I think climate change is a compelling crisis but I find these types of “could maybe happen according to some models” type of catastrophic scenarios a little frustrating because they soak up a lot of attention with scary headlines, reinforcing hopelessness in those who care while providing ammunition to skeptics when the catastrophe doesn’t materialize.
It’s also easy to question methodology for anyone who has done academic modeling and knows how easy it is to get the result you want. Much harder to argue against the basic first principle that injecting trillions of barrels of oil into the atmosphere is literal geoengineering and it’s gonna have consequences.
So many of those 'could maybe happen' are, in fact, happening right now. The researcher is also quoted as saying 'more likely than not' which is pretty big when it comes to something like the AMOC shutting down. This really is catastrophic and really should be causing governments to take immediate, massive, steps to avert it including steps to sanction countries that are causing it.
The big consequence here is for the EU. And the only way to deal with this is for the EU to force US, India and China to seriously reduce energy use, and with that, their economy.
This is not going to happen. The EU can't even convince itself to stop buying from China.
I don't think China needs convincing. They have likely already hit peak emissions and will start dropping, potentially rapidly, going forward. Europe is big. It just needs to move forward with purpose and things will happen. Getting that purpose is the hard part because world leaders have consistently said 'it will destroy our economy' and never actually tried. China, again, is showing that this isn't true. You can have both, a strong economy and a plan, backed by action, to decarbonize. Had Europe and the US had the forethought to actually invest in solar and batteries then they could be leading the energy transition and profiting, with literal profit meaning hard cash, right now by selling to the rest of the world. Instead the boogyman argument of 'it will destroy our economy' keeps rearing its head. I am absolutely done with that argument.
China has made huge efforts toward sustainable power. Google it.
The us on the other hand is well you know blowing up oil all over the world with military conflicts that are wars but aren't wars but are wars that are over but evolving and over and evolving. They are also rolling back green energy projects , fueling data centers with gas, etc.
China’s greatest geopolitical weakness is lack of access to petroleum. That’s why they are going so hard on renewables. We just get the benefits for free.
While there is definitely a big consequence for the EU (and surrounding countries), the article mentions big impacts for the whole world. When it comes to climate, nobody is left untouched...
> the 50th headline they’ve read on how we’re screwed today that hasn’t happened
the things are happening though.
e.g. if you read a headline in the 70s that said something like "ski seasons will shorten by an average of 1 day per year, leading to only 5 inches of snow water equivalent in Colorado resorts by 2026, and eliminating the economic viability of skiing in the northeast by 2060" that would have been completely correct.
That's what the headlines said the last 49 times. Why should the average person care now? What are they supposed to do?
Al Gore got on a scissor lift and showed the hockey stick graph. Millions of people saw it. Then the data was bad. Then the average person didn't see anything happen that they could point to and be like "That's what Al Gore warned us about". What you're asking for already happened, over and over. It's useless now.
except that every time the boy cried wolf, there actually was a wolf and it ate some people, but then the people it didn't eat were like "idk what you're talking about, I'm doing just fine" and then plugged their ears.
Who are 'The climate people' you seem to think are doing this? Do you think there is a club where the climate people president takes a vote from the climate people council on how many news stories hacknews user Izkata should read?
If you lived under a big precarious rock and people always talked about the big rock falling on you would you ignore the big rock because the big rock people keep crying wolf?
If you lived under a big precarious rock and people always talked about the big rock falling on you would you ignore the big rock because the big rock people keep crying wolf?
Yeah, that’s exactly what we do, all the time. From nuclear weapons to pandemics to climate change, people become accustomed to the background risks they live under, and go about their lives. Especially when there’s almost nothing they can do about it anyway.
And well-meaning people constantly predicting calamities that don’t materialize only hasten that process.
"I read a headline that turned out to be wrong, all headlines adjacent to that original one are now wrong"
You are constantly seeing all manner of predictions. When someone makes a wrong prediction that is not a indicator that the thing will never happen. Otherwise I would bet that I will suffer no problematic effects if I stop paying a mortgage.
This isn't some accident, the public could understand many complex situations that just don't have billions of dollars in FUD propaganda networks that takeover the Whitehouse whenever the public is starting to get what it wants.
Steve bannon figured this out a while back. I was reading about it in the Epstein files in a discussion between the two of them. If they can keep the average person dizzy with bad news they can do more bad things easily. Cute trick
The GP didn't say not to pay attention to it. Clearly people are.
The point is that it's unactionable. The people who care could all pour their life savings into climate action and commit suicide to cancel all future carbon footprint and it still wouldn't move the needle. Even if the Democrats in the US took over both branches of Congress, the white house, and the supreme court, they wouldn't move the needle. There isn't any practical action any ordinary person could take.
So why are we writing about it for general consumption? Convince billionaires, politicians, oil execs, other scientists, literally anyone with the ability to do anything. If we're at the point the research claims, trying to get people to go vegan or fly less often isn't even shaving off fractions of a percent.
Its perfectly actionable. Its just inconvenient. Imagine if tomorrow we discovered that internal combustion engines produced a gas which immediately killed everyone with 200 feet. What would change?
In the past, these climate models were mostly on the conservative side. So I would stop questioning them and ask for more actions to take toward implementing existing climate solutions.
The scientists aren't journalists. Convince a politician to start planning for national security considerations. Tell them how it'll affect supply chains. Frame it in a way that literally anyone who has a vested interest in doing something would care about.
It is easier said than done. Politicians do not like to be disturbed by some pesky experts. Mentor Pilot discusses 2025 D.C mid-air collision[1], and finds the most disturbing reason for it: experts tried to escalate issues with too much traffic for years, but they were repeatedly told that it was "too political", so, in other words "just shut up and deal with the traffic, don't bother congressmen and congresswomen, they are too important to be bothered with limits of possible stemming from physics or engineering".
Politicians thought (and some think to this day) that climate warming is "too political" to listen to experts. Most of them will think that Atlantic current is too political, till it stops.
It is easy to say "convince a politician", but it is hard to do. Politicians think politics, and you have to be a genius among politicians to transform a game field, so some concerns of scientists became a political issue that is not possible to ignore. Geniuses among politicians as as rare as in any other discipline, the most of them will just play existing games, without even thinking of rewriting the rules of the game. BTW, when they try to rewrite, the boring old "play by the rules" might start to look pretty good.
Politics is the hardest unsolved problem the humanity faces. We could send humans to the Moon, or it seems increasingly likely we can create an AGI, but we can't make politicians to listen to the reason.
I suppose they could refrain from injecting their feelings into it. The science doesn't change if it is presented as simple information and not as a warning.
So they should be more like "Atlantic currents might shut down, we'll see what happens and if it'll be good or bad" when they already can tell the effects will be pretty bad? Wouldn't that be basically burying the lede?
You'd have to ask the one who raised concern with this in the first place. What is apparent, though, is that "good or bad" is contrary to science. Science seeks to understand what is, not how you might feel about it. It is interesting that things went there.
Theoretically speaking, yes. But practically science is very interested with good and bad, because the goal of science is to bring as much good and to avert as many bad as possible. There is abstract science, there is fundamental science, which are studying things far from our everyday concerns, but even they are not free from "good and bad": ITER has all its funding, because we believe that fusion can bring a lot of good to us. Scientists cannot just forget where the money came from, and what the goal was attached to them.
But when we speak about climate science, or something else "close to Earth", then it is impossible to imagine how they may not be concerned with good and bad.
Theoretically speaking, science is looking for a truth, and any truth, but practically it seeks useful knowledge, and if you look into any scientific article, it starts with an argument that the results presented in the article are useful, and not just the authors of the article think so, but there are (were) other people too. Undergraduates are explicitly taught to write articles like that.
So medicine is not a science because it's concerned with what's "good" and what's "bad" for someone's health? I find this kind of argument principally flawed.
Many sciences are concerned with the consequences of human actions and it's hard if not impossible to describe these in meaningful ways without applying some criteria for what outcomes are good (desirable, positively evaluated) and what outcomes are bad (not desirable, negatively evaluated).
Besides, there is a whole area of science that maybe is more like engineering but is clearly worthwhile, too, even if it's not strictly a natural science only. For example, urban planning might not be a science in the strict sense but it's clearly important and involves scientific studies.
