysis instead of natgas. Disclaimer: I used to be heavily in the sustainability camp in my younger years
    - panta 12d ago
      Neoliberism is not the only possible system, it is very well possible to change the boundaries of what enterprises can do. Technology-will-save-us is a quasi-religious belief, not supported by evidence. Also if it was true that we can't convince politicians and enterprises to change their course now, why should they do later when costs will be much higher? Relying mostly on technology that doesn't yet exist seems absurd to me. We have an incredibly hard problem to solve and maybe a narrow window of action, we should use all the tools we have at our disposal: rapid deployment of available solutions, sustained research into better ones, adoption of more frugal lifestyles, development of alternative sociological, political and economical frameworks.
  - fullshark 12d ago
    Technology is more feasible than politically driven "degrowth" or any of the other proposals.
- epistasis 12d ago
  It is quite ironic that capitalism and the profit motive are now the best hope for staving off climate change, all thanks to the technologists and entrepreneurs that have mad renewables and storage so cheap. The 2020s climate action movement in the US (and the UK) was disastrous in their strategy, action, and outcomes. I was there, I followed along because it seemed like the best way to get climate action, but things like Sunrise and XR at their very best did nothing. They focused on all the wrong people, focused on all the wrong levers. They turned allies into enemies, by "protesting" tech companies that were at the forefront of real action. They refused to acknowledge the massive effects of technology change, and the need for quick adoption, and the huge money saving nature of the solution. I have zero patience for those attitudes now, the difference between a degrowther and a climate change denying politician are minimal in effect, and the effects are all that matter now.
  - woodgala 12d ago
    What about energystar? That had significant impact. Remember how we fixed the ozone hole? It’s entirely possible to drive change through policy or community. We just choose not to do it because the Epstein class wants culture war not class war.
    - epistasis 12d ago
      Yes, policy does change things!! You give examples where a community got together, changed policy, affecting all of society. This is precisely the opposite of the disastrous 2020s action, which had no concrete policy demands, which leaned into the culture war. They ceded the ground to the right wing, who does that sort of culture war much better, as they have focused their efforts on it for so long. With culture war, no policy changes. The fight takes place in vibes. We need policy, execution in concrete changes of physical things in the real world. That's where Sunrise and XR failed.
      - woodgala 12d ago
        I see. Thanks!
      - 12d ago
- hypefi 12d ago
  the best CO2 capture are trees
  - ben_w 12d ago
    Probably algae. Land only slightly beats the ocean, like a 53-47 split or something, and trees are only part of the primary production on land: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_production This is also why you sometimes see startups pumping green goo through plastic pipes for home-scale solar biofuel systems.
  - xnx 12d ago
    They are good at capture, but not sequestration.
- xnx 12d ago
  Population decrease will have the biggest impact.
  - anonzzzies 12d ago
    Yes, but you cannot say that. We need more people, for money.
  - smallerfish 12d ago
    Yeah and there's two ways to get there - planned and unplanned. It'll happen one way or the other.
  - lukeify 12d ago
    The unpopular answers are usually the correct ones.
  - brabel 12d ago
    Good news then: most of the world already has a decreasing population or about to start decreasing. Only exception being Africa.
  - adrianN 12d ago
    Decades too late unless you suggest we start killing people.
- deleted 12d ago
  [deleted]
- psadri 12d ago
  I have been wondering: more solar means we are making Earth less reflective. Solar energy that might have been reflected back to space is now absorbed by the PV to make electricity. But that delta has to go somewhere? Where does it go in terms of Earth’s temperature. Same with more nuclear… we’d be pumping more energy into the system. Don’t take this as an argument against these technologies. It’s a huge win to not be increasing the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels.
  - philipkglass 12d ago
    Yes, this does happen. Solar farms have an albedo modification effect. The good news is that compared to fossil powered generation, the albedo modification is "paid back" in less than a year due to lower GHG emissions: "Small reduction in land surface albedo due to solar panel expansion worldwide" https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-024-01619-w https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-024-01619-w If you download the supplementary information PDF, figure 19 shows a plot of GHG payback times by site. The most common time is about 1 month. The greatest time they found was about 9 months. These times go down as solar panel efficiencies continue to creep upward, because solar panels in 2026 don't have lower albedo than in 2024, but they do have better light-to-electricity conversion efficiency.
  - mr_toad 12d ago
    Current levels of solar panel coverage on Earth are approximately 0%. If we ran the entire Earth on Solar power we’d need ~ half a million square kilometres, around 0.1 percent of the Earth’s surface.
  - p1mrx 12d ago
    A solar array makes the earth less reflective by a fixed amount, for as long as the array exists. Every unit of fossil fuel we burn makes the earth permanently less reflective (or at least something on the order of 100 years). You could compare a 1GW solar array (for its lifetime) to a 1GW coal plant running for x days, though I don't have the value of x.
  - jbotz 12d ago
    We're actually heating the earth in two ways... one is by increasing the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The other is simply by using energy; any use of energy means moving something to higher entropy and thus producing heat, even if that energy comes from 100% clean or renewable sources. However, nobody talks about this second way of heating the earth because it's about two orders of magnitude behind the first, i.e. for now pretty insignificant. As for making the earth less reflective with PV panels... yes, you are right and most of that absorbed solar energy directly contributes to heating the earth because PV panels aren't anywhere near 100% efficient in converting it to electricity, but even the part that is converted to electricity will become heat again in the end, like when it powers AI data centers. (If PV was 100% efficient, then the lack of reflection wouldn't directly do any heating, the heating would all happen when the electricity is used.) For now that isn't a big concern because the greenhouse gases our civilization is releasing into the atmosphere do so much more heating than all our use of energy, but if we do become 100% renewable and survive that particular danger, then by Jevons' paradox we'll soon be using 10x to 100x more "clean" energy and be heating the earth all the same again.
- kogasa240p 12d ago
  >Then, to fix it, we'll need a massive Direct Air Capture industry that will have to operate for a century, and probably past that so we can hit and maintain a CO2 level of 250ppm. Removing CO2 from seawater would be more efficient because some of the work is already done for you, and you'd be de-acidifying the ocean long term.
- fifilura 12d ago
  > Government action has been anemic at best. I am not very surprised, since the people voted for the "drill baby drill" president? I wouldn't classify that as anemic.
- jandrewrogers 12d ago
  Direct Air Capture at any meaningful scale is predicated on mining billions of tons of refined minerals. The environmental impact of that would be so enormous that it will never be allowed to happen, never mind the severe resource crunch.
- irthomasthomas 12d ago
  [flagged]
- LargoLasskhyfv 11d ago
  > Then, to fix it, we'll need a massive Direct Air Capture industry that will have to operate for a century, and probably past that so we can hit and maintain a CO2 level of 250ppm. Which should probably be nuclear powered, at the required scale. So we could have taken the direct route, instead of solar, bess, wind, water, geothermal...(c.f. Alien, Aliens, 'Atmospheric Processor'...) Anybody remembering the trash which was sold as 'lightbulbs' for about 15 years, before LED got somewhat acceptable colors? And prices? And longevity? Mehw, lightbulb baad, eats too much waatt! So lets miniaturize CFLs to be able to screw them in lightbulb sockets! So they get warm because they are so small, the sockets have no airflow, and their own electronics go with a premature blow! Yay!
  - defrost 11d ago
    > Which should probably be nuclear powered, at the required scale. Why? Why not capture CO2, pump carbonated water into the Yilgarn Craton, recover the created hydrogen to both provide power and water to carbonate?
    - LargoLasskhyfv 11d ago
      Because all the stuff required to do that does not grow on trees. Which means it has its own externalities regarding mass flows, EROI, emissions. At present time it just means the externalities have been made into other peoples problems. Regarding mining, tailings, transport, production, and so on.
      - defrost 11d ago
        What tailings, what transport? Serious questions here ... I'm also curious about your actual experience in heavy mineral and energy industry, largest plant you've worked at, scale of operation, etc. (FWiW in fairness, I've worked a few decades in and around > half a billion tonne per annum mining and worked globally in geophysical mineral and energy exploration)
        LargoLasskhyfv 11d ago
Schiendelman 12d ago
There hasn't been a question about this in a decade or more. There was no path, even theoretically, to stopping our CO2 emissions without dramatically lowering quality of life for maybe a couple billion people. We won't slow climate change. We can build resilience to the effects, and we have good incentives to do so. But we'll keep burning fossil fuels for a very long time.
- benfortuna 12d ago
  > We can build resilience to the effects Oh yeah, would love to see the resilience that would have prevented the Nepalese disaster
  - Schiendelman 11d ago
    Resilience isn't prevention. Resilience is the systems to clean up after those events. To be able to build new housing for the people who survive, to route around problems.
  - what_hn 12d ago
    Yeah, not build in the lowest point where there is a glacier upstream
    - sagarm 12d ago
