We don't have to adapt to the situation as it is now, because it is pretty much the best scenario. We have to adapt to the fact that it will get worse, and worse, and worse. And save what we can. Worried about your country not dominating on the AI scene? Wait until your biggest worry is food.
There’s been a few over the last few hundred years. If there’s dust and haze it might be a respite, apart from famines due to poor harvests.
I guess we’ll find out should it happen.
We’re in a more precarious state, and these random natural events could be very tricky.
They way I think/hope we can fix this is two parts:
1. The only way I think you can get rid of the excess CO₂ at scale is to permanently sequester it underground. The oil/gas industry can cheaply deposit huge amounts of gas there. The unsolved problem is extracting enough CO₂ from the atmosphere at reasonable cost. People are working on that, but it will probably be decades before it's is approaching practicality.
Which is why we need to do this in the meantime:
2. Spray the stratosphere with SO₂. This reflects some some sunlight and cools the planet. It sounds scary, but is actually safe: https://makesunsets.com/pages/new-faq
The Pina2bo strategy!
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57094295-termination-sho...
The emission reductions in our simulations correspond closely to the emissions reductions realized in East Asia over the period 2010–2023, in magnitude and geographical location. This allows us to put our results in the context of the recent uptick in the observed rate of global mean surface warming. Here, we find that emissions reductions in East Asia have contributed up to 0.05 °C/decade since 2010, explaining a large fraction of the observed increase of 0.06 °C/decade over the same period, after filtering out the effects of interannual variability. (from https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-025-02527-3)
While it remained, northern hemisphere temperatures lowered by ~0.5°C.
USGS report: https://pubs.usgs.gov/pinatubo/self/
Since the stratosphere is far above the rain cycle, it's very hard to imagine a mechanism whereby this could produce acid rain, and even if it did, acid rain is a much smaller problem than global warming.
If CO2 emissions stop today, it'll keep warming very quickly for several decades, and then it'll slow down but keep warming slowly. What takes half a century now will take a millenium.
And nothing whatsoever humanity does with CO2 will result in cooling on a short timescale.
You don't seem to be denying human caused, or maybe you'd say accelerated, climate change. If we could flip a switch and spread the future warming over a millennium instead of half a century I think everyone would take that deal.
You know, that's yet another major problem. You're wrong. If we did that, meltwater water supply would essentially stop (in somewhere between 8 months and 2 years), everywhere on the planet. Big, highly populated areas of our planet will dry up (Pakistan, Bangladesh and the Ganges valley in India depends significantly on meltwater. That's easily 2 billion people)
In the past century, humanity has adapted itself to constant climate change. Any variable that depends on the temperature delta that we depend on will rapidly become problematic if we stop accelerating global warming.
Now I live in Europe. I don't expect water problems here (or only temporary). I do however expect problems. I'm not even sure what but there is a fuckton of things that will change back if global warming slows and I highly doubt that will just go down smoothly.
I know the theory behind green parties is "let's just stop doing what humanity is doing, and nature will save us". I'm kind of hoping people will realize that that, too, is bullshit. We will need to decide and agree what we want the climate to do, and then make it happen. No matter the choice made, this will have existential consequences for a bunch of places on this planet, and nothing can help that.
"Let's stop global warming" is not a solution to ecological problems, and not necessarily a better solution than continuing it. We WILL need to take control of the climate, and that includes dealing with the consequences of whatever decision we make. "stop CO2" is as much a soundbite, and as stupid, as "drill, baby, drill". Thunberg is as problematic as Trump, it's just harder to realize that that is the case.
Not that I think there's a chance in hell that global warming will stop or even just slow down whatever we decide to do in the west. Getting China, South Asia, and now more and more India and in the future Africa to agree to not use fossil fuels is not politically feasible. There is no solution there either.
So my vote? Aerosols to cool the planet. Which one, and how to spread? TBD. And, yes, that may mean the planet cools again BUT ALSO parts of the planet become uninhabitable. We'll need to agree and deal with that.
How? Why? Meltwater comes from the temperature difference between summer and winter, how does it have anything to do with this?
> Any variable that depends on the temperature delta that we depend on will rapidly become problematic if we stop accelerating global warming.
What variable depends on a temperature _delta_?
> Now I live in Europe. I don't expect water problems here (or only temporary).
We have water problems right now. Agriculture has problems, nuclear reactors have to shut down because of too warm(France) or missing (Romania) water. Dry forests leading to more fire.
> I know the theory behind green parties is "let's just stop doing what humanity is doing, and nature will save us".
I have never heard of this, I have a hard time that anybody relevant claims this.
If we stopped CO2 emissions today and, like you said, warming would continue unabated for decades, why would the meltwater situation change in 2 years?
What exactly are you talking about here? Meltwater amounts would be roughly the same compared to the last millennium, until glaciers start vanishing (only, in that obviously favorably scenario, in 500ish years instead of this century).
I get the impression that you think that manmade climate change is somewhat helpful compensation for natural trending towards ice age. This is not the case at all, because the rate of change is too high. See https://xkcd.com/1732/.
A (natural) looming ice age is not problematic or threathening at all because that happens so slowly that we get many centuries to act.
At this point it may very well be better to go for renewables for much more of the grid coverage (after they fix their damn grid connections) But those pushing the cost picture have been everything but honest over the past 2 decades. I still remember repeatedly getting that Lazard LCOE report thrown at me by germans with absolutely fantasy numbers for storage and such and a nuclear cost based on one unfinished american plant.
