This is the most important part most people don't get:
> And what would 3 °C mean for Germany?
> FB: In summer, meteorological records could reach up to 50 °C. Three degrees of global warming does not mean hot days will just be 3 or 4 degrees hotter. It could mean up to 10 degrees hotter. We would also face much longer droughts.
3°C warming implies summer days can get 10°C hotter. This is nightmare scenario.
It was always explained that way to me though. the "Our house is burning, and we are looking away" speech was like 20 years ago and it was pretty clear then than average increase in temps mostly mean higher maximums and minimums.
Nowadays, people who never did anything to consume less (and made fun of people who stopped taking the plane) can't hide behind the "we didn't know" because everybody knew, so they hide behind the "it was not predicted to be as bad" and other "the scientists explained that poorly", but we know what's up, even when they lie to themselves.
What do you mean? Both Europe and America moved industrial production to China (which was an explicit choice/policy) which as a side effect radically increased the amount of coal used to power industrial production, BUT lets Europeans and Americans both pay less (ie. make workers poorer) AND lets them claim innocence for CO2 increases, while in fact increasing their CO2 use indirectly.
this also means thermal turbulence which means breakup of flow, and that means failure of distribution, leading to localized torrid spots, that translates to heat dome regions of more than 10°C hotter.
Are you being intentionally obtuse? In normal language the quoted text means there is a meaningful chance of record temperatures 10 degrees hotter than current records.
It is weasel language which actually says nothing in order to not be disprovable
The reason we see it all the time is because we've gotten used to people trying to convince us that some unlikely scenario will take place to increase urgency.
While global warming is happening, the quoted sentence should be raising your "this is someone trying to convince me of something that has a neglectable likelihood of becoming reality"-alarm
But sure, it could be that we may get a significant heat up within the next 20 years. Regardless of that, if you're living in Germany you probably should get an AC, as even if that doesn't manifest, things can already get too warm
I recently wrote a reply to someone else with the same argument about the German greens, which I'll recycle here:
"It's bad enough that nuclear proponents ignore the massive cost of nuclear compared to renewables once you factor in building costs, insurance and storage imho. But then to pretend like the conservatives didn't have a choice but to bungle the nuclear exit really is too much.
The CDU never listened to the greens when it came to not killing the solar industry and serving it to China on a golden platter. Or not killing our rail infrastructure by continually delaying maintenance so that we would have to do much more costly repairs later.
But in this instance, they do, and do it in a way that is a gift to the energy companies, and instead of noticing the obvious corruption at play, people still blame the greens."
Sorry if the tone is a bit harsh, but I'm really annoyed at the amount of dishonesty surrounding nuclear energy.
Yeah, it's crazy how successful that particular piece of propaganda is. The conservative CDU is responsible for the decommissioning of nuclear plants, while the Greens extended the lifetime of the remaining plants. It's literally the other way around, but people don't question it - it feels too good to complain about the Greens, right?
What does the German Green Party say in their own political platform today about the use of thermal power plants? Are they in favor of them, to be used to balance the grid when renewable energy fails to meet demand, or are they against the construction and continued use?
I know what the Swedish green party has on their platform, open to be read at any time on their website or in paper materials, or heard by their political representatives. Their position is that thermal power plants are critical to the energy grid in order to enable renewable energy and keeping costs down. They wish to use either bio fuels or green hydrogen to fuel those power plants.
The issue I got with that plan is that current thermal power plants in practice do not use exclusively bio fuels or green hydrogen, and that the environmental science around bio fuels are poor at best and full of green washing and practices that are extremely bad for the environment. The costs of bio fuels and green hydrogen has also demonstrated to be massively expensive, making the cost of nuclear cheap in comparison.
My views of the green will change when/if the green drops their support of thermal power plants, and their overwhelming dependency of using biofuels produced from corn as a way to reduce emissions. Biofuels need to be produced without using artificial fertilizers (natural gas), and without burning down forests to make space for the farming. It also need to be cheaper than nuclear, which disqualify green hydrogen as it is produced, stored and handled currently. Carbon capture and artificial fuels are disqualified on the same point, being overwhelming more expensive than nuclear.
As an anecdote, the Swedish green party leader and a right wing party had a political debate during last election. The Right wing party wanted to demolish an oil fueled thermal power plant that is currently operated in south of Sweden, and replace with new nuclear power plant. Paraphrasing what the green party leader said: "Thermal power plants are a natural part of the Swedish grid, and nuclear energy is way to expensive. We need those plants to keep the grid stable and prices low."
>What does the German Green Party say in their own political platform today about the use of thermal power plants?
Doesn't matter, at least in Germany. Maybe it's different in other countries, though this would surprise me. Here, nobody reads the party platforms, as they do not correlate with the actions of our political parties.
If you vote according to party platform, then you should probably vote for the conservatives or the reds, as they pretend to be good for the economy and the workers.
I think it's better to judge a party by their actions, instead.
I'm sure the day after Russia withdraws from Ukraine they're going to demand the pipeline from Russia be restored and everyone they suspect involved involved in the Nord Stream blasts extradited too.
North Stream was never about additional capacity. It was always about circumventing Ukraine's pipelines. Which in case of war turned it into a national security risk for Ukraine, which is why they blew it up. It forced Russia to either stop its exports or go through Ukraine. Which all turned out somewhat moot in the end.
We _are_ doing something about this. We’re locating concentrated millions of years of trapped fossil energy and moving it into our atmosphere as fast as we possibly can. To a first approximation, that is the world economy.
Both Europe and US's emissions are significantly (18%-30%) below their peak (which was 20 years ago. The rest of the world is also moving towards renewables.
Co2 parts per million are a stock, like the level of water in a bathtub. Annual emissions are a flow, like how strongly the water is flowing in.
The tub is fuller than ever before AND filling at the fastest rate ever.
The problem is that carbon energy is useful. So unless something globally beats almost all use cases then somewhere marginally it will be worth burning vs not burning it.
It's a leaking bathtub. Half life of excess CO2 in the atmosphere is 30-100 years. So you need the water flowing in to continue to increase in rate (not just to continue flowing in), otherwise you reach a new equilibrium and the CO2 levels in the atmosphere stop increasing.
That's a rather misleading statistic. Some is absorbed by oceans, where it acidifies. For land based carbon sinks (trees, soil, etc) any new carbon being deposited is competing with existing carbon in the carbon cycle.
If your stat had any sense then atmospheric carbon levels would rapidly plunge in a few centuries without humans burning carbon. They plainly don't do that.
> Both Europe and US's emissions are significantly (18%-30%) below their peak
Because they outsource their dirty work. To get a true picture of US/EU emissions you need to factor in the factories in Asia that are producing their consumer goods, as well as the global transport network that supports this.
While yes the emissions are down from 2007 and majority of it has been driven by the shift away from coal in power generation.
However, every other sector has been rather flat in terms of emissions since the 90s. When you account for the fact that a large amount of industries have moved to China and other developing countries, the fact that emissions from industries have been flat, means that the overall consumption has gone up.
If you account for the emissions that we’ve offshored, we’d not be looking so good.
Yes, this is the right question to ask. A lot of the decrease in emissions in Western nations is the equivalent of dumping your trash in a lot across town. Sure it's "gone", but only in a technical sense.
There has been a lot of debate over AC use. Everyone chiming in only discusses runtime energy use.
The biggest issue is mining and manufacturing, and the moving of all the materials, parts, and such.
Every AC has sheathed wires and circuit boards.
