Even the crotchetiest and most out-of-touch people I know basically accept that the Earth is warming now. They just either disagree on the cause or proportion.
Some people just naturally resist hyperbole or sensationalist rhetoric, and I find it very helpful to reframe the argument from doom and gloom and fire and brimstone to something more realistic and grounded:
"The longer we put off doing something, the harder and more expensive it will be in the future. In a Pascal's Wager sort of way, many of the changes we are talking about don't even really cost us anything, and the potential that C02 is not a real culprit is more than made up by danger that it is. Making changes now is the prudent and financially sound decision."
In a large part, this is what the brief ESG trend on the stock market was briefly about before it got co-opted by a dozen different competing messages.
The problem with Pascal's wager logic is you have to change your behavior based on all kinds of crazy low-probability events. You must worship every god, be an AI-doomer, a climate-doomer, a nuclear-doomer.
Pascal's wager is generally agreed to be logically unsound, so it's somewhat insane that we've revived it in all these modern contexts. If you believe in it, at least be consistent and sacrifice a goat to Zeus every couple years.
> Even the crotchetiest and most out-of-touch people I know basically accept that the Earth is warming now
My family is fundamentalist protestant, very midwestern, and I think about half of them believe that the earth is warming. Not trying to "win", just trying to say that a lot of this depends on the crowd you interact with. I don't know the percentage, but certainly there are still way too many people that don't even believe it. The very tired response is "well i wish it would warm up here slaps knee". Using the phrase 'Climate Change' at least reduces that objection.
It doesn't; that's kind of a first-glance reading of the phrase without really thinking about it.
Something can said to change from a certain standard even if it wasn't perfectly constant to begin with. For example, if I always kept my house at 65-75 degrees for the past year, and now it's 85 degrees inside, I could certainly say that the temperature in my house recently changed and gotten warmer. That might lead me to check whether my AC's working, rather than say "well I guess the temperature has never really been constant, and 85 is within the range of possible non-constant temperatures, so everything's perfectly normal and nothing has changed."
If I pick up your house and drop it two streets over, that could be accurately described as a "location change" of your house. This is still true despite the fact that your house naturally moves some centimeters per year due to tectonic plates shifting around.
Similarly, when global average temperatures saw long term trends of a fraction of a degree of change per millennium, then suddenly started changing at multiple degrees per century, it's pretty reasonable to call that "climate change" despite the fact that it was not completely constant before.
> many of the changes we are talking about don't even really cost us anything
This is the part that seems to vary widely based on which warming alarmist you're talking to. Many of them are not saying there are things we could do that "don't even really cost us anything" that would deal with the problem--they're saying we need to devote a significant fraction of global GDP to CO2 mitigation.
Things that "don't really cost us anything" are probably happening already anyway, because, well, they don't really cost us anything.
Building a lot more nuclear power plants is the key thing that doesn't really seem to be happening right now, that would be an obvious way to eliminate a lot of CO2 emissions. But of course that does really cost us something. But it's probably the most cost effective thing we could do on a large scale.
> Building a lot more nuclear power plants is the key thing that doesn't really seem to be happening right now
I mean, this is the clear and obvious one. Nuclear theoretically should be much, much cheaper than it is if it were not for the regulatory costs thrust upon it.
It also harrows out people who are legitimately concerned from "moralist concern junkies". You'd think climate change being a global existential crisis would make people open to nuclear energy or more drastic measures like geo-engineering, but the frequency with which people refuse to compromise undercuts the their legitimacy.
Another reframing that may be useful is energy security/redundancy.
If you have a cheap source of solar panels and batteries, the only downside to installing them all over the country is up-front cost (which pays itself off quickly). The upside you gain is a substantially more robust, less centralized power grid that can continue to operate if something happens to impede your supply of fossil fuels or part of the grid gets cut off.
Looking at how things have played out elsewhere in the world the past few years, that's powerful.
I can understand people having their own reasons for dismissing the facts or the rhetoric.
What I can't wrap my head around is the conspiracy thinking around environmentalism.
What's so nefarious about clean air and water? I'll never forget when my grandmother walked out of WALL-E because she said it was government propaganda. She is a regular person, not a coal magnate or anything.
I think it's real and potentially catastrophic. But I see very little chance of (sufficient) coordinated action to mitigate it.
I.e., I think there's too much temptation for individual countries to pursue a competitive economic or military advantage by letting everyone but themselves make sacrifices.
Trump is implementing multi decade right wing fantasies in many fronts. The idea that we can't achieve anything is limiting yourself when you're in a political arena. To win, like Trump, when you get power you have to attack on many fronts, cultural, capital, legal, and approach it as a zero sum scorched earth war where norms are another obstacle in your way.
> many of the changes we are talking about don't even really cost us anything
I hear that often, but it's never followed by details about any of the actual changes that are being talked about. The ones I actually hear (especially politicians) advocate for are catastrophically expensive and dubious in their effectiveness. Banning coal or gas-powered cards might (might) be a good idea in the long run, but it definitely does cost us something.
Banning coal is a complete no-brainer at this point. Has been for quite a while. Never mind climate change, it's horribly polluting. The only reason it's still remotely economically viable is because the people who burn coal don't bear the costs of their pollution. If they actually had to compensate people for all the cancer, lung disease, poisoned ground water, contaminated seafood, and other such problems they cause, coal would vanish.
It's already to the point where the ridiculous coal fans who infest our government are forcing coal power plants to remain open when their operators want to close them because they're no longer profitable to operate.
Yes, parts of my extended family who were anti-climate change and proud went from "Global warming is a hoax", to "So what if global warming is happening" over the past 10 years.
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.'
Modern humans have existed for 60k years, all of which have been in this current icehouse.
To cast a different shade on the meaning, this climate period is rare, easily disturbed, and difficult to restore even with vastly more powerful technology.
The more common greenhouse state is unlikely to lead to a Venus runaway, but it will be hostile to us.
