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Global Warming at 3 °C by 2050? What's Behind the New German Climate Warning

115 points by tejohnso 3mo ago

tonetheman 3mo ago
[dead]
gnabgib 3mo ago
Original article: (14 points, 4 hours ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48913407 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48913407
Madmallard 3mo ago
Is the major issue here that 3 degrees Celsius is like an average so all the hot tropics places just become uninhabitable whereas temperature rises are more moderated in higher latitudes? Also how much faster and higher will that number go with all the data centers? Can't imagine it not just getting worse.
- mitthrowaway2 3mo ago
  The most extreme warming happens at the poles, doesn't it? Plus increases in volatility on top of a rising baseline, so more extreme heat wave peaks even in temperate climates that don't change as much on average.
- trescenzi 3mo ago
  It’s sort of all over the place but it’s mostly the other way round. The poles might see like +5-8c. It’s also the overall temperature. Today’s high temperature where I am is 33 and the low is 25. 33 isn’t super unusual, maybe a dozen days a year. 25 as a low though is crazy high even on days historically above 30. It all averages out to +whatever. For temps by latitude/region this source seems ok on a quick search https://scied.ucar.edu/interactive/compare-climates-regional-future-selector https://scied.ucar.edu/interactive/compare-climates-regional...
  - xyzelement 3mo ago
    // The poles might see like +5-8c. Poland continues to experience significant cold related deaths and any warning might be welcomed.
- defrost 3mo ago
  One major issue is the extreme difficulty of being precise about tipping points. Eg: Have you seen a train derail? A couple of degrees of tilt - nothing .. and then .. whoops. The global climate has been 'stable' about mean values for the bulk of human written history and development of urban civilisations. The planet now hosts 7 billion+ people, largely urban, and feed by a century of stable agriculture patterns write large. The disruption of that will have a major impact across the human population of the planet. The tipping points, when they come, are related to the significant loss of polar ice, and the beginning of positive feedback of atmospheric insulation factors other than CO2. Melting ice, the transformation from near zero degree ice to near zero degree water, takes up a large amount of the energy from the sun trapped by increasing insulation. The energy used to melt X tonnes of ice, if no ice can be melted, will instead raise the temperature of X tonnes of water by some 66 degrees C (or there abouts - worth looking it up exactly). Increased land and sea surface temperatures releases methane from peat bogs and tundras, and increases the water vapour content of the lower atmosphere. Both of these things increase the insulation factor of the atmosphere to a greater degree than CO2.
  - fy20 3mo ago
    We hit 8 billion in 2022 btw. I think the problem is much worse than people imagine as well. Of those around 5.5 to 6 billion people live in "developed world" conditions (sanitation, water & electricity to the home). Over the next 20 years that's expected to grow to by another 1.5 billion (the previous 20 years was around the same). That alone is going to be a huge demand in energy, for construction and ongoing day to day energy usage. On the other hand global energy demand has a very close correlation with the number of people living in developed world conditions - so after this point the growth in energy demand should start to level off. Let's hope China continues to push renewables, and their investment in developing countries favours that instead of fossil fuels.
    - MaxHoppersGhost 3mo ago
      Yet Europeans will continue to hamstring their economic activity to lower their footprint which is really not doing anything in the grand scheme of things vs. China/India and what Africa will produce if/when they modernize.
- danielheath 3mo ago
  Among _many_ other things, 3 degrees Celsius globally means more evaporation over oceans, which makes the air denser. Denser air carries more momentum, which means more frequent (and more severe) hurricanes.
  - newsomix9xl 3mo ago
    Greenpeace literature in the 1980s predicted hurricanes from Global Warming. And here we are.
    - CamperBob2 3mo ago
      Greenpeace is responsible for a lot of that warming.
      - 2000UltraDeluxe 3mo ago
        May I ask how you came to that conclusion?
        CamperBob2 3mo ago
        If you don't build nuclear plants, you'll get your base load generation from fossil fuels. Greenpeace has always strongly opposed nuclear power. In itself, that doesn't mean they're wrong. But right or wrong, it's unquestionable that they have been successful at antinuclear activism. As a result, their activism has the net effect of promoting carbon pollution, and by no small measure. As well as radiological pollution, for that matter: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14169712/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14169712/
  - addaon 3mo ago
    > more evaporation over oceans, which makes the air denser More humid air is less dense than less humid air at the same temperature and otherwise same composition. H2O has a molar mass of 18, vs ~29 for dry air.
- cogman10 3mo ago
  There's a lot of bad things that happen at 3C. The first is that 3C represents a lot more energy in the atmosphere. That translates to more water evaporating from the oceans creating bigger more violent storms (think more frequent flash floods). It changes the ocean currents which can be really bad. Right now Europe is warm for it's latitude because of a weakening current from the equator to the UK brings a lot of heat. If that completely collapses, Europe can enter an ICE age. The rising temperature also ends up weakening the vortex of the north pole which mostly keeps the arctic temperatures sealed up north. As that vortex weakens, spills of crazy blizzards can hit unusual places pretty hard. The winter storm in 2021 is an example of that happening. Then of course there's the potential melting of the ice caps which will release a lot of methane into the atmosphere (speeding up warming). That will ultimately cause sea levels to rise which won't be great for the state of Florida. Mass migration, crop instability, more frequent and more extreme weather. It's just a combo of bad things that all come together at once.
- grahamburger 3mo ago
  As I understand it just means there's a lot more energy in the atmosphere. Like imagine the amount of energy it takes to increase water temperature in a pot by 3° and scale it up to the planet. All that energy makes everything bigger, badder, and less predictable. Longer, dryer droughts; bigger, longer winter storms, etc.
cebert 3mo ago
If we don’t do something about this, I fear future generations will not view us in a positive light.
- Arubis 3mo ago
  We _are_ doing something about this. We’re locating concentrated millions of years of trapped fossil energy and moving it into our atmosphere as fast as we possibly can. To a first approximation, that is the world economy. Or did you mean to do something differently?
  - dunWithIt 3mo ago
    We have to do less There has been a lot of debate over AC use. Everyone chiming in only discusses runtime energy use. The biggest issue is mining and manufacturing, and the moving of all the materials, parts, and such. Every AC has sheathed wires and circuit boards. Every airplane, car, phone, network router, refrigerator... same expansive mess creation. Gamers complaining about disc less games despite that problem pipeline and waste. Complaining about RAM prices despite the problem pipeline. No one is focused on the lag effects, externalities, of billions using up an endless supply of technologies and dumping airplane smog in the atmosphere. Etc, etc, etc Thermodynamics makes it pretty clear that energy is not gone just hanging out in the atmosphere. Thermodynamics means we may be fucked even if we slow down; that energy in the atmosphere can only go from atmosphere into oceans, glaciers, and permafrost. There's a lot of potential energy in the Earth to release as it absorbs the heat already in the atmosphere
