Earth breaches 1.5 °C climate limit for the first time: what does it mean?
nature.com81 points by rbanffy 2 months ago
81 points by rbanffy 2 months ago
The real question is not "what does it mean", but "what will be done ?".
The answer is nothing and at this point without a massive change of life style, it is probably too late.
50 years ago, Pres. Carter wanted to get Climate Change on the radar, but Reagan stopped that and doubled down on Fossil Fuels.
We are probably 50 years from massive coastal flooding, time to start working on mitigations for the flooding. But of course nothing will be done with that until it is too late.
Look at insurance companies, they know what will happen and that is reflected in them pulling out of some parts of the country. 50 years from now, insurance will probably cost 25% to maybe 50% of the house value per year. Similar to Auto Insurance in high risk urban environments.
It's never too late. Better yesterday than today, better today than tomorrow, better tomorrow than the day after tomorrow.
When you have a leak in the plumbing in your home and you only notice when your whole house is already soaked, do you just learn to live with it, continuously cleaning up, installing pumps, ... ? Or will you fix the leak (and deal with all the water until things are dry again)?
The house is gigantic, housing billions of people. Very few people know how the plumbing works, not one person can "fix" it. Most people don't even consider the dripping water to be an issue at all, indoor plants are thriving. Others say the water has always leaked and it will stop leaking on its own. We for sure have to learn to live with it until it is bad enough for collective action to speed up. Unless we keep moving a way from being a shared-reality, knowledge based species.
> The answer is nothing and at this point without a massive change of life style, it is probably too late.
Just this morning I looked out the window where I live and saw several cars idling with no one inside, presumably to warm them up because it's cold out. Most people still have not made a connection between their actions and their actions' consequences and how it relates to our environment. My point is we're not even cutting out the most obviously wasteful behaviors because they're contributing to what's most precious to us: convenience.
Climate change will have to become much worse before people pay attention and change their behavior.
> it is probably too late.
It is definitely too late to avoid breaching 1.5 degrees. It is probably too late to avoid breaching 2.5 degrees. It is not too late to avoid breaching 4 degrees, or 6 or 8.
We cannot give up.
The thing here, one "regular" person trying will have little impact. For example, I have bicycled to work for almost 40 years, depending upon weather. But at times that was impossible due to traffic design and public transportation in the US being close to useless.
We still have large countries pushing fossil fuel and opening up new oil wells. Coal is just being replaced by Natural Gas only because it is much cheaper.
Want to make things better ? Stop all Fossil Fuel subsidizes and at least triple the price of Auto Fuel. Then you will see real impacts. But the very second Gas Prices raise, the Gov does all it can to lower the cost of fuel. It does not matter what party is in office.
So yes, it is close to too late because no real action has taken place. We are seeing adoption of green, but that is being eaten up by AI and *coins and other factors.
The youth of the world will suffer because of our inaction.
End result, people voted in an admin that will increase Fossil Fuel use because of raising prices.
There are some variables to consider, but even using grid energy mix most EVs -including cars- have a smaller co2 emission per mile than bikes, due to agriculture having quite a big eco footprint.
I'd dispute some of the reasoning with those - the first one is assuming the cyclist is fueling themselves with fruit, something quite expensive with limited calories rather than the real stuff people fuel up on like bread or potatoes.
The math is indeed off in the tweet, as fruitarian should be 2.5x worse instead of 1.5.
I don't think the 5g/kcal is expensive according to the chart, it is a good average for omnivores, consider the biker being fueled by cheeseburgers on the other end of the spectrum. If you have a more efficient EV (smaller car, even scooter for commute), put in whole family instead of riding alone in a car, or have more efficient means to charge the EV like surplus renewables you can't store/use at home the difference is getting quite staggering. One could argue the manufacturing of the EV emits more co2 than manufacturing a bike and we should control for miles drive/rode during their lifecycle but if both are available using the EV is most probably the environmentally friendlier option. That said, I won't give up my bike either because I enjoy the exercise, but it is a lot less green than one would imagine without looking at the numbers.
Bread/potatoes are about 0.6g/kcal which would put the cyclist at ~30g/mile vs 100g for the car. Not that people live on that alone but with exercise you often have more potatoes with the steak etc.
I've been using an ebike which is one of the lowest emission things, and fun.
Someone here ran some numbers with bikes better than cars/busses including the cost of making them https://www.bikeradar.com/features/long-reads/cycling-enviro...
> no real action has taken place
No real action, except for the approximately 1 trillion dollars a year the world spends on solar panels, wind turbines, electric cars, etc.
Can't give up if you never try!
[insert head pointing meme here]
We've literally spent trillions of dollars already to combat and mitigate change. We spend $500B annually just on solar panels. Add in the amounts we've spend on wind turbines, EV's, methane capture, etc, and we're spending over $1T per year combatting climate change.
It's not enough, but this meme that we're not trying is silly.
Graph of CO2 level in the atmosphere doesn't show even a tiny sign of those efforts. Sure, they are all good and commendable, but here we get zero points for the effort. If we reduce emissions a lot, really reduce them across he globe, this will simply mean that we will slow heating speed, not the target temperature. Like turning oven regulator from 3 to 2.5 - oven will still reach maximum temperature. CO2 level is the regulator.
For some reason no one wants the obvious solution, a global price/tax on carbon. So what you get is some countries spend billions on solar while others crank up almost untaxed fossil fuel use.
Even in one country like the UK were I live we have stupid expensive electricity combined with basically no tax on heating gas/oil.
I'm honestly puzzled why it's like that. Why do others not think a carbon price is a good idea and instead say let ban plastic straws while having zero tax on carbon for heating - that'll fix it? I don't get it.
We would never agree on a global tax system in the first place. We could tax wars for example, and those kill humans directly, unlike climate change. But we don't do it, because many humans benefit from wars. Same with carbon tax, too many countries benefit from not paying it and so they won't.
Second problem is that carbon tax won't help. It doesn't reduce emissions much (because realistically countries would rather pay than de-industrialize in short term), and it doesn't remove CO2 from the atmosphere at all. As I wrote above - a slow down of emissions won't really change the final outcome, it will only prolong the heating process.
The graph of CO2 emissions per year shows a noticeable impact.
