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Well, fuck
They want decisive and ambitious action, you can't get that if we all turn to doomerism.
Coarsely predictable in the sense that more blankets on the bed (insulating gases in the atmosphere) trap more radiant heat energy, sure.
Predictable, as in we can predict what will happen in or between (or to) climate cells as that trapped energy increases ... nope, not so much.
That's the mathematical conclusion from the study of nonlinear systems embodied in things such as Ed Lorenz's Butterfly Effect and Stephen Smale's Horseshoe.
This just doesn't correspond to reality. A lot of serious stuff is happening in this space.
So, until somebody brings out 10+ aircraft carriers and enforces global climate accord, i don't see any progress happening here.
https://www.ipolitics.ca/2025/07/02/its-too-late-david-suzuk...
We are now in the "hunker down" phase of global warming.
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?
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?
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.
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.
Staying below 1.5 degrees global warming is very unlikely at this point. But every tenth of a degree counts. Humanity needs to be decisive in slowing down climate change. This is a matter of political will.
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.
It would have been a hopeful prediction from today's perspective, as we would necessarily have stopped pumping and burning oil by now, but unfortunately we haven't.
Just one nasty question: if you, as an assumed conservative, had to choose between conserving capitalism or the environment, what would it be?
Conservatives will design a society were they assume they are at the top. More left leaning people will design a society with no concept of where they will be in it.
'Net increase in land area of 2.9%'
'Land area increase in eight of nine atolls. Island change has lacked uniformity with 74% increasing and 27% decreasing in size.'
'Results challenge perceptions of island loss, showing islands are dynamic features that will persist as sites for habitation over the next century, presenting alternate opportunities for adaptation that embrace the heterogeneity of island types and their dynamics.'
Or do you know any popular left leaning politician that advocates for full blown communism instead of just tax reform?
What you called a good point isnt, its diffamation of the left. And btw, imo full blown communism is equally delusional as busines-as-usual capitalism.
If we look at the enforcement and outcomes of former climate action „plans“ this is unfortunately a valid option.
On that topic, the book series including 'Fifty Degrees Below' by Kim Stanley Robinson is worth a read. I think I got that reading tip from HN, or maybe it was his Mars triology, which also has some nice planetary science stuff.
It is absolutely not normal.
It is so fast in fact, that animals especially don't/won't have the number of generations necessary to make natural selection make them evolve in the right ways to survive a warmer Earth.
Finally, it might not be Ok as the planet could become uninhabitable. For example, given enough CO2/other greenhouse gasses the air becomes warmer to a level where it can hold enough water vapor (a more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2) that the planet could enter a spiral where it get's warmer, warmer air can hold more water vapor, which makes everything warmer, ... until you get to something that is closer to Venus with its super high greenhouse gasses and hot atmosphere.
Then go ahead, why dont you correct him :-)
I had too many meandering, unfruitful conversations with such people where i was way too polite. At some point you have to call it by its name: pathological idiocy.
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.
* Data centers powering artificial intelligence could use more electricity than entire cities [0]
* Google’s emissions up 51% as AI electricity demand derails efforts to go green [1]
* AI is poised to drive 160% increase in data center power demand [2]
It is a doomsday cult in the most literal sense.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2024/11/23/data-centers-powering-ai-cou...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jun/27/google-em...
[2] https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/AI-poised-to-...
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/about-us/news-and-media/media-c...
We can certainly, even without genetic engineering breed crops more suited for shorter growing time frames.
There are a lot of corn hybrids, some mature fast, others far slower. Some require more sun, others less. For example, some of the faster growing varieties only take 60 days to mature, others 100+. But here's the thing. Those are 60 "good weather" days. As in not too much cloud, not too unseasonably cold or warm, reasonable amounts of rain and water, and so on.
As corn takes time to grow and mature, it doesn't matter how much sun you throw at it, it still only grows so fast. Up North, even if it's warmer, you still need enough sun too. Compressing the sun around the summer solstice doesn't help. Giving it 22 hour long days of sun doesn't just magically make the corn grow 2x as fast as an area with 11 hours of usable sun.
And the spring is still "rainy season". Some crops can't take too much rain.
Where I live, a local farmer grows traditional yellow corn, as some prefer it over newer, 'peaches and cream' hybrids. But some years? It just doesn't mature. Too much cloud, or other inclement weather (too hot, too cool, to much sun, etc) and being further north means there is little wiggle room in the growing season.