Nuclear is great for base load, not great for peaks
Our current situation is we are building tons of renewables and storage but still burning tons of fossil fuels because they cannot replace the base load very effectively. Nuclear replaces the carbon part of the equation
Providing base load is a privilege you get to enjoy if your marginal cost is lower than anyone elses (and you want/can keep running basically all of the time).
Renewables ruin former baseload providers (like nuclear plants) because those plants are basically no longer making money whenever the sun shines (so the economics for nuclear plants got much worse).
Use its power down when in need of electricity. Bring water up hill when too much electricity is available.
Besides, not every country can effectively utilize hydroelectric power.
Germany, like other countries, should be investing in a mix of power sources. You probably want your backbone to be nuclear and then renewables where it makes sense with a goal (at least in western countries) of also eliminating reliance on China for renewables/batteries.
Dogmatism about renewables is self-defeating.
Nuclear is critical for long term generating power. Batteries and solar are good not able to maintain the same level of power quality and duration though are definitely incredibly important.
I can't stress this enough solar and battery dont work everywhere and they dont provide indefinite power quality. Nor does nuclear. They all need to be resourced where appropriate.
FWIW - there aren't a lot of grids that have the resource mix you described.
Fair enough, but it's still incredibly helpful as a source of no-carbon electricity.
Recent report on restarting German nuclear:
> The easiest group of reactors to restart could produce electricity at an average of €37 per megawatt-hour before the end of 2031.The most difficult restarts could produce electricity at roughly €58 per megawatt-hour by the mid 2030s.
* https://www.radiantenergygroup.com/reports/restarting-german...
* PDF: https://www.radiantenergygroup.com/_files/ugd/ae75b7_bc5db59...
The similar power output is not a coincidence. The biggest bottleneck for new solar and battery storage plants in Germany is getting them connected to the grid, and the freshly decommissioned nuclear plant has a great grid connection that this project wants to reuse
1: https://www.heise.de/news/Mehr-als-1-4-Gigawatt-Riesige-Batt...
A sensible global policy could be:
- Tax carbon positive energy consumption to death. I.e. coal, oil or natural gas.
- Tax (close to) carbon neutral energy consumption at a fixed high rate, e.g. solar, hydro, nuclear or wind. Tax nuclear separately because of its other side effects if you want.
- Use the proceeds to negatively tax carbon negative energy consumption only.
Not that I have any illusions of any policy even remotely like this ever getting enacted. Zero consensus on earth and too many dangerous and selfish idiots.
Our children will be boiling frogs and angry.
Nuclear is different in that regard.
Yet France, which invested heavily in nuclear[1], has energy prices that are 40% lower than Germany's[2]. Something isn't adding up about the repeated claims that renewables are cheaper than nuclear.
[1] https://montel.energy/resources/blog/two-different-energy-sy...
[2] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
Sweden and Norway have very cheap electricity while mostly being renewables.
Our power demands are increasing faster than we can build out renewables and storage.
Despite how much investment we are making into solar, wind, batteries, we're still burning more carbon year over year to make up for the demand for energy. We need a source of energy that can actually replace the base load carbon, not just augment it like renewables are. Nuclear is the most likely source to use for that purpose.
Edit: if we're being honest, we probably should have built out nuclear 20, 30, 40 years ago but we didn't. The expense now is kind of the cost of our poor policy decisions in decades past. We can continue to make poor decisions or we can learn our lesson and eat the cost now to fix those mistakes. I think failing to invest and shift to nuclear now would be yet another instance of passing the buck to the future generations, with even more interest
They had this as an explicit choice, and they demanded other parties went along with closing the nuclear power plants. They knew, it was discussed, that keeping them open would help with global warming, and they explicitly chose against that. Then they stood by that choice, and kept standing by it even up to 2023.
Now you obviously can't fault them for the fact that the Ukraine war would make things 10x worse (by forcing Germany back onto coal and LNG), but you CAN fault them for making that choice, and standing by it. This makes them the main responsible party for the current electricity prices problem in Germany.
European green parties have explicitly chosen that their other goals mattered more than global warming. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say they are absolutely 100% unwilling to make compromises elsewhere to help fix global warming, when they are the ones making a compromise.
And, frankly, if we can't compromise as a country in parliament we may as well stop attempting to do anything about global warming. Green parties are demanding big compromises from everybody else, but cannot give a millimeter themselves? Obviously everybody else is just going to fight them tooth and nail, forever, and we'll get nowhere.
I think that is what is meant by that question.
30 years ago the answer was nuclear. Not today, it's just a distraction to try to keep us burning dead dinosaurs for longer.
To put it another way, I could flip your statement on its head: Renewables are just a distraction to try to keep us burning dead dinosaurs for longer instead of building durable nuclear power capacity.
Check out this year's edition of Ember's Global Electricity Review [0]. The table on p. 78 lists the following five countries as having the highest CO2-equivalent emissions (in Mt):
| China | 5,565 |
| United States | 1,737 |
| India | 1,395 |
| Russia | 536 |
| Japan | 492 |
All these numbers should probably be put into perspective, though, by taking the population size into account. But even then, the whole of the EU does not fare too bad.
[0] https://ember-energy.org/app/uploads/2026/04/Global-Electric...
