If we ever manage to halt this accelerating crisis we should seriously consider a modern-day equivalent of the Nuremberg trials. Thousands upon thousands needlessly dead, https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/08/1152766 (from 2024)
The complicit parties of climate change are so wide you would probably have to try thousands and thousands of people across most of the developed world. The cohort is probably so large that it’s more a reflection of society generally than the malicious acts of a few.
> British military courts carried out proceedings against 1,085 persons
> About forty-five additional trials were held against an unknown number of
accused. [...] In all, French occupation courts passed 2,107 sentences [...]
> [I]n Poland alone 16,819 Germans were sentenced [...]
> In Czechoslovakia, about 16,000 German nationals received sentences. Exact figures are not available.
Oh believe me, there is a part of the political aisle which would be more than happy to put millions of people in forced labour camps, especially if they are wealthy. Any excuse is a good excuse.
Nonsense. Anyone who wants forced labor camps is a fascist. I don't care what they call themselves. Once you stop caring about wellbeing for everyone you stop being a leftist. (Which is your insinuation.)
Also, there is more than one political aisle. The left (who broadly want to redistribute wealth) is distinct from democrats (who are capitalists) is distinct from the various parts of the GOP.
The US Constitution, specifically the 13th amendment, allows:
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall be duly convicted, shall exist within the United STates or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
So in fact, forced labor camps are totally legal and common in the United States. There are lots of private companies which operate these prison / factory systems and are quite profitable (unsurprisingly), such as NYSE:GEO.
All governments "redistribute wealth" friend, not just the left or right or up or down.
It all depends on which side of the bars you live on, amirite?
We do not have infinite resources. Committing 7-11 years and countless billions to build a NPP leads to those funds and other resources to be unavailable elsewhere.
Each wind farm, each set of solar panels, each battery storage will begin to pay dividends immediately as each one is finished. While the huge plant will be nothing-nothing-nothing-... for years upon years.
Builders, engineers, capital, and such is better suited to be investing in other sources of energy.
Solar maybe NOW is, but this isn't a 5 or even 10 year old problem. And cost effective compared to what? We'll consider sending people to Mars to save humanity but reactors are "too expensive"?
This is not an argument for global warming, but do bear in mind that cold kills far more and on balance global warming has saved lives here. The issue is going to cause worse problems than heat deaths though. However, a big wet bulb event could completely reverse that count.
AI and bitcoin, regardless of what one thinks of them, have made negligible contributions to climate change. It is below the noise floor relative to other major industrial and commercial sources of atmospheric CO2.
Virtually all of the current conditions were in motion before bitcoin and AI were even a thing.
Not exactly background noise but totally incomparable to the normal CO2 outputs of major nations like the US or China. I.e. ~20 Million Tons CO2 vs 4 Trillion and 13 Trillion Tons respectively.
Sure. But you have to weigh any application relative to (1) how useful it is and (2) how easy it would be to rely on a carbon-neutral alternative.
And I would argue the usefulness of bitcoin is negative from the viewpoint of a free society.
AI is to a certain degree a different story, but also there it depends what you're doing.
We live in a thin atmospheric skin around the planet, and that skin has a finite volume. If earth was the size of an apple, the atmosphere is thinner than the Apple's skin in proportion.
Pretending we can do whatever we like for infinitly long inside an finite volume is completely unhinged. The financial and political elites, who some frame as the true geniuses point to technological solutions that are always "just around the corner" for the past decades with some of them even eying to leave the planet behind entirely.
All of that while we know how to address the issue.
No, excessive fossil fuel use is the cause by an immense margin. It's completely dominated by commercial shipping (boats), followed by planes. Then I think it may actually be gas from cattle before cars. Bitcoin and AI are so recent and still relative to everything else small.
This is completely incorrect. Aviation contributes 2.5% of global emissions (but is terrible on a per capita basis, as only around 10% of the world's population travels on any given year). Global shipping accounts for 2.3% of global human-made emissions [1].
In transport emissions, passenger vehicles dominate by far (with around 12% of global GHG emissions), even more so in developed countries. Then freight by road with 7.5% of total emissions.
Maritime shipping is actually the least carbon intensive way to transport goods over long distances by at least two orders of magnitude [2].
Widespread use of nuclear power for civilian merchant shipping is a non-starter. It's simply too expensive to train and pay enough qualified nuclear engineers. The US Navy barely manages this for a few dozen nuclear powered vessels with a huge budget and limited concern for cost effectiveness.
Plus there are the security concerns. Every civilian nuclear power plant has armed guards on duty around the clock. Those guards have to also be trained and paid. Many foreign countries have laws against bringing weapons into their ports.
If we want to reduce CO2 emissions from merchant ships then use nuclear or renewable power on shore to manufacture carbon neutral synthetic liquid fuel. Use that to run the ship engines.
I really feel like if the US really wanted to support US shipbuilding (like what the Jones act was supposed to do) it would subsidize building a fleet of nuclear shipping boats.
Lots of manufacturing projects, lots of related industries boosted, a renewed investment in nuclear engineering bringing a lot of nuclear job experience, and a way to potentially dig deeper into the backbone of global trade again.
Would Iran be as likely to have hit one of these ships if the result was potentially a nuclear meltdown close to their shoreline? It would pretty radically change the costs to them for such an attack, wouldn't it?
If you sink nuclear ship you won't get nuclear meltdown. You have enough thermal mass to cool down anything if you are underwater. Some level of loss of nuclear material would happen. But meltdown is not something that would happen.
