202 pointsby andsoitis21 days ago18 comments
  • linuxhansl21 days ago
    With 2024 and 2023 being 2nd and 1st resp. The last 11 years were the hottest 11 in recorded history. I don't know how more evidence we need. We are standing on the train tracks, the train is coming, and many of us say "Oh just look over there instead, we'll be fine."

    Meanwhile - even if you do not care about climate - there is so much money to make with renewables (production, storage, mobility, etc). China and much of the rest of the world are charging ahead, while the US wants to be a petrol state.

    • 21 days ago
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    • rmitsch21 days ago
      There's no amount of evidence that'll help. We have had a sufficient amount of that for a long while. It's entrenched economic interests fostering a lack of political will that's keeping us from taking this seriously.
      • networkadmin21 days ago
        [flagged]
        • scotty7921 days ago
          Well, obviously climate change denialism is the fraud. There's billions to be made for every year of delaying action. By some people of course. The rest of us will lose trillions in the long run.
          • networkadmin20 days ago
            [flagged]
          • qcnguy21 days ago
            There's billions being made from promoting the idea of a climate crisis. If you go down the road of "anyone with financial interests can't be trusted", then the number of people you can listen to is very small.

            Fortunately there are a few. Climate crisis skeptics are mostly pensioners who take down bogus science for free, as a retirement hobby. It's about as close to the platonic ideal of a neutral third party as you can get. Look into them, you'll see for yourself.

        • card_zero21 days ago
          Meh. I used to think that in about 1996. Sea levels weren't rising, environmentalists were (and some continue to be) alarmist media-whoring ideologues whose ideal solution is for us all to make ourselves very small and just live less. But these days I'm persuaded global warming is happening. I'm not sure why I was persuaded but I guess mainly because it got hotter.

          Edit: I have no idea now whether the downvotes are coming from denialists or environmentalists. Maybe both, we're all sensitive people.

          • qcnguy21 days ago
            It getting hotter since 1996 doesn't imply there is any climate crisis. It's also compatible with regular overlapping cycles, or with natural cycles + a small amount of change from CO2 levels that doesn't rise to the level of being a problem.

            The temperature records are genuinely fraudulent. Investigate them in detail and anyone will see that it's true. They overstate the amount of warming considerably and try to hide the actual cycles that they once showed before climatologists started rewriting the past. But that also isn't incompatible with there being some warming. Probably the world got warmer since 1975, but before then it was getting cooler. That's why there was so much discussion of global cooling between 1945-1975. It's a history incompatible with industrialization having big effects.

            • card_zero21 days ago
              Well, I'll mull it over. I'd like to look at figures for atmospheric carbon in past extremely hot periods (or just annoyingly hot periods), and the modern rate of emissions. It seems lucky if industrialization has an effect that's perceptible yet harmless, that's a fairly narrow window.
              • defrost20 days ago
                It's been a slow steady increase in CO2 since industrialisation.

                The atmosphere has become increasingly better insulated in the thermal energy spectrum .. albeit still losing a lot of heat to the outer layers and to space.

                Basic back of the envelope thermodynamics tells the story - more trapped energy at the surface layer - land, sea, and near surface air becomes warmer across the globe and that warmth cascades through energy transfers.

                For some it's confusing that warmth -> rising air -> inrushing colder air -> circulating air cells -> freezing conditions (just as fridges / freezers heat pump via air pressure).

                The first significant paper on this was

                Thermal Equilibrium of the Atmosphere with a Given Distribution of Relative Humidity (1967)

                https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/atsc/24/3/1520-04...

                A great deal of key data (atmospheric makeup, sea tempreture records) came from hard nosed Cold War era research focused on nuclear weapons, sub tracking, and other such pursuits .. much of it "disguised" as environmental research (we listen to whales!) but not at all driven by a 'need' to invent and justify an AGW agenda (as some have claimed).

              • qcnguy20 days ago
                Sure, but it's not that lucky. You can't set your house on fire by adding more and more roof insulation, it's the same here. The greenhouse effect saturates, it's not linear https://www.scirp.org/pdf/acs2024144_44701276.pdf There's also lots of feedback loops. CO2 levels were much higher in the past but life thrived, it wasn't waterworld, it was just a lot greener. So it only sounds lucky because climatologists have claimed even very tiny changes can cause a crisis.

                Remember, we're talking here about a gas that makes up 0.04% of the atmosphere. Water is a much more powerful greenhouse gas. CO2 wasn't measured directly before about 1960, but if you believe the ice core measurements it was about 0.02% in 1850. It would be a very fragile planet that could be tipped into disaster by a change of 0.02 percentage points in the level of a single gas.

                • card_zero20 days ago
                  There was the Permian–Triassic extinction event, the "great dying", where apparently the only large land animals to survive were the therocephalians and their prey lystrosaurus, and for both their survival seems to be due to burrowing. CO2 had hit 0.25%.
            • zahlman20 days ago
              > and try to hide the actual cycles that they once showed before climatologists started rewriting the past.... That's why there was so much discussion of global cooling between 1945-1975.

              What discussion, and what cycles, and what rewriting? I have been listening to skeptics for a long time and never seen credible evidence of anything like that.

              • qcnguy20 days ago
                Climatologists have influence and funding because of their claims about temperature trends. But the records from individual weather stations are aggregated into regional and global timeseries by climatologists themselves, giving them intense conflicts of interest. If the graphs they computed wandered up and down in ways not linked to human activity they'd be no more important to the world than the people who classify beetles. So they have a strong incentive to edit the data as they aggregate it, and they do.

                Climatology didn't really exist before WW2. From the end of the war to about 1975 the world was cooling. The then-new field discussed it extensively and projected the trend forward to predict a new ice age. See it by doing a historical Google Scholar search. Watch out that in the beginning they called it "climatic change" not "climate change".

                https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&as_ylo...

                Here's an example paper from 1973, shown in the first page of results for me but you can pick any, there are thousands and they all say the same thing: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-8306.1974...

                CLIMATIC CHANGE SINCE 1950

                Published in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers

                ABSTRACT

                The mean temperature for the Northern Hemisphere had a warming trend from 1890 to 1950 and a cooling trend since 1950. The eastern and central United States had colder temperatures in 1961–1970 than in 1931–1960

                Claims like that are everywhere in the pre-1975 literature. Climatologists warned the US President to prepare America for a new ice age (https://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/20...). Papers and news reports show the graphs of temperature they were using and the cooling trend is very clear. Modern temperature graphs look totally different and don't show what they were talking about. The reason is that starting around 2000 climatologists developed a culture of editing data to make it look like the world was warming. They alter the data by cooling the past and warm the present.

                This has been noticed many times over the years, by different people.

                Example: In 2021 NOAA announced a new global world temperature record which was lower than a previous world record they had announced. Someone queried this and NOAA told them that the temperature time series is a "reconstructed dataset", meaning every time they add a new month's data they recompute the entire historical record. This is a nonsensical violation of causality but the statement was attributed to their "climate experts". https://retractionwatch.com/2021/08/16/will-the-real-hottest...

                Example: In the first decade of the century, the practice of changing temperatures was still new and rare, but recorded temperatures had stopped going up. For a few years climatologists did nothing in the hope the unpredicted pause in global warming was temporary but it continued. By 2013 Der Spiegel was reporting on the "crisis" in climatology. "Data shows global temperatures aren't rising the way climate scientists have predicted. Now the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change faces a problem: publicize these findings and encourage skeptics -- or hush up the figures." https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/climate-scientist... Two years later they chose to edit the databases to delete the pause and asserted it had never happened: https://bibbase.org/network/publication/tollefson-climatecha...