In Germany add in that they then needed to rely on Russia to provide natural gas to fill in the void - which drove up the costs of power and made their manufacturing base a little less competitive.... Best intentions don't always prove to be good policy making. That's the TL;DR why Germany gets singled out.
Also, while it's important to look at the global picture, let's not ignore the local effects: air quality in Germany is pretty bad, perhaps the worst in Europe. Poland is pretty bad too, especially in the winter. That's not China's or USA's fault.
What... you know you could've looked this up pretty easily before posting?
https://atmosphere.copernicus.eu/sites/default/files/styles/...
Obviously, each individual should have a right to emit a certain amount of GHGs independently from the size of the country he happens to be born in. So the correct list is this (2024 data [1]). Quite surprising in places (e.g. the position of the UK, Australians emitting GHGs at the level of a petro-state, and Canadians too, well above the US).
| Country | MtCO2e/ capita
| Qatar | 54.54
| Kuwait | 38.14
| Bahrain | 35.13
| United Arab Emirates | 25.62
| Oman | 24.02
| Saudi Arabia | 22.79
| Australia | 22.26
| Canada | 19.76
| Russia | 18.02
| United States | 17.34
| New Zealand | 15.59
| South Korea | 12.83
| Ireland | 11.86
| China | 10.81
| Poland | 9.28
| Belgium | 9.15
| Netherlands | 8.35
| Germany | 8.17
| Italy | 6.32
| Spain | 6.16
| Brazil | 5.93
| France | 5.68
| United Kingdom | 5.63
Yeah, other emit more, but the rank stupidity of this environmental vandalism deserves the scorn it gets!
Except their emissions have continued to go down.
Whether you count just electricity or economy wide.
And even before this "explosion" they were about half the US on per capita economy wide and now are less than half.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?t...
I believe they are singled out in a feeble attempt by climate change deniers and fossil fuel boosters to discredit renewables. Which Germany played a pivotal role in kick-starting and which are currently saving the world.
In the meantime batteries + solar or wind can be built quickly and hooked up pretty much anywhere.
Even if we had nuclear fusion, solar+batteries could still win on cost and time to deploy!
In a world with abundant fossil fuels on which globalisation relies.
The question is: what happens when it stops? Can renewables win in a world without abundant oil? We don't know, we haven't tried.
Largest battery storage in Germany set for partial commissioning - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49104584 - July 2026
Analysis: Wind and solar power overtake fossil fuels in Germany for first time ever - https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-wind-and-solar-power-ov... - July 28th, 2026
> Germany has various targets in place that require a rapid expansion of wind and solar power, including cutting economy-wide emissions to net-zero by 2045. The nation is also aiming to increase renewables’ share of electricity consumption to 80% by 2030 to achieve a “largely climate neutral” power system by 2035.
It's time to get over the nuclear issue, it's history. It takes ~10 years to build a new nuclear generator from breaking ground to first kw to the grid, and tens of billions of dollars or euros. Germany deploys ~2GW/month of solar. Total global nuclear generation capacity is ~380GW as of this comment. At current global solar PV deployment rates, even assuming capacity factor delta between solar and nuclear, you could replace total global nuclear generation with ~18 months of solar PV deployment. Batteries and solar will continue to rapidly decline in cost, nuclear will not.
(total annual solar PV deployment is approaching, but not quite yet, at 1TW/year, and continues to increase year over year)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-energy-consumption
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci...
Nuclear is an amazing solution for industrial steady state demand... This is data centers, smelters (glass and metal), lots of industrial processes (think auto plants).
But nuclear is terrible at TV pickup situations because it is simply not that responsive.
Delivery to industrial customers (regardless of source) is also much simpler than it is to domestic - and I don't think that were even beginning to address the issues there.
In and around winter? I think that's a fantasy.
X to doubt, I'll believe it when I see it, for now they are like a galaxy away from that goal.
And also that'll be even harder to reach if they want to improve their atrociously low electricity heating rate.
Fossil gas will fill the gap until solar, wind, batteries, and transmission push the last of fossil generation out of the mix, and every year less and less gas will be used until remaining fossil gas generators sit idle.
Spain’s Nuclear Shutdown Set to Test Renewables Success Story - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-11/spain-s-n... | https://archive.today/4fB7K - April 11th, 2025 (“Spain is a postcard, a glimpse into the future where you’re not going to need baseload generators from 8am to 5pm” with solar and wind providing all of the grid’s needs during that time, said Kesavarthiniy Savarimuthu, a European power markets analyst with BloombergNEF. Still, she said, there is a reasonable chance this goal may take longer than expected and “extending the life of the nuclear fleet can prove as an insurance for these delays.”) (My note: As of this comment, Spain has 7.12GW of nuclear generation capacity per ree.es, and assuming ~2GW/month deployment rate seen in Germany, could replace this capacity with solar and batteries in ~17 months; per Electricity Maps, only 18.79% of Spain's electrical generation over the last twelve months has been sourced from this nuclear: https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/ES/12mo/monthly)
Nuclear doesn't have this requirement. It's truly zero carbon.
