I guess time zones are driving a significantly US-centric response. My company works on climate repair. We're just a four person menlo park startup so far with some pilots in the field but we have a couple of billion in our sales pipeline, entirely based on people who have sought us out. Global spend on climate doubled last year and is on a tear this year. Recent events, from the closure of the gulf of Hormuz to the huge fires in Europe have stiffened peoples' resolve.
Sure, the US cut spending since early '25, but even before those cuts, the US was less than 8% of global spending on climate intervention. But it's destructive: though we're based in the US, there is no commercial interest in the states and all our pipeline is outside the country.
Climate denialism is extremely destructive, but it's pretty much entirely a phenomenon of USA, Russia, Germany, Netherlands, France, UK, Canada, and Australia (crudely ranked by % of population), plus of course some gulf states. One of our three founders is an anthropologist and her field work has found that hardly anyone outside the top of the OECD has any doubt that the climate is changing and affecting them directly.
There's not enough happening but the derivative feels strongly positive.
I wondered where this article got the idea that "half the planet" would die "in 26 years or less" with 3°C of warming. It appears to be a misreading of the table in https://actuaries.org.uk/media/ni4erlna/planetary-solvency.p... "Figure 12: Planetary solvency risk impact and likelihood definitions (illustrative)" qualified by "A risk impact matrix is a methodology for ranking potential impacts, not a prediction or
central scenario."
In particular, they rate ≥50% mortality as Extreme and also rate warming by 3°C or more by 2050 as Extreme (this is relevant for the colorful severity/likelihood grids that are the focus of the paper) and somebody appears to have made the incorrect connection that an Extreme climate would cause Extreme mortality, and also by the time the Extreme climate is reached and not afterwards. Elsewhere, the paper mentions that "We have not
shown an assessment for mortality in this illustration, as very
limited research has been carried out on the potential for
large-scale loss of life in relation to these interconnected risks on which to base an assessment."
Unfortunately, that makes the article title highly ironic.
The report does include a >50% human mortality extreme category and the author of the article is referring to a separate report suggesting 3°C is much more likely than expected. I think it's pretty reasonable to think that an extreme climate would cause extreme mortality. The report is pretty confusing to digest.
But because you think that particular consequence is overstated in the article, you're suggesting that the article itself is a lie? The title refers to the lie that we still have more time and that we don't need to get to work immediately to address climate change. It's about the overall lackadaisical attitude toward the climate emergency.
You seem to be suggesting a dismissal of the article's core message.
So, are you suggesting that we actually have plenty of time to deal with climate change, and that things like "Net Zero by 2050" correctly convey the severity of the situation?
What is your assessment of the current year number of deaths attributable to climate change, and expected number of deaths at a 3°C above baseline global average temperature?
Thank you for putting this here. While I do believe in climate change, I could not finish reading the article as it seemed like the authors opinions are led more by emotions rather than facts. And gourds.
Not to mention that if we limited access to fossil fuels today, billions of people would be dead within months. If we turned off the spigot, billions would starve and civilization would collapse quicker than you could say climate change
It's quite striking to note how media coverage of climate change and pollution have gone down so much. I remember in the 90's it was very much in the popular mileu.
What's more we are living through an actual green revolution. Solar power and batteries have never been so cheap - and still promising to get cheaper and better with sodium ion batteries.
In the 90s it was something to deal with later. Now that it's something to deal with right now, of course they won't cover it. In a few decades they'll cover it again, but only to say how it's too late now.
Another factor is that rich oil and gas people figured out they could just buy the media.
> Another factor is that rich oil and gas people figured out they could just buy the media.
Who is this "media"? Is this the same "media" that Trump and his dullards claim is so corrupt and contrary to The Truth? Are you influenced by this "media"? I don't read The Guardian or Jacobin, but I'm occasionally exposed to their headlines and they are certainly reporting on climate change. Are they part of the "media"?
There is no monoculture "media" and to the extent there is, it is (in the US at least) overwhelmingly left-leaning. And ironically, when there were fewer outlets for information, those outlets (because they served such a large and diverse audience) hewed to a common sense/conventional wisdom understanding of the facts.
No is one controlling media. Maybe the CCP through TikTok steering.
> Is this the same "media" that Trump and his dullards claim is so corrupt and contrary to The Truth? Are you influenced by this "media"? I don't read The Guardian or Jacobin, but I'm occasionally exposed to their headlines and they are certainly reporting on climate change. Are they part of the "media"?
This would have any meaning behind it if e.g. Jacobin had the same reach and viewership as Fox News. But it doesn't, so your entire argument rests on false assumptions.
Thermal systems are slow. On the planetary scale of pump and dump heat the lag is something like 30 years. So the change you’re experiencing today is the effect of what was exhausted in the 90s. What we’re getting in 2050 is already locked in.
I don't disagree but I feel like this comment chain kinda implies taking action today would actually meaningfully change the trajectory too...
It really doesn't.
Climate change is a global problem. It would need a global solution, and everyone should know that that's beyond unlikely to appear... So the only thing you can do is reduce local pollution - which is meaningful in it's way (better quality of life), but has no long term impact on the climate.
Some reports indicate it is already to late for emission reduction, or even elimination, to halt the feedback effects that continue the trend. But it won't be too late for active climate engineering until the effects of the climate change prevent our ability to do that engineering.
Because photosynthesis grinds to a halt at about 40c. This is what people are missing. Climate change isn’t the world hiding in their apartments with the AC blasting, its cities burning a week after everything seemed fine.
Civilisation takes millennia of stable, plentiful resources to create, and a week without food for 30 percent of the population to utterly destroy.
I’d love to be wrong, if you disagree please say why.
Climate change is no food next year because this year's heat wave killed all the crops. If we're unlucky. But there's still next year to get unlucky. And the year after that. And the year after that.
The bigger factor is probably the global pandemic, economic degradation, looming nuclear winter, genocide, WW3, aliens, and singularity. Not to mention orange clowns. We have surpassed the Britney Spears controversy era. Unless the polar bears are going to invade DC and attack ICE, we might not hear much about the climate change until these other problems go away.
That is fundamentally the problem with whole thing. Vast majority of population on Earth is not ready for personal sacrifices needed. And if some government will get to around it, I am pretty sure they will be replaced and most things are rolled back.
My guess is that we somehow end up geoengineering it with even more debt...
I agree, because (and I'm being a bit flippant) I sure as hell am not giving up my gas stove while billionaires fly around in private jets and MAGA guys are coal-rolling in their F-250s...
It seems to me that carbon capture technology plus renewables and nuclear + dream energy (fission) will be the future but we're probably not going to go off of fossil fuels much, which will necessitate in part the need to suck this stuff out of the atmosphere.
CO2 capture and planetary albedo management are going to be the only way. For cO2 capture to be meaningful, we need to increase our planetary energy production by 2 or 3x so we can put that energy into sequestration, and obviously those gains cannot be based on fossil fuels. Albedo management is much faster to roll out, but will have a lot of pushback because it will also create locally undesirable outcomes.
The tipping point is one bad summer. Photosynthesis stops at 40-45c (some plants like cactuses can do night processing based on stored energy, but staple crops don’t do that). If we have just one bad summer, billions will die. Civilization is perpetually just a week or two without food for 30 percent of the population away from complete collapse, and it takes thousands of years of stable conditions to recreate.
If we have a bad summer in the northern hemisphere, we could easily lose the capability to sequester carbon or manage planetary albedo in a meaningful way. Stopping emissions is not a solution at this point, we are already way too deep in self reinforcing methane loops for that to even be the primary factor in warming acceleration.
Why would they be when they see the hypocrisy of the chattering classes? How many celebrities or billionaires have curtailed their own lifestyles while pitching for climate change? Has the number of luxury jets and superyatches gone up or down over time?
The average person may seem stupid but they are paying attention to the actions, and it all sounds like "I got mine, screw yours" to them.
Hypocrisy is really not as useful as people think. Imagine if some man, who beat his wife, made a career of talking about the important and harrowing issues of domestic abuse.
