What does all this mean for global temperatures? Because global temperature lags ENSO by around three to five months, most of this event’s warming will land in 2027, which is now shaping up to be a genuinely alarming year and the warmest on record by a sizable margin
I’m certainly no climate scientist, but if I lived in Europe, I would absolutely be looking into how to get a solar energy system set up and at least one window air-conditioning unit if not a heat pump before next summer
I don't mean to be divisive, but this meme-like stream of news articles and comments about Europeans being silly about air conditioning, from the drill-baby-drill nation that refused to even try to do anything about climate change, really grates on me.
I didn’t see anything meme-like in the comment you responded to. Or even anything related to environmentalism. To me, it just looked like good health advice.
In case you don't know, there is a meme in the US that Europe don't know/don't have A/C. We do, but in some coutries there are laws banning A/C below 25°C (77°F) in public places, so (US) tourist don't get the cold air hit when entering a building like a musseum, leaving with the impression we don't know A/C.
No general A/C might be the case in regions that never needed it before (mild summers, cold winters), but their presence is increasing.
I'm well aware of the memes and discourse on Twitter (although I don't seek it out). My point is that that original comment had none of that. No calling people "europoor." Just important advice delivered unsensationally.
If anything, the AC train wreck is caused by the society being incredibly conformist and conservative, trying to cling to the world of the 20th century that no longer exists.
Something like 90% of US residential buildings have AC. For Europe, it's around 20% (for good reason, mind you). It's not a meme if it's an actual fact that many European homes are not prepared for these kinds of increasingly common heat waves, and I got the impression that the parent was showing genuine concern.
It's clearly an op by people who don't want the story to be about a historic heatwave ravaging Europe, so instead they make it about dum Europeans without air conditioning (which they didn't need before).
That's an uncharitable interpretation of the initial comment.
It can also be read as health-sensible reminder given the climate warnings. AC units demand is already up 26% year over year in my country (according to our biggest online retailer, a month ago). Will be a highly profitable year for manufacturers.
The thing is that both sides have a point. European countries (notably France) have known for at least 30 years that this was coming, but was ideologically insisting not to install proper AC or even ventilation in public spaces and transport. This does not contradict the wider angle about Americans ignoring climate change.
> ideologically insisting not to install proper AC or even ventilation
This is not supported by facts. People won't spend money on equipment they don't need. Most places in France do not need air conditioning (or did not need it).
It makes no sense that a building owner or transit agency would spend limited funds on something that they do not need.
One may argue that the government of France should have imposed some mandate that people install air conditioning, similar to how Texas failed to mandate insulation for its natural gas infrastructure.
Such mandates would not have been popular unless they were funded. And even then I doubt they would have been popular but they also would have come with considerable cost to the taxpayer.
There is additionally a cultural feeling in some parts of Europe (Germany) that conditioned air is stale and unhealthy. This is not "ideology" but it will certainly contribute to the idea that mass spending on rarely used equipment is wasteful.
Finally, the entire world is unprepared for global warning, Including the USA.
If the next massive climate disaster hits the US, say a drought or mega storm will the message be that "US climate denial ideology caused this" or will it be "nobody could have predicted this; random act of God; thoughts and prayers; nothing to be learned?"
It's not just that France isn't installing them. It's that laws prevent installing them, and laws keep offices and schools warm on purpose.
The prevention comes to play with massive restrictions around visibility of the units on facades in order to preserve character of apartment buildings and beauty. In some cases these can apply to private homes, too. Additionally you have the copropriété, where you need the majority of the building to grant you the right to install AC. The cities have rigid enforcement of all these and can mandate clawbacks and of course fines. And we didn't get into what you're even allowed to install - the things installed in the US won't cut it.
Offices and schools. Laws don't mandate AC, but they prevent it from being put too strong. 27C, I believe is as cold as you're going to get.
French people have a sort of cultural revulsion to AC - forget climate change and American influence, it'll make you sick and you'll hurting your health.
Just stating the facts, not defending the US. The US has a religious opposition to climate change actions as strong as the French religious opposition to AC.
And for older people, France sucks. For younger people, arguably the whole situation really sucks.
Except France very much does need AC. They may keep it off 99% of the time, but anyplace that experiences 38C+ temperatures should have AC systems installed for public safety. The cost benefit ratio is extremely in favor of having AC in France even if they don’t fully cool indoor temperatures to 22C, there’s a huge advantage to limiting temperatures to below 30C.
Paris has hit 42+C before, in places without AC those temperatures result in deaths.
On top of everything you mention, AC makes the climate problems worse. Solar reduces the negative impact, but does not eliminate it.
I live in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California. 15 years ago, typical summer daily highs made it into the 80s for a week or two, and in 10+ years of being here before that I never saw it hit 90°F. Now we're 90°F almost all summer and we hit 106°F last summer (the forecast says over 100°F by the end of this week). Overnight lows have seen a similar increase. I'm getting older and fans no longer keep me cool enough to function well. As a compromise, I installed evaporative cooling 5 years ago. In our climate (very dry air when it's hot) it works well and takes ~25% of the energy of AC to run (power is only consumed by a large fan motor and a small water pump). But it does consume water, increasing our total water usage in warm months by ~50%. We have plenty of water in our area, but that's been trending in the wrong direction as well, even in wetter years.
It would be one thing if Europe immediately stopped using coal, drastically reduced airline usage, quit building gasoline cars, but if anything it is only marginally better than the US. Europe mostly shifted their dirty work to Asia and North America, while restricting themselves from using air conditioning as some kind of virtue signaling. That's the problem as I see it.
I don't expect people outside of the U.S. to keep up on state level politics but it is worth noting that many in the U.S. are trying and given our form of government state level action isn't anything to sneeze at.
Even if the US isn't part of any climate agreements, it has still made substantial progress toward achieving climate goals – yes, even under the Trump admin and much to his chagrin. You need only compare the country's emissions and green energy output from 2016 to 2026 to see it.
There is no such thing as a binding 'agreement' like this in the USA system of government. We have treaties. That have to be ratified by the Senate. The governments of the world understood this, and understood that the Paris climate agreement was an attempt by the US executive branch at the time to bluff to a hollow 'deal' (instead of creating a true binding treaty) hoping future politicians would be too embarrassed to go against it. It was incredibly disingenuous/misleading of the United States Executive branch at the time to do play politics this way outside of the actual US system of treaties. It was part of the breaking of American laws/norms by the executive that led us to where we are today (with chaos, tribalism instead of a legal system, and a breakdown of our government).
'we couldn't follow the law because the law's hard, instead we started the gateway for Trump by bending the rules, destroying norms, pretending the meaningless has meaning and creating pretext Conservatives could use for ignoring (first) these fake rules, but later under Trump huge amounts of the the real rules.'.
It was a bullshit agreement, and everyone knew it was, and were knowing in that what they were doing would weaken/damage politics in the USA and adherence to the rules. And they did it anyways. To no productive end but lots and lots and lots of damage.
We literally destroyed our car industry to try to steer the incoming catastrophe a bit, what the fuck do you want more. Germany tried to be the leader of solar but that was stolen err migrated to China, whole world profits now.
While US, China and rest of the world did nothing similar, just stood and let shit hit the fan hard. Gotta milk those petrodollars till the last cent because thats all that counts, fuck our children right. Yeah we are not going to burn ourselves further to the cinder to prove some anonymous yostrovs something he anyway refuses to see.
You destroyed your auto industry by ceding it to countries with higher emission intensity of production. USA, China, Japan have higher intensity than even Germany which is on the upper end of Western European countries. That's not steering anywhere except more sharply into the wall!
You've been lied to by your own ruling class. What else have they been lying to you about, I wonder?
In terms of greenhouse it also depends on type of meat. Very acidental but europeans eat much less beef and eat pork/chicken instead. Chicken protein for example is in many cases better than cheese emission wise.
Also i don't think europeans don't use AC to save the planet. It's just expensive and it didn't use to be a problem.
Paris didn’t have air-conditioning because they sit at a latitude of 49 where in the past you might have a week maybe two of sustained high temperatures above 90°, since Paris sits at a latitude of 49 which is north of the United States-Canadian border all the way from Vancouver to the lake of the woods Minnesota.
Which is hardly air-conditioning country above latitude 49 although obviously climate change may change that, but there was no point having air-conditioning that far north in the past for two weeks of possible hot weather, a resident living in the American southwest who will never have a white Christmas ever and air conditioning was always a must.
As mentioned in other comments, what you call the past has been known for at least 30-40 years to be soon obsolete. They had enough time to prepare to this.
So we've been stupid "solar oven" buildings for 50 years while climate scientists were warning against extreme weather events and, now that said extreme event arrives, the best we find is to rush to aircon.
But since modern buildings usually have huge windows, we're letting in about 1kw of heat from sunlight per square meter of window. That's 6kw for a 3x2m bay window, or about the equivalent of 6 electric heaters at full power.
Block that heat ouside of your house with all kind of shade you can get: trees, blinds, adjustable shades, rolling shutters...
Also, close every openings during the day, vent at night.
I don't know your situation but surely you've tried ventilating at night and then closing up the house at a specific time in the day?
I only ask because when I moved from the US south to the high desert in NM (about 2KM) I had to learn how to time that transition.
Very few folks here run A/Cs, we generally have homes designed to stay warm and during the summer usually fans go on about bed time and off in the morning, and that's enough to keep things cool because of insulation.
It was not obvious to me how that worked and I spent one very sweaty summer before I got the timing correct.
Of course, if the nights are hot (which sometimes happens) then that doesn't work so well.
This is all the usual advice, which works for a few days, but during a period of over a week of high temperatures, there's nothing you can do.
The sun will eventually heat up every part of the house and turn it into a radiator.
Even when night time temperatures drop to 17c, I have my have windows open at 10pm with a decent cross-wind, my bedroom temperature may drop from 26c to 24c after 2-3 hours, but if I close the windows, it jumps to 25c in ~30 minutes...
The streets probably don't help either - no trees, just asphalt, front yards with paving slabs etc
I live in SoCal and am continually shaking my head at the architecture. So my floor-to-ceiling glass buildings in a climate known for sunny weather. So much extra air-conditioning will be spent to cool those buildings compared to if they had been built more reflective.
Also windows that go down to the floor has been considered bad architecture for decades.
Wall-to-wall windows are great.
Floor-to-ceiling windows are stunning when you walk into an empty place that you're thinking about buying or renting, but when you're actually living there, windows that go down to the floor create a few feet of dead space. You can't really put any furniture there without feeling guilty about blocking the view you're paying for, and it's uncomfortable to walk up to the edge and look down - it makes you feel uneasy like you're standing on a cliff with your toes at the edge. It's much better for the window to end around waist high.
They're psychologically fine if both the floor and the ceiling extend beyond the window (e.g. it's on the ground floor, and the roof overhangs), but when they're used on every floor in a high rise apartment building, killing limited square footage and driving up energy bills, it's absolute madness.
I feel every comment section related to weather and climate seems to have the same winging about buildings. Cold? Europe has amazing buildings, hot? Europe has been building ovens... it's interesting psychology.
Edit: We cannot blame people for buildings things that worked when we had a stable climate but are no long suitable for all these extremes. We needed to fix the emissions issue 30-50 year ago to avoid this. We knew it and we collectively ignored it. I get your point, we could've "planned ahead" but if you build something that wasn't suitable / cost effective for the time it was built, you'd be out of business.
50 years ago no one was going to pay extra for a building that might be important in 100 years because we didn't stop burning fossil fuels in time.
Correct. And we'd be "out of business" too as a country if we decided alone to fix emissions. Other economies would have passed ours because burning oil is so damn useful.
Thing is, I don't feel we are changing much in this respect. Now the best idea we come up with is burning more fuel for aircon...
> Now the best idea we come up with is burning more fuel for aircon...
I mean really what else is there? We can't undo the warming, we can't rebuild every building in Europe (even if we could, would it work? Winter will still happen too). We can install solar panels and air conditioners, though.
We can install adjustable shades and ceiling fans. Cheap and efficient. It practically pays for itself in saved energy bills if we decide to add an aircon anyway. Plus the saved energy saves carbon emissions too.
We can update building regulations so that new building are better.
We can plant trees. It brings shade in summer but lets sun through in winter.
Most heat pump installations in Europe are air-to-water systems fitted to use the existing piping in old homes and is used only for heating. Such installations can, in theory, be used for cooling, but very inefficiently.
The annoying thing is that UK at least has a bigger grant for air-to-water systems.
I've been doing some research into this, because I would ideally like to get this system so I can make use of the existing radiators in my old house, but I do also want to have the option of cooling my home. It does seem like Fan Coil Units (FCUs) are an option for this. Anyone have experience with these? Are they really inefficient compared to standard air-to-air units?
The problem is, if you feed cold water into your normal heating pipes, all the piping and radiators will get wet from condensation. So you would have to have a regulator that measures air moisture and temperature in all your rooms and only feeds water with a temperature above the dew point. This is possible, but inefficient and (especially on hot+wet days) doesn't cool very well.
The possible real fixes are either to section off your water circuits in summer, and only run the properly cold water through FCUs, wall or ceiling loops.
Or to get a multisplit heat pump, use a normal refrigerant-air indoor unit to cool and a refrigerant-water indoor unit to heat the water loops.
Yeah, I wasn't planning to run the cold loops through the existing radiator piping. I just want the ability to cool at least 1 room by reusing the air-to-water system, even if that means the FPU requires its own piping from the outside.
In that scenario, are FPUs a good option? Are there other drawbacks?
Most Francoils I know don’t have a way to get rid of any condensation that happens in the unit like internal air conditioning units do. So even if you run the piping outside of the house you have condensation in the unit and the floors, not to mention the walls.
Even then, there is a fair limit in cooling and efficiency you can get from them because of the lack of phase changes occurring.
If you have a balanced mechanical ventilation (both inlet and outlet) that would be one of the best options to condition the whole house without putting air conditioning units everywhere.