Unless you can show me plans to fill this gap with batteries on a national scale, renewables < nuclear
Yes, some fossil fuels will be burned to fill energy consumption gaps until we have fully replaced all fossil generation with that produced from the sun. Again, remember the fact that every year we are adding ~1TW of solar that can account for energy consumption growth and push out fossil generation. We won't know until we look back over time, but we are very likely at peak fossil fuel consumption globally. New generation will be clean tech simply out of economics, and old fossil generation will be replaced eventually with clean tech, because it cannot last forever.
https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/solar-panel-prices-... (solar panel prices have fallen by around 20% every time global capacity doubled)
https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline (lithium-ion battery prices fell by 19% every time global cumulative production doubled)
Ember Energ: Solar electricity every hour of every day is here and it changes everything - https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e... - June 21st, 2025
The Economist: The exponential growth of solar power will change the world - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40746617 - June 2024 (66 comments)
> To call solar power’s rise exponential is not hyperbole, but a statement of fact. Installed solar capacity doubles roughly every three years, and so grows ten-fold each decade. Such sustained growth is seldom seen in anything that matters. That makes it hard for people to get their heads round what is going on. When it was a tenth of its current size ten years ago, solar power was still seen as marginal even by experts who knew how fast it had grown. The next ten-fold increase will be equivalent to multiplying the world’s entire fleet of nuclear reactors by eight in less than the time it typically takes to build just a single one of them.
> Solar cells will in all likelihood be the single biggest source of electrical power on the planet by the mid 2030s. By the 2040s they may be the largest source not just of electricity but of all energy. On current trends, the all-in cost of the electricity they produce promises to be less than half as expensive as the cheapest available today. This will not stop climate change, but could slow it a lot faster. Much of the world—including Africa, where 600m people still cannot light their homes—will begin to feel energy-rich. That feeling will be a new and transformational one for humankind.
> To grasp that this is not some environmentalist fever dream, consider solar economics. As the cumulative production of a manufactured good increases, costs go down. As costs go down, demand goes up. As demand goes up, production increases—and costs go down further. This cannot go on for ever; production, demand or both always become constrained. In earlier energy transitions—from wood to coal, coal to oil or oil to gas—the efficiency of extraction grew, but it was eventually offset by the cost of finding ever more fuel.
(think in systems)
Sure, the sun is incredible, but our capacity of actually using that power is the bottleneck. We still have to have energy to dig up the materials and manufacture the panels and batteries and deploy them and such.
Ember Energy: From scale to system: navigating the next phase of China’s battery storage - https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/from-scale-to-syste... - July 16th, 2026
China Battery Storage Use Surges After Policy Shift, Ember Energy Says - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-15/china-bat... | https://archive.today/QBXxV - July 15th, 2026
China Crosses Energy Milestone as Coal Falls Below 50% of Power - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49110187 - July 2026
Nearly a third of new heavy truck sales in China Electric in 2025 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48676673 - June 2026 ("China targeting EVs to make up 40% of heavy truck sales by 2030 - EVs to make up 20% of heavy truck fleet by 2030 - Trade-in schemes will prioritise EV trucks to boost adoption")
China Is The World’s First Electrostate - https://cleantechnica.com/2025/05/26/china-is-the-worlds-fir... - May 26th, 2025
China’s Oil & Gas Giant Sinopec Says Peak Oil Demand Already Happened In China - https://cleantechnica.com/2023/10/11/chinas-oil-gas-giant-si... - October 11th, 2023
https://globalenergymonitor.org/research/china-building-half...
:)
Lets see what 2030 looks like.
China’s Nuclear Energy Priorities Under Its 15th Five-Year Plan - https://www.csis.org/analysis/chinas-nuclear-energy-prioriti... - May 11th, 2026
> China continues to view nuclear as an electricity source that advances its energy security while also reducing reliance on fossil fuels, as noted in the latest FYP (Part II, Chapter 7): “Promote the safe, reliable, and orderly replacement of fossil fuels with non-fossil energy sources; pursue a multi-pronged approach that combines wind, solar, hydro, and nuclear power; and implement the ten-year plan to double non-fossil energy capacity.” The remarkable growth of renewable energy sources and coal’s continuing preeminence have shaped nuclear energy’s role as a non-carbon-emitting baseload in China’s power generation portfolio (Table 1). Nuclear energy seems to serve as a versatile power source that supplements coal’s role as an energy security enforcer as well as the role of renewables as clean energy boosters. By 2030, China targets 110 gigawatts (GW) of installed nuclear power capacity. If realized, the installed capacity in China will surpass that of the United States unless U.S. capacity—currently the world’s largest—grows substantially from 102.5 GW (gross) in 2025.
If you're going to point at them and say "we should be doing what they're doing" then part of that includes doing nuclear.
Lazard Levelized Cost of Energy+ 2026 - https://www.lazard.com/media/kcfconhf/lazards-lcoeplus_vf.pd... [pdf]
> Renewables Remain Lowest Cost New-Build Generation; All Generation Faces Increasing Cost Pressure: Despite rising and inflationary cost pressures across all generation technologies, renewables remain the most cost-competitive form of new-build generation on an unsubsidized basis and will account for the majority of near-term capacity additions in the U.S. Continuous upward revisions to demand projections have driven a sharp increase in announced new-build gas generation despite a 15-year high LCOE, which is expected to continue to rise, and historically long development and equipment delivery timelines.