    - kennywinker 3mo ago
      > Gamers complaining about disc less games despite that problem pipeline and waste. Tbf the issue is the user-hostile parameters of buying a diskless game. Most people would be happy to download their games if they could back them up to a thumb drive and never get locked out of them and sell the game when they’re done with it. Seems deeply tangential, but it’s not. Blaming people for wanting a physical thing because the alternative is being further abused by a corporation - that’s a miss. Be mad at game platforms for not offering real ownership in whatever the most climate-friendly way possible. Be mad at governments for not forcing companies to cost in the negative externalities of their business.
leonidasv 3mo ago
This is the most important part most people don't get: > And what would 3 °C mean for Germany? > FB: In summer, meteorological records could reach up to 50 °C. Three degrees of global warming does not mean hot days will just be 3 or 4 degrees hotter. It could mean up to 10 degrees hotter. We would also face much longer droughts. 3°C warming implies summer days can get 10°C hotter. This is nightmare scenario.
- rolph 3mo ago
  this also means thermal turbulence which means breakup of flow, and that means failure of distribution, leading to localized torrid spots, that translates to heat dome regions of more than 10°C hotter.
  - foxglacier 3mo ago
    Are you saying those researchers got their upper bound too low? You should inform them of their mistake.
- foxglacier 3mo ago
  [flagged]
  - homosapien97 3mo ago
    Are you being intentionally obtuse? In normal language the quoted text means there is a meaningful chance of record temperatures 10 degrees hotter than current records.
    - foxglacier 3mo ago
      [flagged]
    - ffsm8 3mo ago
      It is weasel language which actually says nothing in order to not be disprovable The reason we see it all the time is because we've gotten used to people trying to convince us that some unlikely scenario will take place to increase urgency. While global warming is happening, the quoted sentence should be raising your "this is someone trying to convince me of something that has a neglectable likelihood of becoming reality"-alarm But sure, it could be that we may get a significant heat up within the next 20 years. Regardless of that, if you're living in Germany you probably should get an AC, as even if that doesn't manifest, things can already get too warm
puskavi 3mo ago
EU has done its part, but all efforts are just drop in the ocean. Also, can these studies be trusted? EU basically throws money anything "green" (except buying forests and making them protected), so naturally these studies benefit from it.
- crystal_revenge 3mo ago
  > EU basically throws money anything "green" Including paying to have wood pellets shipped across the Atlantic using bunker fuel and then calling it "bioenergy" The EU is 'clean' largely out of it's own limited access to fossil fuels and other energy resources rather than because they are "doing their part".
- red75prime 3mo ago
  Protecting forests is good and all, but it will not reverse climate change. We'll have to stop all fossil fuel burning and, additionally, sequester around 600 billion tonnes of CO2 (in addition to all the natural carbon sinks) to get back to +1.5C by 2100.
- rjrjrjrj 3mo ago
  EU has a lot of historic emissions to make up for. https://ourworldindata.org/contributed-most-global-co2 https://ourworldindata.org/contributed-most-global-co2
yanhangyhy 3mo ago
lets plant more trees!
musha68k 3mo ago
UK official body of actuaries basically says we are on trajectory of "Extreme" rating: > 3°C or more by 2050. Multiple climate tipping points triggered, tipping cascade. > over 4 billion deaths If so, big shifts would already be imminently felt within next 5-10 years. Remember that there would basically be no place to hide from these direct or knock-on effects. Not for any self sufficient "prepper with a Mac Studio" nor for any billionaire with their "Galapagos" private island data center come habitat or any other short-sighted fantasy escape scenarios. https://actuaries.org.uk/media/ni4erlna/planetary-solvency.pdf https://actuaries.org.uk/media/ni4erlna/planetary-solvency.p... Edit: "on trajectory" to "Extreme" was too strong; it’s the report’s worst case band and not a forecast. What they’re basically saying is that "the chance of this happening is way too high".
- JumpCrisscross 3mo ago
  > there will basically no place to hide from these direct or any knock-on effects This is nonsense. (And your own source doesn't support the claim that the consequences of global warming will be unmitigable for anyone.) Many parts of the world will become milder for human occupation as a result of climate change. And nothing realistically forecast is unavoidable with wealth–rich countries will A/C and seawall their ways around the consequences.
  - musha68k 3mo ago
    The effects would definitely be felt by everyone if the global population were on its way to be halved. Also knock-on effects like mass emigration putting additional pressure on an already difficult political landscape. Potential for many more wars; more unknown unknowns etc. Edit: the report’s "Extreme" severity band is indeed not a forecast but they’re basically saying "the chance of this happening is way too high".
    - JumpCrisscross 3mo ago
      > effects would definitely be felt by everyone if the global population were on its way to be halved Many effects would hurt most people. But some would also be profited from. It’s incredible–as in debilitating to one’s credibility-to claim that everyone would suffer in the extreme case. The rich, and I say this broadly to include the rich countries, will probably be fine. Poorer, yes, but not uniformly. Plenty of plenty of places and people would see booms from the new weather patterns, coasts and social fault lines.
et-al 3mo ago
Unfortunately Germany phased out nuclear power, but continues to burn coal.
- getnormality 3mo ago
  We'll know European Greens are serious about climate change when they stop decommissioning nuclear plants and replacing them with coal.
  - fnordian_slip 3mo ago
    I recently wrote a reply to someone else with the same argument about the German greens, which I'll recycle here: "It's bad enough that nuclear proponents ignore the massive cost of nuclear compared to renewables once you factor in building costs, insurance and storage imho. But then to pretend like the conservatives didn't have a choice but to bungle the nuclear exit really is too much. The CDU never listened to the greens when it came to not killing the solar industry and serving it to China on a golden platter. Or not killing our rail infrastructure by continually delaying maintenance so that we would have to do much more costly repairs later. But in this instance, they do, and do it in a way that is a gift to the energy companies, and instead of noticing the obvious corruption at play, people still blame the greens." Sorry if the tone is a bit harsh, but I'm really annoyed at the amount of dishonesty surrounding nuclear energy.
    - belorn 3mo ago
