A graph that should be front-page news

https://www.lyrebirddreaming.com/post/the-graph-that-should-be-front-page-news

by rakel_rakel • 10 days ago

696 425 10 days ago

lyrebirddreaming.com

turtleyacht• 10 days ago

Is there a graph starting from the 1950s?

https://www.lyrebirddreaming.com/post/el-ni%C3%B1o-isn-t-an-...

l1chorpe• 10 days ago

Looking at the graph left me wondering just what it means exactly. I'm not well versed in statistics so "the standard deviation is 3.5°C" doesn't mean much. Also, what's up with that other line going down to -3.5°C? And what do the colors mean? In the sense that I'm not sure whether a darker blue means closer to or further from today.

ArnoVW• 10 days ago

my layman understanding, a real statistician will surely intervene.

standard deviation is a measure that informs about the distribution. A high standard deviation means a "wide bell curve". A low standard deviation means that all values are closely clustered around the middle of the curve.

So if your value is 2 x standard deviation (for example) that means it is a relatively rare outlier, since 2 x standard deviation covers 95% of the bell curve. In particle physics I believe they require 5 standard deviations to confirm an observation.

bestouff• 10 days ago

Each blue line represents a different year since 1982. The red line is this year. It doesn't just set a new record. It has departed entirely from the range of previous observations.

danhau• 10 days ago

I'm not an authority on this, but here's is my understanding - I'd appreciate if someone could correct my mistakes.

The baseline of 0.0 represents the average of all years. Anything above / below the baseline is a (standard) deviation from the average. The blue lines are the individual years since 1991 [1] while the red line is the year 2026.

If a line is above the baseline, then the sea-surface temperature was hotter on that day than average. If below, it was cooler than average.

The year 2026 is an outlier, dwarfing all the others starting around June / July. The Nino 3.4 sea-surface temperature is significantly hotter than any previous year during that time. New record, I guess?

[1]: I'm confused about the two date ranges given: 1982-2026 and 1991-2020. I'm assuming this graph is based on measurements from 1982-2026 to calculate the average, but the lines shown are only from 1991-2020, for some statistical reason I don't understand.

plough• 10 days ago

I think it is the other way around: SD is calculated from 1982-2020, while all measurement readings in the plot are 1982-2026. I believe this is meant to not introduce an unwanted shift but compare to sort of a 'stable process'. However, that should have been described and argued somewhere.

blaze33• 10 days ago

You can go to the source website https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/?dm_id=nino3.4

There's is an interactive chart that's easier to understand

camillomiller2• 10 days ago

Check out 2015, it had way hotter temperatures in November, with higher temperatures than the average in this period, but I would like a climatologist to explain this, draw correlations etc. The original post is a weird LLM-mediated mix of vague scaremongering with some easy piling on journalism "just because". So what am I supposed to with it? Nothing, because it's written by an LLM, I guess.

2b3a51• 10 days ago

Thanks for posting that link.

The graph has a key on the right hand side that clearly labels each colour of line, and the horizontal axis is scaled in months of each year. Scrolling down gets you notes and links to data sources.

In answer to another poster in this thread, the dataset only reaches back to 1983, I'm assuming because that is when they started monitoring these temperatures?

bitter_michael• 10 days ago

I had the same concerns and think the chart would benefit from color grading the individual years by age. If the other outlier in the opposite direction is equally likely then it should also be concerning (obviously it is not). My understanding is the deviation is from the 1991-2020 subset avg, so a warming trend would be indicated by relative drift towards positive in the std dev across years from 82-present

anirudhak47• 10 days ago

i have seen this couple of times here and there. with eu melting looks concerning. i guess build more data centers

jones89176• 10 days ago

Shouldn't the y-axis better be called "Standard DeviationS"?

According to one comment on the site, the 3.5 means "3.5 times the SD", which makes much more sense to me.

I initially tried to make sense of "SD being 3.5 on that day of the year", which seems to be a wrong interpretation.

edwinjm• 10 days ago

No. The (standard) deviation is 3.5.

stymaar5• 10 days ago

No. The (standard) deviation is 3.5.

3.5 what, according to you?

You're reading this graph wrong: we're currently 3.63 standard deviation above the mean.

It's clearer on the original article[1] that this AI-generated blog is taking the graph from, the average temperature on the period at this time of the year is around 27.5°, the ocean is almost at 29.5°, just short of 2°C above average, and the standard deviation is 0.55°C.

[1] https://climatecasino.substack.com/p/some-monsters-are-real

Edit: note that the original article is 6 days old, and we've unfortunately crossed the 2°C threshold right after it was posted, so the situation of even direr than described: https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/?dm_id=nino3.4

frumiousirc• 10 days ago

I think you are right.

The title of the figure is ambiguous about what "SD" really means but I guess it is plotting the number of standard deviations of the 1991-2020 data measured from the mean of that data and plotted per day for the 1982-2026 data.

Here's the link that I read off the figure.

https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/json_2clim/oiss...

Going up the URL path I get redirected to here:

https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/?dm_id=world2

That shows measured temperature and 2026 as very hot (surprise) and in fact is the hottest to date for June+July. The standard deviation of that data is not 3.5 C but something less than 1.0 C. It is plausible that current temperature is about 3.5 sigma from the selected mean.

It's worth recognizing that the analysis is applying a biased conclusion prior to making the plot. It singles out post 2020 data to compare to pre-2020 data. and then concluding the held out data is a significant deviation with a cause. It almost certainly is but this is not a proper way to analyze data (unless one is pushing an agenda, be that for good or bad).

I think the sst_daily plot stands on its own without crafting this SD plot to emphasize the point. Especially when the accompanying text doesn't even explain it. It's a disingenuous message.

camillomiller2• 10 days ago

I believe this post was written with some heavy help of an LLM. I hope the irony is not lost on the author, nor the readers here.

ericd3• 10 days ago

Their daily shower used more energy than generating the article, it doesn’t invalidate the article.

voidUpdate2• 10 days ago

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

zipy124• 10 days ago

That was my first reaction too. A perfect fit for a cover image of a story. Also generally when referencing something within an article you want to display a figure before talking about it.

Walf2• 10 days ago

I thought it was quite effective. I read the whole thing in anticipation, and was still shocked by the graph.

ktm5j• 9 days ago

Most people are not going to do that though :/

radial_symmetry• 9 days ago

[flagged]

miltonlost• 9 days ago

Communication about truth is also hard when against decades of industry, talk radio, right-wing media, and Republican propaganda lying about the climate. And humans, with very little scientific or critical thinking skills, felt comfort in the lie that "everything is ok!". Getting past a person's discomfort in order for them to accept truth is a high hill.

Lomlioto4• 9 days ago

[flagged]

tomhow3• 9 days ago

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. It's a hallmark of a low-effort comment that it is not even terminated with a period, and this is the case with many of your comments.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

ludicrousdispla2• 9 days ago

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.

MarkusQ2• 9 days ago

Like this?

https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/?dm_id=nino3.4

snaking0776• 9 days ago

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.

darthwalsh2• 9 days ago

There's probably an economic incentive to get visitors to read past the show more button?

dudefeliciano2• 9 days ago

There is no show more button and scroling to the graph takes less than half a second.

KingOfCoders• 10 days ago

There are many thing people could do, eat less meat, smaller homes, electric cars, green energy, no flights etc. but the vast majority of people does exactly nothing.

embedding-shape• 10 days ago

eat less meat, smaller homes, electric cars, green energy, no flights etc.

How much % of the world's population would have to do those things, for the graph to show a reversal of the trend? 10%? 50%? Everyone?

Hoodedcrow• 10 days ago

"Eat less meat, smaller homes, no flights"? Sounds like an average person to me because of poverty, lol. Even my family, well above the threshold for poverty, has to do this.

