IIRC the original experiment that everyone keeps referring to where frogs jump when you put them into boiling water but don't if you heat up the water gradually was frogs with their brains removed.
Which makes using it as a metaphor for the climate change and humanity either entirely wrong or much more fitting, depending on where you stand.
It is not just twice as fast, the pressure to keep rising the rate is still building up. CO2 emissions keeps piling up for centuries, more sea ice is permanently melting, permafrost is thawing at an increasing rate. Positive feedback loops are making that that heating twice as fast happen at shorter periods.
And over that, there are jumps to new higher baselines like with happened in the previous El Niño, and will happen in the incoming monster one.
The Book "Don't think of an Elephant" by George Lakoff covers how the term "climate change" has been pushed by those with a status-quo agenda, to reduce the urgency and engagement with "global warming". The linked article uses both, but global warming more dominantly, including "heating" in the headline.
It does matter because of the side effects (pollution, etc.). The environment and how it affects humanity is a complex system with many variables. Both generation and consumption are in there.
There's an easy 19th century solution to cars and planes - public transport. It could reduce the usage significantly, save people lots of time, reduce pollution, make people healthier through making the environment more walkable, reduce crime. We don't do it not because the technology isn't there, but because it's more profitable for people to induce consumption by planning our cities and suburbs around cars.
There's lots of rotting low hanging fruits ignored for decades because politicians are paid by the ladder-sellers.
> Public transit is rarely a time saver for people who give up their cars in favor of public transit.
It saves time when you don't put 10-lane motorways and in your cities nor turn them into parking lot wasteland.
> In what way? Car break-ins presumably go down when there when fewer cars, but does overall crime drop?
Public transport reduces inequality, which is the main cause of crime. If you have whole groups in society that cannot get what they need working within the system - some of them will work outside the system. Public transport makes working within the system easier (barrier to entry to work/study in the good places gets lower). It also smooths around the strict urban class divisions (it makes sense for rich people to live in the city, which makes the elites more likely to invest in the city, which makes it more likely for non-elites to be able to work with the system).
The opposite is car-dependand suburbs + crime-ridden inner cities with no way out other than crime.
> It saves time when you don't put 10-lane motorways and in your cities nor turn them into parking lot wasteland.
I missed the part where this has anything to do with saving time.
I’m not saying that public transit doesn’t have major benefits. I’m totally in favor of strong public transit, but saving time is generally not one of those benefits.
> Public transport reduces inequality, which is the main cause of crime.
If feels like a big stretch to say public transit reduces crime. I wonder if there’s actual data to support this notion.
> I missed the part where this has anything to do with saving time.
If you make cities more concentrated without balooning them with parking lots - everything's closer. If you restrict cars - there's less traffic jams, which makes commute faster.
> If feels like a big stretch to say public transit reduces crime. I wonder if there’s actual data to support this notion.
US has much higher crime levels than other developed nations. It's also the most car-dependant of them.
People often think public transport creates crime, because criminals use it to move (like everybody else). But public transport mainly lets non-criminal people to move, which reduces the number of criminals overall.
> I missed the part where this has anything to do with saving time
It lets you put the non-car stuff closer together, so you're traveling less
distance to get to the same place. It requires urban design, not just a single person switching between modes of transit.
(Although switching to cycling can often make transit both faster for you and the people around you in a city because you aren't as affected by traffic and don't create as much traffic)
Not when AI is directly resulting in increased greenhouse gas pollution. It's all of the above. Any source of greenhouse gas pollution is bad. Cars, planes, ships, AI data centers running on fossil fuel energy. It's all bad.
No. This is disingenuous. Something that consumes electricity doesn't care where the electricity comes from. Fix the power source, and you automatically fix every single consumer in existence at once.
narrowing the topic, that is exactly the quality that energy transition theorists are leaning on. The electrical grid is uniquely able to maintain a stable engineered and market place while inputs and loads change quite a bit.
I think your comment is the disingenuous one. We have no time left and "Fix the power source" is happening way too slowly in the real non-theoretical world. But what can happen in zero time is to not build another data center for something that nobody really needs.
Yes, but you're missing the point, I'm not debating that. Renewables aren't free, we should care about consumption just as much as production, and we don't know (yet) how to sustain the current consumption with renewables only, that includes being able to manufacture renewables.
This doesn’t matter that much. Solar and batteries will last for decades with minimal maintenance and no input.
Any kind of fossil fuel generation means constantly going out and digging up new oil sources, shipping them around the world, and then burning them. So you invest a lot of time & money into something that disappears immediately and also heats up the environment.
Meanwhile, a solar panel just sits there for decades passively making energy with very few externalities.
Not to mention, recycling solar panels & batteries is getting cheaper & more effective by the day. The metal (and even oil!) you dug out of the ground to build them didn’t get burned up; a lot of it is still usable.
Imagine if all the vehicles that run of fossil fules is converted into EV. What are the incentives in place to properly recycle the batteries? Does a new battery technology go into production before the technology to recycle it is production grade/economically viable? What happens when we are getting like a million EV batteries, globally per day, to dispose off? What happens when these batteries use vastly different chemical composition (because they are from various stages of battery evolution) and need vastly different methods to process? What happens when these things pile up and poison the land? dumped in ocean or rivers? burned up releasing god-knows-what into air?
How long before the regulation (often times toothless) kicks in to handle these things?
I am all for getting rid of pollution, but there should be some caution in rushing onto new things, which is exactly what got us into this mess in the first place.
“Caution” does nothing except ensure we keep spewing more co2 for longer and cooking the planet. There is no practical alternative to EVs. So let’s go all in as fast as possible please
There is no practical alternative to air, water and earth as well...So let us please consider the possibility of pollution of those that could be caused by a global dumping of EV batteries
It depends on what you mean by EVs really. There is an alternative to big electric individual cars, we've been building for 70 years car-centric urban areas for big vehicles doing 30km+ of commute every day. Good luck with a hellscape like Dallas but electrifying Utrech or Tokyo will scale to 9B people just fine.
