They want decisive and ambitious action, you can't get that if we all turn to doomerism.
The bottom 70% of the world's population would have less than $X00 in the bank, and wouldn't have much control over their lifestyle.
The reasons we haven't done this are because China and India are hungrily industrializing, and the Republican Party in the US is captured by fossil fuel companies.
And yes, we do need to give up several aspects of our lifestyles. Meat consumption absolutely must come down. Air travel must come down. Disposable goods, and consumer plastics, must come down. Our lifestyles must change. Capitalism encourages status symbol goods such as beef, travel/tourism, excessive consumption goods, etc.
We need widespread consumer behavioral change before we have any hope of governments listening to people. As long as half of the population doesn't care about the climate then nothing meaningful will get done. For real change to happen people need sunk cost. Right now people have far too many excuses and denials to actually do much. There is always a China to blame, or a company to blame, or a mega rich person to blame.
This just doesn't correspond to reality. A lot of serious stuff is happening in this space.
None of that means it's not true.
Who is left to take decisive and ambitious action in say, the next decade?
I'm curious which lies you're referring to. "Two Weeks to Flatten the Curve" reminded me of the time I had fun with my passenger's ignorance of celestial mechanics. She thought the moon really was done for, but after a few more minutes had passed it started to come back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24881670
> but ended up sowing distrust.
Because most people eventually caught on that they were being lied to?
Now that we've established that, what's your decisive and ambitious action you've made towards addressing climate change, so we can learn from the example you've set?
https://www.ipolitics.ca/2025/07/02/its-too-late-david-suzuk...
We are now in the "hunker down" phase of global warming.
The doom of climate change is mostly people to dumb to understand the most basic of models or (worse) unwilling to do so on ideological grounds. I already decided not to have children in my life because I think it is irresponsible to put them into this world. We will have enough climate migration anyways.
The truth is that there are tripping points that are extremely hard to reverse and may or may not trigger other tripping points. Reading these risks as a reason not to care is the opposite of what should happen.
And then you figure out what the real reason is to burn the world: some rich fucks trying to extract a few thousand dollars per second more f4om the r3st of us.
Staying below 1.5 degrees global warming is very unlikely at this point. But every tenth of a degree counts. Humanity needs to be decisive in slowing down climate change. This is a matter of political will.
I'm sure we can survive fairly reasonably in whatever climate we end up with in a few hundred/thousand years, but the gap in between is a really doozy. The stories and myths about the selfish people of our times will go on for millennia.
It is the book series 'Carbon Ideologies' by William T Volleman, the opening few pages are written to those that read them in a few hundred years. Those that read these today are already convinced, those in the future will want answers. All he does is use examples of how we live to point out that we are not inherently evil, just looking out for our more immediate needs.
Except there is nothing inherently more selfish about ”people” today than at any point in history.
If anything, it might change humanity’s view of itself, and its capability to collectively handle major threats.
So, until somebody brings out 10+ aircraft carriers and enforces global climate accord, i don't see any progress happening here.
We can certainly, even without genetic engineering breed crops more suited for shorter growing time frames.
There are a lot of corn hybrids, some mature fast, others far slower. Some require more sun, others less. For example, some of the faster growing varieties only take 60 days to mature, others 100+. But here's the thing. Those are 60 "good weather" days. As in not too much cloud, not too unseasonably cold or warm, reasonable amounts of rain and water, and so on.
As corn takes time to grow and mature, it doesn't matter how much sun you throw at it, it still only grows so fast. Up North, even if it's warmer, you still need enough sun too. Compressing the sun around the summer solstice doesn't help. Giving it 22 hour long days of sun doesn't just magically make the corn grow 2x as fast as an area with 11 hours of usable sun.
And the spring is still "rainy season". Some crops can't take too much rain.
I guess my point is, Northern areas will require only certain crops. That's fine of course, and it will indeed feed people, but some crops won't be on the table.
One thing that may have already helped Russia, is the extensive work the Soviets put into breeding crops to grow further north:
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/04/fruit-trenches-cul...
While I do not doubt the weather is more mild in Russia these days, it's also quite erratic. At least it is here in Canada. Some winters mild, then bam a winter of "old". So I wonder if the above breeds have given Russia a leg up on taking advantage?
If we look at the enforcement and outcomes of former climate action „plans“ this is unfortunately a valid option.
The most optimistic estimate of deep-water outgassing south of 60 ° S is 0.36 Pg C yr⁻¹. Even if that rate tripled and persisted unabated, it would take more than 800 years to add 895 Pg C (which would be what it would require to justify the press release’s claims of “doubling”)
What the salinity reversal can do is:
- Expose ice shelves to warmer subsurface water, accelerating sea-level rise.
- Reduce the Southern Ocean’s role as a sink by a few tenths Pg C yr⁻¹, nudging the global ocean sink (~2.7 Pg C yr⁻¹) downward.
- Perturb atmospheric circulation patterns, with knock-on effects for the Atlantic overturning (but those links remain speculative).
Its doubly frustrating because these studies invariably indicate that climate change is happening, getting worse, and triggering feedback loops that amplify CO2.
If I really witness New York flooded to the 3rd floor in my life, it’s really sad, because no-one told me [who didn’t also make spurious science on other topics of life].
Hey, I do a lot of crazy stuff myself, so not exactly blaming you but I don't think your "flooding == really sad" claim holds up here, because of the crazy.
Journalists make lots of mistake, and it's good to keep that in mind, but random people in forums are even worse.
I believe the deep-ocean vents you mention are beside the point. The article is discussing the upwelling of cold, CO2-rich water in the Southern Ocean - not emissions from vents.
Also, it’s worth noting that the PNAS article does not mention CO2 per se, only upwelling. The article summary of the press release does draw the CO2 connection.