      What does the German Green Party say in their own political platform today about the use of thermal power plants? Are they in favor of them, to be used to balance the grid when renewable energy fails to meet demand, or are they against the construction and continued use? I know what the Swedish green party has on their platform, open to be read at any time on their website or in paper materials, or heard by their political representatives. Their position is that thermal power plants are critical to the energy grid in order to enable renewable energy and keeping costs down. They wish to use either bio fuels or green hydrogen to fuel those power plants. The issue I got with that plan is that current thermal power plants in practice do not use exclusively bio fuels or green hydrogen, and that the environmental science around bio fuels are poor at best and full of green washing and practices that are extremely bad for the environment. The costs of bio fuels and green hydrogen has also demonstrated to be massively expensive, making the cost of nuclear cheap in comparison. My views of the green will change when/if the green drops their support of thermal power plants, and their overwhelming dependency of using biofuels produced from corn as a way to reduce emissions. Biofuels need to be produced without using artificial fertilizers (natural gas), and without burning down forests to make space for the farming. It also need to be cheaper than nuclear, which disqualify green hydrogen as it is produced, stored and handled currently. Carbon capture and artificial fuels are disqualified on the same point, being overwhelming more expensive than nuclear. As an anecdote, the Swedish green party leader and a right wing party had a political debate during last election. The Right wing party wanted to demolish an oil fueled thermal power plant that is currently operated in south of Sweden, and replace with new nuclear power plant. Paraphrasing what the green party leader said: "Thermal power plants are a natural part of the Swedish grid, and nuclear energy is way to expensive. We need those plants to keep the grid stable and prices low."
OutOfHere 3mo ago
If we coat and paint the entire human occupied land surface in white nano-diversely-sized barium sulfate paint, it will reflect the excess heat into space. Most people don't understand that this works or how it works, but science does. We will still have to lower our CO2 and emissions but we will get a break from warming.
pbgcp2026 3mo ago
Oil refineries, tankers burn in the open. Nuclear stations may get blown by drones / ballistic rockets any moment. Dead dolphins are all over Black sea. And yet ... let's put a price on carbon!
teravor 3mo ago
I wouldn't be too worried about it this century at least. if things look like they are going to get bad we will resort to geoengineering, and once we get a taste for it we will further optimize global temperatures to our liking. perversely, global warming earlier than expected is a good thing [for us] as it will wipe away all meaningful opposition to geoengineering. note how according to them having 50C days is a likely outcome. no one will tolerate this. sending the sulfur planes is assured at that point. you wouldn't even need to try and convince people with harvest yields.
- chorizo 3mo ago
  What we already have is uncontrolled geoengineering. Having said that, geoengineering might lead to geopolitical conflict. The current situation is making the tropical/equatorial area less habitable while creating overall benefits for the high latitudes.
  - teravor 3mo ago
    > geoengineering might lead to geopolitical conflict I have heard of this but haven't heard a credible scenario describing it. if Europe or the US or China wanted to do it they could just be flying in circles in their own territory to deploy it safely (at the cost of some efficiency probably). only a nuclear power would likely dare to unilaterally do geoengineering. it remains to be seen who will start the geoengineering effort, arguably Russia would benefit from global warming and so will Canada, so the US food supply should also remain secure.
    - TJSomething 3mo ago
      I'm assuming that the most relevant geoengineering is worldwide stuff like blotting out the sun with microsatellites at L1 and dumping iron or lime into the oceans to increase CO2 absorption.
      - teravor 3mo ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injectio...
exabrial 3mo ago
Germany just shut down several perfectly fine nuclear reactors and has some of the dirtiest electricity generation in the entire world They need to look inward before pointing outward.
- aaronchall 3mo ago
  I'm sure the day after Russia withdraws from Ukraine they're going to demand the pipeline from Russia be restored and everyone they suspect involved involved in the Nord Stream blasts extradited too.
  - Paradigma11 3mo ago
    North Stream was never about additional capacity. It was always about circumventing Ukraine's pipelines. Which in case of war turned it into a national security risk for Ukraine, which is why they blew it up. It forced Russia to either stop its exports or go through Ukraine. Which all turned out somewhat moot in the end.
- lwde 3mo ago
  Just not true https://www.destatis.de/Europa/DE/Thema/Umwelt-Energie/Ausbau_ErneuerbareEnergien.html https://www.destatis.de/Europa/DE/Thema/Umwelt-Energie/Ausba...
  - 0x000xca0xfe 3mo ago
    Non-renewable != CO2 intensive (that's how France is doing much better than Germany in CO2 per capita despite being similar in this graph)
- moritzwarhier 3mo ago
  > The German Physics Society and the German Meteorological Society are not the German government.
- Dagonfly 3mo ago
  > some of the dirtiest electricity generation in the entire world In Europe. Still cleaner than the US, China, India, Japan, and the world avg: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electricity https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electric... Coal and gas are down 50% compared to 10 years ago despite the shut-down. Nevertheless, shutting down the last few ones was bad.
xyzelement 3mo ago
This article sprinkles the word "risk" which people interpret as "bad things are coming" but actually means "there's some probability of the bad thing happening." The probability is not quantified so it's impossible to react to. Over-protecting from a risk is as bad and under-protecting. For example - something bad can happen to you any time you leave your house. However if you "protect" against that the risk by never leaving the house you are almost certainly worse off. In case of climate the "thing to do" to protect from the risk is to minimize the economic activity that has improved life for everyone. Stopping that has an immediate "cost" which looks large compared to the unquantified risk it allegedly mitigates.
- bulbar 3mo ago
  > Over-protecting from a risk is as bad and under-protecting. This is not generally true. > For example - something bad can happen to you any time you leave your house. The better analogue would be: outside of your house is a robber that will rob you if you leave the house. But you can't quantify how bad it will be to get robbed.
  - xyzelement 3mo ago
    I think that's a fair analogy actually. I grew up in Brooklyn in 1990s and it was basically guaranteed that you'd have some criminal encounter in the neighborhood sooner or later. People still left the house because running that risk was better that entombing yourself inside the house.
- sparqlittlestar 3mo ago
  > over-protecting from a risk is as bad as under-protecting How would protecting ourselves against 50 °C summer heat (122 °F) ever be as bad as keeping 40° heatwaves or better yet, a return to the 35° summers? 50° means a human mass extinction event. There are no corporate profits possible in that scenario anyway
  - xyzelement 3mo ago
