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Discussion (79 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Ireland is fundamentally a wet country and always has been.
The main thing I have in mind is that human civilization is completely fucked. What is needed to ensure things aren’t too horrible in the next century is so drastic and requires such a global coordinated effort that will never happen. There is no technology or super authority that will magically save us from a climate catastrophe this century.
Given the vast majority of the world population still see vegetarianism as a joke and not a necessity, and developed countries are ready to sacrifice pretty much everything to the AI compute gods we are truly fucked
I'm pretty convinced that lots of people would be willing to make sacrifices. But not while Mark Zuckerberg is allowed to feed his Angus beef Macadamia nuts on Hawaii and all the invitees fly in separate private jets to COP26 instead of making it an online event.
The message of "sacrifice for thee, but not for me!" should not be underestimated here.
It should be much easier to convince people that emission free energy production is a necessity, and yet there is for all practical purpose no such political movement or any political party that actually support the simple fact that producing electricity and heat through burning carbon based fuel is completely unnecessary and should have been relegated as a something past civilizations did. We don't need to convince the world population to change their culture in order to not construct new thermal power plants, only political will and money.
I guess Eric or Barron will follow Project 2025 Edition 10's guideline and invade Greenland to secure their water for USA. And Canada's favorable climate?
The problem is that way too few are willing to change their habits, and legislators have near-zero incentive to enact unpopular rules to help mitigate the problems. AI isn't going to change any of that.
I also tell them to remember that food prices and insurances prices will inevitably go up.
And I won't much more that that because everything else fails (even the death of 1000 persons in my country during this years heat waves just make people say "bah, that's life")
This is 100% a one way street for most governments.
that only a big catastrophe, possibly a global war, will make people think again
a) Asteroid strike
b) Arrival of Aliens (in a sense of "evident to everywhone on earth")
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-08-13/risk-of-...
But first we get to experience (probably) record rainfall in autumn and winter.
What's that going to look like?
Guess it will cancel out the increased temperature?
UK here. It really feels like this year has been a massive wake-up call, a follow-up to the one of 2022 (and 2018, 2019, 2021...)
Some fire services have had their busiest months on record this year. In an extraordinary (and controversial) move, they convinced the government to use the phone Emergency Alert system to alert the entire country about the risk of fires.
Prior to summer, in the North of England, it was extremely windy and gloomy from September to May. Very very few blue skies. The other day, we went from a 2-day mini heat wave (35c & 28c) to gloomy cloud in 2 days - it's just so bizarre.
We've just had our 5th or 6th heatwave of the summer
A train derailed yesterday due to a buckled rail. Another derailed, cause of which is suspected to be heat/drought related. Luckily no fatalities.
We've had more wildfires than 2022 and drought is more widespread. I often can't have my window open at night when it's 29c inside because of the fires 10-20 miles away. I have no A/C
I'm wondering if our future is gales and grey for 9 months then heatwaves and drought? I know the North of England is historically gloomy, but it 'feels' different of late.
It feels like we do not have the money to begin to prepare and fix things that need fixing to continue the life we have. We haven't built a reservoir since 1990 despite massive population increase. Our rail network is not prepared for heat waves or long periods of drought or long periods of rain or long periods of ice/snow. London buses mostly have no A/C, ditto rest of the country. Many people don't have money for A/C at home - not even sure our electricity network could handle it. And about 100 other issues...
Oh, you have the money.
You just don't want to spend it, for that would shift the balance of political power in the country towards labor and away from capital, and away from the old and towards the young, for the wages of labor and the young would have to rise.
That's anathema to an upper class and a body politic whose primary objective is controlling the cost of labor, and even the political party that's named after labor has no plan to change that.
This is going to continue until the current body politic is more afraid of dying from heatstroke than they are of anyone else being in charge.