Having said that, we turn on the air conditioning in the attic during hot days which removes the biggest heat and moisture from the house. Next up is installing more sun blinds to prevent the heat from entering in the first place.
Fan coil units work just fine, you’ll need to install a condensate drain but other than that it works like a mini-split evaporator/fan air handler.
You just have the added equipment and maintenance for the water/glycol loop vs an air to air system that only pipes refrigerant around. Fan coil units or VAV boxes are the usual terminal units for commercial HVAC systems that have a chilled and hot water loop, VAVs are used in a system with ducted AHUs and FCUs are used for apartments (stacked FCUs with vertical supply/return risers) or spaces not served by ducted air handlers for whatever reason.
> Most heat pump installations in Europe are air-to-water systems
I'm not sure thats true.
Most aircon in "warm" europe is standard split aircon
The "heatpump" shit that the UK is sorta looking at is as you describe. However its half the price to install "aircon" over heatpumps (because grants, amongst other things)
Like most recently refurbished offices will use normal aircon (certainly all the one I have worked in)
> I would absolutely be looking into how to get [...] at least one window air-conditioning unit if not a heat pump before next summer
Before you do that, do the cost effective thing: shadow and wind. Then you can add an aircon iff thats not enough.
For shadow, reftrofitting adjustable sunshade is pretty effective. Sunlight brings about 1kw per square meter of window. That like having your heater at full power when its already hot.
For wind: fans, preferably ceiling fans. Lowers perceived temperature by about 3.5 °C.
Uncomfortable heat has nothing to do with temperature and everything to do with air humidity. Only an AC can lower the humidity, by conditioning the air.
27 centigrade with 80% humidity is a lot more uncomfortable for the human body than 33 degrees with 40% humidity. Likewise if the temperature is low, it's worse with high humidity and vice versa. The worst heat is the humid heat, and shade and fans cannot do much about it.
El Nino mostly affects temperature in winter. It can raise the baseline a little in summer but that's not the problem with the heat waves we have this year. There is no buried lede but there is a lot of misunderstanding about El Nino on your side.
I live in Europe. We have in fact invented air conditioning here too, but I am not concerned with what we should be doing next year. That's a trivial matter. I'm concerned about what will happen if this trend continues another 5-10 years. How do we make sure that doesn't happen?
Europe has saved on CO2 emissions by moving production to China, and more recently to India and Southern Asia, moving energy generation for factories onto coal power, significantly INCREASING the rate at which climate change occurs.
China and India have made it very clear that, first, they will continue to do this. Also adding solar power, but not lowering coal power. They added that it is "inappropriate" to even ask them to do so (that was China).
Oh and thanks to reliance on Russian gas, and the Ukraine war, the EU is forced to move to coal and LNG supplies, which are even worse than coal. Plus, of course, that means that it's not just coal plants getting worse for climate change but almost all power plants in Europe.
To do something about it, due to Jevon's paradox the only countries that can lower CO2 emissions are the ones digging up fossil fuels. Saudi Arabia, Russia, Venezuela, US, Norway, the Netherlands, Britain. You have zero chance to convince any of them to stop doing it, burning and selling oil, not even Norway is doing that. And any oil or gas dug up and sold will be burned.
There never was any serious intent, not even on the part of the greens (at least not in Germany, I mean, they even published an article on the subject: eliminating nuclear power was more important than climate change in 2003). And if even they weren't willing to make it a priority, who exactly are you supposing will do it?
Even in 2026, even Germany, increased it's reliance on coal (they're keeping 10GW of additional coal power at the ready, on top of the 20% of Germany's power that's constantly using coal), similar measures have been taken in Japan, Italy, and India has even delayed maintenance on existing coal power plants to increase electricity production from them.
And of course, there's the basic physics part. Aside from a small rounding error climate change is cumulative. Which means once fossil fuels are burned the temperature will rise accordingly. Even if we stopped burning it won't get better.
To merely stop climate change from getting worse, just that, nothing more, we have to cut CO2 emissions worldwide by 99.7 (and some models say 99.97%, there's a surprising range there). That will just stop it from getting worse. It won't make it better. Anything less is not "a good effort" it simply makes things worse.
All policies taken so far to stop climate change have not just made things worse, but increased the rate at which it's getting worse. Doing nothing at all would have been a lot better (because it would have kept factories in the EU going, on much cleaner power).
Oh, and by the way, this was all perfectly clear and known 10 years ago, and nobody changed course. So ...
There is no remotely realistic solution in the current policy directions.
And geoengineering ... is not really allowed to be discussed. Or this argument is being put forward at the UN. Any (successful) geoengineering will have dramatic negative consequences for some states and people. And since that is considered unacceptable, because large portions of the human race are currently dependent on global warming continuing. We won't do that either. People's lives, jobs, work and so on depend on things continuing and we cannot demand they change.
So yeah, I'd get some solar panels and an air conditioner.
Your take is too fatalistic because any reduction in Co2 emissions is helpful. It isn't an all or nothing thing.
The cost estimates for eliminating Co2 emissions are also not very high. In the range of 1-2x total GDP. Would be doable if 3-5% of GDP is spent over the next 20-30 years.
I agree that all oil will be dug up and sold but there is a caveat: not at any price. If solar and wind continue their trajectory their dominance is inevitable.
That does nothing to remove the moisture in the air; an air conditioner removes water from the air which makes the apparent temperature much cooler than relying on sweat evaporating. I just spent an entire weekend in 100F/38C weather and it would’ve been dangerous without an air conditioned space to cool down in.
Letting the sun in is like turning your heaters on. You wouldn't turn on both heaters and aircon in summer, would you ?
Please bring some shade and save energy.
Edit: also, without wind there is a hot and humid bubble around our own body. Fans help a lot with that by bringing fresh dry air right onto the sweat so it can evaporate.
Have an AC if you need to. But please dont have only an AC. Shading and fans pay for themselve in energy savings.
> Remember that 1.5 degrees Celsius is a nearly end-of-the-world scenario
No, it's not end of the world. 3C is where things start getting bad. 1.5C is the target for the 2015 Paris climate agreement to try and avoid hitting 2C.
We are looking at more severe droughts, flash floods, and rising oceans where we are at, but not the worst of it like mass 40C wet bulb heat domes which wipe out all life underneath them.
This is an incorrect way to frame the impacts of temperature increases. 1.5, 2, 3C makes extreme events like the one you stated significantly more likely in a probabilistic sense. The ability of adapt is in part driven by frequency of extreme events as much as it is adaptability to specific thresholds. We are already experiencing deadly heat bulb events at current warming levels, the impacted areas and frequency of these events will strictly increase.
Heat domes are already killing off cattle and reducing crop yields, even in western countries? There was significant cattle die off in the US during 2022/2023. Europe just experienced 10,000 excess deaths due to heat impacts and a reduced grain yield by almost 8-10%. There have not been correlated heat dome events over multiple regional bread baskets (yet) but those are going to get increasingly more probable. We have a lot of adaptability on the food side though as reducing meat consumption is an easy behavioral change. Climate change impacts is one reason why beef is currently so expensive in the US.
The 1.5C target (which, as others pointed out, is not an end-of-the-world scenario) is about average temperature above pre-industrial baseline across 20 years. The temperature anomaly of a single year has nothing to do with that; 2028 will likely be colder again.
Average temperature moves in cycles. By confusing single-year temperatures with the 1.5C target, you're just going to make people think "crisis averted" once 2028 turns out to be cold.
Does that matter? The only thing that can be done, is for oil producers to stop digging up fossil fuels. And not even Norway is willing to do that, to say nothing about Russia or China, even this year. And that, not digging up the fossil fuel is the only way. If it's dug up, it will be burned. Guaranteed.
Oh and it effectively doesn't matter: to merely stop global warming we need 99.7% less fossil fuel production (and that needs to include everything from Saudi oil to Japanese coal)
So why would it matter? Because we feel it? We are not willing to implement real policy when we feel it. We are not willing to implement real policy when we don't feel it.
And geoengineering ... while it at least has the possibility for someone to just do that without the agreement of everyone ... so at least there's the realistic option to do something, so many nations, so many people, have their lives utterly dependent on climate change continuing. So nobody's making serious plans for that either (because, realistically, it'll mean war if something like that is implemented. Which is still better than doing nothing imho)
Yes, accuracy matters in this discussion. Not conflating numbers which have no relation to each other matters. We haven't "surpassed the 1.5C target" just because one year is abnormally hot. When we finally do officially surpass it, we don't want a lot of people to be confused and ask, "wait didn't we already surpass it in 2026?".
These are the conversations that get translated into policy. They are literally about directly satisfying people's emotions. No detours. Accuracy? I hope you're joking.
AND there's the problem that the policy the "pro-global-warming" camp wants will not even help. Global CO2 emission reduction is not realistic.
I'm working in AI and hoping that will help. If I had the realistic option (I have a family to support), I'd love to work in Chemistry to make it at least possible, maybe even easy, to do something about that (of course, even Chemistry products are being designed with AI, so ...). Achieving anything in policy seems to me beyond absurd. In fact I find it very hard to defend the viewpoint that even the policymakers pushing global warming action even want to help. Technological solutions at least might achieve something.
Chemistry to remove CO2 from the atmosphere? The problem is that it costs as much energy as you received by putting it there. You have to unburn the fuel. Did you know each molecule of chlorophyll only processes three molecules of CO2 per second? The limiting factor is energy input.
the oceans can adsorb a great deal more heat, but all the ice will melt, while the deap ocean water expands, from it's rather odd temperature ,that keeps it at the highest density possible, about .5% more than if it were just a bit warmer, so more warming will cause very significsnt sea level rise through several different mechanisms related to heat.
What's interesting to me is that almost all models underestimated the ocean temperature.
We are entering uncharted waters and I fear that at some point we will get an extreme extreme weather event and the worse thing is that we won't see it coming.
That should be the scary part. We know how El Niño affects world's weather, but it is also a symptom of how much heat the ocean is absorbing.
That core problem won't end this year or the next one, and it will keep disrupting global climate. And with it, agriculture, settlements, economy and civilization as we know it.
And the scariest part is what we do about it. Keep doing activities that rise global temperature and power up positive feedback loops, weakening or abolishing climate policies, and when things start to feel urgent will try things by the fast way with unclear outcomes.
- There is no "we", but it would take "we" to fix this.
- There is a global scale issue, but no consensus on this being a problem. Not at the global, continental, local or individual level. FFS, there are idiots proudly rolling coal.
- Leadership - in the rare places on earth where it is somewhat accountable - reflects this lack of consensus.
- Acknowledging the problem does not equal acting even on an individual level.
- There's lots of cognitive dissonance. Why am I even flying to the other side of the world next week?
We are cooked. Not so much us old farts, but the children.
Due to the widespread idea that climate prediction has been predicting doom and gloom all the time, and has always been wrong about it, I have been entertaining myself by revisiting old climate predictions from 20 years ago. I can highly recommend it.
I mean, predicting the climate must be one of the hardest numerical simulations you can run. Climate models are famously incomplete. But the results turned out to be way more accurate than I would have thought. That's some impressive modeling, and I would assume that models have only improved since then.
The most chilling thing (and not in a good way) about it is that popular science type repotrs for the general public usually indicate an interval between a good case and a bad case, with a nice line in between. In retrospect we have been pretty much perfectly tracking the bad case line ever since.
>Due to the widespread idea that climate prediction has been predicting doom and gloom all the time, and has always been wrong about it, I have been entertaining myself by revisiting old climate predictions from 20 years ago. I can highly recommend it.
N=1 Mind, but I remember reading a spread in Australian Scientist that predicted Australia would become something of a rainless desert, storms bringing only lightning, by 2020 or so. Leaving only Melbourne, Adelaide and Tasmania somewhat habitable. Article went on to discuss how to calmly migrate the population south over the 13 or so years remaining, and what the government might do to dissuade climate refugees from pacific islands.
Since then I have a read a lot of people walking back the absolute death and destruction stuff, but "Extremier Extremes" seems to be the closest to a consensus position, one that the strongest El Nino ever supports completely.
We are doing a lot. Almost 90% of electricity capacity added last year was renewables. Nearly 1 in 3 cars sold are now EVs. The world is spending over $2 trillion every year on low‑carbon energy investment. Solar and wind have already avoided more than 2 gigatons of C02 being added to the atmosphere. In the US, the IRA will drop emissions 40% to below 2005 levels.
I’ve had the same discussion with many people, and when I tell them how much work is done on cleaning up carbon emissions, the reply is always “well… it’s not enough”. And of course, they don’t have a sense of what is “enough”.
They don’t really understand it in a factual, measurable way, but just are interesting in what the overall story is, and what it says about humanity failing.
> We are doing a lot. Almost 90% of electricity capacity added last year was renewables
New capacity being electric is fine but we need to be actively removing fossil fuels from existing capacity, which isn't actually happening. We're just building new capacity on top of old existing fossil fuels. So sure, it's nice that a majority of new capacity is green, but we're still burning more fossil fuels year over year
We've been seeing our own certain destruction from climate change coming since the 70s. The 1870s. We had two entire lifetimes to do something about it, we didn't.
Except those guys throwing soup at the fossil fuel HQs. They did a little.
We're building more data centers for a technology that's ramping global warming even faster. Water consumption, heat generation and tons and tons of CO2 emitting concrete to house these things.
So we're doing something, but those things are counterproductive to our planet's general well being. Apparently billionaires don't need an inhabitable Earth to live on.
Growth trend matters more than absolute present value.
Data centres generally had been seeing energy use growing at 12% annually, or with a doubling time of 5.8 years (about 5 years 10 months). AI is accelerating that trend.
In the United States, power consumption by data centres is on course to account for almost half of the growth in electricity demand between now and 2030. Driven by AI use, the US economy is set to consume more electricity in 2030 for processing data than for manufacturing all energy-intensive goods combined, including aluminium, steel, cement and chemicals. In advanced economies more broadly, data centres are projected to drive more than 20% of the growth in electricity demand between now and 2030, putting the power sector in those economies back on a growth footing after years of stagnating or declining demand in many of them.
