First the UK, then leadership of Europe via behind-closed-doors politics, then a gentle colonization of both the east and the west using our amazing cheese, bread that is baked rather than synthesized from fossil fuels, and 30 days of paid vacations per year. The path forward is clear.
If we ever manage to halt this accelerating crisis we should seriously consider a modern-day equivalent of the Nuremberg trials. Thousands upon thousands needlessly dead, https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/08/1152766 (from 2024)
No, excessive fossil fuel use is the cause by an immense margin. It's completely dominated by commercial shipping (boats), followed by planes. Then I think it may actually be gas from cattle before cars. Bitcoin and AI are so recent and still relative to everything else small.
I really feel like if the US really wanted to support US shipbuilding (like what the Jones act was supposed to do) it would subsidize building a fleet of nuclear shipping boats.
Lots of manufacturing projects, lots of related industries boosted, a renewed investment in nuclear engineering bringing a lot of nuclear job experience, and a way to potentially dig deeper into the backbone of global trade again.
Would Iran be as likely to have hit one of these ships if the result was potentially a nuclear meltdown close to their shoreline? It would pretty radically change the costs to them for such an attack, wouldn't it?
If you sink nuclear ship you won't get nuclear meltdown. You have enough thermal mass to cool down anything if you are underwater. Some level of loss of nuclear material would happen. But meltdown is not something that would happen.
Its not like all the ships hit by attacks in the Straight of Hormuz sank. A ship could potentially become critically damaged and become unable to operate the reactor and still be floating.
Either way, "loss of nuclear material" is the real concern isn't it, instead of just the nature of how that loss happened?
The question still stands. If a country knows they're potentially going to cause a nuclear disaster by hitting one of these ships on their shoreline, are they as likely to shoot at them?
The hardliners might want to cause a nuclear incident to keep the strait closed longer.
And even among the non-hardliners mistakes are rampant in war. It's not about what they're likely to rationally do, it's about what some local, demoralized missile officer who graduated in the bottom 20% of his class does when he's cut off from command and drinking too much.
Widespread use of nuclear power for civilian merchant shipping is a non-starter. It's simply too expensive to train and pay enough qualified nuclear engineers. The US Navy barely manages this for a few dozen nuclear powered vessels with a huge budget and limited concern for cost effectiveness.
Plus there are the security concerns. Every civilian nuclear power plant has armed guards on duty around the clock. Those guards have to also be trained and paid. Many foreign countries have laws against bringing weapons into their ports.
If we want to reduce CO2 emissions from merchant ships then use nuclear or renewable power on shore to manufacture carbon neutral synthetic liquid fuel. Use that to run the ship engines.
This is completely incorrect. Aviation contributes 2.5% of global emissions (but is terrible on a per capita basis, as only around 10% of the world's population travels on any given year). Global shipping accounts for 2.3% of global human-made emissions [1].
In transport emissions, passenger vehicles dominate by far (with around 12% of global GHG emissions), even more so in developed countries. Then freight by road with 7.5% of total emissions.
Maritime shipping is actually the least carbon intensive way to transport goods over long distances by at least two orders of magnitude [2].
AI and bitcoin, regardless of what one thinks of them, have made negligible contributions to climate change. It is below the noise floor relative to other major industrial and commercial sources of atmospheric CO2.
Virtually all of the current conditions were in motion before bitcoin and AI were even a thing.
Not exactly background noise but totally incomparable to the normal CO2 outputs of major nations like the US or China. I.e. ~20 Million Tons CO2 vs 4 Trillion and 13 Trillion Tons respectively.
Sure. But you have to weigh any application relative to (1) how useful it is and (2) how easy it would be to rely on a carbon-neutral alternative.
And I would argue the usefulness of bitcoin is negative from the viewpoint of a free society.
AI is to a certain degree a different story, but also there it depends what you're doing.
We live in a thin atmospheric skin around the planet, and that skin has a finite volume. If earth was the size of an apple, the atmosphere is thinner than the Apple's skin in proportion.
Pretending we can do whatever we like for infinitly long inside an finite volume is completely unhinged. The financial and political elites, who some frame as the true geniuses point to technological solutions that are always "just around the corner" for the past decades with some of them even eying to leave the planet behind entirely.
All of that while we know how to address the issue.
You cannot talk about thousands dying today, neglect to mention the actionable solution, and talk only about climate action which will help on a time frame of decades to centuries.
