Global Warming at 3 °C by 2050? What's Behind the New German Climate Warning

https://worldcrunch.com/focus/green-or-gone/global-warming-at-3c-by-2050-what-s-behind-the-new-german-climate-warning/

by tejohnso • 8 days ago

115 195 8 days ago

gnabgib• 8 days ago

Original article: (14 points, 4 hours ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48913407

Is the major issue here that 3 degrees Celsius is like an average so all the hot tropics places just become uninhabitable whereas temperature rises are more moderated in higher latitudes?

Also how much faster and higher will that number go with all the data centers? Can't imagine it not just getting worse.

mitthrowaway2• 8 days ago

The most extreme warming happens at the poles, doesn't it? Plus increases in volatility on top of a rising baseline, so more extreme heat wave peaks even in temperate climates that don't change as much on average.

trescenzi• 8 days ago

It’s sort of all over the place but it’s mostly the other way round. The poles might see like +5-8c. It’s also the overall temperature. Today’s high temperature where I am is 33 and the low is 25. 33 isn’t super unusual, maybe a dozen days a year. 25 as a low though is crazy high even on days historically above 30. It all averages out to +whatever.

For temps by latitude/region this source seems ok on a quick search https://scied.ucar.edu/interactive/compare-climates-regional...

xyzelement4• 8 days ago

// The poles might see like +5-8c.

Poland continues to experience significant cold related deaths and any warning might be welcomed.

defrost6• 8 days ago

One major issue is the extreme difficulty of being precise about tipping points.

Eg: Have you seen a train derail? A couple of degrees of tilt - nothing .. and then .. whoops.

The global climate has been 'stable' about mean values for the bulk of human written history and development of urban civilisations. The planet now hosts 7 billion+ people, largely urban, and feed by a century of stable agriculture patterns write large.

The disruption of that will have a major impact across the human population of the planet.

The tipping points, when they come, are related to the significant loss of polar ice, and the beginning of positive feedback of atmospheric insulation factors other than CO2.

Melting ice, the transformation from near zero degree ice to near zero degree water, takes up a large amount of the energy from the sun trapped by increasing insulation. The energy used to melt X tonnes of ice, if no ice can be melted, will instead raise the temperature of X tonnes of water by some 66 degrees C (or there abouts - worth looking it up exactly).

Increased land and sea surface temperatures releases methane from peat bogs and tundras, and increases the water vapour content of the lower atmosphere.

Both of these things increase the insulation factor of the atmosphere to a greater degree than CO2.

fy20• 8 days ago

We hit 8 billion in 2022 btw.

I think the problem is much worse than people imagine as well. Of those around 5.5 to 6 billion people live in "developed world" conditions (sanitation, water & electricity to the home). Over the next 20 years that's expected to grow to by another 1.5 billion (the previous 20 years was around the same). That alone is going to be a huge demand in energy, for construction and ongoing day to day energy usage.

On the other hand global energy demand has a very close correlation with the number of people living in developed world conditions - so after this point the growth in energy demand should start to level off.

Let's hope China continues to push renewables, and their investment in developing countries favours that instead of fossil fuels.

hcurtiss• 8 days ago

But there have been way higher atmospheric carbon dioxide levels historically, and those have largely coincided with plant and animal life climaxing. See the Jurassic.

danielheath• 8 days ago

Among _many_ other things, 3 degrees Celsius globally means more evaporation over oceans, which makes the air denser.

Denser air carries more momentum, which means more frequent (and more severe) hurricanes.

newsomix9xl• 8 days ago

Greenpeace literature in the 1980s predicted hurricanes from Global Warming.

And here we are.

addaon• 8 days ago

more evaporation over oceans, which makes the air denser

More humid air is less dense than less humid air at the same temperature and otherwise same composition. H2O has a molar mass of 18, vs ~29 for dry air.

cogman10• 8 days ago

There's a lot of bad things that happen at 3C.