>Growth trend matters more than absolute present value.
Only if the current absolute present value is enough that the resulting trend matters.
It was only 2 weeks ago when someone posted an article claiming data centers worldwide use 24x less water than golf courses worldwide.
And I mean, you need somewhere to collate all that climate data? You need telecoms to let scientists communicate?
>Driven by AI use, the US economy is set to consume more electricity in 2030 for processing data than for manufacturing all energy-intensive goods combined, including aluminium, steel, cement and chemicals. In advanced economies more broadly, data centres are projected to drive more than 20% of the growth in electricity demand between now and 2030, putting the power sector in those economies back on a growth footing after years of stagnating or declining demand in many of them.
If horse use trends continue at their current pace, London will be covered in 20 meters of horse manure by the end of the decade.
> In advanced economies more broadly, data centre's are projected to drive more than 20% of the growth in electricity demand between now and 2030
20% of the growth isn't much overall either is it? That's likely assuming that the million and 1 spruiked projects actually get off the ground.
Exponential growth, a/k/a constant periodic percentage growth (per day, month, year, etc.), increases rapidly. Differences (or errors) in magnitude measurement disappear rapidly: a factor of two in a single generation, a factor of ten in about three generations, a factor of 100 in less than 7, a factor of one thousand in fewer than 10.
What matters is that the growth rate continue.
Which of course, it usually doesn't. Most growth trends follow a sigmoid rather than exponential curve (initially), or more complex longer-term dynamics.
The point of your infamous horse quote was less to show that the Earth would be covered in horses (or their effluvia), than that the observed current trend could not reasonably continue. And as some of us are aware, it didn't, due to the adoption of ... the petroleum-fueled automobile ... which has some bearing on this particular HN post itself.
Had the automobile not come along, or petroleum reserves proved much more limited as was widely believed at the time[1], large horse-congested cities such as London, New York, and Chicago would likely have seen sharply slowed or even reversed growth under negative hygiene pressures. It was the multiple factors of growth in fossil fuel use (displacing horses, and their effluvia), development of sewerage systems, solid waste disposal, food safety and purity, refrigeration, and public health which turned cities from death zones to attractive living places, rather than merely drawing desperate immigrants through high wages amidst rampant rural and foreign poverty.
But the point remains that the sustained growth rate matters far more than the starting point.
2030 is three and a half years away. That's soon.
________________________________
Notes:
1. It wasn't until the 1930s with the discovery of the East Texas Oil Field in the US and of vast fields in Saudi Arabia that it seemed likely that oil was more than a short-term resource. In marked contrast to, say, the short-lived Indian natural gas boom of the late 19th and early 20th centuries: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_gas_boom>. Daniel Yergin's The Prize is an excellent history of the industry's growth, though I disagree strongly with the author's strong allegiance to it.
>Exponential growth, a/k/a constant periodic percentage growth (per day, month, year, etc.), increases rapidly. Differences (or errors) in magnitude measurement disappear rapidly: a factor of two in a single generation, a factor of ten in about three generations, a factor of 100 in less than 7, a factor of one thousand in fewer than 10.
Exponential Growth in datacenters is extremely unlikely.
I doubt it could be sustained for half a generation before Colo became cheaper than air.
>But the point remains that the sustained growth rate matters far more than the starting point.
If you add "Sustained" in sure, but its unsustainable, leading back to the starting point mattering more than the rate.
Theres not enough RAM for now. You double colo space worldwide, and there's simply not going to be computers to put in there. That's just the canary, there's indicators of other component shortages. But like, pretending this is exponential will quickly burn out other things. Steel. Powder Coat. Fibre.
Not to mention that funding for data center expansion is already drying up and projects are being cancelled. I honestly dont believe in a single local project that isnt branded NextDC or Equinix. Outside of them I wouldnt be surprised if 90% of projects failed to materialise.
I dont know what world you live in where you think theres an exponential Data Centre growth going on but its not this one. We are already up against the wall. I guarantee you will have a new industry you just learned about to get anxious about by 2030. Just how Bitcoin didn't exponentially grow to consume the whole planets energy supply by 2025 as predicted.
Again: the point remains that the sustained growth rate matters far more than the starting point.
And again: it usually doesn't. Most growth trends follow a sigmoid rather than exponential curve.
You're arguing against points I'm not making.
The point I am making is to keep an eye on the growth trend (and whatever might constrain that, you've given some credible concerns here), rather than the starting magnitude.
The question of how much societal resource information services can plausibly consume over a long term is an interesting one. Looking at biological analogues, the human brain accounts for roughly 25% of our own metabolic output, which I suspect is the present record.[1]
I get 8% for total present use in commercial computing, with the US EIA projecting a pretty steady growth to exceed all refrigeration, lighting, space cooling, and ventilation, by 2050, at about 350% of present levels. It looks as if that analysis presumes a 5% annual growth rate. The full report does incorporate AI in its considerations.
We assume AI servers will increasingly skew more energy intensive, the installed stock of AI servers grows exponentially through at least 2040, and computational efficiency will increase over time. In our High Electricity Demand case, we assume the exponential growth in AI servers will continue through 2050, and the rate of improvement in server computational efficiency will reflect historical trends.
1. Apparently among vertebrates typical metabolic fraction is between 2--8%, though there may be some tree shrews which approach humans as a percentage if not total CNS metabolic magnitude. "Ratio of central nervous system to body metabolism in vertebrates: Its constancy and functional basis" (1981) <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/15916066_Ratio_of_c...>.
Socially, our computational energy is on the high side for vertebrate animals.
> TSMC’s manufacturing success comes at an ecological cost. The company accounts for around 150,000 tonnes of water per day and 6.4% of the national electricity consumption.
It would be great for you to experience living close to one of these data centers [0]. Maybe you'd have a consideration outside of your own myopic view then.
If you think that every data center is now a closed loop system enjoy your propaganda.
Colossus 1 and 2 still use open loop systems. And with the case of blow down water that's "returned" it's not usable due to the use of concentrated salts (1,200 to 6,000 mg/L).
In your mind this is a closed loop system of clean water. It is not. And as DCs have less and less discharge there is more and more solid waste produced.
Your assertion that "water consumption is a red herring" is utter bull shit. I'd suggest enlightening yourself [0][1][2][3].
Unfounded comments that are nothing but a lie are OK. Yet, calling it out directly goes against the rules.
In this case the response is warranted. Until people start to see what actually goes on in these data centers with respect to pollution (of many kinds) I don't have a problem being direct.
I'm doing so both staying within the guidelines and specifically calling out the idiocy displayed, though without relying on that particular word.
Calling out Guidelines violations does not imply disagreement with what's been said otherwise. It is a call for more substantive participation, and probably strengthening your own arguments.
You've been here long enough that all of this should be quite familiar to you.
(I'm not a mod, which is why I'd initially linked a mod's own admonition.)
Yes, but they _could_ be a closed loop system if governments demanded it. And they should.
The could, and should generate their own electricity as well. And perhaps even provide free power to the surrounding neighborhood to make up for the noise and inconvenience of having one nearby.
Have you seen that some of these things are so loud they’re damaging to health? But they’re loud at frequencies we can’t hear so it’s not easy to tell without specialised equipment
Very interesting how your enlightening comments about dirty AI data centers are being downvoted. Pro-Musk, pro-AI bots and shills trying to keep the smoke screen going?
Once I listened to a podcast about the holodomor, a famine caused by Stalin and affected Ukrainians mostly. In the end they were forced to eat their children as they were so desperate for food. The suffering was untold, but real, it happened, and that kind of thing can and will happen again if we're not extra extra careful.
We're pushing ourselves into absolutely untold suffering the longer do nothing. I truly fear a famine like that and the more we go down this road, the closer we're getting.
Obviously its too late to avoid the worst, the only hope we have is to collectively cooperate to help each other get through it. Not sure that will happen but I believe that's the only way through.
I've seen dozens of videos and articles about this strongest ever event. And I still have no clue if the next year I should evacuate from Paris for the summer because heatwaves may be even crazier than this year, or prolonged heavy rains are more likely and can make the city more livable.
Given what I learned from "chaos" by James Gleick, the predicament we're in is that we likely cannot predict outcomes or the events themselves, rather what we know is that weather will become more unpredictable and more extreme.
So the answer to your question is it could be either or both or neither. Whatever happens is going to be on average more extreme than what you're used to.
It might end up like a covid situation where even if you have good AC in your home, you don't want to be in the area because the medical system is on its knees overwhelmed from treating all the cases of heat related illnesses.
It's funny that I said "evacuate" and did not mention air travel. In that part of the world, trains are the default, with nuclear green power powering the majority of consumers. Maybe that other default is a problem. And yes, bien sûr, an abandoned personal flight or train will counter balance China, India or mega leaks of methane in US. And all AC owners must be incarcerated, it's so worse than a car. A new leftist mayor of Paris even said ACs warm up neighbors' places, should be forbidden obviously...
As someone who had to do exactly that this summer (multiple times, to boot), I'm doing my part and working to get the fuck out of here permanently before next summer hits.
I've got an excellent overview of consequences from Claude Opus 5. I'd post it here but there's a "no AI content" policy, so sorry, you need to ask yourself. (Though for Europe specifically, apparently very little except for higher average temperatures).
I can hardly wait to see how this shakes out locally. We have had 3 La Ninas in a row that have left us with a rainfall deficit of 23.5" (597 mm) under the 20 year average annual total that I have measured here in NTexas. It's been dry overall for several years.
Considering the situation going into the 2015-2016 El Nino we were also in a multiyear drought with a rainfall deficit accumulated from 2010-2014 of over 31" (787 mm). That is just under the 20 year average annual precipitation total for my place - 36.3" (922 mm). We were missing almost a full year's rainfall over that 5 year period. I use a NOAA manual rain gauge of the type that can handle up to 11" (279.4mm) of rain before needing to be dumped. I have recently added a digital tipping gauge unit beside the manual gauge so I can have a clear comparison and track rain rates.
Anyway, if it works out like 2015 did then we went into the year with a deficit but it quickly began raining well above normal so that by mid-June we were already above the normal 20-year average rainfall total. Then it dried up with below normal rainfall from mid-June to late October. There was no rain at all between the first week of September and the last week of October. For the year though we were still 3" (76.2 mm) above the 20 year normal annual total when it started raining again.
Between the last week of October and the end of the year it rained an additional 28" (711 mm) and then it stopped and we fell behind again until finally catching up to normal accumulation in the second week of March 2016.
Currently our accumulation to date is almost 1" (25.4 mm) above the 20 year average annual total for this date. So, just as in 2015 we are a little above normal during summer. I expect that if it works out like 2015 then we can expect a lot more rain beginning in the fall, probably by October.
If I look back over the previous 5 years from 2021-2015, we are again running a rainfall deficit of 26.2" (665.5 mm). That is about 72% of rainfall expected in a normal year using my 20 year average accumulation. Nearly 3/4 of a year's rainfall behind at this point over a 5 year period. Interesting.
I suspect I will need to have some more rock hauled in to repair the driveway by the end of the year since it will all wash down the hill again.
Those include: hydrology (floods, drought), sea-surface temperatures (hotter or cooler, both of which impact local ecologies and fisheries), storms (weaker hurricane season in the Atlantic, due to high-altitude wind shear, stronger in other areas), and others: economic, fisheries, military, human health, marine life, and specific regional impacts.
We all know we’re way past the time where we need to cut the carbon emissions, like it was 30 years ago. Why aren’t the governments investing money on research on carbon capture technology? That’s the only way left to undo massive carbon emissions due to industrialisation
Carbon capture is physically unable to be as effective as we need it to be. To an approximation, growing a tree is able to capture as much carbon as burning the wood from that tree. If most of our released carbon came from burning wood, we would just need to re-grow that amount of wood (unfortunately it's not even that simple, as the soil stores carbon long term in a way that just growing the tree doesn't capture, and is also released over time when old growth forests are cut down). Instead, the carbon we're burning comes from processes which efficiently concentrated the carbon from plants and microorganisms over millions of years to create coal, oil, and gas.
Carbon capture technology would have to artificially replicate these millions-of-years-long processes, and do it on a scale of years to decades. The scale of carbon capture we need is entirely unfathomable, requiring processes that don't exist, because they have to work against entropy itself.
Carbon capture at the point of burning fossil fuels to abate further emissions might be economical. Capturing already released carbon dioxide from the atmosphere (concentration of ~0.04%) is a fiction pushed by fossil fuel companies to muddy the debate and distract from the urgency of immediately stopping the burning of fossil fuels.
"Wait, do you mean I should pay to capture the carbon my neighbors emits? No way!"
That's why.
Edit: Also, as some other comment said, thermodynamics tell us that it would take an inordinate amount of energy to bring carbon back to safe levels. More than what we get from burning oil. It's about entropy and all that. So there's that.
See my sibling comment to the parent. Doubling forests won't do near enough, because the carbon we've burnt comes from millions of years of forests compacted into coal (among other sources). We'd need to grow millions of years worth of forests, which we just physically don't have the surface area for.
Its regionally complicated because increased tree cover can lower albedo (reflectivity of radiation) which offsets the co2 removal benefits. Forrests can tip from co2 sinks to co2 sources which is happening in different regions of the world currently.
We needed to reach zero emissions 20 years ago and today we should have strong negative emissions.
At this rate I don't think humanity will reach zero emissions before 2050. It's going to take a couple of very bad years for humanity to take this seriously.
I wrote to Alan Kay over 8 years ago about my fears of global warming and how tech seems to dismiss it as a concern on the whole.
A little known fact about Alan Kay is 17 years ago he was part of a group of "systems people" who published for the NFS about various systems including the climate. He helped write "Transitions and Tipping Points in Complex Environmental Systems" (https://nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/2022-12/Transitions-and-ti...). He wrote to me that "This, along with many other warnings from many other sources over many years, fell on deaf or disbelieving ears."
He agreed with my concern saying "And, yes, you are right that things will likely be really bad if the climate is allowed to crash past the tipping point."
