alt Hacker NewsThe risk of a hothouse Earth trajectory
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Miss the days where YC put emphasis on climate tech too:
Very alarming. I feel like especially the West is regressing on climate change with the rise of the far right (https://www.politico.eu/article/robert-lambrou-alternative-f...)
I don't know what to do.
This is one of the key sentences:
> Policymakers and the public, however, remain largely unaware of the risks posed by such a practically irreversible transition
Most people still underestimate what it means for the earth system to change from the current stable state into another state, which might need many years to become stable again. And that new stable state might be a lot less favourable for us humans.
The CO2 graph over decades is painfully clear.[1] From 321ppm in 1970 to 428ppm in mid-2005, measured in Hawaii atop Mauna Loa, far from any major CO2 sources. Everything else is noisy and statistical, but the CO2 measurement increases very steadily.
Its not a "risk".
Water vapor (clouds) is a stonger greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. We already got measurably higher temperatures, so we also have higher water evaporation, and from the last 5 years it looks like it happens every year.
So the runaway is already happening, until something stops it near hothouse conditions or hopefully earlier than that.
What is generally not understood is that our current icehouse phase is rare.
'A "greenhouse Earth" is a period during which no continental glaciers exist anywhere on the planet... Earth has been in a greenhouse state for about 85% of its history.
'Earth is now in an icehouse state, and ice sheets are present in both poles simultaneously... Earth's current icehouse state is known as the Quaternary Ice Age and began approximately 2.58 million years ago.'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_and_icehouse_Earthh...
The bull case is solar and batteries are only going to get cheaper so the speed of the transition will increase.
* Australia's renewables generation increased from 13.7% in 2015 to 42.9% in 2025 [1]
* EIA: 99%+ of new US capacity in 2026 will be solar, wind + storage [2]
* Wind and solar overtake fossil power in the EU for the first time in 2025 [3]
1. https://explore.openelectricity.org.au/energy/nem/?range=all...
2. https://electrek.co/2026/01/28/eia-99-of-new-us-capacity-in-...
3. https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/european-electricit...
When I want to motivate myself I look at this https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/the-scariest-climate-plot-...
So maybe the people who aren’t having kids due to climate change were right after all?
One of the solutions is to stop the ai hype, as the excessive electrical needs it creates are obviously not helping with the climate.
Let's compare two countries at the same level of development.
Canada has 14 tonnes carbon footprint per person. Canada is a cold country.
France has 8 tonnes carbon footprint per person. Climate is way warmer.
We can't continue adding population and the wondering what is going on.
Just price in the externalities and it probably solves itself
Nothing new under the sun.
We can't cut emissions fast enough politically, but we can race towards economically viable fusion power which would solve the problem from the supply side and would make industrial scale carbon sequestration not insane, for a century or so, until waste heat itself can't be radiated fast enough even in 250 ppm CO2 atmosphere - but that's a problem for the XXII century.
At least considering only temperature, it seems changes are never going to be irreversible since both stratospheric aerosol injection and intentional nuclear winter should always be able to cool down global temperatures
Vote Giant Meteor 2028. Thick Dust or Bust.
>Despite decades of research and sophisticated computational climate modeling, the magnitude and pace of these events have surprised scientists, raising questions about how well current climate projections capture risk.
When this always-revise-in-one-direction phenomenon happened with the electron charge, it was considered a priori "proof" that scientists were fudging their data to match expectations. The Millikan Oil Drop Experiment is still studied in fundamentals of science class.[0]
If climate scientists are constantly revising their predictions upward, then this is equally "proof" that climate scientists are under pressure to revise their estimates downward. Far from being "alarmist," such terms are actually cudgels used to discourage climate scientists from making their data look too bad.
The result is the predictable fudging of climate data to look better than it really is.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment#Millikan's...
> During the mid-to-late Pleistocene (∼1.2 million to 11,700 years before present) ... with temperatures ranging roughly between −6°C and +2°C relative to the pre-industrial mean of ∼14°C
Does this mean during mid-to-late Pleistocene it used to be -6C to +2C, or does it mean it used to be 8C to 16C?
(If the former, then how did early humanoids, and many other animals, survive such cold?)
Carbon tax. Stop subsidizing fossil fuels.
No worries ladies and gentleman, AI will solve it, insert coin, or better throw another trillion at it and all will be solved.
AGI is here
I really think the key to addressing climate change should have started 20 years ago in a lot of primary schools, whereby the curriculum includes subjects that are more tailored to solving problems with capturing or converting C02 (eg sciences) so that these students are thinking about these problems when graduating and starting businesses to solve the challenges (hopefully with gov incentives at same time).
Are there any attempts to start geo-engineering to fix this? I'm assuming there will be no attempt to stop dumping carbon into the atmosphere, can we at least do something to take it back out? Can we use solar or renewables to possibly do that at scale?
If only there was a clean, nearly limitless source of energy, where the waste for hundreds of years of energy could be stored in less than a square kilometer.
If such a thing existed, we could be sure that environmentalists and leftists would have openly embraced it, rather than nip it at the bud 50 years ago. Because they are Good People™. And we should definitely listen to them now because they Follow The Science™.
We can stop saying "risk" at this point. Just "the hothouse Earth's trajectory" is fine
Ehm, we're royally fuxed.
Unless the fake reality starts to crack with the Epstein and other current events and humanity's coming of age will happen. Even if a hundred years later than Bonhoeffer though it would.
What's fascinating and dismaying to me is that it's obvious that there exists sufficient capital and capability in the west to fix this.
I always wondered if we just lacked the ability to mobilize to solve big problems anymore but now I look at this 7% US GDP being allocated to AI datacentres and I realize that it isn't a lack of ability, it's a lack of desire.
Imagine if we had ram shortages because all the silicon was being diverted towards making solar panels. Imagine if we had copper shortages because it was going to the windings on wind mills. Imagine if all these economic disruptions were just temporary and for a better cause or eliminating carbon emissions and eventually moving to sequestration of carbon.
Instead we get chatbots. And funny picture makers.
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And yet, the only reasonable action to take is to flag this topic and move along with the "humanity has always found a way out, technology will save us. Remember, we were supposed to drown in horse manure!"
Why? Because candidly looking at those risks as a society means deep collective existential dread, which automatically means an immediate civilizational collapse.
So I'm guessing some of our elite is actually ignorant and the other part is willfully shutting the hell up on this subject to let our civilization run on fumes a few more years.
It's unfortunate because a rapid civilizational collapse could give humanity as a species a better chance of survival.
Meanwhile all these other AI threads everybody’s worried about losing their jobs
Not realizing we’re gonna go extinct here in the next thousand years unless something solves it
Since humans are incapable of doing this there’s only one possible option: To create something smarter than us and give it the power to solve it because we cannot
Omg people its - the bullshit mascaraing as science these days is exhausting. Earth is on a hot house trajectory regardless of climate. The sun expands and gets hotter - so do we. Its literally then simplest game structure there is - get to the next hop before you die. The next hop is Mars. I don’t understand why this isn’t inherently obvious.
It is important to keep reminding ourselves that climate change is a real problem for humanity and that each and every one of us contributes to its intensification or mitigation through our decisions. It is a problem that requires solutions, but implementing these solutions involves so much inertia that it can sometimes be painful.
And let's contrast that with the AI hype. It's more the opposite, a kind of solution to problems we didn't really have, but are now being persuaded we do. It would be sensible to invest an equal share of the resources currently being pumped into AI with uncertain outcomes into the complex issue of climate change. And, no, AI won't solve it; unfortunately, it only makes it worse.