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Rapid warming may tip AMOC at 2°C, slower warming may avert collapse
- gmuslera 2mo agoToo bad all seems that we are heading to even faster rate of warming. It may end being something we will see by next decade. And it won't be the only big thing that will be sensibly changing by then.
- toasty228 2mo agoIf this doesn't get us we still have massive insect extinction, ocean acidification, permafrost thawing, prolonged droughts, etc. There is just no way out at the point, the planet is tanking the damage for now but once it'll crack, and it's starting to, many systems will fail simultaneously, no amount of theatrical green washing will undo the damage
- moffers 2mo agoI guess we should probably start looking for a new planet. Nothing else to be done I’m afraid.
- snaking0776 2mo agoI hope this is sarcasm. I sometimes can’t tell here
- moffers 2mo agoIt was, but it’s a dry place so I should have made it a bit more obvious
- voidfunc 2mo agoProbably easier to just merge our consciousness with machine based bodies in the long-term. Biology is a bitch compared to mechanical engineering.
- 27183 2mo agoYou might consider cracking a book and learning something before opining.
- voidfunc 2mo agoWhere's the fun in that?
- Mallory_Ringess 2mo agoAgree, start with some books on the veracity of doom predictions of which there have been many. Learn how to read the IPCC reports so that you don't have to rely on the media summary which has been shown to be not much more than click bait given that they have been using the now-dropped RCP8.5 (and SSP5-8.5, and SSP3-7.0) scenarios. Read some works by the likes of Bjørn Lomborg, Michael Schellenberger, Steven Koonin et al as a counter to what the media have been pushing for years. Then and only then it is time to make up your mind where you stand on the subject of anthropogenic climate change and what it means for the future of society.
- cachius 2mo agoAbout Wolf Tivy's idea of "xenohumanism": strip "humanity" of all ape-ish historical contingency and identify the convergent "true man" as sum of "human" capabilities like language, philosophy, sociality, intelligence, consciousness https://xcancel.com/wolftivy/status/2085790987293692248#m https://xcancel.com/wolftivy/status/2085790987293692248#m
- 27183 2mo agoMy apologies. I misunderstood your comment in my first reply to this thread. I now see you're saying biology is vastly more complex and difficult than mechanical engineering. I misinterpreted that before. I agree. Mechanical engineering often doesn't have to contend with systems that are as complex and ill behaved as biological systems. Tipping points, chaos, etc can arise in simple mechanical systems but they're usually pretty easily avoided. So, I'm sorry. And I think you're right.
- phoe-krk 2mo agoI realized that this your comment outlines almost the whole plot of Chrono Trigger, just on a slightly different scale.
- GolfPopper 2mo ago"How did human civilization collapse?" "Two ways. Gradually and then suddenly."
- spwa4 2mo agoWhy? Deindustrializing especially Europe moved factories into coal powered regions. It was put forward as green policy, but how can this result be a surprise to anyone?
- alephnerd 2mo agoIf that was the case, then global GHG emissions would have remained roughly stagnant for over 2 decades. The reality is the world got richer, and households who 30 years ago would have had little access to electricity, finished manufactured goods, and automotive vehicles can now purchase those. Go visit a village in rural China, India, or Vietnam - 30 years ago plastic bags were nonexistent and industrial fertilizers were rationed, and now tetrapaks, plastics, industrial fertilizers, and heavy machinery like tractors and trucks are everywhere. In 2000, China and India's HDIs were comparable to Cameroon and Ethiopia's present HDI. That isn't the case in 2023 (UNDP HDI calculations have a 2-3 year lag because transnational data collection is hard). And large, poor countries like Pakistan (260 million), DRC (100 million), and Ethiopia (139 million) are now hitting developmental indicators comparable to those two in the early 2000s. Most countries have chosen to use both GreenTech and Coal to expand electricity generation from Vietnam [0] to India [1] to Indonesia [2]. You are talking about 3 billion people living in an economic region that is expected to see 6-8% GDP growth rates for at least the next decade. And even countries at the lower end of the developmental cycle like Pakistan [3][4] and Ethiopia [5] are now doing the same. Frankly, it doesn't matter what reduction Europe does (and Europe's GHG emissions reduction has been massive [6]) because India, ASEAN, and LatAm's GHG emissions expansion eats up any reduction from the EU-27 and US. [0] - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/vietnam-allows-coal-miners-raise-output-meet-power-generation-demand-2026-06-10/ https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/vietnam-allows-coal-... [1] - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/india-fuels-global-growth-planned-coal-mining-capacity-report-says-2026-08-13/ https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/india-fuels-global-g... [2] - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/indonesia-coal-power-phase-out-plan-risk-due-stalled-international-funding-2025-11-17/ https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/indonesia-coal-power... [3] - https://www.climatepolicylab.org/climatesmart/2022/1/27/what-drives-pakistans-coal-fired-power-plant-construction-boom https://www.climatepolicylab.org/climatesmart/2022/1/27/what... [4] - https://www.thefridaytimes.com/19-Jun-2026/thar-coal-pakistan-s-imperative-energy-sovereignty-economic-resilience https://www.thefridaytimes.com/19-Jun-2026/thar-coal-pakista... [5] - https://afrinz.ru/en/2026/07/there-is-a-request-to-supply-60-000-tonnes-of-coal-a-month-russian-trade-representative-in-ethiopia-discusses-prospects-for-russian-business/ https://afrinz.ru/en/2026/07/there-is-a-request-to-supply-60... [6] - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-country?time=1980..latest&country=USA~CHN~Asia+%28excl.+China+and+India%29~IND~European+Union+%2828%29~RUS~OWID_AFR~North+America+%28excl.+USA%29~OWID_SAM~OWID_OCE https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-...