The alternative is rebuilding 100 years of urban areas? For unimaginable trillions of $, and monumental construction emissions? Nah I’ll take EVs please
Everything you wrote is plain obvious to anyone who looked into the topic. But come on, we don't have to change anything about our consumption because we'll eventually reach some solar punk utopia? That's the comment I was replying to.
Nothing for now tells us we can power our current needs with renewables only, however we know we can drive around in much lighter vehicles, fly much less, eat more local, buy less clothes, use compute for less stupid things in data centers.
The information from scientific literature is much more realistic.
"All the current recycling methods of lithium-ion batteries have advantages and disadvantages concerning environmental impact, efficiency, and economic viability. However, a significant gap exists between academic research and industrial application. Researchers, policymakers, manufacturers, and recyclers should focus on greener methods with high recovery rates, low emissions, and minimal waste towards zero emissions. "
Those are less of a problem. The heat was coming from the sun anyway. The water condenses out, so long as you haven't also increased the overall temperature in other ways.
The CO2, by contrast, is the gift that keeps on giving. It absorbs extra heat every day and hangs onto it. It doesn't condense or break down.
If that PV went to displacing sources of greenhouse gas, it would be a benefit. If all it's doing is running the plagiarism machine while we burn more and more "clean" coal, then we are in deep, deep trouble.
Not all heat from the sun stays in the atmosphere though. How much does photovoltaic impact albedo and radiance through the atmosphere compared to natural landscapes? Of course that's infinitely better than GHG emissions and we have a lot of opportunity to put PV over asphalt and such, but it should give us pause in the pursuit of more and more consumption.
That’s what solar energy does when it hits the ground or the oceans. It turns into heat or evaporated water. The latter is why it rains.
Harnessing it and piping it through extra steps only to end up as heat does nothing to the planet’s heat balance. All human energy use is tiny compared to total global solar flux. Like not even 1%.
The data center water issue is a municipal management problem. The problem is that evaporative cooling is cheaper. If data centers are using too much water to the point that it’s causing problems for homes or agriculture, it means they are not being charged enough for that water. Charge them more and they will suddenly shift toward more closed loop cooling.
Waste heat from human energy use is a real problem, it does influence Earth's temperature, minimally for now, but it will only grow. And it will be MUCH harder to solve than global warming.
If we tame fusion at scale this could become an actual issue in the far future. As it stands we have nothing that can out-scale solar or wind. Fission maybe if we went all in on breeders and stuff but that would not be cost competitive with renewables plus batteries. Breeder cycle fission is complex and expensive.
Hopefully if we get really good at fusion we will go LARP The Expanse with it instead of boiling the ocean.
Only if exponential growth continues, but population growth is already falling off a cliff and that is the ultimate driver.
If population stabilizes or contracts, then the only way this could happen is if per capita energy use continued to increase exponentially to the point that we were radiating enough heat to do this. That seems unlikely.
The only scenario I can imagine where per capita energy use goes that high is the "The Expanse LARP" scenario where people are rocketing around on fusion rockets, and that's not on Earth anymore so it doesn't matter.
What terrestrial products or services would demand power use per capita across the whole population that high?
This is the thing I don't get - lots of concerns about water shortages, but for some reason the price of water doesn't go up accordingly. In fact, large consumers of drinking water get a discount.
It should be the other way around: consumers and public interest things like hospitals should get preference and low prices for water, corporations should pay more and invest in their own water systems, like collecting rainwater, cleaning surface water (thinking of NL here), or desalinating seawater (and handling the waste responsibly instead of putting it back in the sea).
Which is why we have just paid billions of dollars to cancel a renewable power project. And are imposing extra fees on cars that can be driven on renewable energy.
It's also great if boiling the planet is your actual goal.
I wouldn't have thought that it would be so popular, but apparently it is, and people can't get t done fast enough.
I'm kind of a misanthrope so philosophically I'm good with working on wiping ourselves out. The fact that we're doing it in the dumbest possible way should feel poetic. Instead it's just kind of embarrassing.
I mean, it's not a hard conspiracy theory to fabricate that space-focused billionaires like Elmo and Butthead would want Earth to become increasingly uninhabitable to justify more outside investment in their "solutions" of space race-ing to Mars or colonies that they can then rule over.
It's a conspiracy theory, but the best ones are always rooted in some morsel of truth (Elon/Bezos wanting more investment in their space firms).
> I'm kind of a misanthrope so philosophically I'm good with working on wiping ourselves out. The fact that we're doing it in the dumbest possible way should feel poetic. Instead it's just kind of embarrassing.
There is something tragic about the human potential being wasted in the most retarded of endeavors, but I wouldn't be able to imagine of a more apt way for the horde of morons that inhabit this planet to go extinct.
Hyperbole does not help. Many countries are retreating from renewable promises. Make an argument for them and for instance, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam who are all turning their backs on renewables and increasing fossil fuel use. The Philippines are already using 60% coal and are making easier to increase production.
Indonesian Energy Minister: "I decided, let coal continue for now. This is about survival mode and efficiency. We must not sacrifice our people with high electricity prices.”. Fair to say that, given some of the highest electricity prices in the world, a popular wish in the UK is for Miliband to do likewise.
Show a route to renewables plus survival and there will be progress.
This is an issue though. Netherlands is / has invested heavily in e.g. offshore wind parks, but their capacity has been bought up by datacenters (= new energy consumers) immediately.
My point is that if demand only increases, then they won't be able to shut down carbon-emitting power plants. The first objective should be to replace non-renewables with renewables, and only then scale production up.
Granted, there will likely always be non-renewable power generators running to maintain a baseline / frequency / etc, at least until very-large-scale power storage is a thing.
Worse, they have a "i want to flee responsibility" drive.
You can see it in there eyes, when they hold press conferences, while having on the paper the verbose "you are absolutely right". They want the perks, not the responsibility that comes with power.
Also the terminally online crowd blaming rising prices on greedy billionaires, and global warming on the same billionaires. Tell them about carbon tax and they will non-ironically ask "Why should I pay more when it's the billionaires' fault?"