"Electric cars" is less likely tho because having a car at all is a money drain.

cynicalsecurity2• 10 days ago

Chinese and Indian CO2 emissions dwarf anything you mentioned. You can stop eating meat altogether and move to a small doghouse, it won’t make any global impact at all.

isoprophlex• 10 days ago

This line of "hurrr but they are doing it too so why should I stop!" reasoning constitutes a logical fallacy that a motivated 9 year old is probably already able to reason themselves out of

zaik2• 10 days ago

If the factory is in China but the product is consumed in the US who should the CO2 emissions be attributed to?

walthamstow• 10 days ago

I agree that we should but rational individuals are not going to voluntarily lower their standard of living at any noticeable scale. Simply not going to happen.

arrrg• 10 days ago

Changing your own behavior is certainly not wrong but also not a solution.

Policy changes are needed to address this problem. It’s a political problem that needs a political solution.

kalx• 10 days ago

That’s because those who (our countries that enforce it) eat less, have smaller properties, less productive cars and infrastructure etc, those are the countries that will have the short end of the stick in 10-20 years time - just look at Europe. The tragedy of the commons at a global scale.

Snafuh• 10 days ago

less productive cars

How does enforcing emissions regulations result in less productive cars?

Cars move about 1.5 people per trip on average. A big pickup or SUV is not any more productive doing this task than a mid sized car.

modo_mario• 10 days ago

eat less meat

Eat less and different meat with a smaller footprint. Mostly poultry, eggs, also more organ meats, etc. Also combat fertiliser runoff, etc.

The methane output of a field of cattle isn't that dramatically different from a forest with deer, decomposing wood, etc. Methane is also a potent but temporary actor and tackling it primarily just buys us very little time which will be used as an excuse to keep pumping co2.

However we grow a good bhunch of the feed for that cattle and for ourselves with fossil fuel based fertilisers. We need to quit that. If we get rid of both that 8% co2 output for fertilisers and get rid of the manure as well because we ditch meat too much...

Well we'll solve a lot of related problems by drastically reducing the world's population with a gigantic famine.

gherkinnn2• 10 days ago

Individual action is not the solution

inigyou15• 10 days ago

It can be, but not in the usual way.

______• 10 days ago

What is the collective if not a collection of individuals?

sph3• 10 days ago

Yes, I should recycle more. Meanwhile, it’s OK for politicians to invest in coal and build gas-powered datacenters, while the ultrabillionaires buy groceries in a private jet.

Don’t worry about that, just recycle more!

It is about time we stop blaming the individual at the bottom of the ladder for the problems of society. And let me preempt you: society isn’t made up of individuals, but it is much greater than the sum of its parts.

danparsonson• 10 days ago

Why does it have to be one or the other? 7+ billion small actions add up; power plants and datacenters are still at least partly about fulfilling consumer demand.

Or to put it another way - which of those things is under our control? If one can do something more, then why not? Because billionaires? The climate doesn't blame anyone, it just exists; being to blame or not, doesn't matter when we're all in the same boat together.

yellow_lead• 10 days ago

Lots of AI tells in this article. Ironic?

It's not a forecast. It's not a simulation of what might happen decades from now. These are...

tgv• 9 days ago

The site is apparently one of those AI generated bait traps. The link to the original article is in the (current) top comment.

jibal• 9 days ago

A lot of people mistake basic literacy for AI. Don't forget that LLMs are trained on human texts and replicate patterns within them.

tormeh• 9 days ago

I think that kind of breathless excited tone is justified by the subject matter. Unlike the usual LinkedIn posts this is actually about a pretty dire situation.

stymaar5• 10 days ago

This blog post is pure slop, stealing from this one: https://climatecasino.substack.com/p/some-monsters-are-real the submission should be updated to link to the original instead.

lambdaone• 10 days ago

That article is vastly superior and is the one that should be being discussed, not this.

engineer_222• 10 days ago

Turn the volume on the typical El Niño impacts up to eleven, then watch the collective infrastructure of modern industrial civilization crumble. Watch as flooding storms wash away roads and cities. Watch as trailing storms create new inland lakes, swamping farmland. Watch as fires raze forests and grasslands. Watch as heatwaves turn temperate regions into unsurvivable hellscapes. Watch as crops fail and dams burst. Watch as the shelves of your local grocery store gradually, then suddenly, go empty.

I think this kind of writing is low quality.

Arodex2• 10 days ago

The Forest of Fontainebleau, just 50 km south of Paris, is burning, with Canada it's on the scene trying to contain it. Nearby highways and trains - some of the busiest of France - are cut. It is a temperate European forest, oak trees and beech.

No AC is going to save European from that. In fact, it is American AC which is the main cause of it. They dumped all that energy and greenhouse gases and Europeans are the one impacted by these externalities.

anakaine4• 10 days ago

AC?

phtrivier3• 9 days ago

Air Conditioning. Aka "La clim'" in France.

For some context: the conversation about climate change in general, and the recent heatwaves in particular, has been (quite cynically, but cleverly) reframed by far-right parties to be all about "we need to put AC in France to survive heatwaves".

This is smart because it addresses on the physical sensations of people (it's the third heatwave since end of may, and counting), it has an element of truth (AC is critically lacking in schools), it seems much more "down to earth" than the grand plans of "decarbonization", and it makes other political parties look out of touch (the left and greens have been criticizing AC because of the energy impact.)

Of course, this is both "smart" and incredibly cynical, given that the far right has been on the edge (or not so much on the edge) of climate denial for years. So year, "climate changes is not real" turned into "why didn't they put AC everywhere ?" then "vote for us, we'll put AC everywhere !"

This is also very short sighted.

But I guess no one has found a way to ask our future president (Marine Le Pen, twice convicted of embezzlement, waiting to know if she will have to run for President with a "jail from home" tracker, etc...) what exact amount of "putting AC and kicking immigrants out" is going to avoid Fontainebleau forest from burning.

(Also, since those people are incredibly "lucky", I can only imagine what will happen if we learn that the fire was volontary, and the arsonist was an immigrant... )

The only "consolation" is that El Nino is coming back, and she takes office on the 15th of may, so _she_ will have to deal with at least a couple heatwaves between 2027 and 2037...

ericd3• 10 days ago

That’s tragic, I love Fontainebleau. But it’s industrial civilization as a whole, not American AC. Cement is a larger contributor, for example.

iamacyborg• 10 days ago

Shit, I missed that my home town was burning

ykonstant• 9 days ago

It is not "American AC" that is a serious contributing factor, much less the "main cause"(???).

triceratops7• 9 days ago

They dumped all that energy and greenhouse gases and Europeans are the one impacted

Europeans dumped plenty of greenhouse gases themselves.

retube• 10 days ago

You also need to ask what is the likelihood you get this move just by chance

gpderetta• 10 days ago

According to https://climatecasino.substack.com/p/some-monsters-are-real, this is a 1 in 7000 years event (i.e. 3.5 sigmas).

noosphr3• 10 days ago

I'm not sure how you can make that claim with only 29 years of data without making some pretty big assumptions about the underlying distribution.

yorwba• 10 days ago

Assuming the measurements are independent samples from a normal distribution. Which they of course aren't, as measurements of adjacent days are obviously correlated (if they were independent, a 1-in-7000 event could be expected to happen on about 2 days within a 44-year span). Now the question is what the nature of the deviation is.

- How independent are measurements of different years?

- Has there been a systematic change in the distribution mean?

- Has there been a systematic change in the distribution variance?

- Was there a good reason to assume that the temperature distribution would be normally distributed to begin with? (Maybe there are strong non-additive effects.)

In any case, it's clear that assuming the observed temperatures in the 1991-2020 range follow a normal distribution and temperatures outside that date range will follow the same distribution is a bad model of reality.

Anon1096• 9 days ago

Within the 1982-2026 span there is an equally negative 3.5 sigmas deviation somewhere (no year labels on the graph). The article doesn't touch on it at all so I have no context as to what it could be. But it definitely suggests 3.5 sigmas is not really 1 in 7000 years.

