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In particular, they rate ≥50% mortality as Extreme and also rate warming by 3°C or more by 2050 as Extreme (this is relevant for the colorful severity/likelihood grids that are the focus of the paper) and somebody appears to have made the incorrect connection that an Extreme climate would cause Extreme mortality, and also by the time the Extreme climate is reached and not afterwards. Elsewhere, the paper mentions that "We have not shown an assessment for mortality in this illustration, as very limited research has been carried out on the potential for large-scale loss of life in relation to these interconnected risks on which to base an assessment."
Unfortunately, that makes the article title highly ironic.
What's more we are living through an actual green revolution. Solar power and batteries have never been so cheap - and still promising to get cheaper and better with sodium ion batteries.
Another factor is that rich oil and gas people figured out they could just buy the media.
Who is this "media"? Is this the same "media" that Trump and his dullards claim is so corrupt and contrary to The Truth? Are you influenced by this "media"? I don't read The Guardian or Jacobin, but I'm occasionally exposed to their headlines and they are certainly reporting on climate change. Are they part of the "media"?
There is no monoculture "media" and to the extent there is, it is (in the US at least) overwhelmingly left-leaning. And ironically, when there were fewer outlets for information, those outlets (because they served such a large and diverse audience) hewed to a common sense/conventional wisdom understanding of the facts.
Civilisation takes millennia of stable, plentiful resources to create, and a week without food for 30 percent of the population to utterly destroy.
I’d love to be wrong, if you disagree please say why.
All parties are incentivized against fixing this problem.
Yea, they figured it just now, in the 2010s and 20s. During the 90's the thought just didn't occur to them...Makes complete sense.
Nothing discredits an idea so much like the proponents of it being total idiots.
But I do remember quite a bit about "pollution" and like general acute environmental issues. Smog in LA, the hole in the ozone, etc. Those were both more understandable and visible to your average person and more tractable. And there was the obvious hook about energy independence after the fairly recent (at that time) oil embargo and such.
The Green party (are they still around?) talked about more vague issues like ocean plastic and six pack wrappers on birds, but I don't think we made a ton of progress there, but then that was less consequential anyway.
I feel like we went down the worst timeline since then when it became very political and people burn gas for the hell of it, and others hate people who do so. Solar and nuclear (or hell even just solar) could give us clean, cheap energy abundance, but the people championing solar tend not to do it from the abundance perspective, but in tandem with cutting energy use which is a hard sell and not necessary anyway, in my opinion.
https://www.colorado.edu/today/2026/02/16/climate-change-med...
I really hope that particular article was wrong, because the alternative is that we have to resort to geo engineering. Considering that the governments can't really coordinate in preventing this, I don't see them coordinate in fixing it, especially because the scale and costs of the "fixes" are astronomical.
How do you solve Global Warming? Nuclear Winter ...
I really hope this is not how we end up geo-engineering our way out of Climate change.
What we've seen is new renewable capacity carving out a tiny sliver in the energy mix, sometimes even being able to meet all new demand in the installation period, but we still have all the existing demand running on the old stack.
https://ourworldindata.org/energy-mix
This book talks about this: https://www.amazon.com/More-All-Consuming-History-Energy/dp/...
There's also the fact that global society is not a real time strategy game being managed by a well intentioned min-maxing actor driving compounding efficiency gains in resource usage. It's a free for all where everyone is paranoid that they'll be destroyed if they don't use every dirty trick they can (on a global geopolitical level), entrenched oligarchies permanently lobbying for their inefficient, destructive structures to continue (on a domestic economy level) and so on.
It's not looking good overall.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49208314
Are you talking about US media?
Seems like a delusion to me. Social justice is yet another banned topic under conservative corporate ownership.
Quick headline check:
- Trump claims to have invented a word that exists
- “Burger King’s New Whopper Strikes a Blow in Fast Food Wars”
- “US strikes $1.2bn deal to pay German firm to halt offshore wind projects” (is this a social justice topic?)
- Attorney General confirmation political reporting
- school shooting reporting (is this social justice??)
https://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/report_2025
The climate change part raises some good points, but why gourds?
It is very hopeful that renewables are being pursued and developed by China at least to some degree and have become economically attractive. That's the only feasible way to minimize the damage that's already been done.
My favorite counterexample is the ozone layer. When I was a kid, that was the Big Bad environmental concern. But we actually worked together on a global scale to fix it.
Broader climate change is a much bigger problem with stronger financial and political incentives, but in principle we've done it before.
Of course details matter and what I mentioned above is not a universal truth. It is an often observed pattern though.
In my view there is no credible future in which the world will become carbon neutral in 1 or even 10 years. It just ain't happening. This is one of those problems where the train is already running down the hill, and we need to engineer a way to catch it. We cannot stop it anymore.
aaaand, you lost me.
No call to action, no recommendations in what to do about it. It’s basically insinuating that we, the regular people, are the responsible.
As there in-lies the problem, and it makes me furious. The onus to engineer our way out of a climate catastrophe is not on the regular people. The onus is on the people who engineered is into this problem. Government, industry, politicians, scientists, literal engineers.
If this is really as urgent they say it is, then why aren’t they acting faster to retool our infrastructure? Joe Schmoe doesn’t have the ability to build more electric cars. He can’t go out and build more nuclear power plants, or build solar farms.
