This website is making heavy use of IP range blocking. Here's an uncensored link: <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20260713092155/https://www.lyrebirddreaming.com/post/the-graph-that-should-be-front-page-news" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20260713092155/https://www.lyreb...</a><p>Alternatively, since the link that was posted is just an AI copyright theft site, use the original instead: <a href="https://climatecasino.substack.com/p/some-monsters-are-real" rel="nofollow">https://climatecasino.substack.com/p/some-monsters-are-real</a><p>Discussion: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48890533">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48890533</a>
Interestingly web.archive.org is blocked for me but TFA isn't.
> Turn the volume on the typical El Niño impacts up to eleven, then watch the collective infrastructure of modern industrial civilization crumble.<p>Lol
The El Niño reading there corresponds with the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) collapsing.<p>The result of such a collapse is a complete upheaval of global climate patterns, destroying agricultural production on a civilization-ending scale.<p>Generally, the actual seriousness of these things is so out of proportions for normal people, they have great difficulty appreciating it properly. Taking their hunches from public postures and stances assumed by "authority" figures on the matter doesn't help.
If it should be front-page news, shouldn't it also be at the top of the article, rather than right at the bottom?
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.
I thought it was quite effective. I read the whole thing in anticipation, and was still shocked by the graph.
You react to a serious article rightfully pointing at civilization-ending developments by nitpicking about design choices.<p>Your likely intent is to signal indifference and dismissiveness towards the actual content. To deflect from the actual topic and derail the conversation.<p>Your likely motivation is lack of a ready-made remedy compatible with your premise of leaving your lifestyle untouched.
That's a lot of assumptions about me based on "the important figure should be at the top of the page, not the bottom". Joe Average isn't going to want to read 14 paragraphs before getting to the actual graph the title mentions
The point isn't whether it's true about you in particular, it's about the actual effect it has on the general audience.<p>Improving the design of that article will do absolutely nothing for its public reception.<p>Voicing reasonable reactions to the salient content actually helps furthering the discussion. Nitpicking does the opposite.
If you want to to down that road the article reads like AI slop which cooks the planet itself with energy use. Or, alternately, if the message is that important it is all the more important that it be communicated effectively.
Instead of arguing about this on the internet you could do what I’m doing: working to take carbon emissions off the board.<p>It’s not easy right now because of the funding and political climate, but you <i>can</i> find work where success is measured by metrics like “gallons of diesel not burned.”<p>Start here: <a href="https://climatebase.org" rel="nofollow">https://climatebase.org</a>
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.
- <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_spiral" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_spiral</a>
- <a href="https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/visualizing-daily-global-temperature" rel="nofollow">https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/visualizing-daily-global-t...</a>
- <a href="https://www.climate-lab-book.ac.uk/spirals/" rel="nofollow">https://www.climate-lab-book.ac.uk/spirals/</a>
Thanks. Those are much better than the graph trash in the original article.
Polar coordinates are such a nice way to visualise periodic data.
These are nice if you are scientifically literate but I suspect not so great for the lay
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.
The economic system itself is incompatible with the physical reality of a finite planet.<p>The ones steering society choose to crash and ruin everything rather than to jeopardize their positions in power.<p>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.<p>Objective truth has to take precedence over subjective desires when it comes to existential questions. Currently it does not.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
You're right about the general sentiment acknowledging the seriousness only when you look at the center and left of society. The majority in the US however supports or tolerates the actual political decisions made, contradicting that level of importance.<p>When you paint people as being "disallowed" from more radical actions, the same question of true importance arises? The current trajectory leads to Armageddon, plain and simple.<p>My point here thus is about the proper <i>scale</i> on which people place the topic.<p>It's not a "lifestyle choice" to doom humanity's children to ruin.<p>Placing responsibility with the irresponsible is a cop-out.
The culprit behind corporations is politicians who allow them to get away with what they do, and the culprit behind this nexus is game theory.
Does any country care? Isnt China far worse thsn the US?
> Does any country care?<p>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.<p>There are strategic reasons for this, of course.<p>> Isnt China far worse thsn the US?<p>"It's complicated"<p>* Historically the US is responsible for a greater mass of the CO2 humans have added to the atmosphere.<p>* 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).<p>* 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<p>-- China shut down a <i>lot</i> of badly polluting inefficient coal power plants.<p>-- China opened up a <i>lot</i> of more up to date less polluting but still coal power plants.<p>-- 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.<p>-- Coal is set to be phased out "soon" (and it seems to be slowly going that way, see peaked comment above).<p>* 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 <i>consumption</i>.<p>( 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)<p>There are literal books and stacks of research papers arguing about each point mentioned above - and that's just skimming the surface.
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.
Lots of AI tells in this article. Ironic?<p>> It's not a forecast. It's not a simulation of what might happen decades from now. These are...
The site is apparently one of those AI generated bait traps. The link to the original article is in the (current) top comment.
A lot of people mistake basic literacy for AI. Don't forget that LLMs are trained on human texts and replicate patterns within them.
Tend to follow climate-related news closely. But even then: eyebrows raised.<p>Heh.. Maybe in future we'll see wars being fought not over <i>access</i> to fossil fuels, but over attempts to stop other countries from pumping more fossils out of the ground.<p><i>"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."</i><p>That's the scary bit: no escape hatch. We're all in this together.<p>That's why international co-operation on climate change should <i>NOT</i> be opt-in. Your countries' freedom to emit greenhouse gasses ends where my countries' (future) safety is at stake.