RecycledEle4• 10 days ago

I make this prediction: In 5 years, we will have learned that the red line was in error, and the temperatures will be in the bottom half of the graph.

I know this because every prediction of climate doom turned out to be false.

Entire nations were going to disappear under rising sea levels. It has not happened. I'm not saying no land sinks, but sea levels are not rising rapidly enough to prevent Al Gore (author of "An Inconvenient Truth") from buying an ocean-front home. The same applies to John Kerry and dozens of other outspoken prophets of doom who warned us that rising sea levels would submerge entire nations. They used the proceeds of their fear-mongering to buy oceanfront homes.

I remember signs in Glacier National Park telling us the glaciers would be gone by the year 2,000. It has not happened.

This "signal" too will pass.

zaik2• 10 days ago

The red line is not a prediction, it is a measurement.

RecycledEle4• 9 days ago

1 in every 100 measurements will give a 1-in-100 result.

Please check back in 5 years.

locknitpicker• 10 days ago

You seem to be deep in denial.

These are not projections. These are measurements.

These are known trends from the past century. The trend is accelerating in what seems to be an exponential pattern.

https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...

We are experiencing record heat in northern Europe, with temperatures in line with what a couple of decades ago would be expected in north Africa during the summer.

Southern Europe is already experiencing massive droughts in major urban centers.

RecycledEle4• 8 days ago

We are experiencing record heat in northern Europe

Nope. They color coded the maps differently, but the temperatures are in line with what is normal for that part of the world.

Southern Europe is already experiencing massive droughts in major urban centers.

But a quick we search tells me: "Southern Europe is currently experiencing wetter-than-average conditions"

Where is rainfall down so much that there are "massive droughts" in Southern Europe?

These are not projections. These are measurements.

Please check back in 5 years. The temperatures in the Niño 3.4 region of the equatorial Pacific will be below the 100-year average by then.

anakaine4• 10 days ago

Others have corrected your confusion between prediction and observation. Lets instead show what we have already seen, today, that was previously predicted.

Kiribati and Tuvalu have measurable loss of land due to rising sea levels that is impacting people today. About 80% of the Maldives Islands will likely be uninhabitable within the next 25 years. The Marshall Islands have lost 18 out of their average 200cm above mean sea level height - roughly 6% of its land.

We have seen massive glacial retreat even in just the past 10 years, let alone the past 50. This is happening the world over, and at a rate that is not previously seen in the geological record (happy to argue this, thats my background). We are seeing large ice loss and lack of matching accumulation over Antarctica and Greenland - two great places to observe large scale processes. We just saw the Arctic stay largely unlocked for sea ice/shipping last season. The sum of these will take a moment to kick in, but the failure of conveyor currents will kick us all in the arse quite significantly and likely within our lifetime, and we have already seen hiccups.

RecycledEle4• 9 days ago

Please check back in 5 years.

sethammons• 9 days ago

Glacier park had 150 glaciers in the mid 1800s. Today it has 26. No crisis to see: we still have nearly 20% of what we once had /s

iDon• 10 days ago

Representing that as a "climate spiral" would make it unnecessary to adjust for the seasons, and the original data could be used instead of a statistical view. It makes it easy for anyone to see the trend. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_spiral - https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/visualizing-daily-global-t... - https://www.climate-lab-book.ac.uk/spirals/

HPsquared• 10 days ago

Polar coordinates are such a nice way to visualise periodic data.

crazygringo3• 9 days ago

They often are not, because they highly distort shape and size. Values that are smaller than the mean occupy much less space (area-wise) and seem less significant than they really are, while values that are larger than the mean occupy much more space (area-wise) and seem more significant than they really are.

_kulang• 10 days ago

These are nice if you are scientifically literate but I suspect not so great for the lay

holowoodman11• 9 days ago

Thanks. Those are much better than the graph trash in the original article.

Filligree• 9 days ago

Though the graph is ten years old. Why is it so hard to find recent data? :-(

crazygringo3• 9 days ago

The climate spiral can be misleading though, because it's natural for a viewer to interpret the change in terms of area.

Then, the increase from 1.5° to 2° looks much, much larger than the increase from 0° to 0.5°.

So it's misleading in terms of making recent warming seem even worse than it is. Now, of course, you might argue that is justified in spirit because the negative consequences from warming grow faster than linear... but that doesn't make it any less misleading in terms of the temperature change it is communicating.

layer8• 9 days ago

It would be easy to adjust the radius so that the area increase is proportional to the temperature increase.

anonymousiam• 9 days ago

0° is not zero. Your premise would be true if we were using the Kelvin temperature scale.

nixonaddiction• 10 days ago

“wahhhh this is bad” ok sure but how. what will the downstream effects be. how can we model increased ocean temperatures and how they will affect weather patterns or whatever? gives me no info on the implications, let alone info on the implications with rigor.

tramc• 10 days ago

It’s not spelled in nursery rhyme, but it literally does give info on the implications. As the article states, they are not as simple as A => B, so it provides general idea of the implications. The general idea being ecosystem destabilisation and intensification of extremes and their frequency.

dudefeliciano2• 10 days ago

How they will affect weather patterns or whatever?
This is why graphs like this matter. Not because they prove that catastrophe is inevitable, and not because they predict the precise sequence of events over coming years. Science rarely deals in absolutes. What they show is that Earth is moving beyond the range within which modern human civilisation developed. We’re entering climatic conditions that our infrastructure, ecosystems, economies and institutions were never designed to accommodate.

Reading helps. Also it's pretty clear from the "waaaaah" that you are not asking a good faith question but rather dismissing the article, without bringing any information or sources to back whatever point you are trying to make - ironic.

DivingForGold• 10 days ago

Conspicuous that the X axis is missing numbers ... weeks, days, or months ....

Walf2• 10 days ago

It's one year, from left to right. The termination of the red line is in the middle because it's the middle of the year.

pmnelson• 10 days ago

It is labelled "Day of Year".

jph00• 10 days ago

The range is provided in the title. Presumably it's just regularly sampled over that range.

cbdevidal• 10 days ago

I couldn’t help but notice that there was an equally cold spike at the bottom.

RetroTechie8• 10 days ago

Can you please define "equal"? (and exactly which pic you're referring to?)

SideburnsOfDoom• 10 days ago

This happened a couple of El Niño cycles ago, in the 2015-2016 one:

The City of Cape Town began experiencing a drought in 2015, the first of three consecutive years of dry winters brought on possibly by the El Niño weather pattern and perhaps by climate change

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Town_water_crisis

It's quite possible that this one could worse.

inigyou15• 10 days ago

This website is making heavy use of IP range blocking. Here's an uncensored link: https://web.archive.org/web/20260713092155/https://www.lyreb...

Alternatively, since the link that was posted is just an AI copyright theft site, use the original instead: https://climatecasino.substack.com/p/some-monsters-are-real

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48890533

jstanley2• 9 days ago

Interestingly web.archive.org is blocked for me but TFA isn't.

eth0up2• 9 days ago

I just left a comment on this elsewhere, but are you using cloudflare or nextdns? They seem to block archive sites, especially archive.today (archive.is, etc)

ablation3• 9 days ago

The author of that Climate Casino post has some... strong views. So you might want to bear this in mind when reading his analysis:

"The human cancer is destructive to every living thing, as humans continue to eat the planet into oblivion. As someone who values “everything else,” I would be one of the first to rally behind the NTHE philosophy if it had any scientific basis at all. I want the human cancer gone from this planet."

https://climatecasino.substack.com/p/unfortunately-the-end-o...

Loquebantur4• 9 days ago

People in the climate movement are rarely professional PR folks. Weaponizing their personal faults against the objective subject matter they talk about is disingenuous anyway?