Every airplane, car, phone, network router, refrigerator... same expansive mess creation.
Gamers complaining about disc less games despite that problem pipeline and waste.
Complaining about RAM prices despite the problem pipeline.
No one is focused on the lag effects, externalities, of billions using up an endless supply of technologies and dumping airplane smog in the atmosphere. Etc, etc, etc
Thermodynamics makes it pretty clear that energy is not gone just hanging out in the atmosphere.
Thermodynamics means we may be fucked even if we slow down; that energy in the atmosphere can only go from atmosphere into oceans, glaciers, and permafrost. There's a lot of potential energy in the Earth to release as it absorbs the heat already in the atmosphere
I totally agree with you that our unhinged consumption behavior is the core problem. And with AI we stepped on the accelerator again.
But regarding your second statement. The actual problem is the greenhouse effect of CO2 and Methane in the atmosphere which traps the suns energy in our atmosphere heating up oceans, ice and landmass. The heat we produce is negligible compared to the energy the sun sends every day. The greenhouse gases are the problem. And you are right, pulling away that blanket so that more heat can dissipate into space will take a looong time (growing trees) or cost an insane amount of (clean) energy, reversing the chemical processes of burning oil, gas and coal.
> Gamers complaining about disc less games despite that problem pipeline and waste.
Tbf the issue is the user-hostile parameters of buying a diskless game. Most people would be happy to download their games if they could back them up to a thumb drive and never get locked out of them and sell the game when they’re done with it.
Seems deeply tangential, but it’s not. Blaming people for wanting a physical thing because the alternative is being further abused by a corporation - that’s a miss. Be mad at game platforms for not offering real ownership in whatever the most climate-friendly way possible. Be mad at governments for not forcing companies to cost in the negative externalities of their business.
If you want less of something, tax it. Support consumption based taxes like the FairTax in the US which would tax new goods at a high rate while used goods would be tax free. This encourages keeping items for longer, repairing rather than replacing, and purchasing used goods over new ones.
Oh well ok I will get right on raising taxes. So simple I should have done it sooner.
FairTax is regressive and does nothing to stop a trillionaire from launching dick rockets to nowhere. Each rocket and launch using more resources than a poor person will their entire life.
Not sure why the snarky response, obviously most people have very little direct influence over these things.
So you oppose green tax policy on the grounds that it isn't punitive enough against rich people? A rich person living a miserly life would pay little in taxes, I see no problem with that.
I assume that you are alluding to someone specific with the rocket launching trillionaire quip. That would be the same person who helped make electric vehicles viable and also helped develop reusable rockets, far greener than one time use ones, no?
I don't think having rich people pay more taxes relative to their income should be considered punitive. Progressive taxation has a long history going back to the first modern income taxes in the 18th or 19th centuries on the basis that low income people have a more reduced capacity to pay (due to non-discretionary spending on necessities being a higher portion of income when it is lower) and I think it's reasonable to expect it out of taxes.
Though, I do recognise that having one regressive tax wouldn't necessarily make the entire tax-and-transfers system regressive (or even more regressive, if that tax money is spent).
On the path we're on I don't think we'll have to worry too much about future generations.
The EU has already seeing 10,000 excess deaths from climate changed caused heat waves and this is a minuscule taste of what's to come.
A very large percentage of mass extinction events have their roots in increased atmospheric CO2, but all of them on dramatically increased time scales. The closest thing in the history of the planet to what's happening to day was PETM [0] and that was only a lessor extinction event because the Earth was already quite warm (for example, there was already no polar ice at the time).
You may enjoy Ian McEwan's What We Can Know: "Civilization as we know it ends. A pair of scholars in 2120, risking death from roving predatory gangs, travel across what’s left of England in search of a long-lost, epoch-making poem titled 'A Corona for Vivien.' They are the last, it seems, historians alive" [1]. (It's less apocalyptic than this makes it seem, at least relative to the modern apocalyptic genre à la Mad Max.)
I have already accepted that there is nothing plebs can do about climate change. I can try hard by using public transport, using less plastic, and using less air conditioning, but all of those efforts are rendered useless by rich people going on vacation in yachts or private planes. And if you talk about reducing meat consumption, Americans will go mad, lol.
Ordinary plebs trying to prevent climate change is like subtracting $100 from a billion dollars - it does not make any meaningful difference.
Are you saying no pleb wants to consume? Are you saying no pleb demands more product? Are you saying no pleb wants their polluting employer to continue so they have a job? Are you saying no pleb chooses to lower cost but more polluting options at every turn?
China (13 GT), the US (4.6 GT), and India (3 GT) alone represent 51% of global carbon emissions - and at least in India's case, it is growing at a rate of 5%.
Throw in other large polluters like Russia (2 GT), Indonesia (0.8 GT), Iran (0.8 GT), KSA (0.6 GT), Brazil (0.5 GT), and Vietnam (0.5 GT) whose rate of carbon emissions is growing in the 5-10% range and you see there is no path forward.
Any amount of de-carbonization that China or the collective West does is automatically negated by the other countries I listed. At best global carbon emissions stagnate - which by default is going to lead to a 2-3 °C increase in temperatures.
You conveniently left the US out of that and the US's role in driving global emissions. China is also likely rapidly de-carbonizing right now just like they rapidly spun up. They are an issue, but the US and its policies have a massive impact on this problem. Same with Europe. Rapidly adopting renewables and not externalizing our emissions to other countries would go a long way.
I have seen the argument shift from 'That's a lie. Global warming doesn't exist. Stop pushing regulations for a non-existent problem.' To 'Maybe it does, or there is some human impact but this is all within normal variation and the climate can take some amount of pollution so stop trying to regulate it!' to, I guess the new argument of, 'It's too late so why try? We shouldn't change course because it won't matter so stop trying to regulate the problem away.' It isn't too late. Do something.
> China is also likely rapidly de-carbonizing right now
Huh. "China’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions fell by 1% in the final quarter of 2025, likely securing a decline of 0.3% for the full year as a whole" [1].
So "rapidly de-carbonising" is wrong. But decarbonising per se is correct.
Chin's emissions rose by 20% from 2017 to 2024 and then flat-lined in 2025 with emissions expected to decline in 2026. That is what decarbonization looks like, the rate of change has swung massively in the right direction. The .3 in 2025 will likely turn into -1.5 in 2026 and more after that. They have embraced alternative energy because it is now making them money and gaining them influence. That trend won't change and they will keep on decarbonizing because it is the easy, profitable, route.
Sure, I gave you that. But you went further. China is not “rapidly de-carbonizing right now.” It’s forecast to start rapidly decarbonizing in the next decade.
Its only falling per Chinese gov data. The trend since 2019 is for them to downplay emission data and when the next international review comes around we'll have seen that it was actually increasing for the past 3 years and everything will be revised and they will say oh its decreasing starting from now and everyone will forget that the gov stats were lying and take their word that its decreasing.
NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory, 2 (OCO-2) provides the most complete dataset tracking the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂), the main driver of climate change. Every day, OCO-2 measures sunlight reflected from Earth’s surface to infer the dry-air column-averaged CO₂ mixing ratio and provides around 100,000 cloud-free observations.
I'd love to know- ATM I've been on the hop all day and haven't had the time or the access to have a look see .. NASA datasets have less live website presentation this last year.
The main point to be landed by that terse comment was that the world isn't merely reliant on CCP statements.