We might very well require the rare climate, and perish in the common.
Everyone who can hear this has already heard it. Those who continue to pretend it is not happening are either deliberately deceptive so they can continue to make money from fossil fuels or unable to change their minds when faced by evidence due to identity politics.
My impression is that almost no one denies the warming itself, just the link to greenhouse gasses. That link is unfortunately much harder to prove than rising temperatures by itself. The proof is there nonetheless, but it's easier to cast doubt on it, and that's what certain groups have been doing.
- if it's warming, it's not because of humans, (or)
- if it's warming, it's beneficial
- if it's warming because of humans and that's bad, there's nothing we can do about it
ETA: honorary mention for "what about China?"
People I've argued about this with will switch interchangeably between these. Press them hard enough on one issue, and they'll just switch to another. It's a game of whack-a-mole.
Same here. I'd also add "It's warming, caused by humans, harmful, but mitigating it would be even more harmful."
Basically, anyone capable of thinking about it logically has at this point reached the conclusion that it's real. Anyone arguing otherwise is therefore necessarily not thinking about it logically, and you have to expect things like shifting claims.
"If you look back years ago in the 1920s and the 1930s, they said global cooling will kill the world. We have to do something. Then they said global warming will kill the world, but then it started getting cooler. So now they just call it climate change because that way they can't miss. Climate change because if it goes higher or lower, whatever the hell happens, there's climate change. It's the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion. Climate change, no matter what happens, you're involved in that. No more global warming, no more global cooling. All of these predictions made by the United Nations and many others, often for bad reasons, were wrong. They were made by stupid people that have cost their country's fortunes and given those same countries no chance for success."
> "that have cost their country's fortunes and given those same countries no chance for success."
This is a weird statement coming from Trump. I wouldn't think his base would care for improving the lives and economies of other countries, specially undeveloped countries.
He frequently has campaign rallies and press conferences where he makes statements on both sides of the issue, though if the audience is limited he will tailor the message so only the side present hears the argument in their favor. Every post speech interview I've seen and heard from Trump supporters discount every thing he says that they personally disagree with and heartily approve everything he says that they agree with. Somehow he has insulated his own actions/words and his supporters, and it makes it difficult to reason with these supporters when you bring it up to them - it's quite uncanny.
I didn't even think the link to greenhouse gases is denied any more.
The merchants of doubt ran out the clock and what I hear from the former deniers I know is that it is too expensive and too late to do anything now, being warmer will be nicer, and CO2 is a fertilizer.
There are people that believe the warming, but don't believe it matters because the Earth used to be much hotter at some point in the past so it is a natural cycle. Yet they fail to realize that humans didn't exist then so there is no good reason to believe an Earth that hot can support human life.
>> My impression is that almost no one denies the warming itself, just the link to greenhouse gasses.
I fall in that category. My suspicion is that water vapor from air travel is by far the biggest contributor. I saw the blue skys after 9/11. I read the NASA guys that said daily temperature range increased measurably. I saw the blue skys again during Covid19.
I'm also of the opinion that anyone looking at historical data only going back 200,000 years or less is missing the larger picture. Sea levels are NOT at historic highs, we should expect them to rise further before receeding. We should expect glaciation again if we don't do anything, but speeding up warming IMHO is more likely to trigger glaciation that to "push through" whatever causes it and break the cycle (which would be a good thing).
So as a long-term thinker all this hype is just that. If you don't have a plan to end the glacier cycle you're just making a big deal out of a small change in time-scale due to reasons (CO2 vs H2O) that may well be the wrong ones.
Not to be contrarian, but if you cared, you could easily rule out your suspicions.
It's not even worth it to say why or how, since not even doing rudimentary research means that you aren't interested in developing a well-informed opinion.
>> Not to be contrarian, but if you cared, you could easily rule out your suspicions.
That's just false. You might try to rule it out yourself to see. My comments here and the responses demonstrate that it's a waste of time to argue against people in the purity cycle of global warming. My position is one of moderation not denial - and I'm downvoted, told I don't care, and I haven't done even the minimum of research. Pffft. HN is not what it used to be.
> My suspicion is that water vapor from air travel is by far the biggest contributor.
Have you calculated the water vapor generated from air travel, and compared that to the water vapor already generated by the water cycle? (just normal evaporation from lakes/rivers/oceans/plants)
Even as back-of-napkin math, this should be a pretty easy sanity check.
I think you're off by a few orders of magnitude here, but I also don't want to discourage you from adopting a "check for yourself" mindset.
>> Have you calculated the water vapor generated from air travel, and compared that to the water vapor already generated by the water cycle?
I've SEEN the effects with my own eyes. You can also see contrails seeding cloud formation on some days. Then there's the fact that these extra clouds are formed and dissipate on a 24 hour cycle, so part of the day they let in sunlight and part of the night they trap heat. These effects are significant and there is little research on the bigger picture effects of this (that I've seen).
Clouds reflect radiant heat back into space. Contrary to your claim, "global dimming" was a very active research space for a long time, and in fact the water vapour and other airborne pollutants likely masked the impact of global warming.
Very exciting to live in an apocalyptical era. I'm looking forward to discover which one of the several global threats to humanity will put us down first.
I wonder if we should move beyond this messaging. It’s well known to the smart half of the population that climate change is happening. There is apparently some debate on the cause. But this point is mostly irrelevant, it is problem-oriented thinking. By keeping the conversation in the problem-realm you invite troglodytes into the conversation to insert their bullshit. Instead, if we move forward with “presumption of truth” solutions-based messaging, we can start to talk about what we’re going to do.
Climate control is something more people will be on board with compared to trying to have a conversation about climate science to a person who didn’t graduate high school.
I’ve given up. I’ve long assumed for a year now we are heading for warming that is even worse than the worst projections and it’s all over. This has given me some peace, like accepting you’re going to die.
I still remain optimistic that the clever folks can avoid the absolute worst outcomes. However, I too am very frustrated that almost nobody gives a shit about the future. We are rapidly reaching the point where WE will live through the effects, and our own children will suffer much worse.