You cannot deduce factual correctness from how "holy" the messenger is.

elcritch• 9 days ago

It's additionally not clear that TFA is a copy of the Climate Casino (CC) post.

It's on the same topic, possibly spurred by the CC. Yes it uses the same graph (which I presume CC also didn't make), but otherwise the content and writing is very different. It's less detailed, possibly LLM written, but also more approachable.

I guess re-posting about a salient topic is now just "AI copyright theft".

brikil• 9 days ago

To be fair, the planet is gonna be fine in the long term. It's the human race that's in danger... so maybe a win-win from his perspective??

bryanrasmussen• 9 days ago

So, because he's a nutter the graph shouldn't be front page news is the argument then? That'll teach him.

He will learn the regret the day he dared say "hey, this graph means we're all gonna die if we don't do something! Look at it!" because we outsmarted him by refusing to look.

QuantumGood2• 9 days ago

The most powerful humans, and human systems, often score very low on stewardship and empathy. While "cancer" triggers as opinionated, using a less-charged analogy I think should probably make a similar point.

andy_ppp• 9 days ago

I can understand the desire to be concerned about the climate systems that keep earth habitable for humans starting to break down might come with some extreme views. It seems almost thinking we can continue as normal given the predictions of climate scientists are now coming true, is the extreme views. I worry that these climate scientists might have under egged their estimates due to a “sensible mindset” rather than following the data and we could be in for a horrifying next 30-50 years.

pyaamb• 10 days ago

the ignorance is a consequence of our societies system of incentives. everything keeps pointing back towards that each time theres an event like this. But if we aren't going to attach an economic price for emissions then it remains an externality and not a recognized reality to the economy. The current US administration is playing a leading role in keeping it that way. And voters keep voting for it. Incentives.

Loquebantur4• 10 days ago

The economic system itself is incompatible with the physical reality of a finite planet.

The ones steering society choose to crash and ruin everything rather than to jeopardize their positions in power.

That obvious failure in morals and ethics, basic principles of adult responsibility really, is made possible by a lack of rational reflection in the populace.

Objective truth has to take precedence over subjective desires when it comes to existential questions. Currently it does not.

constantius2• 9 days ago

I'd push back.on blaming the populace for this: the widespread belief in general polls is that the climate situation is dire and that drastic measures need to be taken.

However, the constraints that most people have to contend with do not allow them to be more radical in their calls for change. You saw it in the Gilets Jaunes/Yellow Vests uprising in France, that was motivated not by the passion for IC engines but by the inability to weather the costs of taxation on older vehicles.

The real culprit is far and away corporations that benefit from activities that carry with them extreme effects on the climate, and who can influence both politics and media. The research (sorry for lack of link) that shows that political direction is largely controlled by moneyed interests is not ambiguous.

I do agree that the populace also deserves some of the blame however: regular renewals of electronic devices, and especially the continuing consumption of animal products, is a moral failure justified only by pleasure.

ernst_klim• 9 days ago

The economic system itself is incompatible with the physical reality of a finite planet

The economic reality is perfectly compatible with finite reality, because growth is not a function of resources.

An email is more economically valuable than a paper mail despite requiring much less resources (and leading to a much less CO2 emission)

azan_8• 9 days ago

The economic system itself is incompatible with the physical reality of a finite planet.

„Infinite growth is impossible on planet with finite resources” is nice buzzphrase, but upon closer inspection it makes literally zero sense. Fortunately people will never accept degrowthers’ postulates.

the_real_cher2• 9 days ago

Does any country care? Isnt China far worse thsn the US?

defrost• 9 days ago

Does any country care?

China ostensibly cares, their five year plans drawn up by committees of Engineers (Civil, Mechanical, Electrical) and Scientists are on an arc to minimise reliance on fossil fuels and transition to renewables (wind, solar), and nuclear.

There are strategic reasons for this, of course.

Isnt China far worse thsn the US?

"It's complicated"

* Historically the US is responsible for a greater mass of the CO2 humans have added to the atmosphere.

* Currently, China is adding more per annum (and India is in the bleeding edge mix also, as is Australia) in absolute terms, but still less(?) in per capita terms (having a much much larger population).

* China is still using coal (although they are on the cusp of peaking their use) - that gets thrown at them a lot, the caveats are

-- China shut down a lot of badly polluting inefficient coal power plants.

-- China opened up a lot of more up to date less polluting but still coal power plants.

-- China is using these to power all manner of stuff including the build out of the largest renewable power components production line in the world.

-- Coal is set to be phased out "soon" (and it seems to be slowly going that way, see peaked comment above).

* A lot of China's CO2 emissions are a direct result of their mineral processing, production, and assembly of the rest of the world's consumption.

( eg: The case can be argued that the fall in US per capita CO2 emissions is a result of US consumption now being met by manufacturing that has moved from the US to China)

There are literal books and stacks of research papers arguing about each point mentioned above - and that's just skimming the surface.

dghlsakjg5• 9 days ago

China has a far lower per capita carbon emissions rate than the US. Has a growing share of energy produced by green technology. Is the world leader in manufacturing electric cars and using electric cars. Is the global leader in low cost solar panels and batteries among other green technology. Oh yeah, and a huge portion of their emissions go to making things that Americans consume. On top of all that, they have managed to stop growth in their carbon emissions and are on the cusp of reducing them.

I don’t know how China could possibly be considered worse except that they historically used coal, and are rapidly transitioning away.

deaux• 9 days ago

Considering that it's thanks to China that even a 1% chance of avoiding this remains, I'd say so. Without their enormous investments in solar and batteries, it would be 0% rather than 1%.

triceratops7• 9 days ago

Isnt China far worse thsn the US?

That's fossil fuel industry funded psyops.

hnfong2• 9 days ago

I always feel obliged to link to this when contextually appropriate:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

__MatrixMan__• 9 days ago

We've built an economic system that latches on to scarce things and makes them less scarce. Now we need to make harmful activities scarce, and we can't.

We have to kill this thing before it kills us. There have to be better things to base an economy on (consent? reciprocity? Foresight?).

sdevonoes• 10 days ago

In a world where we have people like Trump, Musk, Thiel, et al, with extreme power and resources, why would we hope for something like climate change to be addressed?

What can scientists do? Even if they are 100% right and can prove it, they have no power to do anything. Governments of the top countries are puppets of the US, so there’s not much to do. Other governments are dealing with more mundane problems. And the “A fucked up planet affects everyone equally” is just not true. Billionaires can live in a fucked up planet just fine. They don’t even need people (as demonstrated by AI and its goal of replacing workers). They truly don’t care about us. And if the worst forecast for the planet is to come, they also won’t care (they would just live to their fullest while they can)

Telemakhos2• 9 days ago

US Greenhouse gas emissions are down 18% from 2007 levels. CO2 emissions and electricity generation are no longer linked. You might not like them, but Trump, Musk, Thiel, et al (whoever the et al are) are doing a good job pushing nuclear power as well, which promises a more energy-rich future without greenhouse emissions.

The people who truly don't care are not in the US; they're China and India, whose per capita CO2 emissions are exploding to the upside. China alone makes up like a third of the world's emissions. They don't talk about cutting emissions but about slowing their growth, and yet people are upset at US politicians as the US is busy meeting climate goals it doesn't even profess (and which don't bind China). When you look at actual data, the people you're blaming aren't the ones you should be blaming.

WA• 9 days ago

Your post is the typical "it's not us, it's them".

- Per capita: US has the highest emissions: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita

- Cumulative, US has the highest emissions: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co-emissions?c...

As a European, we have the same thing going on, except we're usually saying "let the US and China do it first", but our cumulative baggage is also pretty big.

In some way, the US and EU are even MORE responsible for reducing emissions and cleaning up their mess, because they reaped all the benefits of a high GDP because of massive burning of fossil fuels without investing heavily into renewable infrastructure.

inigyou15• 9 days ago

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.