That's the problem I was talking about. We humans can't measure emissions, we can only cleverly estimate them. Especially if the number we want is a global one, a sum of every tiny source plus every big source in every country, from democracies to a closed dictatorships. So when institutions show that badly estimated rate of gas inflow is decreasing, but the actual amount of gas is increasing, then the only logical answer is that inflow measurement is broken. Emissions estimates are broken, because total amount of gas in the atmosphere is only ever increasing and the rate of increase is accelerating.
Mauna Koa direct measurements and the estimates are not significantly different.
Well, yes, they both show almost no impact from our green initiatives on the actual data. Emissions graph is increasing, and very slightly slowing rate of increase in the past few years. But the CO2 graph is a direct measurement of total CO2, so it is effectively a cumulative graph. And it is lowly curving up, accelerating, over past decades including last few years. Even if we magically flat line emissions graph, meaning no more increases of emissions, we will still see CO2 graph increasing and likely accelerating due to compounding of factors and existing CO2 levels already in the atmosphere.
(Positive) feedback loops are dangerous, even if we stop doing anything that moves things forward, feedback loops can get us to hell on Earth (quite literally) all by themselves if we reach the right conditions.
And that is why is dangerous to surpass that limit. Even if we define that today conditions are safe or that we can still move things a bit forward without too much harm, feedback loops won't stop because we want them to do and make us cross the cliff.
It is not something binary, of course, we were getting already loss of albedo and permafrost thawing and so on before reaching that landmark, but things can speed up badly eventually out of the safe zone.
We know that the continued exponential growth of solar means that fossil fuels won’t be absolutely necessary for the economy in 10-15 years. For instance, if we replaced all the corn-for-ethanol fields with solar, we’d produce something like 15x the total electricity as we do now.
But we also know it won’t happen soon enough.
We also know that it only costs about 5-10 billion dollars a year to provide global heat balance through solar radiation management (eg by lofting sulfur or calcium carbonate into the upper atmosphere). We have plenty of volcanoes as natural experiments to provide the efficacy of the approach.
We also know that there is massive “green” opposition to anything involving geoengineering.
But, geoengineering seems to be the only plausible mechanism for preventing global warming at this point. Even stopping all fossil fuels won’t use tomorrow won’t do it — and that won’t be possible for decades — not without riots in the streets.
> We know that the continued exponential growth of solar means that fossil fuels won’t be absolutely necessary for the economy in 10-15 years.
Where did you get that from ?
Renewable are stacked on top of fossil, we use as much (more even) fossil fuel than ever before, it never went down: https://ourworldindata.org/energy-mix
Germany is the prime example of this green washing: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/g...
If you accept that PV will continue to grow exponentially, the historical trend is ~1000x growth over the last 21 years, or 10x every 7 years.
PV is about 10% of global electricity demand and about 1% of all-forms global energy demand today; 7 years (even without wind) and its going to be dominant over electrical generation, 14 and there's enough electricity to electrify everything else we do, too.
If you accept that the exponential growth will continue. It's not guaranteed.
France is 70% nuclear and the average co2 per capita still is ~10 tonnes per year... to get it to a sustainable level I think the target is under 3 tonnes according to the Paris agreement.
I think a lot of posters in the thread run a very simplified version of the world in their mind
3 tons per capita per year, globally, is 24 gigatons — that would only be a 30% or so reduction from the status quo.
We need a 99.9% reduction to be long-term sustainable; that's 4375 grams of CO2 per person per year. If there was no carbon capture, it would be at the level of "everything everywhere except for North Korea" or "everything in every country except for land-use changes to grasslands"
Thinking of simplification, France is ~70% nuclear electricity, which I emphasise because I'd already noted a roughly 10x gap between worldwide electrical and worldwide all-forms power.
Great ref, from Germany’s energy mix!
Here’s an S-curve model I made based on two maximum carrying capacities for solar; the lower bound is the current amount of farmland devoted to ethanol while the upper bound is 1% of the earth’s surface. Data models based on historical growth in solar [1].
I show the current total electricity usage and the total energy usage. These are growing slowly worldwide, around 2%.
https://claude.site/artifacts/eb3c4763-3b70-458b-8e70-6b8370...
We are deep into the massive exponential growth of solar. Can we keep it up?
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci...
I might be misreading the cleanenergywire.org diagram but it shows that oil consumption went down, coal as well.
Or did you mean that this diagram _is_ the greenwashing? If so, why?
The funniest part is probably that this rapid recent rise is partially due to attempts to switch to cleaner fuels in maritime transport. Ships burning sulfur rich bunker fuel have been helping quite a lot by already doing lite geoengineering and we've abruptly cut that stopgap like absolute idiots.
You mean stories like this?
https://www.msn.com/en-us/science/environmental-science/ship...
Fuel additives for ships to increase clouds and fuel additives for planes to reduce clouds could reduce their warming impact by roughly 30%. (High clouds trap heat and low clouds reflect it)
The problem with geo-engineering is that it only treats the symptoms, not the root cause. Treating the symptoms has a side-effect: it lowers the incentive to treat the cause by making it less pressing.
What we want to avoid is not a 1.5 degrees warming, it's a 3 or 4 degrees one. By doing geo-engineering, you could fix the issue in the short time but you would also increase the probability of a bigger problem in the longer term.
What is the non-geo-engineered solution?
Emit less CO2.
Does sequestering what has been emitted count as geoengineering? If not, that too; if so, then surely the status quo of emitting it is already geoengineering?
I would assume that anything done by people is geo-engineering.
Check out the big red band "China"
https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions
But, as I noted in another comment, it's misleading since China has absorbed so much manufacturing for other countries, a lot of those products end up in your hands after you get it from Amazon Prime.
Note that China emits a lot less than the US or Canada calculated per capita (from that same page).
Yes, China's 1.4 billion citizens divided by their number 1 status as a carbon emitter, means that they produce less co2 than the USAs 345 million divided by it's (relatively) lower total emissions.
But as I pointed out, there is likely misleading: the US (and other nations) buy lots of goods from China effectively shifting coal emissions from the US to China by having them made there.
If the US were purchasing 100% US made goods, per capita co2 in the US might be much much higher
No need to hypothesise, it's been calculated:
https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/imported-or-exported-co-e...
