We're getting cooked. I'm already paying 10-times more for water usage than I spend on gas, and 5-times more on electricity bills - AC's running non-stop. That's crazy, because I live in the area where you can't even walk to buy a piece of bread - we drive all the time. I fully expect for businesses very soon to operate at night. Costco, Walmart, groceries, even libraries will be working all night in places like Arizona, Texas and some parts of California.
folkrav 3 hours ago [-]
Maybe this country focusing so much on keeping the gas cheap might have something to do with it.
iLemming 43 minutes ago [-]
American gas is not cheap. In absolute-numbers-sense, it's comparable to the current prices in Russia. And by all means and for all the different reasons, one would expect gasoline to be enormously expensive there right now. Far more expensive than in the States. It doesn't seem to be the case.
Aurornis 37 minutes ago [-]
> American gas is not cheap.
Yes it is. I don’t know why you picked Russia to compare to. Russia’s government heavily intervenes in markets to keep prices low, including subsidizing refineries and banning exports at times. The fact that our prices are as low as theirs means our gas is cheap.
iLemming 23 minutes ago [-]
I feel like you have not watched any videos of what's going on there right now. People lining up to buy any gas, and those lines are miles long, sometimes they have to wait for 8-10 hours. The crisis now causing shortages in neighboring countries - Central Asian republics and Mongolia. Average gas prices jumped considerably - 8-10x, and you'd think, well, how expensive the gas then? And it's about $4 per gallon. So, just like I said - the "cheap" American gas is comparable to the most expensive gas in modern history of Russia. Of course, there's purchasing power parity and other factors, that's why I said "in absolute-numbers-sense".
slashdev 1 hours ago [-]
US emissions have declined 18% since 2005.
Look at Asia.
NegativeLatency 60 minutes ago [-]
You mean the place where we buy all our crap from?
Aurornis 42 minutes ago [-]
> I'm already paying 10-times more for water usage than I spend on gas, and 5-times more on electricity bills
Comparing ratios of bills is confusing. This statement would be unsurprising if you drove 10 miles per week in a Prius. It would be very confusing if you were filling up your tank every week and spending $1000/month on a water bill.
sarchertech 3 hours ago [-]
> I'm already paying 10-times more for water usage than I spend on gas
Are you irrigating an enormous yard?
iLemming 1 hours ago [-]
No, but I have a pool and it's been drying up below the skimmers, I need to keep the water level or the filtration dies.
vachina 49 minutes ago [-]
lol. What a first world problem to have. Sounds like a very solvable problem too (remove the pool then)
iLemming 41 minutes ago [-]
Thank you captain. I'm sure this would greatly reduce the climate change effects. Doing it posthaste - the world needs saving.
jazzpush2 18 minutes ago [-]
To be fair, you were the one complaining about water costs as if it was a climate-related issue, when it's... your pool.
edoceo 3 hours ago [-]
Maybe they mean consumption is the same but price is up.
sarchertech 3 hours ago [-]
The only way I can read what they wrote to mean that is if they are saying water costs $30-40 a gallon.
iLemming 1 hours ago [-]
Have you never used a garden hose? Do you know that a regular, average hose left running overnight can waste like 5,000 gallons of water? My HOA enforces a rule - you must keep at least two trees per household. Trees need water. Not that much, of course, I shared the overnight hose number just for the sense of measure. Now you do the math - couple of trees, bathrooms, showering, drinking, cooking - that water usage adds up.
47 minutes ago [-]
3 hours ago [-]
parineum 2 hours ago [-]
I assume they mean natural gas
iLemming 50 minutes ago [-]
No, I meant exactly in the petrol sense. Darn americanims - you never know if gas is gasoline, or poison, anesthetic, or flatulence, or you're just being gaslighted.
taneq 3 hours ago [-]
Or driving a small, economical car?
sarchertech 2 hours ago [-]
Even if you’re driving a Prius and getting 50mpg, if you’re “driving all the time” you’re spending at least $100 a month in gas. There’s nowhere in the country where a water bill is $1000 a month unless you’re doing a lot of irrigation.
mrexroad 1 hours ago [-]
I read the comment as an overview of their utility costs—natural gas, not gasoline.
0n0n0m0uz 59 minutes ago [-]
Libraries in SW Colorado were packed! Alot of people just using the AC since most houses dont even have it
uncomputation 4 hours ago [-]
Maybe I am pessimistic but it seems no one cares about climate change these days. All of Los Angeles is sweltering now. Just pointing fingers and dropping individual names while the world continues to heat slowly. Any suggestions to get involved are welcome, I don’t want to be just a complainer.
shikshake 4 hours ago [-]
Get politically involved, vote and and volunteer for local pro-climate candidates. Talk about and promote public transport, cycling, better zoning and infrastructure etc. People underestimate the power of local politics.
On a macro scale all you can really do is vote for national level candidates that care about these issues. Luckily it’s not hard to see which ones do and which ones don’t.
SoftTalker 4 hours ago [-]
Individually you can't do anything. You can drive an EV, set your AC to 78, or whatever makes you feel good but only national governments can make the regulatory changes that will really have an impact.
I even roll my eyes at my city council spending even one second on climate change policy (and they have spent whole meetings on it). Our city of 80,000 people could disappear from the face of the planet and it would not make a bit of difference.
tito 3 hours ago [-]
Working at the level of 80,000 people is a lot more effective than working at the level of an individual.
Working on your own carbon footprint is a $100M marketing trick played on you by oil companies like BP.
