We need to get serious about geo-engineering of some form or another. We have seen time and time again that we simply do not have the willpower to reduce climate change. So I'm becoming convinced that the only short- and medium-term solution is geoengineering to stop global warming.
There is no way geoengineering could go wrong right and make things worse. We really understand complex systems right? No way we would be like toddlers messing with powers we barely understand.
I went to Glacier National Park a while ago and stood before a sign that said "The glaciers you see will be gone by year 20xx" or something like that. The year was 20xx and I was looking right at the glaciers and they were decidedly not gone. I understand the motivation. The reality is that an action of strength A is required to create outcome X, but if one expresses this need, it's likely one achieves only an action of strength A- < A and consequently the outcome X- != X. This encourages us to say "we need an action of strength A+ or we will get the outcome X-". The hope is that the discount that people apply on the prediction results in an action of strength A' ~ A and an outcome X' ~= X.
But public exhortation is a repeated game and unless you're Heaven's Gate the success of your popularized predictions has a significant effect on the discount that the public applies to your predictions. Failed predictions have an effect on the discount rate asymmetric to the direction. It is likely that a successful public authority allows some number of people to experience catastrophe pour encourager les autres. Attempting a zero error rate by biasing to zero catastrophe is likely to cause repeated discounting until true catastrophe cannot be averted.
I'm reminded me of the short story The Wandering Earth. Spoilers to follow so don't read if you care. In the story, a group of scientists determine that the Sun is going to flare enough to kill everyone, so all of humanity mobilizes to install massive engines to move the Earth far enough to survive while creating technology that survives the dark. After years of traveling to past Pluto, no Sun catastrophe materializes, resulting in a massive Earthwide revolt that eventually takes control of the control center and the scientists and government officials are sentenced to death by walking into the cold waste. Just as the last of them dies, the Sun flares as predicted, just a little later.
In a democracy, credibility is an important resource. To avert actual existential catastrophe, it is better to err on the side of local under-predicted disaster. It is probably best to let Rancho Palos Verdes fall into the ocean without compensating the homeowners. It is probably best to let the Texan flood plains flood and people to lose their homes entirely. It is probably best to let the Californians lose their homes to the wildfires.
The year predicted for the glacier's collapse was an extrapolation based on data and models available at the time. While the timing was off, the thing is going away visibly for everyone!
In hindsight they shouldn't have set the date, but contrast the fast decline with the long existence. Maybe even let people guess or bet the exact year to involve them and make them think.
Thwaites mass loss rate is 500% what it was in 1990. 500%, that is 2026 study. It is accelerating very rapidly as well.
I don’t give a damn, to be perfectly honest, what some sign posted god knows when with who knows what information, says. This is a man made global catastrophe. Information and research is very clear and very robust.
Ice loss in just 202x, from JUST thwaites, contributes to several centimeters of ocean rise. It’s going to be much much higher in 203x and 204x. It’s just one (unusually big) glacier of many.
We can all sit here and Reee Reee about the things that were overly reductive, overstated, wrong, even a lie. What I wrote above this is none of those and it’s actually psychotic how little we talk about the cryosphere collapse, given how badly it’s going to fuck us, not 1000 years from now, not 100 years from now, but 10 years from now. I played a video game twice that age on my computer yesterday.
well theres a subset of countries that are reducing their emissions and a subset of countries that are not. perhaps we should punish the countries that are not.
> The year was 20xx and I was looking right at the glaciers and they were decidedly not gone.
They just shrunk by 40% in ~50 years, no biggy
On a few other climate related topics scientists are actually surprised at how fast it's getting out of hands.
> In a democracy, credibility is an important resource.
We got Trump... Twice... so clearly not. What matters is selling a dream, and nobody want to hear about the dream of reducing growth, buying less, consuming less, etc.
> The year was 20xx and I was looking right at the glaciers and they were decidedly not gone.
"Experts" like GP poster is why the IPCC studies choose conservative values of how rapid the change will be (they don't want to be dismissed as alarmist), leading to underestimation and:
> On a few other climate related topics scientists are actually surprised at how fast it's getting out of hands.
> nobody want to hear about the dream of reducing growth, buying less, consuming less, etc.
The problem is that it’s going to happen either way.
The only question is are we facing this prepared or are we having a tantrum refusing to accept it and get hit by it anyway with our pants down? Looks like we’re going for pants down.
Oh yeah I fully made peace with that myself already, it'll happen regardless of what we want. Some countries will be prepared, some won't, either way you can't fight what's coming.
focussing on the messaging is a particularly weak way to steer the conversation away from the real issue. just as in your story, that glacier may take an additional decade or two to disappear completely, but it will surely be gone.
we can't seriously believe that if we just adjusted the story a little bit this way or that, that the message would actually click and people would begin to try to minimize the tragic cost to future generations.
this is happening now. blaming the messenger for not being appropriately fawning, or curt, or amusing is kind of irrelevant at this point. maybe we can learn to do a better job next time there is an issue that's going to radically effect everyones lives for the foreseeable future.
> went to Glacier National Park a while ago and stood before a sign that said "The glaciers you see will be gone by year 20xx" or something like that. The year was 20xx and I was looking right at the glaciers and they were decidedly not gone.
Why is it OK for Elon Musk to blow up spaceship after spaceship and everyone says well that’s the way you get it right, but a couple of Climate scientists put up a sign that is maybe a decade or two too early and all hell rains down on them?
