> But while in West Germany and united Germany between 1946 and 2005, cases were brought against 140,000 individuals
https://www.timesofisrael.com/historian-examines-germanys-mi...
> British military courts carried out proceedings against 1,085 persons
> About forty-five additional trials were held against an unknown number of accused. [...] In all, French occupation courts passed 2,107 sentences [...]
> [I]n Poland alone 16,819 Germans were sentenced [...]
> In Czechoslovakia, about 16,000 German nationals received sentences. Exact figures are not available.
https://digitallibrary.un.org/nanna/record/627806/files/A_80...
Also, there is more than one political aisle. The left (who broadly want to redistribute wealth) is distinct from democrats (who are capitalists) is distinct from the various parts of the GOP.
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall be duly convicted, shall exist within the United STates or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
All governments "redistribute wealth" friend, not just the left or right or up or down.
It all depends on which side of the bars you live on, amirite?
And at any rate, why not both?
Each wind farm, each set of solar panels, each battery storage will begin to pay dividends immediately as each one is finished. While the huge plant will be nothing-nothing-nothing-... for years upon years.
Builders, engineers, capital, and such is better suited to be investing in other sources of energy.
Virtually all of the current conditions were in motion before bitcoin and AI were even a thing.
And I would argue the usefulness of bitcoin is negative from the viewpoint of a free society.
AI is to a certain degree a different story, but also there it depends what you're doing.
We live in a thin atmospheric skin around the planet, and that skin has a finite volume. If earth was the size of an apple, the atmosphere is thinner than the Apple's skin in proportion.
Pretending we can do whatever we like for infinitly long inside an finite volume is completely unhinged. The financial and political elites, who some frame as the true geniuses point to technological solutions that are always "just around the corner" for the past decades with some of them even eying to leave the planet behind entirely.
All of that while we know how to address the issue.
Not exactly background noise but totally incomparable to the normal CO2 outputs of major nations like the US or China. I.e. ~20 Million Tons CO2 vs 4 Trillion and 13 Trillion Tons respectively.
In transport emissions, passenger vehicles dominate by far (with around 12% of global GHG emissions), even more so in developed countries. Then freight by road with 7.5% of total emissions.
Maritime shipping is actually the least carbon intensive way to transport goods over long distances by at least two orders of magnitude [2].
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions-from-transport
[2] https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg3/transport/06_figure_8-6/
Followed by agriculture & manufacturing.
Plus there are the security concerns. Every civilian nuclear power plant has armed guards on duty around the clock. Those guards have to also be trained and paid. Many foreign countries have laws against bringing weapons into their ports.
If we want to reduce CO2 emissions from merchant ships then use nuclear or renewable power on shore to manufacture carbon neutral synthetic liquid fuel. Use that to run the ship engines.
Lots of manufacturing projects, lots of related industries boosted, a renewed investment in nuclear engineering bringing a lot of nuclear job experience, and a way to potentially dig deeper into the backbone of global trade again.
Imagine if even one of the tankers hit in the strait of Hormuz was nuclear.
Either way, "loss of nuclear material" is the real concern isn't it, instead of just the nature of how that loss happened?
The question still stands. If a country knows they're potentially going to cause a nuclear disaster by hitting one of these ships on their shoreline, are they as likely to shoot at them?
And even among the non-hardliners mistakes are rampant in war. It's not about what they're likely to rationally do, it's about what some local, demoralized missile officer who graduated in the bottom 20% of his class does when he's cut off from command and drinking too much.
Useless yapping about opening windows at night, protecting the vulnerable, limiting global warming to 1.5C, and not drinking caffeine.
Is any of this "Call to Action" actually actionable?
Obviously not; and it is pathetic.
What should be actioned:
- remove regulatory hurdles to AC installation
- mandate such installation in residences that otherwise reach unbearable temperatures
- make funds available to subsidize the installation or train more workers for AC installation
That would 'protect the vulnerable'.
Talking about opening windows at night or climate change does nothing, and is performative only.
I do not think that you believe so.
How is it acceptable that the actionable solution is entirely ignored in favor of performative speech?
You cannot talk about thousands dying today, neglect to mention the actionable solution, and talk only about climate action which will help on a time frame of decades to centuries.
If you live next to a road and every other month a car crashed through your living room wall you'd probably fix the root cause after the first time it happened. If you are clever you fixed it even before it occurs. What you would not do is only deal with the damage caused month for month and pretend there is no need to address the root cause.
The reason why many pretend our only option is handing out band aids while the blade keeps spinning, is because it is hard to imagine anything else, if your salary depends on you not addressing the problem.
It feels more and more like watching a bus driver playing chicken against a solid, immovable concrete wall. It is obvious who wins, the only question is into which directions the scrap explodes most, while the driver eyes for the ejector seat. And all the kids pretend driving into the wall is the only reasonable option.
It is possible for humanity to create unsurvivable conditions in our earths atmosphere. Should we do that if there is enough profit in it? If not, where would you draw the line and how would you set/enforce the limits?
That being said fuck pollution and the ruining of our environment.