      The US version: kill the national flood insurance program so we stop subsidizing property owners in disaster prone areas.
- whatever1 12d ago
  Maybe it will be a good incentive to rebuild our global infrastructure without having to go through a world war ?
  - __natty__ 12d ago
    Say this to global warlords not to random user on Hacker News
jt2190 12d ago
Interestingly, financial markets are a good place to see the “price” of some environmental issues. A made up example: “Should I buy bonds that are backed by electricity sales from a yet-to-be-built hydroelectric dam? Will there be enough rainfall to fill the reservoir reliably? I’ll have to receive a higher interest payment to offset that risk.”
OgsyedIE 12d ago
Supposing all anthropogenic emissions went to zero today, we'd still keep warming almost as far as three degrees with all of the disasters and famines that entails, because there's a lag time between existing emissions and their effects. We need massive bounty programs that pay out irrespective of nationality for every possible kind of improvement and gain to carbon capture technology if we want to prevent 90% of all land on Earth between 30°N and 30°S from slowly turning into copies of the uninhabitable stretches of the Middle East.
- throw8393739 12d ago
  We need to print much more money!
- cobalt60 12d ago
  Just Zeroing isn't enough, what ever efforts we put into negating it never seems to have frontpage
- brabel 12d ago
  Global warming is much faster in the higher latitudes. It has not significantly impacted the region you mentioned much at all. Most impact has been due to intensification of natural cycles like the Indian Monsoons, the Atlantic hurricane season and El Niño, which are not really limited to that particular area of the Globe. The idea that the problem with global warming is that parts of the world will just become too hot to live seems to be mostly misguided.
- tcfhgj 12d ago
  might not be entirely accurate: https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-will-global-warming-stop-as-soon-as-net-zero-emissions-are-reached https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-will-global-warming-st... https://www.researchgate.net/figure/CO2-emissions-and-respective-global-mean-temperature-and-sea-level-responses-Emission_fig1_323291634 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/CO2-emissions-and-respec...
- consumer451 12d ago
  I think the way to frame this is: what would happen if we burned all known fossil fuel reserves? That is the trajectory we are on. The answer there is >6C global increase, and that would cause beyond disaster movie-level scenarios. Anything and everything we can do to stop that is important.
monster_truck 12d ago
How could this happen? I've faithfully sorted all of my recyclables into their respective bins to maximize profit for my city's garbage collection just like they asked
- p-e-w 12d ago
  Telling you that you have power is one of the ways by which they ensure that you don’t have any power. Elections work the same way.
  - tito 12d ago
    They tell you you have a particular type of power. You have the power to sort your trash, nothing wrong with that. But what's left off and out is you have the power to change what dozens, thousands, millions, and billions of people do. "Carbon footprint" was a marketing trick played by the oil industry. It worked great. What's needed now is something like a "carbon wave", where you evaluate your impact by how quickly you move the entire world forward. There's a new book on this to that just arrived to me last week: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-carbon-wave-leah-c-stokes/1148963997 https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-carbon-wave-leah-c-stok...
- cbg0 12d ago
  We've gone the "crowdsorting" route but if we didn't go this way the fees for garbage collection would be higher and the city's garbage collection company would still make profits, that's a constant.
amazingamazing 12d ago
When will the rich, say top 10% of planet decrease their emissions?
- p-e-w 12d ago
  The top 10% of the planet aren’t “the rich”, what a gross and incendiary misuse of the term.
  - tito 12d ago
    The top 10% richest humans emit about half of all emissions. Decile 10 (richest): ~48% Decile 9: ~15% Decile 8: ~10% Decile 7: ~8% Decile 6: ~6% Deciles 1 through 5 combined: ~12%, so about 1 to 3% each Sources like this: www.oxfam.org.uk/media/press-releases/richest-1-emit-as-much-planet-heating-pollution-as-two-thirds-of-humanity-oxfam/
  - hocuspocus 12d ago
    If you live in better material conditions than 90% of the world population, you're rich, by definition. This is nearly half the global CO2 footprint.
  - infinitezest 12d ago
    What would _you_ call the top 10% richest people in the world? Middle upper, upper, upper, upper class?
    - p-e-w 12d ago
      95% of the top 10% are middle class, because the vast majority of the world’s population are middle or lower class.
- cbg0 12d ago
  How exactly would that make a dent? CO2 sources: - Electricity + heat production ~40–42% - Industry + manufacturing ~20–22% - Road transport ~12–13% - Deforestation & land-use change ~10% - Direct fuel use in buildings ~5–6% - Aviation ~2–3% - Shipping ~2–3% - Rail, pipelines & other transport ~1% - Flaring / other energy & industrial sources ~2–4% I'm guessing the private jets is what you're hinting at? Aviation above includes all flights, not just private jets.
beloch 12d ago
We already know we need to pump the breaks on AI for a host of safety issues. However, perhaps the biggest concern is the sheer scale of electricity generation they require. One hyperscale data centre can require electricity equivalent to a fair sized city. Many data centre builders are keen to claim they'll use renewable energy sources... eventually. They'll just suck power off the grid "temporarily" or rely on "clean" natural gas for a few years. There are a decent number of states, provinces, etc. whose total emissions will double in a matter of months. Could the timing possibly be worse? From a warming perspective, it's utter madness to let this build-out proceed unimpeded. New data centres should be required to be net-zero at power-up. Unfortunately, it's a race and the U.S. side of it has an administration that is actively rolling back policies that fight climate change.
- bakies 12d ago
  Data centers seem tangential to any real problem. The grid should be converting to green energy and regulation that says datacenters must also be power stations is backwards.
  - beloch 12d ago
    A gigawatt is a gigawatt. If you need a gigawatt, you pay for the generation and infrastructure to provide it, whether you're a million people or a single data-centre. The jursidictions that require data-centres to provide their own generation and electrical infrastructure are completely within their rights.
    - bakies 11d ago
      A gigawatt is a gigawatt. Power stations are more efficient the bigger they are. Put data centers in industrial zoning so the infrastructure for both power and water is already there. It's so obvious. Leave the power generating to the power companies. Yes, obviously again, the datacenters should pay for their gigawatts and solar on the roof will help keep the bill down. Why would this specific industry be required to run their own generators?
wateralien 12d ago
Our environment will collapse and the fat cats will still deny it and convince most of us that it was our fault and that nothing could be done and that we should just buy their anti-environment-collapse products to protect ourselves.
- charles_f 12d ago
  > Our environment will collapse and the fat cats will still deny It is, and they are. We keep hitting record X Y and Z temperatures, cyclones, etc, and they're on the brig shouting "it ain't global warming you morons"
fithisux 12d ago
This is not bad news. At some time we should decide to get along with Mother Nature. The Industrial party of the last 2 centuries is over. We should love the trees, the animals, the land and leave ASAP from the cities. Unfortunately, the plutocracy has different plans.
jmclnx 12d ago
>Climate scientist Bill Hare, CEO of Climate Analytics, said that "although UNEP does a good job of describing the hole we've dug ourselves into, it does a poor job of showing us that there's a way out." I need to say WTF, the way out is to stop pumping CO2 into the atmosphere. That means stop using fossil fuels. How many times does this need to be said ? Already it probably has been said millions of times.
- sokoloff 12d ago
  In practical terms, that’s closer to stating the problem than it is to stating the solution.
  - senordevnyc 12d ago
    Well said. At this point I’ve literally read many thousands of HN comments about climate change over the past two decades that boil down to “we just need magically overcome the unprecedented global scale of the collective action problem we face!”
shubhamjain 12d ago
It’s surreal how quickly this went from being the most important problem in the world to barely being on anyone’s mind, all in less than a decade. I had plenty of problems with the fear-mongering and doomed-by-2030 predictions, but the current situation, where we seem basically fine with doing nothing, is genuinely scary. Technology has its limits, billions of people still aspire to a European standard of living, and global population isn’t expected to peak until near the end of this century. I just hate this post-Trump, post-Covid, post-Russia-Ukraine-war world. I don’t know what the trigger was, but there must have been a point where things just went to shit. And here we are: an increasingly ultra-capitalistic dystopia where wealth seems to be the only thing that matters.
- sajithdilshan 12d ago
  Because it’s truly a first world problem. Rest of the world has other problems like hunger, clean drinking water and other basic necessities to solve
  - dfdydx 12d ago
    Aren't those "other problems" somewhat affected by climate change though?
    - sajithdilshan 12d ago
      All those problems were already there even before climate change was a topic, so nothing new regarding that front
      - rendaw 12d ago
        I don't think GP was claiming they weren't.
      - dfdydx 12d ago
        I'd wager they're not binary (absent/present) issues but have many dimensions and a continuum of possible values and thus "climate change makes this problem worse or different" is something new. Random example: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41612-024-00583-8 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41612-024-00583-8
sajithdilshan 12d ago
It’s way easy to preach vegan diets, solar/wind installations, etc. from the comfy chairs by the citizens of first world countries. But for someone living in a dirt poor country, climate change is the last thing in their mind even though they might be the hardest hit population. For them it’s about survival and meeting basic human needs.