What does Elon get credibility yet? Climate scientists don’t? It’s because we choose who we give credibility to. And as a species, we are stupidly optimistic or willing fully blind.
> Why is it OK for Elon Musk to blow up spaceship after spaceship and everyone says well that’s the way you get it right
Because it is, and he's shown that pretty clearly. Look at mass to orbit numbers of SpaceX compared to the rest of the human race put together. It's not even close.
> but a couple of Climate scientists put up a sign that is maybe a decade or two too early and all hell rains down on them?
The claim is that the sign didn't use the word "maybe".
Not to mention the fact that these things are not connected in any way. Your credibility by dismissing the most dramatic revolution in rockets since the invention of the rocket shows that you are doing the exact thing you complain about.
My mother is involved in environmentalism, and she grimaces and tsks, every time me and Dad get in an outer space conversation, because she considers launches to be wasteful. Well, that much is true, but it's also exciting and inspiring for me.
But I was scrolling through the list of SpaceX recovery successes yesterday, and they've had hundreds, hundreds of safe booster landings. I mean, the Apollo mission discarded every last component of the spacecraft to make a round trip, and the Space Shuttle began conserving the most important part, the orbiter, but SpaceX is downright parsimonious in pioneering recoverable flight components. They don't hesitate to go after those fairing halves wherever they landed. Sadly it is just not practical to recover higher stages or obsolete satellites--yet.
If this doesn't get us we still have massive insect extinction, ocean acidification, permafrost thawing, prolonged droughts, etc.
There is just no way out at the point, the planet is tanking the damage for now but once it'll crack, and it's starting to, many systems will fail simultaneously, no amount of theatrical green washing will undo the damage
About Wolf Tivy's idea of "xenohumanism": strip "humanity" of all ape-ish historical contingency and identify the convergent "true man" as sum of "human" capabilities like language, philosophy, sociality, intelligence, consciousness
Why? Deindustrializing especially Europe moved factories into coal powered regions. It was put forward as green policy, but how can this result be a surprise to anyone?
If that was the case, then global GHG emissions would have remained roughly stagnant for over 2 decades.
The reality is the world got richer, and households who 30 years ago would have had little access to electricity, finished manufactured goods, and automotive vehicles can now purchase those. Go visit a village in rural China, India, or Vietnam - 30 years ago plastic bags were nonexistent and industrial fertilizers were rationed, and now tetrapaks, plastics, industrial fertilizers, and heavy machinery like tractors and trucks are everywhere.
In 2000, China and India's HDIs were comparable to Cameroon and Ethiopia's present HDI. That isn't the case in 2023 (UNDP HDI calculations have a 2-3 year lag because transnational data collection is hard). And large, poor countries like Pakistan (260 million), DRC (100 million), and Ethiopia (139 million) are now hitting developmental indicators comparable to those two in the early 2000s.
Most countries have chosen to use both GreenTech and Coal to expand electricity generation from Vietnam [0] to India [1] to Indonesia [2]. You are talking about 3 billion people living in an economic region that is expected to see 6-8% GDP growth rates for at least the next decade. And even countries at the lower end of the developmental cycle like Pakistan [3][4] and Ethiopia [5] are now doing the same.
Frankly, it doesn't matter what reduction Europe does (and Europe's GHG emissions reduction has been massive [6]) because India and ASEAN's GHG emissions expansion eats up any reduction from the EU-27 and US.
> Frankly, it doesn't matter what reduction Europe does (and Europe's GHG emissions reduction has been massive [6]) because India and ASEAN's GHG emissions expansion eats up any reduction from the EU-27 and US.
You're contradicting yourself. If Europe doesn't reduce emissions expansion doubles.
Definitely not billions. Do you have actual sources for how many? Do you imagine they enjoy wood and dung smoke in their houses, or maybe they'd prefer electric ranges or hot plates powered by solar panels?
Likely not. China and the US are decarbonizing, but their overall rate of GHG emissions is still stagnant.
> India and the rest of asia will be interesting - can they leapfrog oil and gas for some sectors ?
Not really. GreenTech is useful, but there are multiple industrial processes and products such as Fertilizers and Steel that have hard carbon and coal dependencies.
Additionally, in Asia energy security is the name of the game, not environmentalism.
Edit: can't reply
> If solar is the cheapest form of energy...
Cheap but comes with a dependency on China.
Also, a number of industrial processes like Fertilizers and Steel simply cannot be decarbonized because carbon is a critical input.
> have much oil and gas
Most of ASEAN (Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Phillipines) has significant gas reserves because of the South China Sea.
But coal remains cheap and available everywhere.
> Asia is also the most vulnerable continent to climate change. Reversing or mitigating it is national security in a way that it simply isn't for most developed economies.
And depending on the country, GreenTech dependency on China is also a real risk. Vietnam (Hoang Sa), Phillipines (Bajo de Masinloc), Indonesia (Laut Natuna Utara), India, and other large industrial states in Asia have ongoing disputes with China that have gone hot over the past decade.
> Additionally, in Asia energy security is the name of the game, not environmentalism.
Does Asia, outside of Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Middle East, have much oil and gas? If solar is the cheapest form of energy, and can't be embargoed, why wouldn't they adopt it rapidly?