If policy makers can't get from climate scientist's an evaluation of the potential consequences of climate changes, then who else would produce these for them? Should they just make it up on the fly?
> So medicine is not a science because it's concerned with what's "good" and what's "bad" for someone's health?
It is concerned with understanding health. It is unable to decide what is "good" or "bad" as that is in the eye of the beholder. That is why medicine presents the options gleaned from the gained understanding, leaving the individual to decide for themselves what is "good" amid all the different tradeoffs. The universe has no fundamental concept of "good" or "bad". It is something humans make up. It is curious that someone who seems to have an interest in science doesn't realize that.
You're nitpicking. Medicine is concerned with what's good and bad for someone's health. Medical doctors literally advise their patients on that and evaluate the effects of actions with respect to what's good and what's bad for their health. What's good and bad for someone's health is simply one form of instrumental goodness. Other sciences evaluate in similar ways, though they are perhaps concerned with other aspects of what's good and bad. Climate scientists are not concerned with what's good and bad for mankind in some abstract philosophical way, but they should without a doubt lay out good or bad consequences of climate change. If the temperature sinks by 10 degrees Celsius in Northern Europe, that would be a bad consequence for the affected countries.
It's false and somewhat naive to claim that such evaluations play no role in science, they are a crucial part of many sciences. For instance, they're needed to find worthwhile subjects of study. Not everything is theoretical physics.
> Medical doctors literally advise their patients on that and evaluate the effects of actions with respect to what's good and what's bad for their health.
You're talking about a consultant now. Yes, consultants take scientific understanding and help translate it into what the customer wants to hear: doing their best to interpret what the other person is likely to think is "good" or "bad". Which, I will add, is not absolute. Often patients reject the doctor's opinion of what is "good". It is technically possible for someone to be both a scientist and a consultant, of course. Humans can do many things. But generally medical doctors are focused on operating consultancies alone. There usually isn't enough time in the day to be both deeply engrossed in science and other professions at the same time. Generally speaking, medical doctors are not scientists in any meaningful sense. That's literally why we call them medical doctors or physicians instead of calling them scientists... Yes, there are some exceptions, as there always is. But, to be sure, even in those exceptional cases, we don't call them scientists when they are operating in a consulting capacity.
“Good” or “bad” is not contrary to science. For example scientists will evaluate the risks vs. benefits of a cancer treatment to determine if the benefits are worth the risk. They will do the same for vaccine efficacy etc.
Scientists are also humans with their own value judgment which is sometimes very flawed (see e.g. Richard Lynn and his race science) and sometimes with revolutionary insights that expands our shared empathy for the world around us (see e.g. Jane Godall).
Often when I hear a statement like this I see it as a thought terminating cliché. The value judgement of a scientists is often disregarded only when it is contrary (or inconvenient) to the speaker’s argument.
Who then should inject their feelings? Journalists don't care because it's too abstract, politicians don't care because it won't happen in their term, business doesn't care because there's no money to be made, and the people don't care because of all of the above people telling them to ignore it.
Agreed. This kind of provocative story gives many people the sense that science is unreliable, full of shifting narratives and unmet prophesies. That undermines the confidence we need in it as a society.
I would argue the opposite. The number one frustration I have with climate change is the continued and persistent inaction by our world leaders. I would argue that modeling out worst case scenarios is more likely to reach our leaders and finally break this decades long inaction.
I think generally the effects climate skeptics have over climate policy is overstated. And corporations with vested interest in being able to continue releasing massive amounts of CO2 into our atmosphere have much more say over climate policy then climate skeptics. Now these companies often do weaponize climate skeptics in order to lobby government into continued inaction, but that behavior will continue regardless of how scientists frame their climate models.
Except the catastrophes are materializing now so those fools are increasingly wrong.
The solar panel install stats give me hope. It’s unfortunate the US is burying its head on new alt energy projects but our grifting culture is just too strong.
This is an ongoing warning which I first read about in university in 1997.
One of the issues with slow moving catastrophes is that we get used to it and then we stop worrying about it.
I believe this is because humans are not good generally at long term planning past a couple years when there is no clear feedback (or it is purposely muddied.)
Basically newer modeling has shown a stronger weakening of the system. Lots of uncertainty, but 1/3rd loss by 2100. There's a lot of unknowns with feedback loops and tipping points where the whole thing might collapse if a threshold is crossed.
Europe needs to start taking this seriously. If they are really science-led and fact-based, they need to fund a series of additional studies to absolutely confirm a 37% loss by 2100, and run clean estimates and projections of the cost to heat Europe and replace shorter growing seasons as the AMOC slows over 25, 50, 75, and 100 years. They can then project the the total cost of the loss, and speak to the insurance and reinsurance companies to determine the cost of remediation. Money will move this needle, nothing else.
What changes are you seeing? When I look at these images, it shows me what sea surface temperatures are today, but I don't have context as to how it's changed.
I would love someone to stitch years of these images together in a video to help me get better context.
The probabilistic nature of predicting how likely any given climate change event like the AMOC shutting down is creating a false sense of security and skepticism.
Many climate change skeptics like to claim that Earth’s climate has been radically different at various points in its history, therefore current anthropogenic climate change is fine. Other climate change skeptics like to claim that we’re currently in an ice age, therefore warming the planet is not a bad thing. Yet others claim that this is natural and humans shouldn’t try to stop it.
What these arguments miss is that all available evidence suggests that CO2 levels and global temperatures have never changed this fast outside of mass extinctions. All available evidence strongly supports the ideas that humans released the excess CO2, that CO2 is a powerful greenhouse gas, and that human-produced CO2 is causing the planet to retain more heat. There are competing theories on how catastrophic anthropogenic climate change will be and how fast it will happen, but the broad consensus is that these drastic changes will impact both humans and the broader environment.
People argue against preventative measures to slow down anthropogenic climate change because it can harm economic growth. The attitude seems to be “we shouldn’t sacrifice profits for the polar bears”. I argue that it’s not a matter of trying to save other species, it’s about saving our own species. Given the overwhelming evidence that humans are causing climate change and that the results will involve drastic changes in climate patterns, I don’t think we’re panicking enough. For the vast majority of us who are not ultra wealthy capitalists, faster economic growth won’t matter if extreme weather events threaten our lives every year and large areas of agricultural land become unusable. We need to slow down our production and consumption and study climate change more carefully, not defund climate research and charge blindly into a future we can’t control or predict.
(1) Gulf Stream is a wind-driven western boundary current and the equatorial Atlantic is getting warmer and warmer so heat delivery is probably stable;
(2) Greenland melt rates are real and fresher ocean water won’t sink as much and could push northern surface currents south;
(3) Wind-driven upwelling (other end of the AMOC) is likely to stay stable so you have the suction pump effect;
(4) Atmospheric warming and overall climate conditions today are very different from that 12,000 ya system the article cites;
Regardless, dumping all this fossil CO2 and CH4 into the atmosphere is definitely changing the climate system; but rather than cooling Europe and the UK I’d guess this will just reduce the warming rate in that region over the next 100 years, and it might cause problems with ocean hypoxia due to slower rates of deep water formation, impacting fish populations.
P.S. If you want to vet these claims, plug it into an LLM with this header: “ As an expert in global planetary science, give me some critiques with positive/negative paper references that both support and push back against each point (eight papers total please, prefer recent, then critique summary).”
I can’t believe there are people in our industry who turn a blind eye (or worse) to these problems. They say that climate scientists are fearmongering and argue there is not a single truth.
Pretty much agree. Nature will fix the climate, after it eliminates (a large number of) the humans that are causing the problem. That's really the only way.
The defeatist mindsets expressed in these comments seem more like a way to shed any sort of personal accountability for participating in a solution that doesn't kill billions of people than a reflection of reality.
There are, but none that will be accepted. Will you give up your car, your air condititioning, your AI agents, your uber eats, your year-round fresh produce at the supermarket, meat as a regular part of your diet, all the imported stuff you are accustomed to having?
We will never, ever see a reduction in the amount of energy that humanity uses. The population might dip slightly from climate change (highly unlikely actually), but that won’t be what solves climate change. Clean energy is the solution, and it’s already happening.