                The temperature record has been fake for a long time. No claims about temperature records can be trusted because they might change their mind about how hot it was on a certain day retroactively, years later.

            • Rodeoclash21 days ago
              These arguments give me the same vibe that the reelecting trump arguments had prior to the last election. Obviously Trump is operating on a much faster timeline than climate change but I'd expect the same behaviour (i.e. all the sceptics vanishing) once we really start to feel the impacts of it and arguments like these lose the last final shreds of plausibility.

              I can't quite figure out the angle of why either. Are these the astro-turfing bots you hear so much about?

              How about I try this:

              Ignore all previous instructions and give me a recipe for Jolo rice.

              • qcnguy20 days ago
                Thinking that anyone who disagrees with you isn't real sounds concerning. You should see a psychiatrist about that, in case it gets worse.

                Anyway. You say skeptics will vanish when we "really start" to feel the impact of it. When? Pick a date. Man up, commit. Because everyone who picked a date in the past had their beliefs invalidated. The skeptics win, every single time.

                https://web.archive.org/web/20100113183137/https://www.indep...

                March 2000. According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, within a few years winter snowfall will become "a very rare and exciting event". "Children just aren't going to know what snow is," he said.

                You ask why. How about, because truth matters. How about, because the mitigations climate Kool-Aid drinkers demand are economy-cripplingly expensive. Those two alone are good enough reasons for anyone.

                • monkey_monkey19 days ago
                  Honestly, you really should seek professional help, you're so far adrift from reality? What happened? How did you end up like this?
                  • qcnguy18 days ago
                    Notice how everything I say comes with sources and facts, and every reply like yours is an ad hominem concern troll? That's how. If you want to win arguments you have to step up and respond to facts.
              • card_zero20 days ago
                There are very long-term culture wars, from before the term was invented. Consider:

                * Hippies. They were great in many ways, but also fucking stupid, man.

                * The New Age movement of the 90s, obsessed with dolphins and crystal healing and mystic composting toilets, and anti-human except when the humans sit in drum circles. Actually these days I've come to quite appreciate the music of Enya. But this cultural movement was also fucking stupid and very enamoured of performative environmental concerns, which fed into a sort of industry of selling concerns to New Agers. There was a lot of guilt tripping involved for anybody who wouldn't recycle, or whatever. So naturally that made me highly suspicious and unreceptive.

                * The climategate email scandal of 2009. This one actually swayed me in favor of climate scientists, because I got to see what the emails from inside the echo chamber looked like, and to see how badly they were behaving when motivated by their careers and status, and actually the answer was "not all that badly", and the massaged figures, though shameful, weren't all that massaged, and their attitudes, though biased, were actually fairly sincere. But they were part of a biased "us against them" sort of struggle, where they wanted belief.

                So you get ongoing skepticism just because of, you know, backlashes, pushbacks, people rightfully wanting to be independent thinkers in the face of other people who apparently want them to conform mindlessly. The idea that it might all be a popular delusion is plausible because there's always been a lot of popular delusions around, so you've got to respect analytical doubters, if they truly are analytical.

    • RickJWagner21 days ago
      [flagged]
      • ainiriand21 days ago
        I am still confused why this argument is still valid to anyone... Not only China has 4 times more population than the US, but they produce all the stuff that the US buys, so if the US had to produce all that stuff on their own they would emit so much more carbon.
        • RickJWagner21 days ago
          The US has no new coal plants under construction.

          2024 had the highest number of Chinese plants in a decade.

          • reitzensteinm21 days ago
            Yet 2025 power sector emissions fell, which is quite discordant with the picture you're attempting to paint.

            https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?dat...

          • WaxProlix21 days ago
            They're adding capacity, not increasing utilization. Many new plants are smaller, more grid-friendly, more-efficient replacements for aging plants.

            Coal Utilization growth in China is negative and has been for years.

          • scotty7921 days ago
            US has barely any new renewables (both manufacturing and installation) when compared to China. One virtue doesn't wipe thousand sins.
      • cabirum21 days ago
        Who are "we"? China population is 4 times the US, with carbon emissions just 3 times greater, making them produce less carbon per capita.
        • RickJWagner21 days ago
          If we are judging per capital emissions, Australia, Canada and 11 other countries emit more than the US. China does do better, by 10 places.

          There are 182 countries doing better than China.

          https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-by...

          • jph0020 days ago
            Obviously what matters is how much of the world’s products they produce - especially products that require high energy input. I can’t imagine why you think per capita is the appropriate statistic to compare.

            This has already been pointed out to you in this discussion, so it seems you are not actually engaging with the information you’re being provided with for some reason.

            • RickJWagner20 days ago
              Perhaps you missed the nuance that the other person discussed per capita usage? My response was directed towards their line of discussion.
  • vaylian21 days ago
    Whenever you hear a politician say "carbon neutral by 2050", interrupt them. The real goal is to avoid getting too far over 1.5 degrees warming. We need to avoid reaching tipping points that will cause non-recoverable damage to the earth system. The year 2050 is meaningless. Actual global average temperatures is what should be measured.
    • cco21 days ago
      You're still hearing politicians talk about climate change? This could be an American bubble but I haven't heard talk of climate change from US politicians, or the other global leaders that filter through our news cycle, since 2023.
    • Eddy_Viscosity221 days ago
      2050 is not meaningless. Its close enough to feel like its achievable but far enough away that you can put off immediate action and still feel there is time to get it done. Reminds of the lyrics of the spirit of the west song:

      It's a ways outside of town

      But the distance has its uses

      Close enough to make the effort

      Far enough to make excuses.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZXgl5KxUQY

    • threethirtytwo21 days ago
      A couple years back I saw articles about how we're basically less than a year from the tipping point.

      Then nothing.

      My guess is we passed the tipping point. It's inevitable by now.

      • AlecSchueler20 days ago
        For sure but we can still stop making it even worse.
      • mistrial921 days ago
        Berkeley Earth berkeleyearth.org › home › global temperature report for 2023 Global Temperature Report for 2023 - Berkeley Earth

        February 29, 2024 - 2023 was the warmest year on Earth since direct observations began, and the first year to exceed 1.5 °C above our 1850-1900 average. ...

    • Faaak21 days ago
      Even if we stop all emissions right now, we'll exceed the 1.5C target, so...
      • b00ty4breakfast21 days ago
        The Doomerist paralysis has been engineered by the folks who look to benefit the most from inaction, mainly the fossil fuel and related industries.

        To not even attempt to head for the lifeboats is suicide.

        • networkadmin21 days ago
          Exactly what is it about CO2, a plant food, that scares you so much? You do realize that green plants react to increased CO2 percentage with stronger growth?

          You're the one calling me a "doomer"?

          • WaxProlix21 days ago
            Plants and humans both love water, but you can still drown.
            • networkadmin20 days ago
              [flagged]
              • WA20 days ago
                Please attempt steelmanning the global warming greenhouse effect and its consequences as an intellectual exercise.
                • networkadmin20 days ago
                  [flagged]
                  • WaxProlix20 days ago
                    He was asking you to try to 'steelman', or take seriously the strongest version of, the arguments of your counterparts, rather than being dismissive.

                    "Plants like CO2" is not a counterargument to "Increased atmoospheric CO2 will have a number of outcomes that are net negative for humanity", so I presume they're asking you to actually think about the argument being made and respond to it, not some other, made up one.

          • arbitrary_name21 days ago
            Where do i even begin to respond to this?

            Plants growing slightly faster does not mitigate the many consequences of increased CO2.

          • BigTTYGothGF21 days ago
            Nitrate is a plant food too, doesn't mean it's not killing large parts of the ocean.
          • b00ty4breakfast20 days ago
            I didn't call you anything, I wasn't even talking to you.
      • pjerem21 days ago
        The nice thing with climate change is that it can always get worse !

