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The Gargantuan Lie That Is Collapsing the Climate
- nisegami 2mo agoAre we ready to have a discussion about seeding the upper atmosphere with SO2 yet?
- glitchc 2mo agoCan we say for certain that doing so would not have an unintended side effect, given how complex the biodome is? If not, then likely no.
- netsharc 2mo agoOne day the calculation is going to be "do nothing and cook ourselves to death" vs. "Put SO2 in the atmosphere and see what happens next". If the SO2 brings about destruction sooner, I'm of the camp that "well, we were destined for death anyway...".
- lkbm 2mo agoI can understand a no answer from people who think climate change is no big deal, but it's kind of weird that people who think climate change will kill hundreds of millions -- possibly everyone -- say no on the grounds that it has risks. Possible unintended side effects is better than "everyone dies". Ten years ago, I was saying we should experiment with it on a small scale so that if it does become necessary, we're not shooting blind, but even then the doomers were opposed because of "risks". You know what else has risks? Unmitigated climate change!
- mikkelam 2mo agoMaybe after double digit million death count. Or just a rogue country that's being hit by the crisis more than others
- Synaesthesia 2mo agoIt's quite striking to note how media coverage of climate change and pollution have gone down so much. I remember in the 90's it was very much in the popular mileu. What's more we are living through an actual green revolution. Solar power and batteries have never been so cheap - and still promising to get cheaper and better with sodium ion batteries.
- inigyou 2mo agoIn the 90s it was something to deal with later. Now that it's something to deal with right now, of course they won't cover it. In a few decades they'll cover it again, but only to say how it's too late now. Another factor is that rich oil and gas people figured out they could just buy the media.
- actionfromafar 2mo agoAnd government.
- Demiurge 2mo agoThe bigger factor is probably the global pandemic, economic degradation, looming nuclear winter, genocide, WW3, aliens, and singularity. Not to mention orange clowns. We have surpassed the Britney Spears controversy era. Unless the polar bears are going to invade DC and attack ICE, we might not hear much about the climate change until these other problems go away.
- ericmay 2mo agoAnd let’s also not forget, we all want the climate crises fixed, but nobody is willing to personally make any changes to their lifestyle! All parties are incentivized against fixing this problem.
- Ekaros 2mo agoThat is fundamentally the problem with whole thing. Vast majority of population on Earth is not ready for personal sacrifices needed. And if some government will get to around it, I am pretty sure they will be replaced and most things are rolled back. My guess is that we somehow end up geoengineering it with even more debt...
- fsflover 2mo agoI hate when such (great) articles end with "we have a lot to do". Please give at least a couple of examples of a constructive action. "Write to your government", "Support this NGO". Do not loose the moment of attention you have just won.
- unsupp0rted 2mo agoJust think of all the good NGOs have done
- usrnm 2mo agoVote. It's literally the best thing you can do, apart from going into politics yourself
- fsflover 2mo agoThis is too rare and too little.
- cxr 2mo agoIn this case, do the things that it says are no use focusing on. Change your individual behavior to align with the position you profess to have taken about whether or not climate change is a serious and urgent problem.
- thisisauserid 2mo ago> This massive lie can best be summed up as “when it comes to climate change... we have more time.” This time we have no more time but 25 years ago when we had no more time it was true? Or we've never had more time?
- arrrg 2mo agoLimiting temperature change by every additional 0.1°C is still worthwhile from a human welfare perspective. In that sense it is never to late. We can always do something to limit the damage. It’s just that it gets harder and harder and some damage becomes irreversible at a certain point. Had we done more 25 years ago it would all have been cheaper, easier and led to less damage overall. That doesn’t mean doing something now is suddenly not worth it.
- nDRDY 2mo agoI suppose millions can die in slightly more comfort.
- arrrg 2mo agoMillions fewer people will die. That’s the difference. It’s just a sliding death scale, not a binary one. Sure, there might be steps, it might not all be linear, but still: doesn’t mean at some point doing something is pointless.