Country Share Cumulative Cumulative (Gt)
China 33% 33% 11.4-13.1
United States 11.7% 44.7% 16.0-18.1
India 8% 52.7% 19.1-21.2
Russia 5.1% 57.8% 21.1-23.2
Japan 2.5% 60.3% 22.1-24.2
UK 0.8% 0.3-0.4 (no cumulative figure)
Note that, first, there really is not much point to doing anything if you don't reduce by at least 52% in 3 years or less (less than that, or more time, will not make the difference between IPCC >2 and <2 scenarios). Hence without drastic reductions from the Chinese government (not promises, not "look at our beautiful new solar field", ONLY we're stopping these HUNDREDS of coal mines WITHIN 2 years) you've pretty much already lost, since a lot of countries lower on the list will definitely be increasing, and have declared it colonization for the west to demand they stop. Oh, by the way, you also must convince many African countries to stop that whole "electricity for our people" thing, otherwise the needed reduction is also a pipedream.
Note that just stopping CO2 output does not matter if it just gets transplanted somewhere else. In other words: the only way to make a difference is to stop first coal and then oil from being dug up in the first place, and let the CO2 emissions "take care of themselves". Otherwise CO2 emission reductions are local, not global, and so without reducing coal mining and oil pumping reductions do not matter and will not make any difference to global warming.
The only countries in the EU that have any influence at all is Norway, and they would have to just give up between 20% and 40% of their national income (France and the Netherlands are rounding errors, and Russia is not EU), and that's a typical figure.
In other words: this will not happen, there is no way in hell the governments involved will agree to even half of what's needed. And the UK, in fact all western governments other than Norway, US, Canada and Mexico have no influence and cannot realistically make a meaningful contributions to stopping climate change. And even those countries that can contribute will have to give up A LOT and it won't matter unless you get China, Russia and Saudi Arabia to follow suit.
Oh and if you do get this going, it'll cause a lot of pain in most of the world.
I made paneer a week ago. Normally I can cut it up and brown it and make the edges crispy. But for this batch I got far less cheese than normal and it was wet - I had to let the molded paneer dry out longer than normal. Then when I went to brown it the entire batch just melted into a gloopy mess - that just doesn't happen.
Reminded me of the omen.
I'm pretty young, too, so I have this, if not worse than this, to look forward to for the majority of my life.
Not to mention here in BC we're up to three summers in a row where entire towns have burned down ... not a positive sign of things to come.
I'm in Spain.
I really hope that after this summer, people of Europe will wake up and make fixing the climate their highest priority - at home, at work, in politics. We have very little time left, maybe a few years.
I can still see news articles everywhere blaming 'climate change' and 'CO2 emissions', pointing the finger at the oil companies and the likes. But those 'bad' guys are not operating in a void - they supply the products which are in high demand from me and you and our families - our entire lifestyle is built around them. So what needs to change is our life styles, philosophy, economic order .. drastic changes.
Consumerism needs to go, tourism needs to go, advertising needs to go, travel and logistics needs to be reinvented, industrial production needs to drop by orders of magnitude, everything replaced with healthy and efficient alternatives.
How can this be done peacefully is beyond me, it probably can't. We've had precedent during covid, when the whole world stopped because everyone was scared that they're going to die. It's not so different now.
What you're proposing (ending consumerism, tourism) is nothing short of revolutionary. I don't imagine that the future is going to be bloodless with or without a revolution.
The biggest issue that keeps accelerating climate change is that people buy too much stuff, travel too much, and more importantly eat in a way that is bound to destroy the climate.
Now go tell people to buy less crap, use more public transport and stop filling their mouths with beef and fish every day, good luck.
And even that would merely slow the progress, not stop or revert climate change.
Sincerely this is a disaster, each generation just keeps doing worse than others, gen z may actually be the firsts to really give 2 damns, or pretend better.
Temporary SO₂ injection to treat the symptoms while we continue to make progress on transitioning to green energy.
Inject where? to atmosphere? Are you dumb or slept in the chemistry class? This would result in sulfurous acid rain
https://supercool-earth.com/
And then, when the AMOC shall start running amok, we'll be forever in extreme cold.
Where should I flee?
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/scorched
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/scorched
https://atmosphere.copernicus.eu/lowest-global-biomass-burni...
"Drill baby drill"