Europe's fires are just the start

They way I think/hope we can fix this is two parts:

1. The only way I think you can get rid of the excess CO₂ at scale is to permanently sequester it underground. The oil/gas industry can cheaply deposit huge amounts of gas there. The unsolved problem is extracting enough CO₂ from the atmosphere at reasonable cost. People are working on that, but it will probably be decades before it's is approaching practicality.

Which is why we need to do this in the meantime:

2. Spray the stratosphere with SO₂. This reflects some some sunlight and cools the planet. It sounds scary, but is actually safe: https://makesunsets.com/pages/new-faq

If CO2 emissions stop today, it'll keep warming very quickly for several decades, and then it'll slow down but keep warming slowly. What takes half a century now will take a millenium.

And nothing whatsoever humanity does with CO2 will result in cooling on a short timescale.

Check out this year's edition of Ember's Global Electricity Review [0]. The table on p. 78 lists the following five countries as having the highest CO2-equivalent emissions (in Mt):

    | China         | 5,565 |
    | United States | 1,737 |
    | India         | 1,395 |
    | Russia        |   536 |
    | Japan         |   492 |

All these numbers should probably be put into perspective, though, by taking the population size into account. But even then, the whole of the EU does not fare too bad.

[0] https://ember-energy.org/app/uploads/2026/04/Global-Electric...

In the meantime batteries + solar or wind can be built quickly and hooked up pretty much anywhere.

Even if we had nuclear fusion, solar+batteries could still win on cost and time to deploy!

Largest battery storage in Germany set for partial commissioning - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49104584 - July 2026

Analysis: Wind and solar power overtake fossil fuels in Germany for first time ever - https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-wind-and-solar-power-ov... - July 28th, 2026

> Germany has various targets in place that require a rapid expansion of wind and solar power, including cutting economy-wide emissions to net-zero by 2045. The nation is also aiming to increase renewables’ share of electricity consumption to 80% by 2030 to achieve a “largely climate neutral” power system by 2035.

It's time to get over the nuclear issue, it's history. It takes ~10 years to build a new nuclear generator from breaking ground to first kw to the grid, and tens of billions of dollars or euros. Germany deploys ~2GW/month of solar. Total global nuclear generation capacity is ~380GW as of this comment. At current global solar PV deployment rates, even assuming capacity factor delta between solar and nuclear, you could replace total global nuclear generation with ~18 months of solar PV deployment. Batteries and solar will continue to rapidly decline in cost, nuclear will not.

(total annual solar PV deployment is approaching, but not quite yet, at 1TW/year, and continues to increase year over year)

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-energy-consumption

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci...

Frankly, it doesn't matter what Germany or other European nations do - their carbon footprint has dramatically decreased.

The issue is everyone else [0]. China (12 GT), the US (5 GT), and India (3 GT) alone represent over half of all global carbon emissions. The EU and UK's combined carbon emissions are half of Asia (excluding China and India) emissions.

Countries like India and Vietnam are expected to see GDP growth in the 6-8% range for the next decade, and both are doubling down on coal [1][2] and other carbon heavy fuels, so emissions are only going to grow further. Any marginal decrease in carbon emissions at this point is too little too late given that much of Asia and South America is expected to see carbon emission grow in the 3-8% range.

[0] - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-...

[1] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-05/india-mul...

[2] - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/vietnam-looks-more-c...

France and Spain are having to shut down their nuclear plants because they can't cool them during heatwaves: https://www.msn.com/en-gb/weather/extreme-weather-events/fra...

We can rant all day about how stupid it was of the conservatives to re-enact the ban on nuclear power without restarting the subsidies for renewables, and lament that they thus ensured that coal power would thus have to replace more of the lost load, but that's all in the past and we can't change that.

If you think we need more nuclear power to fight CO2 emissions, you're 50 years late. That ship has sailed before most of us here were born.

But if climate change leads to permanently losing those forests, that is an effect we will feel. Still less bad than losing permafrost

I didn't mean "it is not there anymore", I meant "we won't be able to preserve it, it may already be too late for that".

The heat output of every single data centre on earth isn’t even worth thinking about on the scale of the global climate system.

Of course we should fight to preserve as much as we can. Nobody wants to live in a bunker on mars. Almost...

no shit sherlock, poor people in those countries have been suffering from starvation, diseases and lack of basic necessities even before the climate change was a thing. For them, it's just another misery on top of their already miserable lives.

Nobody gave a shit about those people in poor countries 20-30 years ago, all of a sudden everyone is worries about climate change because Europe is burning. Had it been a monsoon flooding or a drought in South Asia, nobody in the Economist would even bat an eye, let alone publish an article.

