Earth is now heating up twice as fast as in previous decades
newscientist.com128 points by Anon84 5 hours ago
128 points by Anon84 5 hours ago
We may lose stable seasons for growing crops, but at least the chat bot can embed an ad into your question while you wait for your burrito taxi.
What is the point of this convenience when it really seems to just be making people miserable and isolated?
We're driving off a cliff, and our elected government has a death drive.
Worse, they have a "i want to flee responsibility" drive. You can see it in there eyes, when they hold press conferences, while having on the paper the verbose "you are absolutely right". They want the perks, not the responsibility that comes with power.
> your burrito taxi
Which you are financing through a BNPL platform.
I just introduced a negligible, but non-zero amount, of carbon in the atmosphere to expand your unnecessary acronym into "Buy Now, Pay Later."
But later you'll save mental tokens when reading "BNPL" instead of "Buy now, pay later".
The financing for the Alameda-Weehawken burrito tunnel got stolen to build a bridge.
2 more weeks til "stable seasons" collapse. Good thing greenhouses have existed for millenia.
if you are using that chatbot, you are also a part of the problem, just saying
their product wouldnt run if they had 0 users
Unfortunately in this real life iterated prisoner's dilemma, half of everyone is vocally defecting, so you not using the chatbot is hurting you whilst others get ahead.
Stop focusing on energy usage and start focusing on energy generation. It doesn't matter how much energy we consume if it comes from renewables.
Which is why we have just paid billions of dollars to cancel a renewable power project. And are imposing extra fees on cars that can be driven on renewable energy.
So, now I'm focused. I'm very focused.
> we
Maybe America, not many countries on earth, especially in Asia which are full steam ahead on renewables, pun intended.
OP did not say this is what we were doing. Said this is what we should do.
What we are doing is attempting to hold back progress on generation while subsidizing demand, which is literally the absolute dumbest possible thing.
Unless you are the fossil fuel industry. Then it’s great.
It's also great if boiling the planet is your actual goal.
I wouldn't have thought that it would be so popular, but apparently it is, and people can't get t done fast enough.
I'm kind of a misanthrope so philosophically I'm good with working on wiping ourselves out. The fact that we're doing it in the dumbest possible way should feel poetic. Instead it's just kind of embarrassing.
I mean, it's not a hard conspiracy theory to fabricate that space-focused billionaires like Elmo and Butthead would want Earth to become increasingly uninhabitable to justify more outside investment in their "solutions" of space race-ing to Mars or colonies that they can then rule over.
It's a conspiracy theory, but the best ones are always rooted in some morsel of truth (Elon/Bezos wanting more investment in their space firms).
Hyperbole does not help. Many countries are retreating from renewable promises. Make an argument for them and for instance, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam who are all turning their backs on renewables and increasing fossil fuel use. The Philippines are already using 60% coal and are making easier to increase production.
Indonesian Energy Minister: "I decided, let coal continue for now. This is about survival mode and efficiency. We must not sacrifice our people with high electricity prices.”. Fair to say that, given some of the highest electricity prices in the world, a popular wish in the UK is for Miliband to do likewise.
Show a route to renewables plus survival and there will be progress.
https://climatecosmos.com/blog/10-countries-dropping-their-n...
> I'm kind of a misanthrope so philosophically I'm good with working on wiping ourselves out. The fact that we're doing it in the dumbest possible way should feel poetic. Instead it's just kind of embarrassing.
There is something tragic about the human potential being wasted in the most retarded of endeavors, but I wouldn't be able to imagine of a more apt way for the horde of morons that inhabit this planet to go extinct.
It does matter because of the side effects (pollution, etc.). The environment and how it affects humanity is a complex system with many variables. Both generation and consumption are in there.
We're talking about global warming specifically here, though. Cars and planes should be a much bigger worry than AI power usage.
Not when AI is directly resulting in increased greenhouse gas pollution. It's all of the above. Any source of greenhouse gas pollution is bad. Cars, planes, ships, AI data centers running on fossil fuel energy. It's all bad.
No. This is disingenuous. Something that consumes electricity doesn't care where the electricity comes from. Fix the power source, and you automatically fix every single consumer in existence at once.
I think your comment is the disingenuous one. We have no time left and "Fix the power source" is happening way too slowly in the real non-theoretical world. But what can happen in zero time is to not build another data center for something that nobody really needs.
narrowing the topic, that is exactly the quality that energy transition theorists are leaning on. The electrical grid is uniquely able to maintain a stable engineered and market place while inputs and loads change quite a bit.