China is essentially importing ~1 GT of emissions, and the USA is essentially exporting 0.56 GT of emissions.
The USA would emit about 10% more and China about 10% less if all manufacturing was local; but that would mean the USA per capita emissions would go up to 16.5 tons per capita from 14.9, while the Chinese per capita emissions would go down to about 7.2 from about 8 tons per capita. (Assuming I read the charts correctly).
I aver that none of this matters either, because all of us need to get down to "approximately none" and this kind of thing is just playing a nationalist version of the "no you" game.
Cool beans.
I guess it's time for the US to kick it's Chinese import addiction, in which it shifts it's addiction to cheap foreign (Chinese) labor fueled by 'clean' coal, and then works to whittle it's own emissions problems down to zero by whatever means necessary.
Solar might help with carbon emissions even at apex deployment, but there's a lot of carbon emissions otherwise.
The objection to geoengineering is because those either involve large scale impacts to an already threatened biosphere (I do not accept than even 1% of biosphere threat due to solar energy reflection is understood), it often is pushed by the petroleum industry and they are the living embodiment of not caring about environmental impacts, and the cost of geoengineering is usually so high it begs the question why we don't invest in practical sustainablity.
Ultimately, geoengineering is a delay. And what the petroleum industry in general economic powers that be due is delay cost as long as possible, while imposing costs upon other people. It is the essence of externality economics, which is to say industrial economics, which is to say economics.
We are an economic world built on the religion of economics. That religion has no conception on a practical basis of environmentalism and sustainability.
The fundamental problem externality economics, is that we cannot price the externalities on a practical basis. If you cannot price things, they do not exist to economics.
The problem with geo engineering is that in the proposed shape it doesn't solve two major problems: ocean acidification and impact of CO2 levels on animals (including humans).
Even if we get back to lofting sulphur, it won't stop aquatic life from dying. And our cognitive function won't be better if it's 1000ppm CO2 at 1.5°C degree increase rather than 1000ppm CO2 at 3°C degree increase.
Geoengineering is insufficient.
Cognitive impairment isn’t an issue. High temp already impairs cognition—air conditioning can fix excess co2 and excess heat — indoors.
The ocean ph is currently 8.08. At 1000ppm (worst case scenario) the ph drops to 8.03. Disruptive to ecosystems, but not as bad as people think. Changes in heat will be worse.
The other piece— we can do geoengineering with calcium carbonate! That is alkaline.
Geo-engineering, or carbon capture?
The former has two problems:
1) You can't stop, ever, if that's all you do. Worse, if we're still emitting, cost rise, because the cost depends on how much CO2 is in the air, not much was emitted last year.
2) CO2 has many environmental effects, not just temperature.
Carbon capture is fine for the last 10% or so, IMO.
> You can't stop, ever
I'm not really worried about "ever"; mostly just till I'm through with this planet.
> mostly just till I'm through with this planet.
That kind of thinking is how we got into this mess in the first place.
The long-term impact of climate change was evident 20 years ago, well before we reached this point; back then we didn't have cheap renewables, but there was enough time to have done a big nuclear roll-out.
Zero empathy for younger humans?
I think the opposite; I have so much empathy for them that I never created any in the first place. I can't imagine the despair of being young today. I'm not quite old yet myself and am terrified of what we will do to this planet.
> CO2 has many environmental effects, not just temperature.
Like the oceans acidifying [1].
[1] https://www.noaa.gov/education/resource-collections/ocean-co...
You can stop once you’ve stabilized co2. It buys time for building out a solar power base and develop carbon removal tech.
We need to buy time.
> You can stop once you’ve stabilized co2. It buys time for building out a solar power base and develop carbon removal tech.
That presupposes that we're going to build out the PV and develop carbon removal.
I hope we will, but it does presuppose it: if this were false, then the costs go up each year because the CO2 only gets stabilised when all the fossil fuels get burned.
> We need to buy time.
Agreed.
I assume other people have put thought into this but just as your standard braindead engineer I see some problems with dimming the sun. Some big ones:
1: it would make solar less effective so we'll have a harder time reducing our fossil fuel usage
2: fossil fuels will actually run out at a certain point, and we'd still be stuck with a dim sun but without the warming effects of fossil fuels
3: engineering is a process of trial and error, and we can't afford to try this and fuck it up
1. SRM will reduce efficiency of equatorial solar but minimally effect solar in northern climes. Like, less than 5% reduction. Pretty good trade off for stabilizing temperatures.
SRM from lofting sulfur or calcium only lasts about a year. It has to be done yearly. So, no long term effects, for better or worse.
2: We will fry the planet long before running out of fossil fuels. There is a lot left.
3: we absolutely can and must try geoengineering at small scales before scaling up. It isn’t a binary phenomenon. Every time there is a volcanic event, we get a natural experiment.
> But, geoengineering seems to be the only plausible mechanism for preventing global warming at this point.
I'd rather geoengineering being beta-bested on other planets first than in the only place we can live.
Besides, global warming might not be so bad, if we consider that we are currently in one of the coldest periods in human history.
Temperatures have been going up and down for millions of years, with or without humans.
> Besides, global warming might not be so bad, if we consider that we are currently in one of the coldest periods in human history.
I don't know where you got this idea from, it's not supported by your link.
We were already in an interglacial warm period, and the warming since the preindustrial average is of the same scale as the difference between the preindustrial average and when the ice sheets withdrew from Chicago.
Well I must sadly inform you that we're officially unable to go to Mars until we "fix all of our problems here on Earth" as people put it. /s
maybe check out the book "termination shock"? getting humanity into sulfur-addiction is running hard towards danger don't you think? Also who decides, and who gets the blame and anger when anything climate related has a big visible impact?
I have lived in two countries. In one, the effects of global warming are devastating: droughts, wildfires, epidemics, starvation, and a sense of hopelessness brought about by intense heat and no air conditioner. In my second country, things don't look so dire...longer summers? yes, they will be able to put up with that here, though they may not be able to stand those pesky climate refugees :-( .
I think that best remedy we have now to global warming is to build resilient societies, to increase democratic participation, to educate people, to alleviate inequality, to not rely on gas from Russia, to fight waste, and to ... well, keep a discerning eye on the future and on things in general.