I basically see it as a moral wrong and a grave ethical failure to use fossil fuels at this point. Except for home heating, I am now close to directly powering my entire life with clean, renewable energy. It was not hard. It was expensive, but only in the short term; I have effectively prepaid for my power needs for at least the next 25 years, and over than span it is very inexpensive.
A modern EV is about the same price as any other car, goes about the same distance, and is only slightly more time to fuel in the worst case. In the typical case, you don’t think about charging at all. The fact that I can’t get my supposedly environmentally conscious family of scientists and engineers to care continues to stun me. Somehow saving money while improving the world is “a waste of money” while buying an expensive hobby vehicle or vacation home is not. Frustrating.
you will age, you will weaken, you will cease, no choice or circumstance will change that. endeavor to create something that will persist through the eons, and that part of your mind will live forever.
Maybe a way to game the modern right is to draw attention to something true so that they remember it exists, then they try to censor it, thereby triggering a Streisand effect.
I've shifted my mindset to abandon this idea that humanity will survive forever, or that we should strive to live as long as we can.
Intelligence is a scarcity and it cannot overcome the majority of people that are incredibly stupid or ignorant. So accepting that we are doomed relieves some of the stress. I won't have children to worry about their future, either.
I still live my life in such a way that minimizes my impact on the world as much as possible. I still surround myself with folks that want a better world. But there is no stopping the impending doom and I'm trying not to be miserable with the time I have.
Ultimately I think it will be a self correcting problem, but there is going to be an extremely long period of absolute hell. Global warming is eventually going to cause food and water scarcity on a level that will wipe out a huge percentage of the Earths population. Then the Earth will recover from there being fewer humans.
If in 3000 years we discover humans were completely wiped out to the last person I would be pretty surprised.
I mean, all of humanity has lived in the period between two glacial eras, I don't expect us to go beyond that. This should be clear even to people who choose to ignore the facts about climate change.
China is building clean energy for a good chunk of the world, including itself.
A better question may be: What is the US going to do to make up for its historical emissions? The US got wealthy by creating far more emissions than China, and all those historical emissions are now a problem for the rest of the world.
If people in the US try to turn climate action into a blame game, it will end very very poorly for the US.
The US can't even get countries to enter trade agreements anymore, because it's throwing around threats of large tariffs and annexation of others' lands. The world could drop the dollar as the reserve currency, something that was gradually happening but is now accelerating.
If the US starts trying to force other countries into climate action without taking into account its own contributions, the US will likely cut out of the global economy, and become far poorer as the rest of the world surpasses its wealth through vigorous trade.
The US was the sole remaining superpower, but has recently decided to only occupy a much weaker position with a mere "sphere of influence" and ceding leadership in other parts of the world to others. The US is signalling to allies in Europe that it will no longer lead, that the prior world is over and the US is bugging out, meaning Europe will gain far more influence.
The more that the US attacks others without providing any leadership, the less that the US will be able to take from the world. Up until recently, the US's position of massive economic strength was largely due to it's dominant position among nations and the goodwill that others had towards it. Turning the climate problem into a blame game on other countries would further weaken the US's position and options.
If the rest of the world wants to still have an industry once we finally decide to seriously use green technology, they should quickly catch up to China - if that's still possible.
While China is still very reliant on fossil-fuels, and particularly dirty coal, they're at the same time working on dominating the post-fossil age at astonishing speed. After they already dominate solar and batteries, they're working on doing the same for a number of other future green industries. They are already dominating future technologies like Green Methanol that most people in Europe or the US have never heard of.
Why should should per-capita be most important? If country A keeps their population stable and emissions under control, but country B of the same starting population, keeps doubling their population and doubling their emissions, why should country A have an increasingly declined allowance of emissions when they were more responsible in keeping their total emissions down (by not having as many people)?
Because per capita is the only thing that makes sense.
If China were to split into 10 countries each emitting 10% of what they do now it'd be the exact same emissions, but according to you it would be much better.
Similarly if the EU would become one country, that country would be high up on the list, much higher than member countries now! Oh no!
Looking at per capita emissions is much more fair.
Individuals can of course make choices to reduce their emissions, Americans more than most since they're starting higher. Buy less new stuff, eat less meat, fly less, etc.
But policy is where real change needs to be made, and the effects of policy still scale with population in most cases.
If country B splits into countries C, D, E and F, all of which emit less than country A, has it found an effective way to reduce emissions? Should all countries adopt the Monaco lifestyle to defeat global warming? I guess if you want to find a fair way to measure administration of land you could emmisions per hectare or rainfall.
China's emissions were 10 billion tons CO2 in 2017 and have increased every single year to 12.29 billion tons CO2 in 2024. Meanwhile, US decreased from 5.22 to 4.9 in the same time
Yeah, and don't even get me started on historic emissions.
China has only produced significant CO2/capita in the last decade. The US and Europe are responsible for the accumulated GHG that have gotten us into the current mess. We blew nearly the entire CO2 "budget" for keeping us under 2C of warming, just by ourselves, so it's kinda odd to be pointing fingers at the foreigners who are just now halfway catching up to what we're emitting now.
You can't really isolate China's emissions. They manufacture a huge proportion of the goods the rest of the world needs to operate. The green countries are essentially outsourcing their pollution to China.
The plan was always to put economic pressure on China to catch up to the rest of the developed world, but we can't exactly tell someone else to stop crapping their pants while we are still crapping our pants.
PRC solar power production last year conservatively will diplace ~45 billion barrels of oil, or 10%-20% more than total global consumption per year. It's just retarded eco accounting that attributes emissions to renewable manufacturers while fossil exporters don't get any penalties for extracting emissions.
Every year of PRC solar prevents doubling of oil, basically they're like the only significant country whose net contribution is negative for how much carbon sinks they manufacture. So the answer for US+co is obviously stop exporting oil and lng, and start exporting renewables.