Its not like all the ships hit by attacks in the Straight of Hormuz sank. A ship could potentially become critically damaged and become unable to operate the reactor and still be floating.
Either way, "loss of nuclear material" is the real concern isn't it, instead of just the nature of how that loss happened?
The question still stands. If a country knows they're potentially going to cause a nuclear disaster by hitting one of these ships on their shoreline, are they as likely to shoot at them?
Or Europe should just get air-conditioning and enjoy the beautiful weather. Can’t make it through the winter without heat. Why would you want to make it through the summer without air-conditioning?
That being said fuck pollution and the ruining of our environment.
Do you propose climate action with effects that we will see in decades, if not centuries, is going to save the vulnerable who are currently dying by the thousands?
I do not think that you believe so.
How is it acceptable that the actionable solution is entirely ignored in favor of performative speech?
You cannot talk about thousands dying today, neglect to mention the actionable solution, and talk only about climate action which will help on a time frame of decades to centuries.
I think we should start charging the worst emitters with manslaughter now. We shouldn't wait for the crisis to be halted; the law should be part of how we force firms to recognize part of the harm.
I've been reading up on the inevitable collapse of the AMOC (the potsdam institute has a number of really good videos covering the subject).
Everyone hears 'winters will be up to 10C cooler', but few realize that this will also cause the jet stream to be more wavy, and exacerbate the number of heat waves as well.
Sad that europe's mild climate is about to get a whole lot worse...
I am just repeating the 'gist' I've gotten from my research on the topic, but the risk of AMOC shutdown has gone from a low probability / high impact prediction by 2100, to 'we think there's a strong chance of hitting a tipping point by 2060'. I wish I could point you to a specific paper, but I'm going entirely off memory, and that is fallible
The % likelyhood by x date predictions have swayed back and forth as we've adjusted our predictions of which emissions path we actually wind up following.
Even if you read just the conclusion at the bottom it seems obvious that there is no consensus about a collapse being inevitable:
> Overall though, there is some common ground in recent research: evidence for AMOC weakening having begun is growing, albeit is not clear in every AMOC metric; a substantial decline is expected with current emissions, that over centuries could potentially push the AMOC to a slow ‘shutdown’ state; and there remains a real but uncertain chance that this slowdown could pass a tipping point beyond which this shutdown is locked in, even if warming is halted or even declines. Exactly how much and quickly the AMOC is weakening, and the likelihood of it reaching a tipping point, remain much more uncertain, but what we do know is enough to justify concern and action to reduce the risk of AMOC shutdown
I don't know that there are any pop sci books on amoc collapse specifically, the more popular books on climate change acknowledge it's a possibility but do not really dig into the effects beyond the fact that it will chill europe in the winter and shift the monsoon rainfall belt (southward?). The potsdam institute has some good papers available, and of course, you can find others that ref it in google scholar.
It will probably be warm but this is from the GFS model that was forecasting 50 degrees during the last heat wave. Apparently, it tends to "overegg temperature projections for Europe in the summer by around 2-2.5c. ... it dries out soil too fast in its models."
Somehow, somehow, everyone’s heads are still in the sand. Desperately trying to bury them deeper. It’s like CICO denialism.
I expect this to be a deeply unpopular take here, but solutionism will fail. Magic technology will not come to save us. All of our industrial tekhne has been in the service of rolling down the stored-energy hill faster and faster. To put the genie back in the bottle, to take apart the CO2 and turn it back into hydrocarbons, we’d have to do more work than everything that was done in the last two centuries. And that’s an extremely conservative lower bound.
It’s so dire. I don’t think most people understand that everything around them is made out of petroleum. Not just your ability to travel, or your clothes. Your food is made of petroleum. Your institutions are made of petroleum. Your gender equality is made of petroleum. Your freedom is made of petroleum.
There is no putting this thing in reverse. If the AI doesn’t get us first, thermodynamics will topple all of this.
While it is true that reversing combustion would require more energy than was released burning it, I don't think anyone reasonable is proposing it. The proposal is to redirect future energy production away from fossil extraction and into cleaner sources (solar, wind, nuclear, geothermal) which is a completely different thermodynamic problem. The constraints are things like grid storage capacity, permitting timelines, and critical mineral supply chains - not physics.
If we overcome these very real contraints, we reduce the rate of new additions to atmospheric CO2. We will still need to do the thermodynamically hard work of removing CO2 at gigaton scale, but deferring that until removal tech is more mature is the right sequencing.
Of course, this assumes that we are actually working towards the CO2 output reductions right now and really committed to CO2 removal in the near future.
I agree that it’s a little weird, insofar as people don’t talk about it, but I’m not sure it’s very woke at all. It’s in a lot of tension with conventional woke ideas.
The usual way people talk about all this is more or less idealist (as opposed to materialist): people thought hard and got better morals (or worse morals, if you have a reactionary bent). The claim I’m making is that it’s not a coincidence that egalitarian norms happened to be correlated with the falling cost of energy. It’s basically the same idea as “God created men [and women]; Sam Colt made them equal.”
Seems likely that within our lifetime multiple countries in europe may turn into deserts, and there is little we can do against it except for maybe attempt to terraform the climate by seeding clouds or changing ecosystem flora to something resilient in the face of 40C weather. Losing a huge amount of food production would be my greatest concern.
"2027 is likely to be WAY worse than this 2026 in terms of extreme heat, drought, fires, crop losses. WAY worse. In the Northern hemisphere, we have half a year to prepare for next summer and save some lives.
