We've been on and off with water service because of it, we've got a bit of rain the last few days but the resovoirs in Puerto Rico were looking real skinny last week. Nothing humbles you like coming inside from doing yard work in the August Caribbean sunshine to realize your shower isn't running. RIP to my tomatos.
To be fair, we didn't have the World Food Programme in 1877 which lets us anticipate droughts distribution and crop failures months ahead of time.
That being said, the existing energy crisis and fertilizer crisis can significantly compound the negative impacts of this El Niño even if we are able to anticipate it.
Many farmers are subsidised specifically so that food is over-produced in most years, specifically to ensure than in bad years people don't go hungry.
Corporations may indeed be taking advantage of this, demanding prices so low that the farmers don't get the benefit of those subsidies. However:
> buy the stuff and sell it at a premium later
Is the point of a futures market. Futures let people trade a thing before they even know how supply and demand will balance, guaranteeing a price for the producer and letting them plan purchases of machinery and maintenance, with the risks (in bad years) and profit margins (in good years) going up the supply chain.
No, the point of a futures market is to have a reliable supply which matches demand and allows everyone who works to produce and use a given commodity to have a reasonable expectation of demand and how production should be matched to it.
Goldman-Sachs should _not_ be inserting themselves into profiting on the poor's daily bread.
The point of the futures market is to transfer risk to someone more capable or more willing to manage it. Any effect on supply and demand is a side-effect of this.
The risk is inherent. Not everyone that produces a commodity wants to manage the risk associated with that commodity, as it is a very different skill set.
A "reliable supply" is fundamentally not possible with all the vagaries of the natural world. Even the Code of Hammurabi makes reference to this*, and we still have "acts of god" in modern parlance.
Because tail-risk events are very unlikely, and the average person does not have enough money to diversify widely enough to smooth out their effects. Big entities can launder high variance into low, and they can afford to do this by taking many more positions than an individual. Second, insurance companies directly cannot hold as much risk as they once did. Just like banks don't hold loan books like they once did, insurance tends to reinsure heavily and much of the risk now bottoms out with cat bonds. Third, this is the entire reason we created insurance. It's like asking "why does blue look blue", or when people ask "why does poop happen to smell bad to us". It's tautological.
If what you're upset about is claim denials those are occasionally illegitimate because insurance, like literally everything else, has the occasional bad actor. There's also a massive industry of attorneys who will work on contingency and provide legal representation to resolve that. Much more commonly, it's someone who didn't read his policy, or did but decided post-hoc what it "should" cover. He "shouldn't" have to bear the cost despite not taking out a more comprehensive policy beforehand. This isn't a "capitalism" problem; single-payer systems, generally agreed to be socialistic in nature, still don't cover some things and generally require coverage specifically to avoid people deciding they "deserve" coverage after they get sick. The other major category is things like business insurance in 2020; most policies wrote out plague after the SARS outbreak in the aughts. This isn't "insurers are evil" so much as bio risk is massively correlated which breaks a lot of things about underwriting.
Lots of "acts of god" are, in fact, covered and pay out all the time. Hail and wind and such. Things like flood aren't, because a relatively small number of people live in floodplains and they tend to not want to bear the entire risk. People who live outside of floodplains, on the other hand, don't buy flood insurance, because they don't need it. So you have a lot of adverse selection that makes it hard to insure.
In the US, we have a massive grainfed meat livestock sector that in an emergency could basically all be slaughtered in favor of feeding the grain to people.
But we also have recent history demonstrating that this will not be allowed to happen, no matter how much starvation there is in poorer countries, we WILL have our steaks. Not negotiable.
> But we also have recent history demonstrating that this will not be allowed to happen, no matter how much starvation there is in poorer countries, we WILL have our steaks. Not negotiable.
Indeed, though given Trump's behaviour I have wondered what will happen when it's poorer *US states*.
Fortunately, the farmers had a word and seem to have stopped the deportation of the undocumented (illegal) immigrants who do so much farm work.
Long may it continue that people who can say no to bad decisions, remain able to say no. Last thing anyone in the world needs with the Eurasian breadbaskets of Ukraine and Russia destroying each other's grain export capacity is the US shooting itself in both legs with an M134.
There are many ways this can play out, assuming it happens at all.
He may do a Mugabe and reward the faithful at the expense of the nation. He may do a Pol Pot, and punish the opposition until there are none left and then turn on the faithful and only get stopped when their internal crimes against humanity cross an international border and a foreign army steps in. He may do a Stalin and deny (or be ignorant of due to all the sycophants) the existence of a problem. He may say the equivalent of "Let them eat cake" and bring a repeat of all that entails.
Based on precedent, in such a hypothetical, I suspect he will put a 1000% tariff on all food imports to raise enough money to feed everyone, which obviously won't work but he won't know that, and then complain about how unfair everyone is being.
Distribution is hard too. It’s not as simple as “we have food and we are mean”. Look at how Hamas for example was seizing food supplies meant for starving Palestinians. Who is going to deliver food aid to, idk, Sudan and ensure only the hungry get it? What guns and soldiers will protect it? Who is going to pay for it?
Other countries have a lot of money and excess food too - EU, China, Brazil. I would look forward to hearing their proposals to solve hunger and to shake the hands of each volunteer and soldier and pilot/ship captain going to help feed people.
> Look at how Hamas for example was seizing food supplies meant for starving Palestinians.
Or look at how the IDF had to stand by powerlessly as Israelis blocked supply trucks from entering the refugee camps. Or how the IDF had to indiscriminately shoot up Palestinian civilians who crowded a supply truck in Gaza. Or how the IDF had to launch targeted missile strikes against supply trucks in Gaza that had been identified to and were in continuous communication with Israeli authorities. All because Hamas forced the IDF to indiscriminately destroy practically all infrastructure in the Gaza strip, cut access to Israel-controlled utilities, lock down the border to Egypt, send a population of millions on a death march along designated routes it continued bombing, deliberately assassinate news reporters, bomb hospitals, destroy UN and NGO facilities and literally shoot hostages it mistook for Palestinians.
I have to believe you were intentionally trying to be provocative because to float "Hamas seizing food supplies for starving Palestinians" in 2026 without providing context for why those Palestinians are starving, let alone that the original claim has since pretty much been refuted, feels like a deliberate choice:
There are of course gangs stealing supplies to resell them at inflated prices on the black market but that tends to come with the territory when the only authorities in place become defunct because the entire region is turned into rubbles by a military force that considers anyone without a Jewish Israeli passport a likely terrorist unless proven otherwise.
Anyway, more on point: countries don't have excess food, economic entities do. And our economic system is generally fairly averse to making economic entities give up any property (even with fair compensation), especially when it comes to large corporations. If you want to form any plan that doesn't start with (literally) "seizing the means of (food) production", I think it would have to include the phrase "create market incentives" but I'm not sure there is a better incentive than "people are willing to give you all their money because your product has become scarce" - though of course that hinges on "all their money" being more than you make now and that doesn't tend to hold up when it comes to the resource extraction economy based parts of the world.
Distribution is only hard if you have to find a way to profit off of it. Hundreds food programs of all sizes can do it, from the UN food program, to states of all sizes with food assistance programs (i.e. almost every country), to a tiny charity. Heck even a ragtag bunch of Anarchists can distribute food with their Food Not Bombs charters.
The only thing preventing food being distributed to everybody that needs it is economics, specifically the type of economics which rewards exploitation, hording, and maldistribution. The people with power actually prefer it that way, some people being hungry is fine actually, as long as the rich and powerful in their own country gets to make more money.
Now I am not gonna dignify your genocide apologia with an answer. But you should feel ashamed to have written such hateful words right here on a tech forum.
Another reason why most countries subsidise their agriculture is because in times of war you don't want your enemy to starve you. That's mostly about high calories foods, not fancy salads though.
It would be just easier to not wage war by the way.
Can't think of many countries besides Canada and US that would not starve in NATO if such a necessity arose, and that's because they produce lots of cereals.
All the other countries in NATO are major food importers.
Italy is not food self-sufficient, it relies heavily on imports of cereals, animal feed, oils, and other.
We add value up the chain (with hams, cheese, etc), but bar fruits and vegetables where we are okay-ish, we cannot feed ourselves. Its been decades that even our own pasta is made out of canadian and us cereals. We simply don't have enough, let alone we don't have good quality cereals.
On top of that, our production is super reliant on imported fertilizers and chemicals. We would borderline starve in case of isolation.
Being a major importers of olive oil is probably not such a big deal. The EU is pretty self-sufficient for food, for example - can change a bit the food and agg mix if needed (and some countries have emergency stores as well).
If you think that is going to happen, you can buy up some supplies and store them yourself. I have relatives with some impressive and substantial pantries because they're prepared to be snowed in for an extended period of time. Running out of food is possible the least novel problem humanity has ever encountered.
And what would you rather happen? If they don't store up a surplus then everyone will run out of food and prices will go up anyway. If there is less food because of a drought, prices are going up. If corporations start building up a stockpile then prices aren't going to go up as much as if there were no reserves.
TLDR; Yes. Good. It is a great day when there is food available at the local supermarket.
If the plan isn't to stockpile food communally through a big corporation making a tidy profit for being well prepared in a disaster, and it isn't to stockpile it personally... what is the plan? There won't be any food.
There are very limited options here. Those two are, by far, the two best ones for reliably being able to access food. Someone has to build up a reserve. Literally, you should to be able to point someone out and say "this person will give me food next month, they've got a stockpile for this drought".
Ideally that someone who is very, very motivated to get it right and make it happen. Those big corporations charging extra are going to keep people fed.
> The world is bigger than your relatives.
I offer no commentary on the size of my relatives vs. the rest of the world :)
There is another option than individuals vs corporations though: The government could and should provide for it's citizens. That is what a welfare state is all about: useing the taxes it collects from its citizens for the common good.
I know, to the US centric crowd at HN that probably sounds insane, but as a Scandinavian this is what I would have expected in the past (though probably not these days).
Any property that is needed for the benefit of all (and where there is no alternative way to buy it normally etc) can be taken and redistributed.
So like a storehouse full of food, with a starving population and broken infrastructure - can be just taken and later compensated not with wartime prices, but "normal" ones. And I believe there are at least in theory some plans for that, which military trucks go to which warehouse and what are distribution centers etc.
I mean sure but if we're just going to give people the money to buy food what is the complaint about big corporations charging more?
It isn't like anyone would be unable to afford food, because a welfare state would imply a standing agreement to buy everyone food at the taxpayer's expense if required. And it is entirely reasonable for prices to go up when there is a shortage, the people who built up stockpiles in advance need to be compensated for their foresight. Someone has to be stockpiling food.
During the cold war, Sweden had vast stockpiles of long shelf life food (and other essential items) in case the war stopped being cold. This would have been rationed out in case of an emergency or war. As far as I know, this is no longer the case since the mid 1990s.
But what I'm suggesting is that a governments should perhaps build up such stockpiles again as we move into more uncertain and less peaceful times. This can help even in case of smaller regional disasters, not every emergency is a full blown war.
> the people who built up stockpiles in advance need to be compensated for their foresight
Why? And it's not foresight that sets those people apart, it's having the resources to hoard the food and the ethical framework that allows them to profiteer off their fellow humans misfortune. Why should we reward that?
> Someone has to be stockpiling food.
Sure, like a government or a coop or a commune or whatever. Some institution who's interests are aligned with the community, not somebody who happens to have capital and wants to make a buck.
>the people who built up stockpiles in advance need to be compensated for their foresight.
Or we do what we've always done to war profiteers and hang them after taking their supplies, because hoarding food and expecting to be paid for it while people are dying is immoral and tends to get people a little bit pissed.
There's no fucking bet to be made that people will need to eat tomorrow, or have a house, or have water. Those are basic needs.
> Ideally that someone who is very, very motivated to get it right and make it happen. Those big corporations charging extra are going to keep people fed.
Governments are also actors in this, and have incentivises on a different scale than "how much money this year?"; this remains true even when those governments are literally dictatorships, though as history has shown neither businesses nor governments (democratic nor dictatorship) are correct at all times, so it's nice we've also got super-national aid programs.
The problem with a company stockpiling food (or other basic need like water) in times of scarcity is that it has no obligation to distribute it evenly. This is fine for luxury items, but when it's basic needs, it gets really ugly quickly.
> Ideally that someone who is very, very motivated to get it right and make it happen. Those big corporations charging extra are going to keep people fed.
They (a corporation) are motivated, by profit. Meaning some people will remain fed because they can afford it. The rest will not be fed. I simply don't think that's ethical.
> If the plan isn't to stockpile food communally through a big corporation making a tidy profit for being well prepared in a disaster, and it isn't to stockpile it personally... what is the plan?
Stockpile food communally NOT through a big corporation making a tidy profit?
An African subsistence farmer makes what? A dollar a day. The average American makes $60k+ annually.
So who is going to be able to afford that bag of flour?
Further the African subsistence farmer has lost their harvest, so they don't even have that dollar.
The rich will always be able to outspend the poor. Making things uniformly more expensive doesnt change that. The west will continue to have an obesity epidemic while the poorest starve.
"Communally" and "through a big corporation making a tidy profit" are at odds.
It's either for and by the community or it's for and by a big corporation profiteering off the misfortune of the community. It can't be both at the same time.
The big corporations aren't "going to keep people fed", they will hoard and ration by wealth, not by need. The billionaire will get their twenty course fine dining experience, the beggar will starve. That's not keeping the people fed by any serious definition of the term.
Thanks to being globally remote, easily isolated and events like WWII and COVID we're picky about having reserves (seed, fuel, grain) in storage to ride out <reasonable levels of shit happens>.
> "Communally" and "through a big corporation making a tidy profit" are at odds.
Not really. Corporations are social by essence, and on a much bigger scale than anything that came before. That’s precisely what makes socialism possible.
>Corporations are social by essence, and on a much bigger scale than anything that came before.
Corporations are transactional by essence, not social. Any relationship within or with a corporation has the singular goal of making the corporation money. Food deserts exist because corporations aren't social. Supermarkets and stores aren't there feed the community, they sell food only to those who can afford it, and only for a profit. If it comes down to it they'll station cops outside the store with shotguns to keep the poors away and let the food rot on the shelves because that's how capitalism works. That's the exact opposite of everything socialism is supposed to stand for.
A modern 1877 scale event would probably immediately fuel (pun intended) a furious climate change debate, even though attributing the existence of the El Niño itself to fossil fuels would not be scientifically justified... or maybe was the 1877 El Niño caused by fossil fuels (so many Wars happened in those years) ?
> Nobody in planet modelling has ever suggested that the 3 phase El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO)
We saw already around 2020 or so that specialists opinions didn't really matter. Feelings and politicians opinions were more relevant... so "nobody in planet modelling" means nothing if Politicians and Activists tries to create this link..
Al Gore, if I remember correctly, and António Guterres, i think last month, tried to create this link already.. probably others too?
in one hand i wanted to highlight that if it was today, we - as civilization - would definitely create a link between the events, based on our "feeling"
in another hand, i question if we really could rule out, since back in the days, everything that we have was coal.
If you care to get analytic, it's related to the insulation factor of the atmosphere, fairly consistent amounts of sunlight in (subject to know solar variation and orbit) that heats land and sea surface radiating thermal energy out to space with a "small" amount trapped to maintain a globally mean amount of energy that powers climate cells and cascades into other forms.
The global amount of coal use in the 1880s was non zero, sure, but overall the CO2 emissions from those tonnages were minuscule compared to modern emissions within the past 50 years .. and we have direct libraries of atmosphere created since the early years of the Cold War and many pocket captures for the past 200 years, with proxies (such as ice core bubbles) going back far longer.
ENSO predates heavy coal use - so it's not something created by human activity, and as noted the first uses of coal were barely enough to move the needle (recall that collieries kept records so we have a fair handle on tonnages extracted).
I found myself moved by this recent interview with Prof. Kevin Anderson on the topic of climate change (and associated politics): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBFos_T7cT0
He paints quite a bleak picture of the situation we are in (I tend to agree), but there's also a glimmer of hope in there.