The first is that 3C represents a lot more energy in the atmosphere. That translates to more water evaporating from the oceans creating bigger more violent storms (think more frequent flash floods).

It changes the ocean currents which can be really bad. Right now Europe is warm for it's latitude because of a weakening current from the equator to the UK brings a lot of heat. If that completely collapses, Europe can enter an ICE age.

The rising temperature also ends up weakening the vortex of the north pole which mostly keeps the arctic temperatures sealed up north. As that vortex weakens, spills of crazy blizzards can hit unusual places pretty hard. The winter storm in 2021 is an example of that happening.

Then of course there's the potential melting of the ice caps which will release a lot of methane into the atmosphere (speeding up warming). That will ultimately cause sea levels to rise which won't be great for the state of Florida.

Mass migration, crop instability, more frequent and more extreme weather. It's just a combo of bad things that all come together at once.

grahamburger• 8 days ago

As I understand it just means there's a lot more energy in the atmosphere. Like imagine the amount of energy it takes to increase water temperature in a pot by 3° and scale it up to the planet. All that energy makes everything bigger, badder, and less predictable. Longer, dryer droughts; bigger, longer winter storms, etc.

cebert• 8 days ago

If we don’t do something about this, I fear future generations will not view us in a positive light.

Arubis• 8 days ago

We _are_ doing something about this. We’re locating concentrated millions of years of trapped fossil energy and moving it into our atmosphere as fast as we possibly can. To a first approximation, that is the world economy.

Or did you mean to do something differently?

dunWithIt3• 8 days ago

We have to do less

There has been a lot of debate over AC use. Everyone chiming in only discusses runtime energy use.

The biggest issue is mining and manufacturing, and the moving of all the materials, parts, and such.

Every AC has sheathed wires and circuit boards.

Every airplane, car, phone, network router, refrigerator... same expansive mess creation.

Gamers complaining about disc less games despite that problem pipeline and waste.

Complaining about RAM prices despite the problem pipeline.

No one is focused on the lag effects, externalities, of billions using up an endless supply of technologies and dumping airplane smog in the atmosphere. Etc, etc, etc

Thermodynamics makes it pretty clear that energy is not gone just hanging out in the atmosphere.

Thermodynamics means we may be fucked even if we slow down; that energy in the atmosphere can only go from atmosphere into oceans, glaciers, and permafrost. There's a lot of potential energy in the Earth to release as it absorbs the heat already in the atmosphere

gpt54• 8 days ago

Both Europe and US's emissions are significantly (18%-30%) below their peak (which was 20 years ago. The rest of the world is also moving towards renewables.

alephnerd5• 8 days ago

If we don’t do something about this...

We can't. We're too late.

China (13 GT), the US (4.6 GT), and India (3 GT) alone represent 51% of global carbon emissions - and at least in India's case, it is growing at a rate of 5%.

Throw in other large polluters like Russia (2 GT), Indonesia (0.8 GT), Iran (0.8 GT), KSA (0.6 GT), Brazil (0.5 GT), and Vietnam (0.5 GT) whose rate of carbon emissions is growing in the 5-10% range and you see there is no path forward.

Any amount of de-carbonization that China or the collective West does is automatically negated by the other countries I listed. At best global carbon emissions stagnate - which by default is going to lead to a 2-3 °C increase in temperatures.

cute_boi2• 8 days ago

Despite all the pollution, 24% of Indians live below the lower-middle-income poverty line of $4.20 per day...

suzzer99• 8 days ago

What is Western Europe's #?

jmward012• 8 days ago

You conveniently left the US out of that and the US's role in driving global emissions. China is also likely rapidly de-carbonizing right now just like they rapidly spun up. They are an issue, but the US and its policies have a massive impact on this problem. Same with Europe. Rapidly adopting renewables and not externalizing our emissions to other countries would go a long way.