People would rightly scratch their heads at such an over-the-top hypocrite. But surely, the man would be correct: domestic abuse is an important issue. And imagine a response from the peanut gallery? "I'm not going to stop beating my _own_ wife until that hypocrite gets his comeuppance!"
And people in developing countries complain that "why should beef or jet vacations be taxed more, those Westerners got to enjoy it, and now when we want to enjoy it, it's suddenly bad?".
And we rich Westerners think it's sacrifice to have to drive an EV or pay more for beef...
at the end of the day 'personal changes' as a fix for climate change are just another lie big corporations fed us to make it feel like the onus was on a personal level.
the amount of co2 that industries pollute and that various regulation would be able to change is multiple orders of magnitude compared to regular personal responsibility.
Personal changes against the grain or personal changes following the grain.
Imagine I want to be responsible by drinking soy milk but it's hidden in a corner of the supermarket.
Now imagine every supermarket prominently displays soy milk and cow milk is hidden in the corner. Seems easier to make the change, right? Many people will change automatically because they don't really care and just do what's easiest.
This sounds right. An individual person can’t change a complex system that gives him everything they have, from plastic forks to gas cars. The society can get together and agree on things, but the society clearly just isn’t concerned enough. There is no solution or workaround to this, unless certain scientific discoveries get made that change the warming trends by sheer coincidence. They would have to coincide with popular demand, like more attractive electric cars, and new materials, or fusion energy that’s cheap. Or, perhaps, AGI decide it for us.
In some cases it might be and others it might not. In many cases that's going to be extremely hard to measure and equality might not even be desirable.
For the accumulation of wealth and power. This is the natural consequence of unregulated capitalist incentives. Do you think the corporations care about the individuals?
I suppose you can see it that way, but ultimately the power is mostly in the hands of individuals, either by voting in elections or voting with their wallets.
However, this does not mean corporations aren't actively trying to influence and manipulate them, or that they don't exert pressure on politicians. Aren't Americans responsible as a whole for electing Donald Trump, for example?
Over 70% of Americans oppose data centers being built in their local area, yet they continue to be built, even when local elected representatives publicly oppose it. It's easy to see who really has the power and how futile elections can be.
Frankly, the self reinforcing methane loops we have already triggered make emissions almost irrelevant at this point. If we want a planet compatible with human prosperity, we have no choice but to do planetary scale geoengineering; albedo management and metascale carbon capture are really the only options at this point. We crossed the rubicon a few years ago and even stopping emissions altogether tomorrow won’t stop the avalanche at this point. It would buy us a few decades, at best.
Well "climate change" as understood today wasn't really talked about much in the 90s, as I remember it. Some broad, apocalyptic concern about creeping temperatures and knock on effects over many decades.
But I do remember quite a bit about "pollution" and like general acute environmental issues. Smog in LA, the hole in the ozone, etc. Those were both more understandable and visible to your average person and more tractable. And there was the obvious hook about energy independence after the fairly recent (at that time) oil embargo and such.
The Green party (are they still around?) talked about more vague issues like ocean plastic and six pack wrappers on birds, but I don't think we made a ton of progress there, but then that was less consequential anyway.
I feel like we went down the worst timeline since then when it became very political and people burn gas for the hell of it, and others hate people who do so. Solar and nuclear (or hell even just solar) could give us clean, cheap energy abundance, but the people championing solar tend not to do it from the abundance perspective, but in tandem with cutting energy use which is a hard sell and not necessary anyway, in my opinion.
Did you forget the Earth Summit and its Climate Change Convention? Or the Kyoto Protocol?
Both sat at the top of the news agenda for months! Not to mention years of features, long-form journalism, and documentaries. And then the denialist backlash began to kick off in the late 90s, which (initially) added to the media storm.
Its because society has decided that anyone talking about climate change is rude
It isnt nice to talk about climate change because it's become extremely obvious that blaming the rich and the government is not working. The responsibility lies on the 8 billion individuals making excuses.
So the news isn't really covering it anymore because PEOPLE COMPLAIN.
Are you asking for data to show there's reduced media coverage about climate change? If you look at the article there's a graph in there from Media Matters showing the decline. This isn't reddit, here you're expected to do more than read the headline ;)
No it doesn't. That graph shows minutes of coverage on ABC, CBS, and NBC, and FOX; a cherry picked stat that excludes newspapers, magazines, any non-American media, as well as major networks like MSNOW, or entertainment like Last Week Tonight. This study is more accurate, and less sensationalist.
I was reading somewhere that we are already fucked even if we were to completely halt greenhouse emissions today. Apparently we kickstarted some positive feedback loop (I think it was the thawing of the permafrost in Siberia/Canada) which releases enormous quantities of Methane and that with the higher temperatures we already reached we decreased Earth albedo as there is less snow/ice reflecting light into space.
I really hope that particular article was wrong, because the alternative is that we have to resort to geo engineering. Considering that the governments can't really coordinate in preventing this, I don't see them coordinate in fixing it, especially because the scale and costs of the "fixes" are astronomical.
I think this has to do with the fact that the public has caught on to greenwashing. One example that sticks out in my head is the "save a tree use a plastic bag" thing. I think the appeal to environmentalism was enough to change customer behavior, or at least not cause resistance, but the real motivation for the change was probably financial.
While it's great that green energy is now economically feasible, the idea that there will quickly (say, in the next 50 years) be a "green transition" that eliminates the usage of carbon fuels is still highly dubious.
What we've seen is new renewable capacity carving out a tiny sliver in the energy mix, sometimes even being able to meet all new demand in the installation period, but we still have all the existing demand running on the old stack.
There's also the fact that global society is not a real time strategy game being managed by a well intentioned min-maxing actor driving compounding efficiency gains in resource usage. It's a free for all where everyone is paranoid that they'll be destroyed if they don't use every dirty trick they can (on a global geopolitical level), entrenched oligarchies permanently lobbying for their inefficient, destructive structures to continue (on a domestic economy level) and so on.
Which shows how badly the popular media cover hard news. "Social justice" is all the rage now thrown together with anything else that's exciting to watch on video.
Just in case you miss it: The author of the post, Adam McKay, "is the Academy Award-winning director of The Big Short, Vice, and Don’t Look Up and the founder of Yellow Dot Studios."
I think us people do not have the capacity as societies to effectively anticipate and solve problems that we can see approaching but have not become catastrophic yet. We always act shortsightedly and ..hope for the best. Most of the people will just not vote/support anything that might bring them some minuscule pain. Even if we know by logic that the problem is coming, we tend to follow whomever will tell us that it's not a problem and base our hopes on him/her. Think of a problem that we saw coming in the future and we collectively solved. I can think of none.
It is very hopeful that renewables are being pursued and developed by China at least to some degree and have become economically attractive. That's the only feasible way to minimize the damage that's already been done.
> Think of a problem that we saw coming in the future and we collectively solved. I can think of none.
My favorite counterexample is the ozone layer. When I was a kid, that was the Big Bad environmental concern. But we actually worked together on a global scale to fix it.
Broader climate change is a much bigger problem with stronger financial and political incentives, but in principle we've done it before.
It's not even at society scale IMO. How many times do people at a company deprioritize small-to-medium fixes on things that may/will become a problem later? Sometimes you have to wait until a problem gets "big enough" before you can get buy-in from colleagues to address it.
Of course details matter and what I mentioned above is not a universal truth. It is an often observed pattern though.
Our economy is an abstract intangible system which requires infinite growth and debt issuance, this in reality requires more caloric expenditure and resource consumption. Thermodynamically this is pretty bad news. At one point the see-saw is gonna tip the other way, then it might cool off for a spell.
Sadly I think the only solution is to invest to build more energy infrastructure and more AI, so that in the future when the shit really hits the fan we have enough energy and assistance from AI to create a scalable technology to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere proactively.
In my view there is no credible future in which the world will become carbon neutral in 1 or even 10 years. It just ain't happening. This is one of those problems where the train is already running down the hill, and we need to engineer a way to catch it. We cannot stop it anymore.
AI is literally burning through vast amounts of fossil fuel, all so we can write more homogenous emails and vibe code useless things, and your proposal is moar AI?