This is a cold-hearted way to think about it. The countless people who will suffer are not the ones causing the problem. The problem is caused by the billionaires willing to sacrifice human life and the environment for profit. They actively sow climate skepticism and encourage defunding of climate research to protect their bottom line. When extreme weather events kill millions, those billionaires will be safe in their bunkers. We can’t just condemn millions or even billions to death without trying to do anything about it.
Kings have always sacrificed the common folk for their own benefit. This is also the way of human society. The experience of our own current lifetimes is quite the exception.
At least in the US, many people have to drive because US metropolitan areas are car-centric and lack public transit. This, in turn, is a direct result of lobbying by powerful companies like oil producers and automobile manufacturers.
As for your point about reducing consumption, there has been a deliberate effort by billionaire-controlled corporations to increase consumption. This has been done through a variety of methods, including limiting repairability, deliberate planned obsolescence through things like fast fashion and equipment designed to break down, and psychological manipulation to encourage consumption. Small ‘d’ democratic efforts to limit these techniques have been defeated by powerful lobbies backed by these billionaires.
Billionaires aren’t just responsible for consumption-driven climate change, they’re also responsible for subverting the democratic processes that could have reversed it at large scales.
The car-centrism of the USA is IMO because people like the convenience of being able to go where they want, when they want, and not waiting for a bus that will take an indirect route and twice the time. People also like living in their own house with a fenced back yard and not having neighbors on the other side of the wall/ceiling/floor. This means we're more spread out (we have lots of land) and mass transit is less practical.
In dense urban areas we do have good mass transit and it's relatively more common for people to not own a car.
At the end of the day it’s bullets fired from rifles, mortars, artillery shells, cruise ship missiles, etc. that are killing people in war.
If the executive branch of the government is commanding the military, and generals are commanding the military, they’re killing people with the help of tens of thousands of soldiers.
not to diss the science and the work involved around it but this kind of alarmist stuff makes me wonder how many similar things have happened in the past but nobody noticed because nobody was looking or even knew how to track such a thing, the environment is so complex, seems unlikely that we can make heads or tails of this, and in 50 years some new understanding will flip all of our current models (no pun intended!), so what’s really the value of such “warnings”? money went into this, where does it ultimately go?
> how many similar things have happened in the past but nobody noticed because nobody was looking or even knew how to track such a thing
We can actually make petty good estimates because of things like carbon layers in the ice. It's happened in the past, you're right, and usually it precedes large scale extinction events.
There are a couple of things wrong here. First off, there is a historic climate record that goes back centuries and is fairly accurate. Second, the climate prediction models are tested against this historic record. They reproduce the historic climates quite well. The error margins are generally shrinking due to model improvements.
But when making actual predictions, the models need to make assumption about anthropogenic parameters like CO2 and methane emissions. That's the largest remaining uncertainty at this point. Given the same assumptions, climate models generally agree on the outcome.
I agree with your sentiment, but I have a hard time imagining any alternative action scientists could take besides publishing and warning.
Science is best when it’s purely that, I’ve seen plenty of living examples and read about past ones where science mixed with politics or overt profit motives don’t end well. Surely there must be examples where the contrary has been the case, but I am biased, and I would wager that it ended poorly more often than well.
I would much rather have politicians that heed scientific results than scientists springboarding into politics.
I think the reality is much more grim. I believe we are now firmly in the territory where it is incontestable. (My opinion was cemented after reading Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown by Andreas Malm, Wim Carton)
We will be spending much of our upcoming years trying to get people and capital to accept that fact, before we can even start thinking about what little we can even do. By which point, we may actually just be having to scramble to mitigate the immediate sequelae of the changed climate, rather than focus our efforts to fix the underlying cause.
Sad to say, with AI, crypto mining and now Trump/GOP, it is already too late.
Depending upon timing, if the AOC shuts down, Europe may not be a bad place to live. I am not sure how the AOC will impact NE US and Eastern Canada. But between the 40th parallels could be borderline uninhabitable for humans.
Way things look now, we seem to heading straight to +3C and maybe even +4C.
The archeological and geological records strongly suggest we've been down this road before. There's as much arrogance in assuming we can prevent this, as there is in assuming we caused it (perhaps hastened it). Best use of national or global resources is preparing for the outcome, not trying to prevent it.
This is incorrect. There’s no evidence global CO2 levels and average temperatures have ever increased this fast outside of mass extinctions. On the other hand, there is plenty of evidence we’ve caused the current conditions.
Studies of ratios of carbon isotopes in the atmosphere show that there has been a relative increase in carbon-12 and a relative decrease in carbon-13 and carbon-14 consistent with the burning of fossil fuels, which contains no carbon-14 due to radioactive decay and low levels of carbon-13 because plants preferentially fix carbon-12. Research the Suess effect for more information.
We’ve known since John Tyndall’s research in 1859 that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. Besides countless other studies since, we also have satellite evidence that the Earth is reemitting less infrared radiation at the exact wavelengths that CO2 absorbs. CO2 as the driver of a greenhouse effect is not in doubt either.
There is also plenty of observational evidence that the oceans now trap more heat, that nights are warming faster than days, that winters are warming faster than summers, and these are all consistent with models of anthropogenic climate change.
Tough to tell exactly what you’re referencing, but you might be thinking about the Paleocene–Eocene thermal maximum, which was a natural increase in carbon in the atmosphere that led to higher temperatures. So, in some ways very similar to what we’re seeing now, but if my understanding is correct, even the PETM which was “dramatic” on a geological timescale took thousands of years to ramp up, and played out over 200,000 years. What we’re seeing now is happening much quicker, and is highly correlated with human influence.
Yes the movie was vaguely inspired by the science.
The AMOC has been studied for a long time, including the effects of its possible weakening.
Where the movie is firmly in fantasy land of course is in the timeline, where the effects are nearly instant rather than likely over decades in reality.
Hot take on HN, but techno-optimism sounds so stupid when it comes to climate change... You can't engineer macro climate/ecology, since capital has no interest in human and it's surrounding environment balanced cohabitation.
Techno optimist here who expects the following to make a big contribution to reducing human made future climate change: better batteries+solar/wind, nuclear fusion, self driving cars (we'll need to manufacture less cars for the same amount of miles humanity drives), AI helping with better resource allocation in general (hopefully).
The answer can't be, let's just consume 10x less. We have to engineer our way out of it.
To make energy requires not only a lot of time to be produced, but also a lot of energy to get it done. Industrial society is based on these "oil reserves" from the Mesozoic Era. All the stuff made in factories from the 19th century all the way to iPhones 17s relies on these diminishing EROI — which, instead of being underground, is now in our atmosphere. It's not like a jar on a shelf we can just take off because by the time the energy transfers through the ecosystem all the way it hits where the ecosystem the most fragile, melting the taiga and lowering the albedo.
I’d be embarrassed to call myself a techno optimist and associate with someone who thinks empathy is bad.
I love technology but optimism about it is incompatible with the current capitalist system. Tech is exploited to make capital not to further our optimism.
Edit: if you’re gonna downvote at least offer a counter. lol pathetic.
reducing consumption across the board isnt just unprofitable, it would mean everyone agreeing to overcome our biological gradients. i do not think it is possible for us to do, and evolution has not equipped us to do that as far as i can tell.
my semi-superstitious take is that the race to achieve ai is grounded in needing something that knows whats going on and is able to make decisions aligned to generational time horizons. whether that works out or not time will tell, but i get the sense a "good enough" ai is probably our best shot at saving us from ourselves. it's clear we can't do that on our own.
Which is why, to be blunt, libertarians and conservatives are wrong to demonize government without being equally or more skeptical of the corrupting power of money.
Government is the only apparatus that can govern unregulated motivations of capital, and we need regulations on pollution and investments in clean energy and waste creation/collection to stop things like climate change.
Gen X and forward grew up in a world that by default was cleaner due to regulations like the Clean Water Act, better for seniors due to things like Social Security and Medicare, and safer due to things like food regulations and vaccine mandates. The people who rail against these things are railing against the very things that made their world safer and in some instances kept them alive.
Yeah, this is why I'm not a Libertarian. Concentrated power in the hands of single individuals impacts the freedom and liberty of everyone else. That holds if the person is the head of government, or the CEO of a corporation.
The singular input for every plausible avenue for mitigating and addressing climate change is energy. And an astronomical amount of energy at that if you want to make a measurable dent over the next 100 years. You can't cheat thermodynamics.