    Happy to explain. We need a few more numbers to make this tangible. Let's agree that 50c summers are bad. What's the probability that summers will become 50c in the next 100 years and what's the cost of lowering that likelyhood? Let's say there's a low probability (0.01%) and the cost of action is high. Let's use a ridiculous example: you have the opportunity to lower the risk further by half at the cost of immediately killing your family, any pets you have, and yourself. Would you, sparqlittlestar, kill your family, pets and self to move the risk of 50C summer in the next 100 years from 0.01% to 0.005%? I assume the answer is no because it's obviously and intuitively not worth it On the other extreme let's say there's a 50% risk of 50c summers and you have a low-cost option (snapping your fingers) to halve it to 25%. You would obviously do that. To generalize this point, it doesn't make sense to talk about how bad something could be without quantifying how likely that event is and the cost of mitigation. I find that talking about worst case outcomes regardless of likelihood is basically anxiety. Like someone who never gets on a plane because of how horrible a crash could be, separately from the reality that your particular flight is not going to crash, and meanwhile everything you miss out on by not flying is real.
karmakurtisaani 3mo ago
One of the most important solutions is never taken seriously enough, because most people are just big children: eat less meat.
- xyzsparetimexyz 3mo ago
  Consumer choices are only going to get you so far
  - AlecSchueler 3mo ago
    And so will regulatory solutions so long as we have different states competing for resources.
  - Alpha3031 3mo ago
    True. Review on it from two years ago here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214799324000602 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221479932... Might be worth shifting subsidies away from meat and towards plant protein to a level consistent with the social cost of carbon, but one could probably expect resistance from a certain demographic, maybe loudly exclaiming on social media that it's a secret government plot to emasculate them or something. (and opposition from industry groups as well probably)
    - constantius 3mo ago
      What's the purpose of this caricature? You're talking about eating plant protein, what's the point of throwing in an atack on men, even a subset of them? Or do you really think that the main thing that bars us from eating less meat or any other kind of utopia is some evil men doing "or something" on social media? Your comment could have stood on its own without throwing your bigotry, or ignorance, in to unnecessarily antagonise people.
      - Hikikomori 3mo ago
        What a manly snowflake.
spwa4 3mo ago
But there is the problem: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-world-carbon-emissions-by-country/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-world-carbon-emissio... Note: a lot of the countries on this graph are quite famous for not only refusing to implement any climate policy, but not having the necessary government control (or will) to do it even when agreeing to it.
- tonyedgecombe 3mo ago
  Dividing it by country is misleading. The real divide is between the rich and poor. It's hard to create any emissions when you are only spending a few dollars a day. Meanwhile if I take a flight across the Atlantic then that is another five tonnes of carbon in the atmosphere no matter which country I start from.
- mikelward 3mo ago
  So China is #1. USA is #2 and more than India #3 and Russia #4 combined. Australia and Canada also very high per capita. Really needs a global solution with China and/or US leading.
jerome-jh 3mo ago
There was a report a few months ago predicting 4°C by 2080. It came to this figure by selecting the most likely emission scenario and warming scenario from the GIEC report. In particular, it is hard to be optimistic on the emission scenario nowadays. So the report opted for emissions starting to drop around 2040, if I remember correctly. That's my new baseline. Sorry I cannot find the report anymore. I am pretty sure it was posted on hacker news though.
Yizahi 3mo ago
Remember that IPCC's projection of 2.7C by 2100 is done by selectively ignoring a good quarter of the models which IPCC selected in the first place. So called "hot" models. So it's a very politically motivated number. I can totally see how a scientist not bound by pandering to the most insufferable crowd on the planet can project much worse future just by being unbiased.
insane_dreamer 3mo ago
A good book to read is The Ministry of the Future; yeah, parts could be better written, and I'm not hopeful things will turn out the way they do in the book, but what it did convince me of is that nothing substantial will happen until there is a catastrophic event along the lines of what happens in the beginning of the book -- and even then only if it happens in a "major" (by Western standards) country (i.e., all of the DRC could die and Americans would still happily drive their SUVs to McD for burgers). The other interesting thing in the book is the emergence of radical groups fighting against who they see as responsible for the destruction of our planet and potentially even our civilizations. We could see a lot more social violence, assassinations (Mangione-style) etc. I'm fairly sure that's going to happen. Maybe I've lost hope, but I honestly do not want my kids to have any kids of their own, as I'm afraid of the world they will inherit. (And I've been a confirmed techno-future-enthusiast my whole life until 5-10 years ago.)
SpacePortKnight 3mo ago
It'll be fine, especially in EU. It's much easier to adapt and to make renewables more economically profitable than to accelerate decarbonization by raising cost of living. Even if few days get 10C hotter in the summers, more and more houses will retrofit themsevles with ACs much like Singapore. I live in NL, and I can def see a future where District Cooling[1] becomes a thing. If something is bound to happen, I think a better way to spend energy and money is to prepare for it. In that sense, I would like to see a study on which crops we as a human species could rotate too, what new lands could use investment and how should new housing and public infrastructure be built than constant articles like these which presents no realistic solution. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_cooling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_cooling
sandalwarrior 3mo ago
They claim to know the climate by 2050, but they struggle to forecast the weather for the upcoming week. Don't trust German anxious alarmists. They are just fanatics.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
giardini 3mo ago
Peter Zeihan predicts Germany will disappear by then: https://zeihan.com/the-end-of-germany-as-a-modern-economy/ https://zeihan.com/the-end-of-germany-as-a-modern-economy/ FTFA: "Three unsolvable problems will lead to Germany’s collapse as a modern economy over 20 – 30 years."
johnea 3mo ago
My expectation is that it will be worse than this analysis implies. The world energy mafia, primarily petroleum, but also nuclear and coal, will not give up their revenue streams. Carbon concentrations will continue to rise, and quite likely accelerate. The overwhelming majority of sustainable generation is in large, regional scale projects, because this keeps the profit in the hands of the established energy utilities. Nuclear... nuclear... I would pose a question to every bone head here who advocates it: Can we start storing the spent waste in YOUR garage? The profit motive loves nuclear energy, because tax payers pay to build and decommission it, while industrial scale utilities get to operate it while money is popping out. Nuclear is the most expensive form of electricity generation, by far. By very very far. Distributed generation and storage is advocated by no one with an equity stake in the status quo. The fundamental problem, is that the world economy is run by organized crime. The US whitehouse has now made this explicit, however the situation has existed in this context since the invention of distributing petroleum and electricity.

