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#more#climate#change#world#water#https#com#lot#around#record

Discussion (95 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

iLemmingabout 3 hours ago
We're getting cooked. I'm already paying 10-times more for water usage than I spend on gas, and 5-times more on electricity bills - AC's running non-stop. That's crazy, because I live in the area where you can't even walk to buy a piece of bread - we drive all the time. I fully expect for businesses very soon to operate at night. Costco, Walmart, groceries, even libraries will be working all night in places like Arizona, Texas and some parts of California.
folkravabout 1 hour ago
Maybe this country focusing so much on keeping the gas cheap might have something to do with it.
sarchertechabout 1 hour ago
> I'm already paying 10-times more for water usage than I spend on gas

Are you irrigating an enormous yard?

edoceoabout 1 hour ago
Maybe they mean consumption is the same but price is up.
uncomputationabout 3 hours ago
Maybe I am pessimistic but it seems no one cares about climate change these days. All of Los Angeles is sweltering now. Just pointing fingers and dropping individual names while the world continues to heat slowly. Any suggestions to get involved are welcome, I don’t want to be just a complainer.
titoabout 1 hour ago
Come join our El Niño session on Wednesday with Stripe's climate scientist Zeke Hausfather: https://luma.com/tu0uvbx1
WarmWashabout 1 hour ago
The right thinks it's a hoax and the left thinks it's on corporations (not themselves) to fix it.

To put it plainly, everyone wants the problem to go away without having to change anything about their lifestyle.

amlutoabout 2 hours ago
> All of Los Angeles is sweltering now.

I think that, if people who believe in climate change want to be convincing, it would be more effective to avoid blaming specific instances of weather on climate change without strong justification. Especially when the weather isn’t even abnormal.

Los Angeles, especially inland and in the valley, is hot in the summer. It was hot in the summer 30 years ago and it’s still hot in the summer. It’s the typical hot season right now, and the valley appears to be only slightly above season average temperatures today, and coastal LA seeks be slightly cooler than average. Apparently it will be unseasonably cool in a couple days.

tayo42about 1 hour ago
I haven't paid much attention to la lately.is this true? San Diego is having an unusually hot and humid summer. Water temperatures are nearly tropical right now too
shikshakeabout 2 hours ago
Get politically involved, vote and and volunteer for local pro-climate candidates. Talk about and promote public transport, cycling, better zoning and infrastructure etc. People underestimate the power of local politics.

On a macro scale all you can really do is vote for national level candidates that care about these issues. Luckily it’s not hard to see which ones do and which ones don’t.

SoftTalkerabout 2 hours ago
Individually you can't do anything. You can drive an EV, set your AC to 78, or whatever makes you feel good but only national governments can make the regulatory changes that will really have an impact.

I even roll my eyes at my city council spending even one second on climate change policy (and they have spent whole meetings on it). Our city of 80,000 people could disappear from the face of the planet and it would not make a bit of difference.

estearumabout 2 hours ago
You can vote
thothlessabout 2 hours ago
well obviously YOU couldn't. you seem to lack the willpower to sacrifice a single convenience in favor of the rest of us, per your confession below.

that's the difference between you and the public servants that you roll your eyes at.

mxkopyabout 2 hours ago
“Everyone wants the village, nobody wants to be the villager.” Maybe look into changing what you want.
Gigachadabout 2 hours ago
You can do all of that, and then Elon Musk will use his hundreds of billions to install another pedofile in charge who won't give a shit about the environment.
wolvoleoabout 1 hour ago
I remember when Musk was genuinely trying to make the world better with electric cars.

Now he's more worried about which toilets people use.

scytheabout 1 hour ago
Renewable energy is expanding faster than ever. And it's hard for people to look at that and think we're moving too slowly. But we still are. That's the basic cultural disconnect.

When nuclear power became a thing in the seventies, there was massive planning around a presumed nuclear-powered future. The largest energy storage facilities in the US were all built around that time. This turned out to be a mirage as the cost of nuclear went up with the safety expectations of the electorate, while petrochemical prices dropped. But this time it's not prices we're predicting, it's temperature, which is much more reliable.

wolvoleoabout 1 hour ago
Nuclear has a lot of environmental impact too. You need to mine a lot of earth to get a little uranium, and a lot of that activity is very polluting and a lot of that activity is not climate neutral. Then you have the waste problem that's not figured out, proliferation etc.