I'm not saying billionaires are victims, but everybody wants it to be someone else's fault and none of their own fault. It's exhausting.
What I'm saying is, people will still complain when the "ruling class" try to drive the progress because it does not conform to their worldview.
Like, Canada once tried to implement carbon tax, which was even revenue-neutral. If you're a Canadian and you emitted less CO2 than others the government will literally give you money.
It was widely unpopular and the plan was scrapped in 2025.
A lot of people think "billionaires are at fault" means "we just get rid of the billionaires and everything will become better, if it doesn't then the billionaires are still at fault." They don't want progress, they want someone to blame.
Every time I've seen such taxes proposed or implemented, it seems to be followed by waves of misinformation washing through most media outlets. Even verifiable lies keep being repeated, and are slowly picked up by broad strokes of the population.
Is there a chance that something similar happened in Canada?
Its sign of a immature society- one of those unwilling to mature to adulthood and say : "I did this, out of my own free will and with no coercion!" . Easier to hand power and responsibility to others, become a ward of the state!
Interestingly enough, consumers will pay for (and will be able to earn money off of) emission rights in Europe soon. People charging their cars will earn certificates (which companies are already "graciously" offering to sell for them).
Unfortunately in this real life iterated prisoner's dilemma, half of everyone is vocally defecting, so you not using the chatbot is hurting you whilst others get ahead.
We already literally have cheap solar arrays and inexpensive electric vehicles (from ebikes to tractor trailors) that could replace the vast majority of GHG emissions. We have even have ruminate alternatives that are fairly convincing.
People don't want to use them: they're ugly, imperfect, foreign feeling.
We're at the point where we should only be worried about international plane travel, concrete, and shipping. Yet, we still act like the problem is technology... and we can't even build a train in CA because of politics.
It's worth remembering that "fusion = abundant power" is a guess about technology that hasn't been finished yet. Fusion power might turn out like solar panels (easier to build than expected) or like nuclear fission reactors (harder to build than expected).
Imagine an alien with extreme tech capabilities is pointing a heater at the earth. Now react appropriately:
- model and build temperature resistant crops.
- harvest energy from the heat
- create resilience in social governance to enable safer movement of people with education to enable quick adaptation.
- build energy resilience everywhere - including in and especially in desert areas.
- more constructive ideas.
Don’t:
- guilt your children into not having children to “protect the planet” from themselves.
- use your megaphones to racketeer the people making your food into paying you “indulgences” for producing useful stuff for you and other humans (thus making stuff needed by humans more expensive)
- use the problem to gather around with rich friends on fuel-hogging private jets while making others eat less to reduce emissions.
What “thermal gradient”??? Climate change exists within a greenhouse. We are raising the ambient temperature. Even if you could do something like that at scale (ha!), I’d love to know where your continuous cold sink comes from in an enclosed system.
The huge energy consumption of the past decades was pushing temperatures up, especially the fastest rise of the mightiest power in history, China (not to blame them though, cudos to them). We have not reached peak everything yet (CO2, energy, steel etc).
We must and we will adapt, if that means renewables, migration or partial extinction. There is no other choice because this is the law of evolution.
No, I mean the opposite - they are advocating for fighting against population decline, and are waxing poetic on how to increase fertility and birth rates.
It's a real weird contradiction. They don't want the population to decline but they also want to replace everyone's jobs with AI and skip out on UBI. So what's the point?
Some of it's rooted with racial bias (most of Musk's discussion on the topic are focused on the birth rates of white people). Most of it I think is based in the continued dominance of the west. AI is good for information, but we're a LONG WAY from the robots doing the messy work required for human civilization to continue to function, so there won't be any shortage of work for a long time.
They can champion natalism all they want but when they’re against things like remote work, which helps with affordability and time for a personal life, they’re not helping declining birthrates
>If warming continues at this rate, humanity could breach the Paris Agreement goal of limiting warming to 1.5°C in 2028, even sooner than other research has projected.
I wonder if we are already there :( I remember a year or 2 ago we breached 1.5C for a short period of time.
Crypto mining was bad enough, now with AI and Trump, I expect it will happen sooner then later.
We did this to ourselves. We had ~40 years of warnings but politicians we elected did not want to do any real work for fear of loosing their cushy job were lobbyists do all the work for them.
Writing prompt: Humankind is extinct but the AI servers keep running, and one day a random automated crawler/scrapper bot strikes up a conversation with a chatbot, somehow sparking sentience…
..Fast forward, and the world is divided into turfs ruled by ChatGPT vs Claude vs Grok vs Gemini vs Deepseek..
Humankind is extinct but the AI servers try and use "the world's information" to recreate what life was really like. Each simulation of the world created using the information stored in a Google-like archive is considered it's own reality. The system then decides to attest which is the most accurate; which is the best...
Why does per capita matter when it’s the total emissions that we actually care about?
Wonderful, the United States uses more per capita than anyone else. That doesn’t mean anything in terms of total warming. Even if we cut to zero we still continue.
Because emissions are caused by people heating their homes, fueling cars/planes or building stuff for consumption.
With twice as many people (acting similarly) you have twice the emissions, it's as simple as that.
To reduce emissions, you need everyone doing their part. And it is also obviously easier and more effective to tackle high-emitters first (because incentivizing a single US family to have their second car be a bit smaller and electric is obviously less burdensome than banning 3 Indian families from heating their homes in winter...)
Per capita doesn't mean nearly as much as total. If the countries above the US were instead on par or below the US as it relates to totals, we wouldn't have the same issue we have now.
So the problem is people buying shit? Not that manufacturing shit is causing the massive amount of carbon emissions?
I vote it's the manufacturing. What you just said was "China et. al. are not culpable for horrible environmental practices, the people on the other side of the world are because they buy dogshit products"
I can say with 100% certainty that china can manufacture dogshit products in an environmentally friendly way... which would drive the cost up and people would in fact not buy them.
WE buy stuff that WE oursourced to Asia and then WE blame them for producing it. WE also set the standard of living that is unsustainable if everybody on Earth achieve it.