The same China that, added more new solar capacity in 2024 than the US currently has total? And is currently at 36% of its total energy use from renewable sources compared to the US's 23%? And has ~32GW of nuclear plants in construction compared to the US's 2.5GW?
Nothing? China is solving the problem on their own. They already make substantially less carbon per person that most of the west. If we want to be like China it's a simple proposition: be OK with Manhattan project level investments in power transmission from places that have lots of renewables to places that need renewables.
Climate is determined by total CO2 output, not per capita.
That’s a real problem, because China, and all the poor countries in Asia and Africa aren’t going to stop increasing their CO2 output per capita until they reach western standards of living.
Sounds like we should pioneer better low-emissions tech, then, and pass it along to them. We've got more expendable income and a better tech base from which to do that.
Among other objectives, NASA's 1958 mission statement includes conducting aeronautical and space activities of the US for "the expansion of human knowledge of phenomena in the atmosphere and space".
So: atmospheric climate science directly falls under NASA's responsibilities.
we don't need evidence Earth is warming, because it's happened before humanity, and it will happen after we're gone. We need evidence that we're poisoning ourselves and the planet. Global warming's only accomplishment is giving the poisoners a pass when it was debunked. Private jets and climate change, choose one.
I know you're getting dogpiled, but global warming has been validated, not debunked.
The science behind it really got going in the 1890s, with Arrhenius' paper predicting climate sensitivity to CO2. That was bounced back and forth with rebuttals and counter-rebuttals until about 1950. Major debate points were how much role water vapor played, how this varied with temperature/altitude/pressure. (You can trace each part of the argument if you're so inclined; there's lots of neat science in there. The concept of "pressure broadening" was my favorite; it explores how spectral bands change with pressure).
Around 1950, the science started settling out. Spectrometers had improved, we had clearer view that CO2 and H2O don't fully overlap in their spectra bands through the atmosphere, and we had the computing to do better calculations. By the 1970s, we were getting ice core data showing that the world had gone through huge temperature swings, and how this changed with CO2. Enough data had accumulated that a consensus was forming. In the 1980s, scientists were now concerned enough to form a large body to inform policymakers on this issue (IPCC; 1988). And in the 40 years since then, we've mostly sat on our hands, even as the science just gets clearer and clearer.
I share all this long history to explain that the science went through nearly a century of rigorous debate even before politicians got involved. This a scientific issue, not a political one. And I'm glossing over 99.9999% of the detail here. There was an extensive literature debate between the scientists, hashing out any point you can think of. You just have to go to your local uni library and start reading.
TL;DR: saying that global warming is debunked is about as incorrect as saying that the Earth is flat. We have extensive evidence showing otherwise.
I'm pretty sure global warming isn't debunked. Yes, we should worry about all the other pollution too. But global warming is happening and we are causing it. What's different than nature doing it is the rate of change. Yes the earth was warmer in the past and would be in the future, but it has never warmed as fast as it is now.
Even the crotchetiest and most out-of-touch people I know basically accept that the Earth is warming now. They just either disagree on the cause or proportion.
Some people just naturally resist hyperbole or sensationalist rhetoric, and I find it very helpful to reframe the argument from doom and gloom and fire and brimstone to something more realistic and grounded:
"The longer we put off doing something, the harder and more expensive it will be in the future. In a Pascal's Wager sort of way, many of the changes we are talking about don't even really cost us anything, and the potential that C02 is not a real culprit is more than made up by danger that it is. Making changes now is the prudent and financially sound decision."
In a large part, this is what the brief ESG trend on the stock market was briefly about before it got co-opted by a dozen different competing messages.
The problem with Pascal's wager logic is you have to change your behavior based on all kinds of crazy low-probability events. You must worship every god, be an AI-doomer, a climate-doomer, a nuclear-doomer.
Pascal's wager is generally agreed to be logically unsound, so it's somewhat insane that we've revived it in all these modern contexts. If you believe in it, at least be consistent and sacrifice a goat to Zeus every couple years.
> Even the crotchetiest and most out-of-touch people I know basically accept that the Earth is warming now
My family is fundamentalist protestant, very midwestern, and I think about half of them believe that the earth is warming. Not trying to "win", just trying to say that a lot of this depends on the crowd you interact with. I don't know the percentage, but certainly there are still way too many people that don't even believe it. The very tired response is "well i wish it would warm up here slaps knee". Using the phrase 'Climate Change' at least reduces that objection.
"Climate Change" implies that some sort of "constant climate" is even attainable, irrespective of desirable.
It doesn't; that's kind of a first-glance reading of the phrase without really thinking about it.
Something can said to change from a certain standard even if it wasn't perfectly constant to begin with. For example, if I always kept my house at 65-75 degrees for the past year, and now it's 85 degrees inside, I could certainly say that the temperature in my house recently changed and gotten warmer. That might lead me to check whether my AC's working, rather than say "well I guess the temperature has never really been constant, and 85 is within the range of possible non-constant temperatures, so everything's perfectly normal and nothing has changed."
And you're just like the deniers who pick apart irrelevant things, and then smugly smile.
Only with an excessively literal interpretation.
If I pick up your house and drop it two streets over, that could be accurately described as a "location change" of your house. This is still true despite the fact that your house naturally moves some centimeters per year due to tectonic plates shifting around.
Similarly, when global average temperatures saw long term trends of a fraction of a degree of change per millennium, then suddenly started changing at multiple degrees per century, it's pretty reasonable to call that "climate change" despite the fact that it was not completely constant before.
> many of the changes we are talking about don't even really cost us anything
This is the part that seems to vary widely based on which warming alarmist you're talking to. Many of them are not saying there are things we could do that "don't even really cost us anything" that would deal with the problem--they're saying we need to devote a significant fraction of global GDP to CO2 mitigation.
Things that "don't really cost us anything" are probably happening already anyway, because, well, they don't really cost us anything.