I have seen the argument shift from 'That's a lie. Global warming doesn't exist. Stop pushing regulations for a non-existent problem.' To 'Maybe it does, or there is some human impact but this is all within normal variation and the climate can take some amount of pollution so stop trying to regulate it!' to, I guess the new argument of, 'It's too late so why try? We shouldn't change course because it won't matter so stop trying to regulate the problem away.' It isn't too late. Do something.

tim-projects• 8 days ago

A lot if this industrialisation is actually factories making products that are outsourced manufacturing. So it doesn't really make sense to say its China, India's or Vietnam's fault, when most of the products are being shipped to the US and EU and are not necessarily local born companies.

cute_boi2• 8 days ago

I have already accepted that there is nothing plebs can do about climate change. I can try hard by using public transport, using less plastic, and using less air conditioning, but all of those efforts are rendered useless by rich people going on vacation in yachts or private planes. And if you talk about reducing meat consumption, Americans will go mad, lol.

Ordinary plebs trying to prevent climate change is like subtracting $100 from a billion dollars - it does not make any meaningful difference.

reed1234• 8 days ago

But 800B dollars would matter. And you can vote.

myaccountonhn3• 8 days ago

They're not rendered useless. Do you argue the same way about voting too?

Ultimately consumption is 2/3s of all emissions, and the majority of it is not billionaires.

plqbfbv• 8 days ago

Ordinary plebs trying to prevent climate change is like subtracting $100 from a billion dollars - it does not make any meaningful difference.

It stops making any difference if everyone stops trying. You compare this to subtracting $100 from a billion, but a billion dollars is composed of 10 million $100, and there's only a few rich people in those 10 million.

JumpCrisscross6• 8 days ago

You may enjoy Ian McEwan's What We Can Know: "Civilization as we know it ends. A pair of scholars in 2120, risking death from roving predatory gangs, travel across what’s left of England in search of a long-lost, epoch-making poem titled 'A Corona for Vivien.' They are the last, it seems, historians alive" [1]. (It's less apocalyptic than this makes it seem, at least relative to the modern apocalyptic genre à la Mad Max.)

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/22/books/review/ian-mcewan-w...

crystal_revenge2• 8 days ago

On the path we're on I don't think we'll have to worry too much about future generations.

The EU has already seeing 10,000 excess deaths from climate changed caused heat waves and this is a minuscule taste of what's to come.

A very large percentage of mass extinction events have their roots in increased atmospheric CO2, but all of them on dramatically increased time scales. The closest thing in the history of the planet to what's happening to day was PETM [0] and that was only a lessor extinction event because the Earth was already quite warm (for example, there was already no polar ice at the time).

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene%E2%80%93Eocene_therm...

therealdrag03• 8 days ago

How many excess deaths from cold?

antisthenes2• 7 days ago

The excess deaths from heat/cold are a rounding error compared to the demographic crisis in developed countries.

People aren't getting together and having children at even replacement rate (2.1)

The OECD developed countries population basically peaked a few years ago, even including migration. After the peak, they're on track to lose 300-350 million people in the following 40-50 years.

elchief• 8 days ago

They'll be too dumb from CO2 poisoning to understand the problem!

weregiraffe• 8 days ago

You shouldn't care about how imaginary people view you.

solumunus• 8 days ago

Current generations don’t view us in a positive light.

FranzFerdiNaN• 8 days ago

I’m already do not view our own and the previous generations in a positive light.

AlecSchueler3• 8 days ago

At this point I'll be happy if there are future generations with the capacity to look back and understand what happened.

insane_dreamer2• 7 days ago

If we don’t do something about this

we were sorta going to do something about it, but then we invented LLMs and now nobody cares because $$$ and AI is shiny

I fear future generations will not view us in a positive light.

you can be sure that they already will curse us

leonidasv• 8 days ago

This is the most important part most people don't get:

And what would 3 °C mean for Germany?
FB: In summer, meteorological records could reach up to 50 °C. Three degrees of global warming does not mean hot days will just be 3 or 4 degrees hotter. It could mean up to 10 degrees hotter. We would also face much longer droughts.