Energy absolutely is something that you can engineer. It is one of the most fundamental things engineering is about. Nothing we can do will make a difference without serious investment in carbon-free power systems. There is a lot of money being invested in energy technology, the real question is if we will build enough of it.
Selfishness has nothing to do with it. Capitalism rewards anti-social investment strategies and capital accumulation, so that's what we get. "Capital" is not a force of nature, it's an emergent force from our economic system. It behaves sort of predictably and can be described: that's economics.
EDIT: got to love how anytime you write something even remotely critical of capitalism you get auto-downvoted. Fine, "climate change is only because of bad, selfish people". Is this explanation more palatable?
We engineered ourselves into this, and we’re actually making good progress in engineering ourselves out. Not without some serious upcoming pain, but it’s not all doom and gloom. We as a species have accomplished many things that weren’t profit-motivated.
Techno optimism is bullshit created by power hungry VCs to ostracize anyone who argues against their myopic world view and further fill their own coffers at the expense of others. Anyone want to argue against that? I’ve yet to see a compelling counter.
I am old enough to have witnessed how the climate has completely changed in Europe, where I live.
In the same place where I live now, when I was young there was permanent snow cover for 3 to 4 months.
During the last 10 years, there have been years with no snow and in the others a little snow has been present for 3 or 4 days of a year, when it melted the second day after falling.
I have not used again my winter boots and my winter jackets for the last 15 years or more.
This is really a huge change during less than a human lifetime.
What you've said is emotionally compelling, but scientifically very weak. Personal recollection is selective and location-specific. You’ve described a memory, not established a mechanism.
What you perceive as change isn't macro, it's micro.
It doesn't mean macro change isn't happening, but it's not happening on our timescale.
Just look at any glaciar in the Alps (or almost anywhere in the world really). Over the last 50 years, your liftime, there have been enourmous changes.
You can paste this exact response under your other post, as well. Emotionally compelling, scientifically weak. Worth nothing.
But also, what you wrote is just wrong. There are plenty of measurable, significant, ood effects in the last few decades on the climate and its impact.
Here’s one study onglacier retreat over the last 20 years.
Looking back at the amount of snowfall I saw as a kid and the amount of snowfall I see now in my 30s, or at the number of hot summer days ... I find it hard to claim that climate is not changing over a lifetime. 20 years isn't even a lifetime, that's like 1/4th of a lifetime
There's a problem with memories. You can have a snowy week and remember it as the entire winter, if it affected you in particularly memorable ways. Kids usually get out of school and play building snowmen and having snowball fights.
When I was a kid in the midwest USA, 100 degrees in the summer happened every once in a while. Still does. July and August were always hot. Still are. As a kid the heat didn't bother me so much, I'd go out and play in the sprinkler or go to the pool. Now, I've got to wear clothes and work. Makes the heat more noticable.
But we have undeniable evidence that the number of record highs to record lows has been increasing dramatically over the past few decades. It's just measurement, there's no magic behind it.
Summers are actually hotter and winters are actually warmer on average, that's real.
Likewise in the winter, as a kid in the 90s I remember my dad wondering if we'd have a white Christmas (wondering if snow would fall before Christmas or not). There's even songs from decades earlier about it.
Whether we'd get snow before January has always been a toss-up, and I'd hazard we've gotten it more often recently than when I was a kid. Like about 10 years ago I even remember a huge blizzard in November.
Huh? Sudden events are a very real part of larger processes like evolution and climate change. A volcano eruption, a meteor impact, or a drought year, or the ceasing of a current can absolutely have massive implications on larger systems.
It would be correct if it said "Abnormally high temperatures for the latitude". Most of Europe would be 10 °C colder or so without. We'd be really screwed over here.
The comparison only really works for the West coast though. The East coast is dominated by continental climate carried over from the interior by the prevailing winds. Meanwhile Europe is surrounded by water on three sides, plus the Baltic and North Sea in the middle. Just having this much water nearby (plus prevailing winds coming from an ocean) moderates temperature swings a lot
Yeah, I was doing a variation on this recently (wondering about the same question). Reversing the latitude of the island of Jersey ("extreme weather is rare due to the island's mild climate") takes you to the Kerguelen Islands ("snow throughout the year as well as rain"). But the contrast there is to do with the Azores High and the Roaring Forties. Local climates are complicated.
I think climate change is a compelling crisis but I find these types of “could maybe happen according to some models” type of catastrophic scenarios a little frustrating because they soak up a lot of attention with scary headlines, reinforcing hopelessness in those who care while providing ammunition to skeptics when the catastrophe doesn’t materialize.
It’s also easy to question methodology for anyone who has done academic modeling and knows how easy it is to get the result you want. Much harder to argue against the basic first principle that injecting trillions of barrels of oil into the atmosphere is literal geoengineering and it’s gonna have consequences.
So many of those 'could maybe happen' are, in fact, happening right now. The researcher is also quoted as saying 'more likely than not' which is pretty big when it comes to something like the AMOC shutting down. This really is catastrophic and really should be causing governments to take immediate, massive, steps to avert it including steps to sanction countries that are causing it.
The big consequence here is for the EU. And the only way to deal with this is for the EU to force US, India and China to seriously reduce energy use, and with that, their economy.
This is not going to happen. The EU can't even convince itself to stop buying from China.
I don't think China needs convincing. They have likely already hit peak emissions and will start dropping, potentially rapidly, going forward. Europe is big. It just needs to move forward with purpose and things will happen. Getting that purpose is the hard part because world leaders have consistently said 'it will destroy our economy' and never actually tried. China, again, is showing that this isn't true. You can have both, a strong economy and a plan, backed by action, to decarbonize. Had Europe and the US had the forethought to actually invest in solar and batteries then they could be leading the energy transition and profiting, with literal profit meaning hard cash, right now by selling to the rest of the world. Instead the boogyman argument of 'it will destroy our economy' keeps rearing its head. I am absolutely done with that argument.
China has made huge efforts toward sustainable power. Google it.
The us on the other hand is well you know blowing up oil all over the world with military conflicts that are wars but aren't wars but are wars that are over but evolving and over and evolving. They are also rolling back green energy projects , fueling data centers with gas, etc.
China’s greatest geopolitical weakness is lack of access to petroleum. That’s why they are going so hard on renewables. We just get the benefits for free.
It seems naive to think this will only have big consequences for the EU, it'll be disastrous for everything around the Atlantic, and likely beyond.
While there is definitely a big consequence for the EU (and surrounding countries), the article mentions big impacts for the whole world. When it comes to climate, nobody is left untouched...
The risk was 5% and is now above 50% according to experts in the field.
Given the significant consequences this is worth paying attention to.
Which the average person doesn’t know because this is the 50th headline they’ve read on how we’re screwed today that hasn’t happened.
They’ve blown their attention budget for the layman and aren’t getting it back unless someone serious guides their attention.
> the 50th headline they’ve read on how we’re screwed today that hasn’t happened
the things are happening though.
e.g. if you read a headline in the 70s that said something like "ski seasons will shorten by an average of 1 day per year, leading to only 5 inches of snow water equivalent in Colorado resorts by 2026, and eliminating the economic viability of skiing in the northeast by 2060" that would have been completely correct.
> the things are happening though.
That's what the headlines said the last 49 times. Why should the average person care now? What are they supposed to do?
Al Gore got on a scissor lift and showed the hockey stick graph. Millions of people saw it. Then the data was bad. Then the average person didn't see anything happen that they could point to and be like "That's what Al Gore warned us about". What you're asking for already happened, over and over. It's useless now.
It's like the climate people never heard the fable of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf". It's exactly that.
except that every time the boy cried wolf, there actually was a wolf and it ate some people, but then the people it didn't eat were like "idk what you're talking about, I'm doing just fine" and then plugged their ears.
Who are 'The climate people' you seem to think are doing this? Do you think there is a club where the climate people president takes a vote from the climate people council on how many news stories hacknews user Izkata should read?
If you lived under a big precarious rock and people always talked about the big rock falling on you would you ignore the big rock because the big rock people keep crying wolf?
This is honestly the most baffling worldview.
If you lived under a big precarious rock and people always talked about the big rock falling on you would you ignore the big rock because the big rock people keep crying wolf?