Remember that this is just a piece of the complex system that is the global climate. And over it, there are more systems affected, including human ones like food production or economy. Something this extreme may cause from a severe disruption or a permanent instability in those systems, specially considering feedback loops in all of them.
I don't find that sentence confusing, but I definitely found the article poorly written. Here's the sixth nearly identical map and now let's repeat the exact same thing already stated five times or more while including one new sentence of detail. The density of actual information in the writing is so low that it's hard to follow.
The article is so repetitive and padded out with empty prose that I found myself ignoring whole paragraphs. It's like the author decided to describe what an el niño is, then describe what an el niño is, then describe a super el niño, then describe what an el niño is, then describe what an el niño is, then describe what an el niño is, then describe the possible consequences of a super el niño, then describe what an el niño is, then describe what an el niño is, and finally describe what an el niño is.
Given the repition without new information, random bolded words and consistent paragraph length, I'd say this is probably written mostly or entirely by an LLM
The author is saying the surface of the ocean (where it's easiest to measure temps, so we do that the most) is the 'footprint' or the full colum of warm water below it. Additionally, like a footprint the surface area it represents might be smaller too as warm water continues to rise.
I stumbled across this too but going back to the picture made the sentence easy to understand. Maybe the sentence would have worked better if it was located before the picture. (The picture shows a ramp going up to the right deep under the ocean surface - the subsurface warm core)
I don't know enough about climate science, but south swell usually is the result of west-to-east storms coming off of Australia. In Hawaii, this summer's south swell has been extremely consistent big swells. I imagine it's something like the west coast off South America heating up causes the balance of the southern hemisphere off Africa to counteract that.
I think you might be on to something: I am by no means a weather enthusiast or expert, nor do I live in California: the El Niños building up in 1997 and 2015 had similar seasons, 2023 not, the current fast onset and wave seasons (durable good surfable waves in winter) match especially well with 2015. 2023 was the exception but also slower onset. Also La Niña winters also had good winter conditions, but not as durable. So good surf conditions in NorCal outside of La Niña winters might be a visceral leading indicator for fast onset El Niño.
Check out stormsurf001 on YouTube. He’s been tracking the development of the El Niño for months now.
I (SoCal) kinda hate El Niño. Seems like it always means way more weather (blown out days) and most reefs around here are maxed out beyond overhead. It’s nice to get lots of groundswell but I’ll take 2-3 and high pressure over 6-7 and rainy any day.
Lima, Peru... daytime and night time temps are +8-+3 (single day, might be the coldest of the year) degrees celcius, usually should be like 18-16 celcius daytime, it's at 26-21 (single day, might be the coldest of the year) with +6-+8 being the most common... already past mid winter and there hasn't been a single "cold" day yet.
Pelicans are mass starving so are sea lions as cold based fish have left the shores, no long sleeves or sheets needed to sleep, it's been summer prety much all year... never seen this in 31 years of life... supposedly 98 was bad although this one is projected to be worse... summer temps might hit 39-34 celcius on average if things keep going this way when normally you have 31-27 degrees during summer, considering most houses don't have air conditioning I can definitely see a lot of heat related deaths happening and a potential food crisis forming.
People really don’t appreciate yet. How really bad this situation is and will be. They’re talking about 1.76°C higher temperatures next year because of this El Niño. Those are climate change temperatures that are not supposed to be around until 2035. So it’ll give us a sneak peek into our future.
But the biggest effect and this is noted by many insurance companies now is going to be in places like India.
But this is something the world has never seen and I mean that literally so I don’t expect it to be anything but really bad and you should be ready.
It was inevitable we'd get to the point where climate change began substantially disrupting ecology and human livelihoods. Looks like we're ahead of schedule.
People dying from extreme heatwaves, weather, and famines due to climate change has been predicted for decades at this point; and this is exactly the sort of climatic setup that will enable this to happen.
Way more people die of being exposed to the cold than exposed to the heat. So you could make a good argument that weather events save more lives than they cost by increasing the temperature of marginal zones where people otherwise freeze.
> Way more people die of being exposed to the cold than exposed to the heat.
I was skeptical of this claim, so I looked it up. You’re right. Globally, about 9x as many people die due to cold-related causes than heat-related causes. It’s not freezing, though, but longer-term effects like kidney failure in elderly people. [1]
I’m still dubious about the argument that weather events could save lives, though, partially because climate change makes weather more extreme, not simply “more pleasant for people in colder climates.”
> People dying from extreme heatwaves, weather, and famines due to climate change has been predicted for decades at this point; and this is exactly the sort of climatic setup that will enable this to happen.
Yeah, people have been "predicting" it, but the fact is that this is currently mostly hyperbole, driven by bad reporting and activist exaggeration.
What is happening, right now, is that winters are mostly getting warmer. Summers are getting hotter in certain places, but not at nearly the rate that cold days are decreasing -- and the evidence is weaker on a global scale. From the IPCC 6AR report, figure 11-9 shows it clearly:
Even the IPCC report only gets to the "virtually certain" evidence level by combining the two claims:
> The frequency and intensity of hot extremes (including heatwaves) have increased, and those of cold extremes have decreased on the global scale since 1950 (virtually certain).
That's because, when you actually look at the data, it is abundantly clear that the increase in hot extremes are far less common than the decrease in cold extremes. Of course, when you take the ratio of the two, this looks worse, because the denominator is getting smaller.
Chapter 11 is worth reading. You will be shocked how many of the widely reported memes about extreme weather and climate are just not supported by good data:
I recommend in particular going through the figures, and looking at how many of them are model predictions (nearly all), versus plots of historical data. Setting aside the debates about model quality, etc., surely we can all agree that predictions are not evidence?
Go back and compare some of the earlier IPCC reports and see which bits have been left out. The worst case scenarios keep getting removed, and the best case scenarios are based on projections of CO2 emissions which are highly unrealistic.
Official reports have been downplaying the impact for decades, while countries have been setting climate targets that they had no intention of achieving.
Arguing that the IPCC report is "downplaying the impact" because of corruption -- which is what you seem to be doing, without evidence -- is an implausible assertion.
The far more likely conclusion is that you're wrong.
> What is happening, right now, is that winters are mostly getting warmer. Summers are getting hotter in certain places, but not at nearly the rate that cold days are decreasing -- and the evidence is weaker on a global scale. From the IPCC 6AR report, figure 11-9 shows it clearly:
Thanks.
Crazy that you think even these graphs, which do not include the last six years, are just fine.
Climate change is not just about it getting warmer. The problem also lies with changes in climate, the pattern of weather. Sudden changes in climate do not allow for adaptation to compensate. This includes human adaptation.
But it may be better just to read the IPCC summary:
> People dying from extreme heatwaves, weather, and famines due to climate change has been predicted for decades at this point; and this is exactly the sort of climatic setup that will enable this to happen.
The rhetoric is all well and good, but if you look at the numbers according to the WMO[0], deaths from climate-related hazards have been dropping steadily in the 50-year period from 1970 to 2019, even as atmospheric CO2 went from ~326ppm to ~410ppm and the world population more than doubled. That's not a per capita decrease; it's an absolute decrease, from over 50k deaths worldwide the 70s to fewer than 20k in the 2010s.
All of this is due to the increased ability of humans to deal with what the climate might throw at them, mostly due to cheap energy unlocked by fossil fuels during that time. Remember, there are no countries that are both rich and have a low per capita energy usage. Surplus energy allows humans to build the infrastructure that makes them more resilient to disasters.
If I had to wager, more people will suffer and die in the coming decades from efforts to combat climate change (i.e. hamstring energy production and usage) than from climate change itself. You can already see this in the anti-air conditioning sentiment in parts of Europe.
Look, I think you made some good points, but at the same time, humans have become better at handling the climate because we’ve been able to predict it and have found solutions to certain known issues. What happens when it gets less predictable, like when certain regions get much less water for an extended period, is very much unknown.
Your last claim makes no sense. Is there actually a widespread political effort to ban air conditioning or make it hard to get in Europe? That certainly isn’t the case in the US. And yet hot summers are still killer in cities which aren’t accustomed to them: that’s climate change doing the killing.
Solar is just about the most abundant source of energy on the planet, and easily decentralized. Plugin solar is becoming increasingly popular and cheap, for example.
I think energy production would be much more abundant and directly in control of the people if governments stopped subsidizing energy sources that need massive amounts of resources just to keep running. Why not give solar an advantage when every watt installed can just… work by itself for the next three decades? Every watt of a gas plant needs you to figure out who to buy gas from forever.
Regarding air conditioning in Europe, I suspect that there are other interests at play given that there has been zero pushback against air conditioning in cars.
Air conditioning in buildings is likely viewed as a threat to gas providers as most modern cooling devices also have a heating mode that competes directly with gas heating.
At least here in the UK, recent revisions to the default planning rules around heat pumps (“Permitted Development” legislation) removed the restriction that an install be “used solely for heating purposes” and revised this to “not be used solely for the purpose of cooling”.
The Boiler Upgrade Scheme grant also permits cooling - it’s based on the heating credentials of a unit only.
So in Britain at least, installing cooling systems in private residences seems to be getting easier.
> Air conditioning in buildings is likely viewed as a threat to gas providers as most modern cooling devices also have a heating mode that competes directly with gas heating.
Not sure it makes sense, most of those countries are already phasing out fuel/gas boilers.
IMO it's just cultural shift is slow to adjust (in those countries, a few decades ago AC would have been a wasteful luxury, summer temperature would be well below 30 except for a few days).
People often forget that architecture in (central and northern) Europe is build under the assumption that the climate has more cold extremes than hot extremes. Thus, buildings were constructed to both retain and collect as much heat as possible to save on heating in the winter. Now, if you just slap an AC onto that it will have to fight all of the passive heat collection. In other words, you would have to also close off all south facing and roof windows for it to work.
Furthermore, the way the last mile distribution of power works is often underground (with the cables directly in the sand, no hose or tube around it) which makes it expensive to upgrade to handle a much higher peak consumption. Only lucky thing is that you mostly need AC when the sun is shining, thus local production via photovoltaic cells is a good solution that sidesteps the power grid problem.
Europe is a big place. Domestic air con is ubiquitous in Italy, rare in the UK. But even in the UK, places like shops and offices will usually have air con.
> I think energy production would be much more abundant and directly in control of the people if governments stopped...
Lots of people pat themselves on the back for (correctly) believing that climate change is real. Why is it so hard for people to also believe that regulatory capture and oligarchy are real, and directly responsible for the lack of action against climate change?
Think of all the for-profit power utility companies in the US. Why are they for-profit? For that matter, why are ISPs for-profit and not run as non-profits with heavy government assistance? Answer, basically: Because the existing people that make lots of money off them have been lobbying heavily to make it so. Similarly, it is no coincidence the current leadership in the US is actively against renewable energy.
A lot of the existing wealth, especially in North America and Europe was built on top of fossil fuels directly or indirectly (cars, power plants, industries, maintaining diplomatic relations with oil-rich nations). That dependence is hard to unwind and is going to take 50 years or more unless the US electorate can start electing people that believe in climate change. And for this reason, actually addressing climate change is going to come from unintuitive social actions, like making smaller housing more fashionable, moving to urban areas, possibly cracking down heavily on crime in those areas, and financially rewarding the use of public transport and bikes.
Climate change is science: there is evidence, prediction, measurement, all of that.
Oligarchy and regulatory capture are undeniably real, but they are not scientific. They’re social phenomena, and much harder to theorize about and model than e.g. what happens to rainfall in Northern Europe with a 1.5c El Niño.
Worse, while oligarchy is absolutely real and causing great harm, its amorphous nature means some people blame it the way people used to blame demons, or humours. Flat tire? The oligarchs! Sprained ankle? The oligarchs!
So while both climate change and oligarchy are real problems, I don’t see them as the same class of problem at all, and the tools to address are different. They’re entangled (oligarchs who will never feel discomfort short of defenestration are unlikely to allow disruption of their wealth just for feeding people), but different.
Unless stuff like "Why not give solar an advantage..." is a rhetorical question with the answer of "Because lots of current billionaires would make less money", I don't think they are pointing out the same stuff I said.
The two are racing each other. So far, human adaptation is winning. But climate change is just getting started. The change that happened over the last 50 years is tiny compare to what will happen over the next 50. It may well start winning that race.
You may tie this in to climate change in general to prove your point, but this is a discussion about El Nino weather event and it is important to remember the current situation is not unprecedented.
It's hard to rationally discuss this with non-experts as you will immediately be labeled an AGW denying crank and downvoted to oblivion.
Yes, AGW is real. Yes, extreme weather and climate events have occurred before AGW. No, I am not saying that AGW is incapable of making these extreme events even worse.
For instance, California has experienced megadroughts lasting decades or hundreds of years in the relatively recent past.
This El Nino is expected to be worse than that based on the El Nino 3.4 temperatures we are already seeing. This is why most weather people are talking about it so much.
We do not have the same data for the 1877 event that we do for the last strongest El Nino in 1997. And this one is much stronger than that by far:
Lets not speculate, currently there have been worse ones in the past. If this eventually becomes more extreme then yes it will become a big talking point, but it is not there yet.
It’s not called speculation. It’s called the scientific extrapolation. The reason why we do this is to prevent people from dying. If we wait till it becomes extreme and we’re saddled with food shortages it’s too late.
And currently , this is the worst El Niño ever recorded at this point. El Niño right now is worse than the El Niño in 1997 was at this point. Much worse. We simply don’t have these numbers for 1887.
Consistency doesn't seem your strong point, in language as well as factually!
I stand by my point, this is currently not unprecedented.
You are welcome to disagree, but as you keep saying 'We dont have the numbers' then you cant be sure just as much as you are saying I cant.
Cheap cooling vests distributed at scale, kept cool or "recharged" by a portable and unpluggable solar panel, seems necessary. Individual air conditioning is too expensive and most affected people need to work outside during the daytime.
There's an inverse relationship between exposure to the effects of climate change and CO2 emitted per capita. The people who will need live preserving artificial cooling the most are exactly the people contributing the least to climate change.
In any case, the effects of extreme heat on the body are the easiest part of climate change to mitigate with current technology. The hard part is the famine.
Meanwhile West Antarctic ice shelf barely clutching on.
No direct link, but click the "anomaly" map button just underneath the map. Hello all these similar 10+ °C anomalies that have sat around. Some colder spots too that have hung around! But yikes.
https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/t2_daily/?dm_id=world
I at least think of El Nino kind of running into South, building up in the Pacific. But the heat cuts across, then down, and pools in Antarctica here, is how I read it.
It is dry heat, if you look at it from certain point of view. I once experienced smth like 27-28°C with fog, 100% humidity. Was almost as bad as 40°C with low humidity.
And if it would be 42°C/107°F with fog and 100% humidity, lots of people would be dead already. But it’s more like saying “at least this building is not on fire right now”. Or 1km wide meteor is not crashing down. It is not, and anything near 40°C is really unpleasant, regardless of burning homes and falling meteors.
It would be compatible with life for longer though. A dry sauna can get to 80-100°C, steam rooms are "only" 40-50°C. And subjectively, I can bear it much longer in a typical dry sauna.
Car temperature sensors tend to be inaccurate because they're often in the Sun or some other place affected by baking a car not in a garage.
Check a thermometer in the shade. The weather data stations reported an average of 101 ℉ / 38 ℃ for Waco. It's hot, and especially feels worse with Southern subtropical humidity. OTOH, 101 in California with 0-15% humidity, it would just be a bit annoying. Higher humidity makes heat qualitatively exponentially worse until it's a sauna.
I'm currently sitting in the middle of 100mph gusting winds as every island in Hawaii is under hurricane or tropical storm warning, with at least 100k people without power right now. Hurricane season in Hawaii is usually in Sept/Oct.
Hurricane season in Hawaii is June through November. August and September have always been peak months. It's completely normal to have hurricanes at this time of year.
It's 96 ℉ / 36 °C @ 60% humidity every day for 5 months in hill country with no rain in sight. The El Niňo rain may not get here until November. We're right at the 100 meridian west so it's between hot semi-arid (BSH) and humid subtropical (Cfa), and most storms seem to bypass us to the north by about 20 miles. It was growing zone 8b but changed +3 ℉ to 9a in 10 years.