Asia is also the most vulnerable continent to climate change. Reversing or mitigating it is national security in a way that it simply isn't for most developed economies.
On the last point : given enough climate events, "decarbonization" will become a "national security" topic. Who knows what happens next. (First chapter of "Ministry for the Future" always comes to mind...)
They eat the cost. Most countries are not as poor as they used to be 30 years ago, and can afford a $2 billion or even $10 billion climate disaster hit.
Back in VN, the cyclone seasons now causes several billion dollars of damage a year yet they still trudge on. Same with the Philippines, China, India, and others.
> given enough climate events, "decarbonization" will become a "national security" topic
They already are, but most large states in Asia also have ongoing disputes with China that have almost gone hot multiple times over the past decade.
> You're contradicting yourself. If Europe doesn't reduce emissions expansion doubles.
What I am saying is it doesn't matter if Europe drops GHGs anymore - either way we are now at a stage in 2026 that some of the worst aspects of climate change are irreversible
Once warming gets to a point we may not need desalination plants. The boil off from the ocean will perpetuate rainfall. Clean water for everyone. Never mind the 100+ mph winds that go along with that.
Good point, we should probably do the same thing with our carbon emissions that we did with the chemicals that deplete ozone. The Montreal Protocol of 1987 successfully phased out over 99% of them.
Like a lot of climate sized issues, the ozone hole was a rate based issue, In that our rate of “hole growing” was the real problem that needed addressing immediately. And the rates have MASSIVELY improved thanks to the global CFC actions.
Current direction of rate change show that we reach zero depletion (rate of 0.0 ozone loss) by late 203x, with zero hole in late 20xx (rate of -x.x as it heals).
That’s a very considerable turnaround for damage we did over the course of 30 years.
The news that something is going better is a bit less "selling" than the news that something is going bad.
But this is hacker news, we're supposed to be elite, and so, reading news from MIT [1] : yes, the hole is still there, but it's smaller, because WE ACTUALLY DID SOMETHING.
Okay, the "something" was really "shift to cheaper stuff as we would have done anyway". But, still.
We can do stuff. And people choose to be on the side of doing stuff (or at least trying), the side of doing nothing, or the side of making the problem actually worse.
The world is full of issues everyone is okay with until they are presented as apocalyptic to the public. Like seasonal flu whose annual death toll is in the range of 600-1200 thousands.
And then, as easily forgotten as soon as there's a new scarecrow on the table.
With weather prediction accuracy of 90% for 5 days, 50% for 10 days and basically that of a TRNG for longer terms, what makes you all so sure you're facing a manmade climate apocalypse (you all partook in, by the way) and not a natural harmonic in the weather fractal?
This is really embarrassing to write in public, to be frank.
Weather and climate are not the same thing, they are several orders of magnitude different in scope. This is first grader information, typically.
Predicting weather relies on metrics like wind, pressure, moisture in tight local areas, they can change hundreds of percent in that scope within 24 hours.
Predicting climate relies on information like co2 levels, ocean temperatures, or glacier melt rates. If any of those changes hundreds of percent in 24 hours the entire planet would be fucking dead instantly.
Weather prediction relies in records going back in the range of 30-70 years.
Climate prediction relies on records going back MILLIONS of years.
Comparing the two is like comparing the ripples in your bathtub to the movements of the heavenly bodies. It’s asinine.
Because climate isn't weather. We don't know the temperature 12 months from now (August 2027) but we know it'll be warmer that it will be 3 months from now (November 2026).* This is common sense.
"WE" is an interesting word, isn't it ? The author obviously meant "humanity". Not "him and a bunch of friends".
That being said, this is hacker news, this is for the elite, and startups can disrupt everything, etc...
What can "you and a bunch of friends" do to fix the issue" ?
Because, the people "preventing" us from fixing the issue here are, basically, the whole oil and gas industry, plus the electorate. Which, interestingly, is partly... "WE".
Glad you brought that up. Because we fixed it. Now because of ignorance, we are not fixing this. As a person without kids, its not my problem. Strange that anti-science conservatives wants us to have more children while willfully destroying their future.
Given how we are at the tail end of a small ice age, shouldn't it be expected that temperatures recover to what they were previously? I never quite understood how climate is simultaneously too complicated to understand and predict the weather accurately while also a solved problem that we just need to take action on. And somehow the action we need to take is more taxation?
Since I keep hearing about this for at least 30 years now and still nobody took action the whole thing might be a bit more complicated than what the news media would have you know.
It's pretty easy to model to a first approximation. Gases like Carbon Dioxide reflect certain wavelengths of infrared. When they are present in the atmosphere, they are present at a certain percentage concentration, and as that increases they reflect more infrared.
This matters because there are three ways for a body to eliminate thermal energy: radiation, convection, and conduction. Earth is not in contact with anything else, so it cannot conduct. It does not share an atmosphere with anything else, so it cannot convect. So that leaves radiation, which is largely in the form of infrared. Then it stands to reason that if you change how much IR is reflected back to the surface by the atmosphere, say by changing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, then you will increase the amount of heat the Earth contains as long as there is a source of heat nearby or within. Earth has both in the form of a molten core and the Sun.
This is why they call them "greenhouse gases." Because they cause the Earth to retain more heat than it radiates in the infrared spectrum, like the glass on a greenhouse.