The problem here is every time you read an article like this you’re left feeling guilty. We’re told we’re the problem. Joe Rogan (and others) are the problem. Not the people who actually got us into this situation. The energy here is so misguided. It’s infuriating.
I love you Adam McKay and your art, but us normal folks are just living life, with the tools & systems that were engineered for us by other people. Stop telling us we’re the problem.
The main thrust of the article is that the attention to the uncomfortable issue of climate change has been replaced with noise about everything else and comfortable lies about things being fine, and that the drop in attention correlates strongly with climate change worsening as such making the case that even just bringing more attention back to the issue could help prevent it.
It’s at the point where I wish it were solvable, but I don’t believe it is, so I can’t afford to think about it. Maybe people better than me can, and good luck to them.
The big, meaningful wins come from things like stopping the use of coal, not signing-off on new oil and gas exploration, tax-incentives and disincentives, grid work, fining polluters.
We instinctively frame this as an individual problem, the cynic might say we've been encouraged to, but the reality is that whether or not you fly this summer has precisely dick-all impact globally. It's the actions of our governments that count.
It is all about individual action. And then the emergence from that to what amounts to the multi-pronged solutions that are needed to address a wicked problem. Like create the "big meaningful wins" you mention. There is no mailbox where you drop off "stop the use of coal", and it happens, neither is there a magic button. A complicating factor is that we are not able to see how our small individual actions contribute to solving the wicked problems, and we are not able to coordinate them at scale.
And those boats make a lot less of an impact than all those trucks driving everything across land.
Wise choices are needed.
Most people dont know covid hasnt disappeared. It keeps evolving and there are strains out there still causing issues. But thanks to the attention economy dynamics, all sorts of random people were acting like they were virologists, epidemiologists, microbiologists at its peak. They have all disappeared ie shifted focus to whatever else. Meanwhile the ecosystem and infra dedicated to keep track of this stuff chuggs along keeping the lights on. All am saying is there is no reason to keep everyone in a freaked out state.
Political change is needed to achieve any of this. Changing your individual behavior or even the individual behavior of everyone you know – while certainly not wrong! – won’t solve this.
This is like trying to abolish slavery in 19th century US by not owning slaves and trying your very best to not buy anything that involves slave labor … laudable, but not a way to abolish slavery.
Owning an unnecessary carnivorous animal is rather bad news from a CO2 perspective. A dog can be responsible for higher CO2 emissions than a car.
https://impact.ed.ac.uk/research/climate-environmental-crisi...
https://www.zerosmart.co.uk/post/the-average-carbon-footprin...
(Que outrage from pet owners and people suggesting I'm a crazy vegan.... I'm most certainly not vegan or veggie!)
This time we have no more time but 25 years ago when we had no more time it was true?
Or we've never had more time?
In that sense it is never to late. We can always do something to limit the damage. It’s just that it gets harder and harder and some damage becomes irreversible at a certain point.
Had we done more 25 years ago it would all have been cheaper, easier and led to less damage overall. That doesn’t mean doing something now is suddenly not worth it.
its always a problem and its slow moving enough and cumulative enough that it will always be better to fix it sooner but the real dangers are many years off.
when the jet stream collapses overnight then we'll be forced to deal with it
- Yeah some govts reduce carbon emissions, but others don't care (china) or can't afford to focus on that (developing economies).
- Climate activists will continue to act like we're to literally ruin the world (this is stupid). Climate change deniers will say temperature changes are just cyclical (also stupid).
- On a global macro scale, fossil fuels continue to be consumed as long as it makes sense economically
- Solar eventually gets cheap enough to begin to truly displace fossil fuels. EVs also go mainstream. Both happening now.
- In the end... life will just go on as we just naturally move up the tech tree and fossil fuels become an ever smaller part of the energy mix
Collapsing human-optimum climate, a temporary state Earth entered about 15 thousand years ago and made modern civilization possible.
The truly sad thing about it all is not the damage to some abstract "environment". The fact remains that we had an Eden-like planet for a few thousand years and completely and utterly wrecked it to maximize the "wealth" of a few generations of elites.
In order to not cause chaos, they lie (by denying climate change, sowing FUD) or ensure the issue isn't mentioned/covered (by owning media, self-censorship). "Keep calm, everything is going extremely well."
I believe Earth isn't badly off with a lot less humans, I just don't like the distribution of survivorship isn't going to be random. Survivorship bias is going to contain heroic stories, but in the end a lot of people without power/money are going to take the shortest straw. And, that wasn't necessary.
The track Extrawelt - Phoebe has an excellent quote on the matter.
It also lies with graphs in a way that I just hate -- we have surface temperature charts that show growth trends going all the way back to ... 2024. Please. This page from wikipedia shows a much longer range with a lot more context: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Holocene_Temperature..., and reasonable qualifiers on the methods used to go back.
Useful proposals always welcomed, ideally ones that in a game theoretic sense do not reward defection and are realistic about the economics of releasing more CO2 as part of power production, but this essay isn't it.
Or just a rogue country that's being hit by the crisis more than others
If the SO2 brings about destruction sooner, I'm of the camp that "well, we were destined for death anyway...".
Possible unintended side effects is better than "everyone dies".
Ten years ago, I was saying we should experiment with it on a small scale so that if it does become necessary, we're not shooting blind, but even then the doomers were opposed because of "risks". You know what else has risks? Unmitigated climate change!