We should be investing into living with these changes.
Humanity will survive, don't fret about it. We don't need to buil an ark.
The issue is, although humanity will survive, billions will die. That's not good enough for me.
Will billions die? How?
Crop failures (our food is sensitive to temperature changes).
War (as resources are limited, we'll fight for what's left).
Disease (poorer areas will incubate and spread diseases we already cured or controlled).
Typical dark ages stuff. The ancients who faced similar issues wrote the stories on stones and songs so we won't forget.
I can see all of these happening but billions dead is a really high number so my question is more about the quantitive aspect. Are there estimates that land on this number, or is it just a high number more or less guessed
Well, the Black Death killed ~15% of the world's population in the 14th century[1]. 15% today would be about 1.17 billion people. It's horrific but not implausible.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequences_of_the_Black_Deat...
Yes but that was during a time before we had even entered Enlightenment. I don't see how it says anything about consequences of a 1.5 degree average warming.
I don't know about how many deaths this would cause, but there was an interesting paper that looked at the effects of a limited nuclear war between India and Pakistan [1]. Here's a blog post about it [2].
India and Pakistan both depend on water from Himalayan glaciers that are shrinking due to warming, so the idea of them at some point going to war over control of that shrinking resource is not too far fetched.
What's interesting is how much of the rest of the world could be affected.
The paper looks at a war where the two counties exchange 100 nukes each about the size of the bomb used on Hiroshima, directed at each other's major population centers. That's about 1/3 of their arsenals. Besides killing a lot of people in those population centers, this would set of firestorms that would release a lot of soot into the upper atmosphere.
The paper used state of the art atmospheric models to predict what would happen to that soot, and state of the art crop models and food distribution models to predict what that could do.
Here's the abstract:
> A limited nuclear war between India and Pakistan could ignite fires large enough to emit more than 5 Tg of soot into the stratosphere. Climate model simulations have shown severe resulting climate perturbations with declines in global mean temperature by 1.8 °C and precipitation by 8%, for at least 5 y. Here we evaluate impacts for the global food system. Six harmonized state-of-the-art crop models show that global caloric production from maize, wheat, rice, and soybean falls by 13 (±1)%, 11 (±8)%, 3 (±5)%, and 17 (±2)% over 5 y. Total single-year losses of 12 (±4)% quadruple the largest observed historical anomaly and exceed impacts caused by historic droughts and volcanic eruptions. Colder temperatures drive losses more than changes in precipitation and solar radiation, leading to strongest impacts in temperate regions poleward of 30°N, including the United States, Europe, and China for 10 to 15 y. Integrated food trade network analyses show that domestic reserves and global trade can largely buffer the production anomaly in the first year. Persistent multiyear losses, however, would constrain domestic food availability and propagate to the Global South, especially to food-insecure countries. By year 5, maize and wheat availability would decrease by 13% globally and by more than 20% in 71 countries with a cumulative population of 1.3 billion people. In view of increasing instability in South Asia, this study shows that a regional conflict using <1% of the worldwide nuclear arsenal could have adverse consequences for global food security unmatched in modern history.
I bet that would be very destabilizing in the US and Europe. Think about how crazy some people got during COVID in the US with the relatively minor (but annoying) shortages during that. This would be worse.
[1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1919049117
[2] https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2020/03/16/even-limited-in...
> our food is sensitive to temperature changes.
It's not. It's lack of water that causes failure.
oh wow, how much agronomy did you study? photosynthesis is optimal below 35°C and is at 0% already at 50°C
Famines due to changing weather patterns causing widespread harvest failures, wars due to reduces resources and changing liveability of regions, far bigger refugee crises than we've seen so far, etc.
We're in general really dependent on our climate for global stability.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-38906-7
> Risks of synchronized low yields are underestimated in climate and crop model projections
Age. Roughly 170.000 die every day, and it will become more (because most of earth's population is still quite young).
We should begin to acknowledge that there is a non-zero chance for complete societal collapse in the next few decades.
We should begin to acknowledge that there may be a near-zero chance of avoiding complete societal collapse in the next few decades.
> there may be a near-zero chance
You have two probability qualifiers next to each other. What is "may be" in this case? How should a reader read it?
Consider a disease like rabies. Right now there's a near-zero chance of survival to those who contract it. Let's say we discover a new mosquito variant which can spread rabies, whose population is multiplying exponentially.
Typically we might expect a disease which becomes pandemic to be survivable for some significant percentage of the population. Whereas here we might say that, regardless of how many resources we throw at rabies treatments, there may continue to be a near-zero chance of survival (because rabies had been remarkably untreatable so far).
It's a suggestion that perhaps we should temper optimism.
Ok, so now I understand what you meant.
Technically, you're right. May be there's no chance to fix it. But may be false vacuum will decay tomorrow. "may be" is not very useful here.
Is it probable that we're beyond the point of no return? I don't believe anyone can answer that with any certainty.
Note that even in the above example, a proper response might be to address the mosquito population or to begin initiatives to vaccinate as many people as possible against rabies. Likely a combination of both.
Of course it might be good to continue researching possible treatments for rabies as well, but there are other things which can be done to mitigate the impact.
I don't think climate change will be the only reason for societal collapse, if it happens. I think late-stage capitalism (which is also implicated in driving this climate change) is at least another significant factor.
I also don't pretend do know what societal collapse might look like, and what might come after. Societies don't seem to be immortal[1], and collapse has historically been inevitable. An immortal society is as unprecedented as human immortality, which isn't to say that either are strictly impossible, but that we should analyze both against historical data on statistics and symptoms which might indicate proximity to end of life.
Personally I believe the societal stressors which appear over the next few decades are significant enough that they represent a much larger chance of societal collapse than people seem to recognize. I guess we'll see.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societal_collapse#Societal_lon...
In that case, why play along with society or do any research or investments beyond that time frame?
Because society collapsing doesn't mean that everyone will die; research and investments now might be critical for our children and possibly the long-term survival of the human race.
current society collapsing still gives room for survival - look at indigenous peoples in for example Australia - they survived an apocalypse and still are around.
Which part of the society, the Trump part, or the Musk part. Oh, they seem to be the same now. It’s so confusing.
