2023 was the hottest summer in two thousand years

https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/2023-was-the-hottest-summer-in-two-thousand-years

by gmays • 2 years ago

82 65 2 years ago

cam.ac.uk

bobosha• 2 years ago

..and 2024 will beat that handily ={

Why is this downvoted when the oceans warmed up nearly an entire degree after we stopped dumping sulfur into them? It is very likely that 2024 will be the hottest summer in two thousand years.

postalrat2• 2 years ago

If it isn't what should we change? If it is what should we change?

amelius2• 2 years ago

All those nVidia cards produce a lot of heat.

louwrentius• 2 years ago

The AI hype isn’t really helping.

ilikehurdles• 2 years ago

China is responsible for 70% of new coal power plant construction, meanwhile greenhouse gas output in the US (whether measured per capital, against income, against gdp, or against fuel consumption) has been dropping for almost 30 years. The ai hype could help if it means increasing automation, as compute is cheaper than commute.

postalrat2• 2 years ago

Unless it it's more than hype.

Pelam2• 2 years ago

But economy, china, developing nations, my personal right to consumption, factor x is making this metric seem worse than it should be, another political thing is more important, technological solution Y will save us, technological solution Z won't help or has flaws... endless list of arguments that derail discussion and end up in effective inaction.

Humanity's capacity to handle an slow creeping existential threat appears to be very bad. Especially when preventing it requires simply stopping / doing less some of the things we are doing.

Apparently the production of greenhouse gasses has gone up in past years regardless of the negotiations aimed at reducing them.

I suspect geoengineering is where this will end up when things start to get really bad.

Question, what are the most viable / cost effective / low risk geoengineering tools?

rlili• 2 years ago

I see it more like:

Major lobbying companies' shareholders' interest in handling an slow creeping existential threat appears to be very bad.

Filligree• 2 years ago

Question, what are the most viable / cost effective / low risk geoengineering tools?

Inject sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere. This can be done by adding it to airplane fuel. We have a good idea of the consequences, as ships did the ~same thing (less effectively) until recently—they're now filtering it into the oceans instead.

kachapopopow6• 2 years ago

After we stopped dumping sulfur into the oceans the average temperature went up nearly an entire degree![1]

This will heavily affect the size of cyclones and other weather related disasters (not just heatwaves). 2024 might finally make people realize that the end is near once parts of the world in developed countries start to be slowly wiped off the map due to non stop natural disaster events.

[1] https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https%... @credits borg16

Pelam2• 2 years ago

Do you have a reference for that?

One thing that seems obvious, but hasn't been repeated enough IMHO is that injecting more energy (heat) into a chaotic system (climate), won't simply make the average energy (temperature) higher BUT will also proportionally strenghten the chaotic fluctuations (disasters).

borg162• 2 years ago

interesting you bring developed countries and not developing countries into the picture here first. Is it because such large scale disasters like the cyclones you mention tend to hit US more than any developing nations?

I ask because I hypothesize that the impact of these raising temperatures will be seen more widely and adversely in parts of developing countries given their population density and inability to address the same.

erkt• 2 years ago

This is hysterical.

thegrimmest6• 2 years ago

slow creeping existential threat

I struggle to see how even the worst predicted outcomes of climate change are an existential threat to the human species or our civilization. In the worst case a few billion people die or are displaced. Our species will carry on.

kachapopopow6• 2 years ago

Losing the means of food production in the most fertile parts of the world would pretty much wipe out more than "a few billion people". It's likely that we'd lose the means to support even a billion human lives and would have to redirect our efforts into survival rather than progression setting us back hundreds of years.

edit: not to mention everyone going into war with each other for securing the small amount of places that are able to produce food.

BLKNSLVR5• 2 years ago

Losing a few billion people is an existential threat to civilisation.

Civilisation is quite the fragile structure, built slowly and carefully over centuries of large scale cooperation between much of the populated world.

Scarcity of the basest necessities brings uncivilisation.

fsflover• 2 years ago

But economy, china, developing nations, my personal right to consumption

More excuses: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39756174

analognoise2• 2 years ago

I don’t care and will pick “let’s all go to war” long before I pick “I got to enjoy it all but my kids should live in communal hovels to save power”.

The USA has what, 12 super carriers? They’re not for show - I guarantee we’ll run out of oil last.

bryanlarsen• 2 years ago

Apparently the production of greenhouse gasses has gone up in past years regardless of the negotiations aimed at reducing them.