1. The global temperature has never in human history done what it's doing now.
2. Weather isn't the same as climate. They operate on way different scales and timelines. Uncertainty in the one does not necessarily map to uncertainty in the other.
3. Climate change is most definitely not a solved problem. We know some big things we can do, and none of them are easy.
1. The further back we go, the less reliable the methods of estimating such properties. We only have values for a "global temperature" from the past few years or so.
2. Weather and climate are names for the same underlying nonlinear system. This system is the archetype of a chaotic system - predictions of values and corresponding locations becomes increasingly unreliable and then impossible on larger timescales. Climate modelling was the very thing that lead to our current understanding of sensitive dependence on initial conditions.
People have continually been taking significant action! CFCs were banned in 1987. High GWP refrigerants, like R-12 and R-22 have been banned, and even newer ones like R-401 are now significantly regulated: The days of bleeding an air conditioning system to atmosphere are _long_ gone. Cars in developed countries are annually inspected for emissions systems performance, so NOx and other GHG-producers have been cut to nearly 0% from vehicles since the 1990s in those regions. Transoceanic shipping has recently implemented its sulfur-free requirement, and we're visibly seeing fewer sulfuric clouds over the ocean. Stricter gas milage requirements in cars have seen a drop in CO2 emissions in the US from 2007 to 2025 by 102 million metric tons of CO2, despite having 23,000,000 more people.
The Paris accords have been running for years. No country has met its targets but nearly every country has seen a reduction.
The reductions aren't as big as we'd like. The temperature is still rising faster than we'd like. But the idea that we haven't taken any action is completely false.
>Transoceanic shipping has recently implemented its sulfur-free requirement
While probably a good thing for ecosystems, this has removed an unintended "geoengineering" effect. Sulphur dioxide forms a relatively effective reflector for incoming solar radiation.
The only thing that matters is that we're pumping insane amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and basically terra forming ourselves and most of nature out of the equation.
Nature is infinitely more complex than most people believe, we don't even know how basic things like soil ecosystems truly works, the thing that supports 100% of life on earth, we have virtually no clue about it, so what do we know about the rest...
Nobody is taking action because the whole system is made for growth and continuous improvement, you can't tell people "we have to work more to simply keep the status quo", let alone "we may even lose a lot of nice things and convenience in the process"
> you can't tell people "we have to work more to simply keep the status quo", let alone "we may even lose a lot of nice things and convenience in the process"
And yet this is what will happen. The question is are we walking into this prepared, or not? Just like a war, it’s unpleasant, most people would rather not do it, but would you rather be on the side that prepared for it or on the side that gets “surprised” by it?
Lot's of people can't get out of the Hollywood end of the world cliché where the people who survive are the ones with the biggest bombs, they just can't get past the myths we built... Cooperation is foreign to them, and it's a big part of why we can't seem to build anything cohesive past the country level.
Warming today is because of historic emissions from developed countries. If the global south didn't develop they'd still face climate catastrophe, only maybe 40 years later. And they'd have weaker economies to face it with.
> Given how we are at the tail end of a small ice age, shouldn't it be expected that temperatures recover to what they were previously?
The speed at which the temperature is increasing is what is concerning, it’s much faster than a usual warming cycle. The XKCD comic of the timeline of human history and climate really drives home how steep the increase in temperature has been vs in the past: https://m.xkcd.com/1732/
We need to get serious about geo-engineering of some form or another. We have seen time and time again that we simply do not have the willpower to reduce climate change. So I'm becoming convinced that the only short- and medium-term solution is geoengineering to stop global warming.
Just posted the idea for a win-win reuse of desalination waste water in the arctic depths in a sibling comment! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49283840#49286264
There is no way geoengineering could go wrong right and make things worse. We really understand complex systems right? No way we would be like toddlers messing with powers we barely understand.
> geoengineering could go wrong
Sure. If one path leads to certain doom and the other into the unknown, which one do you choose?
The third path that is constantly being pushed against by rubes, dishonest hacks, and large moneyed interests.
And intentionally left out of conversations like this by people addicted to simplistic thinking and binary fallacies
What's the 3rd path, Commander Vague?
It'll never be too late to mitigate even worse effects. Remember that the defeatism is what people who want no change want.
Oh, it can be too late. Positive feedback loops and so forth.
I went to Glacier National Park a while ago and stood before a sign that said "The glaciers you see will be gone by year 20xx" or something like that. The year was 20xx and I was looking right at the glaciers and they were decidedly not gone. I understand the motivation. The reality is that an action of strength A is required to create outcome X, but if one expresses this need, it's likely one achieves only an action of strength A- < A and consequently the outcome X- != X. This encourages us to say "we need an action of strength A+ or we will get the outcome X-". The hope is that the discount that people apply on the prediction results in an action of strength A' ~ A and an outcome X' ~= X.
But public exhortation is a repeated game and unless you're Heaven's Gate the success of your popularized predictions has a significant effect on the discount that the public applies to your predictions. Failed predictions have an effect on the discount rate asymmetric to the direction. It is likely that a successful public authority allows some number of people to experience catastrophe pour encourager les autres. Attempting a zero error rate by biasing to zero catastrophe is likely to cause repeated discounting until true catastrophe cannot be averted.