Everyone is acting like 2026 is a blip. No: far worse is to come."
As of now, our worst problem in Central Europe seems to be drought. Some of the mightiest rivers of the continent are barely there. You can walk across the Danube, the Rhine or the Wisla in some places, drenching yourself a bit, but never losing contact with the bottom.
The warming is terrible and deadly, AND ALSO Europeans are negligent in not protecting themselves however they can.
The idea that Europe could slow warming by not using air-conditioning is absurd, when the emissions mostly come from elsewhere. France, in particular, gets most of its energy from nuclear power, but also makes it very hard to get climatisation.
People live longer in many parts of Europe than the USA. Does that mean the USA is somehow negligent?
Excess deaths due to heat are primarily the in the elderly. The excess numbers we are seeing now are because the proportion of elderly people in France, Germany and Spain are higher than in the USA.
If the population pyramid in the EU was more similar to that of the USA the number of excess deaths would be lower. I'm not sure negligent is the correct word to use. Climate change will reduce quality of life. Because of these changes people will not live as long.
When I lived in a rather hot area of Spain for a year, I was shocked to find out that many apartments don't have an air conditioner. In a place where a similar heat wave happens every year, for months. A friend of mine moved there from Germany and being somewhat frugal, rented a place without and aircon. Let me just say that he didn't enjoy the summer nights one bit.
I myself had one, but I could probably rent a car for the cost of running it.
I will say this - air conditioning costs to establish room temperature are inversely proportional to the degree the building is insulated. If your whole country is comprised of uninsulated or barely insulated housing stock, you have a MUCH larger project than simply buying some small window units for a few hundred euro per person and then paying a few hundred euros extra per year in energy costs.
Some of these places don't get very cold, others rely on coats, others south facing window solar gain. Very old buildings are common. I'm not claiming all of Europe is uninsulated, just a large enough portion to render heatwave safety a much bigger problem.
If you can't run one fifth of your nuclear plants, because the water levels are to low or the water temperatures too high in the rivers used to cool them, you may want to reconsider whether that is truly the best choice here¹
In the meantime my fathers solar roof allows him free AC cooling, because as it turns out AC generally needs most energy when the sun shines the most.
I am not arguing nuclear plants do not have benefits, I just argue that solar with storage may be a much better fit for powering ACs.
>Europeans are negligent in not protecting themselves however they can.
Well, if the people in charge say or think global warming isn't real, that's what you get: not "other" solutions to the "unacceptable propositions" the Green parties suggest, but no proposition at all, as there is no problem.
The current situation is a direct consequence of pure negationism from conservative parties, not a disagreement on how to deal with climate change between the Right and the Left. The Left proposed solutions you may not agree with, but the Right has been completely rejecting the reality of climate change.
BTW, how do you propose Europe protect not only people from the heat, but also forests from burning, rivers from drying up, fields from being unfit for cows and sheep, lakes from blooming with algae, nuclear plants from being shut down due to river water being too hot and seawater being full of jellyfish, etc, etc, etc? In the end, there are so many things to "adapt" that it would cost less to try to organize a global effort to lower CO2.
[H]ow do you propose Europe protect not only people from the heat, but [all these other things]?
Why does it have to be framed as all-or-nothing? I agree that using air conditioning to reduce the number of people who die from the heat does nothing to help with the problem of jellyfish, but how is that relevant, exactly?
This is a harbinger for insane weather in the United States this fall and winter.
I am expecting my homeless life in in minivan to be choatic trying to chase where the weather will be favorable.
My main concern if is there is heavy rains in California after the drought of rain they have had this summer. The Salton Sea is at an all time low[1] and many people do not know that a rapid fill of water into the Salton Sea from the Cochella Valley is a known trigger for earthquakes on the San Jacinto and San Andreas Faults[2][3].
First the UK, then leadership of Europe via behind-closed-doors politics, then a gentle colonization of both the east and the west using our amazing cheese, bread that is baked rather than synthesized from fossil fuels, and 30 days of paid vacations per year. The path forward is clear.
What a genius idea. How about we pump the heat out of our buildings into the already hot local environment? We could use electricity to do it and increase our carbon footprints.
You should compare the average carbon footprint in the US with the EU before making these kind of comments.
> In a post on X, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said more than 1,300 excess deaths had been recorded since 21 June "linked to high temperatures in Europe".
> On Sunday morning, France's national health ministry said there had been around 1,000 more deaths than expected in the country since Wednesday.
> At least 3,700 excess deaths have been recorded in France, Belgium and the Netherlands alone as a result of the June heat wave that sent temperatures soaring above 40°C (104°F).
Just stop. A lack of European AC is making a negligible difference at best in the fight against climate change and it's killing your people. The models aren't that wrong.
Yes there are going to be a lot of excess deaths. To be honest anyone who doesn't understand that the number of excess deaths we are seeing now is a fraction of what is going to happen worldwide doesn't understand what is happening. I'm not arguing that isn't happening. I was saying the very widely reported graphs that started this whole 'why don't europeans fit AC everywhere' argument was based on modelling.
Your solution is to put AC all over Europe. That won't work because our buildings are not made for AC, the amount of retrofitting required would be insane and it probably wouldn't have a significant impact on excess deaths. Counties like France and Germany have a higher percentage of elderly relative to the USA. These people will be contributing massively to the excess deaths. Your AC solution is not going to be in place fast enough for them.
AC is a bandaid that only makes the systemic problem worse.
I don't know how it's become such a culture war gotcha.
Yes, I have AC myself and yes, it makes things more bearable.