In that case we'd better invest in weapons and find a way how to kill "the others" before they "kill us", since this will affect "our" chance of surviving much more than if we are able to "fight the climate change".
there's always been a non-zero chance for collapse: black death, ww2, cold war, covid, etc.
2 degrees Celsius: We should be investing into living with these changes.
2.5 degrees Celsius: We should be investing into living with these changes.
3 degrees Celsius: We should be investing into living with these changes.
4 degrees Celsius: We should be investing into living with these changes.
5 degrees Celsius: We should be investing into living with these changes.
At some point methane hydrates release, photosynthesis in sea microorganisms ceases, or other general ecosystem collapse occurs.
At some point you have to invest in stopping the rise, because Venus shows there isn't an upper boundary.
At this point you basically hope demographic collapse from urbanization combined with massive wars and starvation from population displacement combined with alternative energy allows for a sustainable tech future.
That's the gentle landing.
The money for change is held by the rich, and they don't care if the world ends as long as their back accounts have 1000000x more unicorn horns than other people.
How exactly do we invest into, for example, people not being able to survive because of the wet-bulb temperature getting too high?
I think that providing public climate shelters will have to be part of the solution in some countries. There is a wide spread between “humans can’t work multiple hours outside” and “humans can’t be outside at all” for the likely temps in the next 100 years.
(To be clear, this is a stopgap to cope with the change as it happens, not a full solution.)
We could invest in cheaper and faster coffin production. Or invest in trying to get mass graves to become culturally acceptable. Or we could try and actually do something about the conditions that create the hellscape to come, but with our current mode of production and incentives around industry, I don't see it happening.
2.0°C any% speedrun starting now.
Fun times.
4°C by 2040, so the numbers match nicely. I know we can do it if we don't put our minds to it.
We're going to see many more people becoming Environmental/Climate refugees :-( Our only short to mid term is solar and wind, with a long term solution being nuclear fusion (not fission).
Fusion isn't technologically viable.
Then it needs to be economically viable.
I'm not convinced that fusion will ever be lower cost than fission.
And fission will probably never be cheaper than solar and wind and storage, which are categorically cheaper currently on a raw energy basis, and solar wind heavy up to fully drop in price and stabilize.
Fission and fusion are peaker and industrial heat application specific. But that implies such a lower level of monetary investment over time that they also won't get the economies of scale to thrive.
Even smr size reactors are a big upfront investment, while wind and solar can be scaled and grown organically.
I'm hopeful for a lftr style small price competitive fission reactor approach exists, but it's ten years away. Fusion is thirty years from practical use at least.
What is apparent is that we will never get political cooperation to solve environmental issues of this scale, outside of mutual agreement to lob nuclear weapons at each other.
what's wrong with fission?
I’m all in for fission, but it has a really bad reputation, has many opponents, it creates a bit of waste and hasn’t solved our energy problems in the past decades.
10 years ago I said to a group of friends that I thought in about 10 years time air travel would be a very very highly regulated thing, with international limits placed on how many miles an airline is allowed to fly a passenger (I even thought a secondary market for airline miles would emerge) - I figured by 2025 we'd have nuclear back on track and large scale nation state projects to implement a rapid shift to solar/wind/nuclear funded by a global $xxxT fund.
How unprophetic of me.
Where are the measurements being taken? Cities are heat islands and really skew the data.
they are being taken with full knowledge of this effect as well as many others. climate scientists are not idiots they are also not conspiring, come on
Can always count on Hackernews to start our day off with an existential threat to all humanity that we can no longer do anything about.
The nice thing is we had the chance. However the people who had the power decided that monies is more important than a sphere of dirt.
It's just too bad that we don't have a replacement for the latter one. Tough luck, maybe next time.
> However the people who had the power decided that monies is more important than a sphere of dirt.
Is that really true?
In the past decades, we really had two options to reduce CO2: massive decrease in standard of living; or massive switch to non-carbon energy -- the only one we had the tech for it nuclear (and even then, I don't think we had the battery tech to move to electric vehicles until recently).
Very few voters would have chosen a massive decrease in standard of living. Though many voters/activists rejected nuclear power.
Now we have solar, wind and battery tech that allows us to move away from carbon-based energy. But that adoption has slowed. Partly because the US has been drilling oil like crazy -- both to reduce inflation and to counter Russia. (And, arguably, driving a Tesla has suddenly become less fashionable since Elon has gone to the Right.)
> we really had two options to reduce CO2: massive decrease in standard of living
We could cut a looooot of useless shit before our standard of living are impacted. And for the things we can't do without we have huge margins to improve.
I feel like a lot of people think "any kind of concession or compromise is an unbearable attack on my god given rights to do whatever the fuck I want whenever the fuck I want", if that's your point of view then of course, we can do absolutely nothing about climate change
> We could cut a looooot of useless shit before our standard of living are impacted.
Do tell.
Do we need trucks transporting tons of sugary water all over the place?
Do we need to smelt energy intensive aluminium for useless trinkets and gadgets?
Do we need to work energy intensive steel for useless trinkets and gadgets?
Do we need disposables vapes?
Do we need the flood of useless junk on Amazon and Alibaba that breaks after a couple of uses?
Do we need fast-food places selling meat?
Do we need fast-food?
Do we need fast fashion?
Do we need all the ultra-processed foods like crisps, candies, cookies, etc.?
etc etc etc
So the question I want to know is what the fuck do we even need in this world?
I think the answer quickly becomes nothing. Just eat food, sleep somewhere safe and wait for something to kill you.
We need shelter, food and a place to cook our food.
We need to be healthy, so we need medical help and assistance.
We need education.
We need friends and communities.
We need entertainment.
We need hope in the future.
> I think the answer quickly becomes nothing
That's exactly what I'm talking about lmao, people like you just completely lack the imagination, as if uber food delivery, 4 hours of netflix a day and buying a new iphone every year was the end game of humanity...
What about job security, healthcare, a community, a fulfilling job, &c. ? None of this requires soon to be e-waste tech gadgets, cheap cloth made from the most vile fabric known to mankind, huge SUV doing 0-60mph in 3s
Sure we got saved from polio and famines, instead we now die from lack of exercise, depression and obesity, that's not even the worst part, we're doing this while permanently fucking up our planet.