I guess my point is, Northern areas will require only certain crops. That's fine of course, and it will indeed feed people, but some crops won't be on the table.
One thing that may have already helped Russia, is the extensive work the Soviets put into breeding crops to grow further north:
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/04/fruit-trenches-cul...
While I do not doubt the weather is more mild in Russia these days, it's also quite erratic. At least it is here in Canada. Some winters mild, then bam a winter of "old". So I wonder if the above breeds have given Russia a leg up on taking advantage?
So for example, if AI can replace the need for additional humans, then overall we're using net less energy?
AI is a massive waste of power in many (most?) cases, but electricity does not necessarily need to be generated in a way that releases CO2. Solar panels, wind farms, geothermic energy, and even nuclear plants can satisfy AI's requirements and only leave it to be a local problem.
Unfortunately, the USA, the government of country with the biggest impact per citizen as well as the hotbed of current AI development, has started taking down climate change related information to serve their oil baron masters. That leaves environmental responsibility with companies and their shareholders.
AI isn't a doomsday cult. It's the epitome of the "Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders" meme in real life.
Which seems like a very strenuous proposal to be betting the future of humanity on.
But what we can rationalize about is that our current effects on the climate are already having dire effects, worsening disasters and increasing extremes. The bug windshield phenomenon is one example of a potential downstream shift.
By the time we have a more concrete timeline the odds are that it'll already be here and far too late.
If AI were to not use so much energy, we would have a much easier time covering our need with green sources. Yes, we can probably also account for the additional use by AI, but it'll make an already existential challenge so much harder.
Regarding your last paragraph - AI is just the riders of the apocalypse. The doomsday cult is capitalism.
Capitalism as a system is fundamentally incapable of functioning without continously running forward, and stopping means the system collapses. It needs consumption, it needs perpetually renewing debt, perpetually working humans. It's a death cult.
Not great for food production. The UK is close enough to a wealthy nation that we should be able to import our food or make enough with high energy/resource requirements. There is a general problem with a lack of resources (hence all the global conflict going on now. Trump doesn't want Greenland because he looked at a Mercator map and got size envy due to his tiny hands, the resources there will go to China, Russia, Europe or the US), but that can be overcome.
The dirty secret of global warming is that Europe can't take a billion climate refugees - even the most bleeding heart liberals will baulk at the UK population increasing from 70m to 200m in a generation, its not sustainable.
America has less of a problem - the population of Central and South America between about 30N and 30S is 500 million. The population of Africa and Asia in that boundary is about 4.5 billion, and as those areas become uninhabitable due to wet bulb temperatures and water scarcity, people will either die or try to move north - mainly to Europe.
AI companies currently simply are a major contributor to climate crisis, justified by racing for future riches for a few people, provided by some imaginary moat. Probably right near the one built by Uber.
I'm not sure what you are trying to say. That this article is part of that doomsday cult (those worried about climate change)? If so, why not give it some credibility? Are you doubting the veracity of the linked articles? Because it seems like you are dismissing the claims presented in this article and the linked ones, attributing them to a doomsday cult. I may be getting it wrong, though.
The other meaning could be that you are referring to Silicon Valley's AI companies with their huge demand for power as the doomsday cult, and that they are to blame for the major reversal in ocean circulation.
In any case, it's not like we humans were intelligent enough to prevent climate change, or modify or adapt to it (depending on what your views are, human-made or just natural warming).
It looks like we're still dumb enough (we come from the apes, and they certainly are dumber than us) to not be able to deal with this problem, so it might be better to grant AI some room to compute, and maybe shrink some cities instead.
Electrical production can emit greenhouse gasses, and there is an argument we should be inventing and investing in decarbonizing it.
1. Can we capture CO2 and prevent it from affecting the climate in a safe way?
2. Could we create a large “blind” between the earth and sun to safely control how much sunlight hits the earth if the temperature gets too hot?
There have been advances in #1 and propositions for #2, but I think most either want to cast blame, bury our heads in the sand, or wallow in self-pity because they think we’re not capable of figuring out a safe solution and/or don’t believe that we could work together to accomplish it.