China Keeps Beating Renewable Targets And Missing Nuclear Ones - https://cleantechnica.com/2026/07/25/china-renewable-targets... - July 25th, 2026
> China set a 2020 wind target of 210 GW and finished the year with about 282 GW. Its solar target was 110 GW, while delivery reached roughly 253 GW. The later commitment to reach at least 1,200 GW of combined wind and solar by 2030 was crossed in 2024, six years early. By the end of 2025, China had about 640 GW of wind and 1,202 GW of solar, for a combined 1,842 GW. Nuclear moved in the other direction: about 50 GW against a 58 GW target in 2020, and about 62 GW against a 70 GW target in 2025. The current goal of 110 GW by 2030 may still be achieved, but the previous record gives no reason to convert it directly into a forecast.
> This is not evidence that Beijing has quietly abandoned nuclear power. China has the world’s largest reactor construction programme, continues approving new units and is building an increasingly domestic supply chain around designs such as Hualong One. The divergence lies between approval and operation. Another difference is that when renewables blow past targets China set much bigger targets, but when nuclear misses targets, the targets don’t change. That difference is harder to explain than the results.
Certainly sounds like China's nuclear goals are aspirational, based on the data. The construction and messaging gives nuclear proponents hope, but construction is not generation. At some point, you have to deliver.
France and Spain are having to shut down their nuclear plants because they can't cool them during heatwaves: https://www.msn.com/en-gb/weather/extreme-weather-events/fra...
"The crisis in France has claimed dozens of lives, with 40 people drowning while attempting to call off from the heat since June 18"
Call off should be "cool off".
And forgive me if this is a stupid question, but don't nuclear power plants produce enough energy that they could power their own cooling? Why do they have to rely on the free cooling provided by a river?
Frankly, it doesn't matter what Germany or other European nations do - their carbon footprint has dramatically decreased.
The issue is everyone else [0]. China (12 GT), the US (5 GT), and India (3 GT) alone represent over half of all global carbon emissions. The EU and UK's combined carbon emissions are half of Asia (excluding China and India) emissions.
Countries like India and Vietnam are expected to see GDP growth in the 6-8% range for the next decade, and both are doubling down on coal [1][2] and other carbon heavy fuels, so emissions are only going to grow further. Any marginal decrease in carbon emissions at this point is too little too late given that much of Asia and South America is expected to see carbon emission grow in the 3-8% range.
[0] - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-...
[1] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-05/india-mul...
[2] - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/vietnam-looks-more-c...
Their carbon footprint is only going to increase as a result.
India [0], Vietnam [1], and others have all doubled down on coal for energy security reasons.
[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-05/india-mul...
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/vietnam-looks-more-c...
co2 per country or capita doesn't mean shit when the world uses China as a factory:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-embedded-in-...
Edit: can't reply
> they don't pollute because they're Chinese, they pollute because they're your factory
If that was the case, then global CO2 emissions would have been stagnant for 30 years, not rising.
We can rant all day about how stupid it was of the conservatives to re-enact the ban on nuclear power without restarting the subsidies for renewables, and lament that they thus ensured that coal power would thus have to replace more of the lost load, but that's all in the past and we can't change that.
If you think we need more nuclear power to fight CO2 emissions, you're 50 years late. That ship has sailed before most of us here were born.
Consequentially running a fireplace is a lot more climate neutral than driving a car, taking a flight, utilising the myriads of high carbon footprint goods or having a gas heater or so.
On the other hand the bogs that we're losing (and kelp forests) are a lot better at sequestring co2 but they're small. Permafrost will also actually accelerate stuff since....well it __was__ permanently forsty.
But if climate change leads to permanently losing those forests, that is an effect we will feel. Still less bad than losing permafrost
Easier said than done, of course. Sinking millions of trees to the bottom of the ocean might be the most practical way.
No, it’s not lost already. We should attempt to preserve what remains, not assume failure is inevitable.
Of course we should fight to preserve as much as we can. Nobody wants to live in a bunker on mars. Almost...
Not even close. Look at satellite imaging.
Not only is the Amazon far from lost, the jungles in Africa/Borneo/PNG all look to be doing surprisingly okay.
I didn't mean "it is not there anymore", I meant "we won't be able to preserve it, it may already be too late for that".
And aside the greenhouse effect, we're also using more power than we've ever used before, building 10Msqft boxes that ultimately turn electricity into heat. We could go all-solar and we'd still be warming our environment.
The heat output of every single data centre on earth isn’t even worth thinking about on the scale of the global climate system.
Beyond accidental or opportunistic arson, Europe has experienced a wave of state-sponsored sabotage in 2024 and 2025, primarily attributed to Russian intelligence. These attacks involved incendiary devices in packages sent to logistics hubs like DHL in Germany, the UK, and Poland, as well as targeted fires at an IKEA in Vilnius and a warehouse in London. Authorities consider these acts of hybrid warfare aimed at disrupting critical infrastructure and testing delivery channels for larger attacks on the US and Canada.
Key developments in European arson include:
Wildfire Arson: France arrested 162 suspects since July 6, 2026, while Spain’s deadliest blaze in 40 years killed 13 people in Almería. Calabrian Tactics: Italian officials found evidence of calculated arson using delayed ignition devices and animals to accelerate fire spread in southern Italy. Sabotage Network: Russian agents have been linked to multiple arson attacks across England, Poland, Lithuania, and Germany, with several suspects convicted or charged for acts of terrorism and espionage. Legal Fragmentation: The EU lacks a harmonized definition of arson or a centralized criminal database, forcing reliance on fragmented national investigations despite advanced satellite monitoring systems like Copernicus.