Do we need 40 car companies working on the same problem ?
Do we need 40 PC companies releasing 20 new laptops each every year ?
Do we need 40 smartphone makers releasing 20 new phones each every year ?
Do we need humongous cars requiring humongous engines, humongous brake pads and tires (massive source of pollution)
How is using a three tonnes metal cage to displace your 80kg ass three miles efficient ?
Do we need earbuds with soldered batteries ? The earbuds should be good for decades but the soldered battery is toast after a few years, same for laptops
Do we need fast fashion and shitty gadgets from china ? 20%+ of france's post packages comes from shein/temu, that's an insane waste of resource and energy: https://www.francetvinfo.fr/economie/vente-en-ligne-temu-et-...
&c.
Take a few steps back and look around you, what the fuck are we even doing ? 80% of all that shit isn't actually bringing anything in term of quality of life
You guys would have been really happy in the Soviet Union. Planned economies sound great on paper, I guess. (Though, to make my point: the standard of living there was below that of the West.)
Or, you can go full CERN. Two teams, same problem, under NDA except their teammates.
In CERN LHC teams, every problem is assigned to two groups, and their sensors are placed on the opposite ends of the accelerator relative to each other. Both starts from scratch, come up with completely different approaches to the same problem, and solve it independently, verifying each other in the process.
Higgs Boson is found by two teams, one week apart, independently verifying that it exists. You can apply this to any grand challenge. Space, AI, etc. Create two super-teams, NDA them, give them money and let loose.
I mean if the choice is between living with Soviet standard of living and burning in a wildfire, the choice sounds obvious.
Note that no one has argued for a planned economy.
Yeah because everything is binary and if you reject any bit of consumerism your dream is obviously to live in a gulag.
This place is filled with very smart dumb people...
I was unable to find the comment now, but a comment about fabric quality bothers me to this day:
Paraphrased: "The clothes had longer lives back then, because we were unable to weave fabric that thin (i.e. low quality). Since we can do now, we do it."
IOW: Things are more expensive and lower quality, because we want you to buy more things and spend more, so we can make more monies.
Let's start by not being so diligent on Diesel passenger cars' emissions, unregulated CFC production in China, not investing in PUE reduction sooner, not forcing effective filtering in coal power plants in some countries.
We can continue with (un)controlled deforestation for mining and palm oil (and increasing its use despite its health hazards), uncontrolled tapping of natural water resources just to sell it as bottled water (remember Nestlé CEO doesn't believe that water is a human right because they can sell it).
Let's add burning petrol wells, untapped methane leaks, oil companies' lobbying to slow down EV adoption, etc. etc. etc...
More on EVs & cars: Formula 1 cars are hybrids way before passenger cars were. This tech would have trickled down way earlier in history. SAAB made 4-cylinter Turbocharged 9-3 and made a compelling, powerful car for everyone, but everyone, esp. US. opted for V8s for "manly" reasons.
...lastly, let's not get started on single-use plastics and how we have been deceived with this arrowy-triangle and recycling.
We had the chance.
P.S.: I keep adding things, but there's also planned obsolescence. e.g.: I have a perfectly fine BT headphone with great sound quality, but I can't replace its battery without destroying it. How being able to replace its battery impacts my quality of life?
Solar radiation management (geoengineering) is also a choice. It has been a choice. I don’t know why people don’t take it seriously. Lofting calcium of sulfur into the upper atmosphere is pretty much the only way to stop runaway feedback loops.
We should be allowed to scientifically research solar radiation management at small scales! However, currently, it is effectively banned. It’s crazy to me.
It's not banned, where are you getting this information? We've deployed 124 times for our customers mostly in Northern California. If you want to learn more: https://makesunsets.com/pages/new-faq
Thanks for sharing the link! The article focuses on Marine Cloud Brightening (MCB), an unscalable method of solar radiation management. MCB would require thousands of autonomous boats (ideally running without fossil fuels) to locate suitable low-altitude ocean clouds and spray them with finely misted saltwater to increase their reflectivity. At best, this method might achieve localized cooling over ocean areas, but its net impact on global temperatures remains uncertain—scientists are still debating whether it would result in overall cooling or even exacerbate warming in some regions.
The specific experiment mentioned in the article was halted due to a lack of community engagement. The organizers failed to inform or invite the local mayor to the deployment event, leading to public backlash when residents learned about it from the New York Times. Much of the misunderstanding came from a perception that the experiment involved risky technology, though in reality, it was as simple as using a patio mister mounted on a retired warship.
What I was referencing, however, is Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI), which differs significantly from MCB in both the type of aerosol used (typically sulfur dioxide, SO₂) and the location of the injection (the stratosphere, rather than the lower atmosphere). If you're interested in learning more about SAI, here's an excellent primer: https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/so2-injection
Just absolutely floors me we have people in this very thread still "being skeptical" about this issue that's probably the second most-studied thing in science, right behind evolution.
I'm glad I didn't have kids and I hope I don't live to see the worst effects of climate change. As for the rest of humanity: good fuckin luck y'all, you'll need it.
Some of these people saw the differences and still deny that anything is changing.
a: We had more snow in the past.
b: Maybe we have less now because everything is warming up?
a: Nah, bullshit. It's just a phase, it'll pass.
For God's sake, people believe when their app says that it'll rain in 15 minutes, but won't believe it that they'll be broiled in 15 years. It's the same calculations basically!
...and despite all this knowledge and we know what we're doing and how we're doing it, many people deny that we did something to the environment and we're here now.
oh, boy.
It's not so surprising. We (the average tech worker on HN) are part of the problem, not the solution.
It cuts both ways. There's a lot of change coming that we can no longer avert, and yet we could still do hugely more damage. It's a tough pill to swallow that we have to live in a drastically changed world and we still have hard work to do to not let it become New Arrakis. Nobody seems to know how to tell an optimistic narrative about this reality, but I believe it to be possible
I wonder if this means first-world nations will stop consuming, or will they continue to patronize the poorer countries?
For sure they will push their citizens to drop their cars and buy brand new which are more ecological, to make the car industry go on. Throwaway things like washing machines that last 2 years are in the agenda too
I don't know what country you live in, but new cars in the U.S. aren't necessarily any more ecological. The SUV has been king and now the CUV ("crossover" UV) which is also a huge beast of a car.