Leah Stokes' new book offers instead a "carbon wave" -- how to evaluate and maximize your impact at a local, state, national, and global level. Here's a LinkedIn post. She's got a new book coming out about this: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:share:7496265286...
estearum 4 hours ago [-]
You can vote
SoftTalker 4 hours ago [-]
Yes you can but you'll have to vote against your immediate self interest and comfort. The sort of changes that will have an impact on the climate will mean giving up a lot of what makes modern life convenient and comfortable.
agentultra 18 minutes ago [-]
Not that much of a difference for the average or lower classes of people that outnumber the rich by quite a lot. It would have a great and positive impact for them.
grackasthebig 3 hours ago [-]
Thermodynamics; your convenience and comfort (CnC) are merely externalized on others not eliminated; someone else makes your stuff, deals with the environmental toll in the future.
Happy to sacrifice some of your CnC to ease obligations on those you give no assurances to.
tzs 2 hours ago [-]
Changes can be phased in. For example that's why places phasing out ICE cars are generally doing it by phasing out new ICE sales over many years and letting any cars already on the road when new sales stop stay on the road, and are concurrently building public charging infrastructure.
bluefirebrand 3 hours ago [-]
I think there are gradients to this
It would be hard for me to vote against indoor plumbing if that was needed to save the planet
I would vote against "Same Day Delivery" in a heartbeat though, if it helped
tgsovlerkhgsel 3 hours ago [-]
Best the corresponding parties can do is banning plastic straws (no impact but feels great) and massive bureaucratic hurdles for air conditioning in private homes (because it's an "unnecessary luxury" and if your apartment is unbearably hot during a heat wave where the temperature doesn't drop below 25 even at night, you're just not correctly using shades and windows).
estearum 3 hours ago [-]
Not really. We've made significant enough progress on this issue to prove that policy-driven progress is in fact possible.
This type of cynicism is both unwarranted and unhelpful.
tgsovlerkhgsel 50 minutes ago [-]
These changes were often not driven by the "green" parties though.
estearum 3 hours ago [-]
Not to mention there are plenty of environmental improvements that are vast and near-term quality of life improvements. The only penalty on many of these things is financial, but even that is only in the near-term, and in the medium to long term become financial wins.
tyre 4 hours ago [-]
Entirely depends on your district. There are many districts where it doesn't matter, especially with gerrymandering.
Better to volunteer for a swing district. You can write letters or fundraise from home, anywhere in the country.
estearum 4 hours ago [-]
It's absolutely worth voting even in a "safe" district because political mandates are won separately from political power itself.
You should also volunteer for a swing district though! Very good idea.
Noaidi 2 hours ago [-]
Both parties in the United States are pretty much turning a blind eye to climate change. What we need to do is start boycotting parties, telling them we won’t vote for them unless they have really strong climate platforms. We need to make them want our vote.
dalyons 2 hours ago [-]
This is some “both sides” absolute bullshit. The Biden administration passed the IRA, huge incentives for personal and commercial renewable energy production, EVs, all kinds of things.
Trump is paying people to burn more coal, blocking solar, canceling wind.
Could the dems have done more, sure. Are those programs perfect, absolutely not. But one party is moving in the right direction and the other is actively trying to accelerate climate change. Gtfo with that both sides crap.
cdaringe 34 minutes ago [-]
100%. Would have gone even harder if some moderates didn’t gunk up the works too.
The both sides bit is jaw droppingly ignorant if you pay attention to regional and national politics.
dylan604 2 hours ago [-]
> I even roll my eyes at my city council spending even one second on climate change policy
Every meeting minute spent on discussing climate change is another minute not spent on authorizing things like Flock or permitting data centers. That's nothing to roll your eyes about
thothless 4 hours ago [-]
well obviously YOU couldn't. you seem to lack the willpower to sacrifice a single convenience in favor of the rest of us, per your confession below.
that's the difference between you and the public servants that you roll your eyes at.
mxkopy 3 hours ago [-]
“Everyone wants the village, nobody wants to be the villager.” Maybe look into changing what you want.
Gigachad 3 hours ago [-]
You can do all of that, and then Elon Musk will use his hundreds of billions to install another pedofile in charge who won't give a shit about the environment.
wolvoleo 3 hours ago [-]
I remember when Musk was genuinely trying to make the world better with electric cars.
Now he's more worried about which toilets people use.
edoceo 2 hours ago [-]
He could use his assets/wealth to ensure everyone on earth has a functional, hygienic toilet. Would improve QOL for many who still live with open sewer systems.
vachina 45 minutes ago [-]
He does that by sponsoring tons of H1Bs.
georgemcbay 44 minutes ago [-]
> I remember when Musk was genuinely trying to make the world better with electric cars.
People rarely 'go bad' like that. You just learn more about who they really are over time.
Noaidi 2 hours ago [-]
Elon Musk was never trying to make the world a better place. He was always a businessman and he was using that to con the government into giving him money so he can make more money.
amluto 3 hours ago [-]
> All of Los Angeles is sweltering now.
I think that, if people who believe in climate change want to be convincing, it would be more effective to avoid blaming specific instances of weather on climate change without strong justification. Especially when the weather isn’t even abnormal.
Los Angeles, especially inland and in the valley, is hot in the summer. It was hot in the summer 30 years ago and it’s still hot in the summer. It’s the typical hot season right now, and the valley appears to be only slightly above season average temperatures today, and coastal LA seeks be slightly cooler than average. Apparently it will be unseasonably cool in a couple days.
acwan93 3 hours ago [-]
You’re correct that LA is usually hot (95F+) this time of year, but the humidity is what’s abnormal. The dew point in Disneyland was higher than in Disney World yesterday due to a tropical storm that dissipated west of the LA basin.
More tropical storms are approaching LA and that’s increasing humidity is why it’s sweltering.
megnaro 3 hours ago [-]
A separate LA Times article explained that the humidity is due to lingering effects of a recent hurricane/tropical storm.