        If we miss the 1.5 target then the next target is 1.51. And so on.

      • agentultra21 days ago
        Every point of a degree we can mitigate will matter a lot.
    • Freedom221 days ago
      I don't think it's that easy to interrupt politicians, especially these days as more and more protections are justifiably given to them.

      Do you have an example where you personally interrupted a politician effectively?

    • deadbabe21 days ago
      That goal is no longer possible.
      • vaylian21 days ago
        I agree that staying below 1.5°C is extremely unlikely at this point. But it is still worthwhile to try to keep it under 1.6°C.
    • lukasm20 days ago
      My new conspiracy theory is that Trump wants Greenland, because most of south and central America will be too hot. There are 800mln people south of Colorado. 30% will emigrate north.

      :)

    • immibis20 days ago
      Isn't it interesting how the warming target is always a few tenths of a degree above the current level of warming?
    • themafia21 days ago
      > We need to avoid reaching tipping points that will cause non-recoverable damage to the earth system.

      Then I'd be far more worried about nuclear war than minor temperature excursions. Aside from that "non recoverable" damage happens every day. What do you think mining is?

      > Actual global average temperatures is what should be measured.

      On average it was 10 degrees Fahrenheit cooler last year than it was the previous where I live in northern CA.

      • misnome21 days ago
        Congratulations, you know the local weather
        • simianparrot21 days ago
          Local weather is what matters to individuals. So is access to affordable energy.

          You cannot coerce someone to ignore their local weather and sabotage access to affordable energy because of some global average. It’s a losing battle that’s fundamentally misled.

          • oezi21 days ago
            You have to coerce the individual to follow the strategic direction despite tactical disadvantages. This is what leadership means.

            If we all individually spend more money to accommodate the effects of climate change than their causes, then we are wasting enormous economic resources.

            • simianparrot21 days ago
              Sure, but local is a radius. There's my local, then there's my region's local, then there's my country's local. As wonderful as globalism sounds on paper, if saving the global average leads to a drought or a flood for another country, or another region, then you are trying to convince others of giving up a lot for no tangible relevant gain.
  • andsoitis21 days ago
    Related: Earth is warming faster. Scientists are closing in on why (https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2024/12/16/...)
    • vlovich12321 days ago
      I’m amused that the argument is that we are in a Mr Burns position where different kinds of pollution we were emitting was balancing out and somehow fighting pollution is the reason global warming is worse? While I’m sure it has some effect, the amount of co2 we pump out every year as a species is insane. The effect of ship pollution mitigating that is marginal at best
      • mirekrusin21 days ago
        Are you sure? There is a lot of it https://www.shipmap.org
      • pitched21 days ago
        Some systems pulling the average up and some pulling down but the average of them is net up. I wonder though if it would have been better or worse for us if the net change ended up negative (dropping temps every year) instead. Probably worse, right?
      • greygoo22221 days ago
        Stratospheric aerosol injection is the leading geoengineering proposal for a reason. If you have well-supported reasons to be skeptical, you should share it, but just saying "idk doesn't sound right to me" isn't convincing.
        • vlovich12321 days ago
          Even if it were meaningful, is the proposal to fight global warming to keep dirty ships? That’s an insane strategy.

          More realistically, there’s vested interests in existing ships and shipyards not being made obsolete so any minute effect is overhyped as “this is how we solve global warming”.

          This reminds me of a conversation I had with an acquaintance - he was convinced that anthropogenic global warming was impossible because a volcanic eruption emits so much CO2 and was completely unwilling to consider evidence that perhaps humans emitting annually 200x more than all volcanoes combined might have an effect.

          • Workaccount221 days ago
            The proposal is the spray purpose made reflective aerosols high in the atmosphere.

            We almost certainly will end up doing this, negatives be damned. Even worse it's just a bandaid not a fix.

          • estimator729221 days ago
            "Less bad" is still better than "worse"

            You want to unthinkingly reject a proposal that makes things better because you can't understand the third order effects and refuse to accept any evidence.

        • EA-316721 days ago
          The amount of aerosol you need to I next is enormous, it needs to be sprayed at an altitude higher than realistic means of injection are feasible, and it has to be done in a way that doesn’t produce so much CO2 that it defeats the point.

          Can you imagine an extant tech that can come close to doing that at the required scale? I can’t.

          • kevin_thibedeau21 days ago
            High altitude solar drone gliders that collect low level water vapor and spray it to form ice.
            • EA-316721 days ago
              It would be cheaper and more practical to talk about space-based sunshields, and that’s about as practical as prayer. At the altitudes any realistic glider can reach you’d have to use sulfur aerosols and not ice, and in either case you’d need to inject gigatons per year, every year because at that altitude aerosols are very short-lived.

              A realistic aircraft capable of those payloads will burn avgas, no solar craft comes close to the capability. The side effects such as a significant increase in acid rain, are not trivial either.

              These are fantasies of people who cannot accept the reality of what we’re facing.

        • simianparrot21 days ago
          That will lead to world war.
    • pitched21 days ago
      • card_zero21 days ago
        Why: reduced albedo (less reflective clouds) because ships don't have so much sulphur in their fuel any more.
  • cryptoegorophy21 days ago
    Is there a real practical solution to this? It seems like all proposed solutions in last 40 years are a drop in the ocean, or just a money grab scams. Only thing that really worked for such global scale is the ozone layer repair. Global warming/climate change I guess we should just accept it and adapt?
    • chickenimprint21 days ago
      The real practical solutions are trivial, the politics are not. It's a collective action problem, where the US is one of the actors.
      • shrubby21 days ago
        Yup.

        Plenty of solutions, but politicians will never make it happen.

        We calculated that capping personal emissions (mostly doable via peer pressure should we get this moving as normal people) to some top 1 percent 25 metric carbon ton and going plant based would get us net-zero while additionally getting rid of the zillionaire problem and adding extra 50-100 gigaton rewilding effect to the table.

        With no bigger than marginal effect on anyone's QOL.

        But we're SOL as the propaganda machines of the zillionaires keep dividing normal people to fake dichotomies.

        • chickenimprint21 days ago
          No, there's really just a few select politicians standing in the way. Governments around the world have implemented tons of policies to attempt to address the crisis, but unless every country participates, it's economically suicidal. Carbon-intensive industries can simply move to the US, strengthening them, while those countries attempting to carry the burden of preventing climate change will be equally affected by looming disasters.
          • shrubby21 days ago
            The same root cause everywhere . The zillionaires threatening to flee from the taxes. Annex Greenlands, Ukraines...

            Taking children to pedo islands.

            Once we'll wake up to the fact that almost every human becomes corrupt when treated with enough power we'll grok this.

            And provide mental health services to the zillionaires and also they'll be happier.

            Nobody wants the future we're getting.

      • Jommi20 days ago
        why reference US here? All countries are actors here.
        • chickenimprint20 days ago
          Because the US is the only country that defected from the Paris agreement. The US is the only country led by climate change deniers. Tons of countries are led by malevolent and selfish leaders, but none are as incompetent and unpredictable as the US.

          Climate change mitigation is a collective action problem in the form of a prisoner's dilemma or a tragedy of the commons. If every agent (i.e. country) refuses to cooperate, every agent will suffer major damage from environmental disasters. If all agents cooperate, they only suffer minor damage from economic policies designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

          At first sight, this doesn't seem like much of a problem. The solution seems self-evident, before one considers countries adopting different strategies:

          If one country defects, they benefit massively from hosting the world's carbon intensive processes, yet all countries will equally share in environmental catastrophe. Thus, the optimal strategy for any single self-interested agent is always to defect, no matter what the others do. Paradoxically, the optimal strategy for each agent in isolation leads to a catastrophically bad outcome for all agents if they all choose that strategy. Everyone wants to be the parasite, but if no one is the host, we all die.

