alt Hacker NewsGlobal warming will exceed 1.5-degree limit, UN says
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After 50 years since I was born for the first I didnt eat grapes from my backyard in Southern Europe because they dried up due to extreme heat. In the rest of my life I might miss any other fruit.
Supposing all anthropogenic emissions went to zero today, we'd still keep warming almost as far as three degrees with all of the disasters and famines that entails, because there's a lag time between existing emissions and their effects.
We need massive bounty programs that pay out irrespective of nationality for every possible kind of improvement and gain to carbon capture technology if we want to prevent 90% of all land on Earth between 30°N and 30°S from slowly turning into copies of the uninhabitable stretches of the Middle East.
It's hard to have people use data in these types of conversations, so I'll just link two charts.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita and https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-emissions-by-re...
Notice which countries are going down. Notice which countries are going up.
I'm mostly stopped feeling autistic since adolescence, but climate change is one of those times. It's obviously real, and it's also obvious that shuffling chairs in developing countries is rounding to zero effect. We're converting to cleaner energy anyways because of pollution and better economics, so the push for decarbonization in itself is... what do you call a rounding error when it's already rounding to zero?
And it's FAR from hopeless. Again, global warming is obviously happening. But the amount of adapting and reacting to it is virtually nil. Installing AC. Tree cover in every city. Start serious discussions on what level of risk we want with geoengineering.
Because yes, there absolutely is an acceptable risk level with geoengineering. Planting trees is that. Carbon capture is also that. And better and more effective tech will definitely be available.
But we're in a social climate where I don't even dare write down examples of what those more effective methods would be, because if you're not luddite enough you're the enemy.
we have had the perfect storm to do a U-turn on most fossile fuels:
- COVID pandemics: everybody at home, less traveling, massive economic reset and massive capitals injected (EU recovery funding, quantitative easing)
- Russian attack on Ucraine, stopping a big chunk of gas and petrol to Europe
- Strait of Hormuz, also chocking oil coming to the rest of the world
We could have said: "oh, let's swap those energy sources to renewables", "oh, let's bind those capitals to de-carbonization projects", "oh, let's plant trees", "oh, let's stop deforestation". A lot of things could have been said and done. But, well, a certain degree of coordinated intelligence is too much to ask.
At this point I have lost all hopes, whatever comes, we have asked for it.
Why are we framing this as "the fight against climate change"? This framing puts the culprit outside of ourselves, as if it's some external force.
I feel that way of looking at it makes changing impossible. It's our own behaviours and systems that will have to change. There's nothing to fight here, the answer instead lies in collaboration.
It’s way easy to preach vegan diets, solar/wind installations, etc. from the comfy chairs by the citizens of first world countries. But for someone living in a dirt poor country, climate change is the last thing in their mind even though they might be the hardest hit population. For them it’s about survival and meeting basic human needs.
Want to do something about this?
El Niño this year is going to be especially crazy, worst in human history by a large margin looks like. I'm putting together El Niño Climate Week to work on averting the worst impacts. It's a good opportunity to move the conversation forward about how our climate is changing very quickly.
My projects tend to be pretty good schelling points for people that like to take action, in case you're finding the comments here frustrating ("I'm not surprised", "we just need to X", "we're doomed", "it will be fine", etc etc etc)
The story does not link to the report itself, which can be found here: https://www.unep.org/resources/limiting-overshoot-navigating...
Are you saying Germany ruined it's industry for nothing?
Modern economies are addicted to growth, and asset prices are pinned to showing continued growth more than ever. As soon as any global power proposes to take a beat and re-evaluate the trajectory of innovation, they will be left behind. Global leadership is also effectively non-existent and aside from trade, no one seems to be able to really make inroads on big ticket issues. In a time where we need more collaboration that ever, governments seem to be skewing more nationalistic than ever.
Our environment will collapse and the fat cats will still deny it and convince most of us that it was our fault and that nothing could be done and that we should just buy their anti-environment-collapse products to protect ourselves.
Maybe if I develop really strong anxiety about this, it's gonna solve the problem
Geophysically, there are 3 pillars to climate stabilization:
1. Emitting fewer greenhouse gasses. Need to do that more than ever, but we are now in overshoot so…
2. Actively remove greenhouse gasses from atmosphere. Will need to do that, but land use and dirty energy trends away from net negative. Also, it’s a 100 year project once started.
3. Shade Earth. Not regions, The whole globe. There are two ways to do that:
a. Stratospheric aerosols b. Planetary sunshades in space, at Sun-Earth L1.
That’s the whole solution space, conceptually. As long as we continue to fail within that space, we will suffer compounding effects of unmitigated climate change.
Interestingly, financial markets are a good place to see the “price” of some environmental issues. As made up example: “Should I buy bonds that are backed by electricity sales from a yet-to-be-built hydroelectric dam? Will there be enough rainfall to fill the reservoir reliably? I’ll have to receive a higher interest payment to offset that risk.”
From my understanding, the West never truly committed to that goal. It just said so as a PR thing, so that the much more affected countries quiet down, because "hey hey we said 1.5°". "Oops, sorry, we tried".
The West knows that it will manage even with more than that, but it also knows that not everyone will.
Jury's still out on whether the neglect is just due to apathy or because it might be beneficial. Only time will tell.
Since land warms much faster than water, and Earth's surface is mostly water, then 1.5C average means how much land warming itself? Isn't talking in averages a way to feel better about all this?
There hasn't been a question about this in a decade or more. There was no path, even theoretically, to stopping our CO2 emissions without dramatically lowering quality of life for maybe a couple billion people.