3°C warming implies summer days can get 10°C hotter. This is nightmare scenario.

rolph• 8 days ago

this also means thermal turbulence which means breakup of flow, and that means failure of distribution, leading to localized torrid spots, that translates to heat dome regions of more than 10°C hotter.

foxglacier• 8 days ago

Are you saying those researchers got their upper bound too low? You should inform them of their mistake.

dataflow• 8 days ago

This is the most important part most people don't get

I wouldn't say "people don't get" it when it's not well-communicated. When the headline always says 2-3 degrees, of course people are going to shrug.

orwin• 8 days ago

It was always explained that way to me though. the "Our house is burning, and we are looking away" speech was like 20 years ago and it was pretty clear then than average increase in temps mostly mean higher maximums and minimums.

Nowadays, people who never did anything to consume less (and made fun of people who stopped taking the plane) can't hide behind the "we didn't know" because everybody knew, so they hide behind the "it was not predicted to be as bad" and other "the scientists explained that poorly", but we know what's up, even when they lie to themselves.

gmuslera• 7 days ago

That 3°C is about the yearly average of global temperatures, from deserts to poles, night and day, all year round, and maintained for several years. That is not weather, but it’s more like system energy.

Now, some regions get more average heating than others, so in that is not even, and then there is the weather, what you feel day to day. And right now we are already getting extreme heatwaves and other extreme weather events like flooding rains and hurricanes in zones where they were not usual. Those will increase in frequency and intensity, and I would not be surprised if there are peaks of temperature beyond 55°C, even before 2050, in industrialized countries

taegee• 7 days ago

This June in Germany was on average 3 °C hotter than usual. That should give an idea.

nicbou• 7 days ago

For those missing context: we beat all-time heat records with ~42ºC, and it was quite difficult to manage for 3 days with our current infrastructure.

sleight423• 7 days ago

For us Imperialists, 10C is 50F.

We would, quite literally, be cooked. That'd leave us with summers around 140-150F.

antisthenes2• 7 days ago

For us Imperialists, 10C is 50F.

That's nowhere near close to correct.

benhurmarcel• 7 days ago

No, it’s 18°F. This is a temperature difference, not an absolute temperature, the conversion isn’t the same.

puskavi• 8 days ago

EU has done its part, but all efforts are just drop in the ocean. Also, can these studies be trusted? EU basically throws money anything "green" (except buying forests and making them protected), so naturally these studies benefit from it.

crystal_revenge2• 8 days ago

EU basically throws money anything "green"

Including paying to have wood pellets shipped across the Atlantic using bunker fuel and then calling it "bioenergy"

The EU is 'clean' largely out of it's own limited access to fossil fuels and other energy resources rather than because they are "doing their part".

red75prime• 8 days ago

Protecting forests is good and all, but it will not reverse climate change. We'll have to stop all fossil fuel burning and, additionally, sequester around 600 billion tonnes of CO2 (in addition to all the natural carbon sinks) to get back to +1.5C by 2100.

rjrjrjrj• 8 days ago

EU has a lot of historic emissions to make up for.

https://ourworldindata.org/contributed-most-global-co2

yanhangyhy• 8 days ago

lets plant more trees!

musha68k2• 8 days ago

UK official body of actuaries basically says we are on trajectory of "Extreme" rating:

3°C or more by 2050. Multiple climate tipping points triggered, tipping cascade.
over 4 billion deaths

If so, big shifts would already be imminently felt within next 5-10 years.

Remember that there would basically be no place to hide from these direct or knock-on effects.

Not for any self sufficient "prepper with a Mac Studio" nor for any billionaire with their "Galapagos" private island data center come habitat or any other short-sighted fantasy escape scenarios.

https://actuaries.org.uk/media/ni4erlna/planetary-solvency.p...