But it won't refill our rivers, it won't make the outside livable, it won't regrow our crops, it won't refreeze the glaciers and poles, it won't unburn the forests. In short, it won't be able to provide the conditions required for human survival.
To do that, we can't avoid fixing the root cause. Every time we have a conversation about the effects of climate change, somebody derails it with "but AC!"...
Characterizing technology whose presence or absence will affect the survival of a lot of people as a “bandaid” is not going to advance the dialog in the way you seem to want.
Realistically, what else can be done to deal with the impact of climate change right now? Addressing the root cause would be great, but it's not going to move the needle for people suffering today.
mass investment in renewable energy across the globe. You can't do much for the people of today, but you can do plenty of good for people 20+ years into the future. Something about planting and sitting in their shade.
That derailing is indicative of the mindset of the people who do it. All they see or understand is the immediate consequence of deaths of people, so they look for solutions to that problem without any consideration for broader systemic factors, second and third order effects, etc.
And lest anyone mistakes this concern for saving lives for humanitarian concern, this same kind of reasoning makes their answer to a refugee crisis "build a wall". It's all just knee-jerk reaction to first-order effects.
Erasing any datacenter ever built (and planned) would do almost nothing to stop climate change.
What we need is (global) electrification of transport and heating, CO2 free electricity and CO2 neutral concrete and steel.
Very effective ways to make this happen would be high prices on emissions, enforced on every local industry and all imports.
But too many people love their cheap fossil-based transport too much and are unwilling to make even small sacrifices to keep the climate stable; sad reality.
Thinking these are at their current level relevant to climate change, is a level of ignorance that I'd almost put on a tin-foil hat to discuss how the fossil industry is feeding an anti-AI campaign of ignorance.
For as long as I can remember, my hometown had extreme summers with temperatures climbing as high as 45c. This was in the early 90's. This year is no different. Location: North Macedonia
For as long as I remember I never had a summer this warm and this dry. And I don't even have to rely on memory alone here as this is backed by actual historic measurements all the way back since humans started to record temperatures in my countries.
You do realize North Macedonia is not representative of all EU countries, and that other EU countries have abnormal heat waves compared to the 90s? With effects like the first pyrocumulonimbus in France's recorded history?
I think denying climate change and it's impact in the face of all evidence is something hard to justify lol.
If we ever manage to halt this accelerating crisis we should seriously consider a modern-day equivalent of the Nuremberg trials. Thousands upon thousands needlessly dead, https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/08/1152766 (from 2024)
The complicit parties of climate change are so wide you would probably have to try thousands and thousands of people across most of the developed world. The cohort is probably so large that it’s more a reflection of society generally than the malicious acts of a few.
Got to start somewhere. Let's start at the top and work ourselves down. If we could do it with over 100 000 persons back then, we could do it again.
> But while in West Germany and united Germany between 1946 and 2005, cases were brought against 140,000 individuals
https://www.timesofisrael.com/historian-examines-germanys-mi...
> British military courts carried out proceedings against 1,085 persons
> About forty-five additional trials were held against an unknown number of accused. [...] In all, French occupation courts passed 2,107 sentences [...]
> [I]n Poland alone 16,819 Germans were sentenced [...]
> In Czechoslovakia, about 16,000 German nationals received sentences. Exact figures are not available.
https://digitallibrary.un.org/nanna/record/627806/files/A_80...
Oh believe me, there is a part of the political aisle which would be more than happy to put millions of people in forced labour camps, especially if they are wealthy. Any excuse is a good excuse.
Nonsense. Anyone who wants forced labor camps is a fascist. I don't care what they call themselves. Once you stop caring about wellbeing for everyone you stop being a leftist. (Which is your insinuation.)
Also, there is more than one political aisle. The left (who broadly want to redistribute wealth) is distinct from democrats (who are capitalists) is distinct from the various parts of the GOP.
The US Constitution, specifically the 13th amendment, allows:
So in fact, forced labor camps are totally legal and common in the United States. There are lots of private companies which operate these prison / factory systems and are quite profitable (unsurprisingly), such as NYSE:GEO.All governments "redistribute wealth" friend, not just the left or right or up or down.
It all depends on which side of the bars you live on, amirite?
Don't even need bars, "subsidies" are just another word for redistribution.
Would opposing nuclear energy qualify as such action? The emission difference was well known and fully scientifically provable at time.
No, because nuclear energy is not a cost effective measure against climate change. Solar is.
If climate change is indeed an existential threat, then by definition nuclear is cost-effective.
And at any rate, why not both?
We do not have infinite resources. Committing 7-11 years and countless billions to build a NPP leads to those funds and other resources to be unavailable elsewhere.
Each wind farm, each set of solar panels, each battery storage will begin to pay dividends immediately as each one is finished. While the huge plant will be nothing-nothing-nothing-... for years upon years.
Builders, engineers, capital, and such is better suited to be investing in other sources of energy.
Solar maybe NOW is, but this isn't a 5 or even 10 year old problem. And cost effective compared to what? We'll consider sending people to Mars to save humanity but reactors are "too expensive"?
We should start with all the people on HN who told us we didn’t need nuclear power.
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=nuclear+climate+change
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Start 11 years ago and go backwards
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1439337600&dateRange=custom&...
This is not an argument for global warming, but do bear in mind that cold kills far more and on balance global warming has saved lives here. The issue is going to cause worse problems than heat deaths though. However, a big wet bulb event could completely reverse that count.
Satoshi would be first in line?