China is not rapidly de-carbonizing. They've put off even starting to transition to clean energy by 15 years and they lag behind the other nations. They shouldnt be where the US is as the US has done an awful job. They should be where the EU is.
In 2025 China installed more solar than the US has, and almost more than what the EU has in total. About the same for wind. So yes they're doing it an extreme pace compared to US/EU as we're comparing 1 year to what the EU/US has done for decades.
Both China and the US have similar carbon emission growth rates (0.3-0.5%).
And that does nothing to stop the collective 8 GT of carbon emissions coming from India and the other countries I listed with an average emissions increase rate of around 3-5%.
A lot if this industrialisation is actually factories making products that are outsourced manufacturing. So it doesn't really make sense to say its China, India's or Vietnam's fault, when most of the products are being shipped to the US and EU and are not necessarily local born companies.
1.1 GT combined but shrinking yearly by 1-3%, which isn't enough to make up for the combined increase in carbon emissions from India, ASEAN, MENA, LatAm, and Russia.
But the UK and EU (the only large polluters who have even considered carbon tariffs) have largely watered them down - for example, yesterday with the UK increasing it's duty free steel quota for India [0] as Tata Steel owns much of the UK's steel capacity and demand (JLR is a Tata company). Add to that the EU's largest steel maker is owned by India's Mittal family (AcrelorMittal) and European conglomerates like Renault [1] are expanding manufacturing in markets like India, which means using Indian steel.
And all of that ignores domestic growth in all those countries. Base GDP growth rates are expected to be in the 6.5-8% for India and ASEAN despite deglobalization because domestic markets are growing.
Developing countries like India, Indonesia, and Vietnam are continuing to expand their emissions as they industrialize. All are expected to have an GDP growth rate in the 6-8% range over the next decade, as will their peers across Asia, so the carbon footprint globally will only increase.
Even China's emissions rate aren't decreasing - they're stagnant, which is a good shift, but not enough to turn the tide given how large China's existing carbon footprint is.
Edit: can't reply
> but they're not going to expand by taking on coal and fossil fuels...
India [0], Vietnam [1], and other large industrializing nation in Asia have all doubled down on expanding coal usage over the last 6 months. And that's ignoring increased usage of NatGas and Oil.
Yeah, but they're not going to expand by taking on coal and fossil fuels. The third world is taking on green energy alternatives at a great rate. Not least because it's cheaper and more convenient. These countries can grow without the damage that marked the Western world through the industrial revolution onwards
This article sprinkles the word "risk" which people interpret as "bad things are coming" but actually means "there's some probability of the bad thing happening."
The probability is not quantified so it's impossible to react to. Over-protecting from a risk is as bad and under-protecting.
For example - something bad can happen to you any time you leave your house. However if you "protect" against that the risk by never leaving the house you are almost certainly worse off.
In case of climate the "thing to do" to protect from the risk is to minimize the economic activity that has improved life for everyone. Stopping that has an immediate "cost" which looks large compared to the unquantified risk it allegedly mitigates.
> Over-protecting from a risk is as bad and under-protecting.
This is not generally true.
> For example - something bad can happen to you any time you leave your house.
The better analogue would be: outside of your house is a robber that will rob you if you leave the house. But you can't quantify how bad it will be to get robbed.
UK official body of actuaries basically says we are on trajectory of "Extreme" rating:
> 3°C or more by 2050.
Multiple climate tipping
points triggered,
tipping cascade.
> over 4 billion
deaths
If so, big shifts would already be imminently felt within next 5-10 years.
Remember that there would basically be no place to hide from these direct or knock-on effects.
Not for any self sufficient "prepper with a Mac Studio" nor for any billionaire with their "Galapagos" private island data center come habitat or any other short-sighted fantasy escape scenarios.
Edit: "on trajectory" to "Extreme" was too strong; it’s the report’s worst case band and not a forecast. What they’re basically saying is that "the chance of this happening is way too high".
> there will basically no place to hide from these direct or any knock-on effects
This is nonsense. (And your own source doesn't support the claim that the consequences of global warming will be unmitigable for anyone.)
Many parts of the world will become milder for human occupation as a result of climate change. And nothing realistically forecast is unavoidable with wealth–rich countries will A/C and seawall their ways around the consequences.
Most of the food is grown in certain areas that might not be able to support it anymore. New areas opening up won't be able to be cultivated for decades. Most big cities will cease to function as food supply dwindles. But hey, some enclaves on the outskirts of climate impact and society will not notice so its totally fine and probably even good.
The effects would definitely be felt by everyone if the global population were on its way to be halved. Also knock-on effects like mass emigration putting additional pressure on an already difficult political landscape. Potential for many more wars; more unknown unknowns etc.
Edit: the report’s "Extreme" severity band is indeed not a forecast but they’re basically saying "the chance of this happening is way too high".
> effects would definitely be felt by everyone if the global population were on its way to be halved
Many effects would hurt most people. But some would also be profited from. It’s incredible–as in debilitating to one’s credibility-to claim that everyone would suffer in the extreme case.
The rich, and I say this broadly to include the rich countries, will probably be fine. Poorer, yes, but not uniformly. Plenty of plenty of places and people would see booms from the new weather patterns, coasts and social fault lines.
Might be worth shifting subsidies away from meat and towards plant protein to a level consistent with the social cost of carbon, but one could probably expect resistance from a certain demographic, maybe loudly exclaiming on social media that it's a secret government plot to emasculate them or something. (and opposition from industry groups as well probably)
I wouldn't be too worried about it this century at least. if things look like they are going to get bad we will resort to geoengineering, and once we get a taste for it we will further optimize global temperatures to our liking.
perversely, global warming earlier than expected is a good thing [for us] as it will wipe away all meaningful opposition to geoengineering.
note how according to them having 50C days is a likely outcome. no one will tolerate this. sending the sulfur planes is assured at that point. you wouldn't even need to try and convince people with harvest yields.
What we already have is uncontrolled geoengineering. Having said that, geoengineering might lead to geopolitical conflict. The current situation is making the tropical/equatorial area less habitable while creating overall benefits for the high latitudes.
> geoengineering might lead to geopolitical conflict
I have heard of this but haven't heard a credible scenario describing it. if Europe or the US or China wanted to do it they could just be flying in circles in their own territory to deploy it safely (at the cost of some efficiency probably). only a nuclear power would likely dare to unilaterally do geoengineering.
it remains to be seen who will start the geoengineering effort, arguably Russia would benefit from global warming and so will Canada, so the US food supply should also remain secure.
I'm assuming that the most relevant geoengineering is worldwide stuff like blotting out the sun with microsatellites at L1 and dumping iron or lime into the oceans to increase CO2 absorption.
We will develop geo engineering with our quantum computers, fueled by cold fusion reactors.
It's not like we just decide to solve something and then it just happens. There can also be serious outcomes of errors are made that are more serious than climate itself.
I'm not convinced that geoengineering is feasible when we can't even seem to stop churning CO2 into the atmosphere. It's far easier to stop the fossil fuel burning than to scrub the atmosphere or set up huge space mirrors, so why do you think that we'll manage to fix the climate? Far more likely is a massive population die off and a collapse of our modern society. At least some people made a lot of money from burning our future.
EU has done its part, but all efforts are just drop in the ocean. Also, can these studies be trusted? EU basically throws money anything "green" (except buying forests and making them protected), so naturally these studies benefit from it.
Protecting forests is good and all, but it will not reverse climate change. We'll have to stop all fossil fuel burning and, additionally, sequester around 600 billion tonnes of CO2 (in addition to all the natural carbon sinks) to get back to +1.5C by 2100.