Okay great. We’re out of time. Fine, we get it. But the problem with this article, and many other similar articles, is it seems like it’s just designed to scare the shit out of us.
No call to action, no recommendations in what to do about it. It’s basically insinuating that we, the regular people, are the responsible.
As there in-lies the problem, and it makes me furious. The onus to engineer our way out of a climate catastrophe is not on the regular people. The onus is on the people who engineered is into this problem. Government, industry, politicians, scientists, literal engineers.
If this is really as urgent they say it is, then why aren’t they acting faster to retool our infrastructure? Joe Schmoe doesn’t have the ability to build more electric cars. He can’t go out and build more nuclear power plants, or build solar farms.
The problem here is every time you read an article like this you’re left feeling guilty. We’re told we’re the problem. Joe Rogan (and others) are the problem. Not the people who actually got us into this situation. The energy here is so misguided. It’s infuriating.
I love you Adam McKay and your art, but us normal folks are just living life, with the tools & systems that were engineered for us by other people. Stop telling us we’re the problem.
>It’s basically insinuating that we, the regular people, are the responsible.
the article:
>Like all grand lies, “we have more time” takes many different forms, often focus-grouped. [...] There are the queries of “What’s your carbon footprint?,” as if individual people with plastic bags or straws were the problem and not gigantic multinational corporations.
If you are looking for the "call to action," you are missing the entire point of the article. There have been millions of calls to action for over 50 years and they have not made any difference. The point is that we must sit with the fact that it is too late. We have made our death bed and now we must be prepared to deal with what comes next.
I don't see him as blaming us regular people. Just liars (which he takes pains to enumerate thoroughly). Of course most of us are just living our lives. But sometimes even us normal folk have an opportunity, when we bump into one of these liars or have a conversation about one, and we can at least remind folks this is still a problem.
The main thrust of the article is that the attention to the uncomfortable issue of climate change has been replaced with noise about everything else and comfortable lies about things being fine, and that the drop in attention correlates strongly with climate change worsening as such making the case that even just bringing more attention back to the issue could help prevent it.
At this point I’m not sure what to do about it. I already live a low-ish carbon life. I barely ever fly. Only drive when I need to. Try and use items that are non-plastic where feasible. I don’t buy extra clothes.
It’s at the point where I wish it were solvable, but I don’t believe it is, so I can’t afford to think about it. Maybe people better than me can, and good luck to them.
It's not at all about individual action. This scale of problem requires policy intervention and investment at national levels, and inter-governmental coordination internationally.
The big, meaningful wins come from things like stopping the use of coal, not signing-off on new oil and gas exploration, tax-incentives and disincentives, grid work, fining polluters.
We instinctively frame this as an individual problem, the cynic might say we've been encouraged to, but the reality is that whether or not you fly this summer has precisely dick-all impact globally. It's the actions of our governments that count.
At least in theory, our governments are voted in place exactly by us. Trump voters loved his ideas and he's implementing them now, yay success. Also industrial pollution is fueled by our buying habits just as well - if nobody would order stuff brought by ship from overseas, well, we wouldn't have many of those huge(ly) polluting ships around. So I wouldn't leave out the personal responsibility here: we make decisions every day, and giving up paper straws is only the most insignificant one.
It's about taking a holistic view of the situation as well. Shipping is a big producer world wide, but stopping it entirely barely makes a dent. A lot more is industry, appliances, heating.
And those boats make a lot less of an impact than all those trucks driving everything across land.
Large merchant ships are extremely efficient in terms of CO2 and other pollutants released per ton of cargo. I agree with ordering less stuff when practical but most of the emissions happen due to manufacturing and use, not transport.
To face this directly: I think an honest answer is probably "yes".
Our buying habits empowered the type of company that wants to put AI into everything. Whether they continue to do so or not will also depend on our buying habits going forward.
> It's not at all about individual action. This scale of problem requires policy intervention and investment at national levels, and inter-governmental coordination internationally.
It is all about individual action. And then the emergence from that to what amounts to the multi-pronged solutions that are needed to address a wicked problem. Like create the "big meaningful wins" you mention. There is no mailbox where you drop off "stop the use of coal", and it happens, neither is there a magic button. A complicating factor is that we are not able to see how our small individual actions contribute to solving the wicked problems, and we are not able to coordinate them at scale.
Well, COVID made sure almost nobody was flying for a couple months. Carbon emissions were slightly down if I remember right.
You can keep telling people to avoid flying and live a life of low carbon footprint, but if the issue is much more systematic, economical and technological, it will just become a distraction and make people dislike you (and the cause).
Individual action definitely doesn't hurt, but it is not enough.
You and all your friends could install solar and batteries and drive EVs and all the energy consumption for your house, cooking, and travel could be totally green and renewable. That's great! But in the US in 2025, 63% of energy consumption is commercial+industrial [1].
National policies need to be set to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and deforestation through clean alternatives, subsidies, regulation, and probably treaties. If you can make green cheaper and/or a better product functionally, you don't have to convince people.
Actually if that can bring up your morale, just replacing coal power plants with nuclear (or other 24x7 clean energy source) would keep up at the 1.5°C objective.
Most people dont know covid hasnt disappeared. It keeps evolving and there are strains out there still causing issues. But thanks to the attention economy dynamics, all sorts of random people were acting like they were virologists, epidemiologists, microbiologists at its peak. They have all disappeared ie shifted focus to whatever else. Meanwhile the ecosystem and infra dedicated to keep track of this stuff chuggs along keeping the lights on. All am saying is there is no reason to keep everyone in a freaked out state.
So we should not own pets, because the real polluters (companies) are lobbying to keep polluting? What bothers me so much about this idea of individual responsibility is that we get blamed for a choice we couldn't possibly make. It is up to the people in power to start making change, and it is important that people vote and educate themselves, but IMO this idea of individual responsibility for societal problems like climate change is ridiculous and only leads to inaction! We need to hold companies accountable, and we need to hold governments accountable. Own a dog, enjoy your life!
There's multiple vegan brands for dogs and cats feed. If it looks "unnatural" I suggest some reflexions:
- Most kibble's ingredients are not naturals
- Most of the kibble's flesh comes from a non-natural production
- Your pet health (and your own health) require some "nutrients" instead of "food types"
Agree 100% societal decisions are more important than individual ones. However the choice in question could be made as it's not doing (pet ownership). Don't take it personal, OP is not telling you what to do or blaming anyone but instead share some data. As you said: enjoy your life :)
Political change is needed to achieve any of this. Changing your individual behavior or even the individual behavior of everyone you know – while certainly not wrong! – won’t solve this.
This is like trying to abolish slavery in 19th century US by not owning slaves and trying your very best to not buy anything that involves slave labor … laudable, but not a way to abolish slavery.
I think that’s an interesting point and one I did actually think about while writing my comment but ultimately didn’t address.
The interaction between individual behavior changes and political changes is interesting and to my mind where lots of interesting stuff happens. I’m not 100% convinced that politics is always downstream from culture and culture is downstream from individual behavior changes but I do agree that there is an interesting interaction happening that’s worth looking at and addressing.
The abolitionist in isolation certainly will not be able to abolish slavery, however their individual behavior might contribute to an atmosphere where slavery is ostracized and seen as more obviously evil by more people, thus making it easier for politicians to make political decisions that ultimately lead to the abolition of slavery.
I think that is why it is always so important for me to point out that it is certainly never wrong to individually behave in a way the limits your own individual contribution to climate change. I mostly have a problem when that‘s the end or even the main focus of it. Climate protection to my mind is most effective when it is tightly coupled to clear political demands. Too often individual behavior changes are used as action terminators. My impression is that individual action is often presented (as here) as a complete solution to climate change when it is anything but.
Exactly! Politics try to appease the mass. If the mass would be willing to put climate change first we would have other policies, instead we follow the dark visions of lunatic billionaires
> Before that [Holocene], for hundreds of thousands of years in the Pleistocene era, humans (and our hominid ancestors) spent most of their time running from drought, fires, floods, extreme cold and heat, predators, and each other. The population was likely no more than a few million people spread across the whole planet. At one point we may have almost gone extinct, with just 10,000 Homo sapiens clinging to life. But after the advent of the Holocene and its remarkably stable climate, in only 100 centuries the world population has risen to 8 billion.