AI and bitcoin, regardless of what one thinks of them, have made negligible contributions to climate change. It is below the noise floor relative to other major industrial and commercial sources of atmospheric CO2.
Virtually all of the current conditions were in motion before bitcoin and AI were even a thing.
Opinion stated as fact
Its a well trod problem: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243511...
Not exactly background noise but totally incomparable to the normal CO2 outputs of major nations like the US or China. I.e. ~20 Million Tons CO2 vs 4 Trillion and 13 Trillion Tons respectively.
Sure. But you have to weigh any application relative to (1) how useful it is and (2) how easy it would be to rely on a carbon-neutral alternative.
And I would argue the usefulness of bitcoin is negative from the viewpoint of a free society.
AI is to a certain degree a different story, but also there it depends what you're doing.
We live in a thin atmospheric skin around the planet, and that skin has a finite volume. If earth was the size of an apple, the atmosphere is thinner than the Apple's skin in proportion.
Pretending we can do whatever we like for infinitly long inside an finite volume is completely unhinged. The financial and political elites, who some frame as the true geniuses point to technological solutions that are always "just around the corner" for the past decades with some of them even eying to leave the planet behind entirely.
All of that while we know how to address the issue.
No, excessive fossil fuel use is the cause by an immense margin. It's completely dominated by commercial shipping (boats), followed by planes. Then I think it may actually be gas from cattle before cars. Bitcoin and AI are so recent and still relative to everything else small.
This is completely incorrect. Aviation contributes 2.5% of global emissions (but is terrible on a per capita basis, as only around 10% of the world's population travels on any given year). Global shipping accounts for 2.3% of global human-made emissions [1].
In transport emissions, passenger vehicles dominate by far (with around 12% of global GHG emissions), even more so in developed countries. Then freight by road with 7.5% of total emissions.
Maritime shipping is actually the least carbon intensive way to transport goods over long distances by at least two orders of magnitude [2].
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions-from-transport
[2] https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg3/transport/06_figure_8-6/
Electricity (including heating) is actually the single biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions, but transport is indeed number 2: https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector
Followed by agriculture & manufacturing.
Is that so? Too bad nuclear civilian ships are not common. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_marine_propulsion
Widespread use of nuclear power for civilian merchant shipping is a non-starter. It's simply too expensive to train and pay enough qualified nuclear engineers. The US Navy barely manages this for a few dozen nuclear powered vessels with a huge budget and limited concern for cost effectiveness.
Plus there are the security concerns. Every civilian nuclear power plant has armed guards on duty around the clock. Those guards have to also be trained and paid. Many foreign countries have laws against bringing weapons into their ports.
If we want to reduce CO2 emissions from merchant ships then use nuclear or renewable power on shore to manufacture carbon neutral synthetic liquid fuel. Use that to run the ship engines.
I really feel like if the US really wanted to support US shipbuilding (like what the Jones act was supposed to do) it would subsidize building a fleet of nuclear shipping boats.
Lots of manufacturing projects, lots of related industries boosted, a renewed investment in nuclear engineering bringing a lot of nuclear job experience, and a way to potentially dig deeper into the backbone of global trade again.
I love the theory, but the security concerns around nuclear anything are a big deal when we're talking ships that sail around the world.
Imagine if even one of the tankers hit in the strait of Hormuz was nuclear.
Would Iran be as likely to have hit one of these ships if the result was potentially a nuclear meltdown close to their shoreline? It would pretty radically change the costs to them for such an attack, wouldn't it?
If you sink nuclear ship you won't get nuclear meltdown. You have enough thermal mass to cool down anything if you are underwater. Some level of loss of nuclear material would happen. But meltdown is not something that would happen.
Its not like all the ships hit by attacks in the Straight of Hormuz sank. A ship could potentially become critically damaged and become unable to operate the reactor and still be floating.
Either way, "loss of nuclear material" is the real concern isn't it, instead of just the nature of how that loss happened?
The question still stands. If a country knows they're potentially going to cause a nuclear disaster by hitting one of these ships on their shoreline, are they as likely to shoot at them?
I’d put people who have maliciously and intentionally undermined action on climate change first. Donald Trump comes to mind.
Or Europe should just get air-conditioning and enjoy the beautiful weather. Can’t make it through the winter without heat. Why would you want to make it through the summer without air-conditioning?
That being said fuck pollution and the ruining of our environment.
Walking outside with 40°C is not "enjoying the beautiful weather", it is miserable. Air conditioning only solves part of the problem.
Walking outside in 40° weather is enjoyable
On the topic of thousands needlessly dead, look at the UN's suggestions:
Useless yapping about opening windows at night, protecting the vulnerable, limiting global warming to 1.5C, and not drinking caffeine.
Is any of this "Call to Action" actually actionable?
Obviously not; and it is pathetic.
What should be actioned:
- remove regulatory hurdles to AC installation
- mandate such installation in residences that otherwise reach unbearable temperatures
- make funds available to subsidize the installation or train more workers for AC installation
That would 'protect the vulnerable'.
Talking about opening windows at night or climate change does nothing, and is performative only.
I think we can all agree that if we just stop talking about climate change, maybe it will go away.
Do you propose climate action with effects that we will see in decades, if not centuries, is going to save the vulnerable who are currently dying by the thousands?
I do not think that you believe so.
How is it acceptable that the actionable solution is entirely ignored in favor of performative speech?
Big AC strikes again.
Yes and: doing things that fight the cause of the warming?
Sure, but this should be an afterthought here.