But what he said following that shook me to my core. Kay said "If you think of a system as an upside-down coca cola bottle, it is easy to see that a little nudge can topple it, whereas considerably more energy is then required to put it back.".
What this means is to get CO2 back down to 350 ppm (we are at 428 ppm), we would need to expend more energy than we did getting it to 450 ppm. That means, we would have to expend more energy than humans have produced IN ALL OF HUMAN HISTORY in the next 10-20 years (30,000-45,000 EJ range) just to put the system back to where it's safe.
Ask yourself, where are we spending our energy right now as a species? On putting the system to a safe level or something else?
Do we even have the capability to do it? As we continue to expand our industrial capacity, we also use non-renewable resources like oil and metals we can't recycle. As we exploit them, we degrade our industrial capacity for the future. For a deeper analysis read Limits to Growth and work related to it.
The weather in Japan has been completely wack I can tell you that. The rainy season is never ending in central and north Japan. It was actually declared over but it's back again. Never seen that before.
Most of the most flood prone areas in CA have been significantly neutered over the decades thanks to massive water projects. There was a time when the LA river would destroy LA routinely. Now everything is channelized. At risk communities are probably the handful of remote ones that do not have great infrastructure, but I'm not even sure where those might be given how the state seems to be able to build thousands of debris flow cement storm drain setups in relevant areas.
Other states seem a lot worse off. Water table is closer to where people live, there's a lack of topology to actually run water out in a lot of cases, there's been little investment in managing water for stormwater for property damage abatement or power or irrigation like in CA where the topology really incentivized massive investment in all of that over the last century.
Not necessarily... it isn't as straightforward as "stronger El Niño means more rain".
The steering of the jet stream seems to have some qualitative changes in these conditions but also more chaos. It could steer storms anywhere along the coast, so different parts of CA, OR, and WA get different impact. Just in my lifetime in CA, I've witnessed some very wet El Niño winters but also some drier than average.
The biggest precipitation threat on the west coast seems to be a repeat of some of the biggest flooding events known historically or geologically. But, these are relatively infrequent and most of the record predates any understanding or tracking of the El Niño oscillation. So the correlation cannot be stated so clearly. These are atmospheric river events which seem to stall, producing heavy rains over the same area for a much longer period.
Just in the recent centuries of CA history, there have been massive floods in northern and southern regions in different month-long rain events. There have been improvements to flood control infrastructure since then. But, the only reason those events aren't known as the most costly is because there wasn't as much economic development here back when the floods happened.
Our usual storms sweep through an area the heaviest rains over just part of a day. Our varied terrain means that each individual storm also has very uneven rainfall amounts due to orographic intensification. Prominences with the right aspect towards the wind will get far more accumulation. Our watersheds can absorb quite a bit of this, but even those brief rains can cause localized flooding.
If the rain continues for many days in a row, we will see widespread mudslides and flooding of larger rivers, basins, etc. Some of the historically extreme events had rain persisting for over a month!
Edit: along with these "mega storm" scenarios, we also have evidence of "mega droughts". It's worrisome to imagine what challenges may come from a more energetic and chaotic climate.
El Niño is the “warm phase” of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation and features warmer than average ocean surface temperatures off the coast of Ecuador and Peru in the equatorial eastern Pacific Ocean.... Historically, the presence of El Niño conditions tilts the odds in favor of wetter than normal precipitation across the southern third of the state. The relationship between El Niño and cool season precipitation is weaker in the central and northern parts of the state.
Flooding is possible, particularly if dams exceed capacity, perhaps exacerbated by earlier snowmelt and peak runoff. Landslides are a more widespread, and less manageable problem, particularly as loose-material slopes are waterlogged. The deluge -> high growth -> heavy fuel load -> large wildfire -> landslide cycle is one that's become fairly well-known in California.
Levee failures within the Sacramento Delta or Central Valley could result in very large-scale flooding, affecting agriculture or communities.
The San Francisco Bay Area may see "king tides" and general flooding throughout the bay and delta region, particularly during December and January, and all the more so if high tides coincide with heavy river run-off. Remember that the entire Central Valley of California, nearly 500 miles long north-to-south, drains out through the Bay. Prevailing winds may create a wind setup or seiche which can result in flooding along a some but not all shorelines, or alternating across a body of water.
The aquifers are all extremely depleted and the reservoirs nearly empty. Extra rain will be very good. If private interests are allowed to graze and log public land, fire risk can be mitigated.
The reservoirs are designed and calibrated for specific times and rates of fill, largely driven by snowmelt runoff rather than precipitation deluges.
Aquifer fill rates are slow, and are generally predicated on large-scale flooding. Prior to modern flood control (dams, river channelisation, levee construction), in which much, and occasionally effectively all of California's Central Valley (as well as large riparian valley systems in Oregon and Washington) would flood.
Reservoirs provide parlous slim protection against landslides of elevated slopes. Those are affected by upslope water saturation (the stuff that's on its way to fill your aquifers in coming months or years), not floodplain innundation. It's exacerbated by fire-cleared hillsides, particularly those which burn ferociously hot, killing plant roots and baking soil. Those fires are not historically typical, but have been the conditions experienced with greatly increased frequency since the 1990s.
Cattle don't graze chaparral, oak woodlands, or ponderosa or Douglas fir forests. Those have been what's been burning.
Your suggestions / assessments are at a far remove from reality.
We haven't had any significant flooding in past El Niños. Of course, it will probably be different this round, but at least El Niños tend to align with Mediterranean weather instead of droughts and wildfires.
We also have one of the more advanced waterwork system in the US to support Central Valley agriculture, so a lot of the worst aspects can be somewhat managed.
It's bad that such dramatic climate change is happening, but we're definetly lucky to live in the West Coast because we won't face the brunt of some of the worst aspects of the El Niño comparatively and have the infrastructure to deal with it.
Sadly, the brunt of climate change will be felt by the poorer half of the world.
True, but a lot of that was due to a lack of integrated water management (IWM) in California at the time, and led to significant reforms as well as infra expansion to prevent that from happening again.
The Lima Prieta Quake and the 1990s floods led to a lot of future proofing in Californian infra. The last major thing left is transmission weathering, which PGE and Sac are fighting over.
Also, most of our infra is state funded which gives us a lot of leeway.
Like I said before, it's bad that we're in this position and it's only going to get worse, but we're in one of the better places that can survive these kinds of shifts.
Its a bit more complicated than that, you have a period during the spring called the spring persistence barrier that makes skillful prediction of a developing el nino difficult. What is impressive is that multi month model predictions before this spring barrier had a historic el nino developing which turned out to be correct (an out of sample prediction).
I could not be more excited about the upcoming warm, dry summer here in NZ's North Island. The media keeps trying to scare us but I'm pumped. I can't do anything about the future of planet Earth and I'm not going to ring my hands and lose sleep over it, but if atmospheric changes are going to result in some great seasons I'm here for it.
Another thing AI makes worse because of all the energy consumption.
I hope we have something more to show than dozens of to-do apps when our children and grandchildren ask which important things made the massive use of AI necessary.
Even if we don't do anything about emissions and climate change picks up, lives in 2126 will be unmistakably better than ours in all dimensions that matter.
If things get really unsustainable, I'm talking about a sizeable percentage of the world's population dying because of heatwaves, shall we see desperate measure being taken?
For example some scientists suggested installing sunshades but... Literally a sunshade: deploying an umbrella of sort, in space, so that less heat reaches the heart.
Now of course as we've been ruled by luminaries since decades, bringing us to the situation we're in now, I wouldn't be surprised if they managed to fuck up that too: for example by fuxxoring the sunshade and killing another sizeable percentage of the population by creating a new ice age.
But really I wonder: at what tipping point shall desperate measures be taken to try to fix things and what could those be? That sunshade doesn't seem that crazy or is it?
>If you give any regularly-occurring event that varies in intensity enough time, it is guaranteed to break the records of its previous intensities.
I don't even have to add emphasis myself, you already did.
Someone then named a regularly-occurring event of varying intensity (summer is hot), and pointed out that the data shows the opposite of your explanation (i.e. this isn't random variance causing random spikes; this is a continuous increasing trend).
You then said, effectively, "not that regularly-occurring event of varying intensity!"
Kinda seems like you're moving the goalposts a bit.
The buried lede:
What does all this mean for global temperatures? Because global temperature lags ENSO by around three to five months, most of this event’s warming will land in 2027, which is now shaping up to be a genuinely alarming year and the warmest on record by a sizable margin
I’m certainly no climate scientist, but if I lived in Europe, I would absolutely be looking into how to get a solar energy system set up and at least one window air-conditioning unit if not a heat pump before next summer
I don't mean to be divisive, but this meme-like stream of news articles and comments about Europeans being silly about air conditioning, from the drill-baby-drill nation that refused to even try to do anything about climate change, really grates on me.
I didn’t see anything meme-like in the comment you responded to. Or even anything related to environmentalism. To me, it just looked like good health advice.
In case you don't know, there is a meme in the US that Europe don't know/don't have A/C. We do, but in some coutries there are laws banning A/C below 25°C (77°F) in public places, so (US) tourist don't get the cold air hit when entering a building like a musseum, leaving with the impression we don't know A/C.
No general A/C might be the case in regions that never needed it before (mild summers, cold winters), but their presence is increasing.
I'm well aware of the memes and discourse on Twitter (although I don't seek it out). My point is that that original comment had none of that. No calling people "europoor." Just important advice delivered unsensationally.
It was fairly impossible to find a restaurant in Paris that had an AC not so long time ago. It’s totally not an issue in states.
There are still hardly any, Paris, July '26.
That's because Europeans are more of nonconformists and could deal with some 7 to 10 super hot days in a year. It's now weeks in a row.
Europe could never "handle" it. Even in 1990-2001, Europe averaged about 3 heat-related deaths per 100,000: https://www.statista.com/chart/36367/average-annual-heat-rel..., compared to about 1 per 100,000 in the Americas at the time.
3 per 100,000 is a lot. That's higher than the homicide rates in New England and the upper midwest of the U.S.
Europeans? Nonconformist? That was funny.
If anything, the AC train wreck is caused by the society being incredibly conformist and conservative, trying to cling to the world of the 20th century that no longer exists.
Europeans are more accepting of being sweaty during the day.
Something like 90% of US residential buildings have AC. For Europe, it's around 20% (for good reason, mind you). It's not a meme if it's an actual fact that many European homes are not prepared for these kinds of increasingly common heat waves, and I got the impression that the parent was showing genuine concern.
House build after WW2 are terrible. I miss my ancient Berlin house with 80cm thick walls. Cool in summer, warm in winter.
It's clearly an op by people who don't want the story to be about a historic heatwave ravaging Europe, so instead they make it about dum Europeans without air conditioning (which they didn't need before).
That's an uncharitable interpretation of the initial comment.
It can also be read as health-sensible reminder given the climate warnings. AC units demand is already up 26% year over year in my country (according to our biggest online retailer, a month ago). Will be a highly profitable year for manufacturers.
The thing is that both sides have a point. European countries (notably France) have known for at least 30 years that this was coming, but was ideologically insisting not to install proper AC or even ventilation in public spaces and transport. This does not contradict the wider angle about Americans ignoring climate change.
> ideologically insisting not to install proper AC or even ventilation
This is not supported by facts. People won't spend money on equipment they don't need. Most places in France do not need air conditioning (or did not need it).
It makes no sense that a building owner or transit agency would spend limited funds on something that they do not need.
One may argue that the government of France should have imposed some mandate that people install air conditioning, similar to how Texas failed to mandate insulation for its natural gas infrastructure.
Such mandates would not have been popular unless they were funded. And even then I doubt they would have been popular but they also would have come with considerable cost to the taxpayer.
There is additionally a cultural feeling in some parts of Europe (Germany) that conditioned air is stale and unhealthy. This is not "ideology" but it will certainly contribute to the idea that mass spending on rarely used equipment is wasteful.
Finally, the entire world is unprepared for global warning, Including the USA.
If the next massive climate disaster hits the US, say a drought or mega storm will the message be that "US climate denial ideology caused this" or will it be "nobody could have predicted this; random act of God; thoughts and prayers; nothing to be learned?"
It's not just that France isn't installing them. It's that laws prevent installing them, and laws keep offices and schools warm on purpose.
The prevention comes to play with massive restrictions around visibility of the units on facades in order to preserve character of apartment buildings and beauty. In some cases these can apply to private homes, too. Additionally you have the copropriété, where you need the majority of the building to grant you the right to install AC. The cities have rigid enforcement of all these and can mandate clawbacks and of course fines. And we didn't get into what you're even allowed to install - the things installed in the US won't cut it.
Offices and schools. Laws don't mandate AC, but they prevent it from being put too strong. 27C, I believe is as cold as you're going to get.
French people have a sort of cultural revulsion to AC - forget climate change and American influence, it'll make you sick and you'll hurting your health.
Just stating the facts, not defending the US. The US has a religious opposition to climate change actions as strong as the French religious opposition to AC.
And for older people, France sucks. For younger people, arguably the whole situation really sucks.
It is very much so supported by facts, see sister comment.
> something they do not need
Except France very much does need AC. They may keep it off 99% of the time, but anyplace that experiences 38C+ temperatures should have AC systems installed for public safety. The cost benefit ratio is extremely in favor of having AC in France even if they don’t fully cool indoor temperatures to 22C, there’s a huge advantage to limiting temperatures to below 30C.
Paris has hit 42+C before, in places without AC those temperatures result in deaths.
The mortuaries in Paris are already being overwhelmed by heat-related deaths, and it's barely past midsummer.
On top of everything you mention, AC makes the climate problems worse. Solar reduces the negative impact, but does not eliminate it.