- myaccountonhn 12d ago
  At this point its not preached from comfy first world countries, but rather countries that are getting unbareably hot in the summer. So much that more and more people are going to die each year as a result
  - sajithdilshan 12d ago
    It is actually worse than preaching because based on your comment it's pure ignorant superiority. You think 40 degrees celcius for few days in the summer is the apocalypse, then try living in an indian village where the temperatures reaches 50 degrees for one month, where you have to walk miles to get a barrel of water to drink. And then imagine having to live there for the whole life. Also now you say because there were heat waves in Europe it's not preaching, then what's the excuse before that?
    - watwut 11d ago
      more than 75% of Indians think global warming is happening and say they are worried about it. They think that global warming will harm people in India. People in India (more in north then in south) report having personally experienced severe heat waves and the effects of global warming, and think that global warming will harm them, their families, and their communities. Turns out that people living in place with 50 degress who "have to walk miles to get a barrel of water to drink" dont want more extreme weather all that much
- watwut 12d ago
  Solar/wind installations are demonized from comfy chairs by the citizens of first world countries. Anti environmental agenda is agenda of rich conservatives, CEOs and their western right wing friends. Dirt poor countries do care about climate change per polls.
wateralien 12d ago
This is mostly the UN’s own fault. Nation governments refrain from getting “hardcore” on this because the better options are expensive and they don’t want to be undercut by another country. The UN is supposed to somehow use its deep diplomatic negotiating and deal-making skill to find and enforce agreement between these states so we all adopt the changes together… and penalise the hold-outs (we all know who) together.
sseary 12d ago
[dead]
skeledrew 12d ago
Burn baby burn!
aorth 12d ago
The story does not link to the report itself, which can be found here: https://www.unep.org/resources/limiting-overshoot-navigating-exceedance https://www.unep.org/resources/limiting-overshoot-navigating...
radu_floricica 12d ago
I'm mostly stopped feeling autistic since adolescence, but climate change is one of those times. It's obviously real, and it's also obvious that shuffling chairs in developing countries is rounding to zero effect. We're converting to cleaner energy anyways because of pollution and better economics, so the push for decarbonization in itself is... what do you call a rounding error when it's already rounding to zero? And it's FAR from hopeless. Again, global warming is obviously happening. But the amount of adapting and reacting to it is virtually nil. Installing AC. Tree cover in every city. Start serious discussions on what level of risk we want with geoengineering. Because yes, there absolutely is an acceptable risk level with geoengineering. Planting trees is that. Carbon capture is also that. And better and more effective tech will definitely be available. But we're in a social climate where I don't even dare write down examples of what those more effective methods would be, because if you're not luddite enough you're the enemy.
- m00dy 12d ago
  Can you explain what 'Luddite' means in a broader context? Not all of us grew up learning British history :)
  - reilly3000 12d ago
    Luddite: someone who is against using technology out of fear (of economic opportunities mostly)
    - notarobot123 12d ago
      More generously: someone who resists new technologies due to their perceived harmful effects (economic but also social and environmental)
    - steve_adams_86 12d ago
      Yeah, important to note that the way the label is used has deviated from its historic meaning. Colloquially it’s something like “someone who rejects new technology” with variable reasons as to why, but historically there’s more nuance and it’s grounded in rejection of technology which worsens working conditions, detracts from craft, and disrupts cottage industry/workers rights/wages/etc. They made more sense than the label presently suggests they did. I suppose you could think of them as activists protecting their crafts and trade privileges that were being undermined by specific machines and their owners
unchocked 12d ago
Geophysically, there are 3 pillars to climate stabilization: 1. Emitting fewer greenhouse gasses. Need to do that more than ever, but we are now in overshoot so… 2. Actively remove greenhouse gasses from atmosphere. Will need to do that, but land use and dirty energy trends away from net negative. Also, it’s a 100 year project once started. 3. Shade Earth. Not regions, The whole globe. There are two ways to do that: a. Stratospheric aerosols b. Planetary sunshades in space, at Sun-Earth L1. That’s the whole solution space, conceptually. As long as we continue to fail within that space, we will suffer compounding effects of unmitigated climate change.
- gozucito 12d ago
  Precisely! The world needs to spend 15 billions a year on reflective aerosols while it reduces emissions thanks to renewables. This will not address the acidification of the oceans which is very bad but something is better than nothing. Carbon capture is way too slow to work. It’s a rounding error.
- hyperbovine 12d ago
  Two of these things will definitely work. One of them is completely untested, poorly understood and with potentially massive consequences for the climate and food production.
- tzs 12d ago
  > Actively remove greenhouse gasses from atmosphere. Will need to do that, but land use and dirty energy trends away from net negative. Also, it’s a 100 year project once started. I once did the math, assuming we have enough resources to build a lot of solar panels. Assuming current efficiency levels of solar panels and current commercial feasible levels of direct air carbon capture (DAC), if we annually allocated an amount equal to our current annual solar panel production to building large solar farms dedicated to powering DAC plants, in about 150ish years those plants would be capturing each year an amount about equal to our current total annual emissions. If we keep expanding solar panel production we could shorten that timeline and build more than just enough to breakeven. The area for those solar farms would be about 1/15th the area of the 5 largest subtropical deserts. What would we do with all the carbon extracted? That's not really a problem. If we can't think of a good use for it, just mount the solar panels powering the DAC plants a few meters off the ground, convert the carbon to graphite, and dump it under the solar panels. Spread evenly it would only be a few mm thick.
qoez 12d ago
Maybe if I develop really strong anxiety about this, it's gonna solve the problem
- infinitezest 12d ago
  Maybe if you don't, the problem will go away.
- cbg0 12d ago
  I'm guessing you're being facetious? The options aren't to either develop anxiety or not care at all.
  - hackable_sand 12d ago
    I do find the coping methods strange. You have people throwing the match for no reason, or crying like children.
hypfer 12d ago
From my understanding, the West never truly committed to that goal. It just said so as a PR thing, so that the much more affected countries quiet down, because "hey hey we said 1.5°". "Oops, sorry, we tried". The West knows that it will manage even with more than that, but it also knows that not everyone will. Jury's still out on whether the neglect is just due to apathy or because it might be beneficial. Only time will tell.
- mr_toad 12d ago
  It was a New Year’s resolution that was broken by the next morning.
  - hypfer 12d ago
    I'm not sure if I'd agree with that, because that sounds like what normal humans do. Systems and politics are not that. Not at all. They're cold, calculating and fundamentally sociopathic. A more fitting analogy I think would be "Yes we were bought by a bigger company, but trust us, there will be no changes". Of course the buyout came with exact plans on who to lay off when, but panic would be bad for business.
tito 12d ago
Want to do something about this? El Niño this year is going to be especially crazy, worst in human history by a large margin looks like. I'm putting together El Niño Climate Week to work on averting the worst impacts. It's a good opportunity to move the conversation forward about how our climate is changing very quickly. https://elninoclimateweek.com https://elninoclimateweek.com My projects tend to be pretty good schelling points for people that like to take action, in case you're finding the comments here frustrating ("I'm not surprised", "we just need to X", "we're doomed", "it will be fine", etc etc etc)
mym1990 12d ago
Modern economies are addicted to growth, and asset prices are pinned to showing continued growth more than ever. As soon as any global power proposes to take a beat and re-evaluate the trajectory of innovation, they will be left behind. Global leadership is also effectively non-existent and aside from trade, no one seems to be able to really make inroads on big ticket issues. In a time where we need more collaboration that ever, governments seem to be skewing more nationalistic than ever.
- hypfer 12d ago
  Well, to be fair, the whole "enough growth" thought happened to spring into existence at the exact moment where we (the west) have comfortable living standards. Something other developing nations would need growth for to achieve. So that's kinda interesting, because degrowth is seen as this conceptual antagonist to the people letting the global south burn, but they both are letting them down - just marginally differently.
- shuwix 12d ago
  [flagged]
  - hyperbovine 12d ago
    Hey at least they are trying.
    - shuwix 11d ago
      With politicans, "atleast they're trying" is the worst option. Either you know what you're doing ... or don't. Destroying local vital industries with tax burden, to pay subsidies to green bullcrap, and importing everything from other side of planet, that's "leftard ecology".
kpmcc 12d ago
Buddy with all 24/7 gas powered data centers in the works we’ll be lucky to keep below 3 C.
roughly 12d ago
I think the conversation here is making me more depressed than the news. The number of people who don’t believe collective action is possible, who somehow believe the current techno-capitalist model is determined by god or history or whatever, who don’t have any particular knowledge about history, economic development, etc but are very happy to very loudly yell that the only thing we can do is more of the same but maybe faster - man, y’all call yourselves hackers, but you sure are an incurious and gullible lot.
- senordevnyc 12d ago