I grew up in the 90s and there was a book in climate in my shelf that talked about thousands dying today, nearly three decades back. At some point we should stop pretending this is a new and surprising danger and start treating it as the risk we willingly steered ourselves into.
If you live next to a road and every other month a car crashed through your living room wall you'd probably fix the root cause after the first time it happened. If you are clever you fixed it even before it occurs. What you would not do is only deal with the damage caused month for month and pretend there is no need to address the root cause.
The reason why many pretend our only option is handing out band aids while the blade keeps spinning, is because it is hard to imagine anything else, if your salary depends on you not addressing the problem.
It feels more and more like watching a bus driver playing chicken against a solid, immovable concrete wall. It is obvious who wins, the only question is into which directions the scrap explodes most, while the driver eyes for the ejector seat. And all the kids pretend driving into the wall is the only reasonable option.
It is possible for humanity to create unsurvivable conditions in our earths atmosphere. Should we do that if there is enough profit in it? If not, where would you draw the line and how would you set/enforce the limits?
Do you propose climate action with effects that we will see in decades, if not centuries, is going to save the vulnerable who are currently dying by the thousands?
I do not think that you believe so.
How is it acceptable that the actionable solution is entirely ignored in favor of performative speech?
Or Europe should just get air-conditioning and enjoy the beautiful weather. Can’t make it through the winter without heat. Why would you want to make it through the summer without air-conditioning?
That being said fuck pollution and the ruining of our environment.
Air conditioning the indoors doesn’t do anything to prevent the harm and damage to animals, agricultural land, infrastructure, and so many other things. It also, of course, can’t protect those who have to work or commute in the heat.
40°C with high humidity from 5am to 10am every day is not ‘beautiful weather’.
We do not have infinite resources. Committing 7-11 years and countless billions to build a NPP leads to those funds and other resources to be unavailable elsewhere.
Each wind farm, each set of solar panels, each battery storage will begin to pay dividends immediately as each one is finished. While the huge plant will be nothing-nothing-nothing-... for years upon years.
Builders, engineers, capital, and such is better suited to be investing in other sources of energy.
Solar maybe NOW is, but this isn't a 5 or even 10 year old problem. And cost effective compared to what? We'll consider sending people to Mars to save humanity but reactors are "too expensive"?
The complicit parties of climate change are so wide you would probably have to try thousands and thousands of people across most of the developed world. The cohort is probably so large that it’s more a reflection of society generally than the malicious acts of a few.
Oh believe me, there is a part of the political aisle which would be more than happy to put millions of people in forced labour camps, especially if they are wealthy. Any excuse is a good excuse.
Nonsense. Anyone who wants forced labor camps is a fascist. I don't care what they call themselves. Once you stop caring about wellbeing for everyone you stop being a leftist. (Which is your insinuation.)
Also, there is more than one political aisle. The left (who broadly want to redistribute wealth) is distinct from democrats (who are capitalists) is distinct from the various parts of the GOP.
The US Constitution, specifically the 13th amendment, allows:
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall be duly convicted, shall exist within the United STates or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
So in fact, forced labor camps are totally legal and common in the United States. There are lots of private companies which operate these prison / factory systems and are quite profitable (unsurprisingly), such as NYSE:GEO.
All governments "redistribute wealth" friend, not just the left or right or up or down.
It all depends on which side of the bars you live on, amirite?
It strikes me that historically whenever one extremist side decides to pull the trigger and goes for a cult-of-personality power grab (because this is not a left/right exclusive thing); the really delusional stuff starts when those already in power trigger a vicious cycle of paranoia.
> British military courts carried out proceedings against 1,085 persons
> About forty-five additional trials were held against an unknown number of
accused. [...] In all, French occupation courts passed 2,107 sentences [...]
> [I]n Poland alone 16,819 Germans were sentenced [...]
> In Czechoslovakia, about 16,000 German nationals received sentences. Exact figures are not available.
I think we should start charging the worst emitters with manslaughter now. We shouldn't wait for the crisis to be halted; the law should be part of how we force firms to recognize part of the harm.
This is not an argument for global warming, but do bear in mind that cold kills far more and on balance global warming has saved lives here. The issue is going to cause worse problems than heat deaths though. However, a big wet bulb event could completely reverse that count.
I've been reading up on the inevitable collapse of the AMOC (the potsdam institute has a number of really good videos covering the subject).