115 points by tejohnso 3mo ago

[dead]

Original article: (14 points, 4 hours ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48913407 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48913407

Madmallard 3mo ago

Is the major issue here that 3 degrees Celsius is like an average so all the hot tropics places just become uninhabitable whereas temperature rises are more moderated in higher latitudes? Also how much faster and higher will that number go with all the data centers? Can't imagine it not just getting worse.

mitthrowaway2 3mo ago
The most extreme warming happens at the poles, doesn't it? Plus increases in volatility on top of a rising baseline, so more extreme heat wave peaks even in temperate climates that don't change as much on average.
trescenzi 3mo ago
It’s sort of all over the place but it’s mostly the other way round. The poles might see like +5-8c. It’s also the overall temperature. Today’s high temperature where I am is 33 and the low is 25. 33 isn’t super unusual, maybe a dozen days a year. 25 as a low though is crazy high even on days historically above 30. It all averages out to +whatever. For temps by latitude/region this source seems ok on a quick search https://scied.ucar.edu/interactive/compare-climates-regional-future-selector https://scied.ucar.edu/interactive/compare-climates-regional...
- xyzelement 3mo ago
  // The poles might see like +5-8c. Poland continues to experience significant cold related deaths and any warning might be welcomed.
defrost 3mo ago
One major issue is the extreme difficulty of being precise about tipping points. Eg: Have you seen a train derail? A couple of degrees of tilt - nothing .. and then .. whoops. The global climate has been 'stable' about mean values for the bulk of human written history and development of urban civilisations. The planet now hosts 7 billion+ people, largely urban, and feed by a century of stable agriculture patterns write large. The disruption of that will have a major impact across the human population of the planet. The tipping points, when they come, are related to the significant loss of polar ice, and the beginning of positive feedback of atmospheric insulation factors other than CO2. Melting ice, the transformation from near zero degree ice to near zero degree water, takes up a large amount of the energy from the sun trapped by increasing insulation. The energy used to melt X tonnes of ice, if no ice can be melted, will instead raise the temperature of X tonnes of water by some 66 degrees C (or there abouts - worth looking it up exactly). Increased land and sea surface temperatures releases methane from peat bogs and tundras, and increases the water vapour content of the lower atmosphere. Both of these things increase the insulation factor of the atmosphere to a greater degree than CO2.
- fy20 3mo ago
  We hit 8 billion in 2022 btw. I think the problem is much worse than people imagine as well. Of those around 5.5 to 6 billion people live in "developed world" conditions (sanitation, water & electricity to the home). Over the next 20 years that's expected to grow to by another 1.5 billion (the previous 20 years was around the same). That alone is going to be a huge demand in energy, for construction and ongoing day to day energy usage. On the other hand global energy demand has a very close correlation with the number of people living in developed world conditions - so after this point the growth in energy demand should start to level off. Let's hope China continues to push renewables, and their investment in developing countries favours that instead of fossil fuels.
  - MaxHoppersGhost 3mo ago
    Yet Europeans will continue to hamstring their economic activity to lower their footprint which is really not doing anything in the grand scheme of things vs. China/India and what Africa will produce if/when they modernize.
danielheath 3mo ago
Among _many_ other things, 3 degrees Celsius globally means more evaporation over oceans, which makes the air denser. Denser air carries more momentum, which means more frequent (and more severe) hurricanes.
- newsomix9xl 3mo ago
  Greenpeace literature in the 1980s predicted hurricanes from Global Warming. And here we are.
  - CamperBob2 3mo ago
    Greenpeace is responsible for a lot of that warming.
    - 2000UltraDeluxe 3mo ago
      May I ask how you came to that conclusion?
      - CamperBob2 3mo ago
        If you don't build nuclear plants, you'll get your base load generation from fossil fuels. Greenpeace has always strongly opposed nuclear power. In itself, that doesn't mean they're wrong. But right or wrong, it's unquestionable that they have been successful at antinuclear activism. As a result, their activism has the net effect of promoting carbon pollution, and by no small measure. As well as radiological pollution, for that matter: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14169712/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14169712/
- addaon 3mo ago
  > more evaporation over oceans, which makes the air denser More humid air is less dense than less humid air at the same temperature and otherwise same composition. H2O has a molar mass of 18, vs ~29 for dry air.
cogman10 3mo ago
There's a lot of bad things that happen at 3C. The first is that 3C represents a lot more energy in the atmosphere. That translates to more water evaporating from the oceans creating bigger more violent storms (think more frequent flash floods). It changes the ocean currents which can be really bad. Right now Europe is warm for it's latitude because of a weakening current from the equator to the UK brings a lot of heat. If that completely collapses, Europe can enter an ICE age. The rising temperature also ends up weakening the vortex of the north pole which mostly keeps the arctic temperatures sealed up north. As that vortex weakens, spills of crazy blizzards can hit unusual places pretty hard. The winter storm in 2021 is an example of that happening. Then of course there's the potential melting of the ice caps which will release a lot of methane into the atmosphere (speeding up warming). That will ultimately cause sea levels to rise which won't be great for the state of Florida. Mass migration, crop instability, more frequent and more extreme weather. It's just a combo of bad things that all come together at once.
grahamburger 3mo ago
As I understand it just means there's a lot more energy in the atmosphere. Like imagine the amount of energy it takes to increase water temperature in a pot by 3° and scale it up to the planet. All that energy makes everything bigger, badder, and less predictable. Longer, dryer droughts; bigger, longer winter storms, etc.

cebert 3mo ago

If we don’t do something about this, I fear future generations will not view us in a positive light.