  Can you point to any examples where democratic populations have engaged in the kinds of sacrifice at scale needed to avert this problem? Do you have any specific, actionable proposals to solve this problem that don’t rely on us magically solving the collective action problem? A vague sense that “we can do it if we just try!” is no better than what you’re decrying.
  - roughly 12d ago
    There are long histories of cultures managing collective resources democratically over extremely long periods. Both the water temples of Southeast Asia and the rituals around salmon runs and controlled burns in the Pacific Northwest maintained careful husbandry of scarce resources across time periods that extend well beyond the time period since the tragedy of the commons was discovered by the same people who are asserting that kind of coordination to be impossible. This is a cultural problem, and it’s with our culture, not humanity writ large. With regards to concrete solutions, we could stop pretending that financial optimization and private equity is anything other than looting at scale, we could stop pretending that it’s the god-given destiny of every imaginable product to get shittier and require more rapid disposal and replacement, we could stop imagining that Jeff Bezos shooting people into space is the sign of a functioning economy, but very very directly, we could start actually taxing people and corporations for the long-term effects of their actions, we could prosecute people who attempt to buy, bribe, or market their way past social issues, and we could start incorporating the full cost of, eg, offsetting category 5 hurricanes and large scale droughts or heatwaves in our calculations of the benefits of our modern supply chains and globalized markets. All of those things would be fine starts to drive policy in the directions we want. All of them run afoul of the current winners of the current systems, which is why they’ve been tarred as the unrealistic fantasies of people who aren’t interested in spending the rest of their lives in hermetically-sealed air conditioned boxes so Sam Altman and Elon Musk don’t have to go to therapy.
internet2000 12d ago
It's hard to have people use data in these types of conversations, so I'll just link two charts. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita and https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-emissions-by-region https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-emissions-by-re... Notice which countries are going down. Notice which countries are going up.
- deleted 12d ago
  [deleted]
- Faaak 12d ago
  That's such a narrow minded point of view. Yeah, who produces your laptop ? Your lawnmower ? Heck, even your knifes ?
- Tadpole9181 12d ago
  Hey, quick question, who does virtually all manufacturing for US and Canadian and EU citizens? And why is the rise of Chinas emissions so coincidentally timed to the fall of those countries'? I didn't go into the study, but looking at all the little text blurbs about the numbers, I don't see anything about if a US citizen purchasing a product that's made in China counts as US emission, as it obviously should.
  - zb3 12d ago
    My view is that current "emission reduction" just moves jobs to China and India, which decreases overall labor rights and negatively affects the working class.. Still, if you want to have your new iPhone 18/19/20 pro ultra max, it has to be produced somewhere.. So maybe it's time to rethink this and get back to the drawing board..
    - kennywinker 12d ago
      Actual emissions reductions is different from just shell-gaming emissions from the US column to the China column. Greenwashing is real, but that doesn’t mean reducing emissions isn’t a real thing we can do.
hasanpiker 12d ago
[flagged]
- SmasherEpilepti 12d ago
  Anthropogenic climate change denial is entering a territory where it's not just illogical, it's straight-up delusional. Even oil companies accept it and have been studying it for decades (even if their public policy is denial).
tito 12d ago
HN's community moderation tools seem to fail at times, so I'm responding to ssearyus's comment that is marked [dead]: ssearyus: At the risk of being immediately downvoted, let me point out that a 250ppm CO2 level is borderline disastrous for plant life -- at 180ppm, plants would starve globally. The increased CO2 levels in recent years (slightly added to by human activities) is immensely helpful for drought-resistance, as stomata do not then need to open as much to get sufficient CO2 with the result that they transpire less water. The above, and the fact the by far the most important GHG in the atmosphere is water vapor (CO2 is comparatively a rounding error) should give reasonable people pause for thought. My response: I think there's something you're trying to say, but it doesn't come through clearly in these many points. - 250ppm is not disastrous for plant life. That's around preindustrial levels of CO2 (280ppm) and plants did just fine - What do you mean by "starve" here regarding 180ppm? - And why are you talking about 250ppm and 180ppm specifically? No one is talking about 250ppm or 180ppm as targets (or maybe you are?) - Water vapor is indeed a greenhouse gas, and contributes to warming. But it's best thought as an accelerant. Warmer temperatures bring more water vapor bring higher temperatures, bring more water vapor etc etc. The rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is so important because it trigger in many ways a feedback loop, one of which is rise in water vapor as a greenhouse gas. The feedback loop caused by temperature/water vapor is one of the reasons we need to be very careful with our human-made emissions. - "CO2 is comparatively a rounding error": Whether by mass or volume, CO2 is not a rounding error by comparison to water vapor. There's roughly 4 to 6 times the amount of water vapor as CO2. I wouldn't call 25% a rounding error. Maybe there's something I missed here. - And when you say water vapor is "by far the most important GHG in the atmosphere", does that mean you're working on lowering water vapor levels in the atmosphere? Or what are you working on regarding solving for this? Maybe something with airplane cloud formation trapping heat?
- tzs 12d ago
  I'd guess part of the reason he got downvoted is this: "The increased CO2 levels in recent years (slightly added to by human activities) [...]". Pretty much all of the CO2 increase above pre-industrial levels (280 ppm) is due to human activity. 99% of the time when someone says otherwise they are going to continue with a bunch of other equally inaccurate things which they got from scientifically worthless sites and so people just flag and move on.
kubafu 12d ago
Since land warms much faster than water, and Earth's surface is mostly water, then 1.5C average means how much land warming itself? Isn't talking in averages a way to feel better about all this?
xyst 12d ago
anybody still grinding out a 9-5 for a trust fund baby at this point is wasting their life. billionaires, boomers, decrepit old men, and o&g industry have fucked future generations and humanity.
dpacmittal 12d ago
Not surprising when leader of the free world is doing such shenanigans - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/06/rwe-deal-wind-leases https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/06/rwe-deal-win...
monneyboi 12d ago
Why are we framing this as "the fight against climate change"? This framing puts the culprit outside of ourselves, as if it's some external force. I feel that way of looking at it makes changing impossible. It's our own behaviours and systems that will have to change. There's nothing to fight here, the answer instead lies in collaboration.
- kennywinker 12d ago
  Great point. For example, we should encourage collaboration between people building hyperscale data centers, and people not building hyperscale data centers to find some middle ground that is good for the planet. Collaboration implies we are all on the same side. Reality suggests some people have made it their business to be on the wrong side.
  - senordevnyc 12d ago
    Who is using the hyperscale data centers?
    - kennywinker 12d ago
      Right now? Nobody is using the hypothetical un-built datacenters that threaten to tax our planet. All the current individual LLM demand is being met by what exists already, yet we're seeing unprecedented amounts of money being spent at the cost of the environment to build out at scale. This is so that jobs that currently earn people money can be replaced with LLMs that earn investors money. Something only the investors want.
raymond_goo 12d ago
Are you saying Germany ruined it's industry for nothing?
dariosalvi78 12d ago
we have had the perfect storm to do a U-turn on most fossile fuels: - COVID pandemics: everybody at home, less traveling, massive economic reset and massive capitals injected (EU recovery funding, quantitative easing) - Russian attack on Ucraine, stopping a big chunk of gas and petrol to Europe - Strait of Hormuz, also chocking oil coming to the rest of the world We could have said: "oh, let's swap those energy sources to renewables", "oh, let's bind those capitals to de-carbonization projects", "oh, let's plant trees", "oh, let's stop deforestation". A lot of things could have been said and done. But, well, a certain degree of coordinated intelligence is too much to ask. At this point I have lost all hopes, whatever comes, we have asked for it.
- senordevnyc 12d ago
  From my perspective, we simply didn’t evolve to have the kind of collective intelligence required. There’s no point in being angry about it, any more than it makes sense to be angry at any other animal for the abilities it hasn’t evolved to have.
tsoukase 12d ago
After 50 years since I was born for the first I didnt eat grapes from my backyard in Southern Europe because they dried up due to extreme heat. In the rest of my life I might miss any other fruit.
deleted 12d ago
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agentultra 12d ago
Big congratulations to the world leaders and policy makers who were at the signing of the Paris Accord. Went home. And did very little about it. Now we output more CO2 faster than we ever have in our entire history. At least the economy is doing okay… oh wait. Maybe the reason action hasn’t happened is because the solutions would drive down income inequality? Was hoping my kids wouldn’t have to live with the worst of it but it looks like we failed at that.
a1371 12d ago
I got invited to a UN conference on climate change. It was a huge deal of course that I could get in; however, the whole time I "felt" important. Everyone did. I question how many of the tens of thousands of people involved actually did important work. Everyone knew we will miss the 1.5 degree target, btw. This was a few years ago.
itsTyrion 12d ago
Hope y'all are having fun with GPT-69 and 50 agent swarms at least! (queue the angry downvotes)
MetroWind 11d ago
Good. The sooner human dies out the better.