40°C with high humidity from 5am to 10am every day is not ‘beautiful weather’.
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=nuclear+climate+change
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Start 11 years ago and go backwards
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1439337600&dateRange=custom&...
Everyone hears 'winters will be up to 10C cooler', but few realize that this will also cause the jet stream to be more wavy, and exacerbate the number of heat waves as well.
Sad that europe's mild climate is about to get a whole lot worse...
https://climatetippingpoints.info/2026/05/06/news-explainer-...
The % likelyhood by x date predictions have swayed back and forth as we've adjusted our predictions of which emissions path we actually wind up following.
Last updated in June.
My whole concern with the AMOC is that given it's a non-linear system, and we've seen evidence of 'fast shutdowns' in the climate record before, I fear we are sleepwalking towards an event that could have catastrophic consequences for the global south, and problems there do not stay there. People flee rather than starve.
I also worry what happens to western liberal democracy under the weight of that influx if we're already seeing populism from today's level of migration.
> Overall though, there is some common ground in recent research: evidence for AMOC weakening having begun is growing, albeit is not clear in every AMOC metric; a substantial decline is expected with current emissions, that over centuries could potentially push the AMOC to a slow ‘shutdown’ state; and there remains a real but uncertain chance that this slowdown could pass a tipping point beyond which this shutdown is locked in, even if warming is halted or even declines. Exactly how much and quickly the AMOC is weakening, and the likelihood of it reaching a tipping point, remain much more uncertain, but what we do know is enough to justify concern and action to reduce the risk of AMOC shutdown
https://www.reddit.com/r/weather/comments/1um7tyn/sometimes_...
There is a heat wave right now, again.
I expect this to be a deeply unpopular take here, but solutionism will fail. Magic technology will not come to save us. All of our industrial tekhne has been in the service of rolling down the stored-energy hill faster and faster. To put the genie back in the bottle, to take apart the CO2 and turn it back into hydrocarbons, we’d have to do more work than everything that was done in the last two centuries. And that’s an extremely conservative lower bound.
It’s so dire. I don’t think most people understand that everything around them is made out of petroleum. Not just your ability to travel, or your clothes. Your food is made of petroleum. Your institutions are made of petroleum. Your gender equality is made of petroleum. Your freedom is made of petroleum.
There is no putting this thing in reverse. If the AI doesn’t get us first, thermodynamics will topple all of this.
If we overcome these very real contraints, we reduce the rate of new additions to atmospheric CO2. We will still need to do the thermodynamically hard work of removing CO2 at gigaton scale, but deferring that until removal tech is more mature is the right sequencing.
Of course, this assumes that we are actually working towards the CO2 output reductions right now and really committed to CO2 removal in the near future.
That is the weirdest and wokest comment I read this year on the internet. Could you please explain?
The usual way people talk about all this is more or less idealist (as opposed to materialist): people thought hard and got better morals (or worse morals, if you have a reactionary bent). The claim I’m making is that it’s not a coincidence that egalitarian norms happened to be correlated with the falling cost of energy. It’s basically the same idea as “God created men [and women]; Sam Colt made them equal.”
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/environment/2026/08/10/climate-...
https://nitter.catsarch.com/JKSteinberger/status/20874034329...
The idea that Europe could slow warming by not using air-conditioning is absurd, when the emissions mostly come from elsewhere. France, in particular, gets most of its energy from nuclear power, but also makes it very hard to get climatisation.
I myself had one, but I could probably rent a car for the cost of running it.
Excess deaths due to heat are primarily the in the elderly. The excess numbers we are seeing now are because the proportion of elderly people in France, Germany and Spain are higher than in the USA.
If the population pyramid in the EU was more similar to that of the USA the number of excess deaths would be lower. I'm not sure negligent is the correct word to use. Climate change will reduce quality of life. Because of these changes people will not live as long.
That's how excess deaths work.
In the meantime my fathers solar roof allows him free AC cooling, because as it turns out AC generally needs most energy when the sun shines the most.
I am not arguing nuclear plants do not have benefits, I just argue that solar with storage may be a much better fit for powering ACs.
¹: https://www.euronews.com/2026/08/12/heatwave-and-jellyfish-a...
Well, if the people in charge say or think global warming isn't real, that's what you get: not "other" solutions to the "unacceptable propositions" the Green parties suggest, but no proposition at all, as there is no problem.
The current situation is a direct consequence of pure negationism from conservative parties, not a disagreement on how to deal with climate change between the Right and the Left. The Left proposed solutions you may not agree with, but the Right has been completely rejecting the reality of climate change.
BTW, how do you propose Europe protect not only people from the heat, but also forests from burning, rivers from drying up, fields from being unfit for cows and sheep, lakes from blooming with algae, nuclear plants from being shut down due to river water being too hot and seawater being full of jellyfish, etc, etc, etc? In the end, there are so many things to "adapt" that it would cost less to try to organize a global effort to lower CO2.
Why does it have to be framed as all-or-nothing? I agree that using air conditioning to reduce the number of people who die from the heat does nothing to help with the problem of jellyfish, but how is that relevant, exactly?