Arubis 3mo ago
We _are_ doing something about this. We’re locating concentrated millions of years of trapped fossil energy and moving it into our atmosphere as fast as we possibly can. To a first approximation, that is the world economy. Or did you mean to do something differently?
- dunWithIt 3mo ago
  We have to do less There has been a lot of debate over AC use. Everyone chiming in only discusses runtime energy use. The biggest issue is mining and manufacturing, and the moving of all the materials, parts, and such. Every AC has sheathed wires and circuit boards. Every airplane, car, phone, network router, refrigerator... same expansive mess creation. Gamers complaining about disc less games despite that problem pipeline and waste. Complaining about RAM prices despite the problem pipeline. No one is focused on the lag effects, externalities, of billions using up an endless supply of technologies and dumping airplane smog in the atmosphere. Etc, etc, etc Thermodynamics makes it pretty clear that energy is not gone just hanging out in the atmosphere. Thermodynamics means we may be fucked even if we slow down; that energy in the atmosphere can only go from atmosphere into oceans, glaciers, and permafrost. There's a lot of potential energy in the Earth to release as it absorbs the heat already in the atmosphere
  - kennywinker 3mo ago
    > Gamers complaining about disc less games despite that problem pipeline and waste. Tbf the issue is the user-hostile parameters of buying a diskless game. Most people would be happy to download their games if they could back them up to a thumb drive and never get locked out of them and sell the game when they’re done with it. Seems deeply tangential, but it’s not. Blaming people for wanting a physical thing because the alternative is being further abused by a corporation - that’s a miss. Be mad at game platforms for not offering real ownership in whatever the most climate-friendly way possible. Be mad at governments for not forcing companies to cost in the negative externalities of their business.

leonidasv 3mo ago

This is the most important part most people don't get: > And what would 3 °C mean for Germany? > FB: In summer, meteorological records could reach up to 50 °C. Three degrees of global warming does not mean hot days will just be 3 or 4 degrees hotter. It could mean up to 10 degrees hotter. We would also face much longer droughts. 3°C warming implies summer days can get 10°C hotter. This is nightmare scenario.

rolph 3mo ago
this also means thermal turbulence which means breakup of flow, and that means failure of distribution, leading to localized torrid spots, that translates to heat dome regions of more than 10°C hotter.
- foxglacier 3mo ago
  Are you saying those researchers got their upper bound too low? You should inform them of their mistake.
foxglacier 3mo ago
[flagged]
- homosapien97 3mo ago
  Are you being intentionally obtuse? In normal language the quoted text means there is a meaningful chance of record temperatures 10 degrees hotter than current records.
  - foxglacier 3mo ago
    [flagged]
  - ffsm8 3mo ago
    It is weasel language which actually says nothing in order to not be disprovable The reason we see it all the time is because we've gotten used to people trying to convince us that some unlikely scenario will take place to increase urgency. While global warming is happening, the quoted sentence should be raising your "this is someone trying to convince me of something that has a neglectable likelihood of becoming reality"-alarm But sure, it could be that we may get a significant heat up within the next 20 years. Regardless of that, if you're living in Germany you probably should get an AC, as even if that doesn't manifest, things can already get too warm

puskavi 3mo ago

EU has done its part, but all efforts are just drop in the ocean. Also, can these studies be trusted? EU basically throws money anything "green" (except buying forests and making them protected), so naturally these studies benefit from it.

crystal_revenge 3mo ago
> EU basically throws money anything "green" Including paying to have wood pellets shipped across the Atlantic using bunker fuel and then calling it "bioenergy" The EU is 'clean' largely out of it's own limited access to fossil fuels and other energy resources rather than because they are "doing their part".
red75prime 3mo ago
Protecting forests is good and all, but it will not reverse climate change. We'll have to stop all fossil fuel burning and, additionally, sequester around 600 billion tonnes of CO2 (in addition to all the natural carbon sinks) to get back to +1.5C by 2100.
rjrjrjrj 3mo ago
EU has a lot of historic emissions to make up for. https://ourworldindata.org/contributed-most-global-co2 https://ourworldindata.org/contributed-most-global-co2

yanhangyhy 3mo ago

lets plant more trees!

musha68k 3mo ago

UK official body of actuaries basically says we are on trajectory of "Extreme" rating: > 3°C or more by 2050. Multiple climate tipping points triggered, tipping cascade. > over 4 billion deaths If so, big shifts would already be imminently felt within next 5-10 years. Remember that there would basically be no place to hide from these direct or knock-on effects. Not for any self sufficient "prepper with a Mac Studio" nor for any billionaire with their "Galapagos" private island data center come habitat or any other short-sighted fantasy escape scenarios. https://actuaries.org.uk/media/ni4erlna/planetary-solvency.pdf https://actuaries.org.uk/media/ni4erlna/planetary-solvency.p... Edit: "on trajectory" to "Extreme" was too strong; it’s the report’s worst case band and not a forecast. What they’re basically saying is that "the chance of this happening is way too high".

JumpCrisscross 3mo ago
> there will basically no place to hide from these direct or any knock-on effects This is nonsense. (And your own source doesn't support the claim that the consequences of global warming will be unmitigable for anyone.) Many parts of the world will become milder for human occupation as a result of climate change. And nothing realistically forecast is unavoidable with wealth–rich countries will A/C and seawall their ways around the consequences.
- musha68k 3mo ago
  The effects would definitely be felt by everyone if the global population were on its way to be halved. Also knock-on effects like mass emigration putting additional pressure on an already difficult political landscape. Potential for many more wars; more unknown unknowns etc. Edit: the report’s "Extreme" severity band is indeed not a forecast but they’re basically saying "the chance of this happening is way too high".
  - JumpCrisscross 3mo ago
    > effects would definitely be felt by everyone if the global population were on its way to be halved Many effects would hurt most people. But some would also be profited from. It’s incredible–as in debilitating to one’s credibility-to claim that everyone would suffer in the extreme case. The rich, and I say this broadly to include the rich countries, will probably be fine. Poorer, yes, but not uniformly. Plenty of plenty of places and people would see booms from the new weather patterns, coasts and social fault lines.

et-al 3mo ago

Unfortunately Germany phased out nuclear power, but continues to burn coal.