Is the major issue here that 3 degrees Celsius is like an average so all the hot tropics places just become uninhabitable whereas temperature rises are more moderated in higher latitudes?
Also how much faster and higher will that number go with all the data centers? Can't imagine it not just getting worse.
One major issue is the extreme difficulty of being precise about tipping points.
Eg: Have you seen a train derail? A couple of degrees of tilt - nothing .. and then .. whoops.
The global climate has been 'stable' about mean values for the bulk of human written history and development of urban civilisations. The planet now hosts 7 billion+ people, largely urban, and feed by a century of stable agriculture patterns write large.
The disruption of that will have a major impact across the human population of the planet.
The tipping points, when they come, are related to the significant loss of polar ice, and the beginning of positive feedback of atmospheric insulation factors other than CO2.
Melting ice, the transformation from near zero degree ice to near zero degree water, takes up a large amount of the energy from the sun trapped by increasing insulation. The energy used to melt X tonnes of ice, if no ice can be melted, will instead raise the temperature of X tonnes of water by some 66 degrees C (or there abouts - worth looking it up exactly).
Increased land and sea surface temperatures releases methane from peat bogs and tundras, and increases the water vapour content of the lower atmosphere.
Both of these things increase the insulation factor of the atmosphere to a greater degree than CO2.
I think the problem is much worse than people imagine as well. Of those around 5.5 to 6 billion people live in "developed world" conditions (sanitation, water & electricity to the home). Over the next 20 years that's expected to grow to by another 1.5 billion (the previous 20 years was around the same). That alone is going to be a huge demand in energy, for construction and ongoing day to day energy usage.
On the other hand global energy demand has a very close correlation with the number of people living in developed world conditions - so after this point the growth in energy demand should start to level off.
Let's hope China continues to push renewables, and their investment in developing countries favours that instead of fossil fuels.
Yet Europeans will continue to hamstring their economic activity to lower their footprint which is really not doing anything in the grand scheme of things vs. China/India and what Africa will produce if/when they modernize.
But there have been way higher atmospheric carbon dioxide levels historically, and those have largely coincided with plant and animal life climaxing. See the Jurassic.
> But there have been way higher atmospheric carbon dioxide levels historically
Historically? In written human history?
If we're talking the state of the planet throughout the past 4 billion odd years of existence, it once had no breathable atmosphere and had a stretch with a largely molten surface, and got smacked up hard when the moon was spun off.
None of these things are relevant to the planets near future as a direct result of human induced changes of the past century and a half.
"History" is generally used to mean when humans were around writing stuff down. And no, CO2 levels have never been this high during the entire history of human civilization, and likely the entire existence of Homo sapiens
I believe those followed global extinction events thanks to large scale volcanic activity over long enough time frames to change the climate. Life did adapt, the life that survived. I'm not sure we want to run that experiment on human civilization.
It’s sort of all over the place but it’s mostly the other way round. The poles might see like +5-8c. It’s also the overall temperature. Today’s high temperature where I am is 33 and the low is 25. 33 isn’t super unusual, maybe a dozen days a year. 25 as a low though is crazy high even on days historically above 30. It all averages out to +whatever.
> more evaporation over oceans, which makes the air denser
More humid air is less dense than less humid air at the same temperature and otherwise same composition. H2O has a molar mass of 18, vs ~29 for dry air.
As I understand it just means there's a lot more energy in the atmosphere. Like imagine the amount of energy it takes to increase water temperature in a pot by 3° and scale it up to the planet. All that energy makes everything bigger, badder, and less predictable. Longer, dryer droughts; bigger, longer winter storms, etc.
The first is that 3C represents a lot more energy in the atmosphere. That translates to more water evaporating from the oceans creating bigger more violent storms (think more frequent flash floods).
It changes the ocean currents which can be really bad. Right now Europe is warm for it's latitude because of a weakening current from the equator to the UK brings a lot of heat. If that completely collapses, Europe can enter an ICE age.
The rising temperature also ends up weakening the vortex of the north pole which mostly keeps the arctic temperatures sealed up north. As that vortex weakens, spills of crazy blizzards can hit unusual places pretty hard. The winter storm in 2021 is an example of that happening.
Then of course there's the potential melting of the ice caps which will release a lot of methane into the atmosphere (speeding up warming). That will ultimately cause sea levels to rise which won't be great for the state of Florida.
Mass migration, crop instability, more frequent and more extreme weather. It's just a combo of bad things that all come together at once.
The most extreme warming happens at the poles, doesn't it? Plus increases in volatility on top of a rising baseline, so more extreme heat wave peaks even in temperate climates that don't change as much on average.
Note: a lot of the countries on this graph are quite famous for not only refusing to implement any climate policy, but not having the necessary government control (or will) to do it even when agreeing to it.
Oil refineries, tankers burn in the open. Nuclear stations may get blown by drones / ballistic rockets any moment. Dead dolphins are all over Black sea. And yet ... let's put a price on carbon!
If we coat and paint the entire human occupied land surface in white nano-diversely-sized barium sulfate paint, it will reflect the excess heat into space. Most people don't understand that this works or how it works, but science does. We will still have to lower our CO2 and emissions but we will get a break from warming.
This is the most important part most people don't get:
> And what would 3 °C mean for Germany?
> FB: In summer, meteorological records could reach up to 50 °C. Three degrees of global warming does not mean hot days will just be 3 or 4 degrees hotter. It could mean up to 10 degrees hotter. We would also face much longer droughts.
3°C warming implies summer days can get 10°C hotter. This is nightmare scenario.
> This is the most important part most people don't get
I wouldn't say "people don't get" it when it's not well-communicated. When the headline always says 2-3 degrees, of course people are going to shrug.
It was always explained that way to me though. the "Our house is burning, and we are looking away" speech was like 20 years ago and it was pretty clear then than average increase in temps mostly mean higher maximums and minimums.
Nowadays, people who never did anything to consume less (and made fun of people who stopped taking the plane) can't hide behind the "we didn't know" because everybody knew, so they hide behind the "it was not predicted to be as bad" and other "the scientists explained that poorly", but we know what's up, even when they lie to themselves.
What do you mean? Both Europe and America moved industrial production to China (which was an explicit choice/policy) which as a side effect radically increased the amount of coal used to power industrial production, BUT lets Europeans and Americans both pay less (ie. make workers poorer) AND lets them claim innocence for CO2 increases, while in fact increasing their CO2 use indirectly.
this also means thermal turbulence which means breakup of flow, and that means failure of distribution, leading to localized torrid spots, that translates to heat dome regions of more than 10°C hotter.
Are you saying those researchers got their upper bound too low? You should inform them of their mistake.
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Are you being intentionally obtuse? In normal language the quoted text means there is a meaningful chance of record temperatures 10 degrees hotter than current records.
It is weasel language which actually says nothing in order to not be disprovable
The reason we see it all the time is because we've gotten used to people trying to convince us that some unlikely scenario will take place to increase urgency.
While global warming is happening, the quoted sentence should be raising your "this is someone trying to convince me of something that has a neglectable likelihood of becoming reality"-alarm
But sure, it could be that we may get a significant heat up within the next 20 years. Regardless of that, if you're living in Germany you probably should get an AC, as even if that doesn't manifest, things can already get too warm
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It's a temperature range and percent likelihood. The warmer the planet, the greater the odds of experiencing these sorts of conditions.
Unfortunately Germany phased out nuclear power, but continues to burn coal.