Yeah, that’s exactly what we do, all the time. From nuclear weapons to pandemics to climate change, people become accustomed to the background risks they live under, and go about their lives. Especially when there’s almost nothing they can do about it anyway.
And well-meaning people constantly predicting calamities that don’t materialize only hasten that process.
Use paper straws, because that is how we save the world. /s
The problem is that those were not the headlines. There were headlines in the 80s saying AMOC would collapse by now.
"I read a headline that turned out to be wrong, all headlines adjacent to that original one are now wrong"
You are constantly seeing all manner of predictions. When someone makes a wrong prediction that is not a indicator that the thing will never happen. Otherwise I would bet that I will suffer no problematic effects if I stop paying a mortgage.
It's a frog/boiling water problem with the timescale.
Maybe, but that’s a far stride or two from the “doomsday” pitched at laypeople.
This isn't some accident, the public could understand many complex situations that just don't have billions of dollars in FUD propaganda networks that takeover the Whitehouse whenever the public is starting to get what it wants.
Steve bannon figured this out a while back. I was reading about it in the Epstein files in a discussion between the two of them. If they can keep the average person dizzy with bad news they can do more bad things easily. Cute trick
The GP didn't say not to pay attention to it. Clearly people are.
The point is that it's unactionable. The people who care could all pour their life savings into climate action and commit suicide to cancel all future carbon footprint and it still wouldn't move the needle. Even if the Democrats in the US took over both branches of Congress, the white house, and the supreme court, they wouldn't move the needle. There isn't any practical action any ordinary person could take.
So why are we writing about it for general consumption? Convince billionaires, politicians, oil execs, other scientists, literally anyone with the ability to do anything. If we're at the point the research claims, trying to get people to go vegan or fly less often isn't even shaving off fractions of a percent.
I don’t think it’s unactionable, just as one example, sadly investing in Northern Europe on a long time frame is pretty risky as a result of this.
There is and should be pressure to decarbonise at this point - it is still going to help and we can vote to make that happen.
Tyrants like Putin want you to think you are powerless, but you are not.
Its perfectly actionable. Its just inconvenient. Imagine if tomorrow we discovered that internal combustion engines produced a gas which immediately killed everyone with 200 feet. What would change?
If it’s perfectly actionable, why haven’t you fixed it yet?
In the past, these climate models were mostly on the conservative side. So I would stop questioning them and ask for more actions to take toward implementing existing climate solutions.
What, exactly, do you expect scientists researching these things to do? Bury their findings?
The scientists aren't journalists. Convince a politician to start planning for national security considerations. Tell them how it'll affect supply chains. Frame it in a way that literally anyone who has a vested interest in doing something would care about.
It is easier said than done. Politicians do not like to be disturbed by some pesky experts. Mentor Pilot discusses 2025 D.C mid-air collision[1], and finds the most disturbing reason for it: experts tried to escalate issues with too much traffic for years, but they were repeatedly told that it was "too political", so, in other words "just shut up and deal with the traffic, don't bother congressmen and congresswomen, they are too important to be bothered with limits of possible stemming from physics or engineering".
Politicians thought (and some think to this day) that climate warming is "too political" to listen to experts. Most of them will think that Atlantic current is too political, till it stops.
It is easy to say "convince a politician", but it is hard to do. Politicians think politics, and you have to be a genius among politicians to transform a game field, so some concerns of scientists became a political issue that is not possible to ignore. Geniuses among politicians as as rare as in any other discipline, the most of them will just play existing games, without even thinking of rewriting the rules of the game. BTW, when they try to rewrite, the boring old "play by the rules" might start to look pretty good.
Politics is the hardest unsolved problem the humanity faces. We could send humans to the Moon, or it seems increasingly likely we can create an AGI, but we can't make politicians to listen to the reason.
[1] https://youtu.be/41UYPeTr96s
I suppose they could refrain from injecting their feelings into it. The science doesn't change if it is presented as simple information and not as a warning.
So they should be more like "Atlantic currents might shut down, we'll see what happens and if it'll be good or bad" when they already can tell the effects will be pretty bad? Wouldn't that be basically burying the lede?
You'd have to ask the one who raised concern with this in the first place. What is apparent, though, is that "good or bad" is contrary to science. Science seeks to understand what is, not how you might feel about it. It is interesting that things went there.
Theoretically speaking, yes. But practically science is very interested with good and bad, because the goal of science is to bring as much good and to avert as many bad as possible. There is abstract science, there is fundamental science, which are studying things far from our everyday concerns, but even they are not free from "good and bad": ITER has all its funding, because we believe that fusion can bring a lot of good to us. Scientists cannot just forget where the money came from, and what the goal was attached to them.
But when we speak about climate science, or something else "close to Earth", then it is impossible to imagine how they may not be concerned with good and bad.
Theoretically speaking, science is looking for a truth, and any truth, but practically it seeks useful knowledge, and if you look into any scientific article, it starts with an argument that the results presented in the article are useful, and not just the authors of the article think so, but there are (were) other people too. Undergraduates are explicitly taught to write articles like that.
This has serious “your dad and I are for the jobs the comet will provide” energy.
Sometimes, the outcome of a scenario will be unambiguously tragic for humanity. The collapse of the AMOC would be one such event.
So medicine is not a science because it's concerned with what's "good" and what's "bad" for someone's health? I find this kind of argument principally flawed.
Many sciences are concerned with the consequences of human actions and it's hard if not impossible to describe these in meaningful ways without applying some criteria for what outcomes are good (desirable, positively evaluated) and what outcomes are bad (not desirable, negatively evaluated).
Besides, there is a whole area of science that maybe is more like engineering but is clearly worthwhile, too, even if it's not strictly a natural science only. For example, urban planning might not be a science in the strict sense but it's clearly important and involves scientific studies.
If policy makers can't get from climate scientist's an evaluation of the potential consequences of climate changes, then who else would produce these for them? Should they just make it up on the fly?
> So medicine is not a science because it's concerned with what's "good" and what's "bad" for someone's health?
It is concerned with understanding health. It is unable to decide what is "good" or "bad" as that is in the eye of the beholder. That is why medicine presents the options gleaned from the gained understanding, leaving the individual to decide for themselves what is "good" amid all the different tradeoffs. The universe has no fundamental concept of "good" or "bad". It is something humans make up. It is curious that someone who seems to have an interest in science doesn't realize that.
You're nitpicking. Medicine is concerned with what's good and bad for someone's health. Medical doctors literally advise their patients on that and evaluate the effects of actions with respect to what's good and what's bad for their health. What's good and bad for someone's health is simply one form of instrumental goodness. Other sciences evaluate in similar ways, though they are perhaps concerned with other aspects of what's good and bad. Climate scientists are not concerned with what's good and bad for mankind in some abstract philosophical way, but they should without a doubt lay out good or bad consequences of climate change. If the temperature sinks by 10 degrees Celsius in Northern Europe, that would be a bad consequence for the affected countries.
It's false and somewhat naive to claim that such evaluations play no role in science, they are a crucial part of many sciences. For instance, they're needed to find worthwhile subjects of study. Not everything is theoretical physics.
> Medical doctors literally advise their patients on that and evaluate the effects of actions with respect to what's good and what's bad for their health.
You're talking about a consultant now. Yes, consultants take scientific understanding and help translate it into what the customer wants to hear: doing their best to interpret what the other person is likely to think is "good" or "bad". Which, I will add, is not absolute. Often patients reject the doctor's opinion of what is "good". It is technically possible for someone to be both a scientist and a consultant, of course. Humans can do many things. But generally medical doctors are focused on operating consultancies alone. There usually isn't enough time in the day to be both deeply engrossed in science and other professions at the same time. Generally speaking, medical doctors are not scientists in any meaningful sense. That's literally why we call them medical doctors or physicians instead of calling them scientists... Yes, there are some exceptions, as there always is. But, to be sure, even in those exceptional cases, we don't call them scientists when they are operating in a consulting capacity.
“Good” or “bad” is not contrary to science. For example scientists will evaluate the risks vs. benefits of a cancer treatment to determine if the benefits are worth the risk. They will do the same for vaccine efficacy etc.
Scientists are also humans with their own value judgment which is sometimes very flawed (see e.g. Richard Lynn and his race science) and sometimes with revolutionary insights that expands our shared empathy for the world around us (see e.g. Jane Godall).