I live in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California. 15 years ago, typical summer daily highs made it into the 80s for a week or two, and in 10+ years of being here before that I never saw it hit 90°F. Now we're 90°F almost all summer and we hit 106°F last summer (the forecast says over 100°F by the end of this week). Overnight lows have seen a similar increase. I'm getting older and fans no longer keep me cool enough to function well. As a compromise, I installed evaporative cooling 5 years ago. In our climate (very dry air when it's hot) it works well and takes ~25% of the energy of AC to run (power is only consumed by a large fan motor and a small water pump). But it does consume water, increasing our total water usage in warm months by ~50%. We have plenty of water in our area, but that's been trending in the wrong direction as well, even in wetter years.
It would be one thing if Europe immediately stopped using coal, drastically reduced airline usage, quit building gasoline cars, but if anything it is only marginally better than the US. Europe mostly shifted their dirty work to Asia and North America, while restricting themselves from using air conditioning as some kind of virtue signaling. That's the problem as I see it.
There's a lot to criticise of every country, but we're trying. The US is not trying (*) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Agreement#/media/File:Pa...
* Not aimed at all the wonderful, sane and reasonable people of the USA.
> The US is not trying
https://usclimatealliance.org/
I don't expect people outside of the U.S. to keep up on state level politics but it is worth noting that many in the U.S. are trying and given our form of government state level action isn't anything to sneeze at.
> There's a lot to criticise of every country, but we're trying. The US is not trying (*)
I'd argue that it's a bit misleading to treat the US as a single entity for this topic.
The population is deeply divided on issues like this one.
>The population is deeply divided on issues like this one.
The politicians they population elect are not deeply divided, and thus can be considered a single entity that refuses to even try to do something.
>* Not aimed at all the wonderful, sane and reasonable people of the USA.
I am sure both of them appreciate the exception
Even if the US isn't part of any climate agreements, it has still made substantial progress toward achieving climate goals – yes, even under the Trump admin and much to his chagrin. You need only compare the country's emissions and green energy output from 2016 to 2026 to see it.
There is no such thing as a binding 'agreement' like this in the USA system of government. We have treaties. That have to be ratified by the Senate. The governments of the world understood this, and understood that the Paris climate agreement was an attempt by the US executive branch at the time to bluff to a hollow 'deal' (instead of creating a true binding treaty) hoping future politicians would be too embarrassed to go against it. It was incredibly disingenuous/misleading of the United States Executive branch at the time to do play politics this way outside of the actual US system of treaties. It was part of the breaking of American laws/norms by the executive that led us to where we are today (with chaos, tribalism instead of a legal system, and a breakdown of our government).
Hmm... If only there were a tangible reason why a treaty would have been impossible to get through the US Congress as currently constituted.
'we couldn't follow the law because the law's hard, instead we started the gateway for Trump by bending the rules, destroying norms, pretending the meaningless has meaning and creating pretext Conservatives could use for ignoring (first) these fake rules, but later under Trump huge amounts of the the real rules.'.
It was a bullshit agreement, and everyone knew it was, and were knowing in that what they were doing would weaken/damage politics in the USA and adherence to the rules. And they did it anyways. To no productive end but lots and lots and lots of damage.
We literally destroyed our car industry to try to steer the incoming catastrophe a bit, what the fuck do you want more. Germany tried to be the leader of solar but that was stolen err migrated to China, whole world profits now.
While US, China and rest of the world did nothing similar, just stood and let shit hit the fan hard. Gotta milk those petrodollars till the last cent because thats all that counts, fuck our children right. Yeah we are not going to burn ourselves further to the cinder to prove some anonymous yostrovs something he anyway refuses to see.
Agreed, but then there's also Norway, the absolute champ of hypocrisy.
You destroyed your auto industry by ceding it to countries with higher emission intensity of production. USA, China, Japan have higher intensity than even Germany which is on the upper end of Western European countries. That's not steering anywhere except more sharply into the wall!
You've been lied to by your own ruling class. What else have they been lying to you about, I wonder?
This. Add to the list: consuming huge amounts of meat while depriving themselves of AC "for the planet".
In terms of greenhouse it also depends on type of meat. Very acidental but europeans eat much less beef and eat pork/chicken instead. Chicken protein for example is in many cases better than cheese emission wise.
Also i don't think europeans don't use AC to save the planet. It's just expensive and it didn't use to be a problem.
Paris didn’t have air-conditioning because they sit at a latitude of 49 where in the past you might have a week maybe two of sustained high temperatures above 90°, since Paris sits at a latitude of 49 which is north of the United States-Canadian border all the way from Vancouver to the lake of the woods Minnesota.
Which is hardly air-conditioning country above latitude 49 although obviously climate change may change that, but there was no point having air-conditioning that far north in the past for two weeks of possible hot weather, a resident living in the American southwest who will never have a white Christmas ever and air conditioning was always a must.
As mentioned in other comments, what you call the past has been known for at least 30-40 years to be soon obsolete. They had enough time to prepare to this.
I wonder if pork is better than beef for the environment.
Pork, by a bunch. Lower land use, lower greenhouse gas emissions, less water use.
So we've been stupid "solar oven" buildings for 50 years while climate scientists were warning against extreme weather events and, now that said extreme event arrives, the best we find is to rush to aircon.
Seems pretty short-sighted to me.
Yup. Built a house in 2016 in Belgium. Perfectly insulated. You didn't have to run heating in winter. Kept it all inside.
Also, it overheated instantly.
Insulation is actually helpul against heat too!
But since modern buildings usually have huge windows, we're letting in about 1kw of heat from sunlight per square meter of window. That's 6kw for a 3x2m bay window, or about the equivalent of 6 electric heaters at full power.
Block that heat ouside of your house with all kind of shade you can get: trees, blinds, adjustable shades, rolling shutters...
Also, close every openings during the day, vent at night.
> Insulation is actually helpul against heat too!
Yes, until you reach that tipping point where once warmed up, you can't cool down anymore.
I don't know your situation but surely you've tried ventilating at night and then closing up the house at a specific time in the day?
I only ask because when I moved from the US south to the high desert in NM (about 2KM) I had to learn how to time that transition.
Very few folks here run A/Cs, we generally have homes designed to stay warm and during the summer usually fans go on about bed time and off in the morning, and that's enough to keep things cool because of insulation.
It was not obvious to me how that worked and I spent one very sweaty summer before I got the timing correct.
Of course, if the nights are hot (which sometimes happens) then that doesn't work so well.
(UK here)
This is all the usual advice, which works for a few days, but during a period of over a week of high temperatures, there's nothing you can do.
The sun will eventually heat up every part of the house and turn it into a radiator.
Even when night time temperatures drop to 17c, I have my have windows open at 10pm with a decent cross-wind, my bedroom temperature may drop from 26c to 24c after 2-3 hours, but if I close the windows, it jumps to 25c in ~30 minutes...
The streets probably don't help either - no trees, just asphalt, front yards with paving slabs etc
I live in SoCal and am continually shaking my head at the architecture. So my floor-to-ceiling glass buildings in a climate known for sunny weather. So much extra air-conditioning will be spent to cool those buildings compared to if they had been built more reflective.
Obviously, Mediterranean, Spanish or Adobe type buildings would have been better, and not the northern European style of architecture.
Also windows that go down to the floor has been considered bad architecture for decades.
Wall-to-wall windows are great.
Floor-to-ceiling windows are stunning when you walk into an empty place that you're thinking about buying or renting, but when you're actually living there, windows that go down to the floor create a few feet of dead space. You can't really put any furniture there without feeling guilty about blocking the view you're paying for, and it's uncomfortable to walk up to the edge and look down - it makes you feel uneasy like you're standing on a cliff with your toes at the edge. It's much better for the window to end around waist high.
They're psychologically fine if both the floor and the ceiling extend beyond the window (e.g. it's on the ground floor, and the roof overhangs), but when they're used on every floor in a high rise apartment building, killing limited square footage and driving up energy bills, it's absolute madness.
I'd try hanging long sheets of aluminum foil in too-large windows. I imagine someone in academia has studied this.
That works. A lot of people do that in their home when they have no other choice (renting the place, typically).
It'd be better to block the sun before it hits the window though, so that the window itself does not get hot and heat the inside.
Edit: people generally use emergency blankets, fyi. You can stick them to the glass with water.
I feel every comment section related to weather and climate seems to have the same winging about buildings. Cold? Europe has amazing buildings, hot? Europe has been building ovens... it's interesting psychology.
Edit: We cannot blame people for buildings things that worked when we had a stable climate but are no long suitable for all these extremes. We needed to fix the emissions issue 30-50 year ago to avoid this. We knew it and we collectively ignored it. I get your point, we could've "planned ahead" but if you build something that wasn't suitable / cost effective for the time it was built, you'd be out of business.
50 years ago no one was going to pay extra for a building that might be important in 100 years because we didn't stop burning fossil fuels in time.
> you'd be out of business.
Correct. And we'd be "out of business" too as a country if we decided alone to fix emissions. Other economies would have passed ours because burning oil is so damn useful.
Thing is, I don't feel we are changing much in this respect. Now the best idea we come up with is burning more fuel for aircon...
> Now the best idea we come up with is burning more fuel for aircon...
I mean really what else is there? We can't undo the warming, we can't rebuild every building in Europe (even if we could, would it work? Winter will still happen too). We can install solar panels and air conditioners, though.
We can install adjustable shades and ceiling fans. Cheap and efficient. It practically pays for itself in saved energy bills if we decide to add an aircon anyway. Plus the saved energy saves carbon emissions too.
We can update building regulations so that new building are better.
We can plant trees. It brings shade in summer but lets sun through in winter.
We can stop taking the plane.
I mean, there really are tons of things to do!
The one thing I want is for everyone to tick the box on their power company's website that says "only give me electricity from renewables".
If everyone does this, hopefully the problem will be fixed quickly, plus you can enjoy all the guilt-free AC you want!
It's 38 degrees this Wednesday again, and you're talking ceiling fans. This is just ridiculously out of touch.
Don't worry it will even out when the Gulf Stream chokes out /s
...or not ? As el Nino would say: Porque no los dos ?
> if not a heat pump
Most heat pump installations in Europe are air-to-water systems fitted to use the existing piping in old homes and is used only for heating. Such installations can, in theory, be used for cooling, but very inefficiently.
Seems like a good thing for them to reconsider between now and next summer!
The annoying thing is that UK at least has a bigger grant for air-to-water systems.
I've been doing some research into this, because I would ideally like to get this system so I can make use of the existing radiators in my old house, but I do also want to have the option of cooling my home. It does seem like Fan Coil Units (FCUs) are an option for this. Anyone have experience with these? Are they really inefficient compared to standard air-to-air units?
The problem is, if you feed cold water into your normal heating pipes, all the piping and radiators will get wet from condensation. So you would have to have a regulator that measures air moisture and temperature in all your rooms and only feeds water with a temperature above the dew point. This is possible, but inefficient and (especially on hot+wet days) doesn't cool very well.
The possible real fixes are either to section off your water circuits in summer, and only run the properly cold water through FCUs, wall or ceiling loops.
Or to get a multisplit heat pump, use a normal refrigerant-air indoor unit to cool and a refrigerant-water indoor unit to heat the water loops.
Yeah, I wasn't planning to run the cold loops through the existing radiator piping. I just want the ability to cool at least 1 room by reusing the air-to-water system, even if that means the FPU requires its own piping from the outside.
In that scenario, are FPUs a good option? Are there other drawbacks?
Most Francoils I know don’t have a way to get rid of any condensation that happens in the unit like internal air conditioning units do. So even if you run the piping outside of the house you have condensation in the unit and the floors, not to mention the walls.
Even then, there is a fair limit in cooling and efficiency you can get from them because of the lack of phase changes occurring.
If you have a balanced mechanical ventilation (both inlet and outlet) that would be one of the best options to condition the whole house without putting air conditioning units everywhere. Having said that, we turn on the air conditioning in the attic during hot days which removes the biggest heat and moisture from the house. Next up is installing more sun blinds to prevent the heat from entering in the first place.
Fan coil units work just fine, you’ll need to install a condensate drain but other than that it works like a mini-split evaporator/fan air handler.
You just have the added equipment and maintenance for the water/glycol loop vs an air to air system that only pipes refrigerant around. Fan coil units or VAV boxes are the usual terminal units for commercial HVAC systems that have a chilled and hot water loop, VAVs are used in a system with ducted AHUs and FCUs are used for apartments (stacked FCUs with vertical supply/return risers) or spaces not served by ducted air handlers for whatever reason.
> Most heat pump installations in Europe are air-to-water systems
I'm not sure thats true.
Most aircon in "warm" europe is standard split aircon
The "heatpump" shit that the UK is sorta looking at is as you describe. However its half the price to install "aircon" over heatpumps (because grants, amongst other things)
Like most recently refurbished offices will use normal aircon (certainly all the one I have worked in)
> I would absolutely be looking into how to get [...] at least one window air-conditioning unit if not a heat pump before next summer
Before you do that, do the cost effective thing: shadow and wind. Then you can add an aircon iff thats not enough.
For shadow, reftrofitting adjustable sunshade is pretty effective. Sunlight brings about 1kw per square meter of window. That like having your heater at full power when its already hot.
For wind: fans, preferably ceiling fans. Lowers perceived temperature by about 3.5 °C.
Uncomfortable heat has nothing to do with temperature and everything to do with air humidity. Only an AC can lower the humidity, by conditioning the air.
> Uncomfortable heat has nothing to do with temperature and everything to do with air humidity
That is not correct. Heat, wind and humidity all contribute.
In a dry air with no wind, your body creates a "hot and humid" bubble around it if you are not moving. A fan helps.
Humid but neither cold nor hot air may not feel great, but not that bad.
Hot and humid air with no wind, now that's bad.
Edit: I know because I added shades and fans.
27 centigrade with 80% humidity is a lot more uncomfortable for the human body than 33 degrees with 40% humidity. Likewise if the temperature is low, it's worse with high humidity and vice versa. The worst heat is the humid heat, and shade and fans cannot do much about it.
Shades will bring your 27C to 24C so yeah, it would do much about it. I don't even get your logic here.
Edit: you can still use an AC or dehumidifier on top of it. You will consume less energy with shades.