- angiolillo 2mo agoLimiting temperature change by every additional 0.1°C is not really about comfort. Either way rich people will be comfortable and poor people will be uncomfortable or dead. It's about buying everyone more time to adapt. With respect to human lives it could mean the difference between tens of millions of deaths and billions of deaths. With respect to wildlife it could be the difference between losing 10–20% of the planet's species in the Holocene extinction versus 40% or more as per the IPCC. With respect to migration it could mean the difference between levels that are painful versus globally destabilizing. With respect to geoengineering it could mean that we have significantly more time to refine the technologies before they're inevitably deployed.
- lukeify 2mo agoAt this point I’m not sure what to do about it. I already live a low-ish carbon life. I barely ever fly. Only drive when I need to. Try and use items that are non-plastic where feasible. I don’t buy extra clothes. It’s at the point where I wish it were solvable, but I don’t believe it is, so I can’t afford to think about it. Maybe people better than me can, and good luck to them.
- hamburgererror 2mo agoMaybe convince your relatives to do the same?
- arrrg 2mo agoThat’s pointless. Political change is needed to achieve any of this. Changing your individual behavior or even the individual behavior of everyone you know – while certainly not wrong! – won’t solve this. This is like trying to abolish slavery in 19th century US by not owning slaves and trying your very best to not buy anything that involves slave labor … laudable, but not a way to abolish slavery.
- amulyabaral 2mo agoIsn't political change brought about by collective changes in behaviors of an individual and of those around them?
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- mnewme 2mo agoExactly! Politics try to appease the mass. If the mass would be willing to put climate change first we would have other policies, instead we follow the dark visions of lunatic billionaires
- arrrg 2mo agoI think that’s an interesting point and one I did actually think about while writing my comment but ultimately didn’t address. The interaction between individual behavior changes and political changes is interesting and to my mind where lots of interesting stuff happens. I’m not 100% convinced that politics is always downstream from culture and culture is downstream from individual behavior changes but I do agree that there is an interesting interaction happening that’s worth looking at and addressing. The abolitionist in isolation certainly will not be able to abolish slavery, however their individual behavior might contribute to an atmosphere where slavery is ostracized and seen as more obviously evil by more people, thus making it easier for politicians to make political decisions that ultimately lead to the abolition of slavery. I think that is why it is always so important for me to point out that it is certainly never wrong to individually behave in a way the limits your own individual contribution to climate change. I mostly have a problem when that‘s the end or even the main focus of it. Climate protection to my mind is most effective when it is tightly coupled to clear political demands. Too often individual behavior changes are used as action terminators. My impression is that individual action is often presented (as here) as a complete solution to climate change when it is anything but.
- canadiantim 2mo ago[flagged]
- master-lincoln 2mo agoThere are many lies, no single "the lie". Climate change is caused by multiple factors, co2 being one of them.
- antiquark 2mo ago[flagged]
- specproc 2mo ago[flagged]
- rendx 2mo agoJust in case you miss it: The author of the post, Adam McKay, "is the Academy Award-winning director of The Big Short, Vice, and Don’t Look Up and the founder of Yellow Dot Studios."
- canadiantim 2mo ago[flagged]
- acuteaura 2mo agoOh, what a wonderful shorthand to dismiss an entire article.
- mnewme 2mo agoSad to see how many climate sceptics are even on HN
- qsera 2mo agoYea, it is as if some people can still think on their own...
- lioeters 2mo agoThe best kind of propaganda is when people believe they're "thinking on their own" while repeating some convenient lie to keep the grift going. If you think that doesn't apply to you, then it's working as designed.
- qsera 2mo agoAt least I am falling to the best kind of propaganda. While the other side, who does not apparently even believe they're "thinking on their own", is falling to a much poorer one...
- VCFundedGenYer 2mo agoEight excruciating paragraphs before the author stops rambling and gets to their thesis. So much fluff.