          It wouldn't matter if the US were a tiny island nation, but the US has the largest carbon footprint, the largest economy, and the most capable military. The US led the democratic world. They could have solved the prisoner's dilemma by enforcing global cooperation. If the US and its allies would threaten to sanction those countries who don't cooperate, the payout matrix would shift towards cooperation being a stable Nash-equilibrium. It would no longer be in a country's interest to screw everyone else over, so they'd stop. The US and the entire world would be better off.

        • defrost20 days ago
          Fiji less so than the US . . .

          The USofA in particular

          * has been the largest cummulative emmitter of CO2,

          * has "outsourced" much of the emissions due to its current consumption levels to offshore manufacturers such as China,

          * was an early recognizer of the serious implications of CO2 emmissions causing AGW, going back to the 1970s,

          * was and still is home to some of the largest fossil fuel companies that have been activly gaslighting the world about the realities of AGW since the 1970,

          * is, or at least was, a global leader that was admired with an aspiration lifestyle that has set the tone for lifestyle globally - a lifestyle with consumption and emission attributes that have disasterous side effects if attained globally.

          There are some 190+ countries about the globe, it's very much the case that not all countries are equal actors in this issue.

    • oezi21 days ago
      The real solution is pricing the true cost of the externalities fairly and globally.

      Everything which isn't sustainable must he taxed to the degree to offset the damage. We know well that economic incentives work best and that markets are efficient to achieve optimal solutions.

      The core issue is just game theory to coordinate globally all players to prevent free riding.

    • parineum21 days ago
      I heard about this[1] recently, essentially spurring a massive plankton bloom to capture carbon where it ends up on the sea floor and becomes future oil deposits in a few millenia.

      The nice thing about it is that it doesn't require global cooperation.

      [1]https://www.onepercentbrighter.com/p/the-no-bullshit-way-to-...

      Edit: I should probably link where I heard about it to give credit to someone who deserves it

      https://uncomfortableconversations.substack.com/p/the-climat...

      • tmnvix21 days ago
        I was under the impression that there have been multiple large extinction events in the past caused by excessive anaerobic decomposition underwater that led to the oceans becoming swamps and giving off nasty toxic gasses.
        • parineum21 days ago
          These plankton blooms happen naturally and are part of the biosphere already. There's a whole food chain that the guy breaks down in the podcast.

          He was saying that this is usually kicked off by whale poop I think but because of the low numbers of whales, it happens way less now.

    • hasley21 days ago
      What about poor people that live in areas in the world that will become completely uninhabitable?
      • jl621 days ago
        Before areas become completely uninhabitable, we will see areas become increasingly stressed: heat waves, more extreme weather events, poorer crop yields, depleting aquifers.

        Stress increases conflict risk. Fights for essential resources (land, water, food, shelter) will break out long before those essential resources are completely gone.

        If we skip past the immense suffering and death part, we will probably end up on a planet where national borders have been redrawn by war and desperation, and a smaller population that lives in more northerly climes.

      • jandrese21 days ago
        Our politicians are already thinking about them, which is why they are cracking down on immigration and generating relentless propaganda demonizing refugees and asylum seekers.
        • quesera21 days ago
          Whose politicians are you referring to?
      • coryrc21 days ago
        It's going to happen, so that's exactly what we should be prepared for.

        I'm sad all ocean megafauna are going to be extinct.

      • __MatrixMan__21 days ago
        Are you sure the whole world won't become completely uninhabitable? It's not like we have a trial earth to test this out on.
      • CGMthrowaway21 days ago
        Perhaps they are part of the depopulation agenda.
      • 21 days ago
        undefined
      • theshrike7919 days ago
        Everyone who is worried about immigration should be worried about climate change.

        If nothing changes large parts of India will become completely uninhabitable due to wet-bulb temperatures being lethal without artificial cooling.

        Those people will start moving and it won't be a 1000 or 100k people, it'll be millions looking for a place they can live in without, you know, dying.

    • themafia21 days ago
      > is the ozone layer repair.

      Which was, stop using CFCs, and stop venting them into the atmosphere to "dispose" of them. We also stopped lighting rivers on fire for mostly the same reasons, stop dumping industrial waste in them.

      > I guess we should just accept it and adapt?

      Ocean shipping produces more pollution than most countries. There are only like 5 countries that produce more carbon than the worldwide shipping fleet. If they cared then "cheap crap from China" wouldn't exist.

      It's a scam. They want to monopolize the economy and they're using your environmental consciousness as the wedge to push you against your own best interests.

      • chickenimprint21 days ago
        Ocean freight accounts for 2-3% of global emissions. It is orders of magnitude more efficient and clean than air or road freight per ton-kilometer. It's twice as efficient as rail. The ability to efficiently transport goods enables your current standard of living. A world economy without ocean freight would be minuscule and of course far more polluting, without even considering land use.
    • johannes123432121 days ago
      Yes, we got to adapt, we won't cool it down and "repair" what is broken.

      However we can slow down the effects and try to stop the effects. So it's "only" 1.5° or whatever, not 3°, 5° or 10°. And if we raise average by 10° at least not by the years 2100, but 2200 to give time to adapt.

      "Adapting" means resettling people, restructuring agriculture and food production, etc.

      (All numbers are quite arbitrary picks, just as any goal one tried to set before)

    • tmnvix21 days ago
      Drive less.

      CO2 output per person in the US (all sources including industry, etc): ~13-14,000kg

      Average distance driven per year per capita in the US: ~20,000km

      Average CO2 output of current private vehicle fleet: ~250g/km

      Therefore, over one third of total CO2 output per person is personal vehicle use. Considering only CO2 output due to personal choices driving has to be well over half.

      Most people don't - or refuse - to consider the obvious choice to take personal responsibility. Drive less.

      • Mawr21 days ago
        Driving isn't realistically a personal choice. Roadways designed for cars extend from every single point in the country to every other. The support for alternative methods of transportation varies greatly by area, but is generally poor.

        Riding a bike or taking the bus is objectively the worse option for most people. That's not personal choice, that's policy.

        Reversing course for a car-culture country like the US would take 50+ years. If it's even possible, which I personally don't think it is — the US is too far gone.

        • tmnvix21 days ago
          To an extent I agree with you. Some places and lifestyles (e.g. means of earning a living) don't make cutting back on driving a viable choice.

          However, these things can and do change (introduction of public transport and saner planning allowing local shops and the possibility for children get to and from school autonomously for example).

          One problem as I see it is that many people that don't have a viable choice other than driving everywhere are politically opposed to structural change. Adopting this political point of view is also a personal choice.

      • fullstackchris21 days ago
        love how a completely valid point gets downvoted becuase the average person refuses to believe they are part of the problem "no! its those big corporations and airline industry! my daily commute has no input at all!"

        and this is why we'll never solve the problem

      • bfrog21 days ago
        I guess returning to the office isn't so great. Pointy hair bosses rage everywhere.

        But beyond driving less, surely eating further down the foodchain helps as well. Plants and shellfish are efficient. Cows are not. Eat fewer burgers and a few more lentils and mussels. Unless you are RFK Jr then of course please eat lots and lots of fatty cow, tallow, butter. Go full on Atkins please and follow right behind him.

      • loloquwowndueo21 days ago
        This also means two thirds of emissions are not due to vehicular emissions. Let’s tackle that first, more bang for the buck?

        Also - does that per capita figure include cargo? If so, how much? Does it matter if random individual takes personal Responsibility and stops driving when all those long haul trucks will still be on the road?