I'm reminded me of the short story The Wandering Earth. Spoilers to follow so don't read if you care. In the story, a group of scientists determine that the Sun is going to flare enough to kill everyone, so all of humanity mobilizes to install massive engines to move the Earth far enough to survive while creating technology that survives the dark. After years of traveling to past Pluto, no Sun catastrophe materializes, resulting in a massive Earthwide revolt that eventually takes control of the control center and the scientists and government officials are sentenced to death by walking into the cold waste. Just as the last of them dies, the Sun flares as predicted, just a little later.
In a democracy, credibility is an important resource. To avert actual existential catastrophe, it is better to err on the side of local under-predicted disaster. It is probably best to let Rancho Palos Verdes fall into the ocean without compensating the homeowners. It is probably best to let the Texan flood plains flood and people to lose their homes entirely. It is probably best to let the Californians lose their homes to the wildfires.
The year predicted for the glacier's collapse was an extrapolation based on data and models available at the time. While the timing was off, the thing is going away visibly for everyone!
In hindsight they shouldn't have set the date, but contrast the fast decline with the long existence. Maybe even let people guess or bet the exact year to involve them and make them think.
Thwaites mass loss rate is 500% what it was in 1990. 500%, that is 2026 study. It is accelerating very rapidly as well.
I don’t give a damn, to be perfectly honest, what some sign posted god knows when with who knows what information, says. This is a man made global catastrophe. Information and research is very clear and very robust.
Ice loss in just 202x, from JUST thwaites, contributes to several centimeters of ocean rise. It’s going to be much much higher in 203x and 204x. It’s just one (unusually big) glacier of many.
We can all sit here and Reee Reee about the things that were overly reductive, overstated, wrong, even a lie. What I wrote above this is none of those and it’s actually psychotic how little we talk about the cryosphere collapse, given how badly it’s going to fuck us, not 1000 years from now, not 100 years from now, but 10 years from now. I played a video game twice that age on my computer yesterday.
well theres a subset of countries that are reducing their emissions and a subset of countries that are not. perhaps we should punish the countries that are not.
> The year was 20xx and I was looking right at the glaciers and they were decidedly not gone.
They just shrunk by 40% in ~50 years, no biggy
On a few other climate related topics scientists are actually surprised at how fast it's getting out of hands.
> In a democracy, credibility is an important resource.
We got Trump... Twice... so clearly not. What matters is selling a dream, and nobody want to hear about the dream of reducing growth, buying less, consuming less, etc.
> The year was 20xx and I was looking right at the glaciers and they were decidedly not gone.
"Experts" like GP poster is why the IPCC studies choose conservative values of how rapid the change will be (they don't want to be dismissed as alarmist), leading to underestimation and:
> On a few other climate related topics scientists are actually surprised at how fast it's getting out of hands.
> nobody want to hear about the dream of reducing growth, buying less, consuming less, etc.
The problem is that it’s going to happen either way.
The only question is are we facing this prepared or are we having a tantrum refusing to accept it and get hit by it anyway with our pants down? Looks like we’re going for pants down.
Oh yeah I fully made peace with that myself already, it'll happen regardless of what we want. Some countries will be prepared, some won't, either way you can't fight what's coming.
Well, rules like borders become irrelevant when people need to live. (Plenty of evidence of that).
Unless the rules are applied by force. (Also plenty of evidence..)
focussing on the messaging is a particularly weak way to steer the conversation away from the real issue. just as in your story, that glacier may take an additional decade or two to disappear completely, but it will surely be gone.
we can't seriously believe that if we just adjusted the story a little bit this way or that, that the message would actually click and people would begin to try to minimize the tragic cost to future generations.
this is happening now. blaming the messenger for not being appropriately fawning, or curt, or amusing is kind of irrelevant at this point. maybe we can learn to do a better job next time there is an issue that's going to radically effect everyones lives for the foreseeable future.
> went to Glacier National Park a while ago and stood before a sign that said "The glaciers you see will be gone by year 20xx" or something like that. The year was 20xx and I was looking right at the glaciers and they were decidedly not gone.
Why is it OK for Elon Musk to blow up spaceship after spaceship and everyone says well that’s the way you get it right, but a couple of Climate scientists put up a sign that is maybe a decade or two too early and all hell rains down on them?
What does Elon get credibility yet? Climate scientists don’t? It’s because we choose who we give credibility to. And as a species, we are stupidly optimistic or willing fully blind.
> Why is it OK for Elon Musk to blow up spaceship after spaceship and everyone says well that’s the way you get it right
Because it is, and he's shown that pretty clearly. Look at mass to orbit numbers of SpaceX compared to the rest of the human race put together. It's not even close.
> but a couple of Climate scientists put up a sign that is maybe a decade or two too early and all hell rains down on them?
The claim is that the sign didn't use the word "maybe".
Not to mention the fact that these things are not connected in any way. Your credibility by dismissing the most dramatic revolution in rockets since the invention of the rocket shows that you are doing the exact thing you complain about.
My mother is involved in environmentalism, and she grimaces and tsks, every time me and Dad get in an outer space conversation, because she considers launches to be wasteful. Well, that much is true, but it's also exciting and inspiring for me.
But I was scrolling through the list of SpaceX recovery successes yesterday, and they've had hundreds, hundreds of safe booster landings. I mean, the Apollo mission discarded every last component of the spacecraft to make a round trip, and the Space Shuttle began conserving the most important part, the orbiter, but SpaceX is downright parsimonious in pioneering recoverable flight components. They don't hesitate to go after those fairing halves wherever they landed. Sadly it is just not practical to recover higher stages or obsolete satellites--yet.
