Major reversal in ocean circulation detected in the Southern Ocean

Climate advocates in general try to avoid implying that we've already crossed a threshold, as that breeds hopelessness.

They want decisive and ambitious action, you can't get that if we all turn to doomerism.

For me its very clear that something will happen given that we fundamentally will never give up our lifestyle. I am not even talking about the ultra rich lifestyle, but lets say the bottom 70% of the world's population.

That sould be the least we do, some sort of coordinated global action to slow down, stop, eventually recover? The damage, and yet not a single country is willing to do anything serious in that regard. Politicians are exclusively focused on their political career, not thinking about the greater benefit to Earth, life, the human civilization. Pretty hopeless how things stand right now.

> Climate advocates in general try to avoid implying that we've already crossed a threshold, as that breeds hopelessness.

None of that means it's not true.

Who is left to take decisive and ambitious action in say, the next decade?

It's a bad idea, the best way to deal with problems is to face them directly, no matter how desperate. This is a similar failure to COVID where they thought lying to the public would make for better outcomes but ended up sowing distrust. In the case of climate change this sows complacency.

> The damage, and yet not a single country is willing to do anything serious in that regard.

This just doesn't correspond to reality. A lot of serious stuff is happening in this space.

okay then why is it taboo to suggest geoengineering interventions like injecting sulfer into the upper atmosphere? The climate advocates don’t have any decisive and ambitious actions that they actually are willing to try.

David Suzuki had some real talk yesterday:

https://www.ipolitics.ca/2025/07/02/its-too-late-david-suzuk...

We are now in the "hunker down" phase of global warming.

They are, Biden funded research into it in 2022 https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/13/what-is-solar-geoengineering.... Biden being the same POTUS who proposed and signed IRA aka the 'Green New Deal'.

Now that we've established that, what's your decisive and ambitious action you've made towards addressing climate change, so we can learn from the example you've set?

> This is a similar failure to COVID where they thought lying to the public would make for better outcomes

I'm curious which lies you're referring to. "Two Weeks to Flatten the Curve" reminded me of the time I had fun with my passenger's ignorance of celestial mechanics. She thought the moon really was done for, but after a few more minutes had passed it started to come back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24881670

> but ended up sowing distrust.

Because most people eventually caught on that they were being lied to?

I think you overestimate how rich the bottom 70% of the world is.

The bottom 70% of the world's population would have less than $X00 in the bank, and wouldn't have much control over their lifestyle.

We don't need to give up our lifestyle. We could switch to renewables, which would create jobs and save money in the process.

The reasons we haven't done this are because China and India are hungrily industrializing, and the Republican Party in the US is captured by fossil fuel companies.

The five stages of grief, often referred to as the Kübler-Ross model, are: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

Yes sure. But as someone who was a kid in the 90s all my life I learned about how climate change is the biggest challenge to humanity. Yet all my life I have seen grown adults pretend it doesn't exist, and when that was no longer avoidable they pretended is was natural and when that was no longer defendable... You get the idea. And I grew up in a part of the world where you could see the glaciers melting with your own eyes.

The doom of climate change is mostly people to dumb to understand the most basic of models or (worse) unwilling to do so on ideological grounds. I already decided not to have children in my life because I think it is irresponsible to put them into this world. We will have enough climate migration anyways.

The truth is that there are tripping points that are extremely hard to reverse and may or may not trigger other tripping points. Reading these risks as a reason not to care is the opposite of what should happen.

And then you figure out what the real reason is to burn the world: some rich fucks trying to extract a few thousand dollars per second more f4om the r3st of us.

Stop blaming China and India. They're an easy excuse.

And yes, we do need to give up several aspects of our lifestyles. Meat consumption absolutely must come down. Air travel must come down. Disposable goods, and consumer plastics, must come down. Our lifestyles must change. Capitalism encourages status symbol goods such as beef, travel/tourism, excessive consumption goods, etc.

We need widespread consumer behavioral change before we have any hope of governments listening to people. As long as half of the population doesn't care about the climate then nothing meaningful will get done. For real change to happen people need sunk cost. Right now people have far too many excuses and denials to actually do much. There is always a China to blame, or a company to blame, or a mega rich person to blame.

Be aware this isn't really what mental health teaches anymore.

Look at per capita and historical emissions. The problem isn’t India and china, the problem is western greed.

Because we consistently over estimate our ability to understand the impact of our interventions in complex systems. Look at Cane Toads in Australia or tumbleweed in the US.

> They want decisive and ambitious action, you can't get that if we all turn to doomerism.

What if "doomerism" is a key component to demoralize people to accept "decisive and ambitious action"?

Note that most of the environmental policy talk is on a global level...blaming living people who aren't wealthy enough to benefit from financial capital. Making everyone who doesn't make their living off of financial assets have a worse quality of life...while those who benefit from financial assets even more wealthy.