Electrify everything where possible (especially transport and heating), get electricity CO2 neutral, get concrete and steel production CO2 neutral (lots of those would be an inevitable consequence of the emission pricing).
This would allow western democracies to basically fix the global situation on their own, by exerting economic pressure on developing countries (those want/need market access, like China).
It would make goods (and especially individual transport!) more expensive though (even if you re-emit the tax income), so you can be sure it's not gonna happen, because too many people are too selfish.
I am expecting my homeless life in in minivan to be choatic trying to chase where the weather will be favorable.
My main concern if is there is heavy rains in California after the drought of rain they have had this summer. The Salton Sea is at an all time low[1] and many people do not know that a rapid fill of water into the Salton Sea from the Cochella Valley is a known trigger for earthquakes on the San Jacinto and San Andreas Faults[2][3].
[1] https://waterdata.usgs.gov/monitoring-location/USGS-10254005...
[2] https://www.sdsu.edu/news/2023/07/drying-salton-sea-has-stav...
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXqOn0GILtA
Adding...
https://subjecttoclimate.org/news/study-las-earthquake-risk-...
First the UK, then leadership of Europe via behind-closed-doors politics, then a gentle colonization of both the east and the west using our amazing cheese, bread that is baked rather than synthesized from fossil fuels, and 30 days of paid vacations per year. The path forward is clear.
https://www.franceinfo.fr/environnement/energie/nucleaire/de...
https://www.franceinfo.fr/environnement/energie/nucleaire/tr...
https://www.rts.ch/info/environnement/2026/article/secheress...
https://www.rts.ch/info/environnement/2026/article/secheress...
https://www.rts.ch/info/regions/fribourg/2026/article/secher...
https://www.rts.ch/info/regions/fribourg/2026/article/secher...
https://www.rts.ch/info/environnement/2026/article/secheress...
You should compare the average carbon footprint in the US with the EU before making these kind of comments.
But I guess that's for right-wingers. Enjoy losing more people to heat than the US does to gun violence
I'll leave it to you to work out why that comparison doesn't hold.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn4d2vv935lo
> In a post on X, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said more than 1,300 excess deaths had been recorded since 21 June "linked to high temperatures in Europe".
> On Sunday morning, France's national health ministry said there had been around 1,000 more deaths than expected in the country since Wednesday.
https://www.dw.com/en/heat-wave-european-countries-report-37...
> At least 3,700 excess deaths have been recorded in France, Belgium and the Netherlands alone as a result of the June heat wave that sent temperatures soaring above 40°C (104°F).
Just stop. A lack of European AC is making a negligible difference at best in the fight against climate change and it's killing your people. The models aren't that wrong.
Your solution is to put AC all over Europe. That won't work because our buildings are not made for AC, the amount of retrofitting required would be insane and it probably wouldn't have a significant impact on excess deaths. Counties like France and Germany have a higher percentage of elderly relative to the USA. These people will be contributing massively to the excess deaths. Your AC solution is not going to be in place fast enough for them.
If you get hit by a truck while infected with COVID-19 you died because you were hit by a truck. I'm not sure how you would do it any other way.
That was even technically correct -- the worst kind of correct. Of course, you could have had Covid but died of a heart attack. But then they made the leap to saying "hence we don't know if Covid even is very deadly", and at this point it was just pure denialism.
Coming back to the heatwave. We know that heat contributes to dangerous health conditions. We know there are excess deaths every time the mercury crosses some threshold. Yes, some of these excess deaths could have been unrelated to the heat. No, this doesn't mean that the stats we have are totally BS.
I don't know how it's become such a culture war gotcha.
Yes, I have AC myself and yes, it makes things more bearable.
But it won't refill our rivers, it won't make the outside livable, it won't regrow our crops, it won't refreeze the glaciers and poles, it won't unburn the forests. In short, it won't be able to provide the conditions required for human survival.
To do that, we can't avoid fixing the root cause. Every time we have a conversation about the effects of climate change, somebody derails it with "but AC!"...
Its not constructive or helpful.
Realistically, what else can be done to deal with the impact of climate change right now? Addressing the root cause would be great, but it's not going to move the needle for people suffering today.
And lest anyone mistakes this concern for saving lives for humanitarian concern, this same kind of reasoning makes their answer to a refugee crisis "build a wall". It's all just knee-jerk reaction to first-order effects.
What we need is (global) electrification of transport and heating, CO2 free electricity and CO2 neutral concrete and steel.
Very effective ways to make this happen would be high prices on emissions, enforced on every local industry and all imports.
But too many people love their cheap fossil-based transport too much and are unwilling to make even small sacrifices to keep the climate stable; sad reality.
Thinking these are at their current level relevant to climate change, is a level of ignorance that I'd almost put on a tin-foil hat to discuss how the fossil industry is feeding an anti-AI campaign of ignorance.
Feel free to remember the past how you want, that doesn't change it.
Locations: Southern Austria and Northern Germany
https://doma.edu.mk/en/research-and-education/macedonia-and-...
I think denying climate change and it's impact in the face of all evidence is something hard to justify lol.