Building a lot more nuclear power plants is the key thing that doesn't really seem to be happening right now, that would be an obvious way to eliminate a lot of CO2 emissions. But of course that does really cost us something. But it's probably the most cost effective thing we could do on a large scale.
> Building a lot more nuclear power plants is the key thing that doesn't really seem to be happening right now
I mean, this is the clear and obvious one. Nuclear theoretically should be much, much cheaper than it is if it were not for the regulatory costs thrust upon it.
It also harrows out people who are legitimately concerned from "moralist concern junkies". You'd think climate change being a global existential crisis would make people open to nuclear energy or more drastic measures like geo-engineering, but the frequency with which people refuse to compromise undercuts the their legitimacy.
Another reframing that may be useful is energy security/redundancy.
If you have a cheap source of solar panels and batteries, the only downside to installing them all over the country is up-front cost (which pays itself off quickly). The upside you gain is a substantially more robust, less centralized power grid that can continue to operate if something happens to impede your supply of fossil fuels or part of the grid gets cut off.
Looking at how things have played out elsewhere in the world the past few years, that's powerful.
I can understand people having their own reasons for dismissing the facts or the rhetoric.
What I can't wrap my head around is the conspiracy thinking around environmentalism.
What's so nefarious about clean air and water? I'll never forget when my grandmother walked out of WALL-E because she said it was government propaganda. She is a regular person, not a coal magnate or anything.
I'm a different kind of crotchety.
I think it's real and potentially catastrophic. But I see very little chance of (sufficient) coordinated action to mitigate it.
I.e., I think there's too much temptation for individual countries to pursue a competitive economic or military advantage by letting everyone but themselves make sacrifices.
I hope I'm wrong.
Luckily the effect is much larger in the opposite direction: weaning oneself off of foreign oil is a huge advantage both economically and militarily.
Trump is implementing multi decade right wing fantasies in many fronts. The idea that we can't achieve anything is limiting yourself when you're in a political arena. To win, like Trump, when you get power you have to attack on many fronts, cultural, capital, legal, and approach it as a zero sum scorched earth war where norms are another obstacle in your way.
> many of the changes we are talking about don't even really cost us anything
I hear that often, but it's never followed by details about any of the actual changes that are being talked about. The ones I actually hear (especially politicians) advocate for are catastrophically expensive and dubious in their effectiveness. Banning coal or gas-powered cards might (might) be a good idea in the long run, but it definitely does cost us something.
Banning coal is a complete no-brainer at this point. Has been for quite a while. Never mind climate change, it's horribly polluting. The only reason it's still remotely economically viable is because the people who burn coal don't bear the costs of their pollution. If they actually had to compensate people for all the cancer, lung disease, poisoned ground water, contaminated seafood, and other such problems they cause, coal would vanish.
It's already to the point where the ridiculous coal fans who infest our government are forcing coal power plants to remain open when their operators want to close them because they're no longer profitable to operate.
Yes, parts of my extended family who were anti-climate change and proud went from "Global warming is a hoax", to "So what if global warming is happening" over the past 10 years.
Reposting a previous comment...
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.'
Modern humans have existed for 60k years, all of which have been in this current icehouse.
To cast a different shade on the meaning, this climate period is rare, easily disturbed, and difficult to restore even with vastly more powerful technology. The more common greenhouse state is unlikely to lead to a Venus runaway, but it will be hostile to us.
We might very well require the rare climate, and perish in the common.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_and_icehouse_Earthh...
Previous climate changes happened over tens of thousands of years. This one is happening in decades.
It's the speed, not the magnitude that matters. Change faster than evolution and migration will destroy ecosystems.
Finally a human with a context window larger than a few hundred years.
Difficult is good. It makes it more competitive. It levels up the game.
>There is unequivocal evidence that Earth is warming at an unprecedented rate. Human activity is the principal cause.
This document was last updated in October 2024, but I am a little surprised to see this still available on a .gov site.
We've already lost the battle to prevent catastrophic change:
https://davidsuzuki.org/story/is-it-too-late-to-escape-clima...
And 7 of 9 boundaries have been crossed?
https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-bound...
This is starting to look more like the movie _Don't Look Up_.
Wasn’t that film explicitly about climate change denial?
Well it was a metaphor I guess but I certainly took it that way.
Oops, someone forgot to delete or redact it.
Maybe they shouldn’t have the “Do scientists agree on climate change?” link go to 404. ;)
Everyone who can hear this has already heard it. Those who continue to pretend it is not happening are either deliberately deceptive so they can continue to make money from fossil fuels or unable to change their minds when faced by evidence due to identity politics.
My impression is that almost no one denies the warming itself, just the link to greenhouse gasses. That link is unfortunately much harder to prove than rising temperatures by itself. The proof is there nonetheless, but it's easier to cast doubt on it, and that's what certain groups have been doing.
I've seen the full-court denial:
- it's not warming, or not significantly
- if it's warming, it's not because of humans, (or)
- if it's warming, it's beneficial
- if it's warming because of humans and that's bad, there's nothing we can do about it
ETA: honorary mention for "what about China?"
People I've argued about this with will switch interchangeably between these. Press them hard enough on one issue, and they'll just switch to another. It's a game of whack-a-mole.
Or "Why does 2 degrees matter?"
Because when were 4 degrees cooler, NYC was under 1000 feet of ice. We really don't want to find out what 4 degrees hotter is like.
Wait really? 1000 feet is insane.
It was actually about 2000 feet. The Laurentide ice sheet, it was 3 kilometers / ten thousand feet thick in some parts.
Same here. I'd also add "It's warming, caused by humans, harmful, but mitigating it would be even more harmful."
Basically, anyone capable of thinking about it logically has at this point reached the conclusion that it's real. Anyone arguing otherwise is therefore necessarily not thinking about it logically, and you have to expect things like shifting claims.