- wartywhoa23 2mo agoI heard in 1988 that we all must be dead by now from the ozone hole.
- DangitBobby 2mo agoThis exact sentiment has been expressed and addressed ad nauseum.
- podgietaru 2mo agoWE FIXED THAT. We literally listened to professionals, introduced legislation and fixed it. The worst possible example you could use.
- wartywhoa23 2mo agoIf YOU fixed that, what stops YOU from fixing this again?
- podgietaru 2mo agoJust the stupidest take you could ever have, well done.
- karmakurtisaani 2mo agoYou don't deserve downvotes for calling out obvious idiocy.
- gspr 2mo agoPeople like you.
- wartywhoa23 2mo agoHow? By asking what stops you?
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- josefritzishere 2mo agoThis is a tepid sort of optimism.
- arjie 2mo agoI went to Glacier National Park a while ago and stood before a sign that said "The glaciers you see will be gone by year 20xx" or something like that. The year was 20xx and I was looking right at the glaciers and they were decidedly not gone. I understand the motivation. The reality is that an action of strength A is required to create outcome X, but if one expresses this need, it's likely one achieves only an action of strength A- < A and consequently the outcome X- != X. This encourages us to say "we need an action of strength A+ or we will get the outcome X-". The hope is that the discount that people apply on the prediction results in an action of strength A' ~ A and an outcome X' ~= X. But public exhortation is a repeated game and unless you're Heaven's Gate the success of your popularized predictions has a significant effect on the discount that the public applies to your predictions. Failed predictions have an effect on the discount rate asymmetric to the direction. It is likely that a successful public authority allows some number of people to experience catastrophe pour encourager les autres. Attempting a zero error rate by biasing to zero catastrophe is likely to cause repeated discounting until true catastrophe cannot be averted. I'm reminded me of the short story The Wandering Earth. Spoilers to follow so don't read if you care. In the story, a group of scientists determine that the Sun is going to flare enough to kill everyone, so all of humanity mobilizes to install massive engines to move the Earth far enough to survive while creating technology that survives the dark. After years of traveling to past Pluto, no Sun catastrophe materializes, resulting in a massive Earthwide revolt that eventually takes control of the control center and the scientists and government officials are sentenced to death by walking into the cold waste. Just as the last of them dies, the Sun flares as predicted, just a little later. In a democracy, credibility is an important resource. To avert actual existential catastrophe, it is better to err on the side of local under-predicted disaster. It is probably best to let Rancho Palos Verdes fall into the ocean without compensating the homeowners. It is probably best to let the Texan flood plains flood and people to lose their homes entirely. It is probably best to let the Californians lose their homes to the wildfires.
- Noaidi 2mo ago> went to Glacier National Park a while ago and stood before a sign that said "The glaciers you see will be gone by year 20xx" or something like that. The year was 20xx and I was looking right at the glaciers and they were decidedly not gone. Why is it OK for Elon Musk to blow up spaceship after spaceship and everyone says well that’s the way you get it right, but a couple of Climate scientists put up a sign that is maybe a decade or two too early and all hell rains down on them? What does Elon get credibility yet? Climate scientists don’t? It’s because we choose who we give credibility to. And as a species, we are stupidly optimistic or willing fully blind.
- podgietaru 2mo agoIt'll never be too late to mitigate even worse effects. Remember that the defeatism is what people who want no change want.
- 1attice 2mo agoOh, it can be too late. Positive feedback loops and so forth.