Edit: "on trajectory" to "Extreme" was too strong; it’s the report’s worst case band and not a forecast. What they’re basically saying is that "the chance of this happening is way too high".

JumpCrisscross6• 8 days ago

there will basically no place to hide from these direct or any knock-on effects

This is nonsense. (And your own source doesn't support the claim that the consequences of global warming will be unmitigable for anyone.)

Many parts of the world will become milder for human occupation as a result of climate change. And nothing realistically forecast is unavoidable with wealth–rich countries will A/C and seawall their ways around the consequences.

musha68k2• 8 days ago

The effects would definitely be felt by everyone if the global population were on its way to be halved. Also knock-on effects like mass emigration putting additional pressure on an already difficult political landscape. Potential for many more wars; more unknown unknowns etc.

Edit: the report’s "Extreme" severity band is indeed not a forecast but they’re basically saying "the chance of this happening is way too high".

Hikikomori7• 8 days ago

Most of the food is grown in certain areas that might not be able to support it anymore. New areas opening up won't be able to be cultivated for decades. Most big cities will cease to function as food supply dwindles. But hey, some enclaves on the outskirts of climate impact and society will not notice so its totally fine and probably even good.

sleight423• 7 days ago

Your perspective is considering only temperature by geography.

Please also consider infectious disease and famine throughout the world.

You can hide from the temperature. You will have a harder time hiding from war and disease.

et-al• 8 days ago

Unfortunately Germany phased out nuclear power, but continues to burn coal.

getnormality3• 8 days ago

We'll know European Greens are serious about climate change when they stop decommissioning nuclear plants and replacing them with coal.

fnordian_slip2• 8 days ago

I recently wrote a reply to someone else with the same argument about the German greens, which I'll recycle here:

"It's bad enough that nuclear proponents ignore the massive cost of nuclear compared to renewables once you factor in building costs, insurance and storage imho. But then to pretend like the conservatives didn't have a choice but to bungle the nuclear exit really is too much.

The CDU never listened to the greens when it came to not killing the solar industry and serving it to China on a golden platter. Or not killing our rail infrastructure by continually delaying maintenance so that we would have to do much more costly repairs later.

But in this instance, they do, and do it in a way that is a gift to the energy companies, and instead of noticing the obvious corruption at play, people still blame the greens."

Sorry if the tone is a bit harsh, but I'm really annoyed at the amount of dishonesty surrounding nuclear energy.

olaf3• 4 days ago

not exactly https://x.com/energy_charts_d/status/2006283588363321836?s=2...

haizhung• 7 days ago

I swear to god there is not one single thread on HN about Germany where nuclear reactors aren’t brought up.

Nuclear reactors are not solving this problem. Period. The technology is too expensive, building them is too slow, and no one wants them.

It’s a smoke screen (that I think is) set up by big oil to distract the focus from renewables, which are cheaper, scale better, and actually endanger their business model.

belorn4• 7 days ago

It is time to set a zero-fossil fuels goal in the grid, similar to how we are banning the sale of new ICE in cars. I would say a complete stop in EU for construction of new grid sized fossil fueled power plants by 2030, and a stop of producing energy in the grid using fossil fuels in 2035.

This should be supported by both those that advocate nuclear and those advocating renewables. Those that do advocate for a grid with renewables that are supported with a reserve energy fleet of fossil fueled power plants, like the oil power plant in south of Sweden, will just have to find an alternative. If that alternative is cheaper, faster and more attractive than nuclear then the choice is obvious, and if its not then fossil fuels are still not an option. This include using bio fuels produced with artificial fertilizers since that process currently uses natural gas (which is why people are predicting a food shortage and famine as a result of the war in Iran).

olaf3• 4 days ago

https://x.com/energy_charts_d/status/2006283588363321836?s=2...