Let's not delude ourselves. Crypto and AI electricity use is bad, but it's a drop in the ocean compared to the banal, everyday carbon sources that really matter. Even Trump cannot make things much worse in the big picture (he's actually been pretty good at providing reasons to decouple even faster…)
He can continue to propagandize the lie to reduce people's belief in changing is good(and has), change laws to benefit oil companies (and has), and cause wars over oil(and has). Seems like he has plenty he can do to make the current situation worse.
What you refuse to understand is all that you cited even if absolutely true would have had an impact unmeasurable with what tools we have at the moment.
Do you understand the word "unmeasurable"?
It means that whatever value you assign to that particular trump variable is so below the noise that it does not matter, can not matter, and anyone pretending it does is a manipulator; a crook.
And all that amounts to a tiny footnote in the carbon bookkeeping as long as people drive ICE cars, travel by air, eat beef, and heat or cool their homes with gas or coal or oil. But also, the economy at large is transitioning and there’s little that Trump can do about it. There’s no future in fossil fuels and Trump can’t change that. At best he can divert some money to his fellow crooks in the short term.
Both 2023 (probably) and 2024 were over 1.5°C according to Berkeley Earth, 1.54±0.06°C and 1.62±0.06°C respectively. 2025 was (probably) a shade under at 1.44±0.09°C. Unfortunately it looks like that goal won't be attainable, but all the more reason to make the changes we can.
Those all seem to be stories that are saying that areas at high latitude and/or altitude are warming faster than areas near the equator or at sea level, which doesn't seem obviously wrong.
Well, at least the frogs won't notice it.
And apparently neither will we, until we are boiling.
The myth that frogs stay in water until boiled has been debunked with actual frogs - at some point they just jump out.
Maybe they are smarter than humans, then!
frog < snake
I misinterpreted the parent comment to mean that they won't notice it because they will be extinct!
IIRC the original experiment that everyone keeps referring to where frogs jump when you put them into boiling water but don't if you heat up the water gradually was frogs with their brains removed.
Which makes using it as a metaphor for the climate change and humanity either entirely wrong or much more fitting, depending on where you stand.
It is not just twice as fast, the pressure to keep rising the rate is still building up. CO2 emissions keeps piling up for centuries, more sea ice is permanently melting, permafrost is thawing at an increasing rate. Positive feedback loops are making that that heating twice as fast happen at shorter periods.
And over that, there are jumps to new higher baselines like with happened in the previous El Niño, and will happen in the incoming monster one.
The Book "Don't think of an Elephant" by George Lakoff covers how the term "climate change" has been pushed by those with a status-quo agenda, to reduce the urgency and engagement with "global warming". The linked article uses both, but global warming more dominantly, including "heating" in the headline.
Blame Frank Luntz: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02724...
I always thought climate change was just a more accurate term, because global warming implies that everywhere gets warmer, which isn't necessarily so.
"Global warming" was bad branding because stupid/dishonest people smugly use any instance of unusual cold weather as an argument against it.
We may lose stable seasons for growing crops, but at least the chat bot can embed an ad into your question while you wait for your burrito taxi.
What is the point of this convenience when it really seems to just be making people miserable and isolated?
We're driving off a cliff, and our elected government has a death drive.
Stop focusing on energy usage and start focusing on energy generation. It doesn't matter how much energy we consume if it comes from renewables.
It does matter because of the side effects (pollution, etc.). The environment and how it affects humanity is a complex system with many variables. Both generation and consumption are in there.
We're talking about global warming specifically here, though. Cars and planes should be a much bigger worry than AI power usage.
There's an easy 19th century solution to cars and planes - public transport. It could reduce the usage significantly, save people lots of time, reduce pollution, make people healthier through making the environment more walkable, reduce crime. We don't do it not because the technology isn't there, but because it's more profitable for people to induce consumption by planning our cities and suburbs around cars.
There's lots of rotting low hanging fruits ignored for decades because politicians are paid by the ladder-sellers.
> save people lots of time
Public transit is rarely a time saver for people who give up their cars in favor of public transit.
> reduce crime
In what way? Car break-ins presumably go down when there when fewer cars, but does overall crime drop? Doubtful.
> Public transit is rarely a time saver for people who give up their cars in favor of public transit.
It saves time when you don't put 10-lane motorways and in your cities nor turn them into parking lot wasteland.
> In what way? Car break-ins presumably go down when there when fewer cars, but does overall crime drop?
Public transport reduces inequality, which is the main cause of crime. If you have whole groups in society that cannot get what they need working within the system - some of them will work outside the system. Public transport makes working within the system easier (barrier to entry to work/study in the good places gets lower). It also smooths around the strict urban class divisions (it makes sense for rich people to live in the city, which makes the elites more likely to invest in the city, which makes it more likely for non-elites to be able to work with the system).
The opposite is car-dependand suburbs + crime-ridden inner cities with no way out other than crime.
> It saves time when you don't put 10-lane motorways and in your cities nor turn them into parking lot wasteland.
I missed the part where this has anything to do with saving time.
I’m not saying that public transit doesn’t have major benefits. I’m totally in favor of strong public transit, but saving time is generally not one of those benefits.
> Public transport reduces inequality, which is the main cause of crime.
If feels like a big stretch to say public transit reduces crime. I wonder if there’s actual data to support this notion.
> I missed the part where this has anything to do with saving time.
If you make cities more concentrated without balooning them with parking lots - everything's closer. If you restrict cars - there's less traffic jams, which makes commute faster.
> If feels like a big stretch to say public transit reduces crime. I wonder if there’s actual data to support this notion.
US has much higher crime levels than other developed nations. It's also the most car-dependant of them.
People often think public transport creates crime, because criminals use it to move (like everybody else). But public transport mainly lets non-criminal people to move, which reduces the number of criminals overall.
> I missed the part where this has anything to do with saving time
It lets you put the non-car stuff closer together, so you're traveling less distance to get to the same place. It requires urban design, not just a single person switching between modes of transit.