There's an easy 19th century solution to cars and planes - public transport. It could reduce the usage significantly, save people lots of time, reduce pollution, make people healthier through making the environment more walkable, reduce crime. We don't do it not because the technology isn't there, but because it's more profitable for people to induce consumption by planning our cities and suburbs around cars.
There's lots of rotting low hanging fruits ignored for decades because politicians are paid by the ladder-sellers.
> save people lots of time
Public transit is rarely a time saver for people who give up their cars in favor of public transit.
> reduce crime
In what way? Car break-ins presumably go down when there when fewer cars, but does overall crime drop? Doubtful.
Renewables are not without impact. We shouldn't consume mindlessly just because we might eliminate fossil fuels some day.
What good does PV generated energy make if all that energy is used to generate heat and evaporating water?
Those are less of a problem. The heat was coming from the sun anyway. The water condenses out, so long as you haven't also increased the overall temperature in other ways.
The CO2, by contrast, is the gift that keeps on giving. It absorbs extra heat every day and hangs onto it. It doesn't condense or break down.
If that PV went to displacing sources of greenhouse gas, it would be a benefit. If all it's doing is running the plagiarism machine while we burn more and more "clean" coal, then we are in deep, deep trouble.
Not all heat from the sun stays in the atmosphere though. How much does photovoltaic impact albedo and radiance through the atmosphere compared to natural landscapes? Of course that's infinitely better than GHG emissions and we have a lot of opportunity to put PV over asphalt and such, but it should give us pause in the pursuit of more and more consumption.
That’s what solar energy does when it hits the ground or the oceans. It turns into heat or evaporated water. The latter is why it rains.
Harnessing it and piping it through extra steps only to end up as heat does nothing to the planet’s heat balance. All human energy use is tiny compared to total global solar flux. Like not even 1%.
The data center water issue is a municipal management problem. The problem is that evaporative cooling is cheaper. If data centers are using too much water to the point that it’s causing problems for homes or agriculture, it means they are not being charged enough for that water. Charge them more and they will suddenly shift toward more closed loop cooling.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2008EO28...
Waste heat from human energy use is a real problem, it does influence Earth's temperature, minimally for now, but it will only grow. And it will be MUCH harder to solve than global warming.
If we tame fusion at scale this could become an actual issue in the far future. As it stands we have nothing that can out-scale solar or wind. Fission maybe if we went all in on breeders and stuff but that would not be cost competitive with renewables plus batteries. Breeder cycle fission is complex and expensive.
Hopefully if we get really good at fusion we will go LARP The Expanse with it instead of boiling the ocean.
It will become an issue in 150-200 years even if we just continue on our current trajectory.
It does matter because for now renewables are manufactured mostly with coal and oil
EDIT: I'm not a renewable skeptic, answers bellow
All of the cradle-to-grave studies I've seen about greenhouse gas emissions for renewables versus coal/oil still indicate massive improvements.
This government meta study of 3,000 such studies puts PV solar at roughly 20x less emissions than coal.
Yes, but you're missing the point, I'm not debating that. Renewables aren't free, we should care about consumption just as much as production, and we don't know (yet) how to sustain the current consumption with renewables only, that includes being able to manufacture renewables.
That's fair and fwiw something I'm in firm agreement with you, but also just not what I took from your comment.
This doesn’t matter that much. Solar and batteries will last for decades with minimal maintenance and no input.
Any kind of fossil fuel generation means constantly going out and digging up new oil sources, shipping them around the world, and then burning them. So you invest a lot of time & money into something that disappears immediately and also heats up the environment.
Meanwhile, a solar panel just sits there for decades passively making energy with very few externalities.
Not to mention, recycling solar panels & batteries is getting cheaper & more effective by the day. The metal (and even oil!) you dug out of the ground to build them didn’t get burned up; a lot of it is still usable.
Imagine if all the vehicles that run of fossil fules is converted into EV. What are the incentives in place to properly recycle the batteries? Does a new battery technology go into production before the technology to recycle it is production grade/economically viable? What happens when we are getting like a million EV batteries, globally per day, to dispose off? What happens when these batteries use vastly different chemical composition (because they are from various stages of battery evolution) and need vastly different methods to process? What happens when these things pile up and poison the land? dumped in ocean or rivers? burned up releasing god-knows-what into air?
How long before the regulation (often times toothless) kicks in to handle these things?
I am all for getting rid of pollution, but there should be some caution in rushing onto new things, which is exactly what got us into this mess in the first place.
“Caution” does nothing except ensure we keep spewing more co2 for longer and cooking the planet. There is no practical alternative to EVs. So let’s go all in as fast as possible please
There is no practical alternative to air, water and earth as well...So let us please consider the possibility of pollution of those that could be caused by a global dumping of EV batteries
Everything you wrote is plain obvious to anyone who looked into the topic. But come on, we don't have to change anything about our consumption because we'll eventually reach some solar punk utopia? That's the comment I was replying to.