We won't slow climate change. We can build resilience to the effects, and we have good incentives to do so. But we'll keep burning fossil fuels for a very long time.
>Climate scientist Bill Hare, CEO of Climate Analytics, said that "although UNEP does a good job of describing the hole we've dug ourselves into, it does a poor job of showing us that there's a way out."
I need to say WTF, the way out is to stop pumping CO2 into the atmosphere. That means stop using fossil fuels. How many times does this need to be said ? Already it probably has been said millions of times.
Not surprising when leader of the free world is doing such shenanigans - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/06/rwe-deal-win...
It’s surreal how quickly this went from being the most important problem in the world to barely being on anyone’s mind, all in less than a decade. I had plenty of problems with the fear-mongering and doomed-by-2030 predictions, but the current situation, where we seem basically fine with doing nothing, is genuinely scary. Technology has its limits, billions of people still aspire to a European standard of living, and global population isn’t expected to peak until near the end of this century.
I just hate this post-Trump, post-Covid, post-Russia-Ukraine-war world. I don’t know what the trigger was, but there must have been a point where things just went to shit. And here we are: an increasingly ultra-capitalistic dystopia where wealth seems to be the only thing that matters.
HN's community moderation tools seem to fail at times, so I'm responding to ssearyus's comment that is marked [dead]:
ssearyus: At the risk of being immediately downvoted, let me point out that a 250ppm CO2 level is borderline disastrous for plant life -- at 180ppm, plants would starve globally. The increased CO2 levels in recent years (slightly added to by human activities) is immensely helpful for drought-resistance, as stomata do not then need to open as much to get sufficient CO2 with the result that they transpire less water. The above, and the fact the by far the most important GHG in the atmosphere is water vapor (CO2 is comparatively a rounding error) should give reasonable people pause for thought.
My response: I think there's something you're trying to say, but it doesn't come through clearly in these many points.
- 250ppm is not disastrous for plant life. That's around preindustrial levels of CO2 (280ppm) and plants did just fine
- What do you mean by "starve" here regarding 180ppm?
- And why are you talking about 250ppm and 180ppm specifically? No one is talking about 250ppm or 180ppm as targets (or maybe you are?)
- Water vapor is indeed a greenhouse gas, and contributes to warming. But it's best thought as an accelerant. Warmer temperatures bring more water vapor bring higher temperatures, bring more water vapor etc etc. The rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is so important because it trigger in many ways a feedback loop, one of which is rise in water vapor as a greenhouse gas. The feedback loop caused by temperature/water vapor is one of the reasons we need to be very careful with our human-made emissions.
- "CO2 is comparatively a rounding error": Whether by mass or volume, CO2 is not a rounding error by comparison to water vapor. There's roughly 4 to 6 times the amount of water vapor as CO2. I wouldn't call 25% a rounding error. Maybe there's something I missed here.
- And when you say water vapor is "by far the most important GHG in the atmosphere", does that mean you're working on lowering water vapor levels in the atmosphere? Or what are you working on regarding solving for this? Maybe something with airplane cloud formation trapping heat?
We already know we need to pump the breaks on AI for a host of safety issues. However, perhaps the biggest concern is the sheer scale of electricity generation they require. One hyperscale data centre can require electricity equivalent to a fair sized city. Many data centre builders are keen to claim they'll use renewable energy sources... eventually. They'll just suck power off the grid "temporarily" or rely on "clean" natural gas for a few years. There are a decent number of states, provinces, etc. whose total emissions will double in a matter of months. Could the timing possibly be worse?
From a warming perspective, it's utter madness to let this build-out proceed unimpeded. New data centres should be required to be net-zero at power-up. Unfortunately, it's a race and the U.S. side of it has an administration that is actively rolling back policies that fight climate change.
When will the rich, say top 10% of planet decrease their emissions?
I think the conversation here is making me more depressed than the news. The number of people who don’t believe collective action is possible, who somehow believe the current techno-capitalist model is determined by god or history or whatever, who don’t have any particular knowledge about history, economic development, etc but are very happy to very loudly yell that the only thing we can do is more of the same but maybe faster - man, y’all call yourselves hackers, but you sure are an incurious and gullible lot.
Burn baby burn!
This is not bad news. At some time we should decide to get along with Mother Nature.
The Industrial party of the last 2 centuries is over. We should love the trees, the animals, the land and leave ASAP from the cities.
Unfortunately, the plutocracy has different plans.
anybody still grinding out a 9-5 for a trust fund baby at this point is wasting their life.
billionaires, boomers, decrepit old men, and o&g industry have fucked future generations and humanity.
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Buddy with all 24/7 gas powered data centers in the works we’ll be lucky to keep below 3 C.
How could this happen? I've faithfully sorted all of my recyclables into their respective bins to maximize profit for my city's garbage collection just like they asked
This is mostly the UN’s own fault. Nation governments refrain from getting “hardcore” on this because the better options are expensive and they don’t want to be undercut by another country. The UN is supposed to somehow use its deep diplomatic negotiating and deal-making skill to find and enforce agreement between these states so we all adopt the changes together… and penalise the hold-outs (we all know who) together.
Not much of a surprise. Government action has been anemic at best. Industry action (overall) has been net negative.
The only hope now is exponential growth of (solar and wind)+batteries making other sources uneconomic. This seems to be slowly happening, so I hope we hit the exponential curve soon and we're there quicker than we expect.
This only stops it.
Then, to fix it, we'll need a massive Direct Air Capture industry that will have to operate for a century, and probably past that so we can hit and maintain a CO2 level of 250ppm.