But POTUS 5 months ago:
"If you look back years ago in the 1920s and the 1930s, they said global cooling will kill the world. We have to do something. Then they said global warming will kill the world, but then it started getting cooler. So now they just call it climate change because that way they can't miss. Climate change because if it goes higher or lower, whatever the hell happens, there's climate change. It's the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion. Climate change, no matter what happens, you're involved in that. No more global warming, no more global cooling. All of these predictions made by the United Nations and many others, often for bad reasons, were wrong. They were made by stupid people that have cost their country's fortunes and given those same countries no chance for success."
https://rollcall.com/factbase/trump/transcript/donald-trump-...
> "that have cost their country's fortunes and given those same countries no chance for success."
This is a weird statement coming from Trump. I wouldn't think his base would care for improving the lives and economies of other countries, specially undeveloped countries.
He frequently has campaign rallies and press conferences where he makes statements on both sides of the issue, though if the audience is limited he will tailor the message so only the side present hears the argument in their favor. Every post speech interview I've seen and heard from Trump supporters discount every thing he says that they personally disagree with and heartily approve everything he says that they agree with. Somehow he has insulated his own actions/words and his supporters, and it makes it difficult to reason with these supporters when you bring it up to them - it's quite uncanny.
I mean, he's saying everyone else who tried to do something about climate change had bad results, so let's do nothing and we'll be better off.
Doesn't seem weird to say that if you want to do nothing.
I didn't even think the link to greenhouse gases is denied any more.
The merchants of doubt ran out the clock and what I hear from the former deniers I know is that it is too expensive and too late to do anything now, being warmer will be nicer, and CO2 is a fertilizer.
A friend of mine says he was convinced by https://xkcd.com/1732/
Even the qualification "in the last 10,000" years gives the doubters something else to dismiss global warming.
There are people that believe the warming, but don't believe it matters because the Earth used to be much hotter at some point in the past so it is a natural cycle. Yet they fail to realize that humans didn't exist then so there is no good reason to believe an Earth that hot can support human life.
>> My impression is that almost no one denies the warming itself, just the link to greenhouse gasses.
I fall in that category. My suspicion is that water vapor from air travel is by far the biggest contributor. I saw the blue skys after 9/11. I read the NASA guys that said daily temperature range increased measurably. I saw the blue skys again during Covid19.
I'm also of the opinion that anyone looking at historical data only going back 200,000 years or less is missing the larger picture. Sea levels are NOT at historic highs, we should expect them to rise further before receeding. We should expect glaciation again if we don't do anything, but speeding up warming IMHO is more likely to trigger glaciation that to "push through" whatever causes it and break the cycle (which would be a good thing).
So as a long-term thinker all this hype is just that. If you don't have a plan to end the glacier cycle you're just making a big deal out of a small change in time-scale due to reasons (CO2 vs H2O) that may well be the wrong ones.
Not to be contrarian, but if you cared, you could easily rule out your suspicions.
It's not even worth it to say why or how, since not even doing rudimentary research means that you aren't interested in developing a well-informed opinion.
>> Not to be contrarian, but if you cared, you could easily rule out your suspicions.
That's just false. You might try to rule it out yourself to see. My comments here and the responses demonstrate that it's a waste of time to argue against people in the purity cycle of global warming. My position is one of moderation not denial - and I'm downvoted, told I don't care, and I haven't done even the minimum of research. Pffft. HN is not what it used to be.
It took me about five seconds to find this: https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/why-do-we-blame-climate-chan...
Do you have any reason to believe otherwise besides a couple of anecdotes about looking at the sky and short-term temperature variations?
> My suspicion is that water vapor from air travel is by far the biggest contributor.
Have you calculated the water vapor generated from air travel, and compared that to the water vapor already generated by the water cycle? (just normal evaporation from lakes/rivers/oceans/plants)
Even as back-of-napkin math, this should be a pretty easy sanity check.
I think you're off by a few orders of magnitude here, but I also don't want to discourage you from adopting a "check for yourself" mindset.
>> Have you calculated the water vapor generated from air travel, and compared that to the water vapor already generated by the water cycle?
I've SEEN the effects with my own eyes. You can also see contrails seeding cloud formation on some days. Then there's the fact that these extra clouds are formed and dissipate on a 24 hour cycle, so part of the day they let in sunlight and part of the night they trap heat. These effects are significant and there is little research on the bigger picture effects of this (that I've seen).
Clouds reflect radiant heat back into space. Contrary to your claim, "global dimming" was a very active research space for a long time, and in fact the water vapour and other airborne pollutants likely masked the impact of global warming.
Very exciting to live in an apocalyptical era. I'm looking forward to discover which one of the several global threats to humanity will put us down first.
> Very exciting to live in an apocalyptical era
Reminds me of that advice about depression more generally. Something like
"If you can't be optimistic, settle for being curious about the way it all unfolds"
Kids alive today will get to see some wild shit toward the end of the century.
I think the smart money is still on nuclear war, but the competition is getting fierce these days.
I think there's a strong argument for generalized systems collapse. It's a silent civilization killer, could be happening right now!
I wonder if we should move beyond this messaging. It’s well known to the smart half of the population that climate change is happening. There is apparently some debate on the cause. But this point is mostly irrelevant, it is problem-oriented thinking. By keeping the conversation in the problem-realm you invite troglodytes into the conversation to insert their bullshit. Instead, if we move forward with “presumption of truth” solutions-based messaging, we can start to talk about what we’re going to do.
Climate control is something more people will be on board with compared to trying to have a conversation about climate science to a person who didn’t graduate high school.
Maybe those who didn't graduate shouldn't get to vote?
IQ test, global events test and platform tests to be able to vote.
I’ve given up. I’ve long assumed for a year now we are heading for warming that is even worse than the worst projections and it’s all over. This has given me some peace, like accepting you’re going to die.
Same, sadly. I’ve done far more than my part, and even my direct family hasn’t, let alone the rest of the country, the world.
I only hope I can have a decent life until it ends, and I hope it takes slightly longer than I think it will.