Letting the sun in is like letting your heaters on. You would not turn on both heaters and aircon in summer, would you?
El Nino mostly affects temperature in winter. It can raise the baseline a little in summer but that's not the problem with the heat waves we have this year. There is no buried lede but there is a lot of misunderstanding about El Nino on your side.
I live in Europe. We have in fact invented air conditioning here too, but I am not concerned with what we should be doing next year. That's a trivial matter. I'm concerned about what will happen if this trend continues another 5-10 years. How do we make sure that doesn't happen?
> How do we make sure that doesn't happen?
That's the neat part, you don't.
Europe has saved on CO2 emissions by moving production to China, and more recently to India and Southern Asia, moving energy generation for factories onto coal power, significantly INCREASING the rate at which climate change occurs.
China and India have made it very clear that, first, they will continue to do this. Also adding solar power, but not lowering coal power. They added that it is "inappropriate" to even ask them to do so (that was China).
Oh and thanks to reliance on Russian gas, and the Ukraine war, the EU is forced to move to coal and LNG supplies, which are even worse than coal. Plus, of course, that means that it's not just coal plants getting worse for climate change but almost all power plants in Europe.
To do something about it, due to Jevon's paradox the only countries that can lower CO2 emissions are the ones digging up fossil fuels. Saudi Arabia, Russia, Venezuela, US, Norway, the Netherlands, Britain. You have zero chance to convince any of them to stop doing it, burning and selling oil, not even Norway is doing that. And any oil or gas dug up and sold will be burned.
There never was any serious intent, not even on the part of the greens (at least not in Germany, I mean, they even published an article on the subject: eliminating nuclear power was more important than climate change in 2003). And if even they weren't willing to make it a priority, who exactly are you supposing will do it?
Even in 2026, even Germany, increased it's reliance on coal (they're keeping 10GW of additional coal power at the ready, on top of the 20% of Germany's power that's constantly using coal), similar measures have been taken in Japan, Italy, and India has even delayed maintenance on existing coal power plants to increase electricity production from them.
And of course, there's the basic physics part. Aside from a small rounding error climate change is cumulative. Which means once fossil fuels are burned the temperature will rise accordingly. Even if we stopped burning it won't get better.
To merely stop climate change from getting worse, just that, nothing more, we have to cut CO2 emissions worldwide by 99.7 (and some models say 99.97%, there's a surprising range there). That will just stop it from getting worse. It won't make it better. Anything less is not "a good effort" it simply makes things worse.
All policies taken so far to stop climate change have not just made things worse, but increased the rate at which it's getting worse. Doing nothing at all would have been a lot better (because it would have kept factories in the EU going, on much cleaner power).
Oh, and by the way, this was all perfectly clear and known 10 years ago, and nobody changed course. So ...
There is no remotely realistic solution in the current policy directions.
And geoengineering ... is not really allowed to be discussed. Or this argument is being put forward at the UN. Any (successful) geoengineering will have dramatic negative consequences for some states and people. And since that is considered unacceptable, because large portions of the human race are currently dependent on global warming continuing. We won't do that either. People's lives, jobs, work and so on depend on things continuing and we cannot demand they change.
So yeah, I'd get some solar panels and an air conditioner.
Your take is too fatalistic because any reduction in Co2 emissions is helpful. It isn't an all or nothing thing.
The cost estimates for eliminating Co2 emissions are also not very high. In the range of 1-2x total GDP. Would be doable if 3-5% of GDP is spent over the next 20-30 years.
I agree that all oil will be dug up and sold but there is a caveat: not at any price. If solar and wind continue their trajectory their dominance is inevitable.
Would please install adjustable shades and ceiling fans first? And also plant a few trees if you can?
That does nothing to remove the moisture in the air; an air conditioner removes water from the air which makes the apparent temperature much cooler than relying on sweat evaporating. I just spent an entire weekend in 100F/38C weather and it would’ve been dangerous without an air conditioned space to cool down in.
Letting the sun in is like turning your heaters on. You wouldn't turn on both heaters and aircon in summer, would you ?
Please bring some shade and save energy.
Edit: also, without wind there is a hot and humid bubble around our own body. Fans help a lot with that by bringing fresh dry air right onto the sweat so it can evaporate.
Have an AC if you need to. But please dont have only an AC. Shading and fans pay for themselve in energy savings.
And by a sizable margin they mean maybe 4 degrees Celsius.
Remember that 1.5 degrees Celsius is a nearly end-of-the-world scenario and we're currently about 1.1 degrees.
All that warming that we caused but didn't actually happen? Turns out the ocean saves it up.
> Remember that 1.5 degrees Celsius is a nearly end-of-the-world scenario
No, it's not end of the world. 3C is where things start getting bad. 1.5C is the target for the 2015 Paris climate agreement to try and avoid hitting 2C.
We are looking at more severe droughts, flash floods, and rising oceans where we are at, but not the worst of it like mass 40C wet bulb heat domes which wipe out all life underneath them.
This is an incorrect way to frame the impacts of temperature increases. 1.5, 2, 3C makes extreme events like the one you stated significantly more likely in a probabilistic sense. The ability of adapt is in part driven by frequency of extreme events as much as it is adaptability to specific thresholds. We are already experiencing deadly heat bulb events at current warming levels, the impacted areas and frequency of these events will strictly increase.
I agree, but what we aren't currently really seeing (at least I've not seen it) is a heat dome killing off a herd of cattle or a crop.
That's the sort of event that becomes much more likely if not inevitable as the temperatures increase.
Heat domes are already killing off cattle and reducing crop yields, even in western countries? There was significant cattle die off in the US during 2022/2023. Europe just experienced 10,000 excess deaths due to heat impacts and a reduced grain yield by almost 8-10%. There have not been correlated heat dome events over multiple regional bread baskets (yet) but those are going to get increasingly more probable. We have a lot of adaptability on the food side though as reducing meat consumption is an easy behavioral change. Climate change impacts is one reason why beef is currently so expensive in the US.
Bad? Things are already fucking bad.
The 1.5C target (which, as others pointed out, is not an end-of-the-world scenario) is about average temperature above pre-industrial baseline across 20 years. The temperature anomaly of a single year has nothing to do with that; 2028 will likely be colder again.
Average temperature moves in cycles. By confusing single-year temperatures with the 1.5C target, you're just going to make people think "crisis averted" once 2028 turns out to be cold.
Does that matter? The only thing that can be done, is for oil producers to stop digging up fossil fuels. And not even Norway is willing to do that, to say nothing about Russia or China, even this year. And that, not digging up the fossil fuel is the only way. If it's dug up, it will be burned. Guaranteed.
Oh and it effectively doesn't matter: to merely stop global warming we need 99.7% less fossil fuel production (and that needs to include everything from Saudi oil to Japanese coal)
So why would it matter? Because we feel it? We are not willing to implement real policy when we feel it. We are not willing to implement real policy when we don't feel it.
And geoengineering ... while it at least has the possibility for someone to just do that without the agreement of everyone ... so at least there's the realistic option to do something, so many nations, so many people, have their lives utterly dependent on climate change continuing. So nobody's making serious plans for that either (because, realistically, it'll mean war if something like that is implemented. Which is still better than doing nothing imho)
Yes, accuracy matters in this discussion. Not conflating numbers which have no relation to each other matters. We haven't "surpassed the 1.5C target" just because one year is abnormally hot. When we finally do officially surpass it, we don't want a lot of people to be confused and ask, "wait didn't we already surpass it in 2026?".
Neither side cares about accuracy, and both will prevent you from getting your message out. The discussion has 2 sides:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVlRompc1yE
and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcxQZ8ub54Y
These are the conversations that get translated into policy. They are literally about directly satisfying people's emotions. No detours. Accuracy? I hope you're joking.
AND there's the problem that the policy the "pro-global-warming" camp wants will not even help. Global CO2 emission reduction is not realistic.
I'm working in AI and hoping that will help. If I had the realistic option (I have a family to support), I'd love to work in Chemistry to make it at least possible, maybe even easy, to do something about that (of course, even Chemistry products are being designed with AI, so ...). Achieving anything in policy seems to me beyond absurd. In fact I find it very hard to defend the viewpoint that even the policymakers pushing global warming action even want to help. Technological solutions at least might achieve something.
Chemistry to remove CO2 from the atmosphere? The problem is that it costs as much energy as you received by putting it there. You have to unburn the fuel. Did you know each molecule of chlorophyll only processes three molecules of CO2 per second? The limiting factor is energy input.
Does anyone knows how much more the oceans can absorb heat?
Well they seem to have switched to releasing stored heat. Isn't that basically the El Nino / La Nina cycle?
Metaphorically relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limnic_eruption
To vaporize 10^21 kg of seawater from ~4 °C to 100 °C would require ~10^27 joules, around 16 trillion Hiroshimas or ~2.5 seconds of the sun's output.
the oceans can adsorb a great deal more heat, but all the ice will melt, while the deap ocean water expands, from it's rather odd temperature ,that keeps it at the highest density possible, about .5% more than if it were just a bit warmer, so more warming will cause very significsnt sea level rise through several different mechanisms related to heat.
What's interesting to me is that almost all models underestimated the ocean temperature.
We are entering uncharted waters and I fear that at some point we will get an extreme extreme weather event and the worse thing is that we won't see it coming.
That should be the scary part. We know how El Niño affects world's weather, but it is also a symptom of how much heat the ocean is absorbing.
That core problem won't end this year or the next one, and it will keep disrupting global climate. And with it, agriculture, settlements, economy and civilization as we know it.
And the scariest part is what we do about it. Keep doing activities that rise global temperature and power up positive feedback loops, weakening or abolishing climate policies, and when things start to feel urgent will try things by the fast way with unclear outcomes.
- There is no "we", but it would take "we" to fix this.
- There is a global scale issue, but no consensus on this being a problem. Not at the global, continental, local or individual level. FFS, there are idiots proudly rolling coal.
- Leadership - in the rare places on earth where it is somewhat accountable - reflects this lack of consensus.
- Acknowledging the problem does not equal acting even on an individual level.
- There's lots of cognitive dissonance. Why am I even flying to the other side of the world next week?
We are cooked. Not so much us old farts, but the children.
It’s all so scary! I regret having a child.
For your child's sake, make sure they never find out your regrets.
I don’t. But I will at least consider the thinking about my kids (8, 4) should look into alternative paths.
Due to the widespread idea that climate prediction has been predicting doom and gloom all the time, and has always been wrong about it, I have been entertaining myself by revisiting old climate predictions from 20 years ago. I can highly recommend it.
I mean, predicting the climate must be one of the hardest numerical simulations you can run. Climate models are famously incomplete. But the results turned out to be way more accurate than I would have thought. That's some impressive modeling, and I would assume that models have only improved since then.
The most chilling thing (and not in a good way) about it is that popular science type repotrs for the general public usually indicate an interval between a good case and a bad case, with a nice line in between. In retrospect we have been pretty much perfectly tracking the bad case line ever since.
Interesting. Do you mind sharing some of the predictions you have been revisiting?
This sounds neat...I'd love to do it as well. Any past predictions vs current conditions tools or datasets that you're using?
There have been a lot of published retrospective cohort climate model studies, ex https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2019GL08...
>Due to the widespread idea that climate prediction has been predicting doom and gloom all the time, and has always been wrong about it, I have been entertaining myself by revisiting old climate predictions from 20 years ago. I can highly recommend it.
N=1 Mind, but I remember reading a spread in Australian Scientist that predicted Australia would become something of a rainless desert, storms bringing only lightning, by 2020 or so. Leaving only Melbourne, Adelaide and Tasmania somewhat habitable. Article went on to discuss how to calmly migrate the population south over the 13 or so years remaining, and what the government might do to dissuade climate refugees from pacific islands.
Since then I have a read a lot of people walking back the absolute death and destruction stuff, but "Extremier Extremes" seems to be the closest to a consensus position, one that the strongest El Nino ever supports completely.
Well, we can see it coming, but we are doing very little about
We are doing a lot. Almost 90% of electricity capacity added last year was renewables. Nearly 1 in 3 cars sold are now EVs. The world is spending over $2 trillion every year on low‑carbon energy investment. Solar and wind have already avoided more than 2 gigatons of C02 being added to the atmosphere. In the US, the IRA will drop emissions 40% to below 2005 levels.
What do you mean we are doing very little?
It should be at the level od the economy of war but worldwide. The majority reacted too late to have the possibility to act slowly.
I’ve had the same discussion with many people, and when I tell them how much work is done on cleaning up carbon emissions, the reply is always “well… it’s not enough”. And of course, they don’t have a sense of what is “enough”.
They don’t really understand it in a factual, measurable way, but just are interesting in what the overall story is, and what it says about humanity failing.
> We are doing a lot. Almost 90% of electricity capacity added last year was renewables
New capacity being electric is fine but we need to be actively removing fossil fuels from existing capacity, which isn't actually happening. We're just building new capacity on top of old existing fossil fuels. So sure, it's nice that a majority of new capacity is green, but we're still burning more fossil fuels year over year
We've been seeing our own certain destruction from climate change coming since the 70s. The 1870s. We had two entire lifetimes to do something about it, we didn't.
Except those guys throwing soup at the fossil fuel HQs. They did a little.
We're building more data centers for a technology that's ramping global warming even faster. Water consumption, heat generation and tons and tons of CO2 emitting concrete to house these things.
So we're doing something, but those things are counterproductive to our planet's general well being. Apparently billionaires don't need an inhabitable Earth to live on.
Yeah, data-centers are definitely the worst thing happening to the planet. You got your priorities straight.
AI data centers are what, half a percent of the world electricity consumption, if that, and an even smaller fraction of the total energy?
Growth trend matters more than absolute present value.
Data centres generally had been seeing energy use growing at 12% annually, or with a doubling time of 5.8 years (about 5 years 10 months). AI is accelerating that trend.