We can't go cherrypicking environmental problems. That way we roll from one crisis into the next. There's so many issues we're causing, like entire ecosystems going extinct. Sooner or later that will lead to crises too. We have to stop externalising.

And yes the electorate wants to be safe and for good reason. Even Fukushima polluted a lot. It's not just about death tolls.

chadgpt3about 2 hours ago
The time for prevention has passed. The course has been set. Now Darwin rules the day - we'll see which species survive. We chose this.
xyzelementabout 1 hour ago
// Now Darwin rules the day

How many children do you have?

mdgrech23about 2 hours ago
I'll go against the grain but our capitalist way of life is totally incompatible with solving climate change. Likewise one country can't solve this problem alone. You need the whole world on board. I truly think the only real solution is a one world government truly working toward for the betterment of the planet and it's occupants. We all know that ain't ever gonna happen though so we're hosed.
switchbakabout 2 hours ago
Hey I grew up super environmental and I have plenty of hippie cred, but this statement gave me shudders "the only real solution is a one world government". Yeesh, yeah a single government, surely nothing could go wrong.
tapoxiabout 2 hours ago
I mean we're staring at apocalypse here so it's not like the alternative is any better.
Gigachadabout 2 hours ago
It seems we are no more capable of organizing than bacteria in a petri dish could avoid replicating until the resources are exhausted.
jimbokunabout 1 hour ago
Let me guess, you think it’s somehow impossible that people like Trump and Musk would end up running this One World Government like Trey have done in the US because…reasons.
scronkfinkleabout 2 hours ago
Sometimes I wonder if the anti-immigrant rhetoric that has been growing more popular is a tactical tool used by individuals who don't actually believe in it but instead have accepted that they would rather be wealthy and destroy the planet and are pricing in the consequences of that decision.
OgsyedIEabout 2 hours ago
There's also a prisoner's dilemma situation. Suppose you're some wealthy media magnate promoting culture war distractions from your portfolio of asset strippers and polluters, thinking of defecting to team decency.

That hypothetical you can look around at the rest of the global political class and see that the rest of the establishment will destroy the livability of the biosphere whether that hypothetical you starts putting all of your money into unions, green technology and BECCs or not and conclude that the only available choice is whether to be poor in a collapsing world or rich in a collapsing world.

wolvoleoabout 1 hour ago
Why would investing in green tech make you poor? That's what's wrong with that argument.

Moving away from fossil fuels is cheaper. Green energy is very cheap, it just misses a base load component right now. It's just that the people benefiting are different ones. And those people are going to lose sooner or later anyway, because in addition to climate change, fossil fuels are also finite.

The only reason trump is on the oil bandwagon is because many of his buddies are benefiting from it. And probably because he's still pissed at the Scotland windmill thing.

But doing the right thing doesn't have to make you poor. It will benefit everyone including the investors.

TACIXATabout 2 hours ago
This seems political and unrelated to the article.
distortionfieldabout 1 hour ago
The causes of the subject of the article are inherently political. It absolutely is relevant.
andsoitisabout 3 hours ago
> The global average sea-surface temperature hit a record 70 degrees on Aug. 22, according to Europe’s Earth observation agency Copernicus, which has been tracking the metric daily since 1979. The previous single-day record was measured in March 2024.

70°F is 21°C

Fish don't have AC.

userbinatorabout 2 hours ago
since 1979

And what about the years before that?

defrostabout 2 hours ago
Other agencies tracked ocean thermoclines.

Eg: Totally not tracking submarines, we're looking at dolphins and whales!

With notable funky bespoke hardware: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RP_FLIP

Scripps itself has been running since 1903.

mlcryptoabout 2 hours ago
Hint: the world had much hotter periods before humans and capitalism
BLKNSLVRabout 1 hour ago
squidlibabout 3 hours ago
How deep is the surface measurement though? It’s a record nonetheless, but a few meters deeper - where fish actually live is likely cooler.
andsoitisabout 2 hours ago
Deep ocean temperatures have also been rising over the decades: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/202...
timrabout 2 hours ago
Yes, but it’s not uniform at all. The paper shows cooling in some parts of the north, and heating in the southern latitudes, along with significant variations by depth.

There’s a lot of nuance in this stuff - far more than global average surface temperature (which is primarily good for scary headlines) and “fish don’t have AC”.

anakaineabout 2 hours ago
That's not the issue, though I recognise the poster above was remarking about fish. High surface temps means more cyclones / typhoons / hurricanes, more coral bleaching, lower fish breeding and feeding because reefs die, impacts out food chains and destroys our homes.