"Forecasters attributed the punishing humidity to the remnants of Tropical Storm Iselle moving over the state, as well as unusually warm ocean temperatures due to a combination of a months-long marine heat wave, a powerful El Niño and climate change.
"Dew points in the Los Angeles Basin have been “really high,” hovering around 70 degrees in many places, with a few coastal areas like Redondo Beach and Torrance reaching a dew point of 73 to 75 on Friday, said Ryan Kittell, meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Oxnard. The metric measures the moisture content in the air."
Exactly! What a strange about what’s going on in the LA basin right now is the extremely high humidity for this time of year. A 69° dewpoint is unheard of in this region. And this is what’s associated with the El Niño and associated with climate change.
pier25 1 hours ago [-]
Climate change is a fact. You can’t believe in a fact.
tayo42 3 hours ago [-]
I haven't paid much attention to la lately.is this true? San Diego is having an unusually hot and humid summer. Water temperatures are nearly tropical right now too
WarmWash 3 hours ago [-]
The right thinks it's a hoax and the left thinks it's on corporations (not themselves) to fix it.
To put it plainly, everyone wants the problem to go away without having to change anything about their lifestyle.
wk_end 2 hours ago [-]
“Both-sides”ing this is ridiculous. Certain leftists might sometimes disproportionally blame corporations for the issue rhetorically but they aren’t broadly opposed to the kinds of taxes and regulations - on corporations or individuals - that would be needed to bring carbon emissions down.
If you insist on finding a way to criticize leftists on the climate file, a much better tack would be pointing out how some environmentalists have opposed nuclear power or densification.
tzs 1 hours ago [-]
For most individuals there is no lifestyle change they can make that will matter. Fixing it requires collective action.
The way individuals can meaningfully contribute is by supporting politicians that will make policies and rules and regulations the meaningfully encourage that collective action, and when they have a choice between more than one corporation for some product or service that are not too different as far as impact on the lifestyle goes choosing the one that is better from a climate change point of view.
The politicians and the corporations (encouraged by incentives and regulations by the politicians) can then bring about changes that will make it so the lifestyle changes for individuals that help with climate change also improve the individual's situations so people voluntarily make them in large numbers.
For example there are a lot of people in the US who would be better off if their next car was an EV except the public charging infrastructure isn't good enough for their needs. Build a lot more public chargers that support 800V cars and many of these people will pick an EV. This is something government can bring about.
For an average individual it is perfectly fine, to use a sports analogy, to play the game as it is now while supporting league wide changes to the rules to make it a better game in the future.
reenorap 1 hours ago [-]
Sf Bay Area didn’t have a single day above 100 this year. Not counting Livermore etc. it’s the first time in a long time I can remember the entire summer being so nice and relatively cool.
tito 3 hours ago [-]
Come join our El Niño session on Wednesday with Stripe's climate scientist Zeke Hausfather: https://luma.com/tu0uvbx1
We'll talk climate science, impacts, and what we can do to avert the worst impacts of the worst El Niño in human history.
taneq 3 hours ago [-]
It’s a thing you can avert? Or do you mean one in the far future which we might avert by reducing carbon emissions now?
defrost 2 hours ago [-]
They appear (I skimmed) to be investing in all any feasible ideas to capture CO2 from the air - this is a good thing.
The numbers are daunting and the returns are scant, but the effort is one that should be made.
The upside is I saw little sign of Gorgan LNG style Carbon Capture; where a massive source of CO2 greenwashes releasing 100 units of CO2 by stuffing 1 unit back in the hole it came from.
dylan604 1 hours ago [-]
For every ton of CO2 pulled from the air is another ton that something else will emit. Once the emitting is lowered, pulling it out of the air might have a chance
sobkas 50 minutes ago [-]
CO2 capture produces more green house gases than it captures
That's more of the "Gorgan LNG style Carbon Capture" I noted above - that's "capture" in the sense of releasing massive amounts of CO2 to the atmosphere while extracting massive amounts of natural gas .. but "making up for it" by not letting quite all of it escape and pushing a bit back.
Dubious accounting trick at best .. not even working as it was sold on the box in practice.
Atmospheric CO2 already floating about appears to be what the air-mining crowd are targeting (albeit small scale so far).
defrost 1 hours ago [-]
The strategy is to walk and chew gum.
tito 3 hours ago [-]
Whoops, my bad. Edited. We can avert the worst impacts of the worst El Nino in human history.
4 hours ago [-]
mdgrech23 4 hours ago [-]
I'll go against the grain but our capitalist way of life is totally incompatible with solving climate change. Likewise one country can't solve this problem alone. You need the whole world on board. I truly think the only real solution is a one world government truly working toward for the betterment of the planet and it's occupants. We all know that ain't ever gonna happen though so we're hosed.
switchbak 3 hours ago [-]
Hey I grew up super environmental and I have plenty of hippie cred, but this statement gave me shudders "the only real solution is a one world government". Yeesh, yeah a single government, surely nothing could go wrong.
tapoxi 3 hours ago [-]
I mean we're staring at apocalypse here so it's not like the alternative is any better.
jimbokun 3 hours ago [-]
It can ALWAYS get worse.
Gigachad 3 hours ago [-]
It seems we are no more capable of organizing than bacteria in a petri dish could avoid replicating until the resources are exhausted.
tito 3 hours ago [-]
I've had this thought too. And when I think about it in the big picture way, I don't think it doesn't need to be all that hard to solve. It's not like we're talking about like, you know, some huge slice of GDP or something. Yes, the price of fossil fuels effectively doubles. But we can create lots of jobs to make solar and nuclear and all these other solutions in the meantime.