This is extremely misleading. The "remarkably stable" climate didn't bring the world's population up to 8 billion, it was abundant energy from fossil fuels (7 out of 8 of all of the humans that have ever lived have done so in the industrial era). The Holocene isn't some serene stable climate period - there are still natural disasters at about the same rate they have been occurring throughout the past 11k years - but the difference is that we're much less likely to be killed by them due to abundant energy and technology. The transition from the Pleistocene into the Holocene definitely made life easier, mostly because of the natural warming.
Limiting temperature change by every additional 0.1°C is still worthwhile from a human welfare perspective.
In that sense it is never to late. We can always do something to limit the damage. It’s just that it gets harder and harder and some damage becomes irreversible at a certain point.
Had we done more 25 years ago it would all have been cheaper, easier and led to less damage overall. That doesn’t mean doing something now is suddenly not worth it.
Limiting temperature change by every additional 0.1°C is not really about comfort. Either way rich people will be comfortable and poor people will be uncomfortable or dead. It's about buying everyone more time to adapt.
With respect to human lives it could mean the difference between tens of millions of deaths and billions of deaths. With respect to wildlife it could be the difference between losing 10–20% of the planet's species in the Holocene extinction versus 40% or more as per the IPCC. With respect to migration it could mean the difference between levels that are painful versus globally destabilizing. With respect to geoengineering it could mean that we have significantly more time to refine the technologies before they're inevitably deployed.
Millions fewer people will die. That’s the difference.
It’s just a sliding death scale, not a binary one. Sure, there might be steps, it might not all be linear, but still: doesn’t mean at some point doing something is pointless.
in some way i guess thats always been an issue with the messaging on climate change and the issue in general.
its always a problem and its slow moving enough and cumulative enough that it will always be better to fix it sooner but the real dangers are many years off.
when the jet stream collapses overnight then we'll be forced to deal with it
This is a tough read. I'm not sure who it's aimed at, since the article mentions only 14% of Americans (surely one of the most climate denying countries) don't believe climate change is real. It's alarmist in a way that is whistlecalling but not in a useful way.
It also lies with graphs in a way that I just hate -- we have surface temperature charts that show growth trends going all the way back to ... 2024. Please. This page from wikipedia shows a much longer range with a lot more context: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Holocene_Temperature..., and reasonable qualifiers on the methods used to go back.
Useful proposals always welcomed, ideally ones that in a game theoretic sense do not reward defection and are realistic about the economics of releasing more CO2 as part of power production, but this essay isn't it.
> This particular sub-genus of grifts, half-truths and strategic omissions ... “Manifest Destiny.” “Aryan superiority.” “The divine right of kings.” “The domino theory.” “Israel has a right to defend itself.”
If you read the article, he is not saying that Israel doesn't have a right to defend itself. He's saying that Israel's right to defend itself has been a lie told to justify the genocide they are carrying out in Gaza.
Collapsing human-optimum climate, a temporary state Earth entered about 15 thousand years ago and made modern civilization possible.
The truly sad thing about it all is not the damage to some abstract "environment". The fact remains that we had an Eden-like planet for a few thousand years and completely and utterly wrecked it to maximize the "wealth" of a few generations of elites.
The people who deny climate change have won, and accepted the [now] inevitable downfall of humanity as we know it. They are enriching themselves to have the financial power to give them the personal power to adapt to climate change. The rest can rot in hell. In essence, they're able to build their own Arc of Noah, and you and 99,999999% of everyone else (nevermind all the animals) aren't on the guest list.
In order to not cause chaos, they lie (by denying climate change, sowing FUD) or ensure the issue isn't mentioned/covered (by owning media, self-censorship). "Keep calm, everything is going extremely well."
I believe Earth isn't badly off with a lot less humans, I just don't like the distribution of survivorship isn't going to be random. Survivorship bias is going to contain heroic stories, but in the end a lot of people without power/money are going to take the shortest straw. And, that wasn't necessary.
The track Extrawelt - Phoebe has an excellent quote on the matter. Paraphrased:
> "We would be the first lifeform that wipe itself out. But what is unique is we did it knowingly. Why didn't we save ourselves from [...]? Is the answer, we weren’t sure if we were worth saving?"
I've always thought it's pretty obvious how all this climate change stuff will play out:
- Yeah some govts reduce carbon emissions, but others don't care (china) or can't afford to focus on that (developing economies).
- Climate activists will continue to act like we're to literally ruin the world (this is stupid). Climate change deniers will say temperature changes are just cyclical (also stupid).
- On a global macro scale, fossil fuels continue to be consumed as long as it makes sense economically
- Solar eventually gets cheap enough to begin to truly displace fossil fuels. EVs also go mainstream. Both happening now.
- In the end... life will just go on as we just naturally move up the tech tree and fossil fuels become an ever smaller part of the energy mix
I can understand a no answer from people who think climate change is no big deal, but it's kind of weird that people who think climate change will kill hundreds of millions -- possibly everyone -- say no on the grounds that it has risks.
Possible unintended side effects is better than "everyone dies".
Ten years ago, I was saying we should experiment with it on a small scale so that if it does become necessary, we're not shooting blind, but even then the doomers were opposed because of "risks". You know what else has risks? Unmitigated climate change!
I hate when such (great) articles end with "we have a lot to do". Please give at least a couple of examples of a constructive action. "Write to your government", "Support this NGO". Do not loose the moment of attention you have just won.
In this case, do the things that it says are no use focusing on. Change your individual behavior to align with the position you profess to have taken about whether or not climate change is a serious and urgent problem.
I guess time zones are driving a significantly US-centric response. My company works on climate repair. We're just a four person menlo park startup so far with some pilots in the field but we have a couple of billion in our sales pipeline, entirely based on people who have sought us out. Global spend on climate doubled last year and is on a tear this year. Recent events, from the closure of the gulf of Hormuz to the huge fires in Europe have stiffened peoples' resolve.
Sure, the US cut spending since early '25, but even before those cuts, the US was less than 8% of global spending on climate intervention. But it's destructive: though we're based in the US, there is no commercial interest in the states and all our pipeline is outside the country.
Climate denialism is extremely destructive, but it's pretty much entirely a phenomenon of USA, Russia, Germany, Netherlands, France, UK, Canada, and Australia (crudely ranked by % of population), plus of course some gulf states. One of our three founders is an anthropologist and her field work has found that hardly anyone outside the top of the OECD has any doubt that the climate is changing and affecting them directly.
There's not enough happening but the derivative feels strongly positive.
I wondered where this article got the idea that "half the planet" would die "in 26 years or less" with 3°C of warming. It appears to be a misreading of the table in https://actuaries.org.uk/media/ni4erlna/planetary-solvency.p... "Figure 12: Planetary solvency risk impact and likelihood definitions (illustrative)" qualified by "A risk impact matrix is a methodology for ranking potential impacts, not a prediction or central scenario."
In particular, they rate ≥50% mortality as Extreme and also rate warming by 3°C or more by 2050 as Extreme (this is relevant for the colorful severity/likelihood grids that are the focus of the paper) and somebody appears to have made the incorrect connection that an Extreme climate would cause Extreme mortality, and also by the time the Extreme climate is reached and not afterwards. Elsewhere, the paper mentions that "We have not shown an assessment for mortality in this illustration, as very limited research has been carried out on the potential for large-scale loss of life in relation to these interconnected risks on which to base an assessment."
Unfortunately, that makes the article title highly ironic.
The report does include a >50% human mortality extreme category and the author of the article is referring to a separate report suggesting 3°C is much more likely than expected. I think it's pretty reasonable to think that an extreme climate would cause extreme mortality. The report is pretty confusing to digest.
But because you think that particular consequence is overstated in the article, you're suggesting that the article itself is a lie? The title refers to the lie that we still have more time and that we don't need to get to work immediately to address climate change. It's about the overall lackadaisical attitude toward the climate emergency.