One positive is that solar (and probably other renewables too) prices are plummeting and are now the cheapest way to generate power - so in economic terms, I hope this trend continues and accelerates even more to the point where even fossil fuel addicts can't resist putting a solar panel on their roof.
In the UK and other European countries, I see every month we're breaking records on the percentage of power generated from renewables.
Meanwhile, the US is paying the German energy firm RWE $1.2 billion to stop a off shore wind farm that was already under construction. Total payouts are over $4 billion to _stop_ adding electricity supply.
> the UK is currently generating 30%+ of it's power from solar
But at midnight last night it was generating 0%.
It is a well known issue that renewables can never provide 100% of the grids requirements because of peaks and troughs, and inefficiencies of storage.
Everyone who states this idea that solar is the saviour never seems to mention the manufacturing chain which requires a TON of energy and chemical processing, and the waste when the panels are no longer efficient enough or past their useful life. Every house in the world suddenly having having solar panels and every ICE vehicle being replaced by electric will cost us untold amounts of physical resources, energy, and create massive amounts of regular waste which cannot be recycled, forever.
There needs to be a managed decline and long term transition which manages both manufacturing and waste pipeline effectively or the shift will just increase the climate change rate.
Im not saying we shouldnt be moving to renewables ASAP, but people need to realise its not as simple as chucking a solar panel on every roof.
It would've helped a ton but it's not like electricity generation is the only source of emissions. You can't run a car or a plane on nuclear power. You can technically run a cargo ship on nuclear power but that's also not gonna happen. Yet transport is the second largest source of emissions.
Batteries have only recently-ish gotten energy dense and cheap enough for electric cars to be competitive, completely different solutions are needed for long distance shipping by sea or air.
It's the same situation across many other sectors like agriculture, construction and waste management. Lots of things causing emissions that's not electricity generation.
I agree. I just wanted to point out that to "stop burning fossil fuels" requires more than green electricity generation. Green electricity generation is 100% necessary, just not in itself sufficient, as was implied by "Would have been doable if we could have switched to nuclear".
We'll never stop burning fossil fuels -- not in our lifetimes, anyway. They're too useful.
Like: Cement kilns. They're ridiculously intensive of energy, and they're necessary. They burn approximately everything, from coal and natural gas to heavy fuel oil and petcoke to used tires. About the cleanest thing I've heard of them burning is old railroad ties, which isn't really so great either. :)
But if we solve some of the other big industrial users and mostly leave the cement factories, then that's... that's actually pretty good.
And we can make cement with electricity. There are companies working on scalable processes to accomplish exactly that. Electricity has just historically been very cost-prohibitive compared to alternatives in the cement-making world for it to be practical.
But! If we'd landed in the age of cheap electricity instead of this timeline, then that process would probably have been solved long ago; the incentives would have been so great that solving it would be inevitable.
And it really may have once been possible at one point to have steered things in that direction, and it even may still be possible today. But we're certainly not there (yet?).
As Romanians will tell you in August 2026, you can't run nuclear power stations without a cooling mechanism. In this case, it's Danube which is failing to offer that. Fusion is almost nowhere to be seen.
We wanted to exploit all natural resources to maximum extent using our science and tech without any regard to the side effects. The advantage is free. It helps our business. Business gains are human progress. Tech is wonderful. What are you talking about?
Not true. El Nino (increases CO2) and Albedo (long term - it's decreasing) are problematic issues in this area. If it's settled science why bother to even consider other factors? Doubtful if humanity would survive the catastrophe resulting from a global interdiction of the kind you suggest and we're not dense for understanding that. Greening of the planet (plants need carbon to grow) which has contributed $trillions to world productivity would also taper off. Moreover the related sulfate emissions actually mask warming - reductions in these emissions is related to some of the recent temperature increases. So you could likely get a temporary spike in warming. All that said, there are sensible routes to reducing human influence on the planet.
I’m a capitalist, but the only conclusion I can arrive at is that neo liberal capitalism makes it impossible to « do the right thing ». What we have is the logical result of the incentives at play
Actually private equity have been accumulating stakes quickly in renewables lately. Makes sense. Talk bad of a future tech to own most of the cake early for cheap...
I honestly don’t know and feel very conflicted about my own ideology. I recognize how broken it is at scale, but also value the personal autonomy, entrepreneurship, nonconformity capitalism promotes.
Though my version of capitalism isn’t the libertarian free market one, libertarianism will always evolve into oligarchy or something fascistic given enough time, it’s just baked into the incentives.
My personal ideology aligns with a managed capitalism, markets are created by an authority that ensures the incentives aligns with its overall goals. Mixed with very liberal social values.
I don’t know if that can survive overtime though. And that would very likely degenerate into something else when under stress.
As I said, I feel conflicted. But I appreciate the question
Perhaps this will help: commerce, free market and capitalism are three different things. Commerce, or trade, has existed for millennia, even among tribes and villages. The free market emerges when there are multiple producers of a good or service, and there is no compulsion upon any producer (from either a third party or another producer) to buy or sell. Capitalism would be when one or more of these producers no longer need to engage in production themselves, but are able to use their surplus savings to employ other producers and then keep for themselves the difference between market price and production cost (including cost of labor). There is nothing inherently wrong with that latter mode of production, except that it never reaches a dynamic equilibrium. Since it's surplus savings that enable the acquisition and direction of other producers (i.e. their labor), and that process leads to additional surpluses, the accumulation of surplus becomes exponential. At some point, the surplus becomes sufficient to apply compulsion on other producers, thus effectively eroding the free market that led to that mode of production in the first place.
I really appreciate the self-reflective answer and I fully understand the conflict.
You seem like a thoughtful dude, kudos.
I fully agree with your assessment about capitalism devolving into either fascism or some sort of feudalism.
I, too, have been struggling with what a more just system could look like.
Personally, some aspects of Yugoslav worker self-management appeal to me.
Basic idea is: Companies compete on a market, but theres no stock market. Companies <= 5 employees can be run however the founders envisioned, past that boundary the board and exec suite are required to be elected by the workers.
Combined with state grants and regulations to direct the overall direction of the economy, I feel like it solves for a lot of issues of shareholder capitalism without swapping them for a whole separate set of Commissariat problems.
Of course, the state itself wasn't democratic in Yugoslavia and it suffered from ethnic tensions that ultimately tore it apart. But we don't need to copy their setup wholesale.
Yugoslavia failed spectacularly economically. People had to smuggle bananas, diapers, coffee and jeans among other goods from the neighboring Italy and Austria. Millions of people (Gastarbeiter) migrated to Germany to be able support their families, because there was no opportunity at home. Inflation was horrendous, people exchanged the local currency to german marks on the same day as the payday, otherwise by the next day it was worth half as much. There was a shortage of gasoline and people sometimes waited years to get a car. But yes the dictator and the red nobility lived very well for sure.
First of all, as already acknowledged above Yugoslavia wasn't perfect - I'm not sure what you're trying to get at here. As already mentioned, I'm not arguing for copying their entire setup wholesale - I just find the specific bits I pointed out interesting. Democracy comes was both invented and then repopularized by societies of slave holders, but that doesn't mean we have to throw out the baby with the bath water!
Inflation was horrendous in many countries, including lots of very capitalist ones. Think Weimar Germany for a famous example, or the Latin American debt crises of the 80s and 90s for ones contemporaneous with Yugoslavia (note also the IMF involvement here)
In the case of Yugoslavia, there's a good argument to be made that the root cause were western trade barriers as part of the successful plan to push it into IMF loans that could then be used to dismantle the country.
Anyways, why are we even religitating the 20th century? We need to be looking forward and figuring out a solution to the crisis right in front of us instead of going all cold war again. The forest are burning right now. The rivers are running low right now. Yugoslavia, however you may feel about it, ended decades ago.
This is what Europe has, in one way or another. Europe is a huge spread - sort of semi-functional communism/socialism that France has for example, and it has nothing to do with more capitalistic approach of say Switzerland. Economies and their state show this very well over time.
Every system is potentially broken, there is always room for it to go extreme in some way. The last thing I would want in Europe is for of unhinged corrupted oligarchy that US has - common folks are squeezed like there is no tomorrow, crappy healthcare and expensive education, almost no chance to escape their allotted class within system based on income ('american dream' is not really... realistic to be polite and I could easily use a word 'lie' there, just to keep poor desperate masses in check around the elections or during crises). Maximization of pure income to suffer in literally every single other aspect that makes society a well working society long term - no thank you, we can and do get it better overall.
So one has to be realistic, there is no ideal system, Swiss system of minimal centralized power that is frequently changing hands is, as many things Swiss had come up with, IMHO the most resilient for the future. Any counter-argument to that can be easily dealt with the reality of frequent public votes on all major topics. If you follow their politics a bit its lightyears ahead of typical cesspool US or EU politics had become daily. But one can't have this system (or any other) without underlying population making it work, day by day, out in the streets. Swiss have it working, work actively and hard on preserving it as much as possible, again not something I see elsewhere, certainly not in EU.
You're not going to do anything at all without money as a fungible exchange mechanism (a sometime measure of 'value'). Capitalists see value in things and try to generate that value. Yes, politicians and the rest of us have the job of regulating that process and sometime fail to do a good job. Do you know the right thing to do? I doubt it. You seriously do not see this as an immensely complicated issue? Finally please give chapter and verse for the 'dying'. Maybe compare the world of 2026 with that of 1900 and the quality of life for people in general and our concern for the life on this planet. Concern isn't action but it's a necessary prerequisite for it.
Money and value exist in all economical systems and has existed in some form since immemorial times, that has literally nothing to do with capitalism, an ideology developed over the past 250y or so
Also, our current system grossly undermines the functionality of our market economy. A lack of pricing for negative externalities will essentially always result in the basic concept of market failure.
Run inaccurate pricing of carbon emissions long enough and something bad is bound to happen. Same ordeal with cattle ranching & agriculture to feed it in the Amazon basin: >20% of the 55-million-year-old Amazon rainforest has been degraded for cattle in the past 55 years, partially because consumers don't pay accurate prices and producers don't pay accurate costs.
The unwillingness to merely partially solve obvious market failures via accurate pricing is a catastrophic hypocrisy in those among us who thump their chests about 'free markets' while conflating the concept with modern capitalism.
> Capitalists see value in things and try to generate that value
Value for who? Value as determined by who?
> Finally please give chapter and verse for the 'dying'.
You're commenting on it right now. Rivers here are drying out. Glaciers are melting. Forests are burning. How long do you think we can keep going like this?
> Maybe compare the world of 2026 with that of 1900 and the quality of life for people in general and our concern for the life on this planet.
How long can we keep optimizing for capital self-reproduction at the expense of the base conditions we survive on? The incentive structure does not allow for making the systemic changes required for continued thriving of humanity. What good is it then? How is it anything but a suicide pact?
Who is "us"? Because in capitalism, only people with capital get to decide what has value.
The values of the poor are not reflected. The values of the indigenous are not reflected. The values of the non-capitalist are not reflected. The value of the unborn is not reflected. The value of nature is not reflected.
The glacier doesn't participate in the market and neither does the river. Are they without value?
> As if this never happened before capitalism?
That's correct. Look at the graph I posted above, you'll notice that things weren't always this hot. Before capitalism they sure weren't.
China is the only country that is seriously doing anything about anything. They've single handedly built more renewable energy capacity than every other country combined, they've pulled millions of diesel and gasoline cars off roads, reforested one of the world's biggest deserts, this year they've finally reduced coal usage, and next year the long awaited Tokamak is set to fire for the first time.
The US is busy sending warships across the planet to blow up oil refineries which will be rebuilt. It's not bad enough we are busy grinding sand, but we are actively making things worse.
Temporarily, all of the middle east oil infrastructure will be rebuilt because their biggest customer still has no real tangible plan to wean itself off.
You can't really have this both ways. Closing Hormuz and blowing up Iranian export facilities has been massively decarbonizing. Chinese solar exports are massively up because countries have had to find new energy sources.
The argument that small countries don't matter in the equation is silly.
There are ~200 countries, of course on average your country will be less than .5% of emissions. Thinking .5% is small enough to do nothing is exactly the kind of thinking that leads us to inaction.
So yeah, china and the US need to get their act together, but so does every other country.
Come on, don't throw out decades-old lazy arguments like that. Everyone with above room-temperature IQ understands the concept of energy use per capita, and also that most other developed and developing countries take climate change seriously and have been reducing or capping their emissions for years. What is the point of wagging your finger at a non-existent problem like this?
>If only China and US could get their shit together....
If people in the US are still consuming multiples more than people in other societies, then a decrease of 36% means the US still does not have their shit together. Presumably, zahlman's response of pointing out the 36% decrease was a refutation of fHr's claim for China and US to get their shit together.
Although, also funny is that the US's 36% decline is partly (significantly?) due to exporting CO2 emissions from manufacturing to China, but that applies to the rest of the world too.
> decline is partly (significantly?) due to exporting CO2 emissions from manufacturing to China
They didn't have to agree to it, you know. But you can look at consumption-based carbon accounting and still get a picture that the US is, indeed, getting its shit together.
There's way more to climate change than fossil fuels: consuming less and changing diet.
A single cow alone requires lots of crop, water, and produces tons of methane (which is 200 times more dangerous than carbon dioxide).
Fishing is another earth destroying endeavor. A single boat, a single one, practicing bottom trawling is more dangerous to the environment than the emissions of tens of thousands of cars. In a single day it can have the same impact of deforestation on an area big as a montain.
Seriously, stop believing the fossil fuels gaslighting. They are indeed a problem, but the cause for climate change is all of our toxic habits and our incapacity to say "enough", take the bus or eath healthier (for us and the planet).
China currently emits a third of the entire C02 generation of the entire planet per year, you taking the bus is going to do nothing.
What we need to do is all stop buying next day delivered pieces of plastic produced in Chinese factories. Boycotting Temu and Amazon and shopping at your local stores is the one massive thing the average person can do to help the planet.
By far the biggest source of carbon emissions is coal. The others make an impact too, but if we're not addressing coal, there's almost no point addressing the others.
You're dragging heavy nets on the sea floor releasing heavy amounts of carbon dioxide and destroying ecosystems that are net contributors to decarbonization like seaweed, seagrass, etc. A single boat with a single net can do insane damage in a single day.
The problem is: when it comes to industrial food production, both fish and meat are insanely taxing on the environment.
But people, we, *don't want to accept that how they eat destroys the planet*
I can understand that. I already have many thoughts and problems, do I also have to feel guilty for what I consume and eat?
But it's the reality, and focusing on transport alone is the narrative that keeps accelerating how fast we kill the planet.
I'm glad you put the industrial qualifier on your food production comment. Eating meat is completely fine when doing it in moderation and buying only from local sustainable farms. However, industrial international scale meat production is a huge blight on the earth.
And the ideal, carbon-neutral reality is difficult to stomach: We humans just go back to the old ways (maybe the stone age is about the right period), wherein:
We build some stuff out of rocks (which themselves are difficult to form without even so much as copper tools). We use trees and plants where we have them (and we tend to die off when the use becomes unsustainable).
We grow and produce what we can on our own, and we do not tend to travel very far to trade for other things.
When the weather regionally turns ugly for a season or two, as it must eventually do, we have no fallback plan other than to starve until our numbers decrease to something that can be sustained (which may be zero).
We did all that stuff once. I don't think anyone really wants to go back to those methods.
So we do change what we can, where we can tolerate that change: It may be contradictive in some ways to charge up an EV at home with solar power and then make a special trip in that EV to pick up some cheeseburgers, but it's still an improvement over changing nothing at all.
And sure: We can do even better than that. We can build neighborhoods that are safe and efficient to walk or bike in so that it's more practical to get a cheeseburger without driving, and promote more of them by actually choosing to live in them. We can choose to eschew cheeseburgers altogether. There's lots of things we can do. There's a lot that we are doing.
