A graph that should be front-page news • Hacker News Board

Re: A graph that should be front-page news

#291

Post by gruez » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 5:20 PM UTC

midnight_eclair wrote: post #287

gruez wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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>shame and allegedly bully average consumers into possibly meaningless lifestyle changes is maybe almost certainly some sort of global or not global conspiracy that should be investigated and depending on the result of the investigation lead to various punishments in accordance with crimes committed ranging from fines to jail time or execution of likely non-zero number of politicians and CEOs possibly across the globe.

"bully average consumers into possibly meaningless lifestyle changes" isn't a crime, so "investigating" them for it seems like the kangaroo trial I just described. Not to mention "politicians and CEOs" isn't a monolith and often times it's not even the same people telling consumers to use paper straws vs pumping out microplastics, so there isn't even a contradiction.

Re: A graph that should be front-page news

#292

Post by mempko » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 5:24 PM UTC

tancop wrote: post #245

the problem with this kind of article is half of them push a doom angle and the other half talk about carbon footprint. both of them have the same effect making people give up or do useless lifestyle changes that do nothing for the environment. we should be pushing for backend changes that are invisible but actually make things better. that means massive subsidies to build out clean power and electrify everything. po…

Backend changes? The world should have a revolution as our leaders have completely failed us.

Re: A graph that should be front-page news

#293

Post by alwa » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 5:25 PM UTC

childintime wrote: post #280

imperio59 wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The word you're looking for is nuclear. Everywhere.

The word is solar. Instant reduction in CO2 emissions, won't be a decade late, and won't be obsolete by the time it's finally ready. Nuclear is a politician's vanity project. And politicians do have a knack for choosing the wrong thing at the wrong time, by ignoring the market. Just let the engineers make the call.

I think the engineers tend to say nuclear makes much more sense than solar for baseload right? That, and “most of the cost and delay is in these obscenely overcautious regulations?”

Re: A graph that should be front-page news

#294

Post by snaking0776 » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 5:25 PM UTC

ludicrousdispla wrote: post #186

voidUpdate wrote: post #14

If it should be front-page news, shouldn't it also be at the top of the article, rather than right at the bottom?

They should also plot the lines on actual temperature, instead of std. dev. And expressing a number as some percentage more or less than another number is a great way to make it meaningless.

Plotting it this way is just a shift and rescaling. As the other commenter already showed this will lead to a plot that looks pretty much the same in terms of difference relative to the past data. I think standard deviation makes sense here since we don’t really have an innate sense of what is a meaningful change in ocean surface temperature and the point is to show that we are already far beyond normal here.

Re: A graph that should be front-page news

#295

Post by midnight_eclair » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 5:25 PM UTC

gruez wrote: post #291

midnight_eclair wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

>shame and allegedly bully average consumers into possibly meaningless lifestyle changes is maybe almost certainly some sort of global or not global conspiracy that should be investigated and depending on the result of the investigation lead to various punishments in accordance with crimes committed ranging from fines to jail time or execution of likely non-zero number of politicians and CEOs possibly across the glob…

[flagged]

Re: A graph that should be front-page news

#296

Post by atleastoptimal » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 5:28 PM UTC

tancop wrote: post #245

the problem with this kind of article is half of them push a doom angle and the other half talk about carbon footprint. both of them have the same effect making people give up or do useless lifestyle changes that do nothing for the environment. we should be pushing for backend changes that are invisible but actually make things better. that means massive subsidies to build out clean power and electrify everything. po…

No matter how bad the climate crisis gets, those who have the power to change it (heads of state/capital) will never abandon their lifestyles which expend 1000x more energy and fossil fuels than the average person. Pushing for voluntary, individual reductions in consumption is pointless and insulting to the average person.

Re: A graph that should be front-page news

#297

Post by uv-depression » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 5:30 PM UTC

azan_ wrote: post #279

uv-depression wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? Some resources are renewable. There's a finite amount of solar energy, but it doesn't "run out" (on human timescales). Growing food doesn't need to remove from the biosphere, even if the way we do it now does do significant damage. So we absolutely must stop using non-renewable resources (i.e. fossil fuels), but if we find an amount of renewable ones combined with recyclable non-renewables (like metal) that are…

You can’t reach steady state in ANY economic system because you can’t have 100% efficiency, that’s basic thermodynamics. Resources will keep decreasing no matter what you do. Hence argument about infinite growth is absurd - infinite existence without growth (or with degrowth) is also impossible.

You're right; sunlight will eventually run out. (Well, long before that the expanding Sun will boil the oceans). No, you couldn't have an economy in a closed system, but the Earth isn't a closed system (due to the aforementioned sunlight).

That's an absurd argument, though. The problem we have right here, right now, is capitalism destroying the habitability of our planet because its hunger for resources must always grow, so it's unable to handle the problem of fossil fuel use, or stop depleting soil, etc.

You're arguing against jumping out of the way of a moving train because we're not immortal.

Re: A graph that should be front-page news

#298

Post by kypro » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 5:30 PM UTC

tancop wrote: post #245

the problem with this kind of article is half of them push a doom angle and the other half talk about carbon footprint. both of them have the same effect making people give up or do useless lifestyle changes that do nothing for the environment. we should be pushing for backend changes that are invisible but actually make things better. that means massive subsidies to build out clean power and electrify everything. po…

Unpopular opinion, but we need to start using hard and soft power if we want to fix this problem.

Europe cannot fix climate change on its own, and we already represent an increasingly small share of total emissions.

The question now is how we get other countries onboard fast, and if they continue to build out cheap coal-fired power stations what are we going to do about it? Something or nothing?

Unless we can get every nation onboard, we should switch strategies to one of managing the inevitable rather than hopeless trying to prevent it. Costly energy policies that reduce global emissions by roughly 0.5% (basically what will happen if the UK ever achieves net-zero) are a total waste of money and time.

Those who care about this issue need to get real and need to stop pretending that the solution is for a few more people in the UK putting solar panels on their roofs. Climate change is a global problem. If your solutions are domestic then they're not serious.

Re: A graph that should be front-page news

#299

Post by jbxntuehineoh » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 5:30 PM UTC

pdonis wrote: post #264

"Earth is moving beyond the range within which modern human civilisation developed." Way, way, way, way overstated. The graph shows a comparison to an average over a few decades. Human civilization is thousands of years old. Does anyone have a graph of what all the El Ninos since the last Ice Age ended have looked like? Of course not. Nobody has that kind of temperature data.

so do you not know what the word "modern" means? or did you just choose to ignore it?

Re: A graph that should be front-page news

#300

Post by mtmickush » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 5:31 PM UTC

tancop wrote: post #245

the problem with this kind of article is half of them push a doom angle and the other half talk about carbon footprint. both of them have the same effect making people give up or do useless lifestyle changes that do nothing for the environment. we should be pushing for backend changes that are invisible but actually make things better. that means massive subsidies to build out clean power and electrify everything. po…

> give away solar panels and two way heat pumps to low-income families

There's no need to caveat benefits like this by income - the most popular social programs are almost always universal. Also the added bureaucracy of validating that someone lands in a category isn't worth the overhead. Why wouldn't we want everyone to install more solar panels and two way heat pumps?