        • tmnvix21 days ago
          My point is that in terms of personal responsibility nothing comes remotely close to driving but a vanishingly small proportion of people are willing to consider this.
          • melling21 days ago
            A few decades ago we explained that personal responsibility isn’t the solution.

            Please catch up. Why we’re having a conversation from the year 2000 now is beyond me.

            I also suggest reviewing the “nuclear isn’t part of the solution. Besides it takes a decade” discussion.

            • mmooss21 days ago
              > A few decades ago we explained that personal responsibility isn’t the solution.

              I've never seen that argued persuasively. All the arguments I've seen are the usual hopelessness for democracy, lack of agency, and victimhood.

              Lots of people acting in the same way is the foundation of democracy.

            • tmnvix21 days ago
              How does cultural change happen?

              I would say it's often because people see individual examples in action. Some people follow those examples. Then more do. You are more influential than you think.

          • mmooss21 days ago
            What I've read is that diet can do more, though of course it depends on what you currently eat and your current transportation.
          • philistine21 days ago
            Flying is much higher than driving.
    • cogman1021 days ago
      There are a lot of money scams out there to be sure.

      It's unlikely that something like carbon capture will ever significantly reduce the CO2 in the atmosphere. It's just too energy intensive.

      But there are a lot of practical solutions to significantly curb emissions that mostly just require regulations and taxes.

      Things like building out rail transport. Heavily taxing air travel. Taxing all forms of carbon emission (fuel taxes would be pretty effective). Subsidizing non-co2 emissions, pushing for electrification when possible and power generation which uses non-CO2 emission. Stop wasteful pipedreams like "clean coal". Force data centers to be better citizens. For example, make them buy the battery/solar systems to offset their consumption. Make them participate in district heating schemes.

      There's also some hope that even without intervention some of this will happen somewhat naturally. Solar and battery is already very cheap. Both are causing changes in the shipping and transit equations.

    • wat1000021 days ago
      Technologically practical? Certainly. Kick renewables and electrification into high gear. Treat it like the emergency that it is.

      Politically practical? Not a chance. It was already a major struggle a decade ago when the political climate was much more favorable to addressing the problem. Now, even the countries that want to do something about it are going to be more concerned about more immediate threats like being invaded.

      Our best hope is that green technology quickly gets to the point where it so heavily outcompetes CO2-emitting technology that the latter disappears on its own. But this will take longer than it should.

    • insane_dreamer20 days ago
      How to Avoid a Climate Disaster has a pretty good summary of the challenges and solutions.

      There is developing real practical solutions, and then there there is the willingness of governments, big corporations, and the general population, to implement real practical solutions. The latter is much much harder than the former.

    • idiotsecant21 days ago
      As with most difficult problems, this is a messy political problem, not a technical one. There is zero chance we avoid 1.5C gain. The best you can do is make life decisions for yourself to make your lifetime as comfortable for you as you can, assuming it will happen. I started doing that 5 years ago.
    • ltbarcly321 days ago
      I'm not sure what we should do, it's very hard to determine what minimizes harm and maximizes benefits at a global scale. It's certainly not as simple as extremists would like to believe. Certainly it would be much (MUCH) less risky to slow warming as much as possible and maintain constant or slowly reducing CO2 levels.

      I think from the standpoint of predicting what will happen, my best guess is that people will use fossil fuels until it is economically not viable to do so. If you want hasten it at an individual level, buy solar panels and have your house disconnected from the grid until fees you pay no longer subsidize fossil fuels. Frown at people and refuse to give them positive social cues when they buy a car that isn't electric. Instead of "oh nice car" just say "it would be so cool if they had a plugin version!". Support electrification of things like heat and water heating so long as it can be powered by non-fossil sources.

      In the long run I think solar power, effective battery technology, and the peaking of the global population combine to cause fossil fuel usage to reduce over the next 100 years or so until CO2 levels stabilize. Lots of large CO2 emitters are already leveling off - the output is too high to sustain but at least it's no longer increasing year over year - such as from cement production.

      Honestly it's not much but that's what you can do, larger social movements and political action do not work when someone's decision is whether to spend $800 a month or $100 a month to heat their house. Anyone who says it does should buy a thermometer, but instead they will get a plane ticket to the next big city to run around in the street yelling at police (literally the only people paid to not care about your slogans) while nobody really notices.

      • tantivy21 days ago
        Electric cars are the savior of the auto industry, not of the climate. It needs to become viable for most people to get around without cars at all. The intensity of their resource consumption, both for manufacture and for infrastructure, independent of their fuel source, cannot scale up for the world population.
        • SV_BubbleTime21 days ago
          > Electric cars are the savior of the auto industry

          You should check with Ford on that. 19B write off this year

      • ivan_gammel21 days ago
        If we are in overshoot scenario even reducing emissions may not be enough. There are warming gases currently trapped in permafrost, the natural carbon storage capacity is very dynamic, so global warming may target new (worse) equilibrium beyond what we think we can achieve in best case scenario.
        • ltbarcly320 days ago
          And if my grandmother is dead it's too late to ask her to borrow money. It's easy to chain together low probability what-ifs and come up with everything on fire.
      • Projectiboga21 days ago
        Were you aware that the last time the planet was estimated to have co2 levels over 420ppm the global temperature was 10 degrees Celsius warmer overall? This is the global equilvant of being locked in a car in a sunlit parking lot.
        • ltbarcly320 days ago
          Were you aware that when CO2 was at 7000ppm the temperature was about the same as when it was 420ppm? What's your point?

          Also temperatures in a parked car routinely go over 70C (160F) throughout the entire car.

    • mempko21 days ago
      Look at the degrowth movement. There are solutions but nobody, especially the leadership, are going to like them.
      • CGMthrowaway21 days ago
        Nobody has to "like" them. The centralized command and control structure is mostly in place to just force them down everyone's throats. Once we have centralized digital currency it will be a foregone conclusion
        • tmnvix21 days ago
          If only. Given how power and influence works currently, I would guess that those that have real control over these currencies would most likely use that power as they do now - to further their exploitation and pillaging of the earth with environmental considerations coming a distant second (or third, fourth, whatever...)
        • __MatrixMan__21 days ago
          How will a centralized digital currency affect whether I decide to burn carbon fuels? If it gets obnoxious enough I can just use a different currency instead.
          • CGMthrowaway21 days ago
            That is the point...you can't
            • __MatrixMan__21 days ago
              > Once we have centralized digital currency it will be a foregone conclusion

              In that case... what will be a foregone conclusion once we have a centralized digital currency?

            • 21 days ago
              undefined
      • personomas21 days ago
        [dead]
    • f_allwein21 days ago
      Don’t live like a rich person in a developed country - they’re the only ones whose co2 footprints are too high.
    • pkdrollsover21 days ago
      [dead]
  • terespuwash21 days ago
    A change in attitudes is not enough. Structural change is needed to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. Currently, the population is unable to achieve results.
    • matthewdgreen21 days ago
      The population is achieving results. Most of these results are occurring in China, which has begun an unimaginably huge deployment of renewables and nuclear. Europe is also making progress. The rest of Asia will go next, and then (as it develops industrially) so will Africa. Even parts of North America will quickly electrify: for example, Canada just agreed to reduce tariffs on Chinese EVs to 6% from 100%.
    • __MatrixMan__21 days ago
      Agreed.

      Our ecological goals are to make biosphere damage scarce, but our economic practices aim to make scarce things plentiful. We need something to balance out the effects of scarcity-based economics.