I still remain optimistic that the clever folks can avoid the absolute worst outcomes. However, I too am very frustrated that almost nobody gives a shit about the future. We are rapidly reaching the point where WE will live through the effects, and our own children will suffer much worse.
I basically see it as a moral wrong and a grave ethical failure to use fossil fuels at this point. Except for home heating, I am now close to directly powering my entire life with clean, renewable energy. It was not hard. It was expensive, but only in the short term; I have effectively prepaid for my power needs for at least the next 25 years, and over than span it is very inexpensive.
A modern EV is about the same price as any other car, goes about the same distance, and is only slightly more time to fuel in the worst case. In the typical case, you don’t think about charging at all. The fact that I can’t get my supposedly environmentally conscious family of scientists and engineers to care continues to stun me. Somehow saving money while improving the world is “a waste of money” while buying an expensive hobby vehicle or vacation home is not. Frustrating.
you will age, you will weaken, you will cease, no choice or circumstance will change that. endeavor to create something that will persist through the eons, and that part of your mind will live forever.
Oh wow, a true statement on a government website. I'm sure they'll take it down within a day.
Maybe a way to game the modern right is to draw attention to something true so that they remember it exists, then they try to censor it, thereby triggering a Streisand effect.
I've shifted my mindset to abandon this idea that humanity will survive forever, or that we should strive to live as long as we can.
Intelligence is a scarcity and it cannot overcome the majority of people that are incredibly stupid or ignorant. So accepting that we are doomed relieves some of the stress. I won't have children to worry about their future, either.
I still live my life in such a way that minimizes my impact on the world as much as possible. I still surround myself with folks that want a better world. But there is no stopping the impending doom and I'm trying not to be miserable with the time I have.
Ultimately I think it will be a self correcting problem, but there is going to be an extremely long period of absolute hell. Global warming is eventually going to cause food and water scarcity on a level that will wipe out a huge percentage of the Earths population. Then the Earth will recover from there being fewer humans.
If in 3000 years we discover humans were completely wiped out to the last person I would be pretty surprised.
Toba catastrophe theory:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youngest_Toba_eruption#Toba_ca...
Agree, this is how excesses always get corrected in nature.
I mean, all of humanity has lived in the period between two glacial eras, I don't expect us to go beyond that. This should be clear even to people who choose to ignore the facts about climate change.
Humans won’t get wiped out, not by global warming atleast. It’s just going to suck and a lot of us will die.
Why did the Trump regime not discover and eradicate this heretical sentence?
It will now.
So what are we going to do about China?
We don't have to do anything about China, "China’s CO2 emissions have now been ‘flat or falling’ for 21 months"
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-ha...
China is building clean energy for a good chunk of the world, including itself.
A better question may be: What is the US going to do to make up for its historical emissions? The US got wealthy by creating far more emissions than China, and all those historical emissions are now a problem for the rest of the world.
If people in the US try to turn climate action into a blame game, it will end very very poorly for the US.
>If people in the US try to turn climate action into a blame game, it will end very very poorly for the US.
Pure fantasy. What will happen to the US and who will do it to us?
The US can't even get countries to enter trade agreements anymore, because it's throwing around threats of large tariffs and annexation of others' lands. The world could drop the dollar as the reserve currency, something that was gradually happening but is now accelerating.
If the US starts trying to force other countries into climate action without taking into account its own contributions, the US will likely cut out of the global economy, and become far poorer as the rest of the world surpasses its wealth through vigorous trade.
The US was the sole remaining superpower, but has recently decided to only occupy a much weaker position with a mere "sphere of influence" and ceding leadership in other parts of the world to others. The US is signalling to allies in Europe that it will no longer lead, that the prior world is over and the US is bugging out, meaning Europe will gain far more influence.
The more that the US attacks others without providing any leadership, the less that the US will be able to take from the world. Up until recently, the US's position of massive economic strength was largely due to it's dominant position among nations and the goodwill that others had towards it. Turning the climate problem into a blame game on other countries would further weaken the US's position and options.
Climate reparations now!
If the rest of the world wants to still have an industry once we finally decide to seriously use green technology, they should quickly catch up to China - if that's still possible.
While China is still very reliant on fossil-fuels, and particularly dirty coal, they're at the same time working on dominating the post-fossil age at astonishing speed. After they already dominate solar and batteries, they're working on doing the same for a number of other future green industries. They are already dominating future technologies like Green Methanol that most people in Europe or the US have never heard of.
A troll response I presume. Or perhaps sarcasm without the indicator.
Not a troll comment. China produces as much or more CO2 as much as the next 5 countries combined.
It's logical to start with the king of greenhouse emissions if you want to stop global warming.
Not per capita. The US is still the worst large country. If you account for offshoring manufacturing then the US looks even worse.
https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-greenhouse-gas-emissions
The climate doesn’t care about per capita obviously.
Climate doesn't care about political borders either.
But per capita is more informative when thinking about policy for curbing emissions, which is how we actually change our effect on the climate.
Why should should per-capita be most important? If country A keeps their population stable and emissions under control, but country B of the same starting population, keeps doubling their population and doubling their emissions, why should country A have an increasingly declined allowance of emissions when they were more responsible in keeping their total emissions down (by not having as many people)?
Because per capita is the only thing that makes sense.
If China were to split into 10 countries each emitting 10% of what they do now it'd be the exact same emissions, but according to you it would be much better.
Similarly if the EU would become one country, that country would be high up on the list, much higher than member countries now! Oh no!
Looking at per capita emissions is much more fair.
Anyway, China's emissions are falling since last year ( https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-ha... ). What's the US doing?
It can't realistically be solved at a per capita level though
Individuals can of course make choices to reduce their emissions, Americans more than most since they're starting higher. Buy less new stuff, eat less meat, fly less, etc.
But policy is where real change needs to be made, and the effects of policy still scale with population in most cases.
Maybe we should start trying before we conclude that.