Too bad all seems that we are heading to even faster rate of warming. It may end being something we will see by next decade.
And it won't be the only big thing that will be sensibly changing by then.
If this doesn't get us we still have massive insect extinction, ocean acidification, permafrost thawing, prolonged droughts, etc.
There is just no way out at the point, the planet is tanking the damage for now but once it'll crack, and it's starting to, many systems will fail simultaneously, no amount of theatrical green washing will undo the damage
"How did human civilization collapse?"
"Two ways. Gradually and then suddenly."
I guess we should probably start looking for a new planet. Nothing else to be done I’m afraid.
I hope this is sarcasm. I sometimes can’t tell here
I realized that this your comment outlines almost the whole plot of Chrono Trigger, just on a slightly different scale.
Probably easier to just merge our consciousness with machine based bodies in the long-term. Biology is a bitch compared to mechanical engineering.
About Wolf Tivy's idea of "xenohumanism": strip "humanity" of all ape-ish historical contingency and identify the convergent "true man" as sum of "human" capabilities like language, philosophy, sociality, intelligence, consciousness
https://xcancel.com/wolftivy/status/2085790987293692248#m
You might consider cracking a book and learning something before opining.
Where's the fun in that?
Why? Deindustrializing especially Europe moved factories into coal powered regions. It was put forward as green policy, but how can this result be a surprise to anyone?
If that was the case, then global GHG emissions would have remained roughly stagnant for over 2 decades.
The reality is the world got richer, and households who 30 years ago would have had little access to electricity, finished manufactured goods, and automotive vehicles can now purchase those. Go visit a village in rural China, India, or Vietnam - 30 years ago plastic bags were nonexistent and industrial fertilizers were rationed, and now tetrapaks, plastics, industrial fertilizers, and heavy machinery like tractors and trucks are everywhere.
In 2000, China and India's HDIs were comparable to Cameroon and Ethiopia's present HDI. That isn't the case in 2023 (UNDP HDI calculations have a 2-3 year lag because transnational data collection is hard). And large, poor countries like Pakistan (260 million), DRC (100 million), and Ethiopia (139 million) are now hitting developmental indicators comparable to those two in the early 2000s.
Most countries have chosen to use both GreenTech and Coal to expand electricity generation from Vietnam [0] to India [1] to Indonesia [2]. You are talking about 3 billion people living in an economic region that is expected to see 6-8% GDP growth rates for at least the next decade. And even countries at the lower end of the developmental cycle like Pakistan [3][4] and Ethiopia [5] are now doing the same.
Frankly, it doesn't matter what reduction Europe does (and Europe's GHG emissions reduction has been massive [6]) because India and ASEAN's GHG emissions expansion eats up any reduction from the EU-27 and US.
[0] - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/vietnam-allows-coal-...
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/india-fuels-global-g...
[2] - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/indonesia-coal-power...
[3] - https://www.climatepolicylab.org/climatesmart/2022/1/27/what...
[4] - https://www.thefridaytimes.com/19-Jun-2026/thar-coal-pakista...
[5] - https://afrinz.ru/en/2026/07/there-is-a-request-to-supply-60...
[6] - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-...
> Frankly, it doesn't matter what reduction Europe does (and Europe's GHG emissions reduction has been massive [6]) because India and ASEAN's GHG emissions expansion eats up any reduction from the EU-27 and US.
You're contradicting yourself. If Europe doesn't reduce emissions expansion doubles.
And China has plans that have some decarbonization baked in - and even the US are decarbonizing, no matter what the current administration says.
Can they decarbonize _fast enough_ ? No idea...
India and the rest of asia will be interesting - can they leapfrog oil and gas for some sectors ?
India is very renewable already. Same with Africa. Hundreds of millions if not billions burn wood and biomass for heat and cooking daily
Definitely not billions. Do you have actual sources for how many? Do you imagine they enjoy wood and dung smoke in their houses, or maybe they'd prefer electric ranges or hot plates powered by solar panels?
> Can they decarbonize _fast enough_ ? No idea...
Likely not. China and the US are decarbonizing, but their overall rate of GHG emissions is still stagnant.
> India and the rest of asia will be interesting - can they leapfrog oil and gas for some sectors ?
Not really. GreenTech is useful, but there are multiple industrial processes and products such as Fertilizers and Steel that have hard carbon and coal dependencies.
Additionally, in Asia energy security is the name of the game, not environmentalism.
Edit: can't reply
> If solar is the cheapest form of energy...
Cheap but comes with a dependency on China.
Also, a number of industrial processes like Fertilizers and Steel simply cannot be decarbonized because carbon is a critical input.
> have much oil and gas
Most of ASEAN (Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Phillipines) has significant gas reserves because of the South China Sea.
But coal remains cheap and available everywhere.
> Asia is also the most vulnerable continent to climate change. Reversing or mitigating it is national security in a way that it simply isn't for most developed economies.
And depending on the country, GreenTech dependency on China is also a real risk. Vietnam (Hoang Sa), Phillipines (Bajo de Masinloc), Indonesia (Laut Natuna Utara), India, and other large industrial states in Asia have ongoing disputes with China that have gone hot over the past decade.
> Additionally, in Asia energy security is the name of the game, not environmentalism.