We'll know European Greens are serious about climate change when they stop decommissioning nuclear plants and replacing them with coal.
I recently wrote a reply to someone else with the same argument about the German greens, which I'll recycle here:
"It's bad enough that nuclear proponents ignore the massive cost of nuclear compared to renewables once you factor in building costs, insurance and storage imho. But then to pretend like the conservatives didn't have a choice but to bungle the nuclear exit really is too much.
The CDU never listened to the greens when it came to not killing the solar industry and serving it to China on a golden platter. Or not killing our rail infrastructure by continually delaying maintenance so that we would have to do much more costly repairs later.
But in this instance, they do, and do it in a way that is a gift to the energy companies, and instead of noticing the obvious corruption at play, people still blame the greens."
Sorry if the tone is a bit harsh, but I'm really annoyed at the amount of dishonesty surrounding nuclear energy.
Yeah, it's crazy how successful that particular piece of propaganda is. The conservative CDU is responsible for the decommissioning of nuclear plants, while the Greens extended the lifetime of the remaining plants. It's literally the other way around, but people don't question it - it feels too good to complain about the Greens, right?
What does the German Green Party say in their own political platform today about the use of thermal power plants? Are they in favor of them, to be used to balance the grid when renewable energy fails to meet demand, or are they against the construction and continued use?
I know what the Swedish green party has on their platform, open to be read at any time on their website or in paper materials, or heard by their political representatives. Their position is that thermal power plants are critical to the energy grid in order to enable renewable energy and keeping costs down. They wish to use either bio fuels or green hydrogen to fuel those power plants.
The issue I got with that plan is that current thermal power plants in practice do not use exclusively bio fuels or green hydrogen, and that the environmental science around bio fuels are poor at best and full of green washing and practices that are extremely bad for the environment. The costs of bio fuels and green hydrogen has also demonstrated to be massively expensive, making the cost of nuclear cheap in comparison.
My views of the green will change when/if the green drops their support of thermal power plants, and their overwhelming dependency of using biofuels produced from corn as a way to reduce emissions. Biofuels need to be produced without using artificial fertilizers (natural gas), and without burning down forests to make space for the farming. It also need to be cheaper than nuclear, which disqualify green hydrogen as it is produced, stored and handled currently. Carbon capture and artificial fuels are disqualified on the same point, being overwhelming more expensive than nuclear.
As an anecdote, the Swedish green party leader and a right wing party had a political debate during last election. The Right wing party wanted to demolish an oil fueled thermal power plant that is currently operated in south of Sweden, and replace with new nuclear power plant. Paraphrasing what the green party leader said: "Thermal power plants are a natural part of the Swedish grid, and nuclear energy is way to expensive. We need those plants to keep the grid stable and prices low."
>What does the German Green Party say in their own political platform today about the use of thermal power plants?
Doesn't matter, at least in Germany. Maybe it's different in other countries, though this would surprise me. Here, nobody reads the party platforms, as they do not correlate with the actions of our political parties.
If you vote according to party platform, then you should probably vote for the conservatives or the reds, as they pretend to be good for the economy and the workers.
I think it's better to judge a party by their actions, instead.
Germany just shut down several perfectly fine nuclear reactors and has some of the dirtiest electricity generation in the entire world
They need to look inward before pointing outward.
Just not true https://www.destatis.de/Europa/DE/Thema/Umwelt-Energie/Ausba...
Non-renewable != CO2 intensive (that's how France is doing much better than Germany in CO2 per capita despite being similar in this graph)
> The German Physics Society and the German Meteorological Society
are not the German government.
I'm sure the day after Russia withdraws from Ukraine they're going to demand the pipeline from Russia be restored and everyone they suspect involved involved in the Nord Stream blasts extradited too.
North Stream was never about additional capacity. It was always about circumventing Ukraine's pipelines. Which in case of war turned it into a national security risk for Ukraine, which is why they blew it up. It forced Russia to either stop its exports or go through Ukraine. Which all turned out somewhat moot in the end.
If we don’t do something about this, I fear future generations will not view us in a positive light.
We _are_ doing something about this. We’re locating concentrated millions of years of trapped fossil energy and moving it into our atmosphere as fast as we possibly can. To a first approximation, that is the world economy.
Or did you mean to do something differently?
Both Europe and US's emissions are significantly (18%-30%) below their peak (which was 20 years ago. The rest of the world is also moving towards renewables.
Global co2 emissions are at an all time high.
Co2 parts per million are a stock, like the level of water in a bathtub. Annual emissions are a flow, like how strongly the water is flowing in.
The tub is fuller than ever before AND filling at the fastest rate ever.
The problem is that carbon energy is useful. So unless something globally beats almost all use cases then somewhere marginally it will be worth burning vs not burning it.
https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions
It's a leaking bathtub. Half life of excess CO2 in the atmosphere is 30-100 years. So you need the water flowing in to continue to increase in rate (not just to continue flowing in), otherwise you reach a new equilibrium and the CO2 levels in the atmosphere stop increasing.
They do increase in rate as you said (for now).
That's a rather misleading statistic. Some is absorbed by oceans, where it acidifies. For land based carbon sinks (trees, soil, etc) any new carbon being deposited is competing with existing carbon in the carbon cycle.
If your stat had any sense then atmospheric carbon levels would rapidly plunge in a few centuries without humans burning carbon. They plainly don't do that.
Carbon levels are expected to plunge over a few centuries if carbon emissions drop.
You are right the the ocean is the largest carbon sink, and it has the negative side effect of acidifying.
> Both Europe and US's emissions are significantly (18%-30%) below their peak
Because they outsource their dirty work. To get a true picture of US/EU emissions you need to factor in the factories in Asia that are producing their consumer goods, as well as the global transport network that supports this.
While yes the emissions are down from 2007 and majority of it has been driven by the shift away from coal in power generation.
However, every other sector has been rather flat in terms of emissions since the 90s. When you account for the fact that a large amount of industries have moved to China and other developing countries, the fact that emissions from industries have been flat, means that the overall consumption has gone up.
If you account for the emissions that we’ve offshored, we’d not be looking so good.
How much of that is just outsourcing much of our industry to Asia/etc.?
Yes, this is the right question to ask. A lot of the decrease in emissions in Western nations is the equivalent of dumping your trash in a lot across town. Sure it's "gone", but only in a technical sense.
Not as much as people would have you believe.
What a terrible answer.
Asia is also moving towards renewables.
We have to do less
There has been a lot of debate over AC use. Everyone chiming in only discusses runtime energy use.
The biggest issue is mining and manufacturing, and the moving of all the materials, parts, and such.
Every AC has sheathed wires and circuit boards.
Every airplane, car, phone, network router, refrigerator... same expansive mess creation.
Gamers complaining about disc less games despite that problem pipeline and waste.
Complaining about RAM prices despite the problem pipeline.
No one is focused on the lag effects, externalities, of billions using up an endless supply of technologies and dumping airplane smog in the atmosphere. Etc, etc, etc
Thermodynamics makes it pretty clear that energy is not gone just hanging out in the atmosphere.
Thermodynamics means we may be fucked even if we slow down; that energy in the atmosphere can only go from atmosphere into oceans, glaciers, and permafrost. There's a lot of potential energy in the Earth to release as it absorbs the heat already in the atmosphere
I totally agree with you that our unhinged consumption behavior is the core problem. And with AI we stepped on the accelerator again.