- shiandow 2mo agoI think its an article about gourds? With some climate change opinions in the middle. The climate change part raises some good points, but why gourds?
- dvh 2mo agoCast away the gourd! Follow the shoe!
- musha68k 2mo agoDon't Look Up
- ak1ng 2mo agoThis. Maybe I am impatient but I was just scrolling through the first half.
- SadErn 2mo ago[dead]
- j4k3 2mo agoOur economy is an abstract intangible system which requires infinite growth and debt issuance, this in reality requires more caloric expenditure and resource consumption. Thermodynamically this is pretty bad news. At one point the see-saw is gonna tip the other way, then it might cool off for a spell.
- timacles 2mo agoWhen it tips the other way, we will be entering the economic dark ages, exactly proportional to how long we’ve been kicking this can down the road, which is likely since 2007 at least.
- vessenes 2mo agoThis is a tough read. I'm not sure who it's aimed at, since the article mentions only 14% of Americans (surely one of the most climate denying countries) don't believe climate change is real. It's alarmist in a way that is whistlecalling but not in a useful way. It also lies with graphs in a way that I just hate -- we have surface temperature charts that show growth trends going all the way back to ... 2024. Please. This page from wikipedia shows a much longer range with a lot more context: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Holocene_Temperature_Variations.png https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Holocene_Temperature..., and reasonable qualifiers on the methods used to go back. Useful proposals always welcomed, ideally ones that in a game theoretic sense do not reward defection and are realistic about the economics of releasing more CO2 as part of power production, but this essay isn't it.
- whatifitoldyou 2mo agoI think us people do not have the capacity as societies to effectively anticipate and solve problems that we can see approaching but have not become catastrophic yet. We always act shortsightedly and ..hope for the best. Most of the people will just not vote/support anything that might bring them some minuscule pain. Even if we know by logic that the problem is coming, we tend to follow whomever will tell us that it's not a problem and base our hopes on him/her. Think of a problem that we saw coming in the future and we collectively solved. I can think of none. It is very hopeful that renewables are being pursued and developed by China at least to some degree and have become economically attractive. That's the only feasible way to minimize the damage that's already been done.
- Iolaum 2mo agoIt's not even at society scale IMO. How many times do people at a company deprioritize small-to-medium fixes on things that may/will become a problem later? Sometimes you have to wait until a problem gets "big enough" before you can get buy-in from colleagues to address it. Of course details matter and what I mentioned above is not a universal truth. It is an often observed pattern though.
- halgir 2mo ago> Think of a problem that we saw coming in the future and we collectively solved. I can think of none. My favorite counterexample is the ozone layer. When I was a kid, that was the Big Bad environmental concern. But we actually worked together on a global scale to fix it. Broader climate change is a much bigger problem with stronger financial and political incentives, but in principle we've done it before.
- joquarky 2mo agoThe Y2k bug.
- 40four 2mo agoOkay great. We’re out of time. Fine, we get it. But the problem with this article, and many other similar articles, is it seems like it’s just designed to scare the shit out of us. No call to action, no recommendations in what to do about it. It’s basically insinuating that we, the regular people, are the responsible. As there in-lies the problem, and it makes me furious. The onus to engineer our way out of a climate catastrophe is not on the regular people. The onus is on the people who engineered is into this problem. Government, industry, politicians, scientists, literal engineers. If this is really as urgent they say it is, then why aren’t they acting faster to retool our infrastructure? Joe Schmoe doesn’t have the ability to build more electric cars. He can’t go out and build more nuclear power plants, or build solar farms. The problem here is every time you read an article like this you’re left feeling guilty. We’re told we’re the problem. Joe Rogan (and others) are the problem. Not the people who actually got us into this situation. The energy here is so misguided. It’s infuriating. I love you Adam McKay and your art, but us normal folks are just living life, with the tools & systems that were engineered for us by other people. Stop telling us we’re the problem.