You cannot talk about thousands dying today, neglect to mention the actionable solution, and talk only about climate action which will help on a time frame of decades to centuries.
The thousands dying are just a means to an end. They don't really care about them.
[dead]
I think we should start charging the worst emitters with manslaughter now. We shouldn't wait for the crisis to be halted; the law should be part of how we force firms to recognize part of the harm.
The largest emitters are electricity generation and personal transport. So... Heads of power companies and everybody that drives a car?
I've been reading up on the inevitable collapse of the AMOC (the potsdam institute has a number of really good videos covering the subject).
Everyone hears 'winters will be up to 10C cooler', but few realize that this will also cause the jet stream to be more wavy, and exacerbate the number of heat waves as well.
Sad that europe's mild climate is about to get a whole lot worse...
I do not think a collapse is inevitable, see:
https://climatetippingpoints.info/2026/05/06/news-explainer-...
I am just repeating the 'gist' I've gotten from my research on the topic, but the risk of AMOC shutdown has gone from a low probability / high impact prediction by 2100, to 'we think there's a strong chance of hitting a tipping point by 2060'. I wish I could point you to a specific paper, but I'm going entirely off memory, and that is fallible
The % likelyhood by x date predictions have swayed back and forth as we've adjusted our predictions of which emissions path we actually wind up following.
What in that link do you think is saying it is not inevitable?
Even if you read just the conclusion at the bottom it seems obvious that there is no consensus about a collapse being inevitable:
> Overall though, there is some common ground in recent research: evidence for AMOC weakening having begun is growing, albeit is not clear in every AMOC metric; a substantial decline is expected with current emissions, that over centuries could potentially push the AMOC to a slow ‘shutdown’ state; and there remains a real but uncertain chance that this slowdown could pass a tipping point beyond which this shutdown is locked in, even if warming is halted or even declines. Exactly how much and quickly the AMOC is weakening, and the likelihood of it reaching a tipping point, remain much more uncertain, but what we do know is enough to justify concern and action to reduce the risk of AMOC shutdown
Any good books on the subject you'd recommend?
I don't know that there are any pop sci books on amoc collapse specifically, the more popular books on climate change acknowledge it's a possibility but do not really dig into the effects beyond the fact that it will chill europe in the winter and shift the monsoon rainfall belt (southward?). The potsdam institute has some good papers available, and of course, you can find others that ref it in google scholar.
It will probably be warm but this is from the GFS model that was forecasting 50 degrees during the last heat wave. Apparently, it tends to "overegg temperature projections for Europe in the summer by around 2-2.5c. ... it dries out soil too fast in its models."
https://www.reddit.com/r/weather/comments/1um7tyn/sometimes_...
This is a two week forecast, one month ago. There is no good two week forecast.
There is a heat wave right now, again.
The soil is quite dry already.
Just in France, cost of this year heat waves has been estimated between 10 and 15 billion euros (figure shared by a ministre today).
Not to mention the cost of premature deaths of children and the elderly who don't deal with heat as well
That's the value of a single third-tier AI startup.
Somehow, somehow, everyone’s heads are still in the sand. Desperately trying to bury them deeper. It’s like CICO denialism.
I expect this to be a deeply unpopular take here, but solutionism will fail. Magic technology will not come to save us. All of our industrial tekhne has been in the service of rolling down the stored-energy hill faster and faster. To put the genie back in the bottle, to take apart the CO2 and turn it back into hydrocarbons, we’d have to do more work than everything that was done in the last two centuries. And that’s an extremely conservative lower bound.
It’s so dire. I don’t think most people understand that everything around them is made out of petroleum. Not just your ability to travel, or your clothes. Your food is made of petroleum. Your institutions are made of petroleum. Your gender equality is made of petroleum. Your freedom is made of petroleum.
There is no putting this thing in reverse. If the AI doesn’t get us first, thermodynamics will topple all of this.
While it is true that reversing combustion would require more energy than was released burning it, I don't think anyone reasonable is proposing it. The proposal is to redirect future energy production away from fossil extraction and into cleaner sources (solar, wind, nuclear, geothermal) which is a completely different thermodynamic problem. The constraints are things like grid storage capacity, permitting timelines, and critical mineral supply chains - not physics.
If we overcome these very real contraints, we reduce the rate of new additions to atmospheric CO2. We will still need to do the thermodynamically hard work of removing CO2 at gigaton scale, but deferring that until removal tech is more mature is the right sequencing.
Of course, this assumes that we are actually working towards the CO2 output reductions right now and really committed to CO2 removal in the near future.
All we have to do is plant trees. Millions of trees, and reduce beef farming.
> Your gender equality is made of petroleum.
That is the weirdest and wokest comment I read this year on the internet. Could you please explain?
I agree that it’s a little weird, insofar as people don’t talk about it, but I’m not sure it’s very woke at all. It’s in a lot of tension with conventional woke ideas.
The usual way people talk about all this is more or less idealist (as opposed to materialist): people thought hard and got better morals (or worse morals, if you have a reactionary bent). The claim I’m making is that it’s not a coincidence that egalitarian norms happened to be correlated with the falling cost of energy. It’s basically the same idea as “God created men [and women]; Sam Colt made them equal.”
Seems likely that within our lifetime multiple countries in europe may turn into deserts, and there is little we can do against it except for maybe attempt to terraform the climate by seeding clouds or changing ecosystem flora to something resilient in the face of 40C weather. Losing a huge amount of food production would be my greatest concern.