It appears likely that CO2 emissions will fall slightly in 2024, and start dropping dramatically in 2025. https://climateanalytics.org/comment/will-2024-be-the-year-e...

In the past 6 degrees of warming was predicted. We're now down to a prediction of 4 degrees of warming; stopping at 2.5 degrees is both possible and practical.

gmuslera2• 2 years ago

The safest path is undo what we did, somewhat stop adding more fossil carbon to the system, and capture the excess that we added since preindustrial times, and then some extra to unwind what some positive feedback loops added by their own. It it looks hard, impractical, expensive and a lot of more ugly words, but it goes right to try to push the system to the previous stable state.

Other “solutions” try to short term deal with one perceived problem without taking into account how the whole system is changing and how our “solution” will change it even more. With very complex systems shortsighted and not holistic approaches could bring to the table far more problems, some of which we may not have a way to deal with.

silverquiet6• 2 years ago

Unburning (my spellcheck marks that as a misspelling which says something even on its own) all the fossil fuels that gave rise to the industrial age we now reside in is I suppose possible in theory, but it would require a nearly limitless source of energy, and even if such a breakthrough occurred, I can't help but feel that all the energy would be directed towards ever more elaborate crypto-mining setups or AI chatbots.

The half-ass solution will be to dim the sky which I suppose will buy some time; enough to see me out I hope.

hyperman1• 2 years ago

I've long been thinking geoengineering is the most likely way for humanity to survive this mostly unscathed.

And this scares me a lot. The technology makes nuclear weapons look like pussies. Letting 1 country control who has which weather where is unacceptable for almost any country.

We need global cooperation to the point of becoming 1 huge global superstate, or we're having all out wars between the most powerfull nations of the world, while dealing with climate change at the same time.

And that's making the assumption that no mistake is made, with a completely new technology field, and mistakes easily killing millions of people.

dpkirchner• 2 years ago

Letting 1 country control who has which weather where is unacceptable for almost any country.

As we saw in the Gerard Butler documentary "Geostorm."

jsnell• 2 years ago

Apparently the production of greenhouse gasses has gone up in past years regardless of the negotiations aimed at reducing them.

Second derivatives matter. The growth in CO2 emissions from 2013 to 2023 was like 1/4th of the growth from 2003 to 2013.

And it's now being driven by the profit motive, not by treaties that might be reneged on at any time, so there's no reason to believe the trend will stop. All that's needed is for governments to not actively screw things up. (Which I guess is a possibility in the US due to the hyper-partisan nature of their politics, but China and India are what really matter, and both stand to gain so much from cheap energy that it's hard to imagine them being willing to stop the transition just out of spite.)

Honestly, there has probably not been more cause for optimism on climate change in like three decades.

krmboya• 2 years ago

developing nations

Yet the population in developed economies will fall drastically in the next 50-100 yrs. Let developing nations have their chance at improving quality of life through cheap energy like developed nations did. Mass immigration is but bandaid at maintaining population and the resulting economic demand within the existing order.

Developing economies account for a negligible percentage of global emissions at the moment. By the time they catch up, some iterations of nuclear energy research will have resulted in more efficient energy production.

amelius2• 2 years ago

my personal right to consumption

What if we simply stop telling people what they should buy every time they visit a website et cetera?

Would that help to keep Earth's temperature down?

eastbound• 2 years ago

You’re probably not even kidding, it’s part of a good solution. However, take a 360° look on the other aspects of this solution:

- We seek to raise every person in poverty to the average consumption level. Through charities, political programs, etc. Should we stop?

- If you don’t drive people to earn, you don’t drive people to work. And you get a dysfunctional society which consumes a lot but does not produce a lot.

- It’s the same philosophical problem as if you started to be fair towards men, then they’d stop striving. I assure you that you don’t want that.

- Would you be ok with solving climate change at the expense of other social targets? If not, congrats, you’re a leftist not a scientist.

nojvek• 2 years ago

Progress requires a generational shift.

At-least in US we are looking at average age of presidential candidates 79y, senate 65y, house 60.

50% of wealth is owned by Boomers. They control majority of wealth and policy.

Even the current generation will be long dead before they have to reckon with climate change.

Until we get a big shock event where millions die, and the death from extreme natural causes is very evident, it won’t be something most governments take seriously.