You seem to be suggesting a dismissal of the article's core message.
So, are you suggesting that we actually have plenty of time to deal with climate change, and that things like "Net Zero by 2050" correctly convey the severity of the situation?
What is your assessment of the current year number of deaths attributable to climate change, and expected number of deaths at a 3°C above baseline global average temperature?
Thank you for putting this here. While I do believe in climate change, I could not finish reading the article as it seemed like the authors opinions are led more by emotions rather than facts. And gourds.
Not to mention that if we limited access to fossil fuels today, billions of people would be dead within months. If we turned off the spigot, billions would starve and civilization would collapse quicker than you could say climate change
It's quite striking to note how media coverage of climate change and pollution have gone down so much. I remember in the 90's it was very much in the popular mileu.
What's more we are living through an actual green revolution. Solar power and batteries have never been so cheap - and still promising to get cheaper and better with sodium ion batteries.
In the 90s it was something to deal with later. Now that it's something to deal with right now, of course they won't cover it. In a few decades they'll cover it again, but only to say how it's too late now.
Another factor is that rich oil and gas people figured out they could just buy the media.
> Another factor is that rich oil and gas people figured out they could just buy the media.
Who is this "media"? Is this the same "media" that Trump and his dullards claim is so corrupt and contrary to The Truth? Are you influenced by this "media"? I don't read The Guardian or Jacobin, but I'm occasionally exposed to their headlines and they are certainly reporting on climate change. Are they part of the "media"?
There is no monoculture "media" and to the extent there is, it is (in the US at least) overwhelmingly left-leaning. And ironically, when there were fewer outlets for information, those outlets (because they served such a large and diverse audience) hewed to a common sense/conventional wisdom understanding of the facts.
No is one controlling media. Maybe the CCP through TikTok steering.
> Is this the same "media" that Trump and his dullards claim is so corrupt and contrary to The Truth? Are you influenced by this "media"? I don't read The Guardian or Jacobin, but I'm occasionally exposed to their headlines and they are certainly reporting on climate change. Are they part of the "media"?
This would have any meaning behind it if e.g. Jacobin had the same reach and viewership as Fox News. But it doesn't, so your entire argument rests on false assumptions.
Why would it be too late?
Thermal systems are slow. On the planetary scale of pump and dump heat the lag is something like 30 years. So the change you’re experiencing today is the effect of what was exhausted in the 90s. What we’re getting in 2050 is already locked in.
I don't disagree but I feel like this comment chain kinda implies taking action today would actually meaningfully change the trajectory too...
It really doesn't. Climate change is a global problem. It would need a global solution, and everyone should know that that's beyond unlikely to appear... So the only thing you can do is reduce local pollution - which is meaningful in it's way (better quality of life), but has no long term impact on the climate.
It really depends on which action you take.
Some reports indicate it is already to late for emission reduction, or even elimination, to halt the feedback effects that continue the trend. But it won't be too late for active climate engineering until the effects of the climate change prevent our ability to do that engineering.
Because photosynthesis grinds to a halt at about 40c. This is what people are missing. Climate change isn’t the world hiding in their apartments with the AC blasting, its cities burning a week after everything seemed fine.
Civilisation takes millennia of stable, plentiful resources to create, and a week without food for 30 percent of the population to utterly destroy.
I’d love to be wrong, if you disagree please say why.
Climate change is no food next year because this year's heat wave killed all the crops. If we're unlucky. But there's still next year to get unlucky. And the year after that. And the year after that.
It'll already be summer temperatures in winter and most life will have died off
And government.
The bigger factor is probably the global pandemic, economic degradation, looming nuclear winter, genocide, WW3, aliens, and singularity. Not to mention orange clowns. We have surpassed the Britney Spears controversy era. Unless the polar bears are going to invade DC and attack ICE, we might not hear much about the climate change until these other problems go away.
And let’s also not forget, we all want the climate crises fixed, but nobody is willing to personally make any changes to their lifestyle!
All parties are incentivized against fixing this problem.
That is fundamentally the problem with whole thing. Vast majority of population on Earth is not ready for personal sacrifices needed. And if some government will get to around it, I am pretty sure they will be replaced and most things are rolled back.
My guess is that we somehow end up geoengineering it with even more debt...
The solution will have to come from growth and technical innovations, not personal sacrifice.
I agree, because (and I'm being a bit flippant) I sure as hell am not giving up my gas stove while billionaires fly around in private jets and MAGA guys are coal-rolling in their F-250s...
It seems to me that carbon capture technology plus renewables and nuclear + dream energy (fission) will be the future but we're probably not going to go off of fossil fuels much, which will necessitate in part the need to suck this stuff out of the atmosphere.
CO2 capture and planetary albedo management are going to be the only way. For cO2 capture to be meaningful, we need to increase our planetary energy production by 2 or 3x so we can put that energy into sequestration, and obviously those gains cannot be based on fossil fuels. Albedo management is much faster to roll out, but will have a lot of pushback because it will also create locally undesirable outcomes.
The tipping point is one bad summer. Photosynthesis stops at 40-45c (some plants like cactuses can do night processing based on stored energy, but staple crops don’t do that). If we have just one bad summer, billions will die. Civilization is perpetually just a week or two without food for 30 percent of the population away from complete collapse, and it takes thousands of years of stable conditions to recreate.
If we have a bad summer in the northern hemisphere, we could easily lose the capability to sequester carbon or manage planetary albedo in a meaningful way. Stopping emissions is not a solution at this point, we are already way too deep in self reinforcing methane loops for that to even be the primary factor in warming acceleration.
It’s an inconvenient truth, to be sure.
Just in case if not aware yet: read Termination Shock, a Novel by Neal Stephenson
Why would they be when they see the hypocrisy of the chattering classes? How many celebrities or billionaires have curtailed their own lifestyles while pitching for climate change? Has the number of luxury jets and superyatches gone up or down over time?
The average person may seem stupid but they are paying attention to the actions, and it all sounds like "I got mine, screw yours" to them.
Hypocrisy is really not as useful as people think. Imagine if some man, who beat his wife, made a career of talking about the important and harrowing issues of domestic abuse.
People would rightly scratch their heads at such an over-the-top hypocrite. But surely, the man would be correct: domestic abuse is an important issue. And imagine a response from the peanut gallery? "I'm not going to stop beating my _own_ wife until that hypocrite gets his comeuppance!"
Standard tragedy of the commons behavior...
And people in developing countries complain that "why should beef or jet vacations be taxed more, those Westerners got to enjoy it, and now when we want to enjoy it, it's suddenly bad?".
And we rich Westerners think it's sacrifice to have to drive an EV or pay more for beef...
What have luxury jets and superyachts got to do with the chattering classes? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chattering_classes
Gas stoves and ordinary jets do.
at the end of the day 'personal changes' as a fix for climate change are just another lie big corporations fed us to make it feel like the onus was on a personal level.
the amount of co2 that industries pollute and that various regulation would be able to change is multiple orders of magnitude compared to regular personal responsibility.
"The amount[...] that industries pollute" is just "personal changes" with more steps.
Personal changes against the grain or personal changes following the grain.
Imagine I want to be responsible by drinking soy milk but it's hidden in a corner of the supermarket.
Now imagine every supermarket prominently displays soy milk and cow milk is hidden in the corner. Seems easier to make the change, right? Many people will change automatically because they don't really care and just do what's easiest.
This sounds right. An individual person can’t change a complex system that gives him everything they have, from plastic forks to gas cars. The society can get together and agree on things, but the society clearly just isn’t concerned enough. There is no solution or workaround to this, unless certain scientific discoveries get made that change the warming trends by sheer coincidence. They would have to coincide with popular demand, like more attractive electric cars, and new materials, or fusion energy that’s cheap. Or, perhaps, AGI decide it for us.
Who do these corporations pollute for? Isn't it for individuals?
Who benefits from a corporation? Is it the customers, the workers or the owners?
In many cases, it's all three.
But not equally.
In some cases it might be and others it might not. In many cases that's going to be extremely hard to measure and equality might not even be desirable.