OutOfHere• 8 days ago

If we coat and paint the entire human occupied land surface in white nano-diversely-sized barium sulfate paint, it will reflect the excess heat into space. Most people don't understand that this works or how it works, but science does. We will still have to lower our CO2 and emissions but we will get a break from warming.

pbgcp2026• 8 days ago

Oil refineries, tankers burn in the open. Nuclear stations may get blown by drones / ballistic rockets any moment. Dead dolphins are all over Black sea. And yet ... let's put a price on carbon!

teravor4• 8 days ago

I wouldn't be too worried about it this century at least. if things look like they are going to get bad we will resort to geoengineering, and once we get a taste for it we will further optimize global temperatures to our liking.

perversely, global warming earlier than expected is a good thing [for us] as it will wipe away all meaningful opposition to geoengineering.

note how according to them having 50C days is a likely outcome. no one will tolerate this. sending the sulfur planes is assured at that point. you wouldn't even need to try and convince people with harvest yields.

chorizo• 8 days ago

What we already have is uncontrolled geoengineering. Having said that, geoengineering might lead to geopolitical conflict. The current situation is making the tropical/equatorial area less habitable while creating overall benefits for the high latitudes.

teravor4• 8 days ago

    > geoengineering might lead to geopolitical conflict

I have heard of this but haven't heard a credible scenario describing it. if Europe or the US or China wanted to do it they could just be flying in circles in their own territory to deploy it safely (at the cost of some efficiency probably). only a nuclear power would likely dare to unilaterally do geoengineering.

it remains to be seen who will start the geoengineering effort, arguably Russia would benefit from global warming and so will Canada, so the US food supply should also remain secure.

bulbar3• 8 days ago

We will develop geo engineering with our quantum computers, fueled by cold fusion reactors.

It's not like we just decide to solve something and then it just happens. There can also be serious outcomes of errors are made that are more serious than climate itself.

teravor4• 8 days ago

only if you want to do something really exotic/scifi. volcanoes have shown us how to do it relatively easily.

conservatively, "$18 billion per year per degree Celsius of warming avoided".

ndsipa_pomu4• 8 days ago

I'm not convinced that geoengineering is feasible when we can't even seem to stop churning CO2 into the atmosphere. It's far easier to stop the fossil fuel burning than to scrub the atmosphere or set up huge space mirrors, so why do you think that we'll manage to fix the climate? Far more likely is a massive population die off and a collapse of our modern society. At least some people made a lot of money from burning our future.

kgabis3• 8 days ago

It's far easier to start doing stratospheric aerosol injection than to stop burning fossil fuels.

moritzwarhier2• 8 days ago

Wishful thinking, at best

exabrial• 8 days ago

Germany just shut down several perfectly fine nuclear reactors and has some of the dirtiest electricity generation in the entire world

They need to look inward before pointing outward.

aaronchall• 8 days ago

I'm sure the day after Russia withdraws from Ukraine they're going to demand the pipeline from Russia be restored and everyone they suspect involved involved in the Nord Stream blasts extradited too.

Paradigma11• 8 days ago

North Stream was never about additional capacity. It was always about circumventing Ukraine's pipelines. Which in case of war turned it into a national security risk for Ukraine, which is why they blew it up. It forced Russia to either stop its exports or go through Ukraine. Which all turned out somewhat moot in the end.

lwde• 8 days ago

Just not true https://www.destatis.de/Europa/DE/Thema/Umwelt-Energie/Ausba...

0x000xca0xfe• 8 days ago

Non-renewable != CO2 intensive (that's how France is doing much better than Germany in CO2 per capita despite being similar in this graph)

moritzwarhier2• 8 days ago

The German Physics Society and the German Meteorological Society

are not the German government.

Dagonfly• 7 days ago

some of the dirtiest electricity generation in the entire world

In Europe. Still cleaner than the US, China, India, Japan, and the world avg:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electric...

Coal and gas are down 50% compared to 10 years ago despite the shut-down. Nevertheless, shutting down the last few ones was bad.

xyzelement4• 8 days ago

This article sprinkles the word "risk" which people interpret as "bad things are coming" but actually means "there's some probability of the bad thing happening."