340 points by ijidak 12d ago

[dead]

Not much of a surprise. Government action has been anemic at best. Industry action (overall) has been net negative. The only hope now is exponential growth of (solar and wind)+batteries making other sources uneconomic. This seems to be slowly happening, so I hope we hit the exponential curve soon and we're there quicker than we expect. This only stops it. Then, to fix it, we'll need a massive Direct Air Capture industry that will have to operate for a century, and probably past that so we can hit and maintain a CO2 level of 250ppm.

WarmWash 12d ago
>Not much of a surprise. Government action has been anemic at best. Industry action (overall) has been net negative. And individual action has switched to just holding governments and industry responsible. Which basically amounts to giving up. "Welp, just gonna buy this truck, enjoy my burgers, set the AC at 68 and fly on all vacations this year because it's nothing compared to Big Oil."
- jkahrs595 12d ago
  Don’t forget eating meat, the easiest thing to stop doing (people needs cars and trucks for work, they don’t need cheeseburgers). People can’t be bothered to make any changes, it’s always someone else’s problem. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/sep/27/meat-gas-emissions-reporting https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/sep/27/meat-gas...
  - deleted 12d ago
    [deleted]
  - benfortuna 12d ago
    Even cutting back on meat can have an impact. Halving quantities in cooking etc. really is hardly noticeable.
    - tyre 12d ago
      Yeah I think this is a much better path. If you mix chicken with jackfruit 50/50 in tacos, for example, it’s barely noticeable. We’re not going to convince Americans to give up meat, but if we can reduce consumption when they do eat it, we can make incremental change.
  - WarmWash 12d ago
    Yeah, good catch, thanks.
  - jezzamon 12d ago
    People need cars... But not trucks for work :)
    - sagarm 12d ago
      People need cars because we designed our environments to require them. It was a choice, not an inevitability.
      - drfloyd51 12d ago
        And here we are. Needing cars. Unless you want to spend the big money of rebuilding cities.
        chrisnight 12d ago
        To be clear, the money is already being spent, it’s just a question of what we make the priority. Even just keeping the current roads useable costs billions of dollars, let alone the amount of money spent on highway expansion (which, due to induced demand, causes even more traffic). In 30 years, every road that exists currently will have been replaced. The question is if it should be replaced with another road, or should some of them have larger sidewalks, bike lanes, bus lanes. Amsterdam has been doing this for decades and it’s going very well. They spent money that would’ve been spent rebuilding a road on making it a better general transportation option.
- zhann_dc 12d ago
  Well, truth be told.. It _is_ nothing compared to Big Oil.
  - WarmWash 12d ago
    Spoiler: It's individuals who are driving that demand. The impact of the decisions of big oil are nothing compared to the collective decisions of individuals. Big oil isn't going to kick down your door when you buy an EV and switch to solar. There is no rancher in the grocery aisle slipping steaks in your cart.
    - collingreen 12d ago
      Spoiler, the oil and other energy industries have done a world changing amount of lobbying and regulatory capture in order to drive decisions that cause more and more fossil fuel use. This includes everything from subsidies to industry stagnating regulations to reduced enforcement to suburban sprawl. Look at how the current US administration shills for big coal. Pretending they haven't shaped the world around the consumers is either naive or bad faith. Yes, consumers have to stop funding these companies and behaviors. Also, the governments that operate on behalf of those consumers have to drop their corruption and start protecting those people they represent. Both virtuous and nonvirtuous conservatives know neither of these are going to happen, which is why they see massive terraforming technology as the only way out - if someone with power can't get rich(er) fixing it then it won't get fixed.
      - tekla 12d ago
        Spoiler, you exist in incredible luxury because YOU benefited from paying for goods and services made extremely cheap from oil. You also have the oil on your hands, and its not washing off easily.
      - WarmWash 12d ago
        >The impact of the decisions of big oil are nothing compared to the collective decisions of individuals.
    - 12d ago
- dreamworld 12d ago
  Acting politically for what matters is not giving up :) Though, as always, we can and really should do both.
- nkohari 12d ago
  Governments and industry are responsible. Personal consumption/waste is not the primary driver of climate change, no matter how much corporations tell us that using paper straws is the solution. It's tough to expect average people to take major action when corporations are essentially given carte blanche.
  - WarmWash 12d ago
    And who is buying all that stuff from corporations? Who is actually the one consuming? We can quibble about edge effects like "induced demand", but by and large, people just love cheap energy, cheap calories, and can shift the moral burden by playing "not my responsibility" games.
  - myaccountonhn 12d ago
    From the IPCC report, 2/3rds of all global emissions are directly tied to consumption.
    - nkohari 11d ago
      Well, yeah. Corporations aren't just nefarious evil entities, dumping carbon into the atmosphere for no reason. They're doing it to sell goods. The problem is that a lot of the environmental costs for the manufacture and transport of those goods are externalized and go unpaid. It's difficult to put the blame for that on the consumer, who has no visibility into manufacturing or logistics, and who has vanishingly-small options for not participating. Buying domestic goods is very difficult or impossible, and goods which are manufactured in more environmentally-safe ways are significantly more expensive (because the costs I mentioned earlier weren't externalized). If a consumer is presented with two options, one that costs $X and has unknown environmental costs, and one that costs $2X and is marketed as being environmentally safe, the majority will choose the first. This is especially true as economic forces continue to squeeze average people. Consumers absolutely participate in the problem, but the only process by which it could be corrected is regulation, and the only entity capable of that is the government. (Democracy being what it is, you can however place more blame at the feet of voters.)
- sagarm 12d ago
  Government is the means by which the electorate acts collectively. Pushing for policy changes is not giving up.
- jmclnx 12d ago
  If the Gov stopped Oil Subsidizes, incentivize the move to renewals and nuclear instead of promoting Oil say 20 years ago, we could keep our A/Cs and 60 degrees (~16C) if we wanted to. The sames goes to flying and beef, make it expensive. So yes, Governments share by far most of the blame for this. A specific individual is not going to change their life stye unless forced to, that is human nature. Instead we have had governments in the US being too afraid to do the right thing. The only possible US President that was willing to make big changes climate wise had his election stolen by the Supreme Court in the year 2000. So here we are still with no politician willing to really force changes on people's life style in the "first world". All they are doing is trying to keep the price of oil low. One final thing, in the US, if you try to use electricity from all renewals, the price is much higher. And in some cases electricity you receive is still generated from fossil fuels.
ThrowawayIP 12d ago
The technology-will-save-us mentality is part of the reason we are here. We live in a society that doesn't do anything unless it makes money for some set of decrepit old men. We had the means to avoid this (strict vegan diets, ground based mass transit, dense development & re-wilding, energy transition) but people made money doing the opposite. And more people made money sabotaging solar+battery pricing in the US. So we get to watch the world burn down around us.
- baq 12d ago
  Just like it isn’t possible to get politicians to stop spending other people’s money, it isn’t possible to stop enterprises from making as much money as possible while spending as little as possible on a global scale (it may work locally!) Thus, technology-will-save-us is the rational choice. Drill all the oil, build the biggest datacenters and speedrun to fusion before the collapse so we can sequester the carbon back into the ground and still have energy left to run Haber-Bosch, ideally with hydrolysis instead of natgas. Disclaimer: I used to be heavily in the sustainability camp in my younger years
  - panta 12d ago
    Neoliberism is not the only possible system, it is very well possible to change the boundaries of what enterprises can do. Technology-will-save-us is a quasi-religious belief, not supported by evidence. Also if it was true that we can't convince politicians and enterprises to change their course now, why should they do later when costs will be much higher? Relying mostly on technology that doesn't yet exist seems absurd to me. We have an incredibly hard problem to solve and maybe a narrow window of action, we should use all the tools we have at our disposal: rapid deployment of available solutions, sustained research into better ones, adoption of more frugal lifestyles, development of alternative sociological, political and economical frameworks.
- fullshark 12d ago
  Technology is more feasible than politically driven "degrowth" or any of the other proposals.
epistasis 12d ago
It is quite ironic that capitalism and the profit motive are now the best hope for staving off climate change, all thanks to the technologists and entrepreneurs that have mad renewables and storage so cheap. The 2020s climate action movement in the US (and the UK) was disastrous in their strategy, action, and outcomes. I was there, I followed along because it seemed like the best way to get climate action, but things like Sunrise and XR at their very best did nothing. They focused on all the wrong people, focused on all the wrong levers. They turned allies into enemies, by "protesting" tech companies that were at the forefront of real action. They refused to acknowledge the massive effects of technology change, and the need for quick adoption, and the huge money saving nature of the solution. I have zero patience for those attitudes now, the difference between a degrowther and a climate change denying politician are minimal in effect, and the effects are all that matter now.
- woodgala 12d ago
  What about energystar? That had significant impact. Remember how we fixed the ozone hole? It’s entirely possible to drive change through policy or community. We just choose not to do it because the Epstein class wants culture war not class war.
  - epistasis 12d ago
    Yes, policy does change things!! You give examples where a community got together, changed policy, affecting all of society. This is precisely the opposite of the disastrous 2020s action, which had no concrete policy demands, which leaned into the culture war. They ceded the ground to the right wing, who does that sort of culture war much better, as they have focused their efforts on it for so long. With culture war, no policy changes. The fight takes place in vibes. We need policy, execution in concrete changes of physical things in the real world. That's where Sunrise and XR failed.
    - woodgala 12d ago
      I see. Thanks!
    - 12d ago
hypefi 12d ago
the best CO2 capture are trees
- ben_w 12d ago
  Probably algae. Land only slightly beats the ocean, like a 53-47 split or something, and trees are only part of the primary production on land: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_production This is also why you sometimes see startups pumping green goo through plastic pipes for home-scale solar biofuel systems.
- xnx 12d ago
  They are good at capture, but not sequestration.
xnx 12d ago
Population decrease will have the biggest impact.
- anonzzzies 12d ago
  Yes, but you cannot say that. We need more people, for money.
- smallerfish 12d ago
  Yeah and there's two ways to get there - planned and unplanned. It'll happen one way or the other.
- lukeify 12d ago
  The unpopular answers are usually the correct ones.
- brabel 12d ago
  Good news then: most of the world already has a decreasing population or about to start decreasing. Only exception being Africa.
- adrianN 12d ago
  Decades too late unless you suggest we start killing people.
deleted 12d ago
[deleted]
psadri 12d ago
I have been wondering: more solar means we are making Earth less reflective. Solar energy that might have been reflected back to space is now absorbed by the PV to make electricity. But that delta has to go somewhere? Where does it go in terms of Earth’s temperature. Same with more nuclear… we’d be pumping more energy into the system. Don’t take this as an argument against these technologies. It’s a huge win to not be increasing the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels.
- philipkglass 12d ago
  Yes, this does happen. Solar farms have an albedo modification effect. The good news is that compared to fossil powered generation, the albedo modification is "paid back" in less than a year due to lower GHG emissions: "Small reduction in land surface albedo due to solar panel expansion worldwide" https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-024-01619-w https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-024-01619-w If you download the supplementary information PDF, figure 19 shows a plot of GHG payback times by site. The most common time is about 1 month. The greatest time they found was about 9 months. These times go down as solar panel efficiencies continue to creep upward, because solar panels in 2026 don't have lower albedo than in 2024, but they do have better light-to-electricity conversion efficiency.
- mr_toad 12d ago
  Current levels of solar panel coverage on Earth are approximately 0%. If we ran the entire Earth on Solar power we’d need ~ half a million square kilometres, around 0.1 percent of the Earth’s surface.
- p1mrx 12d ago
  A solar array makes the earth less reflective by a fixed amount, for as long as the array exists. Every unit of fossil fuel we burn makes the earth permanently less reflective (or at least something on the order of 100 years). You could compare a 1GW solar array (for its lifetime) to a 1GW coal plant running for x days, though I don't have the value of x.
- jbotz 12d ago
  We're actually heating the earth in two ways... one is by increasing the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The other is simply by using energy; any use of energy means moving something to higher entropy and thus producing heat, even if that energy comes from 100% clean or renewable sources. However, nobody talks about this second way of heating the earth because it's about two orders of magnitude behind the first, i.e. for now pretty insignificant. As for making the earth less reflective with PV panels... yes, you are right and most of that absorbed solar energy directly contributes to heating the earth because PV panels aren't anywhere near 100% efficient in converting it to electricity, but even the part that is converted to electricity will become heat again in the end, like when it powers AI data centers. (If PV was 100% efficient, then the lack of reflection wouldn't directly do any heating, the heating would all happen when the electricity is used.) For now that isn't a big concern because the greenhouse gases our civilization is releasing into the atmosphere do so much more heating than all our use of energy, but if we do become 100% renewable and survive that particular danger, then by Jevons' paradox we'll soon be using 10x to 100x more "clean" energy and be heating the earth all the same again.
kogasa240p 12d ago
>Then, to fix it, we'll need a massive Direct Air Capture industry that will have to operate for a century, and probably past that so we can hit and maintain a CO2 level of 250ppm. Removing CO2 from seawater would be more efficient because some of the work is already done for you, and you'd be de-acidifying the ocean long term.
fifilura 12d ago
> Government action has been anemic at best. I am not very surprised, since the people voted for the "drill baby drill" president? I wouldn't classify that as anemic.
jandrewrogers 12d ago
Direct Air Capture at any meaningful scale is predicated on mining billions of tons of refined minerals. The environmental impact of that would be so enormous that it will never be allowed to happen, never mind the severe resource crunch.
irthomasthomas 12d ago
[flagged]
LargoLasskhyfv 11d ago
> Then, to fix it, we'll need a massive Direct Air Capture industry that will have to operate for a century, and probably past that so we can hit and maintain a CO2 level of 250ppm. Which should probably be nuclear powered, at the required scale. So we could have taken the direct route, instead of solar, bess, wind, water, geothermal...(c.f. Alien, Aliens, 'Atmospheric Processor'...) Anybody remembering the trash which was sold as 'lightbulbs' for about 15 years, before LED got somewhat acceptable colors? And prices? And longevity? Mehw, lightbulb baad, eats too much waatt! So lets miniaturize CFLs to be able to screw them in lightbulb sockets! So they get warm because they are so small, the sockets have no airflow, and their own electronics go with a premature blow! Yay!
- defrost 11d ago
  > Which should probably be nuclear powered, at the required scale. Why? Why not capture CO2, pump carbonated water into the Yilgarn Craton, recover the created hydrogen to both provide power and water to carbonate?
  - LargoLasskhyfv 11d ago
    Because all the stuff required to do that does not grow on trees. Which means it has its own externalities regarding mass flows, EROI, emissions. At present time it just means the externalities have been made into other peoples problems. Regarding mining, tailings, transport, production, and so on.
    - defrost 11d ago
      What tailings, what transport? Serious questions here ... I'm also curious about your actual experience in heavy mineral and energy industry, largest plant you've worked at, scale of operation, etc. (FWiW in fairness, I've worked a few decades in and around > half a billion tonne per annum mining and worked globally in geophysical mineral and energy exploration)
      - LargoLasskhyfv 11d ago