Im Australian, so it also means droughts, water restrictions, and significant increases in bushfire number and severity after a few years of drought. Drought followed by cyclone, or bulk rain events causes catastrophic flooding. Its a shit show.

Noaidi18 minutes ago
I can’t overstate how it is. And you will need to be prepared. Be prepared for floods and just weird weather. While we humans are adaptable to these weather changes, plants and animals are not. This is going to affect feed crops for both humans and animals. So I would expect some inflation because of this.

I also want to state for those of you living in Southern California to be prepared for a possible earthquake. It’s a salton sea fills up with a lot of water quickly It could most likely trigger an earthquake.

But those are the impacts just in the United States. We might be looking at food price shocks in combination with the ongoing war in Iran.

By the way for those of you complaining about the heat in Los Angeles, it’s not really the heat. It’s the humidity. The LA basin has had record high dewpoint temperatures. That’s why it’s so uncomfortable.

How do we fix this? The only thing I can think of is a spiritual awakening where owning and doing less is more attractive than flying around in jets and building AI data centers.

while_true_about 3 hours ago
El Niño events are more than 36% stronger today than they were 40 years ago due to climate change.[1]

[1]J. E. Cole et al., Recent strengthening of eastern Pacific ENSO in the last millennium paleorecord. Science DOI:10.1126/science.ady2660

titoabout 1 hour ago
Stripe's climate researcher Zeke Hausfather is coming to AirMiners this Wednesday to share about El Niño climate science, the impacts, and then we're going to work on what we can do to avert the worst impacts of this storm.

Come join! https://luma.com/tu0uvbx1

ChrisArchitectabout 1 hour ago
Discussions:

Oceans hit highest temperature on record

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49424606

Super El Niño Keeps Growing as New Forecasts Reach Record Territory Ahead Winter

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49313428

Climate change is strengthening El Niño, coral records suggest

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49475404

The Strongest El Niño Ever Forecast and the Hunger It Will Leave Behind

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49281960

livinglistabout 1 hour ago
I scuba dive in Monterey, CA every other weekend, and just came back from a liveaboard in Galapagos in May. The water is much warmer this year, and it is very noticeable because usually in Galapagos, divers are expected to wear 8mm wetsuit or dry suit to be comfortable in the water, but this year even a 5mm made me feel too warm. In Monterey, water temp used to be around 11-13°C but this year it’s easily above 16°C, divers also reported more sightings of spiny lobsters which were rare in Monterey because water was too cold for them.
AndrewKemendoabout 2 hours ago
You can’t get a more direct example of failure of collective action.

I’m not sure the human species has the capacity to actually coordinate behavior at the scale needed, irrespective of any future warning etc…, to be able to combat this

BearOsoabout 2 hours ago
We all reduced CFC use and stopped ozone depletion.

The problem with climate change is that there is a huge incentive to not fix it, and the culprit is not just rich oil corporations. Many countries subsist solely on oil profits and have no other natural resources to sustain themselves, i.e. Saudi Arabia. Those countries have influence over others like the US.

There are alternative options already available to replace fossil fuels for most things. In first-world countries, the only thing stopping a transition is the loss of corporate profits.

Gigachadabout 2 hours ago
Ironically the war in Iran was probably one of the most effective ways to cut oil consumption.
esikichabout 2 hours ago
People can't even think big enough to zipper merge properly. We are absolutely cooked.
timnetworksabout 2 hours ago
The planet started out a ball of molten stardust, completely inhospitable to life as we know it. But then there was not only life, but life detached from the ground too. Then K-T event wiped out almost all of it. But the planet kept going! It can be argued it got better and more diverse.

Are people in trouble? Perhaps. If we stop technological achievement in the name of a few degrees centigrade, then definitely.

Frickenabout 2 hours ago
Technological advancement needs to advance towards being sustainable or else it's a joke.
OgsyedIEabout 2 hours ago
With the depletion of the coal and oil deposits the industrial revolution relied on the first time around, it is now locked in that this century is human civilization's only shot at reaching some kind of abstract technology escape velocity.

Crash now and there will never be a second chance, just iron age stuff in a harsher environment for however many tens of millennia it takes to have some random pandemic that wipes the descendants out occur.

Frickenabout 1 hour ago
Are we in prison? What is it we're hoping to escape from when we achieve technological escape velocity?
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