I have no way to evaluate the veracity of this site, but https://inspain.news/spains-wildfire-tragedy-now-has-a-human... says:
> In some cases, arson is linked to economic gain: land clearance, insurance fraud, or disputes over grazing rights. Others are sparked by resentment towards environmental restrictions.
The thing is, the obsession with the AI race is making this problem so much worse. We're using up so much more energy and burning so much more fossil fuel as a direct result of AI mania.
We're so obsessed with becoming king of the ashes we're not even noticing we're burning the whole damn place down.
It's tragic, it's irresponsible and many here are at the very least complicit.
It's basically normal people should sacrifice their standards of livings and pay taxes to reduce carbon emission while the same rules doesn't apply for the other class of the society. Most people are living pay check to pay check and out of all the worries in their minds, climate change is the last thing they can afford to worry about.
I would actually say rich people can afford the most to not worry about climate change, because they can stave off the effects better than poor people (moving to colder climates, building cooling systems, or fleeing to mars [1])
no shit sherlock, poor people in those countries have been suffering from starvation, diseases and lack of basic necessities even before the climate change was a thing. For them, it's just another misery on top of their already miserable lives.
Nobody gave a shit about those people in poor countries 20-30 years ago, all of a sudden everyone is worries about climate change because Europe is burning. Had it been a monsoon flooding or a drought in South Asia, nobody in the Economist would even bat an eye, let alone publish an article.
But all the research suggests dealing with climate change is the cheaper option.
There's complexities there but you're effectively saying that you're too poor to pay off a credit card. Okay, but your only going to get poorer by not engaging with reality.
Also, plenty of middle class, comfortable off people refuse to change their comparatively luxurious, king like lives even a little bit unless there is financial upside to them.
This is a lie. The people preaching those did not started those wars.
Those wars were started by conservatives who dont believe climate change, find vegetarianism unmanly and instinctively oppose any suggestion to lower consumption.
Yeah, it's nowhere near enough. We need to seriously revamp how we manage forests. They must be regularly cleaned, huge fire breaks between fenced areas and roads must be created and maintained. Prescribed burns on a regular schedule. Houses cannot be too close to the trees, no matter how pretty it looks. A huge clean radius must be maintained between houses and trees and between properties. All this work must be done in the winter and everything must be prepared for the summer. Every year. Everywhere.
I see none of this happening at a proper scale in my country (Portugal). So of course every summer we se huge forest fires. Lives lost, ecosystems destroyed. Next year it happens again...
It's only going to get worse.
People keep reiterating this probably because Trump keeps reiterating but it just sounds ridiculous.
How do you clean forests? The debris is part of the forest, not all areas of a forest are easily accessible or feasible to transport debis out of there. A dead tree is actually an ecosystem of fungi and insects. Cleaning it may make it more fire prone as broken sticks and leaves shield the ground from the sun allowing the soil to hold on to moisture a little longer. There is plenty of room for nuance here.
I would need to listen to actual experts on this, the correct solution is probably something akin to resorting wetlands and beavers which act as fantastic self maintaining fire breaks.
However when you suggest things like this you see the actual issues pop up, local farmers protest and others using NIMBY laws to block so they get payouts.
Burn the debris every 10-20 years rather than let it accumulate and become unstoppable disaster fires once a century.
This tends to be very hard hard to do in a democratic system though. People really don't like their forests burning.
Like a lot of things in the US, the resources are "there" for this stuff, because it's a lot of individual labor instead of something that can be turned into a massive payoff for a couple of "investors" there's no "market incentive" so nothing will be done.
For context, I live on 40 unimproved acres in CO, and much of my spring and late fall is spent moving downed wood and cutting down thickets of gamble oak.
That is a lot of work, and I hope (over the next decade) to eventually get it somewhat under control. The idea is to not have, for instance, a dead tree leaning up against a living tree and to try and tamp down or increase the space between the floor and the first couple of branches in the trees. I also collect up wood for heating in the winter (better to burn it to stay warm than to lt it go in an eventual wild fire.
This is a lot of strenuous work, and not just because I have some love and respect for the situation of all the individual flora and fauna that populate this chunk of land. I've know several wildland firefighters here and they are doing similar things in a hurry out in the hills with hand tools. Because you can't get large equipment around to do the work- there aren't roads in a lot of these places.
It'll all probably burn at some point, anyhow.
But I try because at least in the couple of acres where I actually live I might be able to get the underbrush cleared so a fire could be fought.
But the idea of setting it on fire is prepostrous- I might as well set the shack where I live on fire while i am at it.
That more or less scales up.
The process of mitigating wildire (usually done on a line near an active fire) is largely a bunch of 25 year olds with shovels and chainsaws.
I am all for that work- I'd much rather have them doing that than geraing up to go to Iran or Cuba or wherever.
But hey, the ecology of this place is fucked. My ancestors destroyed the megagfauna to prevent folks from subsisting off of the concentration camps/ reservations. The folks who are still "into" that racist, genocidal, ecocidal project aren't going to do anything to fix it; they'd rather burn their own houses down first.
Good luck doing any work in the winter in places like, oh say, the Rocky Mountains.
I do not think “cleaning” it is going to work, so I’m curious what this “not much different” plan looks like.