Schiendelman 12d ago

There hasn't been a question about this in a decade or more. There was no path, even theoretically, to stopping our CO2 emissions without dramatically lowering quality of life for maybe a couple billion people. We won't slow climate change. We can build resilience to the effects, and we have good incentives to do so. But we'll keep burning fossil fuels for a very long time.

benfortuna 12d ago
> We can build resilience to the effects Oh yeah, would love to see the resilience that would have prevented the Nepalese disaster
- Schiendelman 11d ago
  Resilience isn't prevention. Resilience is the systems to clean up after those events. To be able to build new housing for the people who survive, to route around problems.
- what_hn 12d ago
  Yeah, not build in the lowest point where there is a glacier upstream
  - sagarm 12d ago
    The US version: kill the national flood insurance program so we stop subsidizing property owners in disaster prone areas.
whatever1 12d ago
Maybe it will be a good incentive to rebuild our global infrastructure without having to go through a world war ?
- __natty__ 12d ago
  Say this to global warlords not to random user on Hacker News

jt2190 12d ago

Interestingly, financial markets are a good place to see the “price” of some environmental issues. A made up example: “Should I buy bonds that are backed by electricity sales from a yet-to-be-built hydroelectric dam? Will there be enough rainfall to fill the reservoir reliably? I’ll have to receive a higher interest payment to offset that risk.”

OgsyedIE 12d ago

Supposing all anthropogenic emissions went to zero today, we'd still keep warming almost as far as three degrees with all of the disasters and famines that entails, because there's a lag time between existing emissions and their effects. We need massive bounty programs that pay out irrespective of nationality for every possible kind of improvement and gain to carbon capture technology if we want to prevent 90% of all land on Earth between 30°N and 30°S from slowly turning into copies of the uninhabitable stretches of the Middle East.

throw8393739 12d ago
We need to print much more money!
cobalt60 12d ago
Just Zeroing isn't enough, what ever efforts we put into negating it never seems to have frontpage
brabel 12d ago
Global warming is much faster in the higher latitudes. It has not significantly impacted the region you mentioned much at all. Most impact has been due to intensification of natural cycles like the Indian Monsoons, the Atlantic hurricane season and El Niño, which are not really limited to that particular area of the Globe. The idea that the problem with global warming is that parts of the world will just become too hot to live seems to be mostly misguided.
tcfhgj 12d ago
might not be entirely accurate: https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-will-global-warming-stop-as-soon-as-net-zero-emissions-are-reached https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-will-global-warming-st... https://www.researchgate.net/figure/CO2-emissions-and-respective-global-mean-temperature-and-sea-level-responses-Emission_fig1_323291634 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/CO2-emissions-and-respec...
consumer451 12d ago
I think the way to frame this is: what would happen if we burned all known fossil fuel reserves? That is the trajectory we are on. The answer there is >6C global increase, and that would cause beyond disaster movie-level scenarios. Anything and everything we can do to stop that is important.

monster_truck 12d ago

How could this happen? I've faithfully sorted all of my recyclables into their respective bins to maximize profit for my city's garbage collection just like they asked

p-e-w 12d ago
Telling you that you have power is one of the ways by which they ensure that you don’t have any power. Elections work the same way.
- tito 12d ago
  They tell you you have a particular type of power. You have the power to sort your trash, nothing wrong with that. But what's left off and out is you have the power to change what dozens, thousands, millions, and billions of people do. "Carbon footprint" was a marketing trick played by the oil industry. It worked great. What's needed now is something like a "carbon wave", where you evaluate your impact by how quickly you move the entire world forward. There's a new book on this to that just arrived to me last week: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-carbon-wave-leah-c-stokes/1148963997 https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-carbon-wave-leah-c-stok...
cbg0 12d ago
We've gone the "crowdsorting" route but if we didn't go this way the fees for garbage collection would be higher and the city's garbage collection company would still make profits, that's a constant.

amazingamazing 12d ago

When will the rich, say top 10% of planet decrease their emissions?

p-e-w 12d ago
The top 10% of the planet aren’t “the rich”, what a gross and incendiary misuse of the term.
- tito 12d ago
  The top 10% richest humans emit about half of all emissions. Decile 10 (richest): ~48% Decile 9: ~15% Decile 8: ~10% Decile 7: ~8% Decile 6: ~6% Deciles 1 through 5 combined: ~12%, so about 1 to 3% each Sources like this: www.oxfam.org.uk/media/press-releases/richest-1-emit-as-much-planet-heating-pollution-as-two-thirds-of-humanity-oxfam/
- hocuspocus 12d ago
  If you live in better material conditions than 90% of the world population, you're rich, by definition. This is nearly half the global CO2 footprint.
- infinitezest 12d ago
  What would _you_ call the top 10% richest people in the world? Middle upper, upper, upper, upper class?
  - p-e-w 12d ago
    95% of the top 10% are middle class, because the vast majority of the world’s population are middle or lower class.
cbg0 12d ago
How exactly would that make a dent? CO2 sources: - Electricity + heat production ~40–42% - Industry + manufacturing ~20–22% - Road transport ~12–13% - Deforestation & land-use change ~10% - Direct fuel use in buildings ~5–6% - Aviation ~2–3% - Shipping ~2–3% - Rail, pipelines & other transport ~1% - Flaring / other energy & industrial sources ~2–4% I'm guessing the private jets is what you're hinting at? Aviation above includes all flights, not just private jets.

beloch 12d ago

We already know we need to pump the breaks on AI for a host of safety issues. However, perhaps the biggest concern is the sheer scale of electricity generation they require. One hyperscale data centre can require electricity equivalent to a fair sized city. Many data centre builders are keen to claim they'll use renewable energy sources... eventually. They'll just suck power off the grid "temporarily" or rely on "clean" natural gas for a few years. There are a decent number of states, provinces, etc. whose total emissions will double in a matter of months. Could the timing possibly be worse? From a warming perspective, it's utter madness to let this build-out proceed unimpeded. New data centres should be required to be net-zero at power-up. Unfortunately, it's a race and the U.S. side of it has an administration that is actively rolling back policies that fight climate change.

bakies 12d ago
Data centers seem tangential to any real problem. The grid should be converting to green energy and regulation that says datacenters must also be power stations is backwards.
- beloch 12d ago
  A gigawatt is a gigawatt. If you need a gigawatt, you pay for the generation and infrastructure to provide it, whether you're a million people or a single data-centre. The jursidictions that require data-centres to provide their own generation and electrical infrastructure are completely within their rights.
  - bakies 11d ago
    A gigawatt is a gigawatt. Power stations are more efficient the bigger they are. Put data centers in industrial zoning so the infrastructure for both power and water is already there. It's so obvious. Leave the power generating to the power companies. Yes, obviously again, the datacenters should pay for their gigawatts and solar on the roof will help keep the bill down. Why would this specific industry be required to run their own generators?

wateralien 12d ago

Our environment will collapse and the fat cats will still deny it and convince most of us that it was our fault and that nothing could be done and that we should just buy their anti-environment-collapse products to protect ourselves.

charles_f 12d ago
> Our environment will collapse and the fat cats will still deny It is, and they are. We keep hitting record X Y and Z temperatures, cyclones, etc, and they're on the brig shouting "it ain't global warming you morons"

fithisux 12d ago

This is not bad news. At some time we should decide to get along with Mother Nature. The Industrial party of the last 2 centuries is over. We should love the trees, the animals, the land and leave ASAP from the cities. Unfortunately, the plutocracy has different plans.

jmclnx 12d ago

>Climate scientist Bill Hare, CEO of Climate Analytics, said that "although UNEP does a good job of describing the hole we've dug ourselves into, it does a poor job of showing us that there's a way out." I need to say WTF, the way out is to stop pumping CO2 into the atmosphere. That means stop using fossil fuels. How many times does this need to be said ? Already it probably has been said millions of times.