In the United States, power consumption by data centres is on course to account for almost half of the growth in electricity demand between now and 2030. Driven by AI use, the US economy is set to consume more electricity in 2030 for processing data than for manufacturing all energy-intensive goods combined, including aluminium, steel, cement and chemicals. In advanced economies more broadly, data centres are projected to drive more than 20% of the growth in electricity demand between now and 2030, putting the power sector in those economies back on a growth footing after years of stagnating or declining demand in many of them.
<https://www.iea.org/news/ai-is-set-to-drive-surging-electric...>
>or with a doubling time of 5.8 years
So that in ~6 years they will account for 1%, and still a fraction of the percent of the world total energy use?
Modulo, as noted, AI is accelerating that trend.
>Growth trend matters more than absolute present value.
Only if the current absolute present value is enough that the resulting trend matters.
It was only 2 weeks ago when someone posted an article claiming data centers worldwide use 24x less water than golf courses worldwide.
And I mean, you need somewhere to collate all that climate data? You need telecoms to let scientists communicate?
>Driven by AI use, the US economy is set to consume more electricity in 2030 for processing data than for manufacturing all energy-intensive goods combined, including aluminium, steel, cement and chemicals. In advanced economies more broadly, data centres are projected to drive more than 20% of the growth in electricity demand between now and 2030, putting the power sector in those economies back on a growth footing after years of stagnating or declining demand in many of them.
If horse use trends continue at their current pace, London will be covered in 20 meters of horse manure by the end of the decade.
> In advanced economies more broadly, data centre's are projected to drive more than 20% of the growth in electricity demand between now and 2030
20% of the growth isn't much overall either is it? That's likely assuming that the million and 1 spruiked projects actually get off the ground.
Only if...
No.
If the trend continues.
Exponential growth, a/k/a constant periodic percentage growth (per day, month, year, etc.), increases rapidly. Differences (or errors) in magnitude measurement disappear rapidly: a factor of two in a single generation, a factor of ten in about three generations, a factor of 100 in less than 7, a factor of one thousand in fewer than 10.
What matters is that the growth rate continue.
Which of course, it usually doesn't. Most growth trends follow a sigmoid rather than exponential curve (initially), or more complex longer-term dynamics.
The point of your infamous horse quote was less to show that the Earth would be covered in horses (or their effluvia), than that the observed current trend could not reasonably continue. And as some of us are aware, it didn't, due to the adoption of ... the petroleum-fueled automobile ... which has some bearing on this particular HN post itself.
Had the automobile not come along, or petroleum reserves proved much more limited as was widely believed at the time[1], large horse-congested cities such as London, New York, and Chicago would likely have seen sharply slowed or even reversed growth under negative hygiene pressures. It was the multiple factors of growth in fossil fuel use (displacing horses, and their effluvia), development of sewerage systems, solid waste disposal, food safety and purity, refrigeration, and public health which turned cities from death zones to attractive living places, rather than merely drawing desperate immigrants through high wages amidst rampant rural and foreign poverty.
But the point remains that the sustained growth rate matters far more than the starting point.
2030 is three and a half years away. That's soon.
________________________________
Notes:
1. It wasn't until the 1930s with the discovery of the East Texas Oil Field in the US and of vast fields in Saudi Arabia that it seemed likely that oil was more than a short-term resource. In marked contrast to, say, the short-lived Indian natural gas boom of the late 19th and early 20th centuries: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_gas_boom>. Daniel Yergin's The Prize is an excellent history of the industry's growth, though I disagree strongly with the author's strong allegiance to it.
>Exponential growth, a/k/a constant periodic percentage growth (per day, month, year, etc.), increases rapidly. Differences (or errors) in magnitude measurement disappear rapidly: a factor of two in a single generation, a factor of ten in about three generations, a factor of 100 in less than 7, a factor of one thousand in fewer than 10.
Exponential Growth in datacenters is extremely unlikely.
I doubt it could be sustained for half a generation before Colo became cheaper than air.
>But the point remains that the sustained growth rate matters far more than the starting point.
If you add "Sustained" in sure, but its unsustainable, leading back to the starting point mattering more than the rate.
Theres not enough RAM for now. You double colo space worldwide, and there's simply not going to be computers to put in there. That's just the canary, there's indicators of other component shortages. But like, pretending this is exponential will quickly burn out other things. Steel. Powder Coat. Fibre.
Not to mention that funding for data center expansion is already drying up and projects are being cancelled. I honestly dont believe in a single local project that isnt branded NextDC or Equinix. Outside of them I wouldnt be surprised if 90% of projects failed to materialise.
I dont know what world you live in where you think theres an exponential Data Centre growth going on but its not this one. We are already up against the wall. I guarantee you will have a new industry you just learned about to get anxious about by 2030. Just how Bitcoin didn't exponentially grow to consume the whole planets energy supply by 2025 as predicted.
Again: the point remains that the sustained growth rate matters far more than the starting point.
And again: it usually doesn't. Most growth trends follow a sigmoid rather than exponential curve.
You're arguing against points I'm not making.
The point I am making is to keep an eye on the growth trend (and whatever might constrain that, you've given some credible concerns here), rather than the starting magnitude.
The question of how much societal resource information services can plausibly consume over a long term is an interesting one. Looking at biological analogues, the human brain accounts for roughly 25% of our own metabolic output, which I suspect is the present record.[1]
I get 8% for total present use in commercial computing, with the US EIA projecting a pretty steady growth to exceed all refrigeration, lighting, space cooling, and ventilation, by 2050, at about 350% of present levels. It looks as if that analysis presumes a 5% annual growth rate. The full report does incorporate AI in its considerations.
<https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=65564>
Specifically:
We assume AI servers will increasingly skew more energy intensive, the installed stock of AI servers grows exponentially through at least 2040, and computational efficiency will increase over time. In our High Electricity Demand case, we assume the exponential growth in AI servers will continue through 2050, and the rate of improvement in server computational efficiency will reflect historical trends.
Full report: <https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/narrative/>
Notes: ________________________________
1. Apparently among vertebrates typical metabolic fraction is between 2--8%, though there may be some tree shrews which approach humans as a percentage if not total CNS metabolic magnitude. "Ratio of central nervous system to body metabolism in vertebrates: Its constancy and functional basis" (1981) <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/15916066_Ratio_of_c...>.
Socially, our computational energy is on the high side for vertebrate animals.
Because GPUs grow on trees...
> TSMC’s manufacturing success comes at an ecological cost. The company accounts for around 150,000 tonnes of water per day and 6.4% of the national electricity consumption.
https://taiwaninsight.org/2025/11/05/water-nexus-can-semicon...
It would be great for you to experience living close to one of these data centers [0]. Maybe you'd have a consideration outside of your own myopic view then.
[0] https://www.selc.org/news/xai-built-an-illegal-power-plant-t...
DC water consumption is a red herring. That water is returned back to its source but warmer.
If you think that every data center is now a closed loop system enjoy your propaganda.
Colossus 1 and 2 still use open loop systems. And with the case of blow down water that's "returned" it's not usable due to the use of concentrated salts (1,200 to 6,000 mg/L).
In your mind this is a closed loop system of clean water. It is not. And as DCs have less and less discharge there is more and more solid waste produced.
Your assertion that "water consumption is a red herring" is utter bull shit. I'd suggest enlightening yourself [0][1][2][3].
[0] https://genesiswatertech.com/blog-post/advanced-blowdown-tre... [1] https://fieldreport.caes.uga.edu/publications/TP121/how-data... [2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.21760 [3] https://www.yahoo.com/news/science/articles/epa-writing-perm...
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48055532>
Unfounded comments that are nothing but a lie are OK. Yet, calling it out directly goes against the rules.
In this case the response is warranted. Until people start to see what actually goes on in these data centers with respect to pollution (of many kinds) I don't have a problem being direct.
What the link I'd shared stated was "Please edit out swipes, as the site guidelines ask".
It also states "Your comment would be fine without that ... bit."
I frequently address poorly-founded comments myself. Just did immediately before this reply, see: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49064763> (
I'm doing so both staying within the guidelines and specifically calling out the idiocy displayed, though without relying on that particular word.
Calling out Guidelines violations does not imply disagreement with what's been said otherwise. It is a call for more substantive participation, and probably strengthening your own arguments.
You've been here long enough that all of this should be quite familiar to you.
(I'm not a mod, which is why I'd initially linked a mod's own admonition.)
Yes, but they _could_ be a closed loop system if governments demanded it. And they should.
The could, and should generate their own electricity as well. And perhaps even provide free power to the surrounding neighborhood to make up for the noise and inconvenience of having one nearby.
The xAI one does that, with the result of giving everyone in a several mile radius permanent asthma.
Have you seen that some of these things are so loud they’re damaging to health? But they’re loud at frequencies we can’t hear so it’s not easy to tell without specialised equipment
What happens to the water leaving Colossus 1 and 2?
Very interesting how your enlightening comments about dirty AI data centers are being downvoted. Pro-Musk, pro-AI bots and shills trying to keep the smoke screen going?
Yes, just like cow farts.
Cow burps are a significant contributor to global warming, like 10%. There are just so many damn cows and their digestive systems produce methane.
Once I listened to a podcast about the holodomor, a famine caused by Stalin and affected Ukrainians mostly. In the end they were forced to eat their children as they were so desperate for food. The suffering was untold, but real, it happened, and that kind of thing can and will happen again if we're not extra extra careful.
We're pushing ourselves into absolutely untold suffering the longer do nothing. I truly fear a famine like that and the more we go down this road, the closer we're getting.
Obviously its too late to avoid the worst, the only hope we have is to collectively cooperate to help each other get through it. Not sure that will happen but I believe that's the only way through.
I've seen dozens of videos and articles about this strongest ever event. And I still have no clue if the next year I should evacuate from Paris for the summer because heatwaves may be even crazier than this year, or prolonged heavy rains are more likely and can make the city more livable.
Given what I learned from "chaos" by James Gleick, the predicament we're in is that we likely cannot predict outcomes or the events themselves, rather what we know is that weather will become more unpredictable and more extreme.
So the answer to your question is it could be either or both or neither. Whatever happens is going to be on average more extreme than what you're used to.
It might end up like a covid situation where even if you have good AC in your home, you don't want to be in the area because the medical system is on its knees overwhelmed from treating all the cases of heat related illnesses.
And AC won’t work if the grid can’t handle it (at least, not unless you do a lot of additional preparation).
The first chapter of "Ministy for the Future" used to be available for free online, and depicts such a scenario in a fictional Indian region...
I would bet on it becoming hotter for longer, with some really bad but short torrential rain in between.
So get some sturdy shade structure and an heat pump.
Water vapor amplifies the greenhouse effect so I don't think rain is going to make it better.
No offense, but using air travel to avoid climate impacts is a bit ironic and part of the reason we’re in this mess.
No need to fix the root cause, I’ll just fly somewhere cold during the summer /s
It's funny that I said "evacuate" and did not mention air travel. In that part of the world, trains are the default, with nuclear green power powering the majority of consumers. Maybe that other default is a problem. And yes, bien sûr, an abandoned personal flight or train will counter balance China, India or mega leaks of methane in US. And all AC owners must be incarcerated, it's so worse than a car. A new leftist mayor of Paris even said ACs warm up neighbors' places, should be forbidden obviously...
As someone who had to do exactly that this summer (multiple times, to boot), I'm doing my part and working to get the fuck out of here permanently before next summer hits.
He didn't say he would be flying
Climate migration as an individual is not a viable solution to the problem we face, regardless of the method of travel.
I've got an excellent overview of consequences from Claude Opus 5. I'd post it here but there's a "no AI content" policy, so sorry, you need to ask yourself. (Though for Europe specifically, apparently very little except for higher average temperatures).
I can hardly wait to see how this shakes out locally. We have had 3 La Ninas in a row that have left us with a rainfall deficit of 23.5" (597 mm) under the 20 year average annual total that I have measured here in NTexas. It's been dry overall for several years.
Considering the situation going into the 2015-2016 El Nino we were also in a multiyear drought with a rainfall deficit accumulated from 2010-2014 of over 31" (787 mm). That is just under the 20 year average annual precipitation total for my place - 36.3" (922 mm). We were missing almost a full year's rainfall over that 5 year period. I use a NOAA manual rain gauge of the type that can handle up to 11" (279.4mm) of rain before needing to be dumped. I have recently added a digital tipping gauge unit beside the manual gauge so I can have a clear comparison and track rain rates.
Anyway, if it works out like 2015 did then we went into the year with a deficit but it quickly began raining well above normal so that by mid-June we were already above the normal 20-year average rainfall total. Then it dried up with below normal rainfall from mid-June to late October. There was no rain at all between the first week of September and the last week of October. For the year though we were still 3" (76.2 mm) above the 20 year normal annual total when it started raining again.
Between the last week of October and the end of the year it rained an additional 28" (711 mm) and then it stopped and we fell behind again until finally catching up to normal accumulation in the second week of March 2016.
Currently our accumulation to date is almost 1" (25.4 mm) above the 20 year average annual total for this date. So, just as in 2015 we are a little above normal during summer. I expect that if it works out like 2015 then we can expect a lot more rain beginning in the fall, probably by October.
If I look back over the previous 5 years from 2021-2015, we are again running a rainfall deficit of 26.2" (665.5 mm). That is about 72% of rainfall expected in a normal year using my 20 year average accumulation. Nearly 3/4 of a year's rainfall behind at this point over a 5 year period. Interesting.
I suspect I will need to have some more rock hauled in to repair the driveway by the end of the year since it will all wash down the hill again.
Other than "numbers go up" it's unclear to me what the consequences are, as I'm not extremely familiar with El Niño events. Hurricanes, maybe?
US NOAA has a (still generally useful) list of links to various impacts:
<https://www.pmel.noaa.gov/elnino/impacts-of-el-nino>
Those include: hydrology (floods, drought), sea-surface temperatures (hotter or cooler, both of which impact local ecologies and fisheries), storms (weaker hurricane season in the Atlantic, due to high-altitude wind shear, stronger in other areas), and others: economic, fisheries, military, human health, marine life, and specific regional impacts.
I live in the Southeast Asia, so this El Nino event is worrying. It also means drought and super typhoons.