Does Asia, outside of Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Middle East, have much oil and gas? If solar is the cheapest form of energy, and can't be embargoed, why wouldn't they adopt it rapidly?
Asia is also the most vulnerable continent to climate change. Reversing or mitigating it is national security in a way that it simply isn't for most developed economies.
Completely agree.
On the last point : given enough climate events, "decarbonization" will become a "national security" topic. Who knows what happens next. (First chapter of "Ministry for the Future" always comes to mind...)
They eat the cost. Most countries are not as poor as they used to be 30 years ago, and can afford a $2 billion or even $10 billion climate disaster hit.
Back in VN, the cyclone seasons now causes several billion dollars of damage a year yet they still trudge on. Same with the Philippines, China, India, and others.
> given enough climate events, "decarbonization" will become a "national security" topic
They already are, but most large states in Asia also have ongoing disputes with China that have almost gone hot multiple times over the past decade.
Can they afford wet bulb events that kill outdoor laborers? Crop failures and mass starvation?
> You're contradicting yourself. If Europe doesn't reduce emissions expansion doubles.
What I am saying is it doesn't matter if Europe drops GHGs anymore - either way we are now at a stage in 2026 that some of the worst aspects of climate change are irreversible
Edit: can't reply
> It can always get worse...
Not can, will.
> some of the worst aspects of climate change are irreversible
You're wrong about that. It can always get worse. Especially by believing that reducing emissions somewhere doesn't matter.
Can't we just pour the waste water from desalination plants into the arctic abyss to keep AMOC going?
Once warming gets to a point we may not need desalination plants. The boil off from the ocean will perpetuate rainfall. Clean water for everyone. Never mind the 100+ mph winds that go along with that.
This is a tepid sort of optimism.
I heard in 1988 that we all must be dead by now from the ozone hole.
Good point, we should probably do the same thing with our carbon emissions that we did with the chemicals that deplete ozone. The Montreal Protocol of 1987 successfully phased out over 99% of them.
The hole is still there as far as I can tell, though. I hate it when the news cycle alerts people and then never gives out updates and closure.
Like a lot of climate sized issues, the ozone hole was a rate based issue, In that our rate of “hole growing” was the real problem that needed addressing immediately. And the rates have MASSIVELY improved thanks to the global CFC actions.
Current direction of rate change show that we reach zero depletion (rate of 0.0 ozone loss) by late 203x, with zero hole in late 20xx (rate of -x.x as it heals).
That’s a very considerable turnaround for damage we did over the course of 30 years.
The news that something is going better is a bit less "selling" than the news that something is going bad.
But this is hacker news, we're supposed to be elite, and so, reading news from MIT [1] : yes, the hole is still there, but it's smaller, because WE ACTUALLY DID SOMETHING.
Okay, the "something" was really "shift to cheaper stuff as we would have done anyway". But, still.
We can do stuff. And people choose to be on the side of doing stuff (or at least trying), the side of doing nothing, or the side of making the problem actually worse.
[1] https://news.mit.edu/2025/study-healing-ozone-hole-global-re...
It's called agendas.
The world is full of issues everyone is okay with until they are presented as apocalyptic to the public. Like seasonal flu whose annual death toll is in the range of 600-1200 thousands.
And then, as easily forgotten as soon as there's a new scarecrow on the table.
With weather prediction accuracy of 90% for 5 days, 50% for 10 days and basically that of a TRNG for longer terms, what makes you all so sure you're facing a manmade climate apocalypse (you all partook in, by the way) and not a natural harmonic in the weather fractal?
This is really embarrassing to write in public, to be frank.
Weather and climate are not the same thing, they are several orders of magnitude different in scope. This is first grader information, typically.
Predicting weather relies on metrics like wind, pressure, moisture in tight local areas, they can change hundreds of percent in that scope within 24 hours.
Predicting climate relies on information like co2 levels, ocean temperatures, or glacier melt rates. If any of those changes hundreds of percent in 24 hours the entire planet would be fucking dead instantly.
Weather prediction relies in records going back in the range of 30-70 years.
Climate prediction relies on records going back MILLIONS of years.
Comparing the two is like comparing the ripples in your bathtub to the movements of the heavenly bodies. It’s asinine.
Because climate isn't weather. We don't know the temperature 12 months from now (August 2027) but we know it'll be warmer that it will be 3 months from now (November 2026).* This is common sense.
*If you live in the Northern hemisphere.
WE FIXED THAT. We literally listened to professionals, introduced legislation and fixed it. The worst possible example you could use.
If YOU fixed that, what stops YOU from fixing this again?
"WE" is an interesting word, isn't it ? The author obviously meant "humanity". Not "him and a bunch of friends".
That being said, this is hacker news, this is for the elite, and startups can disrupt everything, etc...
What can "you and a bunch of friends" do to fix the issue" ?
Because, the people "preventing" us from fixing the issue here are, basically, the whole oil and gas industry, plus the electorate. Which, interestingly, is partly... "WE".
Just the stupidest take you could ever have, well done.
People like you.
How? By asking what stops you?
By derailing the conversation.
Luckily the Montreal protocol was implemented and CFCs were banned. Something like that should be considered for more green house gasses. Maybe Paris?
And we fixed the ozone hole by taking decisive action internationally banning the worst ozone-destroying gases
This exact sentiment has been expressed and addressed ad nauseum.