The probability is not quantified so it's impossible to react to. Over-protecting from a risk is as bad and under-protecting.

For example - something bad can happen to you any time you leave your house. However if you "protect" against that the risk by never leaving the house you are almost certainly worse off.

In case of climate the "thing to do" to protect from the risk is to minimize the economic activity that has improved life for everyone. Stopping that has an immediate "cost" which looks large compared to the unquantified risk it allegedly mitigates.

bulbar3• 8 days ago

Over-protecting from a risk is as bad and under-protecting.

This is not generally true.

For example - something bad can happen to you any time you leave your house.

The better analogue would be: outside of your house is a robber that will rob you if you leave the house. But you can't quantify how bad it will be to get robbed.

xyzelement4• 7 days ago

I think that's a fair analogy actually. I grew up in Brooklyn in 1990s and it was basically guaranteed that you'd have some criminal encounter in the neighborhood sooner or later. People still left the house because running that risk was better that entombing yourself inside the house.

sparqlittlestar• 8 days ago

over-protecting from a risk is as bad as under-protecting

How would protecting ourselves against 50 °C summer heat (122 °F) ever be as bad as keeping 40° heatwaves or better yet, a return to the 35° summers?

50° means a human mass extinction event. There are no corporate profits possible in that scenario anyway

xyzelement4• 7 days ago

Happy to explain. We need a few more numbers to make this tangible.

Let's agree that 50c summers are bad. What's the probability that summers will become 50c in the next 100 years and what's the cost of lowering that likelyhood?

Let's say there's a low probability (0.01%) and the cost of action is high. Let's use a ridiculous example: you have the opportunity to lower the risk further by half at the cost of immediately killing your family, any pets you have, and yourself. Would you, sparqlittlestar, kill your family, pets and self to move the risk of 50C summer in the next 100 years from 0.01% to 0.005%? I assume the answer is no because it's obviously and intuitively not worth it

On the other extreme let's say there's a 50% risk of 50c summers and you have a low-cost option (snapping your fingers) to halve it to 25%. You would obviously do that.

To generalize this point, it doesn't make sense to talk about how bad something could be without quantifying how likely that event is and the cost of mitigation. I find that talking about worst case outcomes regardless of likelihood is basically anxiety. Like someone who never gets on a plane because of how horrible a crash could be, separately from the reality that your particular flight is not going to crash, and meanwhile everything you miss out on by not flying is real.

karmakurtisaani3• 8 days ago

One of the most important solutions is never taken seriously enough, because most people are just big children: eat less meat.

xyzsparetimexyz• 8 days ago

Consumer choices are only going to get you so far

AlecSchueler3• 8 days ago

And so will regulatory solutions so long as we have different states competing for resources.

Alpha30314• 8 days ago

True. Review on it from two years ago here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221479932...

Might be worth shifting subsidies away from meat and towards plant protein to a level consistent with the social cost of carbon, but one could probably expect resistance from a certain demographic, maybe loudly exclaiming on social media that it's a secret government plot to emasculate them or something. (and opposition from industry groups as well probably)

karmakurtisaani3• 8 days ago

I didn't say it would need to be restricted to individual choice. It could also be a political action from top down.

belorn4• 7 days ago

Encouraging people to eat more from aquafarming is better for the environment. Getting people to change culture and diet is never going to be easy, and the difficulty of getting people to eat more food from the ocean or plants will likely be very similar.

spwa43• 8 days ago

But there is the problem:

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-world-carbon-emissio...

Note: a lot of the countries on this graph are quite famous for not only refusing to implement any climate policy, but not having the necessary government control (or will) to do it even when agreeing to it.

tonyedgecombe4• 7 days ago

Dividing it by country is misleading. The real divide is between the rich and poor. It's hard to create any emissions when you are only spending a few dollars a day. Meanwhile if I take a flight across the Atlantic then that is another five tonnes of carbon in the atmosphere no matter which country I start from.

mikelward• 7 days ago

So China is #1. USA is #2 and more than India #3 and Russia #4 combined.