- striking 2mo agoI don't see him as blaming us regular people. Just liars (which he takes pains to enumerate thoroughly). Of course most of us are just living our lives. But sometimes even us normal folk have an opportunity, when we bump into one of these liars or have a conversation about one, and we can at least remind folks this is still a problem. The main thrust of the article is that the attention to the uncomfortable issue of climate change has been replaced with noise about everything else and comfortable lies about things being fine, and that the drop in attention correlates strongly with climate change worsening as such making the case that even just bringing more attention back to the issue could help prevent it.
- sdellis 2mo agoIf you are looking for the "call to action," you are missing the entire point of the article. There have been millions of calls to action for over 50 years and they have not made any difference. The point is that we must sit with the fact that it is too late. We have made our death bed and now we must be prepared to deal with what comes next.
- automatic6131 2mo ago[flagged]
- basilikum 2mo ago> we wouldn't be fascist, we'd simply need totalitarian control over every facet of business, labor, capital, leisure, transport and production. Even ignoring all the rest, that is in fact not what fascism means.
- automatic6131 2mo agoI thought we were at the stage where emotive language was fine when it's literally wrong if it communicates the right idea?
- Fnoord 2mo agoThe people who deny climate change have won, and accepted the [now] inevitable downfall of humanity as we know it. They are enriching themselves to have the financial power to give them the personal power to adapt to climate change. The rest can rot in hell. In essence, they're able to build their own Arc of Noah, and you and 99,999999% of everyone else (nevermind all the animals) aren't on the guest list. In order to not cause chaos, they lie (by denying climate change, sowing FUD) or ensure the issue isn't mentioned/covered (by owning media, self-censorship). "Keep calm, everything is going extremely well." I believe Earth isn't badly off with a lot less humans, I just don't like the distribution of survivorship isn't going to be random. Survivorship bias is going to contain heroic stories, but in the end a lot of people without power/money are going to take the shortest straw. And, that wasn't necessary. The track Extrawelt - Phoebe has an excellent quote on the matter. Paraphrased: > "We would be the first lifeform that wipe itself out. But what is unique is we did it knowingly. Why didn't we save ourselves from [...]? Is the answer, we weren’t sure if we were worth saving?"
- dosman33 2mo agoI skimmed over half way through and they were still talking about gourds.
- yorwba 2mo agoI wondered where this article got the idea that "half the planet" would die "in 26 years or less" with 3°C of warming. It appears to be a misreading of the table in https://actuaries.org.uk/media/ni4erlna/planetary-solvency.pdf https://actuaries.org.uk/media/ni4erlna/planetary-solvency.p... "Figure 12: Planetary solvency risk impact and likelihood definitions (illustrative)" qualified by "A risk impact matrix is a methodology for ranking potential impacts, not a prediction or central scenario." In particular, they rate ≥50% mortality as Extreme and also rate warming by 3°C or more by 2050 as Extreme (this is relevant for the colorful severity/likelihood grids that are the focus of the paper) and somebody appears to have made the incorrect connection that an Extreme climate would cause Extreme mortality, and also by the time the Extreme climate is reached and not afterwards. Elsewhere, the paper mentions that "We have not shown an assessment for mortality in this illustration, as very limited research has been carried out on the potential for large-scale loss of life in relation to these interconnected risks on which to base an assessment." Unfortunately, that makes the article title highly ironic.
- ashirviskas 2mo agoThank you for putting this here. While I do believe in climate change, I could not finish reading the article as it seemed like the authors opinions are led more by emotions rather than facts. And gourds.
- simmerup 2mo agoAn emotional reaction is rational.