NoGravitas3• 9 days ago

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 individuals and extremely effective.

briHass• 9 days ago

I won't comment on the others you mentioned, but Musk has probably done more for reducing CO2 emissions than any other human on the planet by popularizing electric vehicles and making them 'cool'.

These are the types of solutions we should be cheering, because people voluntarily chose the less-CO2 product due to its appeal. No heavy handed laws required.

RetroTechie8• 10 days ago

Tend to follow climate-related news closely. But even then: eyebrows raised.

Heh.. Maybe in future we'll see wars being fought not over access to fossil fuels, but over attempts to stop other countries from pumping more fossils out of the ground.

"What the planet is going to experience over the next 12 months is just a preview of the movie that’s coming. Godzilla is going to return, and return, and return and return … and as bad as the movie gets, we won’t be able to walk out of the theater."

That's the scary bit: no escape hatch. We're all in this together.

That's why international co-operation on climate change should NOT be opt-in. Your countries' freedom to emit greenhouse gasses ends where my countries' (future) safety is at stake.

exe344• 10 days ago

War is one of the biggest emitter of co2 though.

lotsofpulp• 9 days ago

Technically, could be negated if enough people who are projected to consume above a certain amount over the course of their lifetimes are killed.

RetroTechie8• 9 days ago

Ok then we should focus on eco-friendly ways to stop each other from pumping fossils.

iamnothere• 9 days ago

The nations with the strongest militaries are also the largest emitters. Attempting to force these countries into compliance might not be the smartest move.

In fact, any scheme like this will almost certainly be used to forcibly prevent development in already impoverished nations.

deadeye• 10 days ago

The mean is created using 29 years of data. Why those particular 29 years? IDK.

But I tend to dismiss findings like this that don't explain why they chose a very specific dates as the baseline.

VladVladikoff• 10 days ago

Yes I was wondering the same. Why is the mean using a different set of years than the total data set? There also seems to be a year where the swing was equally as extreme in the other direction, what year was this? Would be worth mentioning at least in the post.

penteract• 9 days ago

Based on https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/?dm_id=nino3.4, 1988 is the year from the dataset with the lowest temperature throughout June and July.

card_zero2• 9 days ago

Hmm. "The 1982-1983 El Niño was the strongest and most devastating of the century, perhaps the worst in recorded history."

https://www.whoi.edu/science/B/people/kamaral/1982-1983ElNin...

So maybe the data starts there in order to distort it, or to balance it, or maybe we started recording data properly in that year because El Niño got alarming. Seems relevant somehow anyway.

thegrim33• 9 days ago

Yup. 20% of the population will look at the graph and scream about how we're all doomed and need to start executing people / nuking countries to fix it (seriously, comments from this very thread), 20% of the population will look at the graph and see the hilariously short timeframe, the carefully manipulated axes ranging, and instantly dismiss it as extremist climate doomer insanity and close out of it, and the remaining 60% of the population doesn't care one way or the other.

mempko3• 9 days ago

Question to you, if they looked further back, do you think the variability would increase or decrease. Do you also believe the mean temperature would be lower or higher? Just want to understand your mental model of the climate.

jgalt212• 10 days ago

I see a negative outlier equal in magnitude to the positive outlier the author is drawing our attention to. What should we make of that data point?

bvan2• 9 days ago

Yes, it is worth looking at. My thinking was, how fast did that sequence revert back to the’mean’? It doesn’t take away from the author’s message though.

holowoodman11• 9 days ago

This graph shouldn't be front-page news. Why? Because it is a crappy graph that says nothing.

That there are deviations from the median is a normal statistical thing. Even deviations beyond 3 sigma. It happens. That's statistics. Those deviations might even be frequent more or less frequent than your statistics table says, because the data might not follow a gaussian normal distribution. See the graph, there is a -3.5 deviation in there...

What would be an interesting graph is: From 1982 to 2026 on the x-axis, plot the yearly maximum and minimum daily sigma and the median. Or just plot all the overlapping segments from the original graph as a continuous sequence. That way one could see periodicity, rising and falling of those values and the overall change over time. (Edit: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48890590 for much better graphs)

But that graph is useless to convey any information beyond "well this year the line goes up". The article also does nothing to really explain the statistical background. Quite the contrary.

The article shows things that the graph doesn't illustrate at all: Like "This is why graphs like this matter [...] What they show is that Earth is moving beyond the range within which modern human civilisation developed.". Like fucking hell it doesn't! The graph starts in 1982! Modern human civilization started in 1982?

Like "The tropical Pacific is thus no longer oscillating around a climate that existed a century ago. It's oscillating around a much warmer baseline.". Well, and why then does this graph start in 1982? Why can't you show that century?

Like "The red line is this year. It doesn't just set a new record. It has departed entirely from the range of previous observations.". No, it fucking doesn't!. Look at the graph, there is a line at -3.5 sigma! Well within range. And even so, it's statistics, outliers are to be expected.

What this article and this graph need is a permanent relocation to the trash can. And a lesson for the author in science. Real science, not misleading propaganda that hurts the cause more than it helps.

bvan2• 9 days ago

You’re welcome to go get the data and chart it the way you think it should be charted, and then we can have a conversation.

mbgerring3• 9 days ago

Instead of arguing about this on the internet you could do what I’m doing: working to take carbon emissions off the board.

It’s not easy right now because of the funding and political climate, but you can find work where success is measured by metrics like “gallons of diesel not burned.”

Start here: https://climatebase.org

Loquebantur4• 9 days ago

Only, while such work is necessary it's also insufficient.

You point at the actual problem yourself: political obstruction and funding going to the opposite.

The relevant issues here are ironically precisely those you can solve by discussing them on the internet.

They are caused by people not thinking right and having their emotions cross-wired.

They can be solved by correcting those errors in reasoning and setting evaluations right. Via discussion.

bluebarbet• 9 days ago

This is a decidedly optimistic take given what we know about social media. HN may be a rare exception.

Rather than using reason to get people to surmount their "emotions" and to "think right", I'd argue we rather need to frame the issue in terms of their self-interest, and to try to persuade and convince not them but rather their tribal leaders.

mbgerring3• 9 days ago

I’m going to tell you, as a person whose path went from journalism to activism to engineering in climate tech and climate justice: persuasion isn’t going to get the goods. Changing the reality on the ground through R&D and deployment moves the needle. There are a lot of very good, very smart people who have been heads down since the 70s building the infrastructure for decarbonization, and we’re winning, even as we continue “losing” the political argument.

andyjohnson0• 9 days ago

People quibbling about whether TFA was written by an AI and why the chart is at the end of the article and what a standard deviation. Meanwhile the planet is simmering.

holowoodman11• 9 days ago

The article is crap as well as the graph. And the author made the planet simmer even more to produce this crap.

birksherty2• 9 days ago

Most crap thing here is this species.

amanaplanacanal2• 9 days ago

Data visualization is hard, but what do you think is wrong with the graph?

anthomtb• 9 days ago

When the substance of an article is accurate, the best people can do is argue over the presentation.

the_real_cher2• 9 days ago

Apparently El Nino reduces Gulf of Mexico hurricanes.

So being in New Orleans is a mixed bag for me.

zombot• 9 days ago

The question is whether we're willing to pay attention and act before the changes become too large, too rapid and too interconnected for us to manage.

I think I can guess the answer to this. It's an easy extrapolation of the past.

harimau777• 9 days ago

If we assume that governments aren't going to address climate change and coordination between private citizens is unlikely to be enough to stop it, has anyone written anything on what individuals should do to avoid its effects?

It feels like we are at the point where we should be talking a lot more about how live decent lives assuming that prevention and mitigation are unlikely.

dghlsakjg5• 9 days ago

It’s going to be very hard to avoid global phenomena. On top of that, predicting higher order effects on a system this complex is hard.