It does, but this due to the demand created by humans. If you create a technologically advanced civilization, with robots doing a lot of the work, and considering their lack of desire to own things like pretty houses, it could be possible to scale down civilization to a few select millions in such a way that the entire system is then respecting earth's resources.
If you were to ship a big group of people through the galaxy, you'd also have to put some constraints on how many people will be on that ship, yet it will have to function regardless of how little people exist on that ship. The same could be applied to earth.
This would also give animals more room on this planet.
What if the pursuit of real AI is what eventually saves humanity and leads to a utopian rather than dystopian future?
2. That's not how it works. It's more like a greenhouse and climate gases absorb more energy. Also look up after how many meters a steel cable ruptures under it's own weight. It's not exactly easy. Thermonuclear war might help.
Everyone in the oil business knew in the 80ies.
We could probably even figure out how to keep our standard of living but consumerism needs to stop but then capitalism breaks down.
It's a great strategy that works fantastically well and saves a lot of time and money, except when it doesn't.
To that, I must ask: look at the people driving the revolution, and their personal ethics.
What future do you think they will provide?
I see no reason to expect this technology to save us. We don’t even need AI to save ourselves from dystopia, it’s not been about lack of technology for decades, we need to change our societies structurally _somehow_
2. Having the ability to control the amount of sunlight hitting the Earth would help prevent overwarming, which is one possible outcome, and neither thermonuclear war nor any culling of humanity would be a solution, as in fact we’re responsible for this, so we must fix it. You’re basically suggesting killing all the life that could help.
is building green infrastructure environmentally friendly? The mines, machinery, ships, concrete, steel, the processing plants, etc, really Green, just because it's for EVs or batteries?
2. We can already fix this but for this we need to radically change the power structures that are in place and figure out a way to peacefully solve the problem. Reducing emissions should be the biggest priority everywhere.
Of course humanity runs on balance between living (and procreating) and saving the planet.. the quickest way to save the planet would be for all of us to drop dead, but very few of us would be in favor of that idea.
Are we going to use it for every new technology? It's a fairly easy stick to beat any tech with.
Does AI use more power than Facebook? Is one more deserving of the power than the other?
Especially here in Europe we like to play the 'Greener than Thou' card while for decades have been doing absolutely nothing real besides imaginary 'carbon credit' spreadsheet shenanigans, tipple passing the subsidy handouts for burning our forests in Dutch incinerators, exporting all our 'emissions' to China and paying very dubious buddies on the other side of the world for 'net zero' absolutions while tripling our real pollution.
Our earth is a shared resource. I am not okay with it being wasted on the pet projects of billionaires trying to enrich themselves even more.
The first one chooses somewhat arbitrary date of 2019 to make the 51% figure stand out. Google scaled up a lot since 2019, I'd bet it's almost entirely unrelated to AI (well, at least wrt to LLMs).
The other two are just a guesswork, which is likely completely outdated because it's from last year and so many things have changed since then.
The case of Bitcoin is more damning because pow for just no reason, serves no purpose. Security by consuming massive amounts of power. There is a reason why Ethereum successfully moved away from that. But Bitcoin will never dare to.
Unfortunately as you say the powers are currently focusing on denying what is clearly undeniable.
This article made me fear first time since a while for what kind of future are my daughters live in. I am truly sorry and sad.
Needless to say, the utopia plan is going badly.
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".
The smart play was to allow AI to fuel a massive growth in production of solar panels and wind in the US which could actually rival China (who are going to eat the US within a decade) but corruption has put pay to that.
A popular narrative but it’s false. Even when we take it into account Europe’s emissions keep dropping.
It’s a small % of China’s massive emissions. They produce and consume on a level we can’t fathom. Their middle class has more people than the US and EU combined.
Nation-wise, all the biggest culprits (US/EU) and a good number of the biggest present and future contributors to climate change are democracies.
You do not get to shift collective responsibility onto some "powers that be": Those powers are you and me.
The problem is neither that people don't know about climate change, nor that "greedy corporations" prevent us from acting-- the central problem is that people, in general, don't want to sacrifice cheap fuel, electricity and high living standards now for a better future-- not even a little bit.
Thats it. You can see this in literally every discussion on environmentalism in basically every election. People only want clean energy as long as they don't have to pay a single dime extra for it.
I have not solution for this, but blaming corporations is most certainly not gonna solve this problem (if anything, it's making things worse).