Environmental policy talk is not on a local level. Never mind the water usage of the AI centers & how it affects communities. The farmers will have to sell their land so big capital to buy it on the cheap. The money pump always leads to accumulation of Capital.

It sure seems like the rhetoric goes one way. Making the rich richer...so they have all the carbon credits to do whatever they want...transcending the "tyranny of morality" while they fly in private jets to "save the climate". Making the working/middle-class poor..."you will own nothing & be happy". Making the poor radicalized & pointing their finger at each other.

This seems like a global scale psychological experiment more than anything. At some point the true believers in climate science will be disappointed by the contradictions of their heroes...because at the end of the day...it's about money & power. There is no "we". There is only "you will have to sacrifice so I can be more wealthy & hold more leverage over you".

Note that most of the emissions come from fairly mundane stuff, notably heating and road transport. Tackling those is fairly straghtforward without that many changes in lifestyle. The last ~20% is where it becomes really difficult without major changes.

> As long as half of the population doesn't care about the climate then nothing meaningful will get done.

This is fairly common misconception. At this point the vast majority of people is on board, but the perception is skewed by vocal minority. Big part of the work at the moment is just communication to help closing this perception gap.

Yes. For example, in the US, they told people to not wear masks at the beginning of the pandemic, saying it wasn't airborne because they wanted to save masks for medical professionals. They should have just said directly that medical professionals need masks, so conserve them, reuse them, donate them, whatever, but anything but lie to the public. It helped create the conspiracy culture around COVID.

My favorite lie had to do with how there weren't enough ventilators. That one got memory holed relatively early, once the frontline medical workers figured out they'd been tricked into thinking ventilation would be helpful for SARS-CoV-2 patients who were not actually in respiratory distress.

My other favorite lie was that the failed ebola drug remdesivir was helpful for COVID-19. The conspiracists think Remdesivir was used to punish people who declined the mRNA jabs.

The ‘very, very bad look' of remdesivir, the first FDA-approved COVID-19 drug - https://www.science.org/content/article/very-very-bad-look-r...

Washington Post: Remdesivir can help keep unvaccinated, high-risk people with covid-19 out of hospitals, study finds - https://www.ihv.org/news/2021-archives/washington-post-remde...

Why Remdesivir Failed: Preclinical Assumptions Overestimate the Clinical Efficacy of Remdesivir for COVID-19 and Ebola https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/aac.01117-21

> It helped create the conspiracy culture around COVID.

I think conspiracists saw very clearly what was going on. A dissident scientist I respected said, at the very beginning, that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was almost certainly a product of the UNC's gain-of-function research. He knew the UNC's work had been transferred to Wuhan, China.

U.S. halts funding for new risky virus studies, calls for voluntary moratorium - No grants for flu, SARS, or MERS while government pursues 1-year risk analysis - https://www.science.org/content/article/us-halts-funding-new... [2014]

great, let’s scale up https://makesunsets.com/

I blamed India, China, and the US. Any one of those countries could switch to renewables and solve the problem.

That's not injecting sulfur into the upper atmosphere though? Is this your company?

no, just some acquaintances. but the only people even doing the experiment, as far as I can tell

I don't necessarily disagree (or agree) with the calculus that we arguably could and should be injecting SO2 into the stratosphere right now as an emergency measure, but your acquaintances are certainly not the only ones thinking about it. As the first article I linked mentions, the idea has been around since at least 1965 and references a 2021 landmark report. The White House OSTP also released their own 44-page report on it in 2023 (https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/30/white-house-releases-report-... , https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/ostp/news-updates/2023/...), pursuant to the research plan from the 2022 article I initially shared.

I'd also probably agree that there is likely misguided opposition to it as a tool in the climate change arsenal as well from "climate advocates" (taboo). The same could also be said for fission nuclear power which, unlike SO2 geoengineering, would substantially address the root cause of the problem - emissions - with fewer risks and unknowns. (France, for example, being a real-world example of how many countries could almost completely decarbonize their electric generation in a proven and scalable way with nuclear fission.)

If we further broaden our scope of misguided opposition from just "climate advocates" to voting polities in countries that are positioned to meaningfully address climate change at a global scale, then we're really getting to the root of the issue. The single most impactful action the average person could take to fight climate change in the US is to vote blue. It's an effectively binary choice to give badly-needed societal support and investment to climate-relevant initiatives like your friends' and so many others.

I vote blue but I don’t see the dems fast-tracking fission! Or really anything else particularly effective about climate for the last 30 years.

anyway my model is: we just have to survive a few years before Wright’s Law pushes solar+batteries so cheap that fossil is priced out of the market. Thus aerosol injection to bridge the gap until drawdown

If you can link me a credible model that shows we can get to net zero that way, then great. Otherwise my understanding is we need all the solar+batteries we can get but it won't be enough to meet even 1/3 of projected demand by 2050.

here you go: https://www.tonyseba.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Rethinki...

Ok, that's a whitepaper from 2020 using a proprietary model. Anything peer-reviewed?