(And I'm going to think about many of those ways this afternoon, in just a couple of hours after the weather dries up some, as predicted by our amazing computing-machines. I'll wash my hands with clean running water from the pipeline that runs all the way to my kitchen both before and after I get some prefabulated burger patties out of my grid-powered freezer and fire up the propane grill.
I'll do all of this while I bask in the unbridled decadence of not having had any opportunities to form memories of nearly running out of food as the yet another winter tirelessly wore on.
After that, I think I might work some on getting networked audio happening with Dante on my Linux desktop. I've got time for that kind of thing, since I'm not out tending the fields and chasing away the thieving poors with a stone hoe.)
There is currently a multi-billion, if not trillion, dollar industry (advertising and marketing) that is convincing everyone to behave the opposite way, i.e. maximize consumption with no regard to negative externalities. If we simply curb them, or better yet, use those same mechanisms to propagate a more rational message, yes, that that's all we need to do.
Granted fossil fuels are much more ubiquitous than CFCs and comparatively more difficult to replace, but we have prior art for changing industrial practices in the interest of improving climate conditions.
That was an awful lot simpler, int aht we (or rather governments) just had to lean on a small number of manufacturers and tell them to find alternatives for CFCs in their products. Nobody was up in arms saying 'my hairspray isn't the same without CFCs' or whatever. I'll bet the majority of consumers never even noticed the difference.
We couldn't have stopped using fossil fuels heavily until nuclear power was widespread and implemented, around the late 70s or 80s.
We could have traditioned our grids off of fossil fuels but we also depend on them for fertilizer to feed the world and for transportation which, until very recently, didn't have a viable alternative.
Nuclear was also kneecapped by FUD and astroturfing, and we didn't properly fund renewables because Republican administrations were in the pockets of big oil. Did you know GM made a fully viable electric car that people loved back in the 90s? Setback after setback, all self-inflicted, people pretending we have these insurmountable hurdles all over the place. Pathetic for an empire that prides itself as a champion of industry.
The fertilizer thing is a perfect example. We don't need to extract, refine, and burn nearly as much fuel as we do to get the fertilizer we need. People make the same empty argument about the cheap plastic shit that dominates the economy as if the world didn't exist before cheap plastic shit and couldn't exist after.
> and we didn't properly fund renewables because Republican administrations were in the pockets of big oil.
The world is a lot bigger than the US and they've all followed pretty much the same trajectory the last two decades. A slow long term investment in R&D/manufacturing techniques, followed by increased adoption when it became economically competitive. Combined with varying levels of government incentives and measured regulation, to ease transitions so it doesn't destroy the economy which we still depend on for everything else.
These major shifts always happen slowly then start exponentially growing once it's demonstrated to be practical.
I agree the US isn't the only country but I believe at that time we had the resources and clout to make green energy research happen everywhere and export our successes. We were still a global leader at the time both politically and technologically, especially where energy was concerned. And the world certainly took notice and set back the movement when the largest polluter per capita repeatedly signalled it had no interest in joining the rest of the world in a green future.
To pick one example: Once Studebaker decided to branch into self-going car territory, they were selling electric cars[1] nearly a century before GM's EV-1 project started delivering vehicles.
They were reasonably-reliable and they plugged into an outlet at home to recharge. Easy-peasy. But the range sucked: 40 miles is useful, but is just not very good for a lot of things that don't require any imagination to realize.
They did a lot better selling gas-fired cars than they did plug-in electric models[2], and this happened without requiring political conspiracy.
Anyway, it's 2026 and the range problem is solved well-enough for many folks. :)
Definitely true. But you see the blame placed on the public fearing nuclear from these events. There was some fear, but also astroturfing to make sure nuclear stayed dead.
> a bunch of people spreading lies about it for 100 years or so.
To be fair to past humans the deliberate lies and misinformation didn't really start until the 1970s, the oil crisis of that decade, the coming together of the UN to recognise the issue following the geophysics papers of the 1960s that nailed the CO2 problem against oil consumption, etc.
That's the period in which Koch money started flowing to think tanks and agencies that spun hard against smaller cars, public transport, integrated rail in cities, etc. The push for bigger cars as freedom.
Arrhenius' 1896 Model of the Greenhouse Effect didn't exactly have enough bite to kick of anti-prop in 1926, the world had other pressing issues.
Also worth noting that Three Mile Island was an earlier stain on public perception that kicked in a power station slow down well before Chernobyl.
You right. 50 years or so. I was trying going back far enough to include the discovery of man-made climate change and not necessarily starting right at the plugging our ears portion of the timeline.
Regarding the nuclear FUD, I'm not backing down. We'll never know how much the fear of nuclear was grassroots and how much was turf, but we can know for sure that someone didn't want Americans to have energy independence.
Fear of nuclear weapons was backed in as part of the Cold War Mutually Assured Destruction stand off doctrine - rather hard to achieve when pushing the Atoms For Peace warm fuzzy alternative.
Didn't help that nukes didn't make good civil engineering tools or help conquer space by farting out tiny bombs.
Even Carl Sagan was pushing the nuclear should not be used primal back brain reaction by over hyping (?) nuclear winter for a disarmament argument.
From a western european perspective, I can think of only one country where misinformation appears to have been a relevant factor for climate policy. Sure, until the early 2000s or so, it was all a bit nonspecific and seemed expensive, but latest by the 2013 paris agreement with falling renewable prices everyone knew what the solutions were going to have to look like for at least electricity, heating, and intracontinental mobility. Surely there'll be other examples too, but the USA is also the only country that both sits among the top emitters and easily had the resources to address their share. I have a hard time believing that "nobody really knew for sure" is what'll go down in history books as the underlying cause for most countries' inaction
To be totally clear, I'm not trying to absolve Americans of our responsibility. Americans are remarkably stupid and basically feral (I'm obviously exaggerating but that's how it feels living here). I have had shocking conversations about climate change and domestic energy policy. About half the country, especially older people, were very eager to hear comforting lies about how the lives to which we've grown accustomed need not be adjusted in any way. Despite it now being quite undeniably knocking on our front door, a solid portion of older Americans still don't think climate change is man made and still resist any hint of a green transition. It's fucking crazy town over here.
But if trusted leadership told everyone that we were roasting the planet instead of telling them we weren't and that roasting the planet is un-American, you can bet your sweet ass we'd have some green and nuclear energy going by now.
>I can think of only one country where misinformation appears to have been a relevant factor for climate policy.
I can think of a lot of countries where it wasn't a factor, maybe because if you are a rational economic actor trying to decide to throw money and messing with what people believe you can concentrate on just the biggest country that everybody does what it says. I mean what would be the point in convincing a large part of the Danish population that climate change wasn't real? It seems like it would be inefficient.
on edit: rational in this context is just using money in a way that maximizes the result one gets while minimizing the expenditure, in case anyone was getting ready with a clever rebuttal.
Most people agree on basic values. It's really not that big a stretch to appeal to such common values, seeing as rapid global warming would cause mass relocation, suffering, adaptation costs for those who can stay put, etc.
Considering how current world powers are heavily increasing military spending as well as the heavy rightward shift in many governments, I'm no longer convinced we'll do the right thing. It feels more and more like poor countries will be left to fend for themselves, so the "developed world" can plunder the remains to prop ourselves up just a bit longer.
Bit of an easy claim without concrete examples as I gave. Would hold more water if you'd tell us which local or global culture does not have basic decency towards each other as a value / wants to cause any of the things I mentioned such as forced relocation
> if you'd tell us which local or global culture does not have basic decency towards each other as a value
Look around the thread at how people are treating each other, and then keep in mind that HN is probably like 99th percentile for civility on the Internet in this regard.
Look at what happens in threads about any other politically charged issue, for that matter. Heck, look how far the discussion will veer into politically charged off-topic matters, whenever the OP is about some meta-level "how to be convincing" "how to argue fairly" etc. point.
Do you believe half the human population should have the same rights as the other half? I'd say this is rather basic, yet the subject of much disagreement.
Not really the topic here but I actually think most people agree on most things; everyone wants to do right by them and theirs. We just focus on the areas where we differ in opinion on how to get there and have things to discuss
You said “the DoD is the single largest consumer of fossil fuels” (emphasis mine). That is a very different claim than what the article says, which is that the DoD uses “more oil than any other institution in the world." Oil is just one type of fossil fuel; natural gas and coal are others. I would also contend that an institution is a very narrow class of consumer.
What you said is much more vague and could be reasonably interpreted to mean “the DoD uses more fossil fuels than the entire country of China,” which seems intuitively false.
In the plus column, we've had a healthy rainy season in the SE US. And while storms seem to move slower than before, we're not yet overwhelmed by stall+flood events.
As for this seasons storms in WCFL, every week I see storms that barely move - often just sitting in place for an hour or more. It's a change from the historical lines that marched across the state.
We've been on and off with water service because of it, we've got a bit of rain the last few days but the resovoirs in Puerto Rico were looking real skinny last week. Nothing humbles you like coming inside from doing yard work in the August Caribbean sunshine to realize your shower isn't running. RIP to my tomatos.
Can you get water from your air conditioning unit, or is it just too dry there?
Yup! I have a line running from it to water one of our beds, it's been raining so it's about as muggy as it gets today.
The strongest El Niño ever caused a massive famine:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1877%E2%80%931878_El_Ni%C3%B1o...
That is the question I am trying to get from the article. Will this new "keep growing" strongest ever be as bad as the one in 1877.
But it keep explaining what El Niño and Super El Niño and how it develops without giving me any context of how strong it will be.
To be fair, we didn't have the World Food Programme in 1877 which lets us anticipate droughts distribution and crop failures months ahead of time.
That being said, the existing energy crisis and fertilizer crisis can significantly compound the negative impacts of this El Niño even if we are able to anticipate it.
> lets us anticipate droughts distribution and crop failures months ahead of time.
If by “us” you mean big corporations, which will then buy the stuff and sell it at a premium later, then I agree.
Many farmers are subsidised specifically so that food is over-produced in most years, specifically to ensure than in bad years people don't go hungry.
Corporations may indeed be taking advantage of this, demanding prices so low that the farmers don't get the benefit of those subsidies. However:
> buy the stuff and sell it at a premium later
Is the point of a futures market. Futures let people trade a thing before they even know how supply and demand will balance, guaranteeing a price for the producer and letting them plan purchases of machinery and maintenance, with the risks (in bad years) and profit margins (in good years) going up the supply chain.
No, the point of a futures market is to have a reliable supply which matches demand and allows everyone who works to produce and use a given commodity to have a reasonable expectation of demand and how production should be matched to it.
Goldman-Sachs should _not_ be inserting themselves into profiting on the poor's daily bread.
https://theecologist.org/2011/sep/13/how-goldman-sachs-start...
The point of the futures market is to transfer risk to someone more capable or more willing to manage it. Any effect on supply and demand is a side-effect of this.
The risk is inherent. Not everyone that produces a commodity wants to manage the risk associated with that commodity, as it is a very different skill set.
A "reliable supply" is fundamentally not possible with all the vagaries of the natural world. Even the Code of Hammurabi makes reference to this*, and we still have "acts of god" in modern parlance.
Futures significantly pre-date your link.
* https://ehammurabi.org/law/48
We've made a couple advances in food production, storage, and distribution in the decades since Hammurabi last walked the earth.
How come acts of god only seem to ever benefit insurance corporations and never individual humans?
Because tail-risk events are very unlikely, and the average person does not have enough money to diversify widely enough to smooth out their effects. Big entities can launder high variance into low, and they can afford to do this by taking many more positions than an individual. Second, insurance companies directly cannot hold as much risk as they once did. Just like banks don't hold loan books like they once did, insurance tends to reinsure heavily and much of the risk now bottoms out with cat bonds. Third, this is the entire reason we created insurance. It's like asking "why does blue look blue", or when people ask "why does poop happen to smell bad to us". It's tautological.
If what you're upset about is claim denials those are occasionally illegitimate because insurance, like literally everything else, has the occasional bad actor. There's also a massive industry of attorneys who will work on contingency and provide legal representation to resolve that. Much more commonly, it's someone who didn't read his policy, or did but decided post-hoc what it "should" cover. He "shouldn't" have to bear the cost despite not taking out a more comprehensive policy beforehand. This isn't a "capitalism" problem; single-payer systems, generally agreed to be socialistic in nature, still don't cover some things and generally require coverage specifically to avoid people deciding they "deserve" coverage after they get sick. The other major category is things like business insurance in 2020; most policies wrote out plague after the SARS outbreak in the aughts. This isn't "insurers are evil" so much as bio risk is massively correlated which breaks a lot of things about underwriting.
Lots of "acts of god" are, in fact, covered and pay out all the time. Hail and wind and such. Things like flood aren't, because a relatively small number of people live in floodplains and they tend to not want to bear the entire risk. People who live outside of floodplains, on the other hand, don't buy flood insurance, because they don't need it. So you have a lot of adverse selection that makes it hard to insure.
"as reliable a supply as weather and other unforeseen circumstances and human efforts spread across as wide an area as is possible"
the point of a system is what it does. if the futures market lets a bank make money off bread, thats the point of it
In the US, we have a massive grainfed meat livestock sector that in an emergency could basically all be slaughtered in favor of feeding the grain to people.
But we also have recent history demonstrating that this will not be allowed to happen, no matter how much starvation there is in poorer countries, we WILL have our steaks. Not negotiable.
> But we also have recent history demonstrating that this will not be allowed to happen, no matter how much starvation there is in poorer countries, we WILL have our steaks. Not negotiable.
Indeed, though given Trump's behaviour I have wondered what will happen when it's poorer *US states*.
Fortunately, the farmers had a word and seem to have stopped the deportation of the undocumented (illegal) immigrants who do so much farm work.
Also fortunately, the reservoirs (that weren't even connected to where the fires in SoCal were) were not actually emptied, so my worst-case scenario at the time didn't come up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_water_release_from_Lake_K...
Long may it continue that people who can say no to bad decisions, remain able to say no. Last thing anyone in the world needs with the Eurasian breadbaskets of Ukraine and Russia destroying each other's grain export capacity is the US shooting itself in both legs with an M134.
Anyone who is actually wondering hasn’t been paying attention.
There are many ways this can play out, assuming it happens at all.
He may do a Mugabe and reward the faithful at the expense of the nation. He may do a Pol Pot, and punish the opposition until there are none left and then turn on the faithful and only get stopped when their internal crimes against humanity cross an international border and a foreign army steps in. He may do a Stalin and deny (or be ignorant of due to all the sycophants) the existence of a problem. He may say the equivalent of "Let them eat cake" and bring a repeat of all that entails.
Based on precedent, in such a hypothetical, I suspect he will put a 1000% tariff on all food imports to raise enough money to feed everyone, which obviously won't work but he won't know that, and then complain about how unfair everyone is being.
rich americans will have their steaks.
poor americans will starve outside the walls
Distribution is hard too. It’s not as simple as “we have food and we are mean”. Look at how Hamas for example was seizing food supplies meant for starving Palestinians. Who is going to deliver food aid to, idk, Sudan and ensure only the hungry get it? What guns and soldiers will protect it? Who is going to pay for it?
Other countries have a lot of money and excess food too - EU, China, Brazil. I would look forward to hearing their proposals to solve hunger and to shake the hands of each volunteer and soldier and pilot/ship captain going to help feed people.
> Who is going to deliver food aid to, idk, Sudan and ensure only the hungry get it?
I assume this is why in really dire circumstances with unsecured territory you airdrop stuff (at the risk of crushing a few people).
At least then the people nearest get a chance at grabbing it first.
> Look at how Hamas for example was seizing food supplies meant for starving Palestinians.
Or look at how the IDF had to stand by powerlessly as Israelis blocked supply trucks from entering the refugee camps. Or how the IDF had to indiscriminately shoot up Palestinian civilians who crowded a supply truck in Gaza. Or how the IDF had to launch targeted missile strikes against supply trucks in Gaza that had been identified to and were in continuous communication with Israeli authorities. All because Hamas forced the IDF to indiscriminately destroy practically all infrastructure in the Gaza strip, cut access to Israel-controlled utilities, lock down the border to Egypt, send a population of millions on a death march along designated routes it continued bombing, deliberately assassinate news reporters, bomb hospitals, destroy UN and NGO facilities and literally shoot hostages it mistook for Palestinians.