I live in the PNW on the Canadian side of the border (PSW?) where people have argued that we might be a climate change safe haven due to plentiful water and a temperate climate. That hasn’t stopped us from having extreme weather events. In the past five years we have seen a heat wave that killed hundreds, floods that cut us off from the rest of Canada for weeks, concerns about water supply since our summer water supply relies on snowmelt, and we are getting less snow and more rain in the winter. Fire and dangerous smoke over huge parts of the province is now a given from mid July onwards.

The list goes on, but the point is that there is no avoiding its effects.

coryrc• 9 days ago

You're looking for "deep adaptation"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Adaptation

snowwrestler• 9 days ago

I know of people who bought property in western North Carolina with this mindset. It’s higher elevation, far from coasts, near fertile farm land, with lots of surface water to drink and use. And far from other geo hazards like volcanoes, earthquakes, etc. On paper it checked a lot of boxes for long-term safety.

Then a hurricane went where it had never gone before and wrecked their entire neighborhood.

It’s hard to know exactly how a complex chaotic system is going to react when inputs change. And it only takes one outlier to cause a lot of harm on a local human scale.

This is why so much effort goes into computer modeling of the climate BTW. We know our emissions are changing the climate. But predicting local effects is damn hard.

nekusar• 9 days ago

We know how to fix climate devastation.

We migrate to renewables (solar, wind, geothermal, hydro) and less-polluting baseload (nuclear).

We run desalination plants with the energy.

We quit running farms in deserts (California almond farmers).

We take energy load and run CO2 scrubbers with leftover energy.

We put quotas on how much CO2 you can emit. None of this goofy selling CO2 credits. If you make more CO2, you buy local scrubbers and run them.

The problems aren't climate healing rules. The problem is governments and incumbent companies, and the idea we can't change things rapidly. Or the fact that a company might lose money (or make, GASP, less profit)

clcaev• 9 days ago

LLM or not, I absolutely hate the "not X but Y" writing pattern

chrisjj• 9 days ago

Blame the parrot feed.

vivzkestrel• 9 days ago

- When I read an article that goes like "it is not A, it is B" i know for a fact that someone used an trash LLM to generate it

stymaar5• 9 days ago

It's not even the worse part. Journalists have used the "it is not A, it is B" for a while and it never was as bad as AI doing it.

The key problem is that AI have no “idea” of how to build an argument, so it just rephrases the same ideas over and over in different forms. There's no direction, no structure, it's just rambling.

IshKebab2• 9 days ago

It's going to have to be like 20C hotter before some people will accept that it isn't "just summer".

izzydata• 9 days ago

At that point it will be a self correcting issue when huge swaths of the human population dies from starvation due to not being able to produce enough food. It is preferable to do something prior to then.

IshKebab2• 9 days ago

Unfortunately it's not going to selectively kill reality-deniers.

justatdotin• 9 days ago

Tjanara Goreng Goreng did nothing rong.

#LiarDreaming

skybrian• 9 days ago

It will be front-page news if there are storms later this year. For now, ocean temperature readings far away are effectively a distant early warning of future weather. (Depending on your perspective about “distant” and “early.”)

codeulike• 9 days ago

For those wondering, I found a post with a graph showing actual temperature rather than std dev from mean

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/tompickerell_this-graph-shoul...

ccvannorman• 9 days ago

This was very helpful. Thanks

globalnode• 9 days ago

not really understanding why the SD graph for the year drops below zero at some points.

znpy• 9 days ago

there is another like that reaches similar deviation, but negative (~ -3.5 degree celsius).

it doesn't say what year is that though.

tancop• 9 days ago

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. politicians right now are either doing "think of the corporations we need to leave it up to the market" or insane degrowth proposals or straight climate denial.

the only reason people hate some environmental policies is because they are the wrong ones. we need a wave of green populism thats been missing for decades to scrap unpopular things like ulez, combustion engine bans or individual carbon tax and focus on positive changes people want.

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 there are easy ways to offload that to the rich.

the point is changes that are good for the climate and good for (ordinary, working and middle class) people are better than changes that hurt or just appear to hurt people, even if they are a bit less effective.

imperio59• 9 days ago

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

childintime• 9 days ago

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.

krupan4• 9 days ago

And we should have started at least 30 years ago. But better late than never?

tejohnso• 9 days ago

there are easy ways to offload that to the rich.

Oh? Do tell.

We have plenty of centi-millionaire individuals in the world. Over ten thousand in the USA alone.

jimbokun• 9 days ago

You got my vote!

Quarrelsome2• 9 days ago

to scrap unpopular things like ulez

How is ulez unpopular? Its geographical, age or class axis. In some places: like the cities, its extremely popular and extremely unpopular in other places: just outside the cities, especially for people who can't afford electric vehicles. Just cos some people vandalise the cameras, don't make it inherently popular or not. Its just that a very few _really_ don't like it, to the extent they're willing to smash stuff up.

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... there are easy ways to offload that to the rich.

The basic issue remains that if we don't punish people relative to their burning of carbon then we're never gonna deal with climate change. One human can undo the hard work of many in one casual or selfish act. By the sound of international debate on the subject we should probably be investing in geo-engineering instead if we care for outcomes.

For all the presumed benefits of a populist green movement, I doubt it would actually care enough about the root issue and easily yield to self-interest. Every electorate-level conversation about climate change always starts and ends with talking about someone _else's_ carbon usage, never our own. As a species we're simply not mature enough to note what habits we've deeply embedded in our culture that are inherently problematic, like supermarkets.

Ntrails2• 9 days ago

How is ulez unpopular?

As a rule most people with a ~10 year old car which runs fine at low cost are going to be frustrated at an extra tax on their vehicle. (It is not like the manufacture of a new electric car is green.)

Ordinary People always were going to have to suffer to migrate off fossil fuels. Expecting them to like it is somewhat hopeful!

deepvibrations• 9 days ago

I agree - I think we really need to encourage reduction in the obvious negative habits and encourage people to take up more positive habits. eg.

- Use car less; walk, cycle, or use public transport more - Eat meat & air-freighted food less; eat local/seasonal produce more - Treat household items as disposable less; repair what breaks and buy for longevity more

I am sure there are plenty more, but how to incentivise these things is a hard problem. One exception being food, where you could easily shift agricultural subsidies away from intensive factory farming and towards local/seasonal food (details may be more complex, but it's do-able!)

mempko3• 9 days ago

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

atleastoptimal• 9 days ago

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.

kypro2• 9 days ago

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.

ecshafer3• 9 days ago

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 tariffs.

hnfong2• 9 days ago

I'm not sure what you're talking about.

Europe dismantled their own nuclear plants and are actively trying to ban electric vehicles from China.

Getting the rest of the world on board would be much easier when you (presumably are in Europe) are getting your domestic policies right.

mtmickush• 9 days ago

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?

benj1112• 9 days ago

First off. Richer people tend to have larger houses, so use more energy. In the UK the grants are such that for me in a smaller house. A heat pump is the same price as a replacement boiler. You could up the grant amount but unless you're going to have a regressive policy of giving more to the rich you aren't going to give the rich all the heat pump and solar they need/can install.

Personally rather than giving someone benefits to pay for electricity I'd rather install solar on their roof.

So for a government, this needs not cost more than what they are doing now.

mcherm• 9 days ago

Or -- hear me out on this one -- we could ban wind energy, raise costs for electric vehicles, and use government resources to promote increased use of coal and oil.

That would have a bunch of advantages such as sounding familiar to leaders whose heyday was in the 1970s, of not making us feel bad about the state of the world, and occasionally giving financial kickbacks to government leaders.

Or... if you don't like this approach, maybe making changes in political leadership is the single most important thing to do.

mmooss2• 9 days ago

That would have a bunch of advantages such as sounding familiar to leaders whose heyday was in the 1970s, of not making us feel bad about the state of the world, and occasionally giving financial kickbacks to government leaders.