If country B splits into countries C, D, E and F, all of which emit less than country A, has it found an effective way to reduce emissions? Should all countries adopt the Monaco lifestyle to defeat global warming? I guess if you want to find a fair way to measure administration of land you could emmisions per hectare or rainfall.
China has a declining population, and had a one-child policy for many years.
Also, you don’t want all the low-population countries to each start contributing as much to global warming as the US.
Because some countries pay others to pollute in their stead?
Because country A just outsourced their emission production to country B.
China is rapidly going green.
Is the US even more rapidly going green? https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/co2?hideControls=false&...
China's emissions were 10 billion tons CO2 in 2017 and have increased every single year to 12.29 billion tons CO2 in 2024. Meanwhile, US decreased from 5.22 to 4.9 in the same time
Both these trends have reversed in 2025.
US emissions icreased by 2.5% https://rhg.com/research/us-greenhouse-gas-emissions-2025/
China's emmisions have decreased by <1% https://e360.yale.edu/digest/china-emissions-decline
1/4 the population. Per capita we are 65% worse not considering how much of China's pollution is on our behalf
Yeah, and don't even get me started on historic emissions.
China has only produced significant CO2/capita in the last decade. The US and Europe are responsible for the accumulated GHG that have gotten us into the current mess. We blew nearly the entire CO2 "budget" for keeping us under 2C of warming, just by ourselves, so it's kinda odd to be pointing fingers at the foreigners who are just now halfway catching up to what we're emitting now.
There is no need for ordering right? All countries can start acting at the same time.
You can't really isolate China's emissions. They manufacture a huge proportion of the goods the rest of the world needs to operate. The green countries are essentially outsourcing their pollution to China.
The plan was always to put economic pressure on China to catch up to the rest of the developed world, but we can't exactly tell someone else to stop crapping their pants while we are still crapping our pants.
Emulate them?
PRC solar power production last year conservatively will diplace ~45 billion barrels of oil, or 10%-20% more than total global consumption per year. It's just retarded eco accounting that attributes emissions to renewable manufacturers while fossil exporters don't get any penalties for extracting emissions.
Every year of PRC solar prevents doubling of oil, basically they're like the only significant country whose net contribution is negative for how much carbon sinks they manufacture. So the answer for US+co is obviously stop exporting oil and lng, and start exporting renewables.
The same China that, added more new solar capacity in 2024 than the US currently has total? And is currently at 36% of its total energy use from renewable sources compared to the US's 23%? And has ~32GW of nuclear plants in construction compared to the US's 2.5GW?
I hope we steal their playbook.
China is going to be fully green in a decade or two. India in 3 or 4.
Nothing? China is solving the problem on their own. They already make substantially less carbon per person that most of the west. If we want to be like China it's a simple proposition: be OK with Manhattan project level investments in power transmission from places that have lots of renewables to places that need renewables.
Climate is determined by total CO2 output, not per capita.
That’s a real problem, because China, and all the poor countries in Asia and Africa aren’t going to stop increasing their CO2 output per capita until they reach western standards of living.
Sounds like we should pioneer better low-emissions tech, then, and pass it along to them. We've got more expendable income and a better tech base from which to do that.
Can’t wait for trump and his gestapo to deport the entirety of nasa for telling the truth
Why does NASA even have to do this? Build some cool rockets and get us to mars.
Among other objectives, NASA's 1958 mission statement includes conducting aeronautical and space activities of the US for "the expansion of human knowledge of phenomena in the atmosphere and space".
So: atmospheric climate science directly falls under NASA's responsibilities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Aeronautics_and_Space...
NASA launches and operates Earth-observing satellites for measuring the weather and climate.
Living on Mars long-term is a practical impossibility. Certainly much, much harder than living on even a climate-changed Earth.
Humans have done a lot of things we once thought were impossible.
we don't need evidence Earth is warming, because it's happened before humanity, and it will happen after we're gone. We need evidence that we're poisoning ourselves and the planet. Global warming's only accomplishment is giving the poisoners a pass when it was debunked. Private jets and climate change, choose one.
They predicted a warming planet based on human activity as long ago as the 50s
We’ve known about the mechanisms of CO2 leading to atmospheric warming since the 19th century.
We know humans are adding CO2 to the atmosphere.
We observe higher CO2 and warmer temps
The evidence isn’t that complicated.
I know you're getting dogpiled, but global warming has been validated, not debunked.
The science behind it really got going in the 1890s, with Arrhenius' paper predicting climate sensitivity to CO2. That was bounced back and forth with rebuttals and counter-rebuttals until about 1950. Major debate points were how much role water vapor played, how this varied with temperature/altitude/pressure. (You can trace each part of the argument if you're so inclined; there's lots of neat science in there. The concept of "pressure broadening" was my favorite; it explores how spectral bands change with pressure).
Around 1950, the science started settling out. Spectrometers had improved, we had clearer view that CO2 and H2O don't fully overlap in their spectra bands through the atmosphere, and we had the computing to do better calculations. By the 1970s, we were getting ice core data showing that the world had gone through huge temperature swings, and how this changed with CO2. Enough data had accumulated that a consensus was forming. In the 1980s, scientists were now concerned enough to form a large body to inform policymakers on this issue (IPCC; 1988). And in the 40 years since then, we've mostly sat on our hands, even as the science just gets clearer and clearer.
I share all this long history to explain that the science went through nearly a century of rigorous debate even before politicians got involved. This a scientific issue, not a political one. And I'm glossing over 99.9999% of the detail here. There was an extensive literature debate between the scientists, hashing out any point you can think of. You just have to go to your local uni library and start reading.
TL;DR: saying that global warming is debunked is about as incorrect as saying that the Earth is flat. We have extensive evidence showing otherwise.
I'm pretty sure global warming isn't debunked. Yes, we should worry about all the other pollution too. But global warming is happening and we are causing it. What's different than nature doing it is the rate of change. Yes the earth was warmer in the past and would be in the future, but it has never warmed as fast as it is now.