Everyone hears 'winters will be up to 10C cooler', but few realize that this will also cause the jet stream to be more wavy, and exacerbate the number of heat waves as well.
Sad that europe's mild climate is about to get a whole lot worse...
Even if you read just the conclusion at the bottom it seems obvious that there is no consensus about a collapse being inevitable:
> Overall though, there is some common ground in recent research: evidence for AMOC weakening having begun is growing, albeit is not clear in every AMOC metric; a substantial decline is expected with current emissions, that over centuries could potentially push the AMOC to a slow ‘shutdown’ state; and there remains a real but uncertain chance that this slowdown could pass a tipping point beyond which this shutdown is locked in, even if warming is halted or even declines. Exactly how much and quickly the AMOC is weakening, and the likelihood of it reaching a tipping point, remain much more uncertain, but what we do know is enough to justify concern and action to reduce the risk of AMOC shutdown
I am just repeating the 'gist' I've gotten from my research on the topic, but the risk of AMOC shutdown has gone from a low probability / high impact prediction by 2100, to 'we think there's a strong chance of hitting a tipping point by 2060'. I wish I could point you to a specific paper, but I'm going entirely off memory, and that is fallible
The % likelyhood by x date predictions have swayed back and forth as we've adjusted our predictions of which emissions path we actually wind up following.
Took a min to read the link, that was a surprisingly good summary.
My whole concern with the AMOC is that given it's a non-linear system, and we've seen evidence of 'fast shutdowns' in the climate record before, I fear we are sleepwalking towards an event that could have catastrophic consequences for the global south, and problems there do not stay there. People flee rather than starve.
I also worry what happens to western liberal democracy under the weight of that influx if we're already seeing populism from today's level of migration.
If your country suddenly has hundreds of thousands (or even millions) of weather migrants from countries with vastly different cultures and values to yours, you'll be wishing that populism was your biggest concern.
I don't know that there are any pop sci books on amoc collapse specifically, the more popular books on climate change acknowledge it's a possibility but do not really dig into the effects beyond the fact that it will chill europe in the winter and shift the monsoon rainfall belt (southward?). The potsdam institute has some good papers available, and of course, you can find others that ref it in google scholar.
Erasing any datacenter ever built (and planned) would do almost nothing to stop climate change.
What we need is (global) electrification of transport and heating, CO2 free electricity and CO2 neutral concrete and steel.
Very effective ways to make this happen would be high prices on emissions, enforced on every local industry and all imports.
But too many people love their cheap fossil-based transport too much and are unwilling to make even small sacrifices to keep the climate stable; sad reality.
Thinking these are at their current level relevant to climate change, is a level of ignorance that I'd almost put on a tin-foil hat to discuss how the fossil industry is feeding an anti-AI campaign of ignorance.
The warming is terrible and deadly, AND ALSO Europeans are negligent in not protecting themselves however they can.
The idea that Europe could slow warming by not using air-conditioning is absurd, when the emissions mostly come from elsewhere. France, in particular, gets most of its energy from nuclear power, but also makes it very hard to get climatisation.
>Europeans are negligent in not protecting themselves however they can.
Well, if the people in charge say or think global warming isn't real, that's what you get: not "other" solutions to the "unacceptable propositions" the Green parties suggest, but no proposition at all, as there is no problem.
The current situation is a direct consequence of pure negationism from conservative parties, not a disagreement on how to deal with climate change between the Right and the Left. The Left proposed solutions you may not agree with, but the Right has been completely rejecting the reality of climate change.
BTW, how do you propose Europe protect not only people from the heat, but also forests from burning, rivers from drying up, fields from being unfit for cows and sheep, lakes from blooming with algae, nuclear plants from being shut down due to river water being too hot and seawater being full of jellyfish, etc, etc, etc? In the end, there are so many things to "adapt" that it would cost less to try to organize a global effort to lower CO2.
[H]ow do you propose Europe protect not only people from the heat, but [all these other things]?
Why does it have to be framed as all-or-nothing? I agree that using air conditioning to reduce the number of people who die from the heat does nothing to help with the problem of jellyfish, but how is that relevant, exactly?
Put a significant price on CO2 emissions (think like $300+/ton, instead of <$100), then tax every import from countries that take insufficient actions (or run a low CO2 emission price). Likewise, tax any export into countries that take no action.