I have to believe you were intentionally trying to be provocative because to float "Hamas seizing food supplies for starving Palestinians" in 2026 without providing context for why those Palestinians are starving, let alone that the original claim has since pretty much been refuted, feels like a deliberate choice:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/26/world/middleeast/hamas-un...
https://www.timesofisrael.com/usaid-finds-no-proof-hamas-sys...
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israeli-officers-say-hama...
There are of course gangs stealing supplies to resell them at inflated prices on the black market but that tends to come with the territory when the only authorities in place become defunct because the entire region is turned into rubbles by a military force that considers anyone without a Jewish Israeli passport a likely terrorist unless proven otherwise.
Anyway, more on point: countries don't have excess food, economic entities do. And our economic system is generally fairly averse to making economic entities give up any property (even with fair compensation), especially when it comes to large corporations. If you want to form any plan that doesn't start with (literally) "seizing the means of (food) production", I think it would have to include the phrase "create market incentives" but I'm not sure there is a better incentive than "people are willing to give you all their money because your product has become scarce" - though of course that hinges on "all their money" being more than you make now and that doesn't tend to hold up when it comes to the resource extraction economy based parts of the world.
Distribution is only hard if you have to find a way to profit off of it. Hundreds food programs of all sizes can do it, from the UN food program, to states of all sizes with food assistance programs (i.e. almost every country), to a tiny charity. Heck even a ragtag bunch of Anarchists can distribute food with their Food Not Bombs charters.
The only thing preventing food being distributed to everybody that needs it is economics, specifically the type of economics which rewards exploitation, hording, and maldistribution. The people with power actually prefer it that way, some people being hungry is fine actually, as long as the rich and powerful in their own country gets to make more money.
Now I am not gonna dignify your genocide apologia with an answer. But you should feel ashamed to have written such hateful words right here on a tech forum.
Another reason why most countries subsidise their agriculture is because in times of war you don't want your enemy to starve you. That's mostly about high calories foods, not fancy salads though.
It would be just easier to not wage war by the way.
Can't think of many countries besides Canada and US that would not starve in NATO if such a necessity arose, and that's because they produce lots of cereals.
All the other countries in NATO are major food importers.
>All the other countries in NATO are major food importers.
All apart from France, Netherlands, Spain, Denmark, Poland, Hungary, Lithuania, Turkey, Italy and Ireland.
Interestingly the US is borderline now depending on how you measure food imports and exports.
I'm Italian and I don't think you're right.
Italy is not food self-sufficient, it relies heavily on imports of cereals, animal feed, oils, and other.
We add value up the chain (with hams, cheese, etc), but bar fruits and vegetables where we are okay-ish, we cannot feed ourselves. Its been decades that even our own pasta is made out of canadian and us cereals. We simply don't have enough, let alone we don't have good quality cereals.
On top of that, our production is super reliant on imported fertilizers and chemicals. We would borderline starve in case of isolation.
Ireland isn't in NATO.
The us could probably half it’s calories intake and be fine, if not better, from a public health perspective.
The average ribeye steak you serve in your barbecue joint can feed a family of 4 in war time.
Barbecue joints don't usually serve steaks. Tri tip, maybe, but if you're talking barbecue and beef then it's brisket.
And the best way to ensure that no one attacks you it is to make strong army and economy.
Being a major importers of olive oil is probably not such a big deal. The EU is pretty self-sufficient for food, for example - can change a bit the food and agg mix if needed (and some countries have emergency stores as well).
> It would be just easier to not wage war by the way.
Wars do not start by mutual agreement of all belligerents. If anything, usually the opposite.
> It would be just easier to not wage war by the way
Yeah, those pesky Ukrainians waging war for the pleasure of it.
Yes, Russia, NATO countries and its allies (Israel), are the major causes for conflicts in the last decades.
But stop framing it as "defense", we've been almost exclusively the ones attacking, not defending. It's us being the bad guys.
Seems to work pretty well. The alternative is either no food or no prices.
So are we supposed to demonize the big corporations for making a profit or celebrate them for planning ahead and making sure we don't starve?
I'm not so sure these days.
I mean do we not want food to be stored for tough times? And the people who do this storing should get paid for it?
If you think that is going to happen, you can buy up some supplies and store them yourself. I have relatives with some impressive and substantial pantries because they're prepared to be snowed in for an extended period of time. Running out of food is possible the least novel problem humanity has ever encountered.
And what would you rather happen? If they don't store up a surplus then everyone will run out of food and prices will go up anyway. If there is less food because of a drought, prices are going up. If corporations start building up a stockpile then prices aren't going to go up as much as if there were no reserves.
TLDR; Yes. Good. It is a great day when there is food available at the local supermarket.
The world is bigger than your relatives.
I'm sure he was referring to already food insecure places. The rich countries will have food available, probably at elevated prices.
In places where there's actual famine people will do crazy things to get their hands on food.
If the plan isn't to stockpile food communally through a big corporation making a tidy profit for being well prepared in a disaster, and it isn't to stockpile it personally... what is the plan? There won't be any food.
There are very limited options here. Those two are, by far, the two best ones for reliably being able to access food. Someone has to build up a reserve. Literally, you should to be able to point someone out and say "this person will give me food next month, they've got a stockpile for this drought".
Ideally that someone who is very, very motivated to get it right and make it happen. Those big corporations charging extra are going to keep people fed.
> The world is bigger than your relatives.
I offer no commentary on the size of my relatives vs. the rest of the world :)
There is another option than individuals vs corporations though: The government could and should provide for it's citizens. That is what a welfare state is all about: useing the taxes it collects from its citizens for the common good.
I know, to the US centric crowd at HN that probably sounds insane, but as a Scandinavian this is what I would have expected in the past (though probably not these days).
"useing the taxes it collects from its citizens for the common good."
Not just taxes, §14 of the german basic law for example says:
https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/gg/art_14.html
Any property that is needed for the benefit of all (and where there is no alternative way to buy it normally etc) can be taken and redistributed.
So like a storehouse full of food, with a starving population and broken infrastructure - can be just taken and later compensated not with wartime prices, but "normal" ones. And I believe there are at least in theory some plans for that, which military trucks go to which warehouse and what are distribution centers etc.
I mean sure but if we're just going to give people the money to buy food what is the complaint about big corporations charging more?
It isn't like anyone would be unable to afford food, because a welfare state would imply a standing agreement to buy everyone food at the taxpayer's expense if required. And it is entirely reasonable for prices to go up when there is a shortage, the people who built up stockpiles in advance need to be compensated for their foresight. Someone has to be stockpiling food.
During the cold war, Sweden had vast stockpiles of long shelf life food (and other essential items) in case the war stopped being cold. This would have been rationed out in case of an emergency or war. As far as I know, this is no longer the case since the mid 1990s.
But what I'm suggesting is that a governments should perhaps build up such stockpiles again as we move into more uncertain and less peaceful times. This can help even in case of smaller regional disasters, not every emergency is a full blown war.
> the people who built up stockpiles in advance need to be compensated for their foresight
Why? And it's not foresight that sets those people apart, it's having the resources to hoard the food and the ethical framework that allows them to profiteer off their fellow humans misfortune. Why should we reward that?
> Someone has to be stockpiling food.
Sure, like a government or a coop or a commune or whatever. Some institution who's interests are aligned with the community, not somebody who happens to have capital and wants to make a buck.
>the people who built up stockpiles in advance need to be compensated for their foresight.
Or we do what we've always done to war profiteers and hang them after taking their supplies, because hoarding food and expecting to be paid for it while people are dying is immoral and tends to get people a little bit pissed.
There's no fucking bet to be made that people will need to eat tomorrow, or have a house, or have water. Those are basic needs.
> Ideally that someone who is very, very motivated to get it right and make it happen. Those big corporations charging extra are going to keep people fed.
Governments are also actors in this, and have incentivises on a different scale than "how much money this year?"; this remains true even when those governments are literally dictatorships, though as history has shown neither businesses nor governments (democratic nor dictatorship) are correct at all times, so it's nice we've also got super-national aid programs.
The problem with a company stockpiling food (or other basic need like water) in times of scarcity is that it has no obligation to distribute it evenly. This is fine for luxury items, but when it's basic needs, it gets really ugly quickly.
> Ideally that someone who is very, very motivated to get it right and make it happen. Those big corporations charging extra are going to keep people fed.
They (a corporation) are motivated, by profit. Meaning some people will remain fed because they can afford it. The rest will not be fed. I simply don't think that's ethical.
> If the plan isn't to stockpile food communally through a big corporation making a tidy profit for being well prepared in a disaster, and it isn't to stockpile it personally... what is the plan?
Stockpile food communally NOT through a big corporation making a tidy profit?
An African subsistence farmer makes what? A dollar a day. The average American makes $60k+ annually.
So who is going to be able to afford that bag of flour?
Further the African subsistence farmer has lost their harvest, so they don't even have that dollar.
The rich will always be able to outspend the poor. Making things uniformly more expensive doesnt change that. The west will continue to have an obesity epidemic while the poorest starve.
"Communally" and "through a big corporation making a tidy profit" are at odds.
It's either for and by the community or it's for and by a big corporation profiteering off the misfortune of the community. It can't be both at the same time.
The big corporations aren't "going to keep people fed", they will hoard and ration by wealth, not by need. The billionaire will get their twenty course fine dining experience, the beggar will starve. That's not keeping the people fed by any serious definition of the term.
You don’t know co-ops exist?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative
My local co-op is nearly a hundred years old now and has a combined members land area larger than the United Kingdom:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGjGsyMe_F8
* https://www.cbh.com.au/about-cbh/what-we-do
Thanks to being globally remote, easily isolated and events like WWII and COVID we're picky about having reserves (seed, fuel, grain) in storage to ride out <reasonable levels of shit happens>.
> "Communally" and "through a big corporation making a tidy profit" are at odds.
Not really. Corporations are social by essence, and on a much bigger scale than anything that came before. That’s precisely what makes socialism possible.
>Corporations are social by essence, and on a much bigger scale than anything that came before.
Corporations are transactional by essence, not social. Any relationship within or with a corporation has the singular goal of making the corporation money. Food deserts exist because corporations aren't social. Supermarkets and stores aren't there feed the community, they sell food only to those who can afford it, and only for a profit. If it comes down to it they'll station cops outside the store with shotguns to keep the poors away and let the food rot on the shelves because that's how capitalism works. That's the exact opposite of everything socialism is supposed to stand for.
When did the WFP eradicate famine?
another excellent agency for mr. president to target
A modern 1877 scale event would probably immediately fuel (pun intended) a furious climate change debate, even though attributing the existence of the El Niño itself to fossil fuels would not be scientifically justified... or maybe was the 1877 El Niño caused by fossil fuels (so many Wars happened in those years) ?
Nobody in planet modelling has ever suggested that the 3 phase El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) exists because of fossil fuel usage.
An extreme swing, here and there, has always been part of its nature.
The observed change is more and more extreme swings, greater amplitude, higher frequency.
> Nobody in planet modelling has ever suggested that the 3 phase El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO)
We saw already around 2020 or so that specialists opinions didn't really matter. Feelings and politicians opinions were more relevant... so "nobody in planet modelling" means nothing if Politicians and Activists tries to create this link..
Al Gore, if I remember correctly, and António Guterres, i think last month, tried to create this link already.. probably others too?
The most anti-facts and anti reality bulshit comes from people who mock feelings and opinions while framing themselves as factual and u biases.
Especially in climate change "debate".
or the said "experts" hungry for media attention.. we saw it all
I have no idea who you are talking about.
You want to imply doubt about climate change without saying it, using dog whistles and vague accusations of "feelings".
You did not stated a single fact, you apparently dont know much about topic, but you know some experts and politicians opinions are wrong.
in one hand i wanted to highlight that if it was today, we - as civilization - would definitely create a link between the events, based on our "feeling"
in another hand, i question if we really could rule out, since back in the days, everything that we have was coal.
If you care to get analytic, it's related to the insulation factor of the atmosphere, fairly consistent amounts of sunlight in (subject to know solar variation and orbit) that heats land and sea surface radiating thermal energy out to space with a "small" amount trapped to maintain a globally mean amount of energy that powers climate cells and cascades into other forms.
The global amount of coal use in the 1880s was non zero, sure, but overall the CO2 emissions from those tonnages were minuscule compared to modern emissions within the past 50 years .. and we have direct libraries of atmosphere created since the early years of the Cold War and many pocket captures for the past 200 years, with proxies (such as ice core bubbles) going back far longer.
ENSO predates heavy coal use - so it's not something created by human activity, and as noted the first uses of coal were barely enough to move the needle (recall that collieries kept records so we have a fair handle on tonnages extracted).
And you're saying that, based in you "feeling"? Nice.
I found myself moved by this recent interview with Prof. Kevin Anderson on the topic of climate change (and associated politics): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBFos_T7cT0
He paints quite a bleak picture of the situation we are in (I tend to agree), but there's also a glimmer of hope in there.
This was a really great listen, thank you!
Remember that this is just a piece of the complex system that is the global climate. And over it, there are more systems affected, including human ones like food production or economy. Something this extreme may cause from a severe disruption or a permanent instability in those systems, specially considering feedback loops in all of them.
We're expecting a dry and hot spring and summer this year in Australia (and our winter has been milder than average to boot). https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-31/nsw-el-nino-weather-e...
I really tried to get through this. But sentences like this were confusing to me:
I don't find that sentence confusing, but I definitely found the article poorly written. Here's the sixth nearly identical map and now let's repeat the exact same thing already stated five times or more while including one new sentence of detail. The density of actual information in the writing is so low that it's hard to follow.
The article is so repetitive and padded out with empty prose that I found myself ignoring whole paragraphs. It's like the author decided to describe what an el niño is, then describe what an el niño is, then describe a super el niño, then describe what an el niño is, then describe what an el niño is, then describe what an el niño is, then describe the possible consequences of a super el niño, then describe what an el niño is, then describe what an el niño is, and finally describe what an el niño is.
Given the repition without new information, random bolded words and consistent paragraph length, I'd say this is probably written mostly or entirely by an LLM
The author is saying the surface of the ocean (where it's easiest to measure temps, so we do that the most) is the 'footprint' or the full colum of warm water below it. Additionally, like a footprint the surface area it represents might be smaller too as warm water continues to rise.
Area vs volume.
If these are the temperatures on the surface, think of the depths. There is a whole additional dimension to multiply (integrate) across.
The added energy is far greater than you might think simply by looking at the surface.
There's a few AI tells in the article. The overuse of bolded text throughout - and the confusing sentences.
I stumbled across this too but going back to the picture made the sentence easy to understand. Maybe the sentence would have worked better if it was located before the picture. (The picture shows a ramp going up to the right deep under the ocean surface - the subsurface warm core)
To use an extremely inappropriate metaphor, they’re saying the warm temperatures at the surface are just the tip of the iceberg.
Yea, I will admit my imagination started to go off as I read that
"In simple terms" should not preceed that sentence imo
It seems quite straightforward.
Great write up but bummed to not see any info about the waves. It’s been a bonkers summer!
I don't know enough about climate science, but south swell usually is the result of west-to-east storms coming off of Australia. In Hawaii, this summer's south swell has been extremely consistent big swells. I imagine it's something like the west coast off South America heating up causes the balance of the southern hemisphere off Africa to counteract that.
Here is an article about the heat wave in Europe: https://www.severe-weather.eu/global-weather/excessive-heat-...
I think you might be on to something: I am by no means a weather enthusiast or expert, nor do I live in California: the El Niños building up in 1997 and 2015 had similar seasons, 2023 not, the current fast onset and wave seasons (durable good surfable waves in winter) match especially well with 2015. 2023 was the exception but also slower onset. Also La Niña winters also had good winter conditions, but not as durable. So good surf conditions in NorCal outside of La Niña winters might be a visceral leading indicator for fast onset El Niño.