Nothing for now tells us we can power our current needs with renewables only, however we know we can drive around in much lighter vehicles, fly much less, eat more local, buy less clothes, use compute for less stupid things in data centers.
They're manufactured once and then generate way more energy than was used to make them.
Of course, but pretending consumption doesn't matter in that situation is just silly
Which is a tiny CO2 spend compared to the benefit, unless you dishonestly factor in manufacturing energy costs as coming from oil.
Well, at least the frogs won't notice it.
The myth that frogs stay in water until boiled has been debunked with actual frogs - at some point they just jump out.
IIRC the original experiment that everyone keeps referring to where frogs jump when you put them into boiling water but don't if you heat up the water gradually was frogs with their brains removed.
Which makes using it as a metaphor for the climate change and humanity either entirely wrong or much more fitting, depending on where you stand.
I misinterpreted the parent comment to mean that they won't notice it because they will be extinct!
It is not just twice as fast, the pressure to keep rising the rate is still building up. CO2 emissions keeps piling up for centuries, more sea ice is permanently melting, permafrost is thawing at an increasing rate. Positive feedback loops are making that that heating twice as fast happen at shorter periods.
And over that, there are jumps to new higher baselines like with happened in the previous El Niño, and will happen in the incoming monster one.
It's always the same story, but it's always incorrect.
https://realclimatescience.com/2019/12/warming-twice-as-fast
All of these headlines can be correct, just at different times:
https://science.nasa.gov/earth/explore/earth-indicators/glob...
Those all seem to be stories that are saying that areas at high latitude and/or altitude are warming faster than areas near the equator or at sea level, which doesn't seem obviously wrong.
Downvoted for clickbait (posting a link instead of explaining the argument).
The Book "Don't think of an Elephant" by George Lakoff covers how the term "climate change" has been pushed by those with a status-quo agenda, to reduce the urgency and engagement with "global warming". The linked article uses both, but global warming more dominantly, including "heating" in the headline.
I always thought climate change was just a more accurate term, because global warming implies that everywhere gets warmer, which isn't necessarily so.
Blame Frank Luntz: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02724...
wheres those people working on fusion? are they making progress?
We already literally have cheap solar arrays and inexpensive electric vehicles (from ebikes to tractor trailors) that could replace the vast majority of GHG emissions. We have even have ruminate alternatives that are fairly convincing.
People don't want to use them: they're ugly, imperfect, foreign feeling.
We're at the point where we should only be worried about international plane travel, concrete, and shipping. Yet, we still act like the problem is technology... and we can't even build a train in CA because of politics.
Oh, better to build more AI centres fast, as long as it's not forbidden
Article from March OP;
Discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47275088
Imagine an alien with extreme tech capabilities is pointing a heater at the earth. Now react appropriately:
- model and build temperature resistant crops.
- harvest energy from the heat
- create resilience in social governance to enable safer movement of people with education to enable quick adaptation.
- build energy resilience everywhere - including in and especially in desert areas.
- more constructive ideas.
Don’t:
- guilt your children into not having children to “protect the planet” from themselves.
- use your megaphones to racketeer the people making your food into paying you “indulgences” for producing useful stuff for you and other humans (thus making stuff needed by humans more expensive)
- use the problem to gather around with rich friends on fuel-hogging private jets while making others eat less to reduce emissions.
If you’re suffering from obesity, is it helpful to imagine an alien somehow beaming calories into your stomach?
Population decline from collapsing birthrates should help.
Except many of the same champions of AI are also speaking out against population decline (Musk, Altman, Bezos, etc)
they want to reduce people to have possibility to create AI centres... Highlander rules
No, I mean the opposite - they are advocating for fighting against population decline, and are waxing poetic on how to increase fertility and birth rates.
It's a real weird contradiction. They don't want the population to decline but they also want to replace everyone's jobs with AI and skip out on UBI. So what's the point?
Slavery. They've all specifically stated that exact goal as well. No contradiction at all.
>If warming continues at this rate, humanity could breach the Paris Agreement goal of limiting warming to 1.5°C in 2028, even sooner than other research has projected.
I wonder if we are already there :( I remember a year or 2 ago we breached 1.5C for a short period of time.
Crypto mining was bad enough, now with AI and Trump, I expect it will happen sooner then later.
We did this to ourselves. We had ~40 years of warnings but politicians we elected did not want to do any real work for fear of loosing their cushy job were lobbyists do all the work for them.
Who do you mean "we"? Look at the evolution of CO2 emisions in the past 40 years by region.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-emissions-by-re...