The only way is to lower consumption drastically, end the constant growth chase, and enbrance closed carbon cycle (biodiverse biomass).
Others might have other models in mind, but it's a cop-out to say "oh well, we've tried bourgeois democracy and it was inevitably corrupted by capitalist interest, I guess we're all out of ideas..."
The good news is that that usage is creating high cost for them and an incentive to do something about that. Which is why MS, Amazon, etc. are very interested in investing in e.g. nuclear and renewables.
I'm not too worried about the long term impact of increased power usage by data centers. I think it's more interesting to focus on the big emitters: domestic and industrial heating, shipping, road transport, aviation, construction, etc. There is some movement there but it's very slow. Fixing that should increase demands on power grids and that's a good thing because investments are needed to make that better and cleaner and the most viable technical path to doing that is via renewables.
And it's not a zero sum game. AI delivers economical benefits as well. Including potential savings in labor, efficiency gains, and indeed power usage. I don't think becoming Luddites is really a realistic path. Not going to happen and quite pointless and ineffective to be calling for that. AI is happening and there's going to be more of it. Wasting energy on trying to put that cat back in the bag it escaped from is a mission impossible.
This is not my point. I think most western democracies do exactly what voters want against climate change: Nothing that would cost extra.
Effective policies to curb CO2 emissions are numerous and pretty obvious: Get rid of combustion engines, phase out fossil fuels from electricity generation, scale up electric grid interconnectivity and storage, lower emissions in steel/concrete production.
Voters are mostly not against those policies, but as soon as there are visible costs (fuel/vehicle/construction/electricity costs rising) or minor inconvenience (vehicle range) any progress gets firmly stopped.
I don't see how another form of government would help in any way-- the eco-communists would just get toppled before they could get anything done.
Building a fence with self aiming and shooting turrets shouldn't be that hard. We only need to militarize couple of choke points and it should solve itself. Bulgaria Greece borders, the islands and gibraltar.
> 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.
I'm an optimist by nature. I probably do err on the side of optimism. But when I look back over history, I see a trend upward in living standards, despite the modern determination to pretend this hasn't happened, or to cherry pick data to prove the opposite, and despite prophecies of doom at almost every step change.
I'm inclined to believe that will continue to happen, that regardless of what people personally think of Altman, Zuckerberg, etc, that ultimately, strong AI is inevitable, and that it will be a force for improving our lives.
I do not believe we'll be relegated to poor existences, while the captains of AI or whoever the elite are defined to be, live in paradise with robot workers do everything for them. It just makes no sense.
> “The likelihood that the AMOC collapses, let's say, before the end of the century, according to numerical models and our understanding, is pretty small. Most likely the weakening will be modest,” he says.
The answer is simple: They want societal collapse, and the reason why they are getting more and more violent and switching to other causes is because the societal collapse promised to them by climate change is not coming, and it looks like it will never come.
Not just on AI. Personally, I only downvote stuff that I think coarsens the dialogue. The opinion expressed, is not really relevant. I like living in a world where I'm challenged.
I too, am an optimist. I think that AI can have tremendous positive effect.
But I also have considerable life experience with the darker corners of human nature, and know exactly how bad it can get (HINT: There's no bottom). Some of the very worst specimens of ... humanity, I guess (for lack of a better term) ... are quite cultured and well-educated. Filed fingernails mean absolutely nothing, when it comes to personal Integrity.
A quick shufti through human history, will quickly show that our shared prosperity is merely a recent blip on the screen. Most of history is the 0.01%, living high on the hog, while the 99.99% live in hell, serving the 0.01%. AI can definitely enable that kind of society.
There's then the political implication of shooting thousands of desperate refugees.
>There's then the political implication of shooting thousands of desperate refugees.
Yeah, the party of the shooters will be reelected.
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]
(But it was probably just preaching to the choir...)
Ending it, and we're in much less charted waters. We might revert the Earth to its normal hot climate, but this is one where mammals do not thrive, potentially do not even survive, except at the poles.
The only reason to get one is to save the world which is a good reason but it’s already too late
Car manufacturers are producing more and more vehicles using more resources and requiring more energy, either for ICE or EV, vehicles.
You can be against a particular tech using resources and power, but if you are selective about which tech then you don't really care as much as you think you do.
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.
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