- alexk307 2mo agoNot to mention that if we limited access to fossil fuels today, billions of people would be dead within months. If we turned off the spigot, billions would starve and civilization would collapse quicker than you could say climate change
- rickydroll 2mo agoYou're right that we can't limit access to fossil fuels today. We can't do it without a substitute energy source. We know from practical experience that replacing fossil fuels with electricity is the best option for heating and cooling buildings, water, and food. I believe the next stage is big ass batteries to soak up excess energy production for later use and to let us work with what we have today, both in generation and grid wiring. Residential and maybe commercial big-ass batteries could reduce the need to rewire buildings for higher energy devices. This would reduce the overall use of fossil fuels and make it available for all the things necessary to preserve human life, while making a serious dent in slowing down climate change. At the same time, we need to tout the environmental benefits of solar farms, such as increasing biodiversity, preserving soil moisture for agrivoltaics, and reducing the stress of climate change on livestock. These will also require big ass batteries for soaking up the excess production of these solar farms.
- gliall_err 2mo agoNot "collapsing the climate" Collapsing human-optimum climate, a temporary state Earth entered about 15 thousand years ago and made modern civilization possible. The truly sad thing about it all is not the damage to some abstract "environment". The fact remains that we had an Eden-like planet for a few thousand years and completely and utterly wrecked it to maximize the "wealth" of a few generations of elites.
- geertj 2mo agoSadly I think the only solution is to invest to build more energy infrastructure and more AI, so that in the future when the shit really hits the fan we have enough energy and assistance from AI to create a scalable technology to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere proactively. In my view there is no credible future in which the world will become carbon neutral in 1 or even 10 years. It just ain't happening. This is one of those problems where the train is already running down the hill, and we need to engineer a way to catch it. We cannot stop it anymore.
- stahtops 2mo agoLike a tree planting robot?
- sdellis 2mo agoAI is literally burning through vast amounts of fossil fuel, all so we can write more homogenous emails and vibe code useless things, and your proposal is moar AI?
- antisthenes 2mo ago> so that in the future when the shit really hits the fan we have enough energy and assistance from AI to create a scalable technology to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere proactively. > In my view there is no credible future in which the world will become carbon neutral in 1 or even 10 years. It just ain't happening. So we're going to skip becoming carbon neutral and go straight to carbon negative, because...magic, I guess?
- geertj 2mo ago> So we're going to skip becoming carbon neutral and go straight to carbon negative Yes, when the effects on the environments are so bad that there can be no denying anymore because they affect everyday life of almost all people. I am not saying this is a good option. I am saying that I don't see an alternative to get a world wide mobilization. Do you see China and the US becoming carbon neutral in the next 10 year? The annoying "magic" dig was unnecessary. With (clean) energy abundance you can indeed capture enough CO2 to make a world wide impact.
- Rover222 2mo agoI've always thought it's pretty obvious how all this climate change stuff will play out: - Yeah some govts reduce carbon emissions, but others don't care (china) or can't afford to focus on that (developing economies). - Climate activists will continue to act like we're to literally ruin the world (this is stupid). Climate change deniers will say temperature changes are just cyclical (also stupid). - On a global macro scale, fossil fuels continue to be consumed as long as it makes sense economically - Solar eventually gets cheap enough to begin to truly displace fossil fuels. EVs also go mainstream. Both happening now. - In the end... life will just go on as we just naturally move up the tech tree and fossil fuels become an ever smaller part of the energy mix
- clydethefrog 2mo agoYou might want to research such things as "feedback loops", the effects a high CO2 had in the past million year with extinction events and the almost impossible task of reversing the released CO2 and more. Climate scientists have studied these models for years now, real life is not a CIV game.
- ghusto 2mo ago> This particular sub-genus of grifts, half-truths and strategic omissions ... “Manifest Destiny.” “Aryan superiority.” “The divine right of kings.” “The domino theory.” “Israel has a right to defend itself.” aaaand, you lost me.
- stahtops 2mo agoWas it domino theory?
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- antiquark 2mo agoExactly the same point where I determined the article is garbage.
- constantius 2mo agoThanks for quoting, I wasn't going to read the article, but now I realise the author is obviously onto something and I'd do well to read him.
- sdellis 2mo agoIf you read the article, he is not saying that Israel doesn't have a right to defend itself. He's saying that Israel's right to defend itself has been a lie told to justify the genocide they are carrying out in Gaza.