For the accumulation of wealth and power. This is the natural consequence of unregulated capitalist incentives. Do you think the corporations care about the individuals?
I suppose you can see it that way, but ultimately the power is mostly in the hands of individuals, either by voting in elections or voting with their wallets.
However, this does not mean corporations aren't actively trying to influence and manipulate them, or that they don't exert pressure on politicians. Aren't Americans responsible as a whole for electing Donald Trump, for example?
Over 70% of Americans oppose data centers being built in their local area, yet they continue to be built, even when local elected representatives publicly oppose it. It's easy to see who really has the power and how futile elections can be.
Changes to those corporations will obviously have downstream effects that voters will largely not tolerate.
Frankly, the self reinforcing methane loops we have already triggered make emissions almost irrelevant at this point. If we want a planet compatible with human prosperity, we have no choice but to do planetary scale geoengineering; albedo management and metascale carbon capture are really the only options at this point. We crossed the rubicon a few years ago and even stopping emissions altogether tomorrow won’t stop the avalanche at this point. It would buy us a few decades, at best.
What's your evidence we hit the methane runaway tipping point?
I mean, in the real world, people will just vote out politicians who raise their gas prices.
Doesn't seem to have worked this time.
>Another factor is that rich oil and gas people figured out they could just buy the media.
Yea, they figured it just now, in the 2010s and 20s. During the 90's the thought just didn't occur to them...Makes complete sense.
Nothing discredits an idea so much like the proponents of it being total idiots.
Well "climate change" as understood today wasn't really talked about much in the 90s, as I remember it. Some broad, apocalyptic concern about creeping temperatures and knock on effects over many decades.
But I do remember quite a bit about "pollution" and like general acute environmental issues. Smog in LA, the hole in the ozone, etc. Those were both more understandable and visible to your average person and more tractable. And there was the obvious hook about energy independence after the fairly recent (at that time) oil embargo and such.
The Green party (are they still around?) talked about more vague issues like ocean plastic and six pack wrappers on birds, but I don't think we made a ton of progress there, but then that was less consequential anyway.
I feel like we went down the worst timeline since then when it became very political and people burn gas for the hell of it, and others hate people who do so. Solar and nuclear (or hell even just solar) could give us clean, cheap energy abundance, but the people championing solar tend not to do it from the abundance perspective, but in tandem with cutting energy use which is a hard sell and not necessary anyway, in my opinion.
Did you forget the Earth Summit and its Climate Change Convention? Or the Kyoto Protocol?
Both sat at the top of the news agenda for months! Not to mention years of features, long-form journalism, and documentaries. And then the denialist backlash began to kick off in the late 90s, which (initially) added to the media storm.
You do realize some of us were alive in the 1990's? That's a really odd thing to lie about.
Its because society has decided that anyone talking about climate change is rude
It isnt nice to talk about climate change because it's become extremely obvious that blaming the rich and the government is not working. The responsibility lies on the 8 billion individuals making excuses.
So the news isn't really covering it anymore because PEOPLE COMPLAIN.
https://www.mediamatters.org/broadcast-networks/abc-cbs-and-...
This isn't reddit. If you have data that supports this assertion, show it.
Are you asking for data to show there's reduced media coverage about climate change? If you look at the article there's a graph in there from Media Matters showing the decline. This isn't reddit, here you're expected to do more than read the headline ;)
No it doesn't. That graph shows minutes of coverage on ABC, CBS, and NBC, and FOX; a cherry picked stat that excludes newspapers, magazines, any non-American media, as well as major networks like MSNOW, or entertainment like Last Week Tonight. This study is more accurate, and less sensationalist.
https://www.colorado.edu/today/2026/02/16/climate-change-med...
I was reading somewhere that we are already fucked even if we were to completely halt greenhouse emissions today. Apparently we kickstarted some positive feedback loop (I think it was the thawing of the permafrost in Siberia/Canada) which releases enormous quantities of Methane and that with the higher temperatures we already reached we decreased Earth albedo as there is less snow/ice reflecting light into space.
I really hope that particular article was wrong, because the alternative is that we have to resort to geo engineering. Considering that the governments can't really coordinate in preventing this, I don't see them coordinate in fixing it, especially because the scale and costs of the "fixes" are astronomical.
There's an old joke that goes about like:
How do you solve Global Warming? Nuclear Winter ...
I really hope this is not how we end up geo-engineering our way out of Climate change.
I think this has to do with the fact that the public has caught on to greenwashing. One example that sticks out in my head is the "save a tree use a plastic bag" thing. I think the appeal to environmentalism was enough to change customer behavior, or at least not cause resistance, but the real motivation for the change was probably financial.
While it's great that green energy is now economically feasible, the idea that there will quickly (say, in the next 50 years) be a "green transition" that eliminates the usage of carbon fuels is still highly dubious.
What we've seen is new renewable capacity carving out a tiny sliver in the energy mix, sometimes even being able to meet all new demand in the installation period, but we still have all the existing demand running on the old stack.
https://ourworldindata.org/energy-mix
This book talks about this: https://www.amazon.com/More-All-Consuming-History-Energy/dp/...
There's also the fact that global society is not a real time strategy game being managed by a well intentioned min-maxing actor driving compounding efficiency gains in resource usage. It's a free for all where everyone is paranoid that they'll be destroyed if they don't use every dirty trick they can (on a global geopolitical level), entrenched oligarchies permanently lobbying for their inefficient, destructive structures to continue (on a domestic economy level) and so on.
It's not looking good overall.
Which shows how badly the popular media cover hard news. "Social justice" is all the rage now thrown together with anything else that's exciting to watch on video.
What does this even mean?
Are you talking about US media?
Seems like a delusion to me. Social justice is yet another banned topic under conservative corporate ownership.
Quick headline check:
- Trump claims to have invented a word that exists
- “Burger King’s New Whopper Strikes a Blow in Fast Food Wars”
- “US strikes $1.2bn deal to pay German firm to halt offshore wind projects” (is this a social justice topic?)
- Attorney General confirmation political reporting
- school shooting reporting (is this social justice??)
Until this administration which is actively canceling wind projects with taxpayer money.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49208314
Your balcony solar is a drop in the ocean of CO2 that USA, China and India keep spewing out.
https://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/report_2025
Eight excruciating paragraphs before the author stops rambling and gets to their thesis. So much fluff.
This. Maybe I am impatient but I was just scrolling through the first half.
I think its an article about gourds? With some climate change opinions in the middle.
The climate change part raises some good points, but why gourds?
Cast away the gourd! Follow the shoe!
Don't Look Up
Just in case you miss it: The author of the post, Adam McKay, "is the Academy Award-winning director of The Big Short, Vice, and Don’t Look Up and the founder of Yellow Dot Studios."
I think us people do not have the capacity as societies to effectively anticipate and solve problems that we can see approaching but have not become catastrophic yet. We always act shortsightedly and ..hope for the best. Most of the people will just not vote/support anything that might bring them some minuscule pain. Even if we know by logic that the problem is coming, we tend to follow whomever will tell us that it's not a problem and base our hopes on him/her. Think of a problem that we saw coming in the future and we collectively solved. I can think of none.
It is very hopeful that renewables are being pursued and developed by China at least to some degree and have become economically attractive. That's the only feasible way to minimize the damage that's already been done.
> Think of a problem that we saw coming in the future and we collectively solved. I can think of none.
My favorite counterexample is the ozone layer. When I was a kid, that was the Big Bad environmental concern. But we actually worked together on a global scale to fix it.
Broader climate change is a much bigger problem with stronger financial and political incentives, but in principle we've done it before.
It's not even at society scale IMO. How many times do people at a company deprioritize small-to-medium fixes on things that may/will become a problem later? Sometimes you have to wait until a problem gets "big enough" before you can get buy-in from colleagues to address it.
Of course details matter and what I mentioned above is not a universal truth. It is an often observed pattern though.
Our economy is an abstract intangible system which requires infinite growth and debt issuance, this in reality requires more caloric expenditure and resource consumption. Thermodynamically this is pretty bad news. At one point the see-saw is gonna tip the other way, then it might cool off for a spell.