But regarding your second statement. The actual problem is the greenhouse effect of CO2 and Methane in the atmosphere which traps the suns energy in our atmosphere heating up oceans, ice and landmass. The heat we produce is negligible compared to the energy the sun sends every day. The greenhouse gases are the problem. And you are right, pulling away that blanket so that more heat can dissipate into space will take a looong time (growing trees) or cost an insane amount of (clean) energy, reversing the chemical processes of burning oil, gas and coal.
Right; I already covered that explaining the runtime energy use of tech is not the real issue. It's the endless production.
> Gamers complaining about disc less games despite that problem pipeline and waste.
Tbf the issue is the user-hostile parameters of buying a diskless game. Most people would be happy to download their games if they could back them up to a thumb drive and never get locked out of them and sell the game when they’re done with it.
Seems deeply tangential, but it’s not. Blaming people for wanting a physical thing because the alternative is being further abused by a corporation - that’s a miss. Be mad at game platforms for not offering real ownership in whatever the most climate-friendly way possible. Be mad at governments for not forcing companies to cost in the negative externalities of their business.
If you want less of something, tax it. Support consumption based taxes like the FairTax in the US which would tax new goods at a high rate while used goods would be tax free. This encourages keeping items for longer, repairing rather than replacing, and purchasing used goods over new ones.
Oh well ok I will get right on raising taxes. So simple I should have done it sooner.
FairTax is regressive and does nothing to stop a trillionaire from launching dick rockets to nowhere. Each rocket and launch using more resources than a poor person will their entire life.
Not sure why the snarky response, obviously most people have very little direct influence over these things.
So you oppose green tax policy on the grounds that it isn't punitive enough against rich people? A rich person living a miserly life would pay little in taxes, I see no problem with that.
I assume that you are alluding to someone specific with the rocket launching trillionaire quip. That would be the same person who helped make electric vehicles viable and also helped develop reusable rockets, far greener than one time use ones, no?
I don't think having rich people pay more taxes relative to their income should be considered punitive. Progressive taxation has a long history going back to the first modern income taxes in the 18th or 19th centuries on the basis that low income people have a more reduced capacity to pay (due to non-discretionary spending on necessities being a higher portion of income when it is lower) and I think it's reasonable to expect it out of taxes.
Though, I do recognise that having one regressive tax wouldn't necessarily make the entire tax-and-transfers system regressive (or even more regressive, if that tax money is spent).
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On the path we're on I don't think we'll have to worry too much about future generations.
The EU has already seeing 10,000 excess deaths from climate changed caused heat waves and this is a minuscule taste of what's to come.
A very large percentage of mass extinction events have their roots in increased atmospheric CO2, but all of them on dramatically increased time scales. The closest thing in the history of the planet to what's happening to day was PETM [0] and that was only a lessor extinction event because the Earth was already quite warm (for example, there was already no polar ice at the time).
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene%E2%80%93Eocene_therm...
How many excess deaths from cold?
How many die from cold in the summer?
At this point I'll be happy if there are future generations with the capacity to look back and understand what happened.
You may enjoy Ian McEwan's What We Can Know: "Civilization as we know it ends. A pair of scholars in 2120, risking death from roving predatory gangs, travel across what’s left of England in search of a long-lost, epoch-making poem titled 'A Corona for Vivien.' They are the last, it seems, historians alive" [1]. (It's less apocalyptic than this makes it seem, at least relative to the modern apocalyptic genre à la Mad Max.)
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/22/books/review/ian-mcewan-w...
Current generations don’t view us in a positive light.
I’m already do not view our own and the previous generations in a positive light.
You shouldn't care about how imaginary people view you.
They'll be too dumb from CO2 poisoning to understand the problem!
I have already accepted that there is nothing plebs can do about climate change. I can try hard by using public transport, using less plastic, and using less air conditioning, but all of those efforts are rendered useless by rich people going on vacation in yachts or private planes. And if you talk about reducing meat consumption, Americans will go mad, lol.
Ordinary plebs trying to prevent climate change is like subtracting $100 from a billion dollars - it does not make any meaningful difference.
They're not rendered useless. Do you argue the same way about voting too?
Ultimately consumption is 2/3s of all emissions, and the majority of it is not billionaires.
Are you saying that no billionaire profits from the consumption of others?
And, if some do, do they not maximise that profit by seeking to maximise the consumption of others?
Are you saying no pleb wants to consume? Are you saying no pleb demands more product? Are you saying no pleb wants their polluting employer to continue so they have a job? Are you saying no pleb chooses to lower cost but more polluting options at every turn?
I say no such thing.
But 800B dollars would matter. And you can vote.
> If we don’t do something about this...
We can't. We're too late.
China (13 GT), the US (4.6 GT), and India (3 GT) alone represent 51% of global carbon emissions - and at least in India's case, it is growing at a rate of 5%.
Throw in other large polluters like Russia (2 GT), Indonesia (0.8 GT), Iran (0.8 GT), KSA (0.6 GT), Brazil (0.5 GT), and Vietnam (0.5 GT) whose rate of carbon emissions is growing in the 5-10% range and you see there is no path forward.
Any amount of de-carbonization that China or the collective West does is automatically negated by the other countries I listed. At best global carbon emissions stagnate - which by default is going to lead to a 2-3 °C increase in temperatures.
You conveniently left the US out of that and the US's role in driving global emissions. China is also likely rapidly de-carbonizing right now just like they rapidly spun up. They are an issue, but the US and its policies have a massive impact on this problem. Same with Europe. Rapidly adopting renewables and not externalizing our emissions to other countries would go a long way.
I have seen the argument shift from 'That's a lie. Global warming doesn't exist. Stop pushing regulations for a non-existent problem.' To 'Maybe it does, or there is some human impact but this is all within normal variation and the climate can take some amount of pollution so stop trying to regulate it!' to, I guess the new argument of, 'It's too late so why try? We shouldn't change course because it won't matter so stop trying to regulate the problem away.' It isn't too late. Do something.
> China is also likely rapidly de-carbonizing right now
Huh. "China’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions fell by 1% in the final quarter of 2025, likely securing a decline of 0.3% for the full year as a whole" [1].
So "rapidly de-carbonising" is wrong. But decarbonising per se is correct.
[1] https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-ha...
Chin's emissions rose by 20% from 2017 to 2024 and then flat-lined in 2025 with emissions expected to decline in 2026. That is what decarbonization looks like, the rate of change has swung massively in the right direction. The .3 in 2025 will likely turn into -1.5 in 2026 and more after that. They have embraced alternative energy because it is now making them money and gaining them influence. That trend won't change and they will keep on decarbonizing because it is the easy, profitable, route.
> That is what decarbonization looks like
Sure, I gave you that. But you went further. China is not “rapidly de-carbonizing right now.” It’s forecast to start rapidly decarbonizing in the next decade.
Its only falling per Chinese gov data. The trend since 2019 is for them to downplay emission data and when the next international review comes around we'll have seen that it was actually increasing for the past 3 years and everything will be revised and they will say oh its decreasing starting from now and everyone will forget that the gov stats were lying and take their word that its decreasing.
…and what do those data say about China’s emissions?
I'd love to know- ATM I've been on the hop all day and haven't had the time or the access to have a look see .. NASA datasets have less live website presentation this last year.
The main point to be landed by that terse comment was that the world isn't merely reliant on CCP statements.
China is not rapidly de-carbonizing. They've put off even starting to transition to clean energy by 15 years and they lag behind the other nations. They shouldnt be where the US is as the US has done an awful job. They should be where the EU is.