Even if we switch from gas to electric, this only shifts the pollution to electric generators, which are... coal/natural gas/nuclear
Although renewables are trending up (21% in this random hit, more than I expected) https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...
So without solving the electricity generation problem, a shift to full electrics is only a part of the puzzle.
An "irony" of this, is that China is a major consumer of "clean coal"
A random first hit on a search quack for "global coal consumption" on DDG:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/coal-consumption-by-count...
note China is dark red.
Now, there's a small problem. One reason that China is using so much coal is... to supply all of the exports to other countries!
It might be said that your Amazon/etc purchases are shifting the coal usage from your country to China.
ctrl+f 'overpopulation' - nothing.
Elephant in the room continued to be ignored. World population doubled in ~50 yeas while simultaneously consumes more.
That is because we have an economy reliant on growth. That has to come somewhere, either us - or worker immigration and having a baby factory elsewhere in the world.
Have we passed the point of no return? I remember reading articles talking about if we ever reach 1.5 degress, there will be irreversible damages.
> Scientists stress that there is nothing magical about the 1.5 °C threshold. It is a political target that was included in the Paris agreement in acknowledgement of concerns that an earlier goal of limiting warming to 2 °C might not be strong enough to protect the most vulnerable countries, including island nations at risk of being submerged by rising seas. That does not mean the world is safe below 1.5 °C, nor that everything will suddenly fall apart if it is breached. It’s a spectrum, Hayhoe says, “and every bit of warming matters”.
We passed the point of no return when scientists warned about it 50 years ago and no one cared.
Should I just stop caring then? I've been trying my best the recent years to minimize my climate footprint.
I just try to contribute something as best as I can. I don’t use cars for example. It won’t change my life or the world, but it’s a little pollution I can commit to removing.
Working on reducing meat, just one more thing I can commit to removing (unnecessary death, I’m not that hungry). Even a 10% reduction.
The rest is on the universe.
I also don't use or own cars. I use my stuff until it breaks. I mend my own clothes instead of buying new ones whenever I can (even to the point of looking like a hobo).
However, I despise hypocritical "ecology" stickers in products. Specially when those stickers are attached to products designed for obsolescense (looking at you, Apple).
I am also fully aware that companies are the largest pollutors, not me. They'll do whatever they can to shift the blame to the consumer.
Honestly? Yes. It won't matter either way at this point, even if we reach net zero worldwide we're still more or less screwed since it's a positive feedback loop in terms of albedo (until all the ice is gone anyway) and the oceans have absorbed enough CO2 to keep emitting it for a long while if atmospheric levels drop.
Any actual solutions would involve increasing reflectivity though artificial means, i.e. aerosol geoengineering.
> we're still more or less screwed
"less screwed" here means "fewer dead people". I think it matters how much screwed are we.
BTW this is the exact switcheroo I expect from the climate deniers - first it was "climate change doesn't exist, why should I limit my consumption?", when it's too undeniable they're going to switch in a second to "too late to do anything about it, why should I limit my consumption?"
It certainly matters how screwed we are, but a single person eating less meat and taking the bus more often isn't going to make any impact whatsoever when everyone else maintains business as usual. Laws and tax incentives need to drive it first and foremost, but as usual with these things it's too little, too late.
Systemic change is what matters and it's all too common that "personal responsibility" is the talking point of corporations who greenwash their operation through buying cheap fake carbon offsets to relieve themselves of any responsibility while outputting more CO2 than a small nation on a daily basis, making sure to simultaneously blame everyone else as much as possible to divert attention.
> but a single person eating less meat
That's the same old Tragedy of the Commons argument, which is valid no matter if we're screwed or have a decent chance at solving the crisis. Using this logic, it's irrational to even vote since you waste your time on something which with all probability will have 0 effect.
> Systemic change is what matters
That's true, but how do you get a systemic change? By influencing individual voting and consumption behavior. Global warming has been started and is still driven the most by democratic countries, you can't absolve yourself of the responsibility.
Corporations are a product of the system we've built. They'll never care about the environment, they're not designed to do that. They care about the legal framework, though, which we (in democratic countries) can influence. The hard pill to swallow is that forcing corporations to care about the environment will increase their costs and thus prices of goods and services.
It's very much tragedy of the commons, but say with the classical example of wells on a combined finite water source, using less water won't make it last longer when you represent a permille of the total consumption, and you are only really hurting yourself by not using it while it still exists. Meanwhile the bottling plant next door pumps half of it for free and sells to back to you with a label that says "save water".
A single vote can change nothing or change everything depending on the overall distribution. If the public opinion is 80% towards one candidate and 20% for the other, even 30% of the votes wouldn't matter. If it's extremely polarized like 50/50 then every vote does indeed make a difference (Gore vs. Bush, topically enough lol). The problem with climate change is that it's more like 95% of people doing nothing cause they just want to live a normal life, and 5% of people trying to do something in a futile way. In the end it doesn't matter if a few million choose to cut down on consumption when the end result is exactly the same in an ocean of billions.
> how do you get a systemic change? By influencing individual voting and consumption behavior.
That's more like a democratic fantasy, believing that most people would even chose to to the right thing if given the option, instead of the most convenient thing.
No, you get it by lobbying key people who have the power to enact change on a massive scale. As you say, corporations only care about legal means and they make sure those means stay in their favor.
One might argue that if enough people can be persuaded to stop using a product (e.g. gasoline) then the production of it will lower, but in lots of cases that's a fallacy as well, since the producer will move against an existential threat to itself with all the means at their disposal, PR, legal, or even less legal. And in a sufficiently large market, any impact a single person can make is again a drop in the ocean.
> using less water won't make it last longer when you represent a permille of the total consumption
Using less water will make finite water supply last longer. You yourself have a small effect, but it is an effect.
Compare that with the elections, where you're not going to have any impact whatsoever.
> The problem with climate change is that it's more like 95% of people doing nothing cause they just want to live a normal life, and 5% of people trying to do something in a futile way.
Those 5% can lobby, talk to friends and make it 10%, then maybe 20% and it starts to become a strong political force.
OTOH you appear to lobby for making 0% out of the 5% ...