It's not targeting the area though is it? It's not like someone is moving this dome across to Europe and saying "Yeah, take that, that'll show 'em".
"2027 is likely to be WAY worse than this 2026 in terms of extreme heat, drought, fires, crop losses. WAY worse. In the Northern hemisphere, we have half a year to prepare for next summer and save some lives. Everyone is acting like 2026 is a blip. No: far worse is to come."
https://nitter.catsarch.com/JKSteinberger/status/20874034329...
As of now, our worst problem in Central Europe seems to be drought. Some of the mightiest rivers of the continent are barely there. You can walk across the Danube, the Rhine or the Wisla in some places, drenching yourself a bit, but never losing contact with the bottom.
The Po River is drying up as well...
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/environment/2026/08/10/climate-...
The warming is terrible and deadly, AND ALSO Europeans are negligent in not protecting themselves however they can.
The idea that Europe could slow warming by not using air-conditioning is absurd, when the emissions mostly come from elsewhere. France, in particular, gets most of its energy from nuclear power, but also makes it very hard to get climatisation.
People live longer in many parts of Europe than the USA. Does that mean the USA is somehow negligent?
Excess deaths due to heat are primarily the in the elderly. The excess numbers we are seeing now are because the proportion of elderly people in France, Germany and Spain are higher than in the USA.
If the population pyramid in the EU was more similar to that of the USA the number of excess deaths would be lower. I'm not sure negligent is the correct word to use. Climate change will reduce quality of life. Because of these changes people will not live as long.
That's how excess deaths work.
When I lived in a rather hot area of Spain for a year, I was shocked to find out that many apartments don't have an air conditioner. In a place where a similar heat wave happens every year, for months. A friend of mine moved there from Germany and being somewhat frugal, rented a place without and aircon. Let me just say that he didn't enjoy the summer nights one bit.
I myself had one, but I could probably rent a car for the cost of running it.
I will say this - air conditioning costs to establish room temperature are inversely proportional to the degree the building is insulated. If your whole country is comprised of uninsulated or barely insulated housing stock, you have a MUCH larger project than simply buying some small window units for a few hundred euro per person and then paying a few hundred euros extra per year in energy costs.
Don't they have to heat them in the winter too? That also costs more and creates more emissions without insulation.
Some of these places don't get very cold, others rely on coats, others south facing window solar gain. Very old buildings are common. I'm not claiming all of Europe is uninsulated, just a large enough portion to render heatwave safety a much bigger problem.
If you can't run one fifth of your nuclear plants, because the water levels are to low or the water temperatures too high in the rivers used to cool them, you may want to reconsider whether that is truly the best choice here¹
In the meantime my fathers solar roof allows him free AC cooling, because as it turns out AC generally needs most energy when the sun shines the most.
I am not arguing nuclear plants do not have benefits, I just argue that solar with storage may be a much better fit for powering ACs.
¹: https://www.euronews.com/2026/08/12/heatwave-and-jellyfish-a...
>Europeans are negligent in not protecting themselves however they can.
Well, if the people in charge say or think global warming isn't real, that's what you get: not "other" solutions to the "unacceptable propositions" the Green parties suggest, but no proposition at all, as there is no problem.
The current situation is a direct consequence of pure negationism from conservative parties, not a disagreement on how to deal with climate change between the Right and the Left. The Left proposed solutions you may not agree with, but the Right has been completely rejecting the reality of climate change.
BTW, how do you propose Europe protect not only people from the heat, but also forests from burning, rivers from drying up, fields from being unfit for cows and sheep, lakes from blooming with algae, nuclear plants from being shut down due to river water being too hot and seawater being full of jellyfish, etc, etc, etc? In the end, there are so many things to "adapt" that it would cost less to try to organize a global effort to lower CO2.
[H]ow do you propose Europe protect not only people from the heat, but [all these other things]?
Why does it have to be framed as all-or-nothing? I agree that using air conditioning to reduce the number of people who die from the heat does nothing to help with the problem of jellyfish, but how is that relevant, exactly?
Your AC isn't going to work when your power plants are stuffed with jellyfish and have to shut down.
We need a grassroots Tiktok campaign against Big Jellyfish
Honest question. How could effective global climate action look?
This is a harbinger for insane weather in the United States this fall and winter.
I am expecting my homeless life in in minivan to be choatic trying to chase where the weather will be favorable.
My main concern if is there is heavy rains in California after the drought of rain they have had this summer. The Salton Sea is at an all time low[1] and many people do not know that a rapid fill of water into the Salton Sea from the Cochella Valley is a known trigger for earthquakes on the San Jacinto and San Andreas Faults[2][3].
[1] https://waterdata.usgs.gov/monitoring-location/USGS-10254005...
[2] https://www.sdsu.edu/news/2023/07/drying-salton-sea-has-stav...
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXqOn0GILtA
Adding...
https://subjecttoclimate.org/news/study-las-earthquake-risk-...
Enjoy it while it lasts; it'll never be this cool again.
Not if Count Binface wins the elections.
First the UK, then leadership of Europe via behind-closed-doors politics, then a gentle colonization of both the east and the west using our amazing cheese, bread that is baked rather than synthesized from fossil fuels, and 30 days of paid vacations per year. The path forward is clear.
And he'll pay for this by "putting up everyone's taxes except yours"!