Check out stormsurf001 on YouTube. He’s been tracking the development of the El Niño for months now.
I (SoCal) kinda hate El Niño. Seems like it always means way more weather (blown out days) and most reefs around here are maxed out beyond overhead. It’s nice to get lots of groundswell but I’ll take 2-3 and high pressure over 6-7 and rainy any day.
Lima, Peru... daytime and night time temps are +8-+3 (single day, might be the coldest of the year) degrees celcius, usually should be like 18-16 celcius daytime, it's at 26-21 (single day, might be the coldest of the year) with +6-+8 being the most common... already past mid winter and there hasn't been a single "cold" day yet.
Pelicans are mass starving so are sea lions as cold based fish have left the shores, no long sleeves or sheets needed to sleep, it's been summer prety much all year... never seen this in 31 years of life... supposedly 98 was bad although this one is projected to be worse... summer temps might hit 39-34 celcius on average if things keep going this way when normally you have 31-27 degrees during summer, considering most houses don't have air conditioning I can definitely see a lot of heat related deaths happening and a potential food crisis forming.
People really don’t appreciate yet. How really bad this situation is and will be. They’re talking about 1.76°C higher temperatures next year because of this El Niño. Those are climate change temperatures that are not supposed to be around until 2035. So it’ll give us a sneak peek into our future.
But the biggest effect and this is noted by many insurance companies now is going to be in places like India.
But this is something the world has never seen and I mean that literally so I don’t expect it to be anything but really bad and you should be ready.
It was inevitable we'd get to the point where climate change began substantially disrupting ecology and human livelihoods. Looks like we're ahead of schedule.
People dying from extreme heatwaves, weather, and famines due to climate change has been predicted for decades at this point; and this is exactly the sort of climatic setup that will enable this to happen.
Way more people die of being exposed to the cold than exposed to the heat. So you could make a good argument that weather events save more lives than they cost by increasing the temperature of marginal zones where people otherwise freeze.
> Way more people die of being exposed to the cold than exposed to the heat.
I was skeptical of this claim, so I looked it up. You’re right. Globally, about 9x as many people die due to cold-related causes than heat-related causes. It’s not freezing, though, but longer-term effects like kidney failure in elderly people. [1]
I’m still dubious about the argument that weather events could save lives, though, partially because climate change makes weather more extreme, not simply “more pleasant for people in colder climates.”
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/part-one-how-many-people-die-from...
> People dying from extreme heatwaves, weather, and famines due to climate change has been predicted for decades at this point; and this is exactly the sort of climatic setup that will enable this to happen. Yeah, people have been "predicting" it, but the fact is that this is currently mostly hyperbole, driven by bad reporting and activist exaggeration.
What is happening, right now, is that winters are mostly getting warmer. Summers are getting hotter in certain places, but not at nearly the rate that cold days are decreasing -- and the evidence is weaker on a global scale. From the IPCC 6AR report, figure 11-9 shows it clearly:
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/figures/chapter-11/figure...
Figure 11-2 shows it another way:
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/figures/chapter-11/figure...
Even the IPCC report only gets to the "virtually certain" evidence level by combining the two claims:
> The frequency and intensity of hot extremes (including heatwaves) have increased, and those of cold extremes have decreased on the global scale since 1950 (virtually certain).
That's because, when you actually look at the data, it is abundantly clear that the increase in hot extremes are far less common than the decrease in cold extremes. Of course, when you take the ratio of the two, this looks worse, because the denominator is getting smaller.
Chapter 11 is worth reading. You will be shocked how many of the widely reported memes about extreme weather and climate are just not supported by good data:
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/chapter/chapter-11/
I recommend in particular going through the figures, and looking at how many of them are model predictions (nearly all), versus plots of historical data. Setting aside the debates about model quality, etc., surely we can all agree that predictions are not evidence?
In other words, average temperature is higher is mostly because cold days are shorter and warmer a lot more than hot days is hotter?
Go back and compare some of the earlier IPCC reports and see which bits have been left out. The worst case scenarios keep getting removed, and the best case scenarios are based on projections of CO2 emissions which are highly unrealistic.
Official reports have been downplaying the impact for decades, while countries have been setting climate targets that they had no intention of achieving.
Arguing that the IPCC report is "downplaying the impact" because of corruption -- which is what you seem to be doing, without evidence -- is an implausible assertion.
The far more likely conclusion is that you're wrong.
I went to both of those links. "Page not found".
>Setting aside the debates about model quality, etc., surely we can all agree that predictions are not evidence?
Predictions are warnings. When we have the evidence it will be too late. So let me ask you, what direction are we headed?
Oops. Links got truncated. Here:
Figure 11-9:
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/figures/chapter-11/figure...
Figure 11-2:
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/figures/chapter-11/figure...
Chapter 11:
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/chapter/chapter-11/
> What is happening, right now, is that winters are mostly getting warmer. Summers are getting hotter in certain places, but not at nearly the rate that cold days are decreasing -- and the evidence is weaker on a global scale. From the IPCC 6AR report, figure 11-9 shows it clearly:
Thanks.
Crazy that you think even these graphs, which do not include the last six years, are just fine.
Climate change is not just about it getting warmer. The problem also lies with changes in climate, the pattern of weather. Sudden changes in climate do not allow for adaptation to compensate. This includes human adaptation.
But it may be better just to read the IPCC summary:
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/chapter/summary-for-polic...
> Crazy that you think even these graphs, which do not include the last six years, are just fine.
Did I say those words?
This is the latest assessment report, AR6, published 2021-2023. It's the latest IPCC data available. The next one won't come out until after 2029.
The fact that you don't understand this indicates that you don't really know the details of what you're talking about.
Crazy that you think even these graphs, which do not include the last six years, are just fine.
They said nothing of the kind. So your opening sentence immediately indicates you aren’t here to discuss this in good faith.
Yeah, ask any european how less intense the heatwaves are during this summer compared to milder winters, you won't hear a polite response
> People dying from extreme heatwaves, weather, and famines due to climate change has been predicted for decades at this point; and this is exactly the sort of climatic setup that will enable this to happen.
The rhetoric is all well and good, but if you look at the numbers according to the WMO[0], deaths from climate-related hazards have been dropping steadily in the 50-year period from 1970 to 2019, even as atmospheric CO2 went from ~326ppm to ~410ppm and the world population more than doubled. That's not a per capita decrease; it's an absolute decrease, from over 50k deaths worldwide the 70s to fewer than 20k in the 2010s.
All of this is due to the increased ability of humans to deal with what the climate might throw at them, mostly due to cheap energy unlocked by fossil fuels during that time. Remember, there are no countries that are both rich and have a low per capita energy usage. Surplus energy allows humans to build the infrastructure that makes them more resilient to disasters.
If I had to wager, more people will suffer and die in the coming decades from efforts to combat climate change (i.e. hamstring energy production and usage) than from climate change itself. You can already see this in the anti-air conditioning sentiment in parts of Europe.
[0]: https://library.wmo.int/idurl/4/57564
Look, I think you made some good points, but at the same time, humans have become better at handling the climate because we’ve been able to predict it and have found solutions to certain known issues. What happens when it gets less predictable, like when certain regions get much less water for an extended period, is very much unknown.
Your last claim makes no sense. Is there actually a widespread political effort to ban air conditioning or make it hard to get in Europe? That certainly isn’t the case in the US. And yet hot summers are still killer in cities which aren’t accustomed to them: that’s climate change doing the killing.
Solar is just about the most abundant source of energy on the planet, and easily decentralized. Plugin solar is becoming increasingly popular and cheap, for example.
I think energy production would be much more abundant and directly in control of the people if governments stopped subsidizing energy sources that need massive amounts of resources just to keep running. Why not give solar an advantage when every watt installed can just… work by itself for the next three decades? Every watt of a gas plant needs you to figure out who to buy gas from forever.
Regarding air conditioning in Europe, I suspect that there are other interests at play given that there has been zero pushback against air conditioning in cars.
Air conditioning in buildings is likely viewed as a threat to gas providers as most modern cooling devices also have a heating mode that competes directly with gas heating.
At least here in the UK, recent revisions to the default planning rules around heat pumps (“Permitted Development” legislation) removed the restriction that an install be “used solely for heating purposes” and revised this to “not be used solely for the purpose of cooling”.
The Boiler Upgrade Scheme grant also permits cooling - it’s based on the heating credentials of a unit only.
So in Britain at least, installing cooling systems in private residences seems to be getting easier.
> Air conditioning in buildings is likely viewed as a threat to gas providers as most modern cooling devices also have a heating mode that competes directly with gas heating.
Not sure it makes sense, most of those countries are already phasing out fuel/gas boilers.
IMO it's just cultural shift is slow to adjust (in those countries, a few decades ago AC would have been a wasteful luxury, summer temperature would be well below 30 except for a few days).
People often forget that architecture in (central and northern) Europe is build under the assumption that the climate has more cold extremes than hot extremes. Thus, buildings were constructed to both retain and collect as much heat as possible to save on heating in the winter. Now, if you just slap an AC onto that it will have to fight all of the passive heat collection. In other words, you would have to also close off all south facing and roof windows for it to work.
Furthermore, the way the last mile distribution of power works is often underground (with the cables directly in the sand, no hose or tube around it) which makes it expensive to upgrade to handle a much higher peak consumption. Only lucky thing is that you mostly need AC when the sun is shining, thus local production via photovoltaic cells is a good solution that sidesteps the power grid problem.
It’s a cultural issue, nothing to do with industry interests
Regarding air conditioning in Europe, the issue is terminally onlime assholes mostly not Europeans trying to start culture war around them.
And I used that offensive word intentionally, because it fits perfectly.
You can buy natural gas powered chillers and heat pumps, there are many ways to run a compressor pump.
Reality is much of Europe hasn’t needed air con until recently
mMy phone tells me that the temperature this week has been 15°C above the long term average for this time of year.
Don’t really need air con when the peak temperature in the past has been 20–25°C
Europe is a big place. Domestic air con is ubiquitous in Italy, rare in the UK. But even in the UK, places like shops and offices will usually have air con.
> I think energy production would be much more abundant and directly in control of the people if governments stopped...
Lots of people pat themselves on the back for (correctly) believing that climate change is real. Why is it so hard for people to also believe that regulatory capture and oligarchy are real, and directly responsible for the lack of action against climate change?
Think of all the for-profit power utility companies in the US. Why are they for-profit? For that matter, why are ISPs for-profit and not run as non-profits with heavy government assistance? Answer, basically: Because the existing people that make lots of money off them have been lobbying heavily to make it so. Similarly, it is no coincidence the current leadership in the US is actively against renewable energy.
A lot of the existing wealth, especially in North America and Europe was built on top of fossil fuels directly or indirectly (cars, power plants, industries, maintaining diplomatic relations with oil-rich nations). That dependence is hard to unwind and is going to take 50 years or more unless the US electorate can start electing people that believe in climate change. And for this reason, actually addressing climate change is going to come from unintuitive social actions, like making smaller housing more fashionable, moving to urban areas, possibly cracking down heavily on crime in those areas, and financially rewarding the use of public transport and bikes.
Climate change is science: there is evidence, prediction, measurement, all of that.
Oligarchy and regulatory capture are undeniably real, but they are not scientific. They’re social phenomena, and much harder to theorize about and model than e.g. what happens to rainfall in Northern Europe with a 1.5c El Niño.
Worse, while oligarchy is absolutely real and causing great harm, its amorphous nature means some people blame it the way people used to blame demons, or humours. Flat tire? The oligarchs! Sprained ankle? The oligarchs!
So while both climate change and oligarchy are real problems, I don’t see them as the same class of problem at all, and the tools to address are different. They’re entangled (oligarchs who will never feel discomfort short of defenestration are unlikely to allow disruption of their wealth just for feeding people), but different.
I'm pretty sure that GP agrees with you on this point? You just cut off the rest of their quote where they point that out.
Do they?
Unless stuff like "Why not give solar an advantage..." is a rhetorical question with the answer of "Because lots of current billionaires would make less money", I don't think they are pointing out the same stuff I said.
all airconditioning brands had massive uptick in sales in Europe; Spain and other southern countries over 100%. what anti air conditioning sentiment?
Online right is trying to create culture war around them, so that they can blame the victims here.
All the while they vote and cheer for political parties that make warming worst.
The two are racing each other. So far, human adaptation is winning. But climate change is just getting started. The change that happened over the last 50 years is tiny compare to what will happen over the next 50. It may well start winning that race.
Ministry for the Future ch. 1 scenario?
https://www.scribd.com/document/979965270/Robinson-Kim-Stanl...
> But this is something the world has never seen and I mean that literally
Lets not forget there have been bigger and hotter events than this in local past.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1877%E2%80%931878_El_Ni%C3%B1o...
You may tie this in to climate change in general to prove your point, but this is a discussion about El Nino weather event and it is important to remember the current situation is not unprecedented.
It's hard to rationally discuss this with non-experts as you will immediately be labeled an AGW denying crank and downvoted to oblivion.
Yes, AGW is real. Yes, extreme weather and climate events have occurred before AGW. No, I am not saying that AGW is incapable of making these extreme events even worse.
For instance, California has experienced megadroughts lasting decades or hundreds of years in the relatively recent past.
This El Nino is expected to be worse than that based on the El Nino 3.4 temperatures we are already seeing. This is why most weather people are talking about it so much.
We do not have the same data for the 1877 event that we do for the last strongest El Nino in 1997. And this one is much stronger than that by far:
https://xcancel.com/BenNollWeather/status/208864941472211787...
> expected to be worse
Lets not speculate, currently there have been worse ones in the past. If this eventually becomes more extreme then yes it will become a big talking point, but it is not there yet.
It’s not called speculation. It’s called the scientific extrapolation. The reason why we do this is to prevent people from dying. If we wait till it becomes extreme and we’re saddled with food shortages it’s too late.
And currently , this is the worst El Niño ever recorded at this point. El Niño right now is worse than the El Niño in 1997 was at this point. Much worse. We simply don’t have these numbers for 1887.
> This El Nino is expected to be worse
> this is the worst El Niño ever recorded
Consistency doesn't seem your strong point, in language as well as factually!
I stand by my point, this is currently not unprecedented. You are welcome to disagree, but as you keep saying 'We dont have the numbers' then you cant be sure just as much as you are saying I cant.
The global average temperature was about 1.5C lower back then.
You miss the point, the warming of El Nino is relative.
El Nino warmed the earth more back then relative to average temperatures than it currently is now.
The future will be much worse. Some effects take years or decades to manifest and we wont see them during a relatively short event like El Niño.
Eg: the severe disruption of the jet stream or the collapse of the AMOC.
Plus all the long term feedbacks like methane etc.
Cheap cooling vests distributed at scale, kept cool or "recharged" by a portable and unpluggable solar panel, seems necessary. Individual air conditioning is too expensive and most affected people need to work outside during the daytime.
The solution to climate change is definitely not more gadgets and power use.
There's an inverse relationship between exposure to the effects of climate change and CO2 emitted per capita. The people who will need live preserving artificial cooling the most are exactly the people contributing the least to climate change.
In any case, the effects of extreme heat on the body are the easiest part of climate change to mitigate with current technology. The hard part is the famine.
There is also an inverse relationship between stopping/slowing climate change and making us survive it more comfortably.
Meanwhile West Antarctic ice shelf barely clutching on.
No direct link, but click the "anomaly" map button just underneath the map. Hello all these similar 10+ °C anomalies that have sat around. Some colder spots too that have hung around! But yikes. https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/t2_daily/?dm_id=world
Sorry, just below the graph, just above the map.
I at least think of El Nino kind of running into South, building up in the Pacific. But the heat cuts across, then down, and pools in Antarctica here, is how I read it.
Needs a TLDR Canadian winter generally: less snow, milder, above normal temp South ontario/quebec more snow.
Looking forward to Fall rain in North Texas. Summer can’t get over soon enough.
I'm in Waco right now and the car said it was 107 today. If one more person says "but it's a dry heat"...