An economy that seizes climate solutions can zoom ahead in terms of innovation, manufacturing, and enforcement. The changing climate is one of the biggest economic opportunities we've ever seen in human history, but somehow we've convinced ourselves that it's not only the worst non-opportunity ever but somehow would break capitalism. The richest man on the planet makes electric cars.
jimbokun 3 hours ago [-]
Let me guess, you think it’s somehow impossible that people like Trump and Musk would end up running this One World Government like Trey have done in the US because…reasons.
dylan604 1 hours ago [-]
The rest of the world would have to accept a Trump and Musk leadership. That seems like a really big ask
macintux 43 minutes ago [-]
China accepts a dictator. Russia accepts a dictator. India accepts a nationalist demagogue.
scythe 3 hours ago [-]
Renewable energy is expanding faster than ever. And it's hard for people to look at that and think we're moving too slowly. But we still are. That's the basic cultural disconnect.
When nuclear power became a thing in the seventies, there was massive planning around a presumed nuclear-powered future. The largest energy storage facilities in the US were all built around that time. This turned out to be a mirage as the cost of nuclear went up with the safety expectations of the electorate, while petrochemical prices dropped. But this time it's not prices we're predicting, it's temperature, which is much more reliable.
wolvoleo 3 hours ago [-]
Nuclear has a lot of environmental impact too. You need to mine a lot of earth to get a little uranium, and a lot of that activity is very polluting and a lot of that activity is not climate neutral. Then you have the waste problem that's not figured out, proliferation etc.
We can't go cherrypicking environmental problems. That way we roll from one crisis into the next. There's so many issues we're causing, like entire ecosystems going extinct. Sooner or later that will lead to crises too. We have to stop externalising.
And yes the electorate wants to be safe and for good reason. Even Fukushima polluted a lot. It's not just about death tolls.
grebc 2 hours ago [-]
Modern lithium batteries or solar panels for that matter don’t get magiced out of nothing.
Those materials are mined also. At least forethought is given to handling/disposal for nuclear since it’s a known issue.
scythe 33 minutes ago [-]
I think you missed the point of the nuclear tangent. The point was that people might be reluctant to build out energy storage capacity before demand appears because of what happened last time. The difference is that climate change is more predictable than the economy.
Noaidi 2 hours ago [-]
My best advice is not to approach people with numbers and figures and all the danger, start with saying you’re concerned about the future. It’s kind of an open ended conversation starter.
The big problem is this is all driven by consumption and it’s hard for people to cut back on consumption. I don’t know how to explain to people how a simple life is much easier than the complicated life of the rich and famous they see every day on the Internet.
I don’t think there is an answer for this, I think there’s way too much propaganda on the other side of the equation. My only hope from this El Niño is that it creates such damage and disaster that it starts waking people up. I think if it affects the ranchers and farmers that will be a big plus because they are usually on the side of not believing in climate change.
What I do right now is just keep talking to people and preparing, but I’m lucky since I live in a minivan full-time. I mean, I can drive anywhere. The weather suits me.
dyzone 1 hours ago [-]
> but I’m lucky since I live in a minivan full-time.
Tell us more
chadgpt3 4 hours ago [-]
The time for prevention has passed. The course has been set. Now Darwin rules the day - we'll see which species survive. We chose this.
xyzelement 3 hours ago [-]
// Now Darwin rules the day
How many children do you have?
andsoitis 5 hours ago [-]
> The global average sea-surface temperature hit a record 70 degrees on Aug. 22, according to Europe’s Earth observation agency Copernicus, which has been tracking the metric daily since 1979. The previous single-day record was measured in March 2024.
70°F is 21°C
Fish don't have AC.
userbinator 4 hours ago [-]
since 1979
And what about the years before that?
defrost 4 hours ago [-]
Other agencies tracked ocean thermoclines.
Eg: Totally not tracking submarines, we're looking at dolphins and whales!
Hint: the world had much hotter periods before humans and capitalism
tzs 2 hours ago [-]
That's like saying coastal sea level rise is nothing to worry about in places like Florida because that whole area was at the bottom of an ocean 100 million years ago.
andsoitis 2 hours ago [-]
Did you mean “humans or capitalism”?
In any event, who cares what the climate was like before humans walked the planet? We do care about what it is like while we’re around because it puts significant constraints on our lives.
Yes, but it’s not uniform at all. The paper shows cooling in some parts of the north, and heating in the southern latitudes, along with significant variations by depth.
There’s a lot of nuance in this stuff - far more than global average surface temperature (which is primarily good for scary headlines) and “fish don’t have AC”.
andsoitis 3 hours ago [-]
Do you think the general statement “ocean temperatures are rising” is misleading?
2legit2quit 3 hours ago [-]
> Yes, but it’s not uniform at all.
Translation: "I expect all areas to be affected the same, despite axial tilt, fluid dynamics, etc."
4 hours ago [-]
anakaine 4 hours ago [-]
That's not the issue, though I recognise the poster above was remarking about fish. High surface temps means more cyclones / typhoons / hurricanes, more coral bleaching, lower fish breeding and feeding because reefs die, impacts out food chains and destroys our homes.
Im Australian, so it also means droughts, water restrictions, and significant increases in bushfire number and severity after a few years of drought. Drought followed by cyclone, or bulk rain events causes catastrophic flooding. Its a shit show.
4 hours ago [-]
scronkfinkle 4 hours ago [-]
Sometimes I wonder if the anti-immigrant rhetoric that has been growing more popular is a tactical tool used by individuals who don't actually believe in it but instead have accepted that they would rather be wealthy and destroy the planet and are pricing in the consequences of that decision.
OgsyedIE 4 hours ago [-]
There's also a prisoner's dilemma situation. Suppose you're some wealthy media magnate promoting culture war distractions from your portfolio of asset strippers and polluters, thinking of defecting to team decency.