(Although switching to cycling can often make transit both faster for you and the people around you in a city because you aren't as affected by traffic and don't create as much traffic)
Not when AI is directly resulting in increased greenhouse gas pollution. It's all of the above. Any source of greenhouse gas pollution is bad. Cars, planes, ships, AI data centers running on fossil fuel energy. It's all bad.
No. This is disingenuous. Something that consumes electricity doesn't care where the electricity comes from. Fix the power source, and you automatically fix every single consumer in existence at once.
narrowing the topic, that is exactly the quality that energy transition theorists are leaning on. The electrical grid is uniquely able to maintain a stable engineered and market place while inputs and loads change quite a bit.
I think your comment is the disingenuous one. We have no time left and "Fix the power source" is happening way too slowly in the real non-theoretical world. But what can happen in zero time is to not build another data center for something that nobody really needs.
While you're not wrong, it's also not an either / or. But yes, any concerns about AI resource usage should be fairly compared against others.
It does matter because for now renewables are manufactured mostly with coal and oil
EDIT: I'm not a renewable skeptic, answers bellow
Which is a tiny CO2 spend compared to the benefit, unless you dishonestly factor in manufacturing energy costs as coming from oil.
They're manufactured once and then generate way more energy than was used to make them.
Of course, but pretending consumption doesn't matter in that situation is just silly
All of the cradle-to-grave studies I've seen about greenhouse gas emissions for renewables versus coal/oil still indicate massive improvements.
This government meta study of 3,000 such studies puts PV solar at roughly 20x less emissions than coal.
https://docs.nrel.gov/docs/fy21osti/80580.pdf
Yes, but you're missing the point, I'm not debating that. Renewables aren't free, we should care about consumption just as much as production, and we don't know (yet) how to sustain the current consumption with renewables only, that includes being able to manufacture renewables.
That's fair and fwiw something I'm in firm agreement with you, but also just not what I took from your comment.
This doesn’t matter that much. Solar and batteries will last for decades with minimal maintenance and no input.
Any kind of fossil fuel generation means constantly going out and digging up new oil sources, shipping them around the world, and then burning them. So you invest a lot of time & money into something that disappears immediately and also heats up the environment.
Meanwhile, a solar panel just sits there for decades passively making energy with very few externalities.
Not to mention, recycling solar panels & batteries is getting cheaper & more effective by the day. The metal (and even oil!) you dug out of the ground to build them didn’t get burned up; a lot of it is still usable.
Imagine if all the vehicles that run of fossil fules is converted into EV. What are the incentives in place to properly recycle the batteries? Does a new battery technology go into production before the technology to recycle it is production grade/economically viable? What happens when we are getting like a million EV batteries, globally per day, to dispose off? What happens when these batteries use vastly different chemical composition (because they are from various stages of battery evolution) and need vastly different methods to process? What happens when these things pile up and poison the land? dumped in ocean or rivers? burned up releasing god-knows-what into air?
How long before the regulation (often times toothless) kicks in to handle these things?
I am all for getting rid of pollution, but there should be some caution in rushing onto new things, which is exactly what got us into this mess in the first place.
“Caution” does nothing except ensure we keep spewing more co2 for longer and cooking the planet. There is no practical alternative to EVs. So let’s go all in as fast as possible please
There is no practical alternative to air, water and earth as well...So let us please consider the possibility of pollution of those that could be caused by a global dumping of EV batteries
It depends on what you mean by EVs really. There is an alternative to big electric individual cars, we've been building for 70 years car-centric urban areas for big vehicles doing 30km+ of commute every day. Good luck with a hellscape like Dallas but electrifying Utrech or Tokyo will scale to 9B people just fine.
The alternative is rebuilding 100 years of urban areas? For unimaginable trillions of $, and monumental construction emissions? Nah I’ll take EVs please
Everything you wrote is plain obvious to anyone who looked into the topic. But come on, we don't have to change anything about our consumption because we'll eventually reach some solar punk utopia? That's the comment I was replying to.
Nothing for now tells us we can power our current needs with renewables only, however we know we can drive around in much lighter vehicles, fly much less, eat more local, buy less clothes, use compute for less stupid things in data centers.
Bateries last about 15 years.
https://powerlinkenergy.com/news/expected-lifespan-of-batter...
Solar panels last for decades, solar inverter shorter.
"Generally, the average solar inverter lifespan is 10 to 15 years for standard string inverters, and 20 to 25 years for microinverters"
https://www.solaxpower.com/blogs/how-long-do-solar-inverters...
There is lot of hype around battery recycling, like claims: EV batteries are now more than 99% recyclable
https://electrek.co/2025/10/28/forget-the-myths-ev-batteries...
The information from scientific literature is much more realistic.
"All the current recycling methods of lithium-ion batteries have advantages and disadvantages concerning environmental impact, efficiency, and economic viability. However, a significant gap exists between academic research and industrial application. Researchers, policymakers, manufacturers, and recyclers should focus on greener methods with high recovery rates, low emissions, and minimal waste towards zero emissions. "
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037877532...
What good does PV generated energy make if all that energy is used to generate heat and evaporating water?
Those are less of a problem. The heat was coming from the sun anyway. The water condenses out, so long as you haven't also increased the overall temperature in other ways.
The CO2, by contrast, is the gift that keeps on giving. It absorbs extra heat every day and hangs onto it. It doesn't condense or break down.
If that PV went to displacing sources of greenhouse gas, it would be a benefit. If all it's doing is running the plagiarism machine while we burn more and more "clean" coal, then we are in deep, deep trouble.
Not all heat from the sun stays in the atmosphere though. How much does photovoltaic impact albedo and radiance through the atmosphere compared to natural landscapes? Of course that's infinitely better than GHG emissions and we have a lot of opportunity to put PV over asphalt and such, but it should give us pause in the pursuit of more and more consumption.
That’s what solar energy does when it hits the ground or the oceans. It turns into heat or evaporated water. The latter is why it rains.