Often when I hear a statement like this I see it as a thought terminating cliché. The value judgement of a scientists is often disregarded only when it is contrary (or inconvenient) to the speaker’s argument.
Who then should inject their feelings? Journalists don't care because it's too abstract, politicians don't care because it won't happen in their term, business doesn't care because there's no money to be made, and the people don't care because of all of the above people telling them to ignore it.
You don’t like honesty?
Agreed. This kind of provocative story gives many people the sense that science is unreliable, full of shifting narratives and unmet prophesies. That undermines the confidence we need in it as a society.
I would argue the opposite. The number one frustration I have with climate change is the continued and persistent inaction by our world leaders. I would argue that modeling out worst case scenarios is more likely to reach our leaders and finally break this decades long inaction.
I think generally the effects climate skeptics have over climate policy is overstated. And corporations with vested interest in being able to continue releasing massive amounts of CO2 into our atmosphere have much more say over climate policy then climate skeptics. Now these companies often do weaponize climate skeptics in order to lobby government into continued inaction, but that behavior will continue regardless of how scientists frame their climate models.
> providing ammunition to skeptics when the catastrophe doesn’t materialize.
This would be compeling if they were actual sceptics who care about evidence. We are talking about people who will bad faith deny everything.
Censoring yourself is exactly what they wanted to achieve and did achieved.
Except the catastrophes are materializing now so those fools are increasingly wrong.
The solar panel install stats give me hope. It’s unfortunate the US is burying its head on new alt energy projects but our grifting culture is just too strong.
This is an ongoing warning which I first read about in university in 1997.
One of the issues with slow moving catastrophes is that we get used to it and then we stop worrying about it.
I believe this is because humans are not good generally at long term planning past a couple years when there is no clear feedback (or it is purposely muddied.)
So essentially we are likely screwed.
This is the study which is behind the recent news articles on the AMOC collapse:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adx4298
Basically newer modeling has shown a stronger weakening of the system. Lots of uncertainty, but 1/3rd loss by 2100. There's a lot of unknowns with feedback loops and tipping points where the whole thing might collapse if a threshold is crossed.
But the Dow is over 50,000! Who cares about the AMOC?
Europe needs to start taking this seriously. If they are really science-led and fact-based, they need to fund a series of additional studies to absolutely confirm a 37% loss by 2100, and run clean estimates and projections of the cost to heat Europe and replace shorter growing seasons as the AMOC slows over 25, 50, 75, and 100 years. They can then project the the total cost of the loss, and speak to the insurance and reinsurance companies to determine the cost of remediation. Money will move this needle, nothing else.
Worth clicking just for that absolutely gorgeous photo of the church.
watch it happening in real time here
https://www.ospo.noaa.gov/products/ocean/sst/contour/
I am seeing changes, unprecidented changes, in my decades of watching, and they do not match any predicted scenario.
What changes are you seeing? When I look at these images, it shows me what sea surface temperatures are today, but I don't have context as to how it's changed.
I would love someone to stitch years of these images together in a video to help me get better context.
The probabilistic nature of predicting how likely any given climate change event like the AMOC shutting down is creating a false sense of security and skepticism.
Many climate change skeptics like to claim that Earth’s climate has been radically different at various points in its history, therefore current anthropogenic climate change is fine. Other climate change skeptics like to claim that we’re currently in an ice age, therefore warming the planet is not a bad thing. Yet others claim that this is natural and humans shouldn’t try to stop it.
What these arguments miss is that all available evidence suggests that CO2 levels and global temperatures have never changed this fast outside of mass extinctions. All available evidence strongly supports the ideas that humans released the excess CO2, that CO2 is a powerful greenhouse gas, and that human-produced CO2 is causing the planet to retain more heat. There are competing theories on how catastrophic anthropogenic climate change will be and how fast it will happen, but the broad consensus is that these drastic changes will impact both humans and the broader environment.
People argue against preventative measures to slow down anthropogenic climate change because it can harm economic growth. The attitude seems to be “we shouldn’t sacrifice profits for the polar bears”. I argue that it’s not a matter of trying to save other species, it’s about saving our own species. Given the overwhelming evidence that humans are causing climate change and that the results will involve drastic changes in climate patterns, I don’t think we’re panicking enough. For the vast majority of us who are not ultra wealthy capitalists, faster economic growth won’t matter if extreme weather events threaten our lives every year and large areas of agricultural land become unusable. We need to slow down our production and consumption and study climate change more carefully, not defund climate research and charge blindly into a future we can’t control or predict.
Just to list some uncertainties:
(1) Gulf Stream is a wind-driven western boundary current and the equatorial Atlantic is getting warmer and warmer so heat delivery is probably stable;
(2) Greenland melt rates are real and fresher ocean water won’t sink as much and could push northern surface currents south;
(3) Wind-driven upwelling (other end of the AMOC) is likely to stay stable so you have the suction pump effect;
(4) Atmospheric warming and overall climate conditions today are very different from that 12,000 ya system the article cites;
Regardless, dumping all this fossil CO2 and CH4 into the atmosphere is definitely changing the climate system; but rather than cooling Europe and the UK I’d guess this will just reduce the warming rate in that region over the next 100 years, and it might cause problems with ocean hypoxia due to slower rates of deep water formation, impacting fish populations.
P.S. If you want to vet these claims, plug it into an LLM with this header: “ As an expert in global planetary science, give me some critiques with positive/negative paper references that both support and push back against each point (eight papers total please, prefer recent, then critique summary).”
I can’t believe there are people in our industry who turn a blind eye (or worse) to these problems. They say that climate scientists are fearmongering and argue there is not a single truth.
People do weird things when there's a lot of money involved.
As if war mongers, and AI tech bros would care.
After COVID it feels doom is unavoidable.
two absolute facts:
1. even if there was something humans could do about it, we won't, ever
2. insurance rates are the only "control". they will skyrocket and thereby the only change to select behavior
human society allows "privatize the profits, socialize the costs"
so that scales from the smallest to the largest models
Pretty much agree. Nature will fix the climate, after it eliminates (a large number of) the humans that are causing the problem. That's really the only way.
The defeatist mindsets expressed in these comments seem more like a way to shed any sort of personal accountability for participating in a solution that doesn't kill billions of people than a reflection of reality.
There are many solutions.
> There are many solutions.
There are, but none that will be accepted. Will you give up your car, your air condititioning, your AI agents, your uber eats, your year-round fresh produce at the supermarket, meat as a regular part of your diet, all the imported stuff you are accustomed to having?
We will never, ever see a reduction in the amount of energy that humanity uses. The population might dip slightly from climate change (highly unlikely actually), but that won’t be what solves climate change. Clean energy is the solution, and it’s already happening.
This is a cold-hearted way to think about it. The countless people who will suffer are not the ones causing the problem. The problem is caused by the billionaires willing to sacrifice human life and the environment for profit. They actively sow climate skepticism and encourage defunding of climate research to protect their bottom line. When extreme weather events kill millions, those billionaires will be safe in their bunkers. We can’t just condemn millions or even billions to death without trying to do anything about it.
Kings have always sacrificed the common folk for their own benefit. This is also the way of human society. The experience of our own current lifetimes is quite the exception.
It's easier to blame climate change on a conspiracy theory around billionaires then it is to stop driving so much and reduce consumption.
At least in the US, many people have to drive because US metropolitan areas are car-centric and lack public transit. This, in turn, is a direct result of lobbying by powerful companies like oil producers and automobile manufacturers.
As for your point about reducing consumption, there has been a deliberate effort by billionaire-controlled corporations to increase consumption. This has been done through a variety of methods, including limiting repairability, deliberate planned obsolescence through things like fast fashion and equipment designed to break down, and psychological manipulation to encourage consumption. Small ‘d’ democratic efforts to limit these techniques have been defeated by powerful lobbies backed by these billionaires.
Billionaires aren’t just responsible for consumption-driven climate change, they’re also responsible for subverting the democratic processes that could have reversed it at large scales.
The car-centrism of the USA is IMO because people like the convenience of being able to go where they want, when they want, and not waiting for a bus that will take an indirect route and twice the time. People also like living in their own house with a fenced back yard and not having neighbors on the other side of the wall/ceiling/floor. This means we're more spread out (we have lots of land) and mass transit is less practical.