That hypothetical you can look around at the rest of the global political class and see that the rest of the establishment will destroy the livability of the biosphere whether that hypothetical you starts putting all of your money into unions, green technology and BECCs or not and conclude that the only available choice is whether to be poor in a collapsing world or rich in a collapsing world.
wolvoleo 3 hours ago [-]
Why would investing in green tech make you poor? That's what's wrong with that argument.
Moving away from fossil fuels is cheaper. Green energy is very cheap, it just misses a base load component right now. It's just that the people benefiting are different ones. And those people are going to lose sooner or later anyway, because in addition to climate change, fossil fuels are also finite.
The only reason trump is on the oil bandwagon is because many of his buddies are benefiting from it. And probably because he's still pissed at the Scotland windmill thing.
But doing the right thing doesn't have to make you poor. It will benefit everyone including the investors.
OgsyedIE 3 hours ago [-]
The optimal strategy for short term oligarchic revenue maximisation is a mixed strategy of mostly fossil fuels with some green tech.
The optimal strategy for long term biosphere habitability is a mixed strategy of mostly green tech with a tiny amount of fossil fuels exclusively for those metal smelting roles where arc furnaces and biofuels are unsuitable.
Investment portfolios dominated by technology that lifts everybody up are less profitable than greedy choices of risky investment, per some of the finer details of the mutual fund separation theorem.
wolvoleo 3 hours ago [-]
Less profitable doesn't mean becoming poor. Far from it.
And oligarchs have kids too, don't they want them to live in a world worth living in?
OgsyedIE 2 hours ago [-]
"Hello, is this the Murdoch family office? I'd like to speak to your team's permanent director of assets strategy about how wonderful it would be for your income to drop by ten to fifteen percent."
You could do the same with the accounting team on retainer for the US Commerce Secretary's family portfolio, or the US Education Secretary's family portfolio, or the US Interior Secretary's family portfolio, or the head of NASA's family portfolio, or the Middle East Special Envoy's family portfolio, or the Administrator-in-Chief of the Small Business Administration's family portfolio.
These are all individuals with a net worth of over a billion dollars who each separately employ a full time accounting and financial team with its own IT and HR just to maximise family income. What's ten million a year in operating costs versus at least sextuple that in return?
Each oligarch of size is the figurehead of a corporation dedicated to number go up.
binoct 2 hours ago [-]
> it just misses a base load component right now.
I’m sympathetic to the intent of your argument, but man, that’s a hallava gotcha there. Other than nuclear there isn’t a compelling story for a base load source of green energy. And all the new-gen nuclear tech is a long shot for safe, cost efficient, rapid scaling right now.
matchbok3 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
bix6 4 hours ago [-]
Bot
OgsyedIE 3 hours ago [-]
On the off chance they weren't a bot and were merely somebody sucked in to the culture war to the point of losing a lot of sanity, the answer is that the optimal amount of green tech for maximising oligarchic wealth extraction is somewhere both far above zero while also being at least one order of magnitude smaller than the necessary amount to mitigate emissions numbers.
matchbok3 3 hours ago [-]
Thanks for reporting my comment instead of engaging. Great contribution!
bix6 3 hours ago [-]
Sorry I guess. I got the exact same stupid comment yesterday on another thread.
CursedSilicon 3 hours ago [-]
Not a bot. Just someone with reaaaallly bad takes it seems
TACIXAT 3 hours ago [-]
This seems political and unrelated to the article.
distortionfield 3 hours ago [-]
The causes of the subject of the article are inherently political. It absolutely is relevant.
de6u99er 2 hours ago [-]
And I think the artificially created right wing shift was to enable Israel to do a lot of killing without the rest world being united to tell them to stop with this.
matchbok3 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
stouset 4 hours ago [-]
I thought the narrative was that it was the blue cities that were the chaotic hellholes, specifically because of all the minorities that live there? Can you try to keep your stories straight?
wolvoleo 3 hours ago [-]
That's the narrative about Europe as well. That we're somehow overrun by immigrants.
Yet I can walk here in the city at night without getting robbed at gunpoint. Or any point really. Pickpockets are a pest here but that's about it.
2 hours ago [-]
matchbok3 3 hours ago [-]
Sorry, I have no idea what you are referencing or what person you are talking about. Please stay on topic. Did you respond to a different post by accident? What is your contribution?
monocasa 3 hours ago [-]
Texas was bussing the Venezuelan migrants out of state to blue cities and pocketing a lot of the money that was to be used for integrating the migrants.
That's how places like Denver ended up with 40k Venezuelan migrants and little federal assistance for them.
And you know what we did? Tighten our belts a bit and help these people get integrated into our city rather than just pawning them off onto someone else.
albedoa 3 hours ago [-]
It is unfathomably weird of you to post like a raving lunatic and then get pissy when we downvote you.
3 hours ago [-]
pasquinelli 3 hours ago [-]
i've lived in rural texas close to the border, and nothing was happening there except an immigration detention facility.
gamblor956 4 hours ago [-]
LA and NY are both border cities that accept millions more immigrants than the red cities that do all the complaining.
while_true_ 4 hours ago [-]
El Niño events are more than 36% stronger today than they were 40 years ago due to climate change.[1]
[1]J. E. Cole et al., Recent strengthening of eastern Pacific ENSO in the last millennium paleorecord.
Science DOI:10.1126/science.ady2660
piloto_ciego 51 minutes ago [-]
So, any legit climate scientists or oceanographers here? Or agronomists? How abnormal (and not just, the climate graphs for the last century say this is bad) is this on a longer timescale. Like, when was the water this warm last?
I feel this is going to be a "big one" this year? And probably the culmination of extreme heat, crop failures, and high diesel prices are going to trigger more conflict too? To be clear, I'm an optimist, I think things will be "good" in the long run, but I have a feeling the next 12-24 months are going to be a doozie with the 4 or 5 things converging...