getnormality 3mo ago
We'll know European Greens are serious about climate change when they stop decommissioning nuclear plants and replacing them with coal.
- fnordian_slip 3mo ago
  I recently wrote a reply to someone else with the same argument about the German greens, which I'll recycle here: "It's bad enough that nuclear proponents ignore the massive cost of nuclear compared to renewables once you factor in building costs, insurance and storage imho. But then to pretend like the conservatives didn't have a choice but to bungle the nuclear exit really is too much. The CDU never listened to the greens when it came to not killing the solar industry and serving it to China on a golden platter. Or not killing our rail infrastructure by continually delaying maintenance so that we would have to do much more costly repairs later. But in this instance, they do, and do it in a way that is a gift to the energy companies, and instead of noticing the obvious corruption at play, people still blame the greens." Sorry if the tone is a bit harsh, but I'm really annoyed at the amount of dishonesty surrounding nuclear energy.
  - belorn 3mo ago
    What does the German Green Party say in their own political platform today about the use of thermal power plants? Are they in favor of them, to be used to balance the grid when renewable energy fails to meet demand, or are they against the construction and continued use? I know what the Swedish green party has on their platform, open to be read at any time on their website or in paper materials, or heard by their political representatives. Their position is that thermal power plants are critical to the energy grid in order to enable renewable energy and keeping costs down. They wish to use either bio fuels or green hydrogen to fuel those power plants. The issue I got with that plan is that current thermal power plants in practice do not use exclusively bio fuels or green hydrogen, and that the environmental science around bio fuels are poor at best and full of green washing and practices that are extremely bad for the environment. The costs of bio fuels and green hydrogen has also demonstrated to be massively expensive, making the cost of nuclear cheap in comparison. My views of the green will change when/if the green drops their support of thermal power plants, and their overwhelming dependency of using biofuels produced from corn as a way to reduce emissions. Biofuels need to be produced without using artificial fertilizers (natural gas), and without burning down forests to make space for the farming. It also need to be cheaper than nuclear, which disqualify green hydrogen as it is produced, stored and handled currently. Carbon capture and artificial fuels are disqualified on the same point, being overwhelming more expensive than nuclear. As an anecdote, the Swedish green party leader and a right wing party had a political debate during last election. The Right wing party wanted to demolish an oil fueled thermal power plant that is currently operated in south of Sweden, and replace with new nuclear power plant. Paraphrasing what the green party leader said: "Thermal power plants are a natural part of the Swedish grid, and nuclear energy is way to expensive. We need those plants to keep the grid stable and prices low."

OutOfHere 3mo ago

If we coat and paint the entire human occupied land surface in white nano-diversely-sized barium sulfate paint, it will reflect the excess heat into space. Most people don't understand that this works or how it works, but science does. We will still have to lower our CO2 and emissions but we will get a break from warming.

pbgcp2026 3mo ago

Oil refineries, tankers burn in the open. Nuclear stations may get blown by drones / ballistic rockets any moment. Dead dolphins are all over Black sea. And yet ... let's put a price on carbon!

teravor 3mo ago

I wouldn't be too worried about it this century at least. if things look like they are going to get bad we will resort to geoengineering, and once we get a taste for it we will further optimize global temperatures to our liking. perversely, global warming earlier than expected is a good thing [for us] as it will wipe away all meaningful opposition to geoengineering. note how according to them having 50C days is a likely outcome. no one will tolerate this. sending the sulfur planes is assured at that point. you wouldn't even need to try and convince people with harvest yields.

chorizo 3mo ago
What we already have is uncontrolled geoengineering. Having said that, geoengineering might lead to geopolitical conflict. The current situation is making the tropical/equatorial area less habitable while creating overall benefits for the high latitudes.
- teravor 3mo ago
  > geoengineering might lead to geopolitical conflict I have heard of this but haven't heard a credible scenario describing it. if Europe or the US or China wanted to do it they could just be flying in circles in their own territory to deploy it safely (at the cost of some efficiency probably). only a nuclear power would likely dare to unilaterally do geoengineering. it remains to be seen who will start the geoengineering effort, arguably Russia would benefit from global warming and so will Canada, so the US food supply should also remain secure.
  - TJSomething 3mo ago
    I'm assuming that the most relevant geoengineering is worldwide stuff like blotting out the sun with microsatellites at L1 and dumping iron or lime into the oceans to increase CO2 absorption.
    - teravor 3mo ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injectio...

exabrial 3mo ago

Germany just shut down several perfectly fine nuclear reactors and has some of the dirtiest electricity generation in the entire world They need to look inward before pointing outward.

aaronchall 3mo ago
I'm sure the day after Russia withdraws from Ukraine they're going to demand the pipeline from Russia be restored and everyone they suspect involved involved in the Nord Stream blasts extradited too.
- Paradigma11 3mo ago
  North Stream was never about additional capacity. It was always about circumventing Ukraine's pipelines. Which in case of war turned it into a national security risk for Ukraine, which is why they blew it up. It forced Russia to either stop its exports or go through Ukraine. Which all turned out somewhat moot in the end.
lwde 3mo ago
Just not true https://www.destatis.de/Europa/DE/Thema/Umwelt-Energie/Ausbau_ErneuerbareEnergien.html https://www.destatis.de/Europa/DE/Thema/Umwelt-Energie/Ausba...
- 0x000xca0xfe 3mo ago
  Non-renewable != CO2 intensive (that's how France is doing much better than Germany in CO2 per capita despite being similar in this graph)
moritzwarhier 3mo ago
> The German Physics Society and the German Meteorological Society are not the German government.
Dagonfly 3mo ago
> some of the dirtiest electricity generation in the entire world In Europe. Still cleaner than the US, China, India, Japan, and the world avg: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electricity https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electric... Coal and gas are down 50% compared to 10 years ago despite the shut-down. Nevertheless, shutting down the last few ones was bad.

xyzelement 3mo ago

This article sprinkles the word "risk" which people interpret as "bad things are coming" but actually means "there's some probability of the bad thing happening." The probability is not quantified so it's impossible to react to. Over-protecting from a risk is as bad and under-protecting. For example - something bad can happen to you any time you leave your house. However if you "protect" against that the risk by never leaving the house you are almost certainly worse off. In case of climate the "thing to do" to protect from the risk is to minimize the economic activity that has improved life for everyone. Stopping that has an immediate "cost" which looks large compared to the unquantified risk it allegedly mitigates.