In 2025 China installed more solar than the US has, and almost more than what the EU has in total. About the same for wind. So yes they're doing it an extreme pace compared to US/EU as we're comparing 1 year to what the EU/US has done for decades.
Both China and the US have similar carbon emission growth rates (0.3-0.5%).
And that does nothing to stop the collective 8 GT of carbon emissions coming from India and the other countries I listed with an average emissions increase rate of around 3-5%.
A lot if this industrialisation is actually factories making products that are outsourced manufacturing. So it doesn't really make sense to say its China, India's or Vietnam's fault, when most of the products are being shipped to the US and EU and are not necessarily local born companies.
What is Western Europe's #?
1.1 GT combined but shrinking yearly by 1-3%, which isn't enough to make up for the combined increase in carbon emissions from India, ASEAN, MENA, LatAm, and Russia.
Are those domestic emissions only? Or do we include emissions from purchasing goods from other countries?
Overall emissions.
But the UK and EU (the only large polluters who have even considered carbon tariffs) have largely watered them down - for example, yesterday with the UK increasing it's duty free steel quota for India [0] as Tata Steel owns much of the UK's steel capacity and demand (JLR is a Tata company). Add to that the EU's largest steel maker is owned by India's Mittal family (AcrelorMittal) and European conglomerates like Renault [1] are expanding manufacturing in markets like India, which means using Indian steel.
And all of that ignores domestic growth in all those countries. Base GDP growth rates are expected to be in the 6.5-8% for India and ASEAN despite deglobalization because domestic markets are growing.
[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-14/india-win...
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/world/india/renault-plans-boost-indi...
Despite all the pollution, 24% of Indians live below the lower-middle-income poverty line of $4.20 per day...
Yes, and?
That's why nothing will happen.
Developing countries like India, Indonesia, and Vietnam are continuing to expand their emissions as they industrialize. All are expected to have an GDP growth rate in the 6-8% range over the next decade, as will their peers across Asia, so the carbon footprint globally will only increase.
Even China's emissions rate aren't decreasing - they're stagnant, which is a good shift, but not enough to turn the tide given how large China's existing carbon footprint is.
Edit: can't reply
> but they're not going to expand by taking on coal and fossil fuels...
India [0], Vietnam [1], and other large industrializing nation in Asia have all doubled down on expanding coal usage over the last 6 months. And that's ignoring increased usage of NatGas and Oil.
[0] - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/india-will-use-more-...
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/vietnam-looks-more-c...
Yeah, but they're not going to expand by taking on coal and fossil fuels. The third world is taking on green energy alternatives at a great rate. Not least because it's cheaper and more convenient. These countries can grow without the damage that marked the Western world through the industrial revolution onwards
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This article sprinkles the word "risk" which people interpret as "bad things are coming" but actually means "there's some probability of the bad thing happening."
The probability is not quantified so it's impossible to react to. Over-protecting from a risk is as bad and under-protecting.
For example - something bad can happen to you any time you leave your house. However if you "protect" against that the risk by never leaving the house you are almost certainly worse off.
In case of climate the "thing to do" to protect from the risk is to minimize the economic activity that has improved life for everyone. Stopping that has an immediate "cost" which looks large compared to the unquantified risk it allegedly mitigates.
> over-protecting from a risk is as bad as under-protecting
How would protecting ourselves against 50 °C summer heat (122 °F) ever be as bad as keeping 40° heatwaves or better yet, a return to the 35° summers?
50° means a human mass extinction event. There are no corporate profits possible in that scenario anyway
> Over-protecting from a risk is as bad and under-protecting.
This is not generally true.
> For example - something bad can happen to you any time you leave your house.
The better analogue would be: outside of your house is a robber that will rob you if you leave the house. But you can't quantify how bad it will be to get robbed.
UK official body of actuaries basically says we are on trajectory of "Extreme" rating:
> 3°C or more by 2050. Multiple climate tipping points triggered, tipping cascade.
> over 4 billion deaths
If so, big shifts would already be imminently felt within next 5-10 years.
Remember that there would basically be no place to hide from these direct or knock-on effects.
Not for any self sufficient "prepper with a Mac Studio" nor for any billionaire with their "Galapagos" private island data center come habitat or any other short-sighted fantasy escape scenarios.
https://actuaries.org.uk/media/ni4erlna/planetary-solvency.p...
Edit: "on trajectory" to "Extreme" was too strong; it’s the report’s worst case band and not a forecast. What they’re basically saying is that "the chance of this happening is way too high".
> there will basically no place to hide from these direct or any knock-on effects
This is nonsense. (And your own source doesn't support the claim that the consequences of global warming will be unmitigable for anyone.)
Many parts of the world will become milder for human occupation as a result of climate change. And nothing realistically forecast is unavoidable with wealth–rich countries will A/C and seawall their ways around the consequences.
Most of the food is grown in certain areas that might not be able to support it anymore. New areas opening up won't be able to be cultivated for decades. Most big cities will cease to function as food supply dwindles. But hey, some enclaves on the outskirts of climate impact and society will not notice so its totally fine and probably even good.
The effects would definitely be felt by everyone if the global population were on its way to be halved. Also knock-on effects like mass emigration putting additional pressure on an already difficult political landscape. Potential for many more wars; more unknown unknowns etc.
Edit: the report’s "Extreme" severity band is indeed not a forecast but they’re basically saying "the chance of this happening is way too high".
> effects would definitely be felt by everyone if the global population were on its way to be halved
Many effects would hurt most people. But some would also be profited from. It’s incredible–as in debilitating to one’s credibility-to claim that everyone would suffer in the extreme case.
The rich, and I say this broadly to include the rich countries, will probably be fine. Poorer, yes, but not uniformly. Plenty of plenty of places and people would see booms from the new weather patterns, coasts and social fault lines.
One of the most important solutions is never taken seriously enough, because most people are just big children: eat less meat.
Consumer choices are only going to get you so far
True. Review on it from two years ago here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221479932...
Might be worth shifting subsidies away from meat and towards plant protein to a level consistent with the social cost of carbon, but one could probably expect resistance from a certain demographic, maybe loudly exclaiming on social media that it's a secret government plot to emasculate them or something. (and opposition from industry groups as well probably)
I didn't say it would need to be restricted to individual choice. It could also be a political action from top down.
And so will regulatory solutions so long as we have different states competing for resources.
Original article: (14 points, 4 hours ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48913407
I wouldn't be too worried about it this century at least. if things look like they are going to get bad we will resort to geoengineering, and once we get a taste for it we will further optimize global temperatures to our liking.
perversely, global warming earlier than expected is a good thing [for us] as it will wipe away all meaningful opposition to geoengineering.
note how according to them having 50C days is a likely outcome. no one will tolerate this. sending the sulfur planes is assured at that point. you wouldn't even need to try and convince people with harvest yields.
What we already have is uncontrolled geoengineering. Having said that, geoengineering might lead to geopolitical conflict. The current situation is making the tropical/equatorial area less habitable while creating overall benefits for the high latitudes.
it remains to be seen who will start the geoengineering effort, arguably Russia would benefit from global warming and so will Canada, so the US food supply should also remain secure.
I'm assuming that the most relevant geoengineering is worldwide stuff like blotting out the sun with microsatellites at L1 and dumping iron or lime into the oceans to increase CO2 absorption.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injectio...
We will develop geo engineering with our quantum computers, fueled by cold fusion reactors.