> In the end it doesn't matter if a few million choose to cut down on consumption when the end result is exactly the same in an ocean of billions.
No, the result will not be exactly the same. If you e.g. produce less waste, then the total amount of waste will be smaller by that amount.
> That's more like a democratic fantasy, believing that most people would even chose to to the right thing if given the option, instead of the most convenient thing.
People have been convinced to do less convenient things. In most western countries, people learned to not throw trash on the sidewalk and make the extra effort to throw it in a in.
If we reach net zero emissions on this decade I think we have a chance.
It sounds implausible, but much more plausible than deus ex-machina solutions like aerosols.
I don't know. I still care, but I'm in no position to change anything. Even if I was, I wouldn't be sure on what to do about it.
I see the current state of personal ecology (I will change one drop of water in the stream!) as a placebo. It's psychologic engineering more than ecology, and I understand how it is supposed to work, but it has been hijacked from its original purpose and turned into an ideological taboo, so we lost that as well.
"I told you so" is our only remaining weapon, and it's a retaliation type of weapon, not a world-saving one.
If we've passed the point of no return, that's a relief. At least we can relax and enjoy our 18MPG 350HP sports cars now without guilt. Vroom!
First time in what timeframe?
The 1.5C (and other similar) thresholds are based on pre-industrial averages. An average of between 1850 and 1900 is generally considered to be the modern pre-industrial baseline. This is then the average of 2024 as compared to that pre-industrial baseline.
The significance of this is the rate at which the planet is warming, which is unprecedented as according to historical data. The rate is what concerns environmental scientists as it means that ecosystems etc. do not have the same time to adapt as compared to pre-historical periods of warming.
From the first line:
> It’s official: Earth’s average temperature climbed to more than 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels for the first time in 2024
First time in a very long time. Most certainly the first time since the first beginnings of civilization; I think also the first time since the existence of humans, or maybe even the existence of life at all, but I'm not 100% sure of that.
> your kitchen is burning, won't you do anything about it ?
> so what ? it burned once 40 years ago already
Literally in the subtitle: for one year so far
They mean when was the baseline. The correct answer is: since industrialization and reliable data
So in the larger Earth history there could have been a higher increase. We are talking about a super small sample on a huge scale.
No one is debating that the earth in the past was much hotter, and far less hospitable than it is today.
The issue here is that modern society was built with certain expectations of certain temperature ranges, and by burning petrochemicals and adding carbon to the atmosphere we have increased the hot house effect of CO2 in the atmosphere beyond the ability of the planet to absorb it, resulting in a net average increase in temperature on a global scale.
A layman's understanding of this:
- burning fossil fuels adds CO2 and CO to the atmosphere
- increased CO2 levels in the atmosphere increases the "greenhouse effect" --- this is easily proven with a science experiment 4th graders can do
- the added solar gain increases the temperature of the planet beyond what can be radiated out into space for that portion of the planet rotated out of the sunlight
- no one has been able to demonstrate that this additional solar energy is doing anything other than warming the planet --- if it isn't doing so, please explain in plain, simple words where this added energy is going and what it is doing
There have been bigger increases but most likely not faster ones though I am not sure how far back we have reliable data for rate of increase.
And even if so this rapid rate of increase is still not a good thing. It will require expensive adaptations and lead to extinctions.
It's possible there were higher spikes in the past, but I would guess that they were all pretty dramatic events, and yes the earth used to be much hotter in the past.
This is obvious if you think about it, all that carbon in the ground had to be in the air before photosynthetic life.
And before any life, the Earth was a molten ball of liquid rock.
The only time scale we care about is the duration human beings have been around. You know the planet being fine it's humans we are worried about and all that jazz.
"If we don't act soon then it will be too late!!!"
The climate hype will end inevitably. Only if warming becomes a real problem, people will start looking at (technical) solutions.
As long as we can "fight" climate by taxing, subventions, greenwashing, bans, restrictions, everything will be fine for the "people of power".
Like "war on terror", child pornography and pandemics, climate change is just another vehicle for global elites to gain more power, influence and wealth.
Being a real change happening in the world, it could also be a chance for YOU to join the powerful and wealthy if you can adapt to the new reality while other people are stuck in the old one.
But I suspect your logic is circular, because people who gain money and power through canny anticipation of change will just get lumped into your category of "global elites" confirming what you already believe.
As it goes, it seems that action against climate change measures is also being used as a vehicle for global elites to gain more power, influence and wealth. Honestly those billionaires will grasp onto anything.
If we have any technical geo engineering type solutions, I hope we try it on another planet first. Although we might find it hard to find something suitably equivalent.
If you're unwilling to accept the science of this, get off your computer. Don't drive your car, or heat your house this winter. The same scientific processes which led to all of society's advancement are utilized in predicting the consequences of climate change. There is no conspiracy.
I think advanced climate models aren't the place of contention is this debate, but the interpretation of those models, and the conclusion as to who has to do what, and when.
Climate has always been changing. Even before humans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles still holds, and explains quite a bit, though recent research added a few more factors, none of them human related.
There's no conspiracy, you just seem to believe more to the "TV approved" science.
Which bit exactly do Milankovitch cycles explain? Isn't the current orbital configuration such that the earth should be slowly cooling?
Do you have any sources for what you're saying?
Do you have any idea how fast current global warming is compared to historical changes? Go to https://xkcd.com/1732/ and scroll all the way down. That should give some perspective on that.
Do you have any idea how much more devastating current global warming is in our civilization of 8 billion people, all interconnected socioeconomically?
Or are you trying to say that global warming isn't human related? In that case, are you (a) willfully ignorant or (b) arguing in bad faith?
It should also be noted that that comic was published 8 years ago. We're now at +1.5c, which means we're actually doing worse than his "current path" line from back then.
You're alleging that there's "TV approved science", in which you're absolutely declaring a conspiracy that the "TV people" are colluding to distort the "facts".
I'd ask you to explain this[1], but you're arguing in bad faith to conform to your world view.
[1] https://assets.science.nasa.gov/dynamicimage/assets/science/...
Again, if you're unwilling to accept the findings of the organization responsible for a great many of society's technical advancements, then you're merely trolling.
[flagged]
Please AtlasBarfed with such a leet pseudo don't let yourself get trolled down into this kind of statement!