Like, I don't want to have this crazy flamewar thing, but like, what do the numbers say, how fucked is this particular one?
timmmmmmay 2 hours ago [-]
they took the sulfur out of the shipping fuel and everything accelerated very quickly. nobody's even talking about it anymore
EdwardDiego 42 minutes ago [-]
If you really think that's the main cause, I'd be interested in your sources.
livinglist 3 hours ago [-]
I scuba dive in Monterey, CA every other weekend, and just came back from a liveaboard in Galapagos in May. The water is much warmer this year, and it is very noticeable because usually in Galapagos, divers are expected to wear 8mm wetsuit or dry suit to be comfortable in the water, but this year even a 5mm made me feel too warm. In Monterey, water temp used to be around 11-13°C but this year it’s easily above 16°C, divers also reported more sightings of spiny lobsters which were rare in Monterey because water was too cold for them.
Noaidi 2 hours ago [-]
I can’t overstate how it is. And you will need to be prepared. Be prepared for floods and just weird weather. While we humans are adaptable to these weather changes, plants and animals are not. This is going to affect feed crops for both humans and animals. So I would expect some inflation because of this.
I also want to state for those of you living in Southern California to be prepared for a possible earthquake. It’s a salton sea fills up with a lot of water quickly It could most likely trigger an earthquake.
But those are the impacts just in the United States. We might be looking at food price shocks in combination with the ongoing war in Iran.
By the way for those of you complaining about the heat in Los Angeles, it’s not really the heat. It’s the humidity. The LA basin has had record high dewpoint temperatures. That’s why it’s so uncomfortable.
How do we fix this? The only thing I can think of is a spiritual awakening where owning and doing less is more attractive than flying around in jets and building AI data centers.
You can’t get a more direct example of failure of collective action.
I’m not sure the human species has the capacity to actually coordinate behavior at the scale needed, irrespective of any future warning etc…, to be able to combat this
BearOso 4 hours ago [-]
We all reduced CFC use and stopped ozone depletion.
The problem with climate change is that there is a huge incentive to not fix it, and the culprit is not just rich oil corporations. Many countries subsist solely on oil profits and have no other natural resources to sustain themselves, i.e. Saudi Arabia. Those countries have influence over others like the US.
There are alternative options already available to replace fossil fuels for most things. In first-world countries, the only thing stopping a transition is the loss of corporate profits.
Gigachad 3 hours ago [-]
Ironically the war in Iran was probably one of the most effective ways to cut oil consumption.
1 hours ago [-]
esikich 4 hours ago [-]
People can't even think big enough to zipper merge properly. We are absolutely cooked.
tito 3 hours ago [-]
Stripe's climate researcher Zeke Hausfather is coming to AirMiners this Wednesday to share about El Niño climate science, the impacts, and then we're going to work on what we can do to avert the worst impacts of this storm.
CCS is a scam promoted by the fossil fuel companies
timnetworks 3 hours ago [-]
The planet started out a ball of molten stardust, completely inhospitable to life as we know it. But then there was not only life, but life detached from the ground too. Then K-T event wiped out almost all of it. But the planet kept going! It can be argued it got better and more diverse.
Are people in trouble? Perhaps. If we stop technological achievement in the name of a few degrees centigrade, then definitely.
tito 3 hours ago [-]
Only a Sith deals in absolutes ^_^
Fricken 3 hours ago [-]
Technological advancement needs to advance towards being sustainable or else it's a joke.
OgsyedIE 3 hours ago [-]
With the depletion of the coal and oil deposits the industrial revolution relied on the first time around, it is now locked in that this century is human civilization's only shot at reaching some kind of abstract technology escape velocity.
Crash now and there will never be a second chance, just iron age stuff in a harsher environment for however many tens of millennia it takes to have some random pandemic that wipes the descendants out occur.
Fricken 3 hours ago [-]
Are we in prison? What is it we're hoping to escape from when we achieve technological escape velocity?
snayan 1 hours ago [-]
I think the idea is that, the current trajectory of technology is just making problems worse. More and more powerful, capable of pulling us further and further from a healthy equilibrium as we see with global warming etc.
Theoretically, if we can crack fusion or some other source of abundant, cheap energy, we could build many of the bandaid solutions proposed today that are not feasible due to energy constraints, while transitioning society to a more sustainable path. Tilt the curve as it were.
Our psyches unfortunately aren't built for the globalized world we live in, and unless we figure out some sort of collective awakening to transcend our egos... Our best hope is likely solutions that allow the march of progress, while slowing, stopping, and eventually undoing a bunch of damage humans have done to the biosphere over our history. Definitely a moon shot, but hopefully we can figure something out.
OgsyedIE 3 hours ago [-]
Present day scarcities of food, water, energy, useful land, etc
Rendered at 04:36:38 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Yes it is. I don’t know why you picked Russia to compare to. Russia’s government heavily intervenes in markets to keep prices low, including subsidizing refineries and banning exports at times. The fact that our prices are as low as theirs means our gas is cheap.
Look at Asia.
Comparing ratios of bills is confusing. This statement would be unsurprising if you drove 10 miles per week in a Prius. It would be very confusing if you were filling up your tank every week and spending $1000/month on a water bill.
Are you irrigating an enormous yard?
On a macro scale all you can really do is vote for national level candidates that care about these issues. Luckily it’s not hard to see which ones do and which ones don’t.
I even roll my eyes at my city council spending even one second on climate change policy (and they have spent whole meetings on it). Our city of 80,000 people could disappear from the face of the planet and it would not make a bit of difference.
Working on your own carbon footprint is a $100M marketing trick played on you by oil companies like BP.