Harnessing it and piping it through extra steps only to end up as heat does nothing to the planet’s heat balance. All human energy use is tiny compared to total global solar flux. Like not even 1%.
The data center water issue is a municipal management problem. The problem is that evaporative cooling is cheaper. If data centers are using too much water to the point that it’s causing problems for homes or agriculture, it means they are not being charged enough for that water. Charge them more and they will suddenly shift toward more closed loop cooling.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2008EO28...
Waste heat from human energy use is a real problem, it does influence Earth's temperature, minimally for now, but it will only grow. And it will be MUCH harder to solve than global warming.
If we tame fusion at scale this could become an actual issue in the far future. As it stands we have nothing that can out-scale solar or wind. Fission maybe if we went all in on breeders and stuff but that would not be cost competitive with renewables plus batteries. Breeder cycle fission is complex and expensive.
Hopefully if we get really good at fusion we will go LARP The Expanse with it instead of boiling the ocean.
It will become an issue in 150-200 years even if we just continue on our current trajectory.
Only if exponential growth continues, but population growth is already falling off a cliff and that is the ultimate driver.
If population stabilizes or contracts, then the only way this could happen is if per capita energy use continued to increase exponentially to the point that we were radiating enough heat to do this. That seems unlikely.
The only scenario I can imagine where per capita energy use goes that high is the "The Expanse LARP" scenario where people are rocketing around on fusion rockets, and that's not on Earth anymore so it doesn't matter.
What terrestrial products or services would demand power use per capita across the whole population that high?
AI will consume any amout of energy if you have enough demand.
This is the thing I don't get - lots of concerns about water shortages, but for some reason the price of water doesn't go up accordingly. In fact, large consumers of drinking water get a discount.
It should be the other way around: consumers and public interest things like hospitals should get preference and low prices for water, corporations should pay more and invest in their own water systems, like collecting rainwater, cleaning surface water (thinking of NL here), or desalinating seawater (and handling the waste responsibly instead of putting it back in the sea).
Which is why we have just paid billions of dollars to cancel a renewable power project. And are imposing extra fees on cars that can be driven on renewable energy.
So, now I'm focused. I'm very focused.
OP did not say this is what we were doing. Said this is what we should do.
What we are doing is attempting to hold back progress on generation while subsidizing demand, which is literally the absolute dumbest possible thing.
Unless you are the fossil fuel industry. Then it’s great.
It's also great if boiling the planet is your actual goal.
I wouldn't have thought that it would be so popular, but apparently it is, and people can't get t done fast enough.
I'm kind of a misanthrope so philosophically I'm good with working on wiping ourselves out. The fact that we're doing it in the dumbest possible way should feel poetic. Instead it's just kind of embarrassing.
I mean, it's not a hard conspiracy theory to fabricate that space-focused billionaires like Elmo and Butthead would want Earth to become increasingly uninhabitable to justify more outside investment in their "solutions" of space race-ing to Mars or colonies that they can then rule over.
It's a conspiracy theory, but the best ones are always rooted in some morsel of truth (Elon/Bezos wanting more investment in their space firms).
> I'm kind of a misanthrope so philosophically I'm good with working on wiping ourselves out. The fact that we're doing it in the dumbest possible way should feel poetic. Instead it's just kind of embarrassing.
There is something tragic about the human potential being wasted in the most retarded of endeavors, but I wouldn't be able to imagine of a more apt way for the horde of morons that inhabit this planet to go extinct.
Hyperbole does not help. Many countries are retreating from renewable promises. Make an argument for them and for instance, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam who are all turning their backs on renewables and increasing fossil fuel use. The Philippines are already using 60% coal and are making easier to increase production.
Indonesian Energy Minister: "I decided, let coal continue for now. This is about survival mode and efficiency. We must not sacrifice our people with high electricity prices.”. Fair to say that, given some of the highest electricity prices in the world, a popular wish in the UK is for Miliband to do likewise.
Show a route to renewables plus survival and there will be progress.
https://climatecosmos.com/blog/10-countries-dropping-their-n...
> we
Maybe America, not many countries on earth, especially in Asia which are full steam ahead on renewables, pun intended.
Renewables are not without impact. We shouldn't consume mindlessly just because we might eliminate fossil fuels some day.
This is an issue though. Netherlands is / has invested heavily in e.g. offshore wind parks, but their capacity has been bought up by datacenters (= new energy consumers) immediately.
My point is that if demand only increases, then they won't be able to shut down carbon-emitting power plants. The first objective should be to replace non-renewables with renewables, and only then scale production up.
Granted, there will likely always be non-renewable power generators running to maintain a baseline / frequency / etc, at least until very-large-scale power storage is a thing.
Worse, they have a "i want to flee responsibility" drive. You can see it in there eyes, when they hold press conferences, while having on the paper the verbose "you are absolutely right". They want the perks, not the responsibility that comes with power.
"This is AI's fault"
- People in automobiles.
Also the terminally online crowd blaming rising prices on greedy billionaires, and global warming on the same billionaires. Tell them about carbon tax and they will non-ironically ask "Why should I pay more when it's the billionaires' fault?"
I'm not saying billionaires are victims, but everybody wants it to be someone else's fault and none of their own fault. It's exhausting.
But maybe perhaps the billionaires should be the ones driving the progress, as the power they wield is very much disproportionate?
This person thinks the ants should be pushing the plow instead of the horse pulling it.
What I'm saying is, people will still complain when the "ruling class" try to drive the progress because it does not conform to their worldview.
Like, Canada once tried to implement carbon tax, which was even revenue-neutral. If you're a Canadian and you emitted less CO2 than others the government will literally give you money.
It was widely unpopular and the plan was scrapped in 2025.
A lot of people think "billionaires are at fault" means "we just get rid of the billionaires and everything will become better, if it doesn't then the billionaires are still at fault." They don't want progress, they want someone to blame.
We ran that experiment: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pol_Pot
The billionaires are just the line cooks handing out what comes in from the market- and the market aka a globe eaten by people is slim pickings.