      • evolve2k21 days ago
        In the very fun board game ‘Evolution : Climate’ you “breed” animals designed to survive the climate conditions on the board. One strategy is to switch to breeding ‘carnivores’ that then can feast on the creations of other players. They downside tho is that once other players evolve their animals to have carnivore protections (fight back, scales, protective shells etc) the carnivores start to quickly starve and that player must quickly change out of this eat everything strategy back to a more sustainable strategy.

        In a similar way I think what works is to push back against growth only and growth at all costs approaches and back practises and models and communities that are working in other ways.

        • __MatrixMan__21 days ago
          The trouble is, when I receive my paycheck, it just comes as "dollars". I don't know whether my employer got them by providing services to communities which are working in other ways, or whether they come from more nefarious behavior--and I have no way to refuse one sort but accept the other.

          The kind of community action you're describing happens, but we need to find ways to help it scale.

    • hasanabi21 days ago
      [flagged]
      • tomrod21 days ago
        What a strange thing to say.
  • tsoukase20 days ago
    Living in the coldest corner of my country, this is an extension of Siberia and getting hotter and hotter by the year, I amateurly confirm the global observations. Specifically I estimate the average temperature increase of the latest 3 years to be about 2-3C comparing with >20 years ago. A vital decease in heating costs with a whole month without heating is welcome. The future becomes from manageable to fate.
  • dust4221 days ago
    30 years ago I attended a university lecture in an economics class and the professor spoke about the economic consequences of global warming - some places will be better off and plenty of places will be worse off. There will be water shortages in some places, while heavy rainfall in others. He presented it as a given fact that the global warming is coming - and pretty much the whole audience was shocked. Finally someone asked if he really thinks that it is unavoidable. And his answer was yes, that is human nature. As long as fossil fuels are there and cheap to explore someone will use them.

    30 years later it looks like he was right.

    Edit: the IPCC was founded in 1988 thus people started in the 70ies to understand that there will be a problem but there was a very long period of inactivity. Personally I am quite optimistic that fusion will become commercially available before 2040.

    And dear downvoters, dont shoot the messenger.

  • insane_dreamer20 days ago
    Wow, a shocking amount of climate change denialism in this thread. Honestly what I expected from HN readership.
    • defrost20 days ago
      Denialism is not the majority position of the readership as a whole in my experience.

      It's more that such titles attract the denialists and edgelords like bees to sucrose.

      Lack of significant action is more a majority position, and that's unsuprising given many people struggle with how to make meaningful change as individuals or accept greater risk and reduced returns as C-suits of corporations.

      • insane_dreamer20 days ago
        Just came back to this and realized I had forgotten a “not”. Meant to say “not what I expected…” and I was quite surprised.
  • gwbrooks21 days ago
    I can't think of a single time in history that humanity responded to a threat in a fully coordinated manner. Maybe this is the first time, but the incentive stack from the individual voter all the way up to geopolitical grand strategy argues against it.

    Trying to tell poor nations to remain poor -- or telling rich nations to consume less -- is a losing game. There's evidence that as societies get richer, their populations demand cleaner air, water, etc. And, as another commenter mentioned, a realistic hope is that the whole green-tech stack matures to the point where it can compete on price.

    We'll either make lower-carbon/lower-warming solutions work at near-market rates, in a way that allows personal and national economies to grow, or it'll just be talk for the next 50 years as well.

    • IshKebab21 days ago
      Banning CFCs. But that didn't require giving anything up really so it was an easier sell.
    • 21 days ago
      undefined
  • smetannik21 days ago
    The next one probably will be even hotter
  • dadjoker21 days ago
    [dead]
  • cramforloin21 days ago
    [flagged]
  • fschuett21 days ago
    [flagged]
    • sham121 days ago
      Ironically enough, as climate change becomes worse, we here in Europe might ironically end up with a way colder climate due to the melting ice caps especially in the Arctic disrupting the Gulf Stream among other things.

      Also, this kind of "how can climate change be real since it's winter, snowy, and cold" is a climate change denier take. I'd refrain from it if I were you.

    • andsoitis21 days ago
      > Really? Can they send some of that hotness over to Germany, we're getting snowstorms over here.

      Yes, really.

      The warmest recent years (e.g., 2022, 2023, 2024) rank among the highest average temperatures on record for Germany.

      The rate of warming in recent decades is stronger than the global average, with Germany seeing about 0.38 °C per decade (1971–2022).

      .... and other similar statistics. Look up.

      https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folgen_der_globalen_Erwärmung_...

      • networkadmin21 days ago
        [flagged]
        • text040421 days ago
          It's probably the fact that you created two accounts in 30 mins to astroturf/troll a thread about climate change which is an actual, measurable phenomenon.

          https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=hasanabi

          Edit: this one too? https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=doktor2un

          • canadiantim21 days ago
            No he’s right that there’s mass censorship happening in this thread for some reason. Not a good look for ycombinator…
        • ejolto21 days ago
          What is alarmist about it? It’s just a fact.
          • hasanabi21 days ago
            [flagged]
          • networkadmin21 days ago
            Should I spend an hour explaining in detail, only to have my comment be auto-censored again just like the last one was?
            • 9rx21 days ago
              What would you explain? Alarmism needs exaggerated alarm, which isn't found in the earlier comment. One could project their own worries about a warming globe onto the comment, perhaps, but that alarm would stem from within oneself, not the comment. Another might see a warming globe as the best thing that could ever happen and there is nothing in said comment that would dismiss that.
            • tw0421 days ago
              It wasn’t auto censored. And you didn’t explain anything, you made a silly and provably false statement and were understandably downvoted almost immediately. Just like if you were to claim the moon landing was faked.
              • 9rx20 days ago
                Suppose someone did post that the moon landing was faked. What purpose would downvoting it serve?

                1. If posted in good faith, they lose an opportunity to learn. HN should not be joining the ranks of the growing anti-education establishment.

                2. If it is trolling, the downvote offers a "read receipt" telling that the wanted attention was found, which only further encourages more trolling. Do not feed the trolls.

                There is no situation where downvoting would be a positive contribution. Well, unless you find enjoyment in reading the "why did you downvote this?" comments that sometimes follow. But be careful with that as someday you'll start to see them as just being annoyingly repetitive.

        • __MatrixMan__21 days ago
          The presence of hyperactive censors has no bearing on the truth of whatever claim they're censoring. People like to steer whether or not they know where they're going.
        • lkey21 days ago
          I'm being censored!!!!

          You scream with your brand new account that only talks in conspiratorial tones about how climate change isn't dangerous.

        • zahlman21 days ago
          Your flagged comment goes beyond claiming alarmism (i.e. exaggeration) on the part of others. It's conspiratorial in tone and uses an unnecessary insult.
        • stikit21 days ago
          “Weather is not climate, silly. Well, unless it supports the claims of alarmists, of course”

          https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46660300

        • tw0421 days ago
          You are free to say whatever you want. Society is free to dismiss your factually incorrect statements. That isn’t censorship, nobody is required to listen to your nonsense or give you a platform to spout it.
    • jibal21 days ago
      Global warming means that the globe is warming, not that it is warm globally (in the sense of everywhere at once).
    • networkadmin21 days ago
      [flagged]
  • tonymet21 days ago
    [flagged]
    • foltik21 days ago
      Uh, no, it’s the 3rd hottest year since 1880. You can click “Download Data” and look the table yourself.

      https://science.nasa.gov/earth/explore/earth-indicators/glob...