sokoloff 12d ago
In practical terms, that’s closer to stating the problem than it is to stating the solution.
- senordevnyc 12d ago
  Well said. At this point I’ve literally read many thousands of HN comments about climate change over the past two decades that boil down to “we just need magically overcome the unprecedented global scale of the collective action problem we face!”

shubhamjain 12d ago

It’s surreal how quickly this went from being the most important problem in the world to barely being on anyone’s mind, all in less than a decade. I had plenty of problems with the fear-mongering and doomed-by-2030 predictions, but the current situation, where we seem basically fine with doing nothing, is genuinely scary. Technology has its limits, billions of people still aspire to a European standard of living, and global population isn’t expected to peak until near the end of this century. I just hate this post-Trump, post-Covid, post-Russia-Ukraine-war world. I don’t know what the trigger was, but there must have been a point where things just went to shit. And here we are: an increasingly ultra-capitalistic dystopia where wealth seems to be the only thing that matters.

sajithdilshan 12d ago
Because it’s truly a first world problem. Rest of the world has other problems like hunger, clean drinking water and other basic necessities to solve
- dfdydx 12d ago
  Aren't those "other problems" somewhat affected by climate change though?
  - sajithdilshan 12d ago
    All those problems were already there even before climate change was a topic, so nothing new regarding that front
    - rendaw 12d ago
      I don't think GP was claiming they weren't.
    - dfdydx 12d ago
      I'd wager they're not binary (absent/present) issues but have many dimensions and a continuum of possible values and thus "climate change makes this problem worse or different" is something new. Random example: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41612-024-00583-8 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41612-024-00583-8

sajithdilshan 12d ago

It’s way easy to preach vegan diets, solar/wind installations, etc. from the comfy chairs by the citizens of first world countries. But for someone living in a dirt poor country, climate change is the last thing in their mind even though they might be the hardest hit population. For them it’s about survival and meeting basic human needs.

myaccountonhn 12d ago
At this point its not preached from comfy first world countries, but rather countries that are getting unbareably hot in the summer. So much that more and more people are going to die each year as a result
- sajithdilshan 12d ago
  It is actually worse than preaching because based on your comment it's pure ignorant superiority. You think 40 degrees celcius for few days in the summer is the apocalypse, then try living in an indian village where the temperatures reaches 50 degrees for one month, where you have to walk miles to get a barrel of water to drink. And then imagine having to live there for the whole life. Also now you say because there were heat waves in Europe it's not preaching, then what's the excuse before that?
  - watwut 11d ago
    more than 75% of Indians think global warming is happening and say they are worried about it. They think that global warming will harm people in India. People in India (more in north then in south) report having personally experienced severe heat waves and the effects of global warming, and think that global warming will harm them, their families, and their communities. Turns out that people living in place with 50 degress who "have to walk miles to get a barrel of water to drink" dont want more extreme weather all that much
watwut 12d ago
Solar/wind installations are demonized from comfy chairs by the citizens of first world countries. Anti environmental agenda is agenda of rich conservatives, CEOs and their western right wing friends. Dirt poor countries do care about climate change per polls.

wateralien 12d ago

This is mostly the UN’s own fault. Nation governments refrain from getting “hardcore” on this because the better options are expensive and they don’t want to be undercut by another country. The UN is supposed to somehow use its deep diplomatic negotiating and deal-making skill to find and enforce agreement between these states so we all adopt the changes together… and penalise the hold-outs (we all know who) together.

sseary 12d ago

[dead]

skeledrew 12d ago

Burn baby burn!

aorth 12d ago

The story does not link to the report itself, which can be found here: https://www.unep.org/resources/limiting-overshoot-navigating-exceedance https://www.unep.org/resources/limiting-overshoot-navigating...

radu_floricica 12d ago

I'm mostly stopped feeling autistic since adolescence, but climate change is one of those times. It's obviously real, and it's also obvious that shuffling chairs in developing countries is rounding to zero effect. We're converting to cleaner energy anyways because of pollution and better economics, so the push for decarbonization in itself is... what do you call a rounding error when it's already rounding to zero? And it's FAR from hopeless. Again, global warming is obviously happening. But the amount of adapting and reacting to it is virtually nil. Installing AC. Tree cover in every city. Start serious discussions on what level of risk we want with geoengineering. Because yes, there absolutely is an acceptable risk level with geoengineering. Planting trees is that. Carbon capture is also that. And better and more effective tech will definitely be available. But we're in a social climate where I don't even dare write down examples of what those more effective methods would be, because if you're not luddite enough you're the enemy.

m00dy 12d ago
Can you explain what 'Luddite' means in a broader context? Not all of us grew up learning British history :)
- reilly3000 12d ago
  Luddite: someone who is against using technology out of fear (of economic opportunities mostly)
  - notarobot123 12d ago
    More generously: someone who resists new technologies due to their perceived harmful effects (economic but also social and environmental)
  - steve_adams_86 12d ago
    Yeah, important to note that the way the label is used has deviated from its historic meaning. Colloquially it’s something like “someone who rejects new technology” with variable reasons as to why, but historically there’s more nuance and it’s grounded in rejection of technology which worsens working conditions, detracts from craft, and disrupts cottage industry/workers rights/wages/etc. They made more sense than the label presently suggests they did. I suppose you could think of them as activists protecting their crafts and trade privileges that were being undermined by specific machines and their owners

unchocked 12d ago

Geophysically, there are 3 pillars to climate stabilization: 1. Emitting fewer greenhouse gasses. Need to do that more than ever, but we are now in overshoot so… 2. Actively remove greenhouse gasses from atmosphere. Will need to do that, but land use and dirty energy trends away from net negative. Also, it’s a 100 year project once started. 3. Shade Earth. Not regions, The whole globe. There are two ways to do that: a. Stratospheric aerosols b. Planetary sunshades in space, at Sun-Earth L1. That’s the whole solution space, conceptually. As long as we continue to fail within that space, we will suffer compounding effects of unmitigated climate change.

gozucito 12d ago
Precisely! The world needs to spend 15 billions a year on reflective aerosols while it reduces emissions thanks to renewables. This will not address the acidification of the oceans which is very bad but something is better than nothing. Carbon capture is way too slow to work. It’s a rounding error.
hyperbovine 12d ago
Two of these things will definitely work. One of them is completely untested, poorly understood and with potentially massive consequences for the climate and food production.
tzs 12d ago
> Actively remove greenhouse gasses from atmosphere. Will need to do that, but land use and dirty energy trends away from net negative. Also, it’s a 100 year project once started. I once did the math, assuming we have enough resources to build a lot of solar panels. Assuming current efficiency levels of solar panels and current commercial feasible levels of direct air carbon capture (DAC), if we annually allocated an amount equal to our current annual solar panel production to building large solar farms dedicated to powering DAC plants, in about 150ish years those plants would be capturing each year an amount about equal to our current total annual emissions. If we keep expanding solar panel production we could shorten that timeline and build more than just enough to breakeven. The area for those solar farms would be about 1/15th the area of the 5 largest subtropical deserts. What would we do with all the carbon extracted? That's not really a problem. If we can't think of a good use for it, just mount the solar panels powering the DAC plants a few meters off the ground, convert the carbon to graphite, and dump it under the solar panels. Spread evenly it would only be a few mm thick.

qoez 12d ago

Maybe if I develop really strong anxiety about this, it's gonna solve the problem

infinitezest 12d ago
Maybe if you don't, the problem will go away.
cbg0 12d ago
I'm guessing you're being facetious? The options aren't to either develop anxiety or not care at all.
- hackable_sand 12d ago
  I do find the coping methods strange. You have people throwing the match for no reason, or crying like children.

hypfer 12d ago

From my understanding, the West never truly committed to that goal. It just said so as a PR thing, so that the much more affected countries quiet down, because "hey hey we said 1.5°". "Oops, sorry, we tried". The West knows that it will manage even with more than that, but it also knows that not everyone will. Jury's still out on whether the neglect is just due to apathy or because it might be beneficial. Only time will tell.

mr_toad 12d ago
It was a New Year’s resolution that was broken by the next morning.
- hypfer 12d ago
  I'm not sure if I'd agree with that, because that sounds like what normal humans do. Systems and politics are not that. Not at all. They're cold, calculating and fundamentally sociopathic. A more fitting analogy I think would be "Yes we were bought by a bigger company, but trust us, there will be no changes". Of course the buyout came with exact plans on who to lay off when, but panic would be bad for business.

tito 12d ago

Want to do something about this? El Niño this year is going to be especially crazy, worst in human history by a large margin looks like. I'm putting together El Niño Climate Week to work on averting the worst impacts. It's a good opportunity to move the conversation forward about how our climate is changing very quickly. https://elninoclimateweek.com https://elninoclimateweek.com My projects tend to be pretty good schelling points for people that like to take action, in case you're finding the comments here frustrating ("I'm not surprised", "we just need to X", "we're doomed", "it will be fine", etc etc etc)

mym1990 12d ago

Modern economies are addicted to growth, and asset prices are pinned to showing continued growth more than ever. As soon as any global power proposes to take a beat and re-evaluate the trajectory of innovation, they will be left behind. Global leadership is also effectively non-existent and aside from trade, no one seems to be able to really make inroads on big ticket issues. In a time where we need more collaboration that ever, governments seem to be skewing more nationalistic than ever.