Wow, this thing should be nicknamed "El Hombre"
There are three possible scenarios for the next decades:
1) return to preindustrial level of pollution, possibility less than 1/10000
2) make radical changes suggested by scientists, less than 1/100
3) continue with the current pace
The pyramid of pollution, which is directly proportional to the pyramid of wealth, is almost impossible to shrink as the latter is also inevitable.
Just brace for impact.
4) Farm upvotes for posting another “we must do something!” comment, practically 1/1
People who post to concerntroll should be flagged as shitposters.
First person who finds an actual answer to this can potentially make a lot of money. Think it over.
Bomb fossil fuel power plants. They’ll be replaced with the least expensive alternative, solar and batteries.
You should also bomb billions of cars, presumably while they are parked, and heating boilers. Better option for all: just turn them off.
They're a comparatively small contributor. Greatest impact would be to shut down coal plants.
We all know we’re way past the time where we need to cut the carbon emissions, like it was 30 years ago. Why aren’t the governments investing money on research on carbon capture technology? That’s the only way left to undo massive carbon emissions due to industrialisation
Carbon capture is physically unable to be as effective as we need it to be. To an approximation, growing a tree is able to capture as much carbon as burning the wood from that tree. If most of our released carbon came from burning wood, we would just need to re-grow that amount of wood (unfortunately it's not even that simple, as the soil stores carbon long term in a way that just growing the tree doesn't capture, and is also released over time when old growth forests are cut down). Instead, the carbon we're burning comes from processes which efficiently concentrated the carbon from plants and microorganisms over millions of years to create coal, oil, and gas.
Carbon capture technology would have to artificially replicate these millions-of-years-long processes, and do it on a scale of years to decades. The scale of carbon capture we need is entirely unfathomable, requiring processes that don't exist, because they have to work against entropy itself.
Carbon capture at the point of burning fossil fuels to abate further emissions might be economical. Capturing already released carbon dioxide from the atmosphere (concentration of ~0.04%) is a fiction pushed by fossil fuel companies to muddy the debate and distract from the urgency of immediately stopping the burning of fossil fuels.
"Wait, do you mean I should pay to capture the carbon my neighbors emits? No way!"
That's why.
Edit: Also, as some other comment said, thermodynamics tell us that it would take an inordinate amount of energy to bring carbon back to safe levels. More than what we get from burning oil. It's about entropy and all that. So there's that.
Will doubling of forest helps ? ( not that it is possible )
See my sibling comment to the parent. Doubling forests won't do near enough, because the carbon we've burnt comes from millions of years of forests compacted into coal (among other sources). We'd need to grow millions of years worth of forests, which we just physically don't have the surface area for.
Its regionally complicated because increased tree cover can lower albedo (reflectivity of radiation) which offsets the co2 removal benefits. Forrests can tip from co2 sinks to co2 sources which is happening in different regions of the world currently.
Indeed.
We needed to reach zero emissions 20 years ago and today we should have strong negative emissions.
At this rate I don't think humanity will reach zero emissions before 2050. It's going to take a couple of very bad years for humanity to take this seriously.
I wrote to Alan Kay over 8 years ago about my fears of global warming and how tech seems to dismiss it as a concern on the whole.
A little known fact about Alan Kay is 17 years ago he was part of a group of "systems people" who published for the NFS about various systems including the climate. He helped write "Transitions and Tipping Points in Complex Environmental Systems" (https://nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/2022-12/Transitions-and-ti...). He wrote to me that "This, along with many other warnings from many other sources over many years, fell on deaf or disbelieving ears."
He agreed with my concern saying "And, yes, you are right that things will likely be really bad if the climate is allowed to crash past the tipping point."
But what he said following that shook me to my core. Kay said "If you think of a system as an upside-down coca cola bottle, it is easy to see that a little nudge can topple it, whereas considerably more energy is then required to put it back.".
What this means is to get CO2 back down to 350 ppm (we are at 428 ppm), we would need to expend more energy than we did getting it to 450 ppm. That means, we would have to expend more energy than humans have produced IN ALL OF HUMAN HISTORY in the next 10-20 years (30,000-45,000 EJ range) just to put the system back to where it's safe.
Ask yourself, where are we spending our energy right now as a species? On putting the system to a safe level or something else?
Do we even have the capability to do it? As we continue to expand our industrial capacity, we also use non-renewable resources like oil and metals we can't recycle. As we exploit them, we degrade our industrial capacity for the future. For a deeper analysis read Limits to Growth and work related to it.
> Ask yourself, where are we spending our energy right now as a species?
Hey Claude, enter plan mode
The weather in Japan has been completely wack I can tell you that. The rainy season is never ending in central and north Japan. It was actually declared over but it's back again. Never seen that before.
Looks like I’m definitely getting a season pass to the local ski resort this year. Should be epic!
Related: https://science.nasa.gov/earth/explore/el-nino/
Does this mean California is more likely to get mega flooding?
Most of the most flood prone areas in CA have been significantly neutered over the decades thanks to massive water projects. There was a time when the LA river would destroy LA routinely. Now everything is channelized. At risk communities are probably the handful of remote ones that do not have great infrastructure, but I'm not even sure where those might be given how the state seems to be able to build thousands of debris flow cement storm drain setups in relevant areas.
Other states seem a lot worse off. Water table is closer to where people live, there's a lack of topology to actually run water out in a lot of cases, there's been little investment in managing water for stormwater for property damage abatement or power or irrigation like in CA where the topology really incentivized massive investment in all of that over the last century.
Yes, atmospheric rivers all winter.
Next year a super bloom then the following year massive wild fires.
rain -> fuel -> fire
Not necessarily... it isn't as straightforward as "stronger El Niño means more rain".
The steering of the jet stream seems to have some qualitative changes in these conditions but also more chaos. It could steer storms anywhere along the coast, so different parts of CA, OR, and WA get different impact. Just in my lifetime in CA, I've witnessed some very wet El Niño winters but also some drier than average.
The biggest precipitation threat on the west coast seems to be a repeat of some of the biggest flooding events known historically or geologically. But, these are relatively infrequent and most of the record predates any understanding or tracking of the El Niño oscillation. So the correlation cannot be stated so clearly. These are atmospheric river events which seem to stall, producing heavy rains over the same area for a much longer period.
Just in the recent centuries of CA history, there have been massive floods in northern and southern regions in different month-long rain events. There have been improvements to flood control infrastructure since then. But, the only reason those events aren't known as the most costly is because there wasn't as much economic development here back when the floods happened.
Our usual storms sweep through an area the heaviest rains over just part of a day. Our varied terrain means that each individual storm also has very uneven rainfall amounts due to orographic intensification. Prominences with the right aspect towards the wind will get far more accumulation. Our watersheds can absorb quite a bit of this, but even those brief rains can cause localized flooding.
If the rain continues for many days in a row, we will see widespread mudslides and flooding of larger rivers, basins, etc. Some of the historically extreme events had rain persisting for over a month!
Edit: along with these "mega storm" scenarios, we also have evidence of "mega droughts". It's worrisome to imagine what challenges may come from a more energetic and chaotic climate.
"El Niño, California Precipitation, and Landslides" <https://www.conservation.ca.gov/cgs/landslides/el-nino>
El Niño is the “warm phase” of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation and features warmer than average ocean surface temperatures off the coast of Ecuador and Peru in the equatorial eastern Pacific Ocean.... Historically, the presence of El Niño conditions tilts the odds in favor of wetter than normal precipitation across the southern third of the state. The relationship between El Niño and cool season precipitation is weaker in the central and northern parts of the state.
Flooding is possible, particularly if dams exceed capacity, perhaps exacerbated by earlier snowmelt and peak runoff. Landslides are a more widespread, and less manageable problem, particularly as loose-material slopes are waterlogged. The deluge -> high growth -> heavy fuel load -> large wildfire -> landslide cycle is one that's become fairly well-known in California.
Levee failures within the Sacramento Delta or Central Valley could result in very large-scale flooding, affecting agriculture or communities.
The San Francisco Bay Area may see "king tides" and general flooding throughout the bay and delta region, particularly during December and January, and all the more so if high tides coincide with heavy river run-off. Remember that the entire Central Valley of California, nearly 500 miles long north-to-south, drains out through the Bay. Prevailing winds may create a wind setup or seiche which can result in flooding along a some but not all shorelines, or alternating across a body of water.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_setup>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seiche>
The aquifers are all extremely depleted and the reservoirs nearly empty. Extra rain will be very good. If private interests are allowed to graze and log public land, fire risk can be mitigated.
The reservoirs are designed and calibrated for specific times and rates of fill, largely driven by snowmelt runoff rather than precipitation deluges.
Aquifer fill rates are slow, and are generally predicated on large-scale flooding. Prior to modern flood control (dams, river channelisation, levee construction), in which much, and occasionally effectively all of California's Central Valley (as well as large riparian valley systems in Oregon and Washington) would flood.
See the Great Flood of 1862: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Flood_of_1862>.
Reservoirs provide parlous slim protection against landslides of elevated slopes. Those are affected by upslope water saturation (the stuff that's on its way to fill your aquifers in coming months or years), not floodplain innundation. It's exacerbated by fire-cleared hillsides, particularly those which burn ferociously hot, killing plant roots and baking soil. Those fires are not historically typical, but have been the conditions experienced with greatly increased frequency since the 1990s.
Cattle don't graze chaparral, oak woodlands, or ponderosa or Douglas fir forests. Those have been what's been burning.
Your suggestions / assessments are at a far remove from reality.
“Extra rain” have you seen what happens when you pour water over dry soil? I’ll tell ya, it doesn’t absorb particularly fast…
We haven't had any significant flooding in past El Niños. Of course, it will probably be different this round, but at least El Niños tend to align with Mediterranean weather instead of droughts and wildfires.
We also have one of the more advanced waterwork system in the US to support Central Valley agriculture, so a lot of the worst aspects can be somewhat managed.
It's bad that such dramatic climate change is happening, but we're definetly lucky to live in the West Coast because we won't face the brunt of some of the worst aspects of the El Niño comparatively and have the infrastructure to deal with it.
Sadly, the brunt of climate change will be felt by the poorer half of the world.
The costliest floods in state history were in the winter 1994-1995 which was a weak El Niño year.
True, but a lot of that was due to a lack of integrated water management (IWM) in California at the time, and led to significant reforms as well as infra expansion to prevent that from happening again.
The Lima Prieta Quake and the 1990s floods led to a lot of future proofing in Californian infra. The last major thing left is transmission weathering, which PGE and Sac are fighting over.
Also, most of our infra is state funded which gives us a lot of leeway.
Like I said before, it's bad that we're in this position and it's only going to get worse, but we're in one of the better places that can survive these kinds of shifts.
I for one am impressed we get couple months of warning before it happens
It's a massive oscillating system (millions of square miles), so we have plenty of lead time. It's easy to measure and watch evolve.
Its a bit more complicated than that, you have a period during the spring called the spring persistence barrier that makes skillful prediction of a developing el nino difficult. What is impressive is that multi month model predictions before this spring barrier had a historic el nino developing which turned out to be correct (an out of sample prediction).
I could not be more excited about the upcoming warm, dry summer here in NZ's North Island. The media keeps trying to scare us but I'm pumped. I can't do anything about the future of planet Earth and I'm not going to ring my hands and lose sleep over it, but if atmospheric changes are going to result in some great seasons I'm here for it.
Another thing AI makes worse because of all the energy consumption.
I hope we have something more to show than dozens of to-do apps when our children and grandchildren ask which important things made the massive use of AI necessary.
Yes. Something like 45% of global emissions come from electricity generation.
Even if we don't do anything about emissions and climate change picks up, lives in 2126 will be unmistakably better than ours in all dimensions that matter.
If you're a single-celled creature living near the Arctic.
I really believe this is corporate propaganda. "Don't worry, we have the solutions".
You don't.
can you show us the world model that predicts this outcome? which variables does it take into account?
This is more or less what most academics and serious policy makers believe.
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6...
This is propaganda
If things get really unsustainable, I'm talking about a sizeable percentage of the world's population dying because of heatwaves, shall we see desperate measure being taken?
For example some scientists suggested installing sunshades but... Literally a sunshade: deploying an umbrella of sort, in space, so that less heat reaches the heart.
Now of course as we've been ruled by luminaries since decades, bringing us to the situation we're in now, I wouldn't be surprised if they managed to fuck up that too: for example by fuxxoring the sunshade and killing another sizeable percentage of the population by creating a new ice age.
But really I wonder: at what tipping point shall desperate measures be taken to try to fix things and what could those be? That sunshade doesn't seem that crazy or is it?
Funding was proposed by Congress during the Biden administration but didn't get a lot of press at the time
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/07/01/white-house-cautiou...
Cloud cover to raise the Earth's albedo can be done by a smaller independent team, vs needing the whole world to agree to stop polluting.
If you give any regularly-occurring event that varies in intensity enough time, it is guaranteed to break the records of its previous intensities.
Yeah like earthquakes, the top registered earthquake happened 66 years ago.
The fact that you see record breaking more often than log of time implies a drift in one direction.
And it varies in intensity because human activity is putting more energy into the system
It varies in intensity because it always has.
If it’s always varied in intensity, why are the ten hottest years on record all after 2015?
Surely we’d see random hot years all over the map.
This thread and the article are discussing about El Nino, not global average temperatures.
You said:
>If you give any regularly-occurring event that varies in intensity enough time, it is guaranteed to break the records of its previous intensities.
I don't even have to add emphasis myself, you already did.
Someone then named a regularly-occurring event of varying intensity (summer is hot), and pointed out that the data shows the opposite of your explanation (i.e. this isn't random variance causing random spikes; this is a continuous increasing trend).
You then said, effectively, "not that regularly-occurring event of varying intensity!"
Kinda seems like you're moving the goalposts a bit.
If you want to be a good denialist you’ll need better arguments my friend.
What am I denying, exactly? This thread and the article pertain to El Nino. Is someone denying that El Nino exists?