In dense urban areas we do have good mass transit and it's relatively more common for people to not own a car.
> conspiracy theory
What is the name for the theory that the most fantastically wealthy do not rule society? No kind adjectives come to mind.
At the end of the day it's unsustainable consumption of resources and increasing generation of waste that's killing the planet.
Even if the 4000 billionaires are ruling society, they're destroying the planet with the help of 8 billion poors.
At the end of the day it’s bullets fired from rifles, mortars, artillery shells, cruise ship missiles, etc. that are killing people in war.
If the executive branch of the government is commanding the military, and generals are commanding the military, they’re killing people with the help of tens of thousands of soldiers.
Then the misanthropes of HN will have their way. And can gloat in their graves.
not to diss the science and the work involved around it but this kind of alarmist stuff makes me wonder how many similar things have happened in the past but nobody noticed because nobody was looking or even knew how to track such a thing, the environment is so complex, seems unlikely that we can make heads or tails of this, and in 50 years some new understanding will flip all of our current models (no pun intended!), so what’s really the value of such “warnings”? money went into this, where does it ultimately go?
> how many similar things have happened in the past but nobody noticed because nobody was looking or even knew how to track such a thing
We can actually make petty good estimates because of things like carbon layers in the ice. It's happened in the past, you're right, and usually it precedes large scale extinction events.
There are a couple of things wrong here. First off, there is a historic climate record that goes back centuries and is fairly accurate. Second, the climate prediction models are tested against this historic record. They reproduce the historic climates quite well. The error margins are generally shrinking due to model improvements.
But when making actual predictions, the models need to make assumption about anthropogenic parameters like CO2 and methane emissions. That's the largest remaining uncertainty at this point. Given the same assumptions, climate models generally agree on the outcome.
I agree with your sentiment, but I have a hard time imagining any alternative action scientists could take besides publishing and warning.
Science is best when it’s purely that, I’ve seen plenty of living examples and read about past ones where science mixed with politics or overt profit motives don’t end well. Surely there must be examples where the contrary has been the case, but I am biased, and I would wager that it ended poorly more often than well.
I would much rather have politicians that heed scientific results than scientists springboarding into politics.
De be sure to let us know when you've completed your research into this topic.
“Scientists” have been warning the world about this since Stommel issued his paper in 1961:
https://tellusjournal.org/articles/10.3402/tellusa.v13i2.949...
It’s going to shut down
The ice caps and antartic ice are going to melt entirely
The Gulf Stream is going to collapse
Global emissions have skyrocketed with no brakes since then
1.5C target was a joke. 2.0 target is a joke. There is no world where humans can coordinate in a way that reduces global emissions
MAYBE by accident with enough selfishness around not wanting to die. I don’t see it though
The problem is that by the time it becomes incontestable that the scientists were right, it will be much, much too late to do anything about it.
I think the reality is much more grim. I believe we are now firmly in the territory where it is incontestable. (My opinion was cemented after reading Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown by Andreas Malm, Wim Carton)
We will be spending much of our upcoming years trying to get people and capital to accept that fact, before we can even start thinking about what little we can even do. By which point, we may actually just be having to scramble to mitigate the immediate sequelae of the changed climate, rather than focus our efforts to fix the underlying cause.
Sad to say, with AI, crypto mining and now Trump/GOP, it is already too late.
Depending upon timing, if the AOC shuts down, Europe may not be a bad place to live. I am not sure how the AOC will impact NE US and Eastern Canada. But between the 40th parallels could be borderline uninhabitable for humans.
Way things look now, we seem to heading straight to +3C and maybe even +4C.
> There is no world where humans can coordinate in a way that reduces global emissions
They seem to have cooperated rather effectively on increasing them, so I wouldn't say "no world"?
We burned fossil fuels because they were the cheapest form of energy. We will stop doing that when it becomes too expensive.
We are moving that direction, but a lot of damage will be done before we get there.
People don’t need to coordinate to ignore externalities
The archeological and geological records strongly suggest we've been down this road before. There's as much arrogance in assuming we can prevent this, as there is in assuming we caused it (perhaps hastened it). Best use of national or global resources is preparing for the outcome, not trying to prevent it.
This is incorrect. There’s no evidence global CO2 levels and average temperatures have ever increased this fast outside of mass extinctions. On the other hand, there is plenty of evidence we’ve caused the current conditions.
Studies of ratios of carbon isotopes in the atmosphere show that there has been a relative increase in carbon-12 and a relative decrease in carbon-13 and carbon-14 consistent with the burning of fossil fuels, which contains no carbon-14 due to radioactive decay and low levels of carbon-13 because plants preferentially fix carbon-12. Research the Suess effect for more information.
We’ve known since John Tyndall’s research in 1859 that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. Besides countless other studies since, we also have satellite evidence that the Earth is reemitting less infrared radiation at the exact wavelengths that CO2 absorbs. CO2 as the driver of a greenhouse effect is not in doubt either.
There is also plenty of observational evidence that the oceans now trap more heat, that nights are warming faster than days, that winters are warming faster than summers, and these are all consistent with models of anthropogenic climate change.
Tough to tell exactly what you’re referencing, but you might be thinking about the Paleocene–Eocene thermal maximum, which was a natural increase in carbon in the atmosphere that led to higher temperatures. So, in some ways very similar to what we’re seeing now, but if my understanding is correct, even the PETM which was “dramatic” on a geological timescale took thousands of years to ramp up, and played out over 200,000 years. What we’re seeing now is happening much quicker, and is highly correlated with human influence.
> preparing for the outcome
How exactly do you propose to prepare for Europe becoming uninhabitable?
You can buy sets of matching luggage.
"Funny" story, in a few months we'll be moving a few hundred km north, partly due to the summers being unbearably hot and dry the past few years.
Now we're hearing more and more about the area we're going to potentially getting really cold due to the weakening of the Atlantic current.
Good times.
Wheres the research that shows this has happened before at the same timescale?
Citation needed
Wait I've seen this... Day before the day after tomorrow right?
Generally in science when your see the same results being reproduced by different researchers your certainty should increase.
Don’t look up, 2026 is the midterm campaign slogan for MAGA
regardless of a reproduction science is repetition and verification yes... is there a point beyond that?
Yes the movie was vaguely inspired by the science.
The AMOC has been studied for a long time, including the effects of its possible weakening.
Where the movie is firmly in fantasy land of course is in the timeline, where the effects are nearly instant rather than likely over decades in reality.
> Yes the movie was vaguely inspired by the science.
I.. _sigh_, my comment was satire I'm well aware of the "science", the modelling, the failures of large amounts of models, the ones that work, the...
Hot take on HN, but techno-optimism sounds so stupid when it comes to climate change... You can't engineer macro climate/ecology, since capital has no interest in human and it's surrounding environment balanced cohabitation.
Techno optimist here who expects the following to make a big contribution to reducing human made future climate change: better batteries+solar/wind, nuclear fusion, self driving cars (we'll need to manufacture less cars for the same amount of miles humanity drives), AI helping with better resource allocation in general (hopefully).
The answer can't be, let's just consume 10x less. We have to engineer our way out of it.
To make energy requires not only a lot of time to be produced, but also a lot of energy to get it done. Industrial society is based on these "oil reserves" from the Mesozoic Era. All the stuff made in factories from the 19th century all the way to iPhones 17s relies on these diminishing EROI — which, instead of being underground, is now in our atmosphere. It's not like a jar on a shelf we can just take off because by the time the energy transfers through the ecosystem all the way it hits where the ecosystem the most fragile, melting the taiga and lowering the albedo.
These are all helpful contributions, but ultimately we need buy-in from decision makers (i.e. rulers/heads of nations).
And at least in the US we do not have it and are actively going in the opposite direction, mostly in the name of money.
I know one way to get their "buy-in", if you catch my drift.
These awesome things will enable a higher human population. We are like a virus taking over the host organism and overdoing it.
In almost every wealthy country the birth rate has fallen below sustainable, meaning we're shrinking if life expectancy doesn't magically explode.
Viruses btw never reflect on killing the host :P
Like cancer
Ironically what is pushing many countries to a faster adoption of renewables is not climate change but the recent Iran conflict.
Yes tech can help but implementation depends on human nature.