Sadly I think the only solution is to invest to build more energy infrastructure and more AI, so that in the future when the shit really hits the fan we have enough energy and assistance from AI to create a scalable technology to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere proactively.
In my view there is no credible future in which the world will become carbon neutral in 1 or even 10 years. It just ain't happening. This is one of those problems where the train is already running down the hill, and we need to engineer a way to catch it. We cannot stop it anymore.
AI is literally burning through vast amounts of fossil fuel, all so we can write more homogenous emails and vibe code useless things, and your proposal is moar AI?
Like a tree planting robot?
Okay great. We’re out of time. Fine, we get it. But the problem with this article, and many other similar articles, is it seems like it’s just designed to scare the shit out of us.
No call to action, no recommendations in what to do about it. It’s basically insinuating that we, the regular people, are the responsible.
As there in-lies the problem, and it makes me furious. The onus to engineer our way out of a climate catastrophe is not on the regular people. The onus is on the people who engineered is into this problem. Government, industry, politicians, scientists, literal engineers.
If this is really as urgent they say it is, then why aren’t they acting faster to retool our infrastructure? Joe Schmoe doesn’t have the ability to build more electric cars. He can’t go out and build more nuclear power plants, or build solar farms.
The problem here is every time you read an article like this you’re left feeling guilty. We’re told we’re the problem. Joe Rogan (and others) are the problem. Not the people who actually got us into this situation. The energy here is so misguided. It’s infuriating.
I love you Adam McKay and your art, but us normal folks are just living life, with the tools & systems that were engineered for us by other people. Stop telling us we’re the problem.
you:
>It’s basically insinuating that we, the regular people, are the responsible.
the article:
>Like all grand lies, “we have more time” takes many different forms, often focus-grouped. [...] There are the queries of “What’s your carbon footprint?,” as if individual people with plastic bags or straws were the problem and not gigantic multinational corporations.
If you are looking for the "call to action," you are missing the entire point of the article. There have been millions of calls to action for over 50 years and they have not made any difference. The point is that we must sit with the fact that it is too late. We have made our death bed and now we must be prepared to deal with what comes next.
I don't see him as blaming us regular people. Just liars (which he takes pains to enumerate thoroughly). Of course most of us are just living our lives. But sometimes even us normal folk have an opportunity, when we bump into one of these liars or have a conversation about one, and we can at least remind folks this is still a problem.
The main thrust of the article is that the attention to the uncomfortable issue of climate change has been replaced with noise about everything else and comfortable lies about things being fine, and that the drop in attention correlates strongly with climate change worsening as such making the case that even just bringing more attention back to the issue could help prevent it.
At this point I’m not sure what to do about it. I already live a low-ish carbon life. I barely ever fly. Only drive when I need to. Try and use items that are non-plastic where feasible. I don’t buy extra clothes.
It’s at the point where I wish it were solvable, but I don’t believe it is, so I can’t afford to think about it. Maybe people better than me can, and good luck to them.
It's not at all about individual action. This scale of problem requires policy intervention and investment at national levels, and inter-governmental coordination internationally.
The big, meaningful wins come from things like stopping the use of coal, not signing-off on new oil and gas exploration, tax-incentives and disincentives, grid work, fining polluters.
We instinctively frame this as an individual problem, the cynic might say we've been encouraged to, but the reality is that whether or not you fly this summer has precisely dick-all impact globally. It's the actions of our governments that count.
At least in theory, our governments are voted in place exactly by us. Trump voters loved his ideas and he's implementing them now, yay success. Also industrial pollution is fueled by our buying habits just as well - if nobody would order stuff brought by ship from overseas, well, we wouldn't have many of those huge(ly) polluting ships around. So I wouldn't leave out the personal responsibility here: we make decisions every day, and giving up paper straws is only the most insignificant one.
It's about taking a holistic view of the situation as well. Shipping is a big producer world wide, but stopping it entirely barely makes a dent. A lot more is industry, appliances, heating.
And those boats make a lot less of an impact than all those trucks driving everything across land.
Wise choices are needed.
Large merchant ships are extremely efficient in terms of CO2 and other pollutants released per ton of cargo. I agree with ordering less stuff when practical but most of the emissions happen due to manufacturing and use, not transport.
did our buying habits force AI into everything?
To face this directly: I think an honest answer is probably "yes".
Our buying habits empowered the type of company that wants to put AI into everything. Whether they continue to do so or not will also depend on our buying habits going forward.
> It's not at all about individual action. This scale of problem requires policy intervention and investment at national levels, and inter-governmental coordination internationally.
It is all about individual action. And then the emergence from that to what amounts to the multi-pronged solutions that are needed to address a wicked problem. Like create the "big meaningful wins" you mention. There is no mailbox where you drop off "stop the use of coal", and it happens, neither is there a magic button. A complicating factor is that we are not able to see how our small individual actions contribute to solving the wicked problems, and we are not able to coordinate them at scale.
Well, COVID made sure almost nobody was flying for a couple months. Carbon emissions were slightly down if I remember right.
You can keep telling people to avoid flying and live a life of low carbon footprint, but if the issue is much more systematic, economical and technological, it will just become a distraction and make people dislike you (and the cause).
Individual action definitely doesn't hurt, but it is not enough.
You and all your friends could install solar and batteries and drive EVs and all the energy consumption for your house, cooking, and travel could be totally green and renewable. That's great! But in the US in 2025, 63% of energy consumption is commercial+industrial [1].
National policies need to be set to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and deforestation through clean alternatives, subsidies, regulation, and probably treaties. If you can make green cheaper and/or a better product functionally, you don't have to convince people.
Actually if that can bring up your morale, just replacing coal power plants with nuclear (or other 24x7 clean energy source) would keep up at the 1.5°C objective.
Lot of info overload going on.
Most people dont know covid hasnt disappeared. It keeps evolving and there are strains out there still causing issues. But thanks to the attention economy dynamics, all sorts of random people were acting like they were virologists, epidemiologists, microbiologists at its peak. They have all disappeared ie shifted focus to whatever else. Meanwhile the ecosystem and infra dedicated to keep track of this stuff chuggs along keeping the lights on. All am saying is there is no reason to keep everyone in a freaked out state.
Stop voting for Republicans. That's a good start.
Don't have a pet cat or dog.
Owning an unnecessary carnivorous animal is rather bad news from a CO2 perspective. A dog can be responsible for higher CO2 emissions than a car.
https://impact.ed.ac.uk/research/climate-environmental-crisi...
https://www.zerosmart.co.uk/post/the-average-carbon-footprin...
(Que outrage from pet owners and people suggesting I'm a crazy vegan.... I'm most certainly not vegan or veggie!)
So we should not own pets, because the real polluters (companies) are lobbying to keep polluting? What bothers me so much about this idea of individual responsibility is that we get blamed for a choice we couldn't possibly make. It is up to the people in power to start making change, and it is important that people vote and educate themselves, but IMO this idea of individual responsibility for societal problems like climate change is ridiculous and only leads to inaction! We need to hold companies accountable, and we need to hold governments accountable. Own a dog, enjoy your life!
There's multiple vegan brands for dogs and cats feed. If it looks "unnatural" I suggest some reflexions:
Agree 100% societal decisions are more important than individual ones. However the choice in question could be made as it's not doing (pet ownership). Don't take it personal, OP is not telling you what to do or blaming anyone but instead share some data. As you said: enjoy your life :)Maybe convince your relatives to do the same?
That’s pointless.
Political change is needed to achieve any of this. Changing your individual behavior or even the individual behavior of everyone you know – while certainly not wrong! – won’t solve this.
This is like trying to abolish slavery in 19th century US by not owning slaves and trying your very best to not buy anything that involves slave labor … laudable, but not a way to abolish slavery.
Isn't political change brought about by collective changes in behaviors of an individual and of those around them?
I think that’s an interesting point and one I did actually think about while writing my comment but ultimately didn’t address.
The interaction between individual behavior changes and political changes is interesting and to my mind where lots of interesting stuff happens. I’m not 100% convinced that politics is always downstream from culture and culture is downstream from individual behavior changes but I do agree that there is an interesting interaction happening that’s worth looking at and addressing.