All major governments dragged their feet through 2020 regarding Covid.

ForHackernews• 2 years ago

It's going to keep getting worse for the rest of our lives, and then even worse for our children and grandchildren: https://arewestillfucked.com/

It's a tragedy but at some point it stops being news.

input_sh• 2 years ago

The thing that truly made me realise just how fucked we are is when the Guardian sent out a survey to the scientists behind the IPCC report. About half of them responded:

77% of respondents believe global temperatures will reach at least 2.5C above preindustrial levels, a devastating degree of heating;
almost half – 42% – think it will be more than 3C;
only 6% think the 1.5C limit will be achieved.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2024/...

BLKNSLVR5• 2 years ago

Did you mean: at some point there stops being news?

BillFranklin3• 2 years ago

PSA to the hardware engineers on here --

Y Combinator is actively looking for founders starting climate tech companies: https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs#climate-tech

BillFranklin3• 2 years ago

Also well worth reading -- https://www.institute.global/insights/climate-and-energy/rei...

Tl;dr = Climate change is best addressed by producing technology that makes things more efficient and/or that helps the developing world decarbonise.

If anyone is working on something gamechanging please hit me up -- I'm happy to help out on the dev / infra side pro bono.

lucianbr• 2 years ago

The financial opportunity of building in this space is massive: an estimated $3-10 trillion in EBITDA will be up for grabs. Recent legislation will also significantly accelerate the existing market trends.

Yeah, I don't think these will be part of the solution. We're not going to get out of this by making more money. Trying to make more money is how we got here.

I recently read some opinions about carbon credits for example, and boy does it look like it's just a scam to take money from governments into private pockets, while at best doing greenwashing.

BillFranklin3• 2 years ago

We're not going to get out of this by making more money.

I absolutely think we are going to get out of this by making money.

The incentives preventing action on climate change are not moral/ethical, but economic.

Countries and individuals use fossil fuels because they are cheaper, and are unwilling to make decisions that put them in a worse position relative to others.

While de-growth naively sounds appealing, the results are horrendous – countries with approx. the same GDP that they had 20 years ago are not places you would want to move to.

You might also point to the ozone layer issue in the late 80s and argue an accord will fix our current problem, but fossil fuels are far more fundamental to our way of life than CFCs were.

chiefalchemist3• 2 years ago

Simply (and obvious) question: Of the recent climate change, how much is human-made and how much is natural?

2000 yrs ago, the world population was a fraction of what it is now. Tbere was no mass burning of fossil fuels. And yet the temps were at record highs. Do we have enough reliable data to judge the climate properly?

silverquiet6• 2 years ago

If it's an obvious question to you, don't you think that climate scientists who have been looking into this for going on a century might also have thought of it and perhaps written about it?

chiefalchemist3• 2 years ago

If they have...

1) You could have provided a link to two, yes?

2) The Media - and its scientist (?) pundits - would ease up on the "this is absolutely 100% human-made" narrative.

3) People who have suggested that maybe it's not "absolutely 100% human-made" would not be ridiculed, marginalized, canceled, etc.

So if you can help out with any of these, it would be appreciated, sincerely.

p.s. And per the article, the climate data that was being used prior, was incomplete, unreliable, and too small a sample size. And yet how many leaders and scientists have been basing big stroke ideas on that? We can't demand The Science, and then cherry pick bullshit because it perpetuates a narrative. Or can we??

Unbefleckt• 2 years ago

As an ignorant outsider, I just notice that the sun gets intense and someone tells me that on the news they read that the sun is having a solar storm or something. I'm guessing the fossil fuels are responsible for reducing our protection from this storm? Cause otherwise to me it looks like the sun is the deciding factor in setting heat records. I still can't stand plastics and pollution so I still do my bit just from a cleanliness(?) point of view rather than climate change.

BLKNSLVR5• 2 years ago

This is probably one of the best representations I've seen of historic climate cycles leading into what we're seeing in the last century or so:

https://xkcd.com/1732/

post_break• 2 years ago

It's been hotter on this planet every year since the year I was born.

fho• 2 years ago

This ...

... since 30 years (of not longer) it was the "hottest year of all times" some where on Germany.

One or two years in a row? Random chance ... Every, single, year for 30 years? Yeah something is definitely wrong here.

2023 was the hottest summer in two thousand years

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