Global warming has accelerated significantly • Hacker News Board

Re: Global warming has accelerated significantly

#551

Post by jimnotgym » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 5:47 PM UTC

deepsun wrote: post #341

jokoon wrote: post #147

Nothing will change until developed rich countries are starting to hurt. And I don't think it's going to hurt enough in 10 or 20 years. The pain will come slowly, people won't see it. It's like going back to the middle age so slowly, that the population don't realize or feel it. And honestly, wars and trump are making climate concerns so difficult to think about.

Well, most deforestation happens in poor underdeveloped countries. Yes, they hurt, but keep doing it.

For the UK at least, this must be in a large part because we already cut our forests down. We simply couldn't deforest at a high rate, because there aren't enough trees left to go at.

Re: Global warming has accelerated significantly

#552

Post by qgin » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 5:50 PM UTC

Fricken wrote: post #367

qgin wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All data centers in aggregate (AI and all other uses) use about 1.5% of electricity production, which itself is about 20% of total energy use. So when people are focusing on AI above all other energy uses, it doesn't really paint an accurate picture of what's going on.

I've heard many different groups tell me their small fraction is not the small fraction that matters.

It's not really about which one matters. They all matter. But here is a rough breakdown of global fossil fuel energy usage:

* Electricity: 27%

* Industry: 24%

* Transportation: 15%

* Agriculture & land use: 11%

* Buildings: 7%

Then within electricity, data centers use about 1.5% of global electricity. Within data centers, AI accounts for somewhere between 15-20% of energy use.

So if you take 27% × 1.5% × ~17%, you find that AI is currently responsible for something like 0.07% of global fossil fuel emissions.

It definitely matters in the "every bit matters" sense, but also the numbers paint a really different picture than you'd get from statement like the one we started with.

Re: Global warming has accelerated significantly

#553

Post by culi » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 5:50 PM UTC

Someone wrote: post #531

culi wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Early IPCC reports, all the way up to AR5 basically threw their hands up when it came to permafrost emissions. They admitted we didn't have the necessary data yet and for the most part didn't account for it at all in their models Check out the 1.5C special report. Go to section 2.2.1.2, last paragraph says > The reduced complexity climate models employed in this assessment do not take into account permafrost or non-C…

The claim being discussed is not that they didn’t account for it, but that they didn’t attempt to account for it. Reading that text, I think they did, but chose not to include it (I guess because they didn’t need to to make their point and, by not including it, avoided opponents from arguing about the validity of the result based on uncertainties in those models)

I don't get the distinction you're trying to make. It seems to me they considered it, but did not even attempt to account for it.

They admitted limitations of the data/research they had available. Their model explicitly does not attempt to account for it.

Re: Global warming has accelerated significantly

#554

Post by Retric » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 5:50 PM UTC

crystal_revenge wrote: post #530

bko wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nothing will change until developed rich countries are starting to hurt. Ironic OECD countries actually REDUCED their emissions based on a peak in 2007 and continue to do so. Not reduced as a percentage of GDP or adjusted for population growth, but reduced in absolute levels. It's all China, but I guess it's cool to blame things on developed countries. There are literally 100k deaths in Europe that can be prevented…

> Ironic OECD countries actually REDUCED their emissions based on a peak in 2007 and continue to do so. Our economies are built on oil burning somewhere else in the world. You can try to point the blame at China, but the wealth generated in the middle east selling them oil is a major part of the reason why US stock markets keep going up. If you forced China to use less fossil fuels you would personally feel a much la…

> If you forced China to use less fossil fuels you would personally feel a much larger hit to your quality of life.

America imports more from Mexico, Canada, and the EU than China which ranks as #4 when you consider EU as a single entity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_trading_pa...

Imports from China are a small fraction of GDP and offset by exports to other countries. OECD countries are largely exporting labor not the kind of heavy industry associated with heavy CO2 emissions. Which makes sense as China has relatively cheap labor, but they don’t get a discount on Oil.

Re: Global warming has accelerated significantly

#555

Post by 52-6F-62 » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 5:51 PM UTC

fjwater wrote: post #204

tsoukase wrote: post #164

This ship has sailed, warming is irreversible. Developing nations mainly in Asia (China, India etc) are, well, developing and burn like there is no tomorrow. But they are not to blame. It is their turn to live nicely, like the US and Europe did for decades. Nobody can remove this right from them.

