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Earth is now heating up twice as fast as in previous decades
- sometimelurker 5mo agowheres those people working on fusion? are they making progress?
- scoofy 5mo agoWe 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.
- GeoAtreides 5mo agoyes, the ITER fusion reactor is coming along nicely: https://www.youtube.com/@iterorganization/videos https://www.youtube.com/@iterorganization/videos
- insane_dreamer 5mo agowe could also just not get rid of the wind farms and EVs like our corrupt oil-and-gas-funded prez is doing
- comicjk 5mo agoIt'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).
- amelius 5mo agoWell, at least the frogs won't notice it.
- davidrjones1977 5mo agoAnd apparently neither will we, until we are boiling.
- loloquwowndueo 5mo agoThe myth that frogs stay in water until boiled has been debunked with actual frogs - at some point they just jump out.
- hootz 5mo agoMaybe they are smarter than humans, then!
- mujib77 5mo agofrog < snake
- bcoughlan 5mo agoI misinterpreted the parent comment to mean that they won't notice it because they will be extinct!
- pepperoni_pizza 5mo agoIIRC 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.
- vikaveri 5mo agoThat explains reality shows then?
- jmclnx 5mo ago>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.
- Razengan 5mo agoWriting 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..
- martzy13 5mo agoIf 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-tchaikovsky/854d8d3ca3125264 https://bookshop.org/p/books/children-of-time-adrian-tchaiko...
- butlike 5mo agoHumankind 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...
- leonidasrup 5mo agoWho 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-region?time=1980..latest https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-emissions-by-re...
- MSFT_Edging 5mo agoWe 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.
- stavros 5mo agoStop focusing on energy usage and start focusing on energy generation. It doesn't matter how much energy we consume if it comes from renewables.
- mathgeek 5mo agoIt 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.
- stavros 5mo agoWe're talking about global warming specifically here, though. Cars and planes should be a much bigger worry than AI power usage.
- ajuc 5mo agoThere'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.
- dpark 5mo ago
- chaostheory 5mo agoPopulation decline from collapsing birthrates should help.
- bdcravens 5mo agoExcept many of the same champions of AI are also speaking out against population decline (Musk, Altman, Bezos, etc)
- p0w3n3d 5mo agothey want to reduce people to have possibility to create AI centres... Highlander rules
- bdcravens 5mo agoNo, I mean the opposite - they are advocating for fighting against population decline, and are waxing poetic on how to increase fertility and birth rates.
- morkalork 5mo agoIt'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?
- kgwxd 5mo agoSlavery. They've all specifically stated that exact goal as well. No contradiction at all.
- bdcravens 5mo agoSome 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.
- indianbunghole 5mo ago[flagged]
- gmuslera 5mo agoIt 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.
- p0w3n3d 5mo agoOh, better to build more AI centres fast, as long as it's not forbidden
- ptaffs 5mo agoThe 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.
- tchock23 5mo agoBlame Frank Luntz: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0272494419307376 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02724...
- amanaplanacanal 5mo agoI always thought climate change was just a more accurate term, because global warming implies that everywhere gets warmer, which isn't necessarily so.
- gdulli 5mo ago"Global warming" was bad branding because stupid/dishonest people smugly use any instance of unusual cold weather as an argument against it.
- frankest 5mo agoImagine 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.
- pavlov 5mo agoIf you’re suffering from obesity, is it helpful to imagine an alien somehow beaming calories into your stomach?
- scoofy 5mo ago>harvest energy from the heat This is not a thing. This is just entropy.
- rolph 5mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoelectric_effect#Seebeck_effect 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-thermoelectric-generator/ 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.
- scoofy 5mo agoWhat “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.
- ChrisArchitect 5mo agoArticle from March OP; Discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47275088 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47275088
- anonymousiam 5mo agoIt's always the same story, but it's always incorrect. https://realclimatescience.com/2019/12/warming-twice-as-fast https://realclimatescience.com/2019/12/warming-twice-as-fast
- scoofy 5mo agoAll of these headlines can be correct, just at different times: https://science.nasa.gov/earth/explore/earth-indicators/global-temperature/ https://science.nasa.gov/earth/explore/earth-indicators/glob...
- pavlov 5mo agoDownvoted for clickbait (posting a link instead of explaining the argument).
- amanaplanacanal 5mo agoThose 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.
- array_key_first 5mo ago> realclimatescience.com This is one of the stupidest websites I've ever seen.
- tsoukase 5mo agoThe 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.
- devn0ll 5mo agoThanks Obama .... /s