I used to not worry about climate change. Now I do [video]

Per person, China India and Russia are still lower in emissions than the US. The people who individually have the most impact and likely ability to reduce their carbon footprint is therefore those in the US.

Thank you for the answer.

I do realize HN trends are unreliable. As a few others who replied, it felt peculiarly acute in this thread, but my impression was not based merely on this thread, but on several such 'huh' moments in the past two years. While HN always felt somewhat heterogeneous and still does, compared to 7-10 years ago, to me it feels that there is relatively more science contrarianism or even denialism with regards to climate, vaccination, etc., more subthreads derailing into religion because someone justified some strongly held position upthread using religion and more socially/culturally conservative attitudes. These are things which for lack of a better term I labeled a rightward trend in the USA sense of the word. In my unreliable memory, I remember HN being mainly economically right leaning and culturally left leaning which mirrors the corporate environment which found it much easier and cheaper to gain good will points that way. In retrospect, the pandemic feels kinda like an inflexion point (both HN wide and society wide).

I also have a limited POV into HN, for example I never really looked at the Launch HN threads (for the simple reason that most focus on the USA, at least in early stages, while I am in eastern EU) so I never really got those data points. With no real data and just remembered personal anecdotes is is hard for me to tell if this was merely an illusion or things haven't changed but I have become more aware of these aspects or whether the trend is real. Others in this subthread have proposed explanations for the trend and I think several theories can be found both society wide and HN wide. But while we do have some evidence the trend is real society wide, I thought it worth checking if the it is true HN wide before hypothesising explanations. Also, (compared to FB for example which we know captured a certain cohort and is aging along with it) with HN allowing easy account creation and throwaway accounts I think it is hard to accurately measure how well the HN sample reflects the population of society at large (we do at least know there is a heavy US-centric bias for obvious reasons).

I wish there was a reliable political alignment text classifier I could use to science this.

I am disappointed to see some have interpreted this inquiry on my part as me trying to police the thread.

Absolutely, when gas doubled during the Great Recession I personally saw much less traffic on the roads in the major US city I lived in at the time. People were also much less aggressive on the roads. Unlike those days, people can now offset their use of oil for transportation with BEVs and PHEVs. See recent reports of oil/gas demand seemingly plateaued to decreasing.

When the price of something increases, energy included, alternatives become more attractive. Oil enjoyed strong price insensitivities for a long time, but those days are sunsetting.

Even China is seeing this with their “lying flat” movement. Dowries for a marriage are averaging USD 60,000(per The Economist). So instead men aren’t dating and aren’t doing the 996.

Russia is seeing it in European nations building LNG infrastructure at their major ports and taking deliveries from overseas. That’s a long term loss of business. And those same European nations are incentivizing their citizens to replace heaters with heatpumps and other means of reducing fossil fuel use.

When prices and costs increase people are incentivized to decide to go with alternatives.

Those data from measured ocean temperature needs to be readjusted:

Before about 1940, the most common method for measuring sea surface temperature was to throw a bucket attached to a rope overboard from a ship, haul it back up, and read the water temperature. The method was far from perfect. Depending on the air temperature, the water temperature could change as the bucket was pulled from the water. (1)

In the late 1970s ... tracking what was happening to Earth temperatures was at a relatively primitive state. Much of the relevant weather station data had not been digitized and what had been, was not widely available. Previous estimates of temperature changes ... had focused on the northern hemisphere, but that obviously missed half the planet. (2) interactive map: (3)

There is analysis showing differences in model temperature variation models and actual data from balloons and satellites since 1979. (4)

Those are few examples how our ability to measure things changes with our developing knowledge.

Rising temperatures is not new phenomena. Greenland ice core project (5) showing that there was about 25 dramatic climate changes in history. Its called Dansgaard–Oeschger event. (6), (7) and shows that for example during Younger Dryas (8) there was dramatic temperature decline and increase in few decades.

Making predictions on data since 70's are fragile and should be constantly reanalyzed.

(1) https://climate.nasa.gov/explore/ask-nasa-climate/3071/the-r...

(2) https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/history/

(3) https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/station_data_v4_globe/

(4) https://naturalresources.house.gov/uploadedfiles/christytest...

(5) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland_ice_core_project

(6) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dansgaard%E2%80%93Oeschger_eve...

(7) https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/sites/default/files/2021-11/2%20He...

(8) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas

right here: 15 mln between 2020 and 2022 (https://www.who.int/data/stories/global-excess-deaths-associ...). For better, more up to date data check analysises by Ariel Karlinsky and The Economist.