I don't think that's fair to say; the USA's CO2 emissions per capita are roughly 150% of China's, and the average Canadian emits more than 7x as much as an Indian citizen. The entire EU produces only about half of the USA's total emissions, despite having a population of over 100 million more people.

Lol. Not exactly an apt comparison.

"Average" Canadian. A lot of the population lives in a climate where half the year more energy is required to survive the climate. And the population is exponentially smaller than the United States, India, or China.

That's like calling out the guy in the mountains burning a campfire to stay warm at night when the guy sleeping on the beach in Hawaii requires none.

Point being, brand new account, if we want solutions it needs to be done without such angling or it all reduces to absurdities and jabs instead of cooperation. It needs to be realistic in terms of where people are being absurdly wasteful, but also sympathetic that we do not all face the same circumstances.

It's a hole and we don't get out by digging downward.

Re: Global warming has accelerated significantly

#556

Post by oxqbldpxo » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 5:51 PM UTC

For a 1000 points: For the turkey, what is Thanksgiving? What is a Black swan?

Re: Global warming has accelerated significantly

#557

Post by mbgerring » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 5:52 PM UTC

peab wrote: post #521

gzread wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China is some years behind our industrial development then undevelopment, and is building an entire USA of solar panels every year or whatever - can we expect them to quickly reduce emissions soon?

they continue to build more solar, more wind, but also more coal power plants.

No, they are not building new coal fired power plants at the same rate they are expanding renewables. This is several years out of date.

Re: Global warming has accelerated significantly

#558

Post by n8cpdx » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 5:52 PM UTC

dcchambers wrote: post #517

There's literally nothing that can be done about it. The people with actual ability to make a change don't care. We're going to have to figure out how to adapt to it. Expect many of the things you love now (seafood, coffee, etc) to be gone within your lifetime.

There were voters who could do part of it. Long term, having a US President that doesn’t cancel wind projects, tear up EV subsidies, and promote coal would probably be a difference maker for US emissions.

And if the voters were just a bit smarter and not bought into the “China bad” narrative, we might even get proper, nice, affordable EVs in the US.

Re: Global warming has accelerated significantly

#559

Post by epistasis » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 5:52 PM UTC

jokoon wrote: post #147

Nothing will change until developed rich countries are starting to hurt. And I don't think it's going to hurt enough in 10 or 20 years. The pain will come slowly, people won't see it. It's like going back to the middle age so slowly, that the population don't realize or feel it. And honestly, wars and trump are making climate concerns so difficult to think about.

The energy situation is actually changing very quickly precisely because renewables and storage are so cheap. Building a new natural gas plant today is really hard to justify in most places in the world.

Capitalism will actually save the day, because a bunch of capitalists advanced renewable technology to the point where it was cheap.

The biggest impediment to change right now is actually political interference in deployment of cheaper renewables. You see this all across the US both in intentional and unintentional ways. Trump explicitly cancels permits for wind, tries to ban solar on federal lands, and forces coal plants to keep running even when they are super expensive and raise the cost electricity.

Unintentional political impediments are also endemic in the US; permitting and interconnection of residential solar makes it 5x-6x more expensive than places like Australia, even in places like California that should be accelerating residential solar and storage.

There's a lot to be hopeful about when it comes to climate change, in addition a lot to be scared about.

Re: Global warming has accelerated significantly

#560

Post by chneu » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 5:53 PM UTC

mbgerring wrote: post #544

The only extant “X-risk” is, and always has been, climate change. “AGI” is science fiction, and actually-existing AI is making climate change harder to deal with, by increasing electricity demand on our fossil-fuel-powered grid with no attendant increase in clean generation. Serious engineers need to stop whatever they’re doing and work on this problem. Also, if you’re hiring: I’m an expert on the U.S. regulated util…

Really AI is a drop in the bucket compared to other things. Beef and dairy take up an incredible amount of water, land, and energy but we don't complain about that.

AI could lead to massive savings and improvements in terms of emissions and climate change. AI could possibly help us out of this.

Beef and dairy have no chance of helping us. They'll kill us and the beef nuts will say how they saved 4% of emissions by moving some cows around. Problem solved.