bulbar 3mo ago
> Over-protecting from a risk is as bad and under-protecting. This is not generally true. > For example - something bad can happen to you any time you leave your house. The better analogue would be: outside of your house is a robber that will rob you if you leave the house. But you can't quantify how bad it will be to get robbed.
- xyzelement 3mo ago
  I think that's a fair analogy actually. I grew up in Brooklyn in 1990s and it was basically guaranteed that you'd have some criminal encounter in the neighborhood sooner or later. People still left the house because running that risk was better that entombing yourself inside the house.
sparqlittlestar 3mo ago
> over-protecting from a risk is as bad as under-protecting How would protecting ourselves against 50 °C summer heat (122 °F) ever be as bad as keeping 40° heatwaves or better yet, a return to the 35° summers? 50° means a human mass extinction event. There are no corporate profits possible in that scenario anyway
- xyzelement 3mo ago
  Happy to explain. We need a few more numbers to make this tangible. Let's agree that 50c summers are bad. What's the probability that summers will become 50c in the next 100 years and what's the cost of lowering that likelyhood? Let's say there's a low probability (0.01%) and the cost of action is high. Let's use a ridiculous example: you have the opportunity to lower the risk further by half at the cost of immediately killing your family, any pets you have, and yourself. Would you, sparqlittlestar, kill your family, pets and self to move the risk of 50C summer in the next 100 years from 0.01% to 0.005%? I assume the answer is no because it's obviously and intuitively not worth it On the other extreme let's say there's a 50% risk of 50c summers and you have a low-cost option (snapping your fingers) to halve it to 25%. You would obviously do that. To generalize this point, it doesn't make sense to talk about how bad something could be without quantifying how likely that event is and the cost of mitigation. I find that talking about worst case outcomes regardless of likelihood is basically anxiety. Like someone who never gets on a plane because of how horrible a crash could be, separately from the reality that your particular flight is not going to crash, and meanwhile everything you miss out on by not flying is real.

karmakurtisaani 3mo ago

One of the most important solutions is never taken seriously enough, because most people are just big children: eat less meat.

xyzsparetimexyz 3mo ago
Consumer choices are only going to get you so far
- AlecSchueler 3mo ago
  And so will regulatory solutions so long as we have different states competing for resources.
- Alpha3031 3mo ago
  True. Review on it from two years ago here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214799324000602 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221479932... Might be worth shifting subsidies away from meat and towards plant protein to a level consistent with the social cost of carbon, but one could probably expect resistance from a certain demographic, maybe loudly exclaiming on social media that it's a secret government plot to emasculate them or something. (and opposition from industry groups as well probably)
  - constantius 3mo ago
    What's the purpose of this caricature? You're talking about eating plant protein, what's the point of throwing in an atack on men, even a subset of them? Or do you really think that the main thing that bars us from eating less meat or any other kind of utopia is some evil men doing "or something" on social media? Your comment could have stood on its own without throwing your bigotry, or ignorance, in to unnecessarily antagonise people.
    - Hikikomori 3mo ago
      What a manly snowflake.

spwa4 3mo ago

But there is the problem: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-world-carbon-emissions-by-country/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-world-carbon-emissio... Note: a lot of the countries on this graph are quite famous for not only refusing to implement any climate policy, but not having the necessary government control (or will) to do it even when agreeing to it.

tonyedgecombe 3mo ago
Dividing it by country is misleading. The real divide is between the rich and poor. It's hard to create any emissions when you are only spending a few dollars a day. Meanwhile if I take a flight across the Atlantic then that is another five tonnes of carbon in the atmosphere no matter which country I start from.
mikelward 3mo ago
So China is #1. USA is #2 and more than India #3 and Russia #4 combined. Australia and Canada also very high per capita. Really needs a global solution with China and/or US leading.

jerome-jh 3mo ago

There was a report a few months ago predicting 4°C by 2080. It came to this figure by selecting the most likely emission scenario and warming scenario from the GIEC report. In particular, it is hard to be optimistic on the emission scenario nowadays. So the report opted for emissions starting to drop around 2040, if I remember correctly. That's my new baseline. Sorry I cannot find the report anymore. I am pretty sure it was posted on hacker news though.

Yizahi 3mo ago

Remember that IPCC's projection of 2.7C by 2100 is done by selectively ignoring a good quarter of the models which IPCC selected in the first place. So called "hot" models. So it's a very politically motivated number. I can totally see how a scientist not bound by pandering to the most insufferable crowd on the planet can project much worse future just by being unbiased.

insane_dreamer 3mo ago

A good book to read is The Ministry of the Future; yeah, parts could be better written, and I'm not hopeful things will turn out the way they do in the book, but what it did convince me of is that nothing substantial will happen until there is a catastrophic event along the lines of what happens in the beginning of the book -- and even then only if it happens in a "major" (by Western standards) country (i.e., all of the DRC could die and Americans would still happily drive their SUVs to McD for burgers). The other interesting thing in the book is the emergence of radical groups fighting against who they see as responsible for the destruction of our planet and potentially even our civilizations. We could see a lot more social violence, assassinations (Mangione-style) etc. I'm fairly sure that's going to happen. Maybe I've lost hope, but I honestly do not want my kids to have any kids of their own, as I'm afraid of the world they will inherit. (And I've been a confirmed techno-future-enthusiast my whole life until 5-10 years ago.)

SpacePortKnight 3mo ago

It'll be fine, especially in EU. It's much easier to adapt and to make renewables more economically profitable than to accelerate decarbonization by raising cost of living. Even if few days get 10C hotter in the summers, more and more houses will retrofit themsevles with ACs much like Singapore. I live in NL, and I can def see a future where District Cooling[1] becomes a thing. If something is bound to happen, I think a better way to spend energy and money is to prepare for it. In that sense, I would like to see a study on which crops we as a human species could rotate too, what new lands could use investment and how should new housing and public infrastructure be built than constant articles like these which presents no realistic solution. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_cooling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_cooling

sandalwarrior 3mo ago

They claim to know the climate by 2050, but they struggle to forecast the weather for the upcoming week. Don't trust German anxious alarmists. They are just fanatics.

deleted 3mo ago
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giardini 3mo ago

Peter Zeihan predicts Germany will disappear by then: https://zeihan.com/the-end-of-germany-as-a-modern-economy/ https://zeihan.com/the-end-of-germany-as-a-modern-economy/ FTFA: "Three unsolvable problems will lead to Germany’s collapse as a modern economy over 20 – 30 years."

johnea 3mo ago

My expectation is that it will be worse than this analysis implies. The world energy mafia, primarily petroleum, but also nuclear and coal, will not give up their revenue streams. Carbon concentrations will continue to rise, and quite likely accelerate. The overwhelming majority of sustainable generation is in large, regional scale projects, because this keeps the profit in the hands of the established energy utilities. Nuclear... nuclear... I would pose a question to every bone head here who advocates it: Can we start storing the spent waste in YOUR garage? The profit motive loves nuclear energy, because tax payers pay to build and decommission it, while industrial scale utilities get to operate it while money is popping out. Nuclear is the most expensive form of electricity generation, by far. By very very far. Distributed generation and storage is advocated by no one with an equity stake in the status quo. The fundamental problem, is that the world economy is run by organized crime. The US whitehouse has now made this explicit, however the situation has existed in this context since the invention of distributing petroleum and electricity.