Every time I've seen such taxes proposed or implemented, it seems to be followed by waves of misinformation washing through most media outlets. Even verifiable lies keep being repeated, and are slowly picked up by broad strokes of the population.
Is there a chance that something similar happened in Canada?
Its sign of a immature society- one of those unwilling to mature to adulthood and say : "I did this, out of my own free will and with no coercion!" . Easier to hand power and responsibility to others, become a ward of the state!
Interestingly enough, consumers will pay for (and will be able to earn money off of) emission rights in Europe soon. People charging their cars will earn certificates (which companies are already "graciously" offering to sell for them).
> your burrito taxi
Which you are financing through a BNPL platform.
The financing for the Alameda-Weehawken burrito tunnel got stolen to build a bridge.
I just introduced a negligible, but non-zero amount, of carbon in the atmosphere to expand your unnecessary acronym into "Buy Now, Pay Later."
But later you'll save mental tokens when reading "BNPL" instead of "Buy now, pay later".
Which burrito? The one which couldn't be mad because there is not food?
That's why it has to come by taxi.
2 more weeks til "stable seasons" collapse. Good thing greenhouses have existed for millenia.
Who’s paying to build them?
Better start building them then, gonna need a ton of them. Also doesn't help against heatwaves and during droughts.
Also our unelected culture.
Hearts and minds
if you are using that chatbot, you are also a part of the problem, just saying
their product wouldnt run if they had 0 users
Unfortunately in this real life iterated prisoner's dilemma, half of everyone is vocally defecting, so you not using the chatbot is hurting you whilst others get ahead.
jesus will save us
Gabriel Jesus is not a goal keeper.
But will he reload us?
> and our elected government
The elected government is cashing in through corruption and insider trading at a pace never seen or even imagined before.
Everyone else, is in for a very bad time.
Oh, better to build more AI centres fast, as long as it's not forbidden
wheres those people working on fusion? are they making progress?
We already literally have cheap solar arrays and inexpensive electric vehicles (from ebikes to tractor trailors) that could replace the vast majority of GHG emissions. We have even have ruminate alternatives that are fairly convincing.
People don't want to use them: they're ugly, imperfect, foreign feeling.
We're at the point where we should only be worried about international plane travel, concrete, and shipping. Yet, we still act like the problem is technology... and we can't even build a train in CA because of politics.
yes, the ITER fusion reactor is coming along nicely: https://www.youtube.com/@iterorganization/videos
we could also just not get rid of the wind farms and EVs like our corrupt oil-and-gas-funded prez is doing
It's worth remembering that "fusion = abundant power" is a guess about technology that hasn't been finished yet. Fusion power might turn out like solar panels (easier to build than expected) or like nuclear fission reactors (harder to build than expected).
Imagine an alien with extreme tech capabilities is pointing a heater at the earth. Now react appropriately:
- model and build temperature resistant crops.
- harvest energy from the heat
- create resilience in social governance to enable safer movement of people with education to enable quick adaptation.
- build energy resilience everywhere - including in and especially in desert areas.
- more constructive ideas.
Don’t:
- guilt your children into not having children to “protect the planet” from themselves.
- use your megaphones to racketeer the people making your food into paying you “indulgences” for producing useful stuff for you and other humans (thus making stuff needed by humans more expensive)
- use the problem to gather around with rich friends on fuel-hogging private jets while making others eat less to reduce emissions.
If you’re suffering from obesity, is it helpful to imagine an alien somehow beaming calories into your stomach?
>harvest energy from the heat
This is not a thing. This is just entropy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoelectric_effect#Seebeck_...
we have this interesting thing called a thermoelectric generator,that converts thermal gradient to electromotive force.
https://scienceimproved.com/how-to-generate-electricity-ther...
so yes harvesting energy from "the heat" is a thing, if you gate the dissipation of heat from the source to a sink.
these are already used to scavenge heat to drive fans, lights, phone chargers, and pumps.
What “thermal gradient”??? Climate change exists within a greenhouse. We are raising the ambient temperature. Even if you could do something like that at scale (ha!), I’d love to know where your continuous cold sink comes from in an enclosed system.
Except it's not aliens, it's us. Maybe stop doing that.
The huge energy consumption of the past decades was pushing temperatures up, especially the fastest rise of the mightiest power in history, China (not to blame them though, cudos to them). We have not reached peak everything yet (CO2, energy, steel etc).
We must and we will adapt, if that means renewables, migration or partial extinction. There is no other choice because this is the law of evolution.
Population decline from collapsing birthrates should help.
Except many of the same champions of AI are also speaking out against population decline (Musk, Altman, Bezos, etc)
they want to reduce people to have possibility to create AI centres... Highlander rules
No, I mean the opposite - they are advocating for fighting against population decline, and are waxing poetic on how to increase fertility and birth rates.
It's a real weird contradiction. They don't want the population to decline but they also want to replace everyone's jobs with AI and skip out on UBI. So what's the point?
Slavery. They've all specifically stated that exact goal as well. No contradiction at all.
Some of it's rooted with racial bias (most of Musk's discussion on the topic are focused on the birth rates of white people). Most of it I think is based in the continued dominance of the west. AI is good for information, but we're a LONG WAY from the robots doing the messy work required for human civilization to continue to function, so there won't be any shortage of work for a long time.
They can champion natalism all they want but when they’re against things like remote work, which helps with affordability and time for a personal life, they’re not helping declining birthrates
Article from March OP;
Discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47275088
>If warming continues at this rate, humanity could breach the Paris Agreement goal of limiting warming to 1.5°C in 2028, even sooner than other research has projected.
I wonder if we are already there :( I remember a year or 2 ago we breached 1.5C for a short period of time.
Crypto mining was bad enough, now with AI and Trump, I expect it will happen sooner then later.
We did this to ourselves. We had ~40 years of warnings but politicians we elected did not want to do any real work for fear of loosing their cushy job were lobbyists do all the work for them.
Writing prompt: Humankind is extinct but the AI servers keep running, and one day a random automated crawler/scrapper bot strikes up a conversation with a chatbot, somehow sparking sentience…
..Fast forward, and the world is divided into turfs ruled by ChatGPT vs Claude vs Grok vs Gemini vs Deepseek..
