Europe's new climate in seven charts • Hacker News Board

Re: Europe's new climate in seven charts

#161

Post by spwa4 » Sun, Jul 05, 2026, 1:00 PM UTC

illiac786 wrote: post #154

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah. It's really as simple as this: Southern climates are moving north. (In the northern hemisphere.) If you want a vision of the future, consider a New England that looks more like the Southeast. There will be winners and losers. As climate zones move toward the poles, weather patterns and agricultural viability will shift with them. This will eventually turn current breadbaskets into deserts while warming up northe…

Let’s say the end of our civilization and going back to middle age or something like that.

The middle ages were in the middle of something called "the little ice age" which was entirely different and, obviously, mostly had the opposite effect.

The most dramatic story about that is what happened to the settling of Greenland (more than once). Basically during a cold spell the city was gradually abandoned, with sometimes the last few people literally freezing to death when their fuel ran out.

Re: Europe's new climate in seven charts

#162

Post by IshKebab » Sun, Jul 05, 2026, 1:01 PM UTC

inigyou wrote: post #135

IshKebab wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are literally hundreds of actions that could be (or in some cases have been) taken. I think the vast majority need to be taken by the government. Individuals mainly need to to support and demand these actions from the government, and punch climate change deniers in the face. E.g. 1. Stick to their plan to ban ICE car sales by 2030. 2. Unban on-shore wind power (Labour did this! Not that anyone noticed...) 3. Ma…

Then I think the answer to your question is that the government is corrupt and paid off by oil companies and other interests to not do these things. So they will not happen.

Wasn't my question, but no I don't think that's the reason. It's that ordinary people do not actually care about it that much. Plenty of people are still climate change deniers (yes even in the middle of an unprecedented heatwave in the UK which is relatively liberal).

Even the people that have brains are ostensibly do care about climate change... when push comes to shove and you try to increase petrol prices to the level that represents their true cost, or try to erect a wind turbine near them... They'll say "erm actually never mind".

Actually it doesn't even need to be a wind turbine. There are many PV solar projects in the UK that get attacked by NIMBYs. Literally just solar panels in fields. The most low impact construction ever.

How could people possibly object to that, you ask? There are a variety of bullshit reasons they come up with e.g.

1. Extra lorry traffic during construction (a one-time minor inconvenience).

2. The applicants hadn't done a survey on how putting poles in the ground in the middle of a field might affect the habitats of newts, or some bollocks like that.

3. There's too much solar power already. I shit you not.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd0vyv7rejlo

Re: Europe's new climate in seven charts

#163

Post by jmyeet » Sun, Jul 05, 2026, 1:01 PM UTC

graemep wrote: post #105

jmyeet wrote: post #71

It's hard to compare a shift in a probability distribution because people will hang on to outliers. We hear this every winter: "all I hear about is Global Warming but look at this record snow". But I do believe the empirical evidence for all this has gone well beyond statistical significance. The Wire is one of my all-time favorite shows in part because it's a story of institutional failure at every level. The police…

> The wealthy prefer fossil fuels because a mine or an oil well is and always has been a massive wealth concentrator. lots of wealthy people are anti-fossil fuel. > Build a solar farm and it... just produces electricity. it needs land. It increases the value of land. Wealthy people own lots of land. The main objections for switching to wind and solar are variability in output and the cost of building all the new stuf…

> lots of wealthy people are anti-fossil fuel.

They're really not. Or it's just perfrmative environmentalism. Because they continue to support to politicians and the system that maintains the status quo.

> Fine if you are Spanish.

Please read the whole paragraph. Transmitting power, which is what UHVDC lines are for and something China builds to transmit power thousands of kilometers from the Western half of the country to the Eastern half where everybody lives, exists [1]. Standard transmission lines lose 4-10%/1000km. UHVDC loses 1-3%/1000km.

Europe loves importing electricity. It's the key to greenwashing. Why not build solar where it's most efficient and import that instead?

> I wonder whether the British government would be so keen on moving away from fossil fuels if it still owned BP?

The UK has spent hudnreds of billions of pounds subsidizing electricity that goes straight into the pockets of the shareholders of natural gas companies and private utilities. Is that better?

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9OcsvNZeB0

Re: Europe's new climate in seven charts

#164

Post by Aachen » Sun, Jul 05, 2026, 1:02 PM UTC

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #126

Aachen wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> our prehistoric forebears had a lot worse to deal with Do you mean in terms of climate change? I know some temperatures were different but this was much more gradual afaik, which is no problem for anyone with two feet and a sense of where to go, but they were much more dependent on the ecosystem which struggles to keep up with the speed of today's changes From what I hear, what we're causing is unprecedented for hu…

Prehistoric climate change was sometimes much more sudden than anything we've experienced. See e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas There are others.