Leah Stokes' new book offers instead a "carbon wave" -- how to evaluate and maximize your impact at a local, state, national, and global level. Here's a LinkedIn post. She's got a new book coming out about this: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:share:7496265286...
Happy to sacrifice some of your CnC to ease obligations on those you give no assurances to.
It would be hard for me to vote against indoor plumbing if that was needed to save the planet
I would vote against "Same Day Delivery" in a heartbeat though, if it helped
This type of cynicism is both unwarranted and unhelpful.
Better to volunteer for a swing district. You can write letters or fundraise from home, anywhere in the country.
You should also volunteer for a swing district though! Very good idea.
Trump is paying people to burn more coal, blocking solar, canceling wind.
Could the dems have done more, sure. Are those programs perfect, absolutely not. But one party is moving in the right direction and the other is actively trying to accelerate climate change. Gtfo with that both sides crap.
The both sides bit is jaw droppingly ignorant if you pay attention to regional and national politics.
Every meeting minute spent on discussing climate change is another minute not spent on authorizing things like Flock or permitting data centers. That's nothing to roll your eyes about
that's the difference between you and the public servants that you roll your eyes at.
Now he's more worried about which toilets people use.
People rarely 'go bad' like that. You just learn more about who they really are over time.
I think that, if people who believe in climate change want to be convincing, it would be more effective to avoid blaming specific instances of weather on climate change without strong justification. Especially when the weather isn’t even abnormal.
Los Angeles, especially inland and in the valley, is hot in the summer. It was hot in the summer 30 years ago and it’s still hot in the summer. It’s the typical hot season right now, and the valley appears to be only slightly above season average temperatures today, and coastal LA seeks be slightly cooler than average. Apparently it will be unseasonably cool in a couple days.
More tropical storms are approaching LA and that’s increasing humidity is why it’s sweltering.
"Forecasters attributed the punishing humidity to the remnants of Tropical Storm Iselle moving over the state, as well as unusually warm ocean temperatures due to a combination of a months-long marine heat wave, a powerful El Niño and climate change.
"Dew points in the Los Angeles Basin have been “really high,” hovering around 70 degrees in many places, with a few coastal areas like Redondo Beach and Torrance reaching a dew point of 73 to 75 on Friday, said Ryan Kittell, meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Oxnard. The metric measures the moisture content in the air."
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-08-28/forget-f...
To put it plainly, everyone wants the problem to go away without having to change anything about their lifestyle.
If you insist on finding a way to criticize leftists on the climate file, a much better tack would be pointing out how some environmentalists have opposed nuclear power or densification.
The way individuals can meaningfully contribute is by supporting politicians that will make policies and rules and regulations the meaningfully encourage that collective action, and when they have a choice between more than one corporation for some product or service that are not too different as far as impact on the lifestyle goes choosing the one that is better from a climate change point of view.
The politicians and the corporations (encouraged by incentives and regulations by the politicians) can then bring about changes that will make it so the lifestyle changes for individuals that help with climate change also improve the individual's situations so people voluntarily make them in large numbers.
For example there are a lot of people in the US who would be better off if their next car was an EV except the public charging infrastructure isn't good enough for their needs. Build a lot more public chargers that support 800V cars and many of these people will pick an EV. This is something government can bring about.
For an average individual it is perfectly fine, to use a sports analogy, to play the game as it is now while supporting league wide changes to the rules to make it a better game in the future.
We'll talk climate science, impacts, and what we can do to avert the worst impacts of the worst El Niño in human history.
The numbers are daunting and the returns are scant, but the effort is one that should be made.
The upside is I saw little sign of Gorgan LNG style Carbon Capture; where a massive source of CO2 greenwashes releasing 100 units of CO2 by stuffing 1 unit back in the hole it came from.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/24/shell-ccs-facility-in-canada...
Dubious accounting trick at best .. not even working as it was sold on the box in practice.
Atmospheric CO2 already floating about appears to be what the air-mining crowd are targeting (albeit small scale so far).
An economy that seizes climate solutions can zoom ahead in terms of innovation, manufacturing, and enforcement. The changing climate is one of the biggest economic opportunities we've ever seen in human history, but somehow we've convinced ourselves that it's not only the worst non-opportunity ever but somehow would break capitalism. The richest man on the planet makes electric cars.
When nuclear power became a thing in the seventies, there was massive planning around a presumed nuclear-powered future. The largest energy storage facilities in the US were all built around that time. This turned out to be a mirage as the cost of nuclear went up with the safety expectations of the electorate, while petrochemical prices dropped. But this time it's not prices we're predicting, it's temperature, which is much more reliable.
We can't go cherrypicking environmental problems. That way we roll from one crisis into the next. There's so many issues we're causing, like entire ecosystems going extinct. Sooner or later that will lead to crises too. We have to stop externalising.
And yes the electorate wants to be safe and for good reason. Even Fukushima polluted a lot. It's not just about death tolls.
Those materials are mined also. At least forethought is given to handling/disposal for nuclear since it’s a known issue.
The big problem is this is all driven by consumption and it’s hard for people to cut back on consumption. I don’t know how to explain to people how a simple life is much easier than the complicated life of the rich and famous they see every day on the Internet.
I don’t think there is an answer for this, I think there’s way too much propaganda on the other side of the equation. My only hope from this El Niño is that it creates such damage and disaster that it starts waking people up. I think if it affects the ranchers and farmers that will be a big plus because they are usually on the side of not believing in climate change.
What I do right now is just keep talking to people and preparing, but I’m lucky since I live in a minivan full-time. I mean, I can drive anywhere. The weather suits me.
Tell us more
How many children do you have?
70°F is 21°C
Fish don't have AC.
And what about the years before that?
Eg: Totally not tracking submarines, we're looking at dolphins and whales!