- karmakurtisaani 2mo agoYes, but we don't know that. So mitigation is the only rational action.
- 1attice 2mo agoMaybe, maybe not. Rationality is not settled, and us philosophers argue about it all the time. :) What you want to say is that group survival is less and less likely the more we prevaricate, and acknowledging the severity of the situation may lead some people, perhaps many, to disengage. I would argue that this can be both rational, on an individual level; a dying man might blamelessly and rationally choose to smoke a cigarette, long after the cancer set in. What you are noticing, and rightfully afraid of, is that the window of time in which it is rational to act will close long before the heat kills us. Moreover, I can't think of a way of proving that this window has not yet closed, which means that, pending an argument, it might already have elapsed, or just about to. Scary stuff.
- jmclnx 2mo agoAnother way of saying "thoughts and prayers" :) Drastic mitigations need to start now, talking will do nothing. But with people voting in leaders like Trump, nothing will happen. And remember, when gas prices was high during Biden's Admin. ? He did all he could to get them lower, including opening up new oil fields. So both "sides" are to blame. We should have let the fossil fuel prices rise and force people to change their way of life. Instead our descendants will be force to change in ways that will be far worse then we would have if we started years ago.
- OroPla 2mo agoGiven how we are at the tail end of a small ice age, shouldn't it be expected that temperatures recover to what they were previously? I never quite understood how climate is simultaneously too complicated to understand and predict the weather accurately while also a solved problem that we just need to take action on. And somehow the action we need to take is more taxation? Since I keep hearing about this for at least 30 years now and still nobody took action the whole thing might be a bit more complicated than what the news media would have you know.
- alephnerd 2mo agoNobody took action because the global south (logically) decided that economic growth and rising living standards is worth the global cost.
- triceratops 2mo agoWarming today is because of historic emissions from developed countries. If the global south didn't develop they'd still face climate catastrophe, only maybe 40 years later. And they'd have weaker economies to face it with.
- phlakaton 2mo ago1. The global temperature has never in human history done what it's doing now. 2. Weather isn't the same as climate. They operate on way different scales and timelines. Uncertainty in the one does not necessarily map to uncertainty in the other. 3. Climate change is most definitely not a solved problem. We know some big things we can do, and none of them are easy.
- nDRDY 2mo ago1. The further back we go, the less reliable the methods of estimating such properties. We only have values for a "global temperature" from the past few years or so. 2. Weather and climate are names for the same underlying nonlinear system. This system is the archetype of a chaotic system - predictions of values and corresponding locations becomes increasingly unreliable and then impossible on larger timescales. Climate modelling was the very thing that lead to our current understanding of sensitive dependence on initial conditions.
- cachius 2mo agoCan't we just pour the waste water from desalination plants into the arctic abyss to keep AMOC going?
- SlightlyLeftPad 2mo agoOnce warming gets to a point we may not need desalination plants. The boil off from the ocean will perpetuate rainfall. Clean water for everyone. Never mind the 100+ mph winds that go along with that.
- drewg123 2mo agoWe need to get serious about geo-engineering of some form or another. We have seen time and time again that we simply do not have the willpower to reduce climate change. So I'm becoming convinced that the only short- and medium-term solution is geoengineering to stop global warming.
- christkv 2mo agoThere is no way geoengineering could go wrong right and make things worse. We really understand complex systems right? No way we would be like toddlers messing with powers we barely understand.
- cachius 2mo ago> geoengineering could go wrong Sure. If one path leads to certain doom and the other into the unknown, which one do you choose?
- Lord-Jobo 2mo agoThe third path that is constantly being pushed against by rubes, dishonest hacks, and large moneyed interests. And intentionally left out of conversations like this by people addicted to simplistic thinking and binary fallacies
- netsharc 2mo agoWhat's the 3rd path, Commander Vague?
- Lord-Jobo 2mo agoTaking it fucking seriously as a nation and implementing any of the possible externality capture models in earnest. That means a rapidly scaling(5 year) decline in oil subsidizes to zero, a rapidly scaling ban on fossil fuel power (10 year) and a rapidly scaling (10 years) deployment of a carbon tax credit system, and at least a 100x government research grants on carbon capture technology. All of the above, in sufficient numbers, would achieve surefire results without taking absurd risks and massive gambles. All of it, and many other things, have been researched and talked about to death for years, rigor and scrutiny that geo engineering has not. They haven’t been implemented because vested interests have billions of dollars to keep those changes from happening, and the public has not put their ballots behind it, leading to very unserious short term thinkers in positions of power. Change that, and we could easily afford to do this, we have the money and lack the willpower.