Electrify everything where possible (especially transport and heating), get electricity CO2 neutral, get concrete and steel production CO2 neutral (lots of those would be an inevitable consequence of the emission pricing).
This would allow western democracies to basically fix the global situation on their own, by exerting economic pressure on developing countries (those want/need market access, like China).
It would make goods (and especially individual transport!) more expensive though (even if you re-emit the tax income), so you can be sure it's not gonna happen, because too many people are too selfish.
I will say this - air conditioning costs to establish room temperature are inversely proportional to the degree the building is insulated. If your whole country is comprised of uninsulated or barely insulated housing stock, you have a MUCH larger project than simply buying some small window units for a few hundred euro per person and then paying a few hundred euros extra per year in energy costs.
Some of these places don't get very cold, others rely on coats, others south facing window solar gain. Very old buildings are common. I'm not claiming all of Europe is uninsulated, just a large enough portion to render heatwave safety a much bigger problem.
When I lived in a rather hot area of Spain for a year, I was shocked to find out that many apartments don't have an air conditioner. In a place where a similar heat wave happens every year, for months. A friend of mine moved there from Germany and being somewhat frugal, rented a place without and aircon. Let me just say that he didn't enjoy the summer nights one bit.
I myself had one, but I could probably rent a car for the cost of running it.
If you can't run one fifth of your nuclear plants, because the water levels are to low or the water temperatures too high in the rivers used to cool them, you may want to reconsider whether that is truly the best choice here¹
In the meantime my fathers solar roof allows him free AC cooling, because as it turns out AC generally needs most energy when the sun shines the most.
I am not arguing nuclear plants do not have benefits, I just argue that solar with storage may be a much better fit for powering ACs.
People live longer in many parts of Europe than the USA. Does that mean the USA is somehow negligent?
Excess deaths due to heat are primarily the in the elderly. The excess numbers we are seeing now are because the proportion of elderly people in France, Germany and Spain are higher than in the USA.
If the population pyramid in the EU was more similar to that of the USA the number of excess deaths would be lower. I'm not sure negligent is the correct word to use. Climate change will reduce quality of life. Because of these changes people will not live as long.
For as long as I can remember, my hometown had extreme summers with temperatures climbing as high as 45c. This was in the early 90's. This year is no different. Location: North Macedonia
For as long as I remember I never had a summer this warm and this dry. And I don't even have to rely on memory alone here as this is backed by actual historic measurements all the way back since humans started to record temperatures in my countries.
You do realize North Macedonia is not representative of all EU countries, and that other EU countries have abnormal heat waves compared to the 90s? With effects like the first pyrocumulonimbus in France's recorded history?
I think denying climate change and it's impact in the face of all evidence is something hard to justify lol.
It will probably be warm but this is from the GFS model that was forecasting 50 degrees during the last heat wave. Apparently, it tends to "overegg temperature projections for Europe in the summer by around 2-2.5c. ... it dries out soil too fast in its models."
As of now, our worst problem in Central Europe seems to be drought. Some of the mightiest rivers of the continent are barely there. You can walk across the Danube, the Rhine or the Wisla in some places, drenching yourself a bit, but never losing contact with the bottom.
This is a harbinger for insane weather in the United States this fall and winter.
I am expecting my homeless life in in minivan to be choatic trying to chase where the weather will be favorable.
My main concern if is there is heavy rains in California after the drought of rain they have had this summer. The Salton Sea is at an all time low[1] and many people do not know that a rapid fill of water into the Salton Sea from the Cochella Valley is a known trigger for earthquakes on the San Jacinto and San Andreas Faults[2][3].
"2027 is likely to be WAY worse than this 2026 in terms of extreme heat, drought, fires, crop losses. WAY worse. In the Northern hemisphere, we have half a year to prepare for next summer and save some lives.
Everyone is acting like 2026 is a blip. No: far worse is to come."
Seems likely that within our lifetime multiple countries in europe may turn into deserts, and there is little we can do against it except for maybe attempt to terraform the climate by seeding clouds or changing ecosystem flora to something resilient in the face of 40C weather. Losing a huge amount of food production would be my greatest concern.
Somehow, somehow, everyone’s heads are still in the sand. Desperately trying to bury them deeper. It’s like CICO denialism.