The abolitionist in isolation certainly will not be able to abolish slavery, however their individual behavior might contribute to an atmosphere where slavery is ostracized and seen as more obviously evil by more people, thus making it easier for politicians to make political decisions that ultimately lead to the abolition of slavery.
I think that is why it is always so important for me to point out that it is certainly never wrong to individually behave in a way the limits your own individual contribution to climate change. I mostly have a problem when that‘s the end or even the main focus of it. Climate protection to my mind is most effective when it is tightly coupled to clear political demands. Too often individual behavior changes are used as action terminators. My impression is that individual action is often presented (as here) as a complete solution to climate change when it is anything but.
In the West it feels like individual change is kinda marketed as a substitute for political change.
Exactly! Politics try to appease the mass. If the mass would be willing to put climate change first we would have other policies, instead we follow the dark visions of lunatic billionaires
I do all those things freely, and that offsets your carefulness. But I don’t/won’t have kids, so I’m not even a drop in the bucket.
I skimmed over half way through and they were still talking about gourds.
> Before that [Holocene], for hundreds of thousands of years in the Pleistocene era, humans (and our hominid ancestors) spent most of their time running from drought, fires, floods, extreme cold and heat, predators, and each other. The population was likely no more than a few million people spread across the whole planet. At one point we may have almost gone extinct, with just 10,000 Homo sapiens clinging to life. But after the advent of the Holocene and its remarkably stable climate, in only 100 centuries the world population has risen to 8 billion.
This is extremely misleading. The "remarkably stable" climate didn't bring the world's population up to 8 billion, it was abundant energy from fossil fuels (7 out of 8 of all of the humans that have ever lived have done so in the industrial era). The Holocene isn't some serene stable climate period - there are still natural disasters at about the same rate they have been occurring throughout the past 11k years - but the difference is that we're much less likely to be killed by them due to abundant energy and technology. The transition from the Pleistocene into the Holocene definitely made life easier, mostly because of the natural warming.
> This massive lie can best be summed up as “when it comes to climate change... we have more time.”
This time we have no more time but 25 years ago when we had no more time it was true?
Or we've never had more time?
Limiting temperature change by every additional 0.1°C is still worthwhile from a human welfare perspective.
In that sense it is never to late. We can always do something to limit the damage. It’s just that it gets harder and harder and some damage becomes irreversible at a certain point.
Had we done more 25 years ago it would all have been cheaper, easier and led to less damage overall. That doesn’t mean doing something now is suddenly not worth it.
I suppose millions can die in slightly more comfort.
Limiting temperature change by every additional 0.1°C is not really about comfort. Either way rich people will be comfortable and poor people will be uncomfortable or dead. It's about buying everyone more time to adapt.
With respect to human lives it could mean the difference between tens of millions of deaths and billions of deaths. With respect to wildlife it could be the difference between losing 10–20% of the planet's species in the Holocene extinction versus 40% or more as per the IPCC. With respect to migration it could mean the difference between levels that are painful versus globally destabilizing. With respect to geoengineering it could mean that we have significantly more time to refine the technologies before they're inevitably deployed.
Millions fewer people will die. That’s the difference.
It’s just a sliding death scale, not a binary one. Sure, there might be steps, it might not all be linear, but still: doesn’t mean at some point doing something is pointless.
in some way i guess thats always been an issue with the messaging on climate change and the issue in general.
its always a problem and its slow moving enough and cumulative enough that it will always be better to fix it sooner but the real dangers are many years off.
when the jet stream collapses overnight then we'll be forced to deal with it
This is a tough read. I'm not sure who it's aimed at, since the article mentions only 14% of Americans (surely one of the most climate denying countries) don't believe climate change is real. It's alarmist in a way that is whistlecalling but not in a useful way.
It also lies with graphs in a way that I just hate -- we have surface temperature charts that show growth trends going all the way back to ... 2024. Please. This page from wikipedia shows a much longer range with a lot more context: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Holocene_Temperature..., and reasonable qualifiers on the methods used to go back.
Useful proposals always welcomed, ideally ones that in a game theoretic sense do not reward defection and are realistic about the economics of releasing more CO2 as part of power production, but this essay isn't it.
> This particular sub-genus of grifts, half-truths and strategic omissions ... “Manifest Destiny.” “Aryan superiority.” “The divine right of kings.” “The domino theory.” “Israel has a right to defend itself.”
aaaand, you lost me.
Thanks for quoting, I wasn't going to read the article, but now I realise the author is obviously onto something and I'd do well to read him.
If you read the article, he is not saying that Israel doesn't have a right to defend itself. He's saying that Israel's right to defend itself has been a lie told to justify the genocide they are carrying out in Gaza.
Exactly the same point where I determined the article is garbage.
Was it domino theory?
Not "collapsing the climate"
Collapsing human-optimum climate, a temporary state Earth entered about 15 thousand years ago and made modern civilization possible.
The truly sad thing about it all is not the damage to some abstract "environment". The fact remains that we had an Eden-like planet for a few thousand years and completely and utterly wrecked it to maximize the "wealth" of a few generations of elites.
The people who deny climate change have won, and accepted the [now] inevitable downfall of humanity as we know it. They are enriching themselves to have the financial power to give them the personal power to adapt to climate change. The rest can rot in hell. In essence, they're able to build their own Arc of Noah, and you and 99,999999% of everyone else (nevermind all the animals) aren't on the guest list.
In order to not cause chaos, they lie (by denying climate change, sowing FUD) or ensure the issue isn't mentioned/covered (by owning media, self-censorship). "Keep calm, everything is going extremely well."
I believe Earth isn't badly off with a lot less humans, I just don't like the distribution of survivorship isn't going to be random. Survivorship bias is going to contain heroic stories, but in the end a lot of people without power/money are going to take the shortest straw. And, that wasn't necessary.
The track Extrawelt - Phoebe has an excellent quote on the matter. Paraphrased:
> "We would be the first lifeform that wipe itself out. But what is unique is we did it knowingly. Why didn't we save ourselves from [...]? Is the answer, we weren’t sure if we were worth saving?"
I've always thought it's pretty obvious how all this climate change stuff will play out:
- Yeah some govts reduce carbon emissions, but others don't care (china) or can't afford to focus on that (developing economies).
- Climate activists will continue to act like we're to literally ruin the world (this is stupid). Climate change deniers will say temperature changes are just cyclical (also stupid).
- On a global macro scale, fossil fuels continue to be consumed as long as it makes sense economically
- Solar eventually gets cheap enough to begin to truly displace fossil fuels. EVs also go mainstream. Both happening now.
- In the end... life will just go on as we just naturally move up the tech tree and fossil fuels become an ever smaller part of the energy mix
Are we ready to have a discussion about seeding the upper atmosphere with SO2 yet?
Maybe after double digit million death count.
Or just a rogue country that's being hit by the crisis more than others
Can we say for certain that doing so would not have an unintended side effect, given how complex the biodome is? If not, then likely no.
One day the calculation is going to be "do nothing and cook ourselves to death" vs. "Put SO2 in the atmosphere and see what happens next".
If the SO2 brings about destruction sooner, I'm of the camp that "well, we were destined for death anyway...".
I can understand a no answer from people who think climate change is no big deal, but it's kind of weird that people who think climate change will kill hundreds of millions -- possibly everyone -- say no on the grounds that it has risks.
Possible unintended side effects is better than "everyone dies".
Ten years ago, I was saying we should experiment with it on a small scale so that if it does become necessary, we're not shooting blind, but even then the doomers were opposed because of "risks". You know what else has risks? Unmitigated climate change!
I hate when such (great) articles end with "we have a lot to do". Please give at least a couple of examples of a constructive action. "Write to your government", "Support this NGO". Do not loose the moment of attention you have just won.
Vote. It's literally the best thing you can do, apart from going into politics yourself
In this case, do the things that it says are no use focusing on. Change your individual behavior to align with the position you profess to have taken about whether or not climate change is a serious and urgent problem.
Just think of all the good NGOs have done