"in the tropics, the cooling was spread out over several centuries" but "2–6 °C in Europe and up to 10 °C in Greenland, in a few decades. Cooling in Greenland was particularly rapid, taking place over just 3 years or less"

That's indeed a lot more extreme in a shorter amount of time, at least regionally. Feel like I should have known that! Thanks

Re: Europe's new climate in seven charts

#165

Post by feydaykyn » Sun, Jul 05, 2026, 1:03 PM UTC

dismalaf wrote: post #55

thewhitetulip wrote: post #32

Why is it that aggressive climate action is not taken still?

Do you really think Russia, China, India or developing countries are going to stop using fossil fuels if we stop? If the west de-industrializes then our enemies will destroy us... Russia's literally invading Europe right now (albeit poorly).

Check current renewal deployment figures, China is actually at the forefront, and India is taking the "right" path.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1MGJUaxQPk

Re: Europe's new climate in seven charts

#166

Post by spwa4 » Sun, Jul 05, 2026, 1:03 PM UTC

usrnm wrote: post #143

intended wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is… one way to look at the death of billions, the end of nations, and the collapse of society due to the ensuing refugee crises. Not to forget, we are dependent on the food web. These changes mean species will be wiped out, fishing stocks will crash, and invasive will spread. Since you are likely in the developed world, tropical temps in Europe would mean refurbishment of houses. People won’t remember things lik…

Even anatomically modern humans have gone through similar events several times in the history of our species, let alone our ancestors. Climate change itself will not be the end of humanity, but it may be the end of the current civilisation.

There are several highly problematic areas, but they are local (very, very big, but local, not remotely close to covering the whole of human civilization).

Re: Europe's new climate in seven charts

#167

Post by rsynnott » Sun, Jul 05, 2026, 1:05 PM UTC

joe_mamba wrote: post #102

rsynnott wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We did not see a massive decrease. We saw a short-lived drop to levels normal in the mid tens. It is barely a blip on the graph. WFH won’t save us, unfortunately.

My bad, I was only talking about the readings in my city, not the whole planet. I assumed it would scale to the whole planet in that period.

Ah. I’d consider _city-level_ readings an absolutely useless metric here, because, particularly if it’s a city with a large commuter hinterland, a lot of people were simply not present in the city, but still existed out there somewhere, running their heating/cooling/etc. Daytime populations of large cities generally dropped during the covid wfh period, so yeah, no shit CO2 emissions dropped; people were off emitting CO2 elsewhere.

Re: Europe's new climate in seven charts

#168

Post by notrealyme123 » Sun, Jul 05, 2026, 1:06 PM UTC

epgui wrote: post #25

notrealyme123 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think thats the wrong level of abstraction. The cold war ended, but clima change will not end.

The word abstraction does not mean the same thing as the words analogy or comparison.

Yes absolutely. They are different things . I am using "level of abstraction" in a sense to find a useful amount of details to drop or keep, which in turn makes an analogy/comparison possible.

Re: Europe's new climate in seven charts

#169

Post by tasuki » Sun, Jul 05, 2026, 1:08 PM UTC

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #12

inigyou wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People one or two generations before you felt that about the cold war.

The cold war never heated up. Even if we stopped using fossil fuels tomorrow, it will take millennia for the climate to return to normal.

> it will take millennia for the climate to return to normal

No. There is no such thing as "normal" climate. It's ever changing. We're just making the change a whole lot faster.

Re: Europe's new climate in seven charts

#170

Post by swiftcoder » Sun, Jul 05, 2026, 1:08 PM UTC

inigyou wrote: post #130

swiftcoder wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What action will you take to ensure next year it's only 85F? The time to take that particular action was 20 or 30 years ago. We're not in a position to do a damn thing about next year's heat waves, or the year after that... What we're talking about now is taking actions that may prevent much larger heat waves 20 years from now

What actions will you take to ensure the summer of 2050 isn't 200F?

Solar + heat pumps, electric vehicle (I'd rather use public transit, but I live in the wilderness), eating locally-grown seasonal fruits and vegetables, etc.

I walk this walk, bud, but at the same time, whatever I do is completely irrelevant if we don't get off our collective asses and force the governments and corporations to do their part.