I expect this to be a deeply unpopular take here, but solutionism will fail. Magic technology will not come to save us. All of our industrial tekhne has been in the service of rolling down the stored-energy hill faster and faster. To put the genie back in the bottle, to take apart the CO2 and turn it back into hydrocarbons, we’d have to do more work than everything that was done in the last two centuries. And that’s an extremely conservative lower bound.
It’s so dire. I don’t think most people understand that everything around them is made out of petroleum. Not just your ability to travel, or your clothes. Your food is made of petroleum. Your institutions are made of petroleum. Your gender equality is made of petroleum. Your freedom is made of petroleum.
There is no putting this thing in reverse. If the AI doesn’t get us first, thermodynamics will topple all of this.
While it is true that reversing combustion would require more energy than was released burning it, I don't think anyone reasonable is proposing it. The proposal is to redirect future energy production away from fossil extraction and into cleaner sources (solar, wind, nuclear, geothermal) which is a completely different thermodynamic problem. The constraints are things like grid storage capacity, permitting timelines, and critical mineral supply chains - not physics.
If we overcome these very real contraints, we reduce the rate of new additions to atmospheric CO2. We will still need to do the thermodynamically hard work of removing CO2 at gigaton scale, but deferring that until removal tech is more mature is the right sequencing.
Of course, this assumes that we are actually working towards the CO2 output reductions right now and really committed to CO2 removal in the near future.
I agree that it’s a little weird, insofar as people don’t talk about it, but I’m not sure it’s very woke at all. It’s in a lot of tension with conventional woke ideas.
The usual way people talk about all this is more or less idealist (as opposed to materialist): people thought hard and got better morals (or worse morals, if you have a reactionary bent). The claim I’m making is that it’s not a coincidence that egalitarian norms happened to be correlated with the falling cost of energy. It’s basically the same idea as “God created men [and women]; Sam Colt made them equal.”
Trees are carbon neutral. They turn carbon into wood while they're growing and then release that carbon when they rot or burn or are eaten. Only a very small number of trees escape one of those fates.
Devasta | 5 hours ago
H8crilA | 2 hours ago
First the UK, then leadership of Europe via behind-closed-doors politics, then a gentle colonization of both the east and the west using our amazing cheese, bread that is baked rather than synthesized from fossil fuels, and 30 days of paid vacations per year. The path forward is clear.
geye1234 | an hour ago
thibaut_barrere | 2 hours ago
wing-_-nuts | 2 hours ago
antonvs | an hour ago
Y-bar | 2 hours ago
sam_lowry_ | 2 hours ago
tensor | 2 hours ago
esafak | 2 hours ago
vel0city | 2 hours ago
Lots of manufacturing projects, lots of related industries boosted, a renewed investment in nuclear engineering bringing a lot of nuclear job experience, and a way to potentially dig deeper into the backbone of global trade again.
scottLobster | an hour ago
Imagine if even one of the tankers hit in the strait of Hormuz was nuclear.
vel0city | an hour ago
Ekaros | an hour ago
vel0city | an hour ago
Either way, "loss of nuclear material" is the real concern isn't it, instead of just the nature of how that loss happened?
The question still stands. If a country knows they're potentially going to cause a nuclear disaster by hitting one of these ships on their shoreline, are they as likely to shoot at them?
scottLobster | 16 minutes ago
And even among the non-hardliners mistakes are rampant in war. It's not about what they're likely to rationally do, it's about what some local, demoralized missile officer who graduated in the bottom 20% of his class does when he's cut off from command and drinking too much.
raffraffraff | 28 minutes ago
nradov | an hour ago
Plus there are the security concerns. Every civilian nuclear power plant has armed guards on duty around the clock. Those guards have to also be trained and paid. Many foreign countries have laws against bringing weapons into their ports.
If we want to reduce CO2 emissions from merchant ships then use nuclear or renewable power on shore to manufacture carbon neutral synthetic liquid fuel. Use that to run the ship engines.
othello | 2 hours ago
In transport emissions, passenger vehicles dominate by far (with around 12% of global GHG emissions), even more so in developed countries. Then freight by road with 7.5% of total emissions.
Maritime shipping is actually the least carbon intensive way to transport goods over long distances by at least two orders of magnitude [2].
