Observations like this is why the Trump administration is dismantling instruments that can observe the effects.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/01/climate/ocean-observatori...
A graph that should be front-page news
371–380 of 469 posts
Re: A graph that should be front-page news
#372Earlier quoted context omitted.
If my system requires infinity growth then yours also does require infinite resources by the logic outlines above. If you agree that your system does not require infinite resources because we should be talking only at timescales that are relevant to humans, then my system also does not require infinite growth. You can’t have it both ways, either you are ok with infinite timeframe (and then degrowth will eventually ru…
Nonsense, but you clearly either haven't read my replies or don't understand that capitalism requires growth while some other economic systems don't. Even 1% growth per year is exponential growth and quickly will run into limits (as we are currently experiencing!). But let's grant "both systems eventually run out of resources" for the sake of argument. The rate at which that happens then becomes clearly relevant, and…
> Nonsense, but you clearly either haven't read my replies or don't understand that capitalism requires growth while some other economic systems don't. Even 1% growth per year is exponential growth and quickly will run into limits (as we are currently experiencing!).
> But let's grant "both systems eventually run out of resources" for the sake of argument. The rate at which that happens then becomes clearly relevant, and if staying alive is good (I hope we can at least agree on that), using resources slower is better. Capitalism is depleting resources on a human timescale (as, again, we are currently experiencing with climate change), so instead depleting them on longer-than-human timescales is clearly the better option.
But you were talking about INFINITE growth, not exponential and those are two completely different things! Exponential growth will become infinite only if you have infinite time frame! So can we agree than "infinite growth is impossible on a planet with finite resources" is really dumb argument, because capitalism does not require infinite growth at all? Then we'll be able to move on to exponential growth.
Re: A graph that should be front-page news
#373Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's probably an economic incentive to get visitors to read past the show more button?
There is no show more button and scroling to the graph takes less than half a second.
Oops you're right. I double-checked both from the hacker News app preview (Harmonic), and mobile Chrome. No "show more."
I must have confused it with another article, sorry.
Re: A graph that should be front-page news
#374Here's a related chart with a bit more context. Check out the different ocean regions as well as the air temp anomoly charts:
Re: A graph that should be front-page news
#375With a headline like that the graph should be at the beginning. Usually you'd put it up front and then talk about the graph, not put it at the bottom and talk about how people aren't talking about it. Anyway, I scrolled down to the graph and skipped the text. We are currently 4 std deviations above the mean with respect to El Niño temperature. But there's also a historical line -4 std deviations from the mean. Was th…
The graph represents 44 years of statistics, and shouldn't be dismissed out of hand. But you can not determine how these stats relate to longer term time frames such as a 100 years or more. Obviously the article wants you to believe the absolute worst about how these modern indicators compare back even further than the data shows, but how much of that is confirmation bias, and how much is actual science?
confirmation bias, how?
they gradually swapped in biased thermometers, or the thermometers were always biased to start showing temperature rise around 2026? what motivates thermometers to commit confirmation bias?
Re: A graph that should be front-page news
#376the 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…
> enforce right to repair
How much would this change Niño surface temperatures, you reckon?
Re: A graph that should be front-page news
#377the 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…
> that could be: give away solar panels and two way heat pumps to low-income families, tax the profits of oil and gas companies, enforce right to repair, remove tariffs on chinese car makers if they create jobs in europe, fund train networks to get tickets cheaper than flying, invest in renewable energy to make electricity cheap. theres a lot of options. all of them will lead to some inflation and public debt but the…
> Some (e.g. right to repair, sadly) will achieve almost nothing at all.
I'd be curious as to why you say that. I feel that, right now, you would be correct. But if we could move society to a new paradigm where right-to-repair were the default, then cheap non-OEM parts manufacturers would bloom and repairing something would become much cheaper than replacing. Imagine if every object sold had to come with a manual describing how to repair common failures, and a support department to answer for other components.
Personal anecdote: My $700 oven has a microswitch that broke. The oven wouldn't work without it but the replacement part was all of $5. However the vast majority wouldn't know how to repair it.
Expand this to cellphones, computers, tables, wardrobes, cars, tractors and I feel it would have an impact. And... I suppose... my gut feeling is the biggest part of the problem is psychological. People are overwhelmed and don't know what they can do to help. Raising awareness is crucial, but just raising awareness obviously does nothing to reduce CO2 emissions - it's in second order effects when people start thinking harder about what they can do.
Another anecdote: I gave a seminar recently about energy to a small local environmental conference in a nearby town. My starting point was that nobody knows how to talk about energy - we can talk about length, size, weight, cost, speed, age, price, longevity and so, because we know the units - feet or meters, pounds or kilograms, dollars/euros/yen/etc, mph/kph/mps/etc and so on. But ask someone what is a "Joule" or what can you do with a "kilowatt-hour" and you get blank stares. The outcome? I learned of an attendee who drew lines on his kettle for 1-cup, 2-cups, and so on, and now boils only the necessary amount of water. That won't really move the needle on CO2, but it will raise awareness.
Re: A graph that should be front-page news
#378Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 eve…
I've pitched this idea before. But instead of something like the Paris Climate Accords which were an agreement for people to self-regulate and reduce emissions. What is needed is an agreement that is a sort of cartel. Nations a,b,c agree on these policies (carbon per person, environmental regulations, etc), and any nation that wants to export services/goods to a,b,c they must enter the agreement or be subject to tari…
Yeah, this is exactly the type of thing I'd support.
The UK (where I live) emits something like 0.5% of global CO2, but we're one of the largest economies in the world.
If we're going to do anything it seems we should really be doing everything we can to use our economic might to try to do something about that other 99.5%. Where as at the moment we're wasting our time obsessing about how we bring down that 0.5%, and providing an economic horror story for why no other country should replicate what we're doing.
Re: A graph that should be front-page news
#379Earlier quoted context omitted.
Note that anyone who suggested actions that would be both implementable by an individual and extremely effective would be rapidly banned from HN. We could build out private solar farms though.
I can think of a nonfiction book whose title would get you rapidly banned from HN. A movie was made with the same subject and title, but because it was a drama and not a documentary, it's not really fair to say the movie is an adaptation of a book. In the movie, a small group does the thing that is extremely effective. /The Ministy for the Future/ also contains a grassroots group that does something implementable by…
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Re: A graph that should be front-page news
#380Earlier quoted context omitted.
The graph represents 44 years of statistics, and shouldn't be dismissed out of hand. But you can not determine how these stats relate to longer term time frames such as a 100 years or more. Obviously the article wants you to believe the absolute worst about how these modern indicators compare back even further than the data shows, but how much of that is confirmation bias, and how much is actual science?
confirmation bias, how? they gradually swapped in biased thermometers, or the thermometers were always biased to start showing temperature rise around 2026? what motivates thermometers to commit confirmation bias?
By choosing what data to show. There is a lot of data to choose from in climate science. How do you think we end up with such strong arguments on the issue? Cherry picking is as big a problem in climate science as anything else.