[flagged]
Can AC solve this?
https://www.franceinfo.fr/environnement/energie/nucleaire/de...
https://www.franceinfo.fr/environnement/energie/nucleaire/tr...
https://www.rts.ch/info/environnement/2026/article/secheress...
https://www.rts.ch/info/environnement/2026/article/secheress...
https://www.rts.ch/info/regions/fribourg/2026/article/secher...
https://www.rts.ch/info/regions/fribourg/2026/article/secher...
https://www.rts.ch/info/environnement/2026/article/secheress...
No, but a lack of AC doesn't solve it either.
What a genius idea. How about we pump the heat out of our buildings into the already hot local environment? We could use electricity to do it and increase our carbon footprints.
You should compare the average carbon footprint in the US with the EU before making these kind of comments.
would you make the same argument against heating homes during winter?
The genius idea is not dying of heat stroke. Also AC can be powered by clean energy, like the vaunted French nuclear plants.
But I guess that's for right-wingers. Enjoy losing more people to heat than the US does to gun violence
The US gun deaths figure comes from death certificates. The EU heat death figures comes from modelling.
I'll leave it to you to work out why that comparison doesn't hold.
You sure about that?
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn4d2vv935lo
> In a post on X, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said more than 1,300 excess deaths had been recorded since 21 June "linked to high temperatures in Europe".
> On Sunday morning, France's national health ministry said there had been around 1,000 more deaths than expected in the country since Wednesday.
https://www.dw.com/en/heat-wave-european-countries-report-37...
> At least 3,700 excess deaths have been recorded in France, Belgium and the Netherlands alone as a result of the June heat wave that sent temperatures soaring above 40°C (104°F).
Just stop. A lack of European AC is making a negligible difference at best in the fight against climate change and it's killing your people. The models aren't that wrong.
Yes there are going to be a lot of excess deaths. To be honest anyone who doesn't understand that the number of excess deaths we are seeing now is a fraction of what is going to happen worldwide doesn't understand what is happening. I'm not arguing that isn't happening. I was saying the very widely reported graphs that started this whole 'why don't europeans fit AC everywhere' argument was based on modelling.
Your solution is to put AC all over Europe. That won't work because our buildings are not made for AC, the amount of retrofitting required would be insane and it probably wouldn't have a significant impact on excess deaths. Counties like France and Germany have a higher percentage of elderly relative to the USA. These people will be contributing massively to the excess deaths. Your AC solution is not going to be in place fast enough for them.
Are we now doing that "died with Covid, not of Covid" shite again?
I'm not sure what you mean. I'm in the UK we categorized into deaths due to COVID-19 and those who died with COVID-19.
If you get hit by a truck while infected with COVID-19 you died because you were hit by a truck. I'm not sure how you would do it any other way.
That was just mean.
AC is a bandaid that only makes the systemic problem worse.
I don't know how it's become such a culture war gotcha.
Yes, I have AC myself and yes, it makes things more bearable.
But it won't refill our rivers, it won't make the outside livable, it won't regrow our crops, it won't refreeze the glaciers and poles, it won't unburn the forests. In short, it won't be able to provide the conditions required for human survival.
To do that, we can't avoid fixing the root cause. Every time we have a conversation about the effects of climate change, somebody derails it with "but AC!"...
Its not constructive or helpful.
Characterizing technology whose presence or absence will affect the survival of a lot of people as a “bandaid” is not going to advance the dialog in the way you seem to want.
> AC is a bandaid
Realistically, what else can be done to deal with the impact of climate change right now? Addressing the root cause would be great, but it's not going to move the needle for people suffering today.
mass investment in renewable energy across the globe. You can't do much for the people of today, but you can do plenty of good for people 20+ years into the future. Something about planting and sitting in their shade.
That derailing is indicative of the mindset of the people who do it. All they see or understand is the immediate consequence of deaths of people, so they look for solutions to that problem without any consideration for broader systemic factors, second and third order effects, etc.
And lest anyone mistakes this concern for saving lives for humanitarian concern, this same kind of reasoning makes their answer to a refugee crisis "build a wall". It's all just knee-jerk reaction to first-order effects.
Install Air Conditioning... It's literally not rocket science
More data centers for plagiarizing code and solving 10 unimportant Erdos problems per year will fix this!
Erasing any datacenter ever built (and planned) would do almost nothing to stop climate change.
What we need is (global) electrification of transport and heating, CO2 free electricity and CO2 neutral concrete and steel.
Very effective ways to make this happen would be high prices on emissions, enforced on every local industry and all imports.
But too many people love their cheap fossil-based transport too much and are unwilling to make even small sacrifices to keep the climate stable; sad reality.
If only Al Gore warned us about AI as well! /s
Thinking these are at their current level relevant to climate change, is a level of ignorance that I'd almost put on a tin-foil hat to discuss how the fossil industry is feeding an anti-AI campaign of ignorance.
For as long as I can remember, my hometown had extreme summers with temperatures climbing as high as 45c. This was in the early 90's. This year is no different. Location: North Macedonia
For as long as I can remember, I turned off the lights in the bathroom. Yet, I just checked, and turns out they are on.
Feel free to remember the past how you want, that doesn't change it.
For as long as I remember I never had a summer this warm and this dry. And I don't even have to rely on memory alone here as this is backed by actual historic measurements all the way back since humans started to record temperatures in my countries.
Locations: Southern Austria and Northern Germany
Good thing we have more reliable data than your memory:
https://doma.edu.mk/en/research-and-education/macedonia-and-...
You do realize North Macedonia is not representative of all EU countries, and that other EU countries have abnormal heat waves compared to the 90s? With effects like the first pyrocumulonimbus in France's recorded history?
I think denying climate change and it's impact in the face of all evidence is something hard to justify lol.