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions-from-transport
[2] https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg3/transport/06_figure_8-6/
tao_oat | 2 hours ago
Followed by agriculture & manufacturing.
jandrewrogers | 2 hours ago
Virtually all of the current conditions were in motion before bitcoin and AI were even a thing.
nprateem | 2 hours ago
vonneumannstan | an hour ago
Not exactly background noise but totally incomparable to the normal CO2 outputs of major nations like the US or China. I.e. ~20 Million Tons CO2 vs 4 Trillion and 13 Trillion Tons respectively.
atoav | 2 hours ago
And I would argue the usefulness of bitcoin is negative from the viewpoint of a free society.
AI is to a certain degree a different story, but also there it depends what you're doing.
We live in a thin atmospheric skin around the planet, and that skin has a finite volume. If earth was the size of an apple, the atmosphere is thinner than the Apple's skin in proportion.
Pretending we can do whatever we like for infinitly long inside an finite volume is completely unhinged. The financial and political elites, who some frame as the true geniuses point to technological solutions that are always "just around the corner" for the past decades with some of them even eying to leave the planet behind entirely.
All of that while we know how to address the issue.
pbkompasz | 2 hours ago
user43928 | 2 hours ago
Useless yapping about opening windows at night, protecting the vulnerable, limiting global warming to 1.5C, and not drinking caffeine.
Is any of this "Call to Action" actually actionable?
Obviously not; and it is pathetic.
What should be actioned:
- remove regulatory hurdles to AC installation
- mandate such installation in residences that otherwise reach unbearable temperatures
- make funds available to subsidize the installation or train more workers for AC installation
That would 'protect the vulnerable'.
Talking about opening windows at night or climate change does nothing, and is performative only.
tonyedgecombe | 2 hours ago
atoav | 2 hours ago
user43928 | 2 hours ago
You cannot talk about thousands dying today, neglect to mention the actionable solution, and talk only about climate action which will help on a time frame of decades to centuries.
bsian | 2 hours ago
atoav | 25 minutes ago
If you live next to a road and every other month a car crashed through your living room wall you'd probably fix the root cause after the first time it happened. If you are clever you fixed it even before it occurs. What you would not do is only deal with the damage caused month for month and pretend there is no need to address the root cause.
The reason why many pretend our only option is handing out band aids while the blade keeps spinning, is because it is hard to imagine anything else, if your salary depends on you not addressing the problem.
It feels more and more like watching a bus driver playing chicken against a solid, immovable concrete wall. It is obvious who wins, the only question is into which directions the scrap explodes most, while the driver eyes for the ejector seat. And all the kids pretend driving into the wall is the only reasonable option.
It is possible for humanity to create unsurvivable conditions in our earths atmosphere. Should we do that if there is enough profit in it? If not, where would you draw the line and how would you set/enforce the limits?
justin66 | 2 hours ago
user43928 | 2 hours ago
I do not think that you believe so.
How is it acceptable that the actionable solution is entirely ignored in favor of performative speech?
dyauspitr | 2 hours ago
That being said fuck pollution and the ruining of our environment.
sebtron | 2 hours ago
dyauspitr | an hour ago
_djo_ | 55 minutes ago
40°C with high humidity from 5am to 10am every day is not ‘beautiful weather’.
Ekaros | 2 hours ago
uecker | 2 hours ago
scottLobster | 2 hours ago
And at any rate, why not both?
Y-bar | an hour ago
Each wind farm, each set of solar panels, each battery storage will begin to pay dividends immediately as each one is finished. While the huge plant will be nothing-nothing-nothing-... for years upon years.
Builders, engineers, capital, and such is better suited to be investing in other sources of energy.
skeeter2020 | an hour ago
halfmatthalfcat | 2 hours ago
bsian | 2 hours ago
forestrywat | an hour ago
Also, there is more than one political aisle. The left (who broadly want to redistribute wealth) is distinct from democrats (who are capitalists) is distinct from the various parts of the GOP.
cduzz | an hour ago
All governments "redistribute wealth" friend, not just the left or right or up or down.
It all depends on which side of the bars you live on, amirite?
halfmatthalfcat | an hour ago
athrowaway3z | an hour ago
Y-bar | an hour ago
> But while in West Germany and united Germany between 1946 and 2005, cases were brought against 140,000 individuals
https://www.timesofisrael.com/historian-examines-germanys-mi...
> British military courts carried out proceedings against 1,085 persons
> About forty-five additional trials were held against an unknown number of accused. [...] In all, French occupation courts passed 2,107 sentences [...]
> [I]n Poland alone 16,819 Germans were sentenced [...]