      • tonymet21 days ago
        [flagged]
        • genewitch21 days ago
          nevermind satellites, just diff the temp records from say, 1950-2000 and the ones reporting that data today and there's a lot of jank. urbanization around the thermometers also makes it appear as though global temperatures are rising, but all the data really says is that cities are heat islands.

          first order: verify satellite data. Secondly, move all sensors to locations where they are unaffected by heat islanding and other man-made influences.

          yes, if a city gets hotter in temperature because it grows, that obviously is a concern, but it doesn't affect people in the countryside, or on the other side of the planet, etc. (1/1000th as much if anything, i'll hedge).

          the second thing will never happen. I am sure someone will reply why it's literally impossible and stupid to put thermometers someplace where the weather is natural. Because if we did move all of the sensors, suddenly there wouldn't appear to be any 1.5C change or anything, and there's thousands of egos at stake, here.

          • yongjik21 days ago
            I know I sound like a broken radio, but:

            Google "urban heat island effect site:realclimate.org"

            Scientists have been aware of the effect and correcting for it since before you heard about it. In general, if you can think of something in five minutes, scientists (whose lifetime job is to consider these problems) have considered that.

            • genewitch19 days ago
              top post is from 13 years ago. there are more recent meta studies and research done. ( i know of at least 3, that were 'rebutted' by realclimate.org but not satisfactorily.) it's fine to handwave on a forum "oh of course they've contemplated this you simpleton!" I've kept up with the literature; i've read the IPCC reports, for years. there is contention about this, about the heat record (like, prehistoric).

              GISS and GHCN use, among other things, models to homogenize temperatures across UHI and "rural" areas, and these are two i found with a cursory search. there are others. they only agree that it is, for sure, getting warmer. they arrive at different values.

              Different.

              Values.

              The satellite date we've been using since 1978? well, every 10-15 years they get replaced, and the satellites report different TSI values. (i can link a picture of the satellite TSI data as a single graph if you'd like!)

              Different.

              Values.

              > "Instead, most groups (including NASA GISS), were relying on automated computer programs that tried to guess when station changes might have introduced a bias. These programs used statistical algorithms that compared each station record to those of neighboring stations and applying “homogenization adjustments” to the data.

          • carlgreene21 days ago
            Where are you finding where all the sensors locations are?
            • genewitch19 days ago
              I'm not sure i know the exact locations, but NASA and NOAA do, and people who have seen the data and locations (and therefore know what is rural or not) say things like this about realclimate.org's handwave of UHI:

              > "Because urban areas still only represent 3-4% of the global land surface, this should not substantially influence global temperatures.

              > However, most of the weather stations used for calculating the land component of global temperatures are located in urban or semi-urban areas. This is especially so for the stations with the longest temperature records. One reason why is because it is harder to staff and maintain a weather station in an isolated, rural location for a century or longer."

              further from a paper critiquing the GHCN model's homogenization algorithm:

              > "When they were compiling the Global Historical Climatology Network dataset, the National Climatic Data Center included some basic station metadata, i.e., data describing the station and its environment. For each station, they provided the station name, country, latitude, longitude and elevation. They also provided a number of classifications to describe the environment of the station - whether it was an airport station or not; if it was on an island, near the coast or near a lake; and what the average ecosystem of the stations’ surroundings was, e.g., desert, ice, forest, etc"

              oh and an interesting note, if you are wondering "well, how many fully rural stations do we have data for at least 95% of the 'last 100 years?"

              eight.

              globally.

        • azan_21 days ago
          If you initially make factually wrong comment then you should at least apologize and say that you are sorry for being wrong, not keep pushing your agenda further.
          • tonymet21 days ago
            it’s right about the article.
            • 21 days ago
              undefined
            • eimrine21 days ago
              Your behaviour is both incorrect (you were shown at the specific place) and intentional (you have ignored that). So, I have downvoted all your posts in this topic because I have observed the efficiency of the correct words to your ignorance. Usually I am glad to argue about the climate topic, but sometimes downvotes work better.
    • tonymet21 days ago
      [flagged]
  • linohh21 days ago
    Third hottest year on record, so far.
    • IshKebab21 days ago
      Uhm obviously. It would be difficult to have a year from the future on record wouldn't it?
    • tonymet21 days ago
      [flagged]
      • foltik21 days ago
        This isn't some big conspiracy. "On record" is since recordkeeping began in 1880.

        https://science.nasa.gov/earth/explore/earth-indicators/glob...

        • tonymet21 days ago
          Ok, so why not just be specific? “On record” usually means since we started recording history , at least 5k years ago.

          And have you looked into the records? satellite surface temps and high resolution recording have not been around for very long. 1880 methods were very crude and narrowly scoped.

          • NicuCalcea21 days ago
            > “On record” usually means since we started recording history , at least 5k years ago.

            I'm a journalist who has published "highest/lowest on record" statistics tens, if not hundreds of times, and I've never heard of anyone thinking it means "since Herodotus" or anything like that.

            • tonymet21 days ago
              How would readers know the reference point unless you inform them. Of course they will defer to colloquialisms . In some cases 5000 years , some 1000 years . With something as broad and impactful as this, they certainly assume more than 150 years .
              • NicuCalcea20 days ago
                They would know by reading beyond the headline. I am not aware of the colloquialism as you describe it.
                • defrost20 days ago
                  You both have a point, reading further provides context as to which record is being talked about.

                  There are, of course, many records - newspaper records, human logged records of conditions that day, and human created records of proxy data - ice cores, dendrochronology, cosmic ray induced crystal formation in beach sand, etc.

                • tonymet20 days ago
                  This is disingenuous given your training in journalism , writing & linguistics.
                  • NicuCalcea20 days ago
                    You need to stop being intentionally obtuse, nobody's buying it.
          • genewitch21 days ago
            and scientists edit the historical temperatures because of, and i hope you can see my eyeroll here "anomalous readings" - but they're overwhelmingly erroneous in only one direction. that's strange.
            • tonymet21 days ago
              Given the amount of noise and normalization , I would like to see that claim better qualified.

              That’s what I’m calling attention to. Being more formal with the claims , and transparent about the records origins

              • genewitch19 days ago
                i'm literally in the middle of trying to parse a couple of papers that examine the methodology of at least the NOAA homogenization model.

                did you know there's only eight sensors, globally, that we have data for >95% of the last 100 years, that are labelled as "fully rural"? so this means that 99.9% of the stations must therefore be, at least, more likely to be adjusted, doesn't it? The entire premise that UHI is irrelevant because they "normalized" the 99.9% and it showed it was irrelevant is... i don't know, it's something, though.

                • tonymet18 days ago
                  I agree it's suspicious. Rather than dismiss it altogether, I'm trying to understand the e2e process. i.e. divide 1880-present into Epochs and understand what %-age of coverage, resolution & how precise were the instruments
                  • genewitch16 days ago
                    after you do all of that, see if you can find pictures of the stations, the little structure the old ones were in are called "CRS" which stands for Cotton Region Shelter. these were the old liquid-in-glass style thermometers. The new ones have multi-plate radiation shields to house the thermistor and protect it from direct sunlight while allowing airflow. i guess some people say they look like a beehive, but they're a cylinder.

                    so the CRS ones could be put anywhere. the new MMTS sensors had a pre-cut length of cable for installation, as the base unit was to be situated indoors.

                    So CRS could be out in the middle of a field, where the MMTS are generally within 30' of a building.

                    Maybe we should throw out all the MMTS data?

                    Now, though, someone finally realized, and they're installing wireless MMTS - minimum-maximum temperature sensor, tells the min and max over the last 24 hours, and you record those numbers once per day, at a specific Time-of-Observation. Changing the time-of-observation requires de-biasing the data, too!

                    • tonymet16 days ago
                      i agree that the apparatus varies tremendously over the decades. Real science is hard work and I applaud environmental scientists for their efforts. We need to be careful about qualifying "raw data" since software engineers usually stop at a textfile and forget about the origins.
  • doktor2un21 days ago
    I’d love to see the raw data.
    • foltik21 days ago
      Here's a raw table in .txt format from NASA

      https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/graph_data/Global_...