- alexk307 2mo ago> Before that [Holocene], for hundreds of thousands of years in the Pleistocene era, humans (and our hominid ancestors) spent most of their time running from drought, fires, floods, extreme cold and heat, predators, and each other. The population was likely no more than a few million people spread across the whole planet. At one point we may have almost gone extinct, with just 10,000 Homo sapiens clinging to life. But after the advent of the Holocene and its remarkably stable climate, in only 100 centuries the world population has risen to 8 billion. This is extremely misleading. The "remarkably stable" climate didn't bring the world's population up to 8 billion, it was abundant energy from fossil fuels (7 out of 8 of all of the humans that have ever lived have done so in the industrial era). The Holocene isn't some serene stable climate period - there are still natural disasters at about the same rate they have been occurring throughout the past 11k years - but the difference is that we're much less likely to be killed by them due to abundant energy and technology. The transition from the Pleistocene into the Holocene definitely made life easier, mostly because of the natural warming.
- gumby 2mo agoI guess time zones are driving a significantly US-centric response. My company works on climate repair. We're just a four person menlo park startup so far with some pilots in the field but we have a couple of billion in our sales pipeline, entirely based on people who have sought us out. Global spend on climate doubled last year and is on a tear this year. Recent events, from the closure of the gulf of Hormuz to the huge fires in Europe have stiffened peoples' resolve. Sure, the US cut spending since early '25, but even before those cuts, the US was less than 8% of global spending on climate intervention. But it's destructive: though we're based in the US, there is no commercial interest in the states and all our pipeline is outside the country. Climate denialism is extremely destructive, but it's pretty much entirely a phenomenon of USA, Russia, Germany, Netherlands, France, UK, Canada, and Australia (crudely ranked by % of population), plus of course some gulf states. One of our three founders is an anthropologist and her field work has found that hardly anyone outside the top of the OECD has any doubt that the climate is changing and affecting them directly. There's not enough happening but the derivative feels strongly positive.
- alexk307 2mo agoWhat is Climate repair? What is your company doing to repair the climate?
- gumby 2mo agoClimate report is exactly what it sounds like: turning back the clock on temperature rise in the atmosphere and oceans. I’d like to get it to 1750, but really it isn’t really necessary to turn the clock back more than a few decades. We are working on methane emissions and methane concentrations in the atmosphere (we can destroy methane in gas streams with very high levels all the way down to ones below the current ambient environment (which is about 2 ppm). We really need to stop using fossil fuels but sadly the drivers of that are not really related to pollution. And we need to clean up the atmospheric damage, which is more than the super pollutant methane, rather it’s primarily CO2. But methane will buy us more time. Apart from climate repair, people are also trying mitigation strategies (e.g. moving away from low-lying places) but that’s a lot harder than it sounds for psychological and sociological reasons. Also people are just trying to address the heating problems directly, mainly by changing the earth’s albedo or putting up an umbrella at L1. Nobody really has any idea of the consequences of such approaches even if they were viable, but they are pretty dangerous from both the physics and again sociological factors. And it doesn’t address the underlying problems.
- chronolitus 2mo agoThe gargantuan lie that is collapsing the climate is that we told ourselves nuclear is deadly dangerous, but coal & gas are merely "dirty".
- mvdtnz 2mo agoBullshit alarmism like this helps no one.
- simmerup 2mo agoJust because it makes you feel uncomfortable doesn’t mean it’s bullshit. Global economy could face 50% loss in GDP between 2070 and 2090 from climate shocks, say actuaries https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jan/16/economic-growth-could-fall-50-over-20-years-from-climate-shocks-say-actuaries https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jan/16/economic... German scientists warn global warming is accelerating faster than expected, raising the risk of a 3 °C rise by 2050 https://worldcrunch.com/focus/green-or-gone/global-warming-at-3c-by-2050-what-s-behind-the-new-german-climate-warning/ https://worldcrunch.com/focus/green-or-gone/global-warming-a...