> In Czechoslovakia, about 16,000 German nationals received sentences. Exact figures are not available.
https://digitallibrary.un.org/nanna/record/627806/files/A_80...
abeppu | 2 hours ago
amanaplanacanal | an hour ago
melling | an hour ago
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=nuclear+climate+change
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Start 11 years ago and go backwards
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1439337600&dateRange=custom&...
adammarples | an hour ago
wing-_-nuts | 2 hours ago
Everyone hears 'winters will be up to 10C cooler', but few realize that this will also cause the jet stream to be more wavy, and exacerbate the number of heat waves as well.
Sad that europe's mild climate is about to get a whole lot worse...
user43928 | 2 hours ago
https://climatetippingpoints.info/2026/05/06/news-explainer-...
conception | 2 hours ago
user43928 | 2 hours ago
> Overall though, there is some common ground in recent research: evidence for AMOC weakening having begun is growing, albeit is not clear in every AMOC metric; a substantial decline is expected with current emissions, that over centuries could potentially push the AMOC to a slow ‘shutdown’ state; and there remains a real but uncertain chance that this slowdown could pass a tipping point beyond which this shutdown is locked in, even if warming is halted or even declines. Exactly how much and quickly the AMOC is weakening, and the likelihood of it reaching a tipping point, remain much more uncertain, but what we do know is enough to justify concern and action to reduce the risk of AMOC shutdown
wing-_-nuts | an hour ago
The % likelyhood by x date predictions have swayed back and forth as we've adjusted our predictions of which emissions path we actually wind up following.
user43928 | 58 minutes ago
Last updated in June.
wing-_-nuts | 33 minutes ago
My whole concern with the AMOC is that given it's a non-linear system, and we've seen evidence of 'fast shutdowns' in the climate record before, I fear we are sleepwalking towards an event that could have catastrophic consequences for the global south, and problems there do not stay there. People flee rather than starve.
I also worry what happens to western liberal democracy under the weight of that influx if we're already seeing populism from today's level of migration.
raffraffraff | 23 minutes ago
Insanity | 2 hours ago
wing-_-nuts | an hour ago
12as109q | 2 hours ago
myrmidon | an hour ago
What we need is (global) electrification of transport and heating, CO2 free electricity and CO2 neutral concrete and steel.
Very effective ways to make this happen would be high prices on emissions, enforced on every local industry and all imports.
But too many people love their cheap fossil-based transport too much and are unwilling to make even small sacrifices to keep the climate stable; sad reality.
athrowaway3z | an hour ago
Thinking these are at their current level relevant to climate change, is a level of ignorance that I'd almost put on a tin-foil hat to discuss how the fossil industry is feeding an anti-AI campaign of ignorance.
jp57 | 2 hours ago
The idea that Europe could slow warming by not using air-conditioning is absurd, when the emissions mostly come from elsewhere. France, in particular, gets most of its energy from nuclear power, but also makes it very hard to get climatisation.
Arodex | 2 hours ago
Well, if the people in charge say or think global warming isn't real, that's what you get: not "other" solutions to the "unacceptable propositions" the Green parties suggest, but no proposition at all, as there is no problem.
The current situation is a direct consequence of pure negationism from conservative parties, not a disagreement on how to deal with climate change between the Right and the Left. The Left proposed solutions you may not agree with, but the Right has been completely rejecting the reality of climate change.
BTW, how do you propose Europe protect not only people from the heat, but also forests from burning, rivers from drying up, fields from being unfit for cows and sheep, lakes from blooming with algae, nuclear plants from being shut down due to river water being too hot and seawater being full of jellyfish, etc, etc, etc? In the end, there are so many things to "adapt" that it would cost less to try to organize a global effort to lower CO2.
jp57 | 2 hours ago
Why does it have to be framed as all-or-nothing? I agree that using air conditioning to reduce the number of people who die from the heat does nothing to help with the problem of jellyfish, but how is that relevant, exactly?
Arodex | 2 hours ago
antonvs | an hour ago
markvdb | 2 hours ago
myrmidon | an hour ago
Electrify everything where possible (especially transport and heating), get electricity CO2 neutral, get concrete and steel production CO2 neutral (lots of those would be an inevitable consequence of the emission pricing).
This would allow western democracies to basically fix the global situation on their own, by exerting economic pressure on developing countries (those want/need market access, like China).