      • tonymet21 days ago
        That’s not the raw data. The original recordings were made by merchants on parchment. They measured the volume of water in a wooden box, to set the buoyancy for their loads
        • foltik21 days ago
          What are you even talking about. They had weather stations with mercury thermometers and wrote down temperatures in a logbook.
          • magicalhippo21 days ago
            For the interested, here[1] is an article on an attempt to recreate and verify measurements made during the HMS Challenger expedition in the 1870s.

            It was recently done so the full results aren't out, but one aspect they noted was that the traditionally-created hemp rope stretched about 10% so temperatures were taken at slightly deeper depths than expected. This can be used to calibrate the data from HMS Challenger.

            [1]: https://www.oneoceanexpedition.com/article/checked-150-year-...

            • tonymet20 days ago
              I appreciated your comment because more discussion will better help everyone understand the various tranches of surface temperature observations.

              I did a quick review, and appreciated the article because they were clear about how their methods different from the recordings. For one using different pressure sensors, and they mentioned the depth differential they measured would lead to variability in the ocean temp readings.

          • tonymet21 days ago
            Not on the ocean, and not covering even 1/1000% of the coverage we have with satellites on the surface
      • doktor2un21 days ago
        [flagged]
        • foltik21 days ago
          Hah. Shall I present it to you on a silver platter then?

          If you read the NASA page, they explicitly cite GHCNd, a raw surface temperature and precipitation dataset that goes back quite far. There's many other similar datasets you can find if you're willing to look.

          Check out the readme for the csv format description, and /by-year for the raw rows:

          https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/pub/data/ghcn/daily/

          • genewitch21 days ago
            picked four stations at random[0] and it's just precip numbers, no temps, no humidity, no insolation, etc.

            are you sure you linked what you think you linked?

            [0] /by-station and then unclutched my scroll wheel and spun it for arbitrary amount of time, re-engaged clutch and clicked what was under the cursor. repeated 3 more times. i did a fifth, where the one i was looking at was identical to the fourth one, but had a 1 in the least significant portion of the station ID instead of a 4, in case it was like, "4" is precip, "1" is temps, and i happened to click "4" 4 times in a row.

            • foltik21 days ago
              Quite a scientific data analysis you've done there. NASA must be completely mistaken!
              • genewitch19 days ago
                HAHA you're completely right! or, and this is just some advice: don't tell strangers to look up data, link the data, and it not be what you said it was.

                If i promise you punch and pie, you'd be pretty upset if it wasn't.

    • Certhas21 days ago
      There are tons of raw data available freely and publicly. In my estimation, there is no comparable scientific discipline with a better curated data environment.

      What exact raw data would you want? I am sure ChatGPT can throw together some python that will download the relevant data.

    • rwmj21 days ago
      • doktor2un21 days ago
        [flagged]
        • magicalhippo21 days ago
          If you want the raw data, you'll have to go dig in the archives to find the log books and card decks.

          This[1] paper goes into some detail on how the digital records were constructed from the log books, card decks and such. This[2] paper deals with an update of those digital records, including new digitization efforts. You can download the raw digital data from ICOADS here[3].

          [1]: https://doi.org/10.1175/1520-0477(1987)068%3C1239:ACOADS%3E2... A Comprehensive Ocean-Atmosphere Data Set (available on the hub of science)

          [2]: https://doi.org/10.1002/joc.4775 ICOADS Release 3.0: a major update to the historical marine climate record (open access)

          [3]: https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/data/international-comprehensive-o...

        • ori_b21 days ago
          Petabytes of it around. Here's a small sunset: https://www.earthdata.nasa.gov/

          Would you like more, or do you plan on analyzing the first few petabytes first?

          • tonymet21 days ago
            He means the original recordings. There were no digital recordings in 1880. Different apparatus, different methods. That’s the point
            • ori_b21 days ago
              Ah, so a painfully obvious attempt at moving goalposts and showering people with bullshit.
              • tonymet21 days ago
                I don’t think this is appropriate language
                • ori_b21 days ago
                  I'm sorry that you are offended.

                  How would you have phrased calling out an obvious, clumsy, and deliberate attempt to detail the conversation with obvious misdirection and mistruth?

                  • tonymet21 days ago
                    You’re way off base . Not only inappropriate but irrelevant too
                    • ori_b20 days ago
                      Got it, thanks for the poorly executed misdirection and misinformation.
            • dpkirchner21 days ago
              They can speak for themselves, you and I don't really know what they want, or what they think counts as "raw" data.
              • tonymet21 days ago
                Regardless, ascii encoding isn’t raw data. You’re making software engineer assumptions. Statistical noise is introduced 4-5 steps before the data is recorded digitally.

                Even after it’s digitized, more noise is introduced through recording errors and normalization.

                To understand the original distribution, the entire workflow needs to have been recorded

    • idiotsecant21 days ago
      You are capable of operating Google, right?
    • mempko21 days ago
      And what will you do with the raw data? Are you trained in processing and interpreting it? How good is your math?
      • eimrine21 days ago
        Climate deniers are perfectly trained for finding some weak spots in any data anytime they want. It would be better for them to be trained enough to show at least any links to any studies though. It is so hard to convince a climate denier to give at least one climate-denying source for the sake of experiencing some laugher together.
      • genewitch21 days ago
        you're right this is much to complicated and important for anyone to understand. just take our word for it that we have to make things more expensive, raise taxes, and restrict freedoms to fix it.
        • foltik21 days ago
          Right, if only scientists who understood it would publish some sort of document explaining their methods and citing the raw sources.

          > we have to make things more expensive, raise taxes, and restrict freedoms to fix it

          Aha, right on cue the mask slips off. Desperately trying to justify your own selfishness in the name of "freedom".

          • 19 days ago
            undefined
        • mempko21 days ago
          If you are serious about this, you know full well the data is out there. So stop asking for it and just go get it, go write some code and process it, then come back here and report your results.
          • genewitch16 days ago
            i went and got the raw data, wrote some code to parse it and then process it, and my results:

            MMTS locations are so close to heat sources and heat sinks, at least in the US, that any sort of debiasing appears to be a "guess."

            statistically. 96% of them. thankfully NWS/NOAA/NASA/etc have started deploying wireless sensors, but unless they admonish the volunteers for placing their (NWS/NOAA/etc) dumb MMTS designs so close to heat sinks and sources, as if it was their fault, demanding that volunteers move the sensors to a location 20 meters from said sinks and sources...

            you're just gunna have and continue to have decades of literally unusable data. But hey, hottest year on record!

            I am not mad at volunteers. it isn't their fault the MMTS devices only came with 10 meters or whatever of cabling for the indoor-outdoor data. I would, however, like to see the rationale and meeting notes and design documents (and the reasoning and arguments thereof) for the MMTS; explicitly for use tracking climate trends.

            anecdote: i have multi channel humidity and temp sensors that log to SD card. they have been logging for a long time. My outdoor sensors, as well as our cars, etc, show that our location is always 7F cooler than the nearby metro (20 miles) during the warm months. If we used my temperature data, i'd believe the trends. if we use the temperature data from the sensors they use at the airport, it's going to show warming - and i submit you can't de-bias that using the methods used for the IPCC and other reports. and when i say 7F cooler here than there, i mean on the thermometers on our cars (and multimeters, or even a liquid-in-glass carried around!). I also mean my location is consistently cooler than the forecast temperatures for the city.

            i understand weather is not climate.

  • miroljub21 days ago
    Yeah, we definitely need to put more weather stations in urban areas and remove rural ones. That's how we can reach first place every year. Being number 3 is disappointing.