In general I would say start fires near towns, and let fires that start elsewhere burn.
And it is not just forest fires. Floods caused by extreme rainfalls, running out of letters in hurricane seasons, once in a century/millenia extreme weather events happening several times in a decade are increasingly noticeable, and they are just symptoms of bigger but harder to directly perceive global trends like that the global yearly average temperature increased a few tens of degrees or that the ocean is winning heat at a rate of 6 Hiroshima bombs per second.
Climate change will create winners and losers. Losers -- anyone on the equator or within the the tropic of cancer/capricorn. Winners -- those outside those regions or with enough $ to adapt.
Give me solar geoengineering, 2x increase in R&D spending on reducing fossil fuel usage, and funding for direct carbon capture (and a financial incentive to do it).
It's going to get worse before it gets better sadly.
Russia and Canada might end up winning from this, but for everyone else it seems like a big negative, with some silver linings
You can look up : Antonio Donato Nobre, Victor Gorshkov and Anastassia Makarieva and go from there.
The science is NOT settled, and people are still learning how all this works. They may all be crooks for all i know.
But as is mentionned in another comment, "(...)stop eating meat, stop driving non-electric vehicles, stop using AC, reduce consumption (...)" won't save us if indeed the massive hits to old-growth forest doom us anyhow.
Arguing for arguing’s sake gets old fast when there is nothing left to drink.
Two weeks ago here in Umbria, Italy the heat was extreme. It was 40°C without a breeze of air, it literally felt like braathing hot air. One morning while I was walking I couldn't believe the amount of dry leaves on the street, by pictures people would have guessed that it was autumn.
I have a really good tolerance to high temperatures but this time I got home very dizzy.
Hope is not too late to revert the current situation, but realistically year after year temperatures have been raising steadly.
So the fighting will continue while we keep duct taping and band aiding the problem.
0. https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/202...
What end of the century ? The way things are going, these cities (in Europe) are going to be unlivable by the end of this decade. They already are. And the fires..
Numbers, percentages, increases, excess, estimated.. We've constructed this abstract parallel universe in which we comfortably live in front of the screens.. and then wonder why the world around us is burning.
Climate change.. Such a comfortable word behind which we can all hide and dispel the responsibility for a life of copious comfort and pleasure.
It's the avocado toasts, the leather jackets, the 1-click-checkouts, the weekend flight to Barcelona, the CL=F price, the bonuses, the 'natural resources' there for us to use and exploit in infinite amounts..
The whole fucking system. That's why the world is burning.
Yeah, I'm guilty of all of the above too. And I have no solution. Just blowing out the smoke from those fires.
On television such fires were/are sold/brainwashed as climate change, rather than corruption and psychopaths.
I would recommend to keep an eye on this things, to investigate possible motivations, independently, fire by fire.
The people in charge a either clinically retarded or willingly ignoring the problem, either way we're fucked, the point of no return is behind us now, this is the new normal, and it'll only get worse
I think the biggest issue with the climate change communication is that the scientists decided to focus on a temperature delta.
There is no meaningful temperature delta, it's just something that you get after a lot of aggregation and averaging.
Sure it makes sense for scientists running their models and such, but it should never have been the primary communication tool to politicians and laymen.
I think it would have been significantly better if they invented some new scale, like the Richter scale or the hurricane severity scale, which instead incorporates the effects of the average temperature rising. A scale which directly communicates a sense of how many more fires will we see per year, how many more severe storms, flash floods etc.
I used to have snow for weeks each winter in my city and now if I get 2-3 days of snow a year it's unusual. Extreme weather events where it rains in one day as much as in one month have become a recurring event to the point we're re-planning sewage systems around these things.
Life is short, there's no point freezing and living off leaves for the next few decades when you'll be old in the blink of an eye anyway
Is it? We are not talking about screwing the climate for the people who will come in 200 years, right? In the last decades we have been saying "if we don't change the trend, your children will most likely die because of the climate change".
Is it rational to be 30 and not care about the fact that we will be screwed long before we reach the age of retirement?
Setting aside the fact that even if I was so selfish to care about my personal legacy, I'd want the world around long enough to learn about it...
there's no point freezing and living off leaves for the next few decades
I don't think the ask here is so unreasonable. It's disingenuous to frame it this way.
The everyday person votes for those in charge, and the everyday person couldn’t care less.
A classic collective action problem as described by Mancur Olson.
What we all need to understand is that after oil, we just won't have enough energy to maintain our current way of life. Not just energy by the way: our way of life relies on petrochemical products (from fertilisers to electronics). Solar panels need electronics, we don't know if we can build/maintain them at scale without computers that need petrochemical products.
So we need as much as we can of everything. Both renewables and nuclear.
The oil companies in the 1970s for one:
However, the people in charge (e.g. in France) are elected by the people, and therefore represent it. Do you think that the far-right will care more about the climate crisis? The French people is likely to elect them next year.
It's too easy to vote for people who don't give a shit about the climate crisis, and then blame them.
> either way we're fucked, the point of no return is behind us now
The faster and the harder we react, the more we save. Fires are a good example: because many trees are burning now (therefore they are already dead) and many trees will burn (because the fire won't magically stop), it's worth fighting to preserve as much as we can. Saying "we won't get those dead trees back, so we may as well let the rest of the forest burn" is counter-productive.
We need to act now. And not by electing morons and then blaming them for being morons.