Burn the debris every 10-20 years rather than let it accumulate and become unstoppable disaster fires once a century.

This tends to be very hard hard to do in a democratic system though. People really don't like their forests burning.

Like a lot of things in the US, the resources are "there" for this stuff, because it's a lot of individual labor instead of something that can be turned into a massive payoff for a couple of "investors" there's no "market incentive" so nothing will be done.

For context, I live on 40 unimproved acres in CO, and much of my spring and late fall is spent moving downed wood and cutting down thickets of gamble oak.

That is a lot of work, and I hope (over the next decade) to eventually get it somewhat under control. The idea is to not have, for instance, a dead tree leaning up against a living tree and to try and tamp down or increase the space between the floor and the first couple of branches in the trees. I also collect up wood for heating in the winter (better to burn it to stay warm than to lt it go in an eventual wild fire.

This is a lot of strenuous work, and not just because I have some love and respect for the situation of all the individual flora and fauna that populate this chunk of land. I've know several wildland firefighters here and they are doing similar things in a hurry out in the hills with hand tools. Because you can't get large equipment around to do the work- there aren't roads in a lot of these places.

It'll all probably burn at some point, anyhow.

But I try because at least in the couple of acres where I actually live I might be able to get the underbrush cleared so a fire could be fought.

But the idea of setting it on fire is prepostrous- I might as well set the shack where I live on fire while i am at it.

That more or less scales up.

The process of mitigating wildire (usually done on a line near an active fire) is largely a bunch of 25 year olds with shovels and chainsaws.

I am all for that work- I'd much rather have them doing that than geraing up to go to Iran or Cuba or wherever.

But hey, the ecology of this place is fucked. My ancestors destroyed the megagfauna to prevent folks from subsisting off of the concentration camps/ reservations. The folks who are still "into" that racist, genocidal, ecocidal project aren't going to do anything to fix it; they'd rather burn their own houses down first.

https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4974

I think the biggest issue with the climate change communication is that the scientists decided to focus on a temperature delta.

There is no meaningful temperature delta, it's just something that you get after a lot of aggregation and averaging.

Sure it makes sense for scientists running their models and such, but it should never have been the primary communication tool to politicians and laymen.

I think it would have been significantly better if they invented some new scale, like the Richter scale or the hurricane severity scale, which instead incorporates the effects of the average temperature rising. A scale which directly communicates a sense of how many more fires will we see per year, how many more severe storms, flash floods etc.

I used to have snow for weeks each winter in my city and now if I get 2-3 days of snow a year it's unusual. Extreme weather events where it rains in one day as much as in one month have become a recurring event to the point we're re-planning sewage systems around these things.

Life is short, there's no point freezing and living off leaves for the next few decades when you'll be old in the blink of an eye anyway

What we all need to understand is that after oil, we just won't have enough energy to maintain our current way of life. Not just energy by the way: our way of life relies on petrochemical products (from fertilisers to electronics). Solar panels need electronics, we don't know if we can build/maintain them at scale without computers that need petrochemical products.

So we need as much as we can of everything. Both renewables and nuclear.

Far right, far left, far center, it's all the same: money, power, money, power, stay in the EU, free market, money, power.

What does this look like, precisely, in practice?

Now it's starting to impact us directly, but we still don't really give a shit. In a few weeks it will be business as usual.

It will get worse every year, and we will be more and more willing to do something as it gets worse. But we will have fewer and fewer resources to do it, and less stuff to save (once a forest disappears, you as a human won't see it come back in your lifetime).

It's been predicted for decades, in multiple reports, over and over and over and over again... No excuses

> can anyone predict specifically what will happen "next" and "where" and prepare to mitigate the impact?

Something bad, duh? And reduce emissions, duh?

The things people have been predicting and advocating for during the past like 50 years at that point. Are we still debating these details lol?

It's not. The climate will warm as much as we emit CO2. Sure, the CO2 that we have already emitted won't leave. We've passed 1.5C, that won't come back in our lifetime. But the more we emit, the worse it will get. To keep what we have now, we have to stop emitting entirely, right now.

> We now need to worry about the hundreds of millions of people

We need to worry about the problems that are coming from the CO2 we have already emitted, that's true. But we also need to worry a lot about the fact that we are making it worse every single day. We are not reducing our CO2 emissions, we are increasing them right now.

Are you worried about hundreds of millions of refugees? The way it's going, we'll reach 4C. It means that billions of people will have to move.

I don't think we can still use the concept of "refugee" when its entire countries that need to move because their part of the world has become so hot that humans cannot survive outside without life support (that's what will happen to billions of people with 4C). At this point, it's entire countries moving with their military, it's just global war.