Australia and Canada also very high per capita.

Really needs a global solution with China and/or US leading.

jerome-jh• 7 days ago

There was a report a few months ago predicting 4°C by 2080. It came to this figure by selecting the most likely emission scenario and warming scenario from the GIEC report.

In particular, it is hard to be optimistic on the emission scenario nowadays. So the report opted for emissions starting to drop around 2040, if I remember correctly.

That's my new baseline. Sorry I cannot find the report anymore. I am pretty sure it was posted on hacker news though.

Yizahi• 7 days ago

Remember that IPCC's projection of 2.7C by 2100 is done by selectively ignoring a good quarter of the models which IPCC selected in the first place. So called "hot" models. So it's a very politically motivated number. I can totally see how a scientist not bound by pandering to the most insufferable crowd on the planet can project much worse future just by being unbiased.

insane_dreamer2• 7 days ago

A good book to read is The Ministry of the Future; yeah, parts could be better written, and I'm not hopeful things will turn out the way they do in the book, but what it did convince me of is that nothing substantial will happen until there is a catastrophic event along the lines of what happens in the beginning of the book -- and even then only if it happens in a "major" (by Western standards) country (i.e., all of the DRC could die and Americans would still happily drive their SUVs to McD for burgers).

The other interesting thing in the book is the emergence of radical groups fighting against who they see as responsible for the destruction of our planet and potentially even our civilizations. We could see a lot more social violence, assassinations (Mangione-style) etc. I'm fairly sure that's going to happen.

Maybe I've lost hope, but I honestly do not want my kids to have any kids of their own, as I'm afraid of the world they will inherit. (And I've been a confirmed techno-future-enthusiast my whole life until 5-10 years ago.)

SpacePortKnight• 7 days ago

It'll be fine, especially in EU. It's much easier to adapt and to make renewables more economically profitable than to accelerate decarbonization by raising cost of living.

Even if few days get 10C hotter in the summers, more and more houses will retrofit themsevles with ACs much like Singapore. I live in NL, and I can def see a future where District Cooling[1] becomes a thing.

If something is bound to happen, I think a better way to spend energy and money is to prepare for it. In that sense, I would like to see a study on which crops we as a human species could rotate too, what new lands could use investment and how should new housing and public infrastructure be built than constant articles like these which presents no realistic solution.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_cooling

sandalwarrior• 7 days ago

They claim to know the climate by 2050, but they struggle to forecast the weather for the upcoming week. Don't trust German anxious alarmists. They are just fanatics.

giardini• 7 days ago

Peter Zeihan predicts Germany will disappear by then:

https://zeihan.com/the-end-of-germany-as-a-modern-economy/

FTFA:

"Three unsolvable problems will lead to Germany’s collapse as a modern economy over 20 – 30 years."

johnea• 7 days ago

My expectation is that it will be worse than this analysis implies.

The world energy mafia, primarily petroleum, but also nuclear and coal, will not give up their revenue streams.

Carbon concentrations will continue to rise, and quite likely accelerate.

The overwhelming majority of sustainable generation is in large, regional scale projects, because this keeps the profit in the hands of the established energy utilities.

Nuclear... nuclear... I would pose a question to every bone head here who advocates it: Can we start storing the spent waste in YOUR garage?

The profit motive loves nuclear energy, because tax payers pay to build and decommission it, while industrial scale utilities get to operate it while money is popping out.

Nuclear is the most expensive form of electricity generation, by far. By very very far.

Distributed generation and storage is advocated by no one with an equity stake in the status quo.

The fundamental problem, is that the world economy is run by organized crime.

The US whitehouse has now made this explicit, however the situation has existed in this context since the invention of distributing petroleum and electricity.

Global Warming at 3 °C by 2050? What's Behind the New German Climate Warning

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