It is dry heat, if you look at it from certain point of view. I once experienced smth like 27-28°C with fog, 100% humidity. Was almost as bad as 40°C with low humidity.
And if it would be 42°C/107°F with fog and 100% humidity, lots of people would be dead already. But it’s more like saying “at least this building is not on fire right now”. Or 1km wide meteor is not crashing down. It is not, and anything near 40°C is really unpleasant, regardless of burning homes and falling meteors.
42C and 100% would be a humidex of 81~ that would be every animal at that location instantly dying.
Or as we called it growing up in Missouri: “summer”.
I exaggerate. Slightly.
Exactly! Proper wet heat. /s
My reply to that is usually “the inside of an oven is a dry heat too, it’s still incompatible with life” hah.
It would be compatible with life for longer though. A dry sauna can get to 80-100°C, steam rooms are "only" 40-50°C. And subjectively, I can bear it much longer in a typical dry sauna.
It's just wet heat.. humid here. Just back-breaking humidity. London has been terrible, 40c (104f).
You step out of the shower and within minutes you're stepping back in for another.
That's brutal for London. Sorry. Hopefully it cools down soon there.
It's humid here (50-60%) but public spaces are all ice cold indoors. I'm just here for a graduation, fly out tomorrow.
A little south from you. Car said 102. Some of that depends on where you are. Parking lot, vs say, at the lake or rural areas.
That’s practically our city motto here in Perth, Western Australia.
But it’s true, it’s easier to move around in 38C here than 31 and wet in Singapore.
Of course you don’t want to be caught in the sun, and those 44C summer days really are something else
How come your air stays dry, when you're literally on the ocean coast?
Car temperature sensors tend to be inaccurate because they're often in the Sun or some other place affected by baking a car not in a garage.
Check a thermometer in the shade. The weather data stations reported an average of 101 ℉ / 38 ℃ for Waco. It's hot, and especially feels worse with Southern subtropical humidity. OTOH, 101 in California with 0-15% humidity, it would just be a bit annoying. Higher humidity makes heat qualitatively exponentially worse until it's a sauna.
I think mine is under the car, so it registers temps near the road, which can be hot (asphalt in the sun). It’s usually 3-6 degrees (Fahrenheit) high.
I'm currently sitting in the middle of 100mph gusting winds as every island in Hawaii is under hurricane or tropical storm warning, with at least 100k people without power right now. Hurricane season in Hawaii is usually in Sept/Oct.
Hurricane season in Hawaii is June through November. August and September have always been peak months. It's completely normal to have hurricanes at this time of year.
https://www.weather.gov/hfo/faq
https://energy.ecoflow.com/us/blog/when-is-it-hurricane-seas...
https://manoa.hawaii.edu/dps/hurricane/
It's 96 ℉ / 36 °C @ 60% humidity every day for 5 months in hill country with no rain in sight. The El Niňo rain may not get here until November. We're right at the 100 meridian west so it's between hot semi-arid (BSH) and humid subtropical (Cfa), and most storms seem to bypass us to the north by about 20 miles. It was growing zone 8b but changed +3 ℉ to 9a in 10 years.
What in the content farm is this linked website!?
Someone pin this and keep it mind for the actual weather patterns that happen later this year and compare the two.
All we needed to do was stop burning fossil fuels we really are fucking dense.
One positive is that solar (and probably other renewables too) prices are plummeting and are now the cheapest way to generate power - so in economic terms, I hope this trend continues and accelerates even more to the point where even fossil fuel addicts can't resist putting a solar panel on their roof.
In the UK and other European countries, I see every month we're breaking records on the percentage of power generated from renewables.
Check out https://www.energydashboard.co.uk/live - it shows the UK is currently generating 30%+ of it's power from solar, which is incredible.
Meanwhile, the US is paying the German energy firm RWE $1.2 billion to stop a off shore wind farm that was already under construction. Total payouts are over $4 billion to _stop_ adding electricity supply.
I hope it continues but I hope we make it too.
> the UK is currently generating 30%+ of it's power from solar
But at midnight last night it was generating 0%.
It is a well known issue that renewables can never provide 100% of the grids requirements because of peaks and troughs, and inefficiencies of storage.
Everyone who states this idea that solar is the saviour never seems to mention the manufacturing chain which requires a TON of energy and chemical processing, and the waste when the panels are no longer efficient enough or past their useful life. Every house in the world suddenly having having solar panels and every ICE vehicle being replaced by electric will cost us untold amounts of physical resources, energy, and create massive amounts of regular waste which cannot be recycled, forever.
There needs to be a managed decline and long term transition which manages both manufacturing and waste pipeline effectively or the shift will just increase the climate change rate.
Im not saying we shouldnt be moving to renewables ASAP, but people need to realise its not as simple as chucking a solar panel on every roof.
Would have been doable if we could have switched to nuclear, but no.
It would've helped a ton but it's not like electricity generation is the only source of emissions. You can't run a car or a plane on nuclear power. You can technically run a cargo ship on nuclear power but that's also not gonna happen. Yet transport is the second largest source of emissions.
Batteries have only recently-ish gotten energy dense and cheap enough for electric cars to be competitive, completely different solutions are needed for long distance shipping by sea or air.
It's the same situation across many other sectors like agriculture, construction and waste management. Lots of things causing emissions that's not electricity generation.
It would indeed have helped a ton. It's important to not let perfection be the enemy of good.
If we just wait around forever for a perfect solution to appear, then we'll simply be waiting around forever. That's not the path of progress.
I agree. I just wanted to point out that to "stop burning fossil fuels" requires more than green electricity generation. Green electricity generation is 100% necessary, just not in itself sufficient, as was implied by "Would have been doable if we could have switched to nuclear".
Agreed.
We'll never stop burning fossil fuels -- not in our lifetimes, anyway. They're too useful.
Like: Cement kilns. They're ridiculously intensive of energy, and they're necessary. They burn approximately everything, from coal and natural gas to heavy fuel oil and petcoke to used tires. About the cleanest thing I've heard of them burning is old railroad ties, which isn't really so great either. :)
But if we solve some of the other big industrial users and mostly leave the cement factories, then that's... that's actually pretty good.
And we can make cement with electricity. There are companies working on scalable processes to accomplish exactly that. Electricity has just historically been very cost-prohibitive compared to alternatives in the cement-making world for it to be practical.
But! If we'd landed in the age of cheap electricity instead of this timeline, then that process would probably have been solved long ago; the incentives would have been so great that solving it would be inevitable.
And it really may have once been possible at one point to have steered things in that direction, and it even may still be possible today. But we're certainly not there (yet?).
As Romanians will tell you in August 2026, you can't run nuclear power stations without a cooling mechanism. In this case, it's Danube which is failing to offer that. Fusion is almost nowhere to be seen.
Nuclear plants are being switched off because the droughts.
We wanted to exploit all natural resources to maximum extent using our science and tech without any regard to the side effects. The advantage is free. It helps our business. Business gains are human progress. Tech is wonderful. What are you talking about?
Not true. El Nino (increases CO2) and Albedo (long term - it's decreasing) are problematic issues in this area. If it's settled science why bother to even consider other factors? Doubtful if humanity would survive the catastrophe resulting from a global interdiction of the kind you suggest and we're not dense for understanding that. Greening of the planet (plants need carbon to grow) which has contributed $trillions to world productivity would also taper off. Moreover the related sulfate emissions actually mask warming - reductions in these emissions is related to some of the recent temperature increases. So you could likely get a temporary spike in warming. All that said, there are sensible routes to reducing human influence on the planet.
I’m a capitalist, but the only conclusion I can arrive at is that neo liberal capitalism makes it impossible to « do the right thing ». What we have is the logical result of the incentives at play
Actually private equity have been accumulating stakes quickly in renewables lately. Makes sense. Talk bad of a future tech to own most of the cake early for cheap...
https://www.cfainstitute.org/insights/articles/private-equit...
I have come to the same conclusion, but let me ask you, how can you still be a capitalist having had that insight?
Why would you support a system that you recognize makes it impossible to do the right thing even as we're dying from its consequences?
I honestly don’t know and feel very conflicted about my own ideology. I recognize how broken it is at scale, but also value the personal autonomy, entrepreneurship, nonconformity capitalism promotes.
Though my version of capitalism isn’t the libertarian free market one, libertarianism will always evolve into oligarchy or something fascistic given enough time, it’s just baked into the incentives.
My personal ideology aligns with a managed capitalism, markets are created by an authority that ensures the incentives aligns with its overall goals. Mixed with very liberal social values.
I don’t know if that can survive overtime though. And that would very likely degenerate into something else when under stress.
As I said, I feel conflicted. But I appreciate the question
Perhaps this will help: commerce, free market and capitalism are three different things. Commerce, or trade, has existed for millennia, even among tribes and villages. The free market emerges when there are multiple producers of a good or service, and there is no compulsion upon any producer (from either a third party or another producer) to buy or sell. Capitalism would be when one or more of these producers no longer need to engage in production themselves, but are able to use their surplus savings to employ other producers and then keep for themselves the difference between market price and production cost (including cost of labor). There is nothing inherently wrong with that latter mode of production, except that it never reaches a dynamic equilibrium. Since it's surplus savings that enable the acquisition and direction of other producers (i.e. their labor), and that process leads to additional surpluses, the accumulation of surplus becomes exponential. At some point, the surplus becomes sufficient to apply compulsion on other producers, thus effectively eroding the free market that led to that mode of production in the first place.
I really appreciate the self-reflective answer and I fully understand the conflict.
You seem like a thoughtful dude, kudos.
I fully agree with your assessment about capitalism devolving into either fascism or some sort of feudalism.
I, too, have been struggling with what a more just system could look like.
Personally, some aspects of Yugoslav worker self-management appeal to me.
Basic idea is: Companies compete on a market, but theres no stock market. Companies <= 5 employees can be run however the founders envisioned, past that boundary the board and exec suite are required to be elected by the workers.
Combined with state grants and regulations to direct the overall direction of the economy, I feel like it solves for a lot of issues of shareholder capitalism without swapping them for a whole separate set of Commissariat problems.
Of course, the state itself wasn't democratic in Yugoslavia and it suffered from ethnic tensions that ultimately tore it apart. But we don't need to copy their setup wholesale.
Wonder how you'd feel about something like that?
Yugoslavia failed spectacularly economically. People had to smuggle bananas, diapers, coffee and jeans among other goods from the neighboring Italy and Austria. Millions of people (Gastarbeiter) migrated to Germany to be able support their families, because there was no opportunity at home. Inflation was horrendous, people exchanged the local currency to german marks on the same day as the payday, otherwise by the next day it was worth half as much. There was a shortage of gasoline and people sometimes waited years to get a car. But yes the dictator and the red nobility lived very well for sure.
First of all, as already acknowledged above Yugoslavia wasn't perfect - I'm not sure what you're trying to get at here. As already mentioned, I'm not arguing for copying their entire setup wholesale - I just find the specific bits I pointed out interesting. Democracy comes was both invented and then repopularized by societies of slave holders, but that doesn't mean we have to throw out the baby with the bath water!
Inflation was horrendous in many countries, including lots of very capitalist ones. Think Weimar Germany for a famous example, or the Latin American debt crises of the 80s and 90s for ones contemporaneous with Yugoslavia (note also the IMF involvement here)
In the case of Yugoslavia, there's a good argument to be made that the root cause were western trade barriers as part of the successful plan to push it into IMF loans that could then be used to dismantle the country.
Anyways, why are we even religitating the 20th century? We need to be looking forward and figuring out a solution to the crisis right in front of us instead of going all cold war again. The forest are burning right now. The rivers are running low right now. Yugoslavia, however you may feel about it, ended decades ago.
This is what Europe has, in one way or another. Europe is a huge spread - sort of semi-functional communism/socialism that France has for example, and it has nothing to do with more capitalistic approach of say Switzerland. Economies and their state show this very well over time.
Every system is potentially broken, there is always room for it to go extreme in some way. The last thing I would want in Europe is for of unhinged corrupted oligarchy that US has - common folks are squeezed like there is no tomorrow, crappy healthcare and expensive education, almost no chance to escape their allotted class within system based on income ('american dream' is not really... realistic to be polite and I could easily use a word 'lie' there, just to keep poor desperate masses in check around the elections or during crises). Maximization of pure income to suffer in literally every single other aspect that makes society a well working society long term - no thank you, we can and do get it better overall.
So one has to be realistic, there is no ideal system, Swiss system of minimal centralized power that is frequently changing hands is, as many things Swiss had come up with, IMHO the most resilient for the future. Any counter-argument to that can be easily dealt with the reality of frequent public votes on all major topics. If you follow their politics a bit its lightyears ahead of typical cesspool US or EU politics had become daily. But one can't have this system (or any other) without underlying population making it work, day by day, out in the streets. Swiss have it working, work actively and hard on preserving it as much as possible, again not something I see elsewhere, certainly not in EU.
You're not going to do anything at all without money as a fungible exchange mechanism (a sometime measure of 'value'). Capitalists see value in things and try to generate that value. Yes, politicians and the rest of us have the job of regulating that process and sometime fail to do a good job. Do you know the right thing to do? I doubt it. You seriously do not see this as an immensely complicated issue? Finally please give chapter and verse for the 'dying'. Maybe compare the world of 2026 with that of 1900 and the quality of life for people in general and our concern for the life on this planet. Concern isn't action but it's a necessary prerequisite for it.
Money and value exist in all economical systems and has existed in some form since immemorial times, that has literally nothing to do with capitalism, an ideology developed over the past 250y or so
Also, our current system grossly undermines the functionality of our market economy. A lack of pricing for negative externalities will essentially always result in the basic concept of market failure.
Run inaccurate pricing of carbon emissions long enough and something bad is bound to happen. Same ordeal with cattle ranching & agriculture to feed it in the Amazon basin: >20% of the 55-million-year-old Amazon rainforest has been degraded for cattle in the past 55 years, partially because consumers don't pay accurate prices and producers don't pay accurate costs.
The unwillingness to merely partially solve obvious market failures via accurate pricing is a catastrophic hypocrisy in those among us who thump their chests about 'free markets' while conflating the concept with modern capitalism.
> Capitalists see value in things and try to generate that value
Value for who? Value as determined by who?
> Finally please give chapter and verse for the 'dying'.
You're commenting on it right now. Rivers here are drying out. Glaciers are melting. Forests are burning. How long do you think we can keep going like this?
> Maybe compare the world of 2026 with that of 1900 and the quality of life for people in general and our concern for the life on this planet.
You can compare the results of those 126 years right here: https://static01.nyt.com/images/2023/01/23/learning/GlobalTe...
Regarding your quality of life claim, let me refer back to the burning forests, drying rivers etc. Would you call that an improvement?
Clearly, its not going great. And action is actively being sabotaged by the most capitalist major power: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/06/climate/trump-climate-int...
So how do we proceed with all this in mind?
How long can we keep optimizing for capital self-reproduction at the expense of the base conditions we survive on? The incentive structure does not allow for making the systemic changes required for continued thriving of humanity. What good is it then? How is it anything but a suicide pact?
>>Value for who? Value as determined by who?
Value for us, real people who have needs. We decide what we want to buy and not some apparatchik on their pedestal.
>>Rivers here are drying out. Glaciers are melting. Forests are burning.
As if this never happened before capitalism?
Who is "us"? Because in capitalism, only people with capital get to decide what has value.
The values of the poor are not reflected. The values of the indigenous are not reflected. The values of the non-capitalist are not reflected. The value of the unborn is not reflected. The value of nature is not reflected.
The glacier doesn't participate in the market and neither does the river. Are they without value?
> As if this never happened before capitalism?
That's correct. Look at the graph I posted above, you'll notice that things weren't always this hot. Before capitalism they sure weren't.
If only China and US could get their shit together....
China is the only country that is seriously doing anything about anything. They've single handedly built more renewable energy capacity than every other country combined, they've pulled millions of diesel and gasoline cars off roads, reforested one of the world's biggest deserts, this year they've finally reduced coal usage, and next year the long awaited Tokamak is set to fire for the first time.