Besides the connections you mention, the PNAS article points out that this result illustrates that current models of ice/ocean interaction are not producing these observational trends.
We don't really know at what point that is. It's probably something we can only identify in hindsight. I find it bewildering that our approach is basically FAFO.
And thus unreliable investment, a house or factory might be flood prone in a dessert valley, a dam with power stations might fail to provide.
So you have uninsureable riches, that might aswell no longer be there.
> The Day After Tomorrow was a documentary.
On that topic, the book series including 'Fifty Degrees Below' by Kim Stanley Robinson is worth a read. I think I got that reading tip from HN, or maybe it was his Mars triology, which also has some nice planetary science stuff.
It is absolutely not normal.
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/about-us/news-and-media/media-c...
- Phthora 3:12And another thing is, it's very clear that the people who are willing to disrupt society for the sake of "climate justice" actually sees the abolition of the west and free markets as a higher priority than reducing Co2 emissions, as we already have perfectly good solutions to that: nuclear. But they don't want a solution to the climate problem, they want the west to fall.
Just one nasty question: if you, as an assumed conservative, had to choose between conserving capitalism or the environment, what would it be?
Conservatives will design a society were they assume they are at the top. More left leaning people will design a society with no concept of where they will be in it.
Or do you know any popular left leaning politician that advocates for full blown communism instead of just tax reform?
What you called a good point isnt, its diffamation of the left. And btw, imo full blown communism is equally delusional as busines-as-usual capitalism.
Then go ahead, why dont you correct him :-)
I had too many meandering, unfruitful conversations with such people where i was way too polite. At some point you have to call it by its name: pathological idiocy.
People are proposing comparatively minor fixes to avoid unmitigated disaster.
This isn’t to argue against climate change, but I think journalism like this only fuels skeptics.
A 2023 study https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/03/230330102327.h... observed slowdown in Antarctic overturning, in which cold water sinks down at the south pole and then spreads north in the deeper parts of the ocean.
The slowing of this process would cause deep ocean water to become warmer.
edit: the publication linked in the article https://www.pnas.org/doi/epub/10.1073/pnas.2500440122 makes this a bit clearer:
"In the polar Southern Ocean, cold, fresh surface waters overlay warmer, saltier deep waters (Fig. 2A). During winter, surface cooling and sea ice formation reduce stratification, allowing vertical mixing to transport heat upward, either melting sea ice from below or limiting its growth (8). However, decades of surface freshening strengthened stratification, trapping subsurface heat at depth, sustaining expanded sea ice coverage (7, 9) and limiting deep convection along with open-ocean polynyas (10). Here, we show that since 2015, these conditions have reversed: Surface salinity in the polar Southern Ocean has increased, upper-ocean stratification has weakened, sea ice has reached multiple record lows, and open-ocean polynyas have reemerged."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ThermoclineSeasonDepth.pn...
Also the authors of the paper is involved with the article, there is for example this quote:
“We are witnessing a true reversal of ocean circulation in the Southern Hemisphere—something we’ve never seen before,” explains Antonio Turiel, ICM-CSIC researcher and co-author of the study.
> We are witnessing a true reversal of ocean circulation in the Southern Hemisphere—something we’ve never seen before,” explains Antonio Turiel, ICM-CSIC researcher and co-author of the study.
If you incorporate these statements it seems quite reasonable to me. You can argue with the author of the study saying that but I can't see an issue with an article reporting that they did, if that's what actually happened.
True or not, this will be yet another asset in the the climate change deniers' toolbox.
Please let's not repeat 2020 with the flu again.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-uns-devastating-climate-...
Old articles. Nowadays I'd say there's an even stronger current against "doomerism", which acts as a force suppressing sufficiently bad news. Don't look up!
We still don't have to. We could change our consumption in a few years and still avoid a lot of this. But we won't
It's not great for us humans though, pretty sure most people care about that more than the planet being happy or unhappy.
It is so fast in fact, that animals especially don't/won't have the number of generations necessary to make natural selection make them evolve in the right ways to survive a warmer Earth.
Finally, it might not be Ok as the planet could become uninhabitable. For example, given enough CO2/other greenhouse gasses the air becomes warmer to a level where it can hold enough water vapor (a more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2) that the planet could enter a spiral where it get's warmer, warmer air can hold more water vapor, which makes everything warmer, ... until you get to something that is closer to Venus with its super high greenhouse gasses and hot atmosphere.
So this is a huge deal. I’ve been down to the Southern Ocean, lectured all the way by scientists.
North of the Antarctic is the only place on earth where the sea can rotate completely around the world without hitting a land mass, and it is deemed the engine of the world’s oceans. Those oceans are what have absorbed most of the excess CO2 that we’ve emitted, and a lot captured has been buried in deep ocean. But the ocean warms, and can capture less CO2, and bad days are ahead.
This news signals not just a slowing in that absorption for an area, which not just sends more CO2 into the atmosphere, but has more terrifyingly unknown downstream implications for other ocean streams.
Well as long as we keep pretending that the most conservative of the already downplayed IPCC estimates is the real trajectory we'll keep getting surprised over and over. It's not really a coincidence that most climate scientists are depressed.
* Data centers powering artificial intelligence could use more electricity than entire cities [0]
* Google’s emissions up 51% as AI electricity demand derails efforts to go green [1]
* AI is poised to drive 160% increase in data center power demand [2]
It is a doomsday cult in the most literal sense.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2024/11/23/data-centers-powering-ai-cou...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jun/27/google-em...
[2] https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/AI-poised-to-...
So for example, if AI can replace the need for additional humans, then overall we're using net less energy?
scottgg•3h ago
Well, fuck
troyvit•3h ago
kergonath•3h ago
ykonstant•2h ago
jes5199•2h ago