Weird how something was done about that though
Pretty trivial to replace CFC with HCFC gases (which breaks down more easily in the atmosphere) compared to moving away from fossil fuels.
CFC elimination worked, but switching refrigerants is a lot easier than not burning hydrocarbons.
Glad you brought that up. Because we fixed it. Now because of ignorance, we are not fixing this. As a person without kids, its not my problem. Strange that anti-science conservatives wants us to have more children while willfully destroying their future.
> As a person without kids, its not my problem.
If you're under 50 it definitely will be your problem
Given how we are at the tail end of a small ice age, shouldn't it be expected that temperatures recover to what they were previously? I never quite understood how climate is simultaneously too complicated to understand and predict the weather accurately while also a solved problem that we just need to take action on. And somehow the action we need to take is more taxation?
Since I keep hearing about this for at least 30 years now and still nobody took action the whole thing might be a bit more complicated than what the news media would have you know.
It's pretty easy to model to a first approximation. Gases like Carbon Dioxide reflect certain wavelengths of infrared. When they are present in the atmosphere, they are present at a certain percentage concentration, and as that increases they reflect more infrared.
This matters because there are three ways for a body to eliminate thermal energy: radiation, convection, and conduction. Earth is not in contact with anything else, so it cannot conduct. It does not share an atmosphere with anything else, so it cannot convect. So that leaves radiation, which is largely in the form of infrared. Then it stands to reason that if you change how much IR is reflected back to the surface by the atmosphere, say by changing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, then you will increase the amount of heat the Earth contains as long as there is a source of heat nearby or within. Earth has both in the form of a molten core and the Sun.
This is why they call them "greenhouse gases." Because they cause the Earth to retain more heat than it radiates in the infrared spectrum, like the glass on a greenhouse.
1. The global temperature has never in human history done what it's doing now. 2. Weather isn't the same as climate. They operate on way different scales and timelines. Uncertainty in the one does not necessarily map to uncertainty in the other. 3. Climate change is most definitely not a solved problem. We know some big things we can do, and none of them are easy.
1. The further back we go, the less reliable the methods of estimating such properties. We only have values for a "global temperature" from the past few years or so.
2. Weather and climate are names for the same underlying nonlinear system. This system is the archetype of a chaotic system - predictions of values and corresponding locations becomes increasingly unreliable and then impossible on larger timescales. Climate modelling was the very thing that lead to our current understanding of sensitive dependence on initial conditions.
People have continually been taking significant action! CFCs were banned in 1987. High GWP refrigerants, like R-12 and R-22 have been banned, and even newer ones like R-401 are now significantly regulated: The days of bleeding an air conditioning system to atmosphere are _long_ gone. Cars in developed countries are annually inspected for emissions systems performance, so NOx and other GHG-producers have been cut to nearly 0% from vehicles since the 1990s in those regions. Transoceanic shipping has recently implemented its sulfur-free requirement, and we're visibly seeing fewer sulfuric clouds over the ocean. Stricter gas milage requirements in cars have seen a drop in CO2 emissions in the US from 2007 to 2025 by 102 million metric tons of CO2, despite having 23,000,000 more people.
The Paris accords have been running for years. No country has met its targets but nearly every country has seen a reduction.
The reductions aren't as big as we'd like. The temperature is still rising faster than we'd like. But the idea that we haven't taken any action is completely false.
>Transoceanic shipping has recently implemented its sulfur-free requirement
While probably a good thing for ecosystems, this has removed an unintended "geoengineering" effect. Sulphur dioxide forms a relatively effective reflector for incoming solar radiation.
The only thing that matters is that we're pumping insane amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and basically terra forming ourselves and most of nature out of the equation.
Nature is infinitely more complex than most people believe, we don't even know how basic things like soil ecosystems truly works, the thing that supports 100% of life on earth, we have virtually no clue about it, so what do we know about the rest...
Nobody is taking action because the whole system is made for growth and continuous improvement, you can't tell people "we have to work more to simply keep the status quo", let alone "we may even lose a lot of nice things and convenience in the process"
> you can't tell people "we have to work more to simply keep the status quo", let alone "we may even lose a lot of nice things and convenience in the process"
And yet this is what will happen. The question is are we walking into this prepared, or not? Just like a war, it’s unpleasant, most people would rather not do it, but would you rather be on the side that prepared for it or on the side that gets “surprised” by it?
So you are in favor of more defense spending?
How is this relevant to what we’re discussing in this thread?
Lot's of people can't get out of the Hollywood end of the world cliché where the people who survive are the ones with the biggest bombs, they just can't get past the myths we built... Cooperation is foreign to them, and it's a big part of why we can't seem to build anything cohesive past the country level.
Nobody took action because the global south (logically) decided that economic growth and rising living standards is worth the global cost.
Warming today is because of historic emissions from developed countries. If the global south didn't develop they'd still face climate catastrophe, only maybe 40 years later. And they'd have weaker economies to face it with.
> temperatures recover
Not. so. fast.
> Given how we are at the tail end of a small ice age, shouldn't it be expected that temperatures recover to what they were previously?
The speed at which the temperature is increasing is what is concerning, it’s much faster than a usual warming cycle. The XKCD comic of the timeline of human history and climate really drives home how steep the increase in temperature has been vs in the past: https://m.xkcd.com/1732/