Far right, far left, far center, it's all the same: money, power, money, power, stay in the EU, free market, money, power.
What does this look like, precisely, in practice?
Chiefly we need to replace fossil fuels with electricity from carbon free sources and electrify transportation, heating, and industry.
That's happening. For instance, China now generates less than half its energy from coal for the first time, as reported earlier today: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/china-generates-less...
* CO2 emissions are screwing the climate, and CO2 emissions come from fossil fuels. We need to stop using fossil fuels.
* Our way of life depends on fossil fuels. In some cases it's obvious (we transport food in trucks that need oil), but it's too easy to believe that we may replace that with electricity. It's a lot more complicated than that: everything depends on petrochemical products. How do you transport food without plastics? How do you build electronics without petrochemical products (the PCBs need them, for one)? Without electronics, how do you manage solar panels?
* We don't necessarily have to go back to the Middle-Age: first we probably couldn't: we are way too many for that, and second we know a lot more than they did.
But overall, we will have to do a lot less with a lot less. We have to think about what's fundamental, and how we want to preserve it. I'm not saying "choose between a new game console or a new smartphone every two years instead of having both". I'm saying "do you want to preserve some nature? Produce enough food for everybody? Keep some kind of democratic system?".
Of course, it's too much, we cannot do everything that we need, and we won't be able to preserve everything that we want. We need to accept it and start prioritising.
Overall, I would say that a good first step would be to get informed about how bad it is. There are enough books and resources about that. The people need to be informed in order to elect informed people. Too many don't give a shit, spend their free time on TikTok and then blame the ruling class.
The "people in charge" as well as the "climate experts" are generally aligned on the climate crisis, but everyone has been surprised by unexpected acceleration and the very sudden swings.
Put differently, you can predict and act, according to the trend, but the sudden and unpredictable timing of these swings is a separate, and more difficult issue to navigate.
For instance, can anyone predict specifically what will happen "next" and "where" and prepare to mitigate the impact?
Now it's starting to impact us directly, but we still don't really give a shit. In a few weeks it will be business as usual.
It will get worse every year, and we will be more and more willing to do something as it gets worse. But we will have fewer and fewer resources to do it, and less stuff to save (once a forest disappears, you as a human won't see it come back in your lifetime).
It's been predicted for decades, in multiple reports, over and over and over and over again... No excuses
> can anyone predict specifically what will happen "next" and "where" and prepare to mitigate the impact?
Something bad, duh? And reduce emissions, duh?
The things people have been predicting and advocating for during the past like 50 years at that point. Are we still debating these details lol?
Of course we're fucked.
The only way climate change stops is with a technological solution.
It's not. The climate will warm as much as we emit CO2. Sure, the CO2 that we have already emitted won't leave. We've passed 1.5C, that won't come back in our lifetime. But the more we emit, the worse it will get. To keep what we have now, we have to stop emitting entirely, right now.
> We now need to worry about the hundreds of millions of people
We need to worry about the problems that are coming from the CO2 we have already emitted, that's true. But we also need to worry a lot about the fact that we are making it worse every single day. We are not reducing our CO2 emissions, we are increasing them right now.
Are you worried about hundreds of millions of refugees? The way it's going, we'll reach 4C. It means that billions of people will have to move.
I don't think we can still use the concept of "refugee" when its entire countries that need to move because their part of the world has become so hot that humans cannot survive outside without life support (that's what will happen to billions of people with 4C). At this point, it's entire countries moving with their military, it's just global war.
you are talking reason, you are in the wrong timeline buddy. i'm talking about what we will chose as a society, i feel we can't help ourselves.
You can convince a person (me certainly) that we should stop immediately (or very very short time frame). But most people have experienced their entire lifetime of propaganda and fallacious arguments that words and reason have lost all meaning.
We are still getting cooked so slowly that people will only see unrelated incidents for a long time. World War(s) 3 is what the survivors will call it.
Maybe I've missed it because I don't follow news on this much (apart from "it will get warmer/worse"), but what happens after that? Seems like I've been hearing "by 2100" for the last 20 years, but now that's only 74 years away. Some people alive today will live to see it. Will it just keep getting warmer or will it level off somewhat? Or is it not worth discussing because preceding events will already be such an overwhelming disaster?
It will get warmer for every kg of CO2 we emit. If we emitted less every day, it would still warm, but slower. Right now we are emitting more every day, so it will warm faster and faster.
> Or is it not worth discussing because preceding events will already be such an overwhelming disaster?
It's always worth discussing. It is not linear: every extra degree makes it a lot worse than the previous one. We're finding it worrying now with 1.5C? We should do everything we can to stay as close as possible to it. Probably we cannot avoid 2C, and if we keep going with the current emissions, that's 4C. 4C means that billions of people have to leave their country. I think it pretty much means that more than half of us die in a global war?
There is hope: we don't have to reach 4C. But we have to change our way of life for that. Which should be worth it, right? I'm ready to change my way of life to... survive.
There's a point where "head in stand" becomes deliberately malicious.
So in 2026, this magazine (and others) are reporting how +2C will be far worse than +1.5C. How about reporting stopping at +2C is a pipe dream. We are heading straight to +3C and probably +4C.
Time to start reporting on how we need to stop using fossil fuels now, not later. But even doing that really will not stop us from reaching +2.5C due to inaction by world Gov. over the last 50 years.