hypfer 12d ago
Well, to be fair, the whole "enough growth" thought happened to spring into existence at the exact moment where we (the west) have comfortable living standards. Something other developing nations would need growth for to achieve. So that's kinda interesting, because degrowth is seen as this conceptual antagonist to the people letting the global south burn, but they both are letting them down - just marginally differently.
shuwix 12d ago
[flagged]
- hyperbovine 12d ago
  Hey at least they are trying.
  - shuwix 11d ago
    With politicans, "atleast they're trying" is the worst option. Either you know what you're doing ... or don't. Destroying local vital industries with tax burden, to pay subsidies to green bullcrap, and importing everything from other side of planet, that's "leftard ecology".

kpmcc 12d ago

Buddy with all 24/7 gas powered data centers in the works we’ll be lucky to keep below 3 C.

roughly 12d ago

I think the conversation here is making me more depressed than the news. The number of people who don’t believe collective action is possible, who somehow believe the current techno-capitalist model is determined by god or history or whatever, who don’t have any particular knowledge about history, economic development, etc but are very happy to very loudly yell that the only thing we can do is more of the same but maybe faster - man, y’all call yourselves hackers, but you sure are an incurious and gullible lot.

senordevnyc 12d ago
Can you point to any examples where democratic populations have engaged in the kinds of sacrifice at scale needed to avert this problem? Do you have any specific, actionable proposals to solve this problem that don’t rely on us magically solving the collective action problem? A vague sense that “we can do it if we just try!” is no better than what you’re decrying.
- roughly 12d ago
  There are long histories of cultures managing collective resources democratically over extremely long periods. Both the water temples of Southeast Asia and the rituals around salmon runs and controlled burns in the Pacific Northwest maintained careful husbandry of scarce resources across time periods that extend well beyond the time period since the tragedy of the commons was discovered by the same people who are asserting that kind of coordination to be impossible. This is a cultural problem, and it’s with our culture, not humanity writ large. With regards to concrete solutions, we could stop pretending that financial optimization and private equity is anything other than looting at scale, we could stop pretending that it’s the god-given destiny of every imaginable product to get shittier and require more rapid disposal and replacement, we could stop imagining that Jeff Bezos shooting people into space is the sign of a functioning economy, but very very directly, we could start actually taxing people and corporations for the long-term effects of their actions, we could prosecute people who attempt to buy, bribe, or market their way past social issues, and we could start incorporating the full cost of, eg, offsetting category 5 hurricanes and large scale droughts or heatwaves in our calculations of the benefits of our modern supply chains and globalized markets. All of those things would be fine starts to drive policy in the directions we want. All of them run afoul of the current winners of the current systems, which is why they’ve been tarred as the unrealistic fantasies of people who aren’t interested in spending the rest of their lives in hermetically-sealed air conditioned boxes so Sam Altman and Elon Musk don’t have to go to therapy.

internet2000 12d ago

It's hard to have people use data in these types of conversations, so I'll just link two charts. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita and https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-emissions-by-region https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-emissions-by-re... Notice which countries are going down. Notice which countries are going up.

deleted 12d ago
[deleted]
Faaak 12d ago
That's such a narrow minded point of view. Yeah, who produces your laptop ? Your lawnmower ? Heck, even your knifes ?
Tadpole9181 12d ago
Hey, quick question, who does virtually all manufacturing for US and Canadian and EU citizens? And why is the rise of Chinas emissions so coincidentally timed to the fall of those countries'? I didn't go into the study, but looking at all the little text blurbs about the numbers, I don't see anything about if a US citizen purchasing a product that's made in China counts as US emission, as it obviously should.
- zb3 12d ago
  My view is that current "emission reduction" just moves jobs to China and India, which decreases overall labor rights and negatively affects the working class.. Still, if you want to have your new iPhone 18/19/20 pro ultra max, it has to be produced somewhere.. So maybe it's time to rethink this and get back to the drawing board..
  - kennywinker 12d ago
    Actual emissions reductions is different from just shell-gaming emissions from the US column to the China column. Greenwashing is real, but that doesn’t mean reducing emissions isn’t a real thing we can do.

hasanpiker 12d ago

[flagged]

SmasherEpilepti 12d ago
Anthropogenic climate change denial is entering a territory where it's not just illogical, it's straight-up delusional. Even oil companies accept it and have been studying it for decades (even if their public policy is denial).

tito 12d ago

HN's community moderation tools seem to fail at times, so I'm responding to ssearyus's comment that is marked [dead]: ssearyus: At the risk of being immediately downvoted, let me point out that a 250ppm CO2 level is borderline disastrous for plant life -- at 180ppm, plants would starve globally. The increased CO2 levels in recent years (slightly added to by human activities) is immensely helpful for drought-resistance, as stomata do not then need to open as much to get sufficient CO2 with the result that they transpire less water. The above, and the fact the by far the most important GHG in the atmosphere is water vapor (CO2 is comparatively a rounding error) should give reasonable people pause for thought. My response: I think there's something you're trying to say, but it doesn't come through clearly in these many points. - 250ppm is not disastrous for plant life. That's around preindustrial levels of CO2 (280ppm) and plants did just fine - What do you mean by "starve" here regarding 180ppm? - And why are you talking about 250ppm and 180ppm specifically? No one is talking about 250ppm or 180ppm as targets (or maybe you are?) - Water vapor is indeed a greenhouse gas, and contributes to warming. But it's best thought as an accelerant. Warmer temperatures bring more water vapor bring higher temperatures, bring more water vapor etc etc. The rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is so important because it trigger in many ways a feedback loop, one of which is rise in water vapor as a greenhouse gas. The feedback loop caused by temperature/water vapor is one of the reasons we need to be very careful with our human-made emissions. - "CO2 is comparatively a rounding error": Whether by mass or volume, CO2 is not a rounding error by comparison to water vapor. There's roughly 4 to 6 times the amount of water vapor as CO2. I wouldn't call 25% a rounding error. Maybe there's something I missed here. - And when you say water vapor is "by far the most important GHG in the atmosphere", does that mean you're working on lowering water vapor levels in the atmosphere? Or what are you working on regarding solving for this? Maybe something with airplane cloud formation trapping heat?

tzs 12d ago
I'd guess part of the reason he got downvoted is this: "The increased CO2 levels in recent years (slightly added to by human activities) [...]". Pretty much all of the CO2 increase above pre-industrial levels (280 ppm) is due to human activity. 99% of the time when someone says otherwise they are going to continue with a bunch of other equally inaccurate things which they got from scientifically worthless sites and so people just flag and move on.

kubafu 12d ago

Since land warms much faster than water, and Earth's surface is mostly water, then 1.5C average means how much land warming itself? Isn't talking in averages a way to feel better about all this?

xyst 12d ago

anybody still grinding out a 9-5 for a trust fund baby at this point is wasting their life. billionaires, boomers, decrepit old men, and o&g industry have fucked future generations and humanity.

dpacmittal 12d ago

Not surprising when leader of the free world is doing such shenanigans - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/06/rwe-deal-wind-leases https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/06/rwe-deal-win...

monneyboi 12d ago

Why are we framing this as "the fight against climate change"? This framing puts the culprit outside of ourselves, as if it's some external force. I feel that way of looking at it makes changing impossible. It's our own behaviours and systems that will have to change. There's nothing to fight here, the answer instead lies in collaboration.

kennywinker 12d ago
Great point. For example, we should encourage collaboration between people building hyperscale data centers, and people not building hyperscale data centers to find some middle ground that is good for the planet. Collaboration implies we are all on the same side. Reality suggests some people have made it their business to be on the wrong side.
- senordevnyc 12d ago
  Who is using the hyperscale data centers?
  - kennywinker 12d ago
    Right now? Nobody is using the hypothetical un-built datacenters that threaten to tax our planet. All the current individual LLM demand is being met by what exists already, yet we're seeing unprecedented amounts of money being spent at the cost of the environment to build out at scale. This is so that jobs that currently earn people money can be replaced with LLMs that earn investors money. Something only the investors want.

raymond_goo 12d ago

Are you saying Germany ruined it's industry for nothing?

dariosalvi78 12d ago

we have had the perfect storm to do a U-turn on most fossile fuels: - COVID pandemics: everybody at home, less traveling, massive economic reset and massive capitals injected (EU recovery funding, quantitative easing) - Russian attack on Ucraine, stopping a big chunk of gas and petrol to Europe - Strait of Hormuz, also chocking oil coming to the rest of the world We could have said: "oh, let's swap those energy sources to renewables", "oh, let's bind those capitals to de-carbonization projects", "oh, let's plant trees", "oh, let's stop deforestation". A lot of things could have been said and done. But, well, a certain degree of coordinated intelligence is too much to ask. At this point I have lost all hopes, whatever comes, we have asked for it.

senordevnyc 12d ago
From my perspective, we simply didn’t evolve to have the kind of collective intelligence required. There’s no point in being angry about it, any more than it makes sense to be angry at any other animal for the abilities it hasn’t evolved to have.

tsoukase 12d ago

After 50 years since I was born for the first I didnt eat grapes from my backyard in Southern Europe because they dried up due to extreme heat. In the rest of my life I might miss any other fruit.

deleted 12d ago

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agentultra 12d ago

Big congratulations to the world leaders and policy makers who were at the signing of the Paris Accord. Went home. And did very little about it. Now we output more CO2 faster than we ever have in our entire history. At least the economy is doing okay… oh wait. Maybe the reason action hasn’t happened is because the solutions would drive down income inequality? Was hoping my kids wouldn’t have to live with the worst of it but it looks like we failed at that.

a1371 12d ago

I got invited to a UN conference on climate change. It was a huge deal of course that I could get in; however, the whole time I "felt" important. Everyone did. I question how many of the tens of thousands of people involved actually did important work. Everyone knew we will miss the 1.5 degree target, btw. This was a few years ago.

itsTyrion 12d ago

Hope y'all are having fun with GPT-69 and 50 agent swarms at least! (queue the angry downvotes)

MetroWind 11d ago

Good. The sooner human dies out the better.