It would make goods (and especially individual transport!) more expensive though (even if you re-emit the tax income), so you can be sure it's not gonna happen, because too many people are too selfish.
mapt | 2 hours ago
jp57 | 2 hours ago
mapt | 2 hours ago
suslik | 2 hours ago
I myself had one, but I could probably rent a car for the cost of running it.
atoav | 2 hours ago
In the meantime my fathers solar roof allows him free AC cooling, because as it turns out AC generally needs most energy when the sun shines the most.
I am not arguing nuclear plants do not have benefits, I just argue that solar with storage may be a much better fit for powering ACs.
¹: https://www.euronews.com/2026/08/12/heatwave-and-jellyfish-a...
PH02 | an hour ago
Excess deaths due to heat are primarily the in the elderly. The excess numbers we are seeing now are because the proportion of elderly people in France, Germany and Spain are higher than in the USA.
If the population pyramid in the EU was more similar to that of the USA the number of excess deaths would be lower. I'm not sure negligent is the correct word to use. Climate change will reduce quality of life. Because of these changes people will not live as long.
That's how excess deaths work.
saturn5k | 2 hours ago
atoav | 2 hours ago
Locations: Southern Austria and Northern Germany
Insanity | 2 hours ago
I think denying climate change and it's impact in the face of all evidence is something hard to justify lol.
Arodex | 2 hours ago
https://doma.edu.mk/en/research-and-education/macedonia-and-...
javcasas | 2 hours ago
Feel free to remember the past how you want, that doesn't change it.
yread | 2 hours ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/weather/comments/1um7tyn/sometimes_...
b800h | 2 hours ago
Arodex | 2 hours ago
There is a heat wave right now, again.
inglor_cz | 2 hours ago
Noaidi | 2 hours ago
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/environment/2026/08/10/climate-...
Noaidi | 2 hours ago
I am expecting my homeless life in in minivan to be choatic trying to chase where the weather will be favorable.
My main concern if is there is heavy rains in California after the drought of rain they have had this summer. The Salton Sea is at an all time low[1] and many people do not know that a rapid fill of water into the Salton Sea from the Cochella Valley is a known trigger for earthquakes on the San Jacinto and San Andreas Faults[2][3].
[1] https://waterdata.usgs.gov/monitoring-location/USGS-10254005...
[2] https://www.sdsu.edu/news/2023/07/drying-salton-sea-has-stav...
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXqOn0GILtA
Adding...
https://subjecttoclimate.org/news/study-las-earthquake-risk-...
Noaidi | 2 hours ago
https://nitter.catsarch.com/JKSteinberger/status/20874034329...
fl4regun | 2 hours ago
KingTravis | 2 hours ago
throwaway_7274 | an hour ago
I expect this to be a deeply unpopular take here, but solutionism will fail. Magic technology will not come to save us. All of our industrial tekhne has been in the service of rolling down the stored-energy hill faster and faster. To put the genie back in the bottle, to take apart the CO2 and turn it back into hydrocarbons, we’d have to do more work than everything that was done in the last two centuries. And that’s an extremely conservative lower bound.
It’s so dire. I don’t think most people understand that everything around them is made out of petroleum. Not just your ability to travel, or your clothes. Your food is made of petroleum. Your institutions are made of petroleum. Your gender equality is made of petroleum. Your freedom is made of petroleum.
There is no putting this thing in reverse. If the AI doesn’t get us first, thermodynamics will topple all of this.
kldavis4 | an hour ago
If we overcome these very real contraints, we reduce the rate of new additions to atmospheric CO2. We will still need to do the thermodynamically hard work of removing CO2 at gigaton scale, but deferring that until removal tech is more mature is the right sequencing.
Of course, this assumes that we are actually working towards the CO2 output reductions right now and really committed to CO2 removal in the near future.
fittingopposite | an hour ago
That is the weirdest and wokest comment I read this year on the internet. Could you please explain?
throwaway_7274 | an hour ago
The usual way people talk about all this is more or less idealist (as opposed to materialist): people thought hard and got better morals (or worse morals, if you have a reactionary bent). The claim I’m making is that it’s not a coincidence that egalitarian norms happened to be correlated with the falling cost of energy. It’s basically the same idea as “God created men [and women]; Sam Colt made them equal.”
adammarples | an hour ago
bryanlarsen | 33 minutes ago
baggy_trough | 32 minutes ago
vonneumannstan | an hour ago