The US is busy sending warships across the planet to blow up oil refineries which will be rebuilt. It's not bad enough we are busy grinding sand, but we are actively making things worse.
And with that they built the manufacturing engine that is supplying the rest of the world with renewable tech
To be fair, closing the straight of hormuz has probably put a dent in carbon emissions.
Temporarily, all of the middle east oil infrastructure will be rebuilt because their biggest customer still has no real tangible plan to wean itself off.
Is US the biggest customer?
You can't really have this both ways. Closing Hormuz and blowing up Iranian export facilities has been massively decarbonizing. Chinese solar exports are massively up because countries have had to find new energy sources.
Oil is a small proportion of carbon emissions. Coal is where it's at, and Iran has very little to do with that.
Chinese solar was a big deal globally long before Trump's Iran blunder
The argument that small countries don't matter in the equation is silly.
There are ~200 countries, of course on average your country will be less than .5% of emissions. Thinking .5% is small enough to do nothing is exactly the kind of thinking that leads us to inaction.
So yeah, china and the US need to get their act together, but so does every other country.
Come on, don't throw out decades-old lazy arguments like that. Everyone with above room-temperature IQ understands the concept of energy use per capita, and also that most other developed and developing countries take climate change seriously and have been reducing or capping their emissions for years. What is the point of wagging your finger at a non-existent problem like this?
https://apnews.com/article/wind-solar-energy-china-climate-c...
Republicans are the bad guys right now.
Always have been
Per capita CO2 emissions in the US are down about 36% from their 1973 peak (https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions).
So? It’s still multiples more than other places.
So, what exactly does "getting one's shit together" mean, if not a reduction in per-capita usage over time?
So it's a good thing ya doink
In response to fHr's comment of
>If only China and US could get their shit together....
If people in the US are still consuming multiples more than people in other societies, then a decrease of 36% means the US still does not have their shit together. Presumably, zahlman's response of pointing out the 36% decrease was a refutation of fHr's claim for China and US to get their shit together.
Although, also funny is that the US's 36% decline is partly (significantly?) due to exporting CO2 emissions from manufacturing to China, but that applies to the rest of the world too.
If we had to choose between the US decreasing by 36%, and decreasing by 0%, I know which one I would choose if I cared about the climate (which I do).
You care about the climate and you think just cutting emissions in one part of the world to increase them in another is a good thing?
> decline is partly (significantly?) due to exporting CO2 emissions from manufacturing to China
They didn't have to agree to it, you know. But you can look at consumption-based carbon accounting and still get a picture that the US is, indeed, getting its shit together.
There's way more to climate change than fossil fuels: consuming less and changing diet.
A single cow alone requires lots of crop, water, and produces tons of methane (which is 200 times more dangerous than carbon dioxide).
Fishing is another earth destroying endeavor. A single boat, a single one, practicing bottom trawling is more dangerous to the environment than the emissions of tens of thousands of cars. In a single day it can have the same impact of deforestation on an area big as a montain.
Seriously, stop believing the fossil fuels gaslighting. They are indeed a problem, but the cause for climate change is all of our toxic habits and our incapacity to say "enough", take the bus or eath healthier (for us and the planet).
China currently emits a third of the entire C02 generation of the entire planet per year, you taking the bus is going to do nothing.
What we need to do is all stop buying next day delivered pieces of plastic produced in Chinese factories. Boycotting Temu and Amazon and shopping at your local stores is the one massive thing the average person can do to help the planet.
By far the biggest source of carbon emissions is coal. The others make an impact too, but if we're not addressing coal, there's almost no point addressing the others.
What are fishing boats doing that could cause so much emissions in a single day?
You're dragging heavy nets on the sea floor releasing heavy amounts of carbon dioxide and destroying ecosystems that are net contributors to decarbonization like seaweed, seagrass, etc. A single boat with a single net can do insane damage in a single day.
The problem is: when it comes to industrial food production, both fish and meat are insanely taxing on the environment.
But people, we, *don't want to accept that how they eat destroys the planet*
I can understand that. I already have many thoughts and problems, do I also have to feel guilty for what I consume and eat?
But it's the reality, and focusing on transport alone is the narrative that keeps accelerating how fast we kill the planet.
I'm glad you put the industrial qualifier on your food production comment. Eating meat is completely fine when doing it in moderation and buying only from local sustainable farms. However, industrial international scale meat production is a huge blight on the earth.
Interesting, thanks for explaining. I'm vegetarian and thereby don't eat fish, but I didn't know fishing had such an impact on the environment.
You raise some interesting points.
And the ideal, carbon-neutral reality is difficult to stomach: We humans just go back to the old ways (maybe the stone age is about the right period), wherein:
We build some stuff out of rocks (which themselves are difficult to form without even so much as copper tools). We use trees and plants where we have them (and we tend to die off when the use becomes unsustainable).
We grow and produce what we can on our own, and we do not tend to travel very far to trade for other things.
When the weather regionally turns ugly for a season or two, as it must eventually do, we have no fallback plan other than to starve until our numbers decrease to something that can be sustained (which may be zero).
We did all that stuff once. I don't think anyone really wants to go back to those methods.
So we do change what we can, where we can tolerate that change: It may be contradictive in some ways to charge up an EV at home with solar power and then make a special trip in that EV to pick up some cheeseburgers, but it's still an improvement over changing nothing at all.
And sure: We can do even better than that. We can build neighborhoods that are safe and efficient to walk or bike in so that it's more practical to get a cheeseburger without driving, and promote more of them by actually choosing to live in them. We can choose to eschew cheeseburgers altogether. There's lots of things we can do. There's a lot that we are doing.
(And I'm going to think about many of those ways this afternoon, in just a couple of hours after the weather dries up some, as predicted by our amazing computing-machines. I'll wash my hands with clean running water from the pipeline that runs all the way to my kitchen both before and after I get some prefabulated burger patties out of my grid-powered freezer and fire up the propane grill.
I'll do all of this while I bask in the unbridled decadence of not having had any opportunities to form memories of nearly running out of food as the yet another winter tirelessly wore on.
After that, I think I might work some on getting networked audio happening with Dante on my Linux desktop. I've got time for that kind of thing, since I'm not out tending the fields and chasing away the thieving poors with a stone hoe.)
Ah yes it could have been so easy: All we needed to do was convince everyone in the world to behave a certain way.
There is currently a multi-billion, if not trillion, dollar industry (advertising and marketing) that is convincing everyone to behave the opposite way, i.e. maximize consumption with no regard to negative externalities. If we simply curb them, or better yet, use those same mechanisms to propagate a more rational message, yes, that that's all we need to do.
Exactly, kinda like what we did with CFCs!
Granted fossil fuels are much more ubiquitous than CFCs and comparatively more difficult to replace, but we have prior art for changing industrial practices in the interest of improving climate conditions.
That was an awful lot simpler, int aht we (or rather governments) just had to lean on a small number of manufacturers and tell them to find alternatives for CFCs in their products. Nobody was up in arms saying 'my hairspray isn't the same without CFCs' or whatever. I'll bet the majority of consumers never even noticed the difference.
It really was very achievable, the main reason we didn't was we had a bunch of people spreading lies about it for 100 years or so.
We couldn't have stopped using fossil fuels heavily until nuclear power was widespread and implemented, around the late 70s or 80s.
We could have traditioned our grids off of fossil fuels but we also depend on them for fertilizer to feed the world and for transportation which, until very recently, didn't have a viable alternative.
Nuclear was also kneecapped by FUD and astroturfing, and we didn't properly fund renewables because Republican administrations were in the pockets of big oil. Did you know GM made a fully viable electric car that people loved back in the 90s? Setback after setback, all self-inflicted, people pretending we have these insurmountable hurdles all over the place. Pathetic for an empire that prides itself as a champion of industry.
The fertilizer thing is a perfect example. We don't need to extract, refine, and burn nearly as much fuel as we do to get the fertilizer we need. People make the same empty argument about the cheap plastic shit that dominates the economy as if the world didn't exist before cheap plastic shit and couldn't exist after.
> and we didn't properly fund renewables because Republican administrations were in the pockets of big oil.
The world is a lot bigger than the US and they've all followed pretty much the same trajectory the last two decades. A slow long term investment in R&D/manufacturing techniques, followed by increased adoption when it became economically competitive. Combined with varying levels of government incentives and measured regulation, to ease transitions so it doesn't destroy the economy which we still depend on for everything else.
These major shifts always happen slowly then start exponentially growing once it's demonstrated to be practical.
I agree the US isn't the only country but I believe at that time we had the resources and clout to make green energy research happen everywhere and export our successes. We were still a global leader at the time both politically and technologically, especially where energy was concerned. And the world certainly took notice and set back the movement when the largest polluter per capita repeatedly signalled it had no interest in joining the rest of the world in a green future.
EVs aren't new. Like, at all.
To pick one example: Once Studebaker decided to branch into self-going car territory, they were selling electric cars[1] nearly a century before GM's EV-1 project started delivering vehicles.
They were reasonably-reliable and they plugged into an outlet at home to recharge. Easy-peasy. But the range sucked: 40 miles is useful, but is just not very good for a lot of things that don't require any imagination to realize.
They did a lot better selling gas-fired cars than they did plug-in electric models[2], and this happened without requiring political conspiracy.
Anyway, it's 2026 and the range problem is solved well-enough for many folks. :)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studebaker_Electric
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studebaker#End_of_horse-drawn_...
To be fair, Chernobyl didn't exactly help the cause.
Definitely true. But you see the blame placed on the public fearing nuclear from these events. There was some fear, but also astroturfing to make sure nuclear stayed dead.
> a bunch of people spreading lies about it for 100 years or so.
To be fair to past humans the deliberate lies and misinformation didn't really start until the 1970s, the oil crisis of that decade, the coming together of the UN to recognise the issue following the geophysics papers of the 1960s that nailed the CO2 problem against oil consumption, etc.
That's the period in which Koch money started flowing to think tanks and agencies that spun hard against smaller cars, public transport, integrated rail in cities, etc. The push for bigger cars as freedom.
Arrhenius' 1896 Model of the Greenhouse Effect didn't exactly have enough bite to kick of anti-prop in 1926, the world had other pressing issues.
Also worth noting that Three Mile Island was an earlier stain on public perception that kicked in a power station slow down well before Chernobyl.
You right. 50 years or so. I was trying going back far enough to include the discovery of man-made climate change and not necessarily starting right at the plugging our ears portion of the timeline.
Regarding the nuclear FUD, I'm not backing down. We'll never know how much the fear of nuclear was grassroots and how much was turf, but we can know for sure that someone didn't want Americans to have energy independence.
Fear of nuclear weapons was backed in as part of the Cold War Mutually Assured Destruction stand off doctrine - rather hard to achieve when pushing the Atoms For Peace warm fuzzy alternative.
Didn't help that nukes didn't make good civil engineering tools or help conquer space by farting out tiny bombs.
Even Carl Sagan was pushing the nuclear should not be used primal back brain reaction by over hyping (?) nuclear winter for a disarmament argument.
> Did you know GM made a fully viable electric car that people loved back in the 90s?
105m range on nimh which rapidly degrades isn't a fully viable car and a maximum of 1000 people "loved" it considering that's all they made.
GM is in business to make money. They didn't cancel a car that was a viable product.
From a western european perspective, I can think of only one country where misinformation appears to have been a relevant factor for climate policy. Sure, until the early 2000s or so, it was all a bit nonspecific and seemed expensive, but latest by the 2013 paris agreement with falling renewable prices everyone knew what the solutions were going to have to look like for at least electricity, heating, and intracontinental mobility. Surely there'll be other examples too, but the USA is also the only country that both sits among the top emitters and easily had the resources to address their share. I have a hard time believing that "nobody really knew for sure" is what'll go down in history books as the underlying cause for most countries' inaction
To be totally clear, I'm not trying to absolve Americans of our responsibility. Americans are remarkably stupid and basically feral (I'm obviously exaggerating but that's how it feels living here). I have had shocking conversations about climate change and domestic energy policy. About half the country, especially older people, were very eager to hear comforting lies about how the lives to which we've grown accustomed need not be adjusted in any way. Despite it now being quite undeniably knocking on our front door, a solid portion of older Americans still don't think climate change is man made and still resist any hint of a green transition. It's fucking crazy town over here.
But if trusted leadership told everyone that we were roasting the planet instead of telling them we weren't and that roasting the planet is un-American, you can bet your sweet ass we'd have some green and nuclear energy going by now.
>I can think of only one country where misinformation appears to have been a relevant factor for climate policy.
I can think of a lot of countries where it wasn't a factor, maybe because if you are a rational economic actor trying to decide to throw money and messing with what people believe you can concentrate on just the biggest country that everybody does what it says. I mean what would be the point in convincing a large part of the Danish population that climate change wasn't real? It seems like it would be inefficient.
on edit: rational in this context is just using money in a way that maximizes the result one gets while minimizing the expenditure, in case anyone was getting ready with a clever rebuttal.
Most people agree on basic values. It's really not that big a stretch to appeal to such common values, seeing as rapid global warming would cause mass relocation, suffering, adaptation costs for those who can stay put, etc.
Considering how current world powers are heavily increasing military spending as well as the heavy rightward shift in many governments, I'm no longer convinced we'll do the right thing. It feels more and more like poor countries will be left to fend for themselves, so the "developed world" can plunder the remains to prop ourselves up just a bit longer.
> Most people agree on basic values
This isn't even true at a local level, let alone at the global scale.
Bit of an easy claim without concrete examples as I gave. Would hold more water if you'd tell us which local or global culture does not have basic decency towards each other as a value / wants to cause any of the things I mentioned such as forced relocation
> if you'd tell us which local or global culture does not have basic decency towards each other as a value
Look around the thread at how people are treating each other, and then keep in mind that HN is probably like 99th percentile for civility on the Internet in this regard.
Look at what happens in threads about any other politically charged issue, for that matter. Heck, look how far the discussion will veer into politically charged off-topic matters, whenever the OP is about some meta-level "how to be convincing" "how to argue fairly" etc. point.
Yeah they do, on the really basic stuff, on a global level.
Do you believe half the human population should have the same rights as the other half? I'd say this is rather basic, yet the subject of much disagreement.
Not really the topic here but I actually think most people agree on most things; everyone wants to do right by them and theirs. We just focus on the areas where we differ in opinion on how to get there and have things to discuss
individual people don't matter, they're peanuts. otoh the single biggest consumer of fossil fuels is the US DOD. and why is that, really?
One person's consumption doesn't matter, but multiply it by 8 billion and it does.
It's like being in a traffic jam and complaining about the other people in the traffic jam... Dude, you're one of them.
it's like being in a traffic jam and complaining about the aircraft carrier on the road ahead of you.
Is this actually true? That sounds suspicious. I’d love to see that data.
https://www.ucs.org/resources/us-military-and-oil
that article links to the dod's own reporting.
You said “the DoD is the single largest consumer of fossil fuels” (emphasis mine). That is a very different claim than what the article says, which is that the DoD uses “more oil than any other institution in the world." Oil is just one type of fossil fuel; natural gas and coal are others. I would also contend that an institution is a very narrow class of consumer.
What you said is much more vague and could be reasonably interpreted to mean “the DoD uses more fossil fuels than the entire country of China,” which seems intuitively false.
In the plus column, we've had a healthy rainy season in the SE US. And while storms seem to move slower than before, we're not yet overwhelmed by stall+flood events.
Have we? Most all of South Carolina is in a drought. We experienced an exceptionally dry Spring and have had good but not sufficient rains all summer.
Yeah and the west is so extremely dry.
Has seemed pretty normal here in central Florida as far as rain goes.
> Has seemed pretty normal here in central Florida as far as rain goes.
We're defiantly in the rainy side of the scale. https://climatecenter.fsu.edu/products-services/data/statewi...
As for this seasons storms in WCFL, every week I see storms that barely move - often just sitting in place for an hour or more. It's a change from the historical lines that marched across the state.
Come to Japan and say it
Fantastic, might mean I get to golf all winter up here in New England if it stays warm enough thanks to this.
As a New Zealander - oh no please stop threatening me with a warm dry summer.