Besides 'kickbacks' I don't think those reasons have much to do with it. The policy benefits the fossil fuel industries' investors / owners, and follows the rent-seeking, anti-free market theory and practice of many current capitalists (specifically, that's not about capitalism but a current powerful group of capitalists). Those capitalists strongly influence government.

The other effects you mention persuade the public.

EDIT: We might ask, if the above theory is true, why the same rent-seeking capitalists do use that strategy for renewable energy? Maybe those industries, dominated by many non-American companies, are hard to monopolize? But I'm wandering far into speculation.

strictnein• 9 days ago

Texas, with their evil leadership, generates significantly more solar and wind energy than California, and has significantly more energy storage.

So maybe just blaming this on a political viewpoint you don't like doesn't actually help anything?

https://www.reddit.com/r/charts/comments/1t5ud20/texas_vs_ca...

LordDragonfang2• 9 days ago

I feel like you're not actually engaging with GP's point, Jonathan Swift.

Their point is that unpopular climate policies are exactly what is pushing the general populace towards this sort of regressive climate policy you're describing. "Maybe we should make a change in political leadership" is not a productive contribution when the current leadership is the result of bad policy messaging. GP isn't opposing leadership change, they're explaining how to move towards it.

(As much as I'd like to believe that people will just gain an educated understanding of the issues and choose correctly, the unfortunate fact is that real-world politics doesn't work like that, and has to contend with the fact that populism is what wins elections)

benj1112• 9 days ago

combustion engine bans

You think that won't do anything?

doodlesarefun• 9 days ago

Riots

throwaway20372• 9 days ago

    > scrap unpopular things like ulez

"ulez"? I assume that you mean Ultra Low Emissions Zone, such as the ones in London or Milan? As I understand, for the people who live inside the zone, there has been a dramatic improvement in air quality. For the people who live outside and need to pay to drive in the ULEZ, I suggest they switch to a lower emission or electric vehicle to avoid or reduce their driving fees. In the case of London, the gov't should offer huge incentives to small businesses replace old dirty diesel trucks.

    > remove tariffs on chinese car makers if they create jobs in europe

I recommend that EU follow the path that the US followed. It maintains modest tarrifs on auto imports, but strongly encourages (cheap lending, tax rebates, etc.) foreign manufs to build and operate plants and R&D centers in the US. Since the late 1980s, this has been widely practiced by Japan, Germany, and Korea. As the US auto industry became less and less competitive, they were effectively replaced by autos built in the US by foreign companies.

    > fund train networks to get tickets cheaper than flying

I did a quick Google search. More than 70% of air passengers are travelling for leisure; some sources say as high as 88%. We should use a "green tax" on all air passengers to help fund anything and everything to reduce carbon footprint. How about 10-20 USD per ticket? In my mind, air travel in rich countries is way too cheap in this era.

smcg• 9 days ago

Remember when the Obama and Biden admins started a bunch of solar incentives and Trump rolled them back?

epihelix• 9 days ago

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 there are easy ways to offload that to the rich.

The problem is that most of these (and potentially all of these) ideas sound good, but achieve very little. Some (e.g. right to repair, sadly) will achieve almost nothing at all. This would be a scatter-gun approach at best; at worst, it creates the impression of doing something while actually doing very little.

I don't know what the best solution is. Arguably a genuine carbon tax (one that taxes large producers for the previously-externalised costs of greenhouse gas production, while providing tax cuts to the general population) is the single most effect means of enacting real change. However, Australia demonstrated that even a scheme that results in real, substantial income tax cuts while generating measurable, real reductions in emissions is vulnerable to a scare campaign by a committed, ultra-right attack dog politician.

I strongly suspect that our only potential way out of this now is via geoengineering, and that's fraught with dangers. I am also worried that a lack of government interest in climate change will eventually induce a highly wealthy individual to undertake geoengineering privately, without oversight, scientific input or regulation. But I cannot see the world stopping this any other way, other than by reversing the effects of climate change via nuclear winter.

tenthirtyam3• 9 days ago

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.

runeks• 9 days ago

enforce right to repair

How much would this change Niño surface temperatures, you reckon?

directevolve• 9 days ago

Taxes, debt, loss of shareholder value, and infrastructure buildouts are all highly visible to large swathes of the American population.

Republicans are an anti-tax and to some extent anti-debt constituency. Liberals are also fairly anti-tax, unless it’s limited to taxing the rich. There’s opposition now to all forms of new energy infrastructure: to oil/gas/nuclear from the left and many liberals, to wind/solar from the right.

There are no “easy ways.” Only hard fights, against both sometime allies and longtime political opponents.

19f191ty• 9 days ago

The right comparison is previous El Nino?

recitedropper2• 9 days ago

Don't worry, just a few more months until we get AGI and all of our problems magically disappear as the singularity changes everything forever.

Why care for current iterations of nature, when we will all get to experience infinite varities of it as immortal digital consciousnesses?

defterGoose• 9 days ago

Forgot the /s tag

recitedropper2• 7 days ago

There is a very real contingent of people driving AI who genuinely believe this. And it is this belief that allows them to avoid their cognitive dissonance around the negative externalities of their work. For the environment, and really for the future of humanity too.

The /s tag weakens the post. Glad to see I got downvotes--hopefully a few of these incredibly wealthy people in positions of power had to, for even a brief moment, consider their beliefs.

pdonis2• 9 days ago

"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.

quickthrowman2• 9 days ago

There is not a graph of prehistoric ocean surface temperatures (doesn’t seem possible to obtain this data other than collecting it as it happens as far as I can tell) but there is global historical temperature data. Here is an XKCD comic, scroll to the bottom and pay attention to the rate of change since 1850 vs the prior 20,000 years: https://xkcd.com/1732/

This Wikipedia article has a graph of the last 2000 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_surface_temperature

And yes, I am aware that earth has possibly been covered in ice/slush and also that the avg global temp has been 10C (or more) higher than it is now, but humans were not around for either scenario.

krupan4• 9 days ago

How does the global temperature relate to El Nino temperature? Do we know without having El Nino data?

pdonis2• 9 days ago

there is global historical temperature data

Reconstructed from proxies. Not all experts in the field agree on how reliable the proxies actually are, especially over such long time periods.

jbxntuehineoh• 9 days ago

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

danielmarkbruce3• 9 days ago

You can't be serious. Modern civilization is not just the past few decades.

mempko3• 9 days ago

You are an engineer or programmer? Why are you working in this industry if you can't take the time to learn about how this system works. We are supposed to be systems thinkers with a scientific mindset. How can you make a statement like "Nobody has that kind of temperature data" without researching first?

I'm embarrassed for my industry. I'm shocked how many climate denialists there are among engineers and programmers.

chrsw• 9 days ago

Climate change is a political problem, not an informational problem.

deadbabe• 9 days ago

The question is whether we're willing to pay attention and act before the changes become too large, too rapid and too interconnected for us to manage.

Stopped asking this question a long time ago.

It’s over.

nojvek• 9 days ago

The message of article was great, but I wish it was written by a human.

Yeah we are on track to get to a point where Earth heating up is irreversible before Artificial super intelligence can come to aid to solve it. In fact, our datacenter buildout using gas and coal as primary energy makes this worse.

I think about Fermi Paradox a lot. The tragedy of commons when it comes to capitalism may very well one of the reasons why Dinosaurs may have a longer species lifespan than Homosapiens.

The change happens too slowly, but reversal takes global coordination which humans as a species aren't great at. Especially when anyone not coordinating may be economically advantaged.

ecshafer3• 9 days ago

The same graph also shows a corresponding -3.5 STDEV below the mean temperature as well. It actually seems rather balanced. This year is hot, but we see similar abnormal jumps in other directions.

mrkeen4• 9 days ago

Graphs centred around the mean do tend to look pretty balanced.

tsss• 9 days ago

Now write a blog post about that line at the bottom with comparable magnitude in the other direction.