It's not like we just decide to solve something and then it just happens. There can also be serious outcomes of errors are made that are more serious than climate itself.
only if you want to do something really exotic/scifi. volcanoes have shown us how to do it relatively easily.
conservatively, "$18 billion per year per degree Celsius of warming avoided".
Reduce the efficiency of solar energy generation by 5-15%. Best build alternative energy sources before attempting geo-engineering.
Wishful thinking, at best
I'm not convinced that geoengineering is feasible when we can't even seem to stop churning CO2 into the atmosphere. It's far easier to stop the fossil fuel burning than to scrub the atmosphere or set up huge space mirrors, so why do you think that we'll manage to fix the climate? Far more likely is a massive population die off and a collapse of our modern society. At least some people made a lot of money from burning our future.
It's far easier to start doing stratospheric aerosol injection than to stop burning fossil fuels.
EU has done its part, but all efforts are just drop in the ocean. Also, can these studies be trusted? EU basically throws money anything "green" (except buying forests and making them protected), so naturally these studies benefit from it.
> EU basically throws money anything "green"
Including paying to have wood pellets shipped across the Atlantic using bunker fuel and then calling it "bioenergy"
The EU is 'clean' largely out of it's own limited access to fossil fuels and other energy resources rather than because they are "doing their part".
Protecting forests is good and all, but it will not reverse climate change. We'll have to stop all fossil fuel burning and, additionally, sequester around 600 billion tonnes of CO2 (in addition to all the natural carbon sinks) to get back to +1.5C by 2100.
EU has a lot of historic emissions to make up for.
https://ourworldindata.org/contributed-most-global-co2
Is the major issue here that 3 degrees Celsius is like an average so all the hot tropics places just become uninhabitable whereas temperature rises are more moderated in higher latitudes?
Also how much faster and higher will that number go with all the data centers? Can't imagine it not just getting worse.
One major issue is the extreme difficulty of being precise about tipping points.
Eg: Have you seen a train derail? A couple of degrees of tilt - nothing .. and then .. whoops.
The global climate has been 'stable' about mean values for the bulk of human written history and development of urban civilisations. The planet now hosts 7 billion+ people, largely urban, and feed by a century of stable agriculture patterns write large.
The disruption of that will have a major impact across the human population of the planet.
The tipping points, when they come, are related to the significant loss of polar ice, and the beginning of positive feedback of atmospheric insulation factors other than CO2.
Melting ice, the transformation from near zero degree ice to near zero degree water, takes up a large amount of the energy from the sun trapped by increasing insulation. The energy used to melt X tonnes of ice, if no ice can be melted, will instead raise the temperature of X tonnes of water by some 66 degrees C (or there abouts - worth looking it up exactly).
Increased land and sea surface temperatures releases methane from peat bogs and tundras, and increases the water vapour content of the lower atmosphere.
Both of these things increase the insulation factor of the atmosphere to a greater degree than CO2.
We hit 8 billion in 2022 btw.
I think the problem is much worse than people imagine as well. Of those around 5.5 to 6 billion people live in "developed world" conditions (sanitation, water & electricity to the home). Over the next 20 years that's expected to grow to by another 1.5 billion (the previous 20 years was around the same). That alone is going to be a huge demand in energy, for construction and ongoing day to day energy usage.
On the other hand global energy demand has a very close correlation with the number of people living in developed world conditions - so after this point the growth in energy demand should start to level off.
Let's hope China continues to push renewables, and their investment in developing countries favours that instead of fossil fuels.
Yet Europeans will continue to hamstring their economic activity to lower their footprint which is really not doing anything in the grand scheme of things vs. China/India and what Africa will produce if/when they modernize.
But there have been way higher atmospheric carbon dioxide levels historically, and those have largely coincided with plant and animal life climaxing. See the Jurassic.
> But there have been way higher atmospheric carbon dioxide levels historically
Historically? In written human history?
If we're talking the state of the planet throughout the past 4 billion odd years of existence, it once had no breathable atmosphere and had a stretch with a largely molten surface, and got smacked up hard when the moon was spun off.
None of these things are relevant to the planets near future as a direct result of human induced changes of the past century and a half.
"History" is generally used to mean when humans were around writing stuff down. And no, CO2 levels have never been this high during the entire history of human civilization, and likely the entire existence of Homo sapiens
I believe those followed global extinction events thanks to large scale volcanic activity over long enough time frames to change the climate. Life did adapt, the life that survived. I'm not sure we want to run that experiment on human civilization.
It’s sort of all over the place but it’s mostly the other way round. The poles might see like +5-8c. It’s also the overall temperature. Today’s high temperature where I am is 33 and the low is 25. 33 isn’t super unusual, maybe a dozen days a year. 25 as a low though is crazy high even on days historically above 30. It all averages out to +whatever.
For temps by latitude/region this source seems ok on a quick search https://scied.ucar.edu/interactive/compare-climates-regional...
// The poles might see like +5-8c.
Poland continues to experience significant cold related deaths and any warning might be welcomed.
Among _many_ other things, 3 degrees Celsius globally means more evaporation over oceans, which makes the air denser.
Denser air carries more momentum, which means more frequent (and more severe) hurricanes.
> more evaporation over oceans, which makes the air denser
More humid air is less dense than less humid air at the same temperature and otherwise same composition. H2O has a molar mass of 18, vs ~29 for dry air.
Greenpeace literature in the 1980s predicted hurricanes from Global Warming.
And here we are.
Greenpeace is responsible for a lot of that warming.
May I ask how you came to that conclusion?
As I understand it just means there's a lot more energy in the atmosphere. Like imagine the amount of energy it takes to increase water temperature in a pot by 3° and scale it up to the planet. All that energy makes everything bigger, badder, and less predictable. Longer, dryer droughts; bigger, longer winter storms, etc.
There's a lot of bad things that happen at 3C.
The first is that 3C represents a lot more energy in the atmosphere. That translates to more water evaporating from the oceans creating bigger more violent storms (think more frequent flash floods).
It changes the ocean currents which can be really bad. Right now Europe is warm for it's latitude because of a weakening current from the equator to the UK brings a lot of heat. If that completely collapses, Europe can enter an ICE age.
The rising temperature also ends up weakening the vortex of the north pole which mostly keeps the arctic temperatures sealed up north. As that vortex weakens, spills of crazy blizzards can hit unusual places pretty hard. The winter storm in 2021 is an example of that happening.
Then of course there's the potential melting of the ice caps which will release a lot of methane into the atmosphere (speeding up warming). That will ultimately cause sea levels to rise which won't be great for the state of Florida.
Mass migration, crop instability, more frequent and more extreme weather. It's just a combo of bad things that all come together at once.
The most extreme warming happens at the poles, doesn't it? Plus increases in volatility on top of a rising baseline, so more extreme heat wave peaks even in temperate climates that don't change as much on average.
But there is the problem:
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-world-carbon-emissio...
Note: a lot of the countries on this graph are quite famous for not only refusing to implement any climate policy, but not having the necessary government control (or will) to do it even when agreeing to it.
Oil refineries, tankers burn in the open. Nuclear stations may get blown by drones / ballistic rockets any moment. Dead dolphins are all over Black sea. And yet ... let's put a price on carbon!
lets plant more trees!
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If we coat and paint the entire human occupied land surface in white nano-diversely-sized barium sulfate paint, it will reflect the excess heat into space. Most people don't understand that this works or how it works, but science does. We will still have to lower our CO2 and emissions but we will get a break from warming.