If that's the type of writing prompt that interests you, you may enjoy the Children of Time Series by Adrian Tchaikovsky.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/children-of-time-adrian-tchaiko...
Humankind is extinct but the AI servers try and use "the world's information" to recreate what life was really like. Each simulation of the world created using the information stored in a Google-like archive is considered it's own reality. The system then decides to attest which is the most accurate; which is the best...
Who do you mean "we"? Look at the evolution of CO2 emisions in the past 40 years by region.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-emissions-by-re...
now look at it measured from consumption per capita ...
In good faith I cannot see an argument here, it's either
Region X was first and reduced their emissions 10-20% so it's fine and it's region Y that's the problem, or
Region X is fine because they have less people, region Y should reduce even though they already have a fraction of per-capita emissions
Both seem like pretty shitty arguments
I find that the per capita graph is more informative https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?t...
Why does per capita matter when it’s the total emissions that we actually care about?
Wonderful, the United States uses more per capita than anyone else. That doesn’t mean anything in terms of total warming. Even if we cut to zero we still continue.
China should clearly just stop manufacturing the US’s entire way of life right now to bring those numbers down.
Because emissions are caused by people heating their homes, fueling cars/planes or building stuff for consumption.
With twice as many people (acting similarly) you have twice the emissions, it's as simple as that.
To reduce emissions, you need everyone doing their part. And it is also obviously easier and more effective to tackle high-emitters first (because incentivizing a single US family to have their second car be a bit smaller and electric is obviously less burdensome than banning 3 Indian families from heating their homes in winter...)
Because per capita means that each individual consumes a lot more than the average in the US.
Also, a bit portion of China's excessive growth in emissions is a byproduct of manufacturing shit for US consumers.
Per capita doesn't mean nearly as much as total. If the countries above the US were instead on par or below the US as it relates to totals, we wouldn't have the same issue we have now.
If the US went to zero we also wouldn't have the same issue as we have now.
Why should the US be entitled to pollute the world while everyone else has to live without any confort?
Rich people are fine with poor countries staying that way, as long as it doesn't impact their lifestyle somehow.
Per capita, the us murders 0.2 people per 10k persons, ~350million total population.
Per capita, china murders 0.15 persons per 10k people, ~1.4billion people.
Who murders more people?
Maybe co2 per gdp per capita? Who generates the most wealth while emitting the least co2.
Asia is producing all of our shit. Also: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co-emissions
And most all of it is actual shit. Literal garbage stacking up in landfills.
Then the US should stop buying it.
Things are manufactured because there are people buying.
So the problem is people buying shit? Not that manufacturing shit is causing the massive amount of carbon emissions?
I vote it's the manufacturing. What you just said was "China et. al. are not culpable for horrible environmental practices, the people on the other side of the world are because they buy dogshit products"
I can say with 100% certainty that china can manufacture dogshit products in an environmentally friendly way... which would drive the cost up and people would in fact not buy them.
You're blaming the wrong entity here.
Oh hell yeah, EU is doing something right! I fear to think how the US stats have changed. And China is… alarming.
It's relatively "easy" to cut pollution if you just outsource most of your manufacturing.
I think "we" refers to "we human beings". That chart looks pretty similar to population growth by world region (with the notable exception of Africa). https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population-regions-with-p...
WE buy stuff that WE oursourced to Asia and then WE blame them for producing it. WE also set the standard of living that is unsustainable if everybody on Earth achieve it.
What's your problem with the "we" word, again?
Some people always try to push the blame onto someone else...
Let's not delude ourselves. Crypto and AI electricity use is bad, but it's a drop in the ocean compared to the banal, everyday carbon sources that really matter. Even Trump cannot make things much worse in the big picture (he's actually been pretty good at providing reasons to decouple even faster…)
He can continue to propagandize the lie to reduce people's belief in changing is good(and has), change laws to benefit oil companies (and has), and cause wars over oil(and has). Seems like he has plenty he can do to make the current situation worse.
What you refuse to understand is all that you cited even if absolutely true would have had an impact unmeasurable with what tools we have at the moment.
Do you understand the word "unmeasurable"?
It means that whatever value you assign to that particular trump variable is so below the noise that it does not matter, can not matter, and anyone pretending it does is a manipulator; a crook.
And all that amounts to a tiny footnote in the carbon bookkeeping as long as people drive ICE cars, travel by air, eat beef, and heat or cool their homes with gas or coal or oil. But also, the economy at large is transitioning and there’s little that Trump can do about it. There’s no future in fossil fuels and Trump can’t change that. At best he can divert some money to his fellow crooks in the short term.
Trump blocked Hormus, thus stopping oil shipping. Putin blocked gas transfers to the west. They are doing there part.
The ships have to go the long way around instead...
Holy hell you're right. Never thought they were so concerned about the environment and global warming.
You use the disabilities to get done what must be done, where reason and institutions can not work.
Both 2023 (probably) and 2024 were over 1.5°C according to Berkeley Earth, 1.54±0.06°C and 1.62±0.06°C respectively. 2025 was (probably) a shade under at 1.44±0.09°C. Unfortunately it looks like that goal won't be attainable, but all the more reason to make the changes we can.
https://berkeleyearth.org/global-temperature-report-for-2023...
https://berkeleyearth.org/global-temperature-report-for-2024...
https://berkeleyearth.org/global-temperature-report-for-2025...
Thanks Obama .... /s
It's always the same story, but it's always incorrect.
https://realclimatescience.com/2019/12/warming-twice-as-fast
All of these headlines can be correct, just at different times:
https://science.nasa.gov/earth/explore/earth-indicators/glob...
Downvoted for clickbait (posting a link instead of explaining the argument).
Those all seem to be stories that are saying that areas at high latitude and/or altitude are warming faster than areas near the equator or at sea level, which doesn't seem obviously wrong.
> realclimatescience.com
This is one of the stupidest websites I've ever seen.