With notable funky bespoke hardware: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RP_FLIP
Scripps itself has been running since 1903.
In any event, who cares what the climate was like before humans walked the planet? We do care about what it is like while we’re around because it puts significant constraints on our lives.
There’s a lot of nuance in this stuff - far more than global average surface temperature (which is primarily good for scary headlines) and “fish don’t have AC”.
Translation: "I expect all areas to be affected the same, despite axial tilt, fluid dynamics, etc."
Im Australian, so it also means droughts, water restrictions, and significant increases in bushfire number and severity after a few years of drought. Drought followed by cyclone, or bulk rain events causes catastrophic flooding. Its a shit show.
That hypothetical you can look around at the rest of the global political class and see that the rest of the establishment will destroy the livability of the biosphere whether that hypothetical you starts putting all of your money into unions, green technology and BECCs or not and conclude that the only available choice is whether to be poor in a collapsing world or rich in a collapsing world.
Moving away from fossil fuels is cheaper. Green energy is very cheap, it just misses a base load component right now. It's just that the people benefiting are different ones. And those people are going to lose sooner or later anyway, because in addition to climate change, fossil fuels are also finite.
The only reason trump is on the oil bandwagon is because many of his buddies are benefiting from it. And probably because he's still pissed at the Scotland windmill thing.
But doing the right thing doesn't have to make you poor. It will benefit everyone including the investors.
The optimal strategy for long term biosphere habitability is a mixed strategy of mostly green tech with a tiny amount of fossil fuels exclusively for those metal smelting roles where arc furnaces and biofuels are unsuitable.
Investment portfolios dominated by technology that lifts everybody up are less profitable than greedy choices of risky investment, per some of the finer details of the mutual fund separation theorem.
And oligarchs have kids too, don't they want them to live in a world worth living in?
You could do the same with the accounting team on retainer for the US Commerce Secretary's family portfolio, or the US Education Secretary's family portfolio, or the US Interior Secretary's family portfolio, or the head of NASA's family portfolio, or the Middle East Special Envoy's family portfolio, or the Administrator-in-Chief of the Small Business Administration's family portfolio.
These are all individuals with a net worth of over a billion dollars who each separately employ a full time accounting and financial team with its own IT and HR just to maximise family income. What's ten million a year in operating costs versus at least sextuple that in return?
Each oligarch of size is the figurehead of a corporation dedicated to number go up.
I’m sympathetic to the intent of your argument, but man, that’s a hallava gotcha there. Other than nuclear there isn’t a compelling story for a base load source of green energy. And all the new-gen nuclear tech is a long shot for safe, cost efficient, rapid scaling right now.
Yet I can walk here in the city at night without getting robbed at gunpoint. Or any point really. Pickpockets are a pest here but that's about it.
That's how places like Denver ended up with 40k Venezuelan migrants and little federal assistance for them.
And you know what we did? Tighten our belts a bit and help these people get integrated into our city rather than just pawning them off onto someone else.
[1]J. E. Cole et al., Recent strengthening of eastern Pacific ENSO in the last millennium paleorecord. Science DOI:10.1126/science.ady2660
I feel this is going to be a "big one" this year? And probably the culmination of extreme heat, crop failures, and high diesel prices are going to trigger more conflict too? To be clear, I'm an optimist, I think things will be "good" in the long run, but I have a feeling the next 12-24 months are going to be a doozie with the 4 or 5 things converging...
Like, I don't want to have this crazy flamewar thing, but like, what do the numbers say, how fucked is this particular one?
I also want to state for those of you living in Southern California to be prepared for a possible earthquake. It’s a salton sea fills up with a lot of water quickly It could most likely trigger an earthquake.
But those are the impacts just in the United States. We might be looking at food price shocks in combination with the ongoing war in Iran.
By the way for those of you complaining about the heat in Los Angeles, it’s not really the heat. It’s the humidity. The LA basin has had record high dewpoint temperatures. That’s why it’s so uncomfortable.
How do we fix this? The only thing I can think of is a spiritual awakening where owning and doing less is more attractive than flying around in jets and building AI data centers.
Oceans hit highest temperature on record
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49424606
Super El Niño Keeps Growing as New Forecasts Reach Record Territory Ahead Winter
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49313428
Climate change is strengthening El Niño, coral records suggest
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49475404
The Strongest El Niño Ever Forecast and the Hunger It Will Leave Behind
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49281960
I’m not sure the human species has the capacity to actually coordinate behavior at the scale needed, irrespective of any future warning etc…, to be able to combat this
The problem with climate change is that there is a huge incentive to not fix it, and the culprit is not just rich oil corporations. Many countries subsist solely on oil profits and have no other natural resources to sustain themselves, i.e. Saudi Arabia. Those countries have influence over others like the US.
There are alternative options already available to replace fossil fuels for most things. In first-world countries, the only thing stopping a transition is the loss of corporate profits.
Come join! https://luma.com/tu0uvbx1
Are people in trouble? Perhaps. If we stop technological achievement in the name of a few degrees centigrade, then definitely.
Crash now and there will never be a second chance, just iron age stuff in a harsher environment for however many tens of millennia it takes to have some random pandemic that wipes the descendants out occur.
Theoretically, if we can crack fusion or some other source of abundant, cheap energy, we could build many of the bandaid solutions proposed today that are not feasible due to energy constraints, while transitioning society to a more sustainable path. Tilt the curve as it were.
Our psyches unfortunately aren't built for the globalized world we live in, and unless we figure out some sort of collective awakening to transcend our egos... Our best hope is likely solutions that allow the march of progress, while slowing, stopping, and eventually undoing a bunch of damage humans have done to the biosphere over our history. Definitely a moon shot, but hopefully we can figure something out.