Blowing up all the world's oil fields would probably do a lot to focus people's attention.
> The answer can't be, let's just consume 10x less. We have to engineer our way out of it.
We will have to do both I am afraid
I’d be embarrassed to call myself a techno optimist and associate with someone who thinks empathy is bad.
I love technology but optimism about it is incompatible with the current capitalist system. Tech is exploited to make capital not to further our optimism.
Edit: if you’re gonna downvote at least offer a counter. lol pathetic.
The forest where the community hikes has no value unless the trees are turned into paper.
All to say, Capital at large seeks out the profit. Until climate change effects the profit considerably, mitigation will be the path less traveled.
The only real way to approach this problem is to reduce consumption across the board which as you might guess, isn't profitable.
reducing consumption across the board isnt just unprofitable, it would mean everyone agreeing to overcome our biological gradients. i do not think it is possible for us to do, and evolution has not equipped us to do that as far as i can tell.
my semi-superstitious take is that the race to achieve ai is grounded in needing something that knows whats going on and is able to make decisions aligned to generational time horizons. whether that works out or not time will tell, but i get the sense a "good enough" ai is probably our best shot at saving us from ourselves. it's clear we can't do that on our own.
>The only real way to approach this problem is to reduce consumption across the board which as you might guess, isn't profitable.
We need a human civilization that is run for the benefit of human beings, not paper-clip maximizing overlords.
Which is why, to be blunt, libertarians and conservatives are wrong to demonize government without being equally or more skeptical of the corrupting power of money.
Government is the only apparatus that can govern unregulated motivations of capital, and we need regulations on pollution and investments in clean energy and waste creation/collection to stop things like climate change.
Gen X and forward grew up in a world that by default was cleaner due to regulations like the Clean Water Act, better for seniors due to things like Social Security and Medicare, and safer due to things like food regulations and vaccine mandates. The people who rail against these things are railing against the very things that made their world safer and in some instances kept them alive.
Yeah, this is why I'm not a Libertarian. Concentrated power in the hands of single individuals impacts the freedom and liberty of everyone else. That holds if the person is the head of government, or the CEO of a corporation.
The singular input for every plausible avenue for mitigating and addressing climate change is energy. And an astronomical amount of energy at that if you want to make a measurable dent over the next 100 years. You can't cheat thermodynamics.
Energy absolutely is something that you can engineer. It is one of the most fundamental things engineering is about. Nothing we can do will make a difference without serious investment in carbon-free power systems. There is a lot of money being invested in energy technology, the real question is if we will build enough of it.
> capital has no interest
Selfish humans. "Capital" is a mental model, it's not some force of nature or hand of god.
Selfishness has nothing to do with it. Capitalism rewards anti-social investment strategies and capital accumulation, so that's what we get. "Capital" is not a force of nature, it's an emergent force from our economic system. It behaves sort of predictably and can be described: that's economics.
EDIT: got to love how anytime you write something even remotely critical of capitalism you get auto-downvoted. Fine, "climate change is only because of bad, selfish people". Is this explanation more palatable?
I don't get the impression of much techno-optimism here lately, it's mostly just incessant whining about how they think everything's AI generated.
We engineered ourselves into this, and we’re actually making good progress in engineering ourselves out. Not without some serious upcoming pain, but it’s not all doom and gloom. We as a species have accomplished many things that weren’t profit-motivated.
Techno optimism is bullshit created by power hungry VCs to ostracize anyone who argues against their myopic world view and further fill their own coffers at the expense of others. Anyone want to argue against that? I’ve yet to see a compelling counter.
Climate also doesn't change in macro over a lifetime.
It's very real, but the notion that it's changing over a 5 year period is nonsense.
things aren't "shutting off".
I am old enough to have witnessed how the climate has completely changed in Europe, where I live.
In the same place where I live now, when I was young there was permanent snow cover for 3 to 4 months.
During the last 10 years, there have been years with no snow and in the others a little snow has been present for 3 or 4 days of a year, when it melted the second day after falling.
I have not used again my winter boots and my winter jackets for the last 15 years or more.
This is really a huge change during less than a human lifetime.
Better keep those winter clothes in care the current shuts down.
What you've said is emotionally compelling, but scientifically very weak. Personal recollection is selective and location-specific. You’ve described a memory, not established a mechanism.
What you perceive as change isn't macro, it's micro.
It doesn't mean macro change isn't happening, but it's not happening on our timescale.
I'm 50 FWIW.
Just look at any glaciar in the Alps (or almost anywhere in the world really). Over the last 50 years, your liftime, there have been enourmous changes.
What are you considering 'macro' climate change to be then? The mechanism they described was warming climate.
> it's not happening on our timescale.
Talk to anyone over 30 and they'll tell you the climate has already changed.
Well anyone that doesn't have a political agenda or shares in ExxonMobil.
Even ExxonMobil scientists came to the conclusion. They made an internal study in the 70s and it was actually incredibly solid: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abk0063
You can paste this exact response under your other post, as well. Emotionally compelling, scientifically weak. Worth nothing.
But also, what you wrote is just wrong. There are plenty of measurable, significant, ood effects in the last few decades on the climate and its impact.
Here’s one study onglacier retreat over the last 20 years.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2021GL09...
And here’s a paper on the effects of the mechanism:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-025-02282-5
I’m sure you’ll read them earnestly.
Meteoroligista says thw same thing. They have measurements, cause humanity was able to measure and record 30 years ago.
What has no value is to pretend it is not happening because ones favorite ideological movements said so.
Climate has changed over a lifetime though.
Looking back at the amount of snowfall I saw as a kid and the amount of snowfall I see now in my 30s, or at the number of hot summer days ... I find it hard to claim that climate is not changing over a lifetime. 20 years isn't even a lifetime, that's like 1/4th of a lifetime
Maybe climate is more stable wherever you live
There's a problem with memories. You can have a snowy week and remember it as the entire winter, if it affected you in particularly memorable ways. Kids usually get out of school and play building snowmen and having snowball fights.
When I was a kid in the midwest USA, 100 degrees in the summer happened every once in a while. Still does. July and August were always hot. Still are. As a kid the heat didn't bother me so much, I'd go out and play in the sprinkler or go to the pool. Now, I've got to wear clothes and work. Makes the heat more noticable.
But we have undeniable evidence that the number of record highs to record lows has been increasing dramatically over the past few decades. It's just measurement, there's no magic behind it.
Summers are actually hotter and winters are actually warmer on average, that's real.
Likewise in the winter, as a kid in the 90s I remember my dad wondering if we'd have a white Christmas (wondering if snow would fall before Christmas or not). There's even songs from decades earlier about it.
Whether we'd get snow before January has always been a toss-up, and I'd hazard we've gotten it more often recently than when I was a kid. Like about 10 years ago I even remember a huge blizzard in November.
Same as my childhood in the 1970s.
I refer you to: https://xkcd.com/1732/
Huh? Sudden events are a very real part of larger processes like evolution and climate change. A volcano eruption, a meteor impact, or a drought year, or the ceasing of a current can absolutely have massive implications on larger systems.
Wishful thinking...
I wonder how people like you end up so hostile to experts.
Isn’t calling AMOC “the primary source of warmth for northern Europe” wildly overstated?
It would be correct if it said "Abnormally high temperatures for the latitude". Most of Europe would be 10 °C colder or so without. We'd be really screwed over here.
So how much coal we need to burn to compensate that 10C?
So much that the rest of the planet dies and most of the world is underwater.
Not really, look at what's on the same latitude in Amerika as northern europe. Then compare their climates.
The comparison only really works for the West coast though. The East coast is dominated by continental climate carried over from the interior by the prevailing winds. Meanwhile Europe is surrounded by water on three sides, plus the Baltic and North Sea in the middle. Just having this much water nearby (plus prevailing winds coming from an ocean) moderates temperature swings a lot
Yeah, I was doing a variation on this recently (wondering about the same question). Reversing the latitude of the island of Jersey ("extreme weather is rare due to the island's mild climate") takes you to the Kerguelen Islands ("snow throughout the year as well as rain"). But the contrast there is to do with the Azores High and the Roaring Forties. Local climates are complicated.
Time to deploy sulfate aerosols in the stratosphere https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/73f7f362-9890-4375-9a92-1...