_alternator_3• 9 days ago

With 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 that an eventful year too? I can't tell and the graph is at such low resolution that the source URL isn't visible. If the graph and data is so important, shouldn't we care more about presentation? This is either super sloppy or deliberate obfuscation.

Look, I'm all for good reporting on climate. This just doesn't feel like it.

smallerize• 9 days ago

I didn't find the source URL unreadable. It's here: https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/?dm_id=nino3.4 The lowest ones were 1988 and 1989.

_alternator_3• 9 days ago

Fair, I had to click into the full size (I pinch zoomed on my phone). But now the fact that 1988/1989 are outliers raise a few more questions about the variance calculation. In particular, the title suggests that those weren't included in the variance calculation.

A 3.5-sigma event is a 1-in-1000 chance. Yet we have 2 of them in our data set that goes back only 40ish years? Something is suspect. Maybe I'm not accounting for the likelihood of a random walk excursion probability, but if a 3.5 sigma event isn't a 1-in-1000 event I have difficulty interpreting.

quantummagic3• 9 days ago

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?

DoctorOetker3• 9 days ago

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?

dwaltrip3• 9 days ago

It seems like you are ignoring the hundreds of other signals that tell a similar story to this graph?

drumttocs8• 8 days ago

I had to assume there must be ads displayed before the "payoff"- luckily, wouldn't know

mvdtnz• 9 days ago

Yeah NZ national news has been going on about this for a couple of weeks. They're trying to scare everyone by saying what an extreme El Nino we're in for this summer with such devastating consequences as (let's see here) warm dry summer days.

It's going to be a good summer, I can't wait.

colechristensen• 9 days ago

The now retired meteorologist at Iowa State, Elwin Taylor had been predicting for decades a dust-bowl level event to happen in 2025 as a result of an 89-ish year cycle. It didn't happen last year but this is a pretty clear signal for this year.

It takes the form of a super El Nino the likes of what is happening right now.

https://www.agriculture.com/weather/news/dust-bowl-coming-in...

aliasxneo• 9 days ago

Do we have reliable data that goes back a lot farther? I'm wondering what the graph would look like as extrapolated between ices ages / other large climate changes across Earth's history.

krupan4• 9 days ago

We don't, sadly

exiguus• 9 days ago

Maybe it becomes headline when the Gulf Stream collapses; but until then: Climate Change does not exist. And actually I read about it a while ago.

etc-hosts• 9 days ago

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...

IAmGraydon• 9 days ago

Here's a related chart with a bit more context. Check out the different ocean regions as well as the air temp anomoly charts:

https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/?dm_id=nino3.4

thelastgallon2• 9 days ago

What is developing is so far beyond any global climate event that has impacted modern industrial civilization that predicting much of what’s coming is educated guesswork. Turn the volume on the typical El Niño impacts up to eleven, then watch the collective infrastructure of modern industrial civilization crumble. Watch as flooding storms wash away roads and cities. Watch as trailing storms create new inland lakes, swamping farmland. Watch as fires raze forests and grasslands. Watch as heatwaves turn temperate regions into unsurvivable hellscapes. Watch as crops fail and dams burst. Watch as the shelves of your local grocery store gradually, then suddenly, go empty.

From: https://climatecasino.substack.com/p/some-monsters-are-real

insane_dreamer• 9 days ago

Haven't you heard -- it's all about building bigger and better AI now. Nobody GAF about warming temps anymore.

And the band played on.

femto• 9 days ago

Where I live, it was front page news four weeks ago.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-16/nsw-bureau-of-meterol...

Not that it lead to any particular action or recognition.

thelastgallon2• 9 days ago

tldr: Deploy a TON of solar. Use the excess production to charge batteries (EVs, BESS), chemical storage (Ammonia), green hydrogen for industrial uses, heat pump for HVAC, CO2 as refrigerant.

Deploy solar everywhere. On roofs (inefficient), plug in solar, vertical solar, solar on reservoirs, highways. Everywhere. Use excess production!

Phase 1

1) Buy only EVs[1]

2) Use EVs as energy storage. Pay the EV owners because power price goes negative (or worst case charge at no cost).

3) This will immediately capture clean energy that is being curtailed (~20% or more)

4) Without 3 in place, we can't accelerate clean energy, because curtailment will increase, making it unproductive.

5) Pay the EV owners to supply power back to the grid. They now replace peaker plants, which is the most expensive part of electricity bills.

6) EV storage becomes the new grid, creating a gigantic energy reservoir. Extremely resilient energy storage. (think just like the kube/containers, cattle/pets, etc)

With the scale of EV car adoption, we'll get better and better at batteries, making them significantly cheaper. This will allow us to build battery swapping infrastructure for big vehicles. Most likely, this will be sodium or solid state.

Phase 2: All big vehicles (trucks/buses) can use battery swapping stations spread out everywhere. The battery swapping stations serve multiple functions, they are an essential part of the short term battery storage (multi-day), a layer above the EV storage. And they also provide the battery swap infrastructure. They get paid for being charged (negative price) and then again for the trucks using them. We shouln't build charging infrastructure for big vehicles, it is capital intensive, requires a lot of expensive machinery, real-time transmission capacity, real estate, wasted time, etc.

Long term/seasonal: Build Ammonia --> electricity emergency plants. We need ammonia at a massive scale anyways for fertilizer. The best outcome would be green ammonia (green hydrogen), using excess power from clean energy.

Industrial uses (heat): Green hydrogen on demand, freshly produced from solar. Hydrogen is the smallest molecule, explosive and corrosive, won't work with any storage.

All heating and cooling: Use heat pumps. Use CO2 as refrigerant and ban everything else. We are going to see 100x deployment of ACs everywhere, all of the third world will buy AC as their incomes increase.

[1] Govts could ban all ICE vehicles, but they wont. Fossil fuel lobby wont let them. For the fossil fuel shills who are invitably going to comment that EV doesn't work for them, please continue using your EV for your daily commute from Alberta to San Diego. There will be enough used ICE cars for the next 20 years.

d_theorist• 9 days ago

The last 40 years is not "the range within which modern human civilisation developed". It's a very thin slice of time even on human scales. Let's try not to vastly overstate the data.

marsxr360• 9 days ago

Sanction Reality: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F--SWFQ6M9c

[instrumental intro]

[bridge]

[VERSE 1: judges] Sanction the judges War crimes didn’t happen That’s all you need to know In this controversial matter.

Sanction the judges War crimes disappear Livestreamed in 4K Still don't see clear

[bridge] [instrumental]

[REFRAIN] That was a verse Now this is refrain Follow the narrative From truth refrain.

[bridge] [instrumental]

[VERSE 2: reality] Sanction reality It’s easier that way Moral clarity Concerns go away

Sanction reality Money will follow Don’t follow the money Morality hollow

[bridge] [instrumental]

[REFRAIN] That was a verse Now this is refrain Follow the narrative From truth refrain.

[bridge] [instrumental]

[VERSE 3: Albanese]

Sanction Albanese Her weapon is a pen Research and legalese Her reports contain

Sanction Albanese Political tool Rubio by Chinese He is sanctioned too

[bridge] [instrumental]

[REFRAIN] That was a verse Now this is refrain Follow the narrative From truth refrain.

[bridge] [instrumental]

[VERSE 4: Climate]

Sanction the climate But climate doesn’t care No speech, no objections It just comes in waves

Sanction the climate NASA is wrong Moon sixty nine Now facts are gone

[bridge] [instrumental]

[REFRAIN] That was a verse Now this is refrain Follow the narrative From truth refrain.

[bridge] [instrumental]

[Final verse]

The system was broke Sanctions were a joke Reality arrives Humanity thrives Your heart knows the truth It's beyond the proof

[bridge] [instrumental]

Your heart knows the truth It's beyond the proof

[bridge] [instrumental]

[instrumental drum and bass]

[outro]

A graph that should be front-page news

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