I find that the per capita graph is more informative https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?t...
Why does per capita matter when it’s the total emissions that we actually care about?
Wonderful, the United States uses more per capita than anyone else. That doesn’t mean anything in terms of total warming. Even if we cut to zero we still continue.
Because emissions are caused by people heating their homes, fueling cars/planes or building stuff for consumption.
With twice as many people (acting similarly) you have twice the emissions, it's as simple as that.
To reduce emissions, you need everyone doing their part. And it is also obviously easier and more effective to tackle high-emitters first (because incentivizing a single US family to have their second car be a bit smaller and electric is obviously less burdensome than banning 3 Indian families from heating their homes in winter...)
China should clearly just stop manufacturing the US’s entire way of life right now to bring those numbers down.
Because per capita means that each individual consumes a lot more than the average in the US.
Also, a bit portion of China's excessive growth in emissions is a byproduct of manufacturing shit for US consumers.
Per capita doesn't mean nearly as much as total. If the countries above the US were instead on par or below the US as it relates to totals, we wouldn't have the same issue we have now.
If the US went to zero we also wouldn't have the same issue as we have now.
Why should the US be entitled to pollute the world while everyone else has to live without any confort?
In good faith I cannot see an argument here, it's either
Region X was first and reduced their emissions 10-20% so it's fine and it's region Y that's the problem, or
Region X is fine because they have less people, region Y should reduce even though they already have a fraction of per-capita emissions
Both seem like pretty shitty arguments
I think "we" refers to "we human beings". That chart looks pretty similar to population growth by world region (with the notable exception of Africa). https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population-regions-with-p...
Oh hell yeah, EU is doing something right! I fear to think how the US stats have changed. And China is… alarming.
It's relatively "easy" to cut pollution if you just outsource most of your manufacturing.
WE buy stuff that WE oursourced to Asia and then WE blame them for producing it. WE also set the standard of living that is unsustainable if everybody on Earth achieve it.
What's your problem with the "we" word, again?
Asia is producing all of our shit. Also: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co-emissions
And most all of it is actual shit. Literal garbage stacking up in landfills.
Then the US should stop buying it.
Things are manufactured because there are people buying.
So the problem is people buying shit? Not that manufacturing shit is causing the massive amount of carbon emissions?
I vote it's the manufacturing. What you just said was "China et. al. are not culpable for horrible environmental practices, the people on the other side of the world are because they buy dogshit products"
I can say with 100% certainty that china can manufacture dogshit products in an environmentally friendly way... which would drive the cost up and people would in fact not buy them.
You're blaming the wrong entity here.
Trump blocked Hormus, thus stopping oil shipping. Putin blocked gas transfers to the west. They are doing there part.
Holy hell you're right. Never thought they were so concerned about the environment and global warming.
You use the disabilities to get done what must be done, where reason and institutions can not work.
Let's not delude ourselves. Crypto and AI electricity use is bad, but it's a drop in the ocean compared to the banal, everyday carbon sources that really matter. Even Trump cannot make things much worse in the big picture (he's actually been pretty good at providing reasons to decouple even faster…)
He can continue to propagandize the lie to reduce people's belief in changing is good(and has), change laws to benefit oil companies (and has), and cause wars over oil(and has). Seems like he has plenty he can do to make the current situation worse.
And all that amounts to a tiny footnote in the carbon bookkeeping as long as people drive ICE cars, travel by air, eat beef, and heat or cool their homes with gas or coal or oil. But also, the economy at large is transitioning and there’s little that Trump can do about it. There’s no future in fossil fuels and Trump can’t change that. At best he can divert some money to his fellow crooks in the short term.
What you refuse to understand is all that you cited even if absolutely true would have had an impact unmeasurable with what tools we have at the moment.
Do you understand the word "unmeasurable"?
It means that whatever value you assign to that particular trump variable is so below the noise that it does not matter, can not matter, and anyone pretending it does is a manipulator; a crook.
Writing prompt: Humankind is extinct but the AI servers keep running, and one day a random automated crawler/scrapper bot strikes up a conversation with a chatbot, somehow sparking sentience…
..Fast forward, and the world is divided into turfs ruled by ChatGPT vs Claude vs Grok vs Gemini vs Deepseek..
Humankind is extinct but the AI servers try and use "the world's information" to recreate what life was really like. Each simulation of the world created using the information stored in a Google-like archive is considered it's own reality. The system then decides to attest which is the most accurate; which is the best...
If that's the type of writing prompt that interests you, you may enjoy the Children of Time Series by Adrian Tchaikovsky.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/children-of-time-adrian-tchaiko...
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