Is there a graph starting from the 1950s?<p><a href="https://www.lyrebirddreaming.com/post/el-ni%C3%B1o-isn-t-an-excuse-for-global-warming" rel="nofollow">https://www.lyrebirddreaming.com/post/el-ni%C3%B1o-isn-t-an-...</a>
This blog post is pure slop, stealing from this one: <a href="https://climatecasino.substack.com/p/some-monsters-are-real" rel="nofollow">https://climatecasino.substack.com/p/some-monsters-are-real</a> the submission should be updated to link to the original instead.
The mean is created using 29 years of data. Why those particular 29 years? IDK.<p>But I tend to dismiss findings like this that don't explain why they chose a very specific dates as the baseline.
You also need to ask what is the likelihood you get this move just by chance
Shouldn't the y-axis better be called "Standard DeviationS"?<p>According to one comment on the site, the 3.5 means "3.5 times the SD", which makes much more sense to me.<p>I initially tried to make sense of "SD being 3.5 on that day of the year", which seems to be a wrong interpretation.
I think you are right.<p>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.<p>Here's the link that I read off the figure.<p><a href="https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/json_2clim/oisst2.1_nino3.4_sst_day.json" rel="nofollow">https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/json_2clim/oiss...</a><p>Going up the URL path I get redirected to here:<p><a href="https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/?dm_id=world2" rel="nofollow">https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/?dm_id=world2</a><p>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.<p>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).<p>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.
No. The (standard) deviation is 3.5.
> No. The (standard) deviation is 3.5.<p>3.5 what, according to you?<p>You're reading this graph wrong: we're currently 3.63 standard deviation above the mean.<p>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.<p>[1]: <a href="https://climatecasino.substack.com/p/some-monsters-are-real" rel="nofollow">https://climatecasino.substack.com/p/some-monsters-are-real</a><p>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: <a href="https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/?dm_id=nino3.4" rel="nofollow">https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/?dm_id=nino3.4</a>
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.
You can go to the source website <a href="https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/?dm_id=nino3.4" rel="nofollow">https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/?dm_id=nino3.4</a><p>There's is an interactive chart that's easier to understand
Thanks for posting that link.<p>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.<p>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?
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.
I'm not an authority on this, but here's is my understanding - I'd appreciate if someone could correct my mistakes.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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?<p>[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.
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.
> 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.
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
my layman understanding, a real statistician will surely intervene.<p>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.<p>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.
This graph shouldn't be front-page news. Why? Because it is a crappy graph that says nothing.<p>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...<p>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 <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48890590">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48890590</a> for much better graphs)<p>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.<p>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?<p>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?<p>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.<p>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.
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.
Apparently El Nino reduces Gulf of Mexico hurricanes.<p>So being in New Orleans is a mixed bag for me.
Conspicuous that the X axis is missing numbers ... weeks, days, or months ....
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.
The range is provided in the title. Presumably it's just regularly sampled over that range.
I couldn’t help but notice that there was an equally cold spike at the bottom.
It is labelled "Day of Year".
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?
This happened a couple of El Niño cycles ago, in the 2015-2016 one:<p>> 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<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Town_water_crisis" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Town_water_crisis</a><p>It's quite possible that this one could worse.
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?<p>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)
Note that anyone who suggested actions that would be both implementable by an individual and extremely effective would be rapidly banned from HN.<p>We could build out private solar farms though.
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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.
That’s tragic, I love Fontainebleau. But it’s industrial civilization as a whole, not American AC. Cement is a larger contributor, for example.
AC?
Air Conditioning. Aka "La clim'" in France.<p>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".<p>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.)<p>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 !"<p>This is also very short sighted.<p>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.<p>(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... )<p>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...
Shit, I missed that my home town was burning
[flagged]
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.<p>I know this because every prediction of climate doom turned out to be false.<p>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.<p>I remember signs in Glacier National Park telling us the glaciers would be gone by the year 2,000. It has not happened.<p>This "signal" too will pass.
Others have corrected your confusion between prediction and observation. Lets instead show what we have already seen, today, that was previously predicted.<p>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.<p>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.
The red line is not a prediction, it is a measurement.
You seem to be deep in denial.<p>These are not projections. These are measurements.<p>These are known trends from the past century. The trend is accelerating in what seems to be an exponential pattern.<p><a href="https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-global-temperature" rel="nofollow">https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...</a><p>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.<p>Southern Europe is already experiencing massive droughts in major urban centers.
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
i have seen this couple of times here and there. with eu melting looks concerning. i guess build more data centers
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.
"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.<p>"Electric cars" is less likely tho because having a car at all is a money drain.
Changing your own behavior is certainly not wrong but also not a solution.<p>Policy changes are needed to address this problem. It’s a political problem that needs a political solution.
> eat less meat, smaller homes, electric cars, green energy, no flights etc.<p>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?
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.<p>Don’t worry about that, just recycle more!<p>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.
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.<p>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.
> power plants and datacenters are still at least partly about fulfilling consumer demand.<p>Consumer demand doesn't determine whether to build coal vs solar vs nuclear. Public policy does. No new oil/gas/coal plants, period, and start working to shut down the ones we have. Electricity generation is the source of about a third of all CO2 emissions.<p>Consumer demand doesn't determine whether we do carbon capture, or reforestation. Those require public policy.
It’s a tough sell. The impact of <i>you</i> turning your AC a little bit colder or having a bigger car is almost unmeasurable on a global basis yet the benefits to you personally are probably pretty big.
The reality is that what is in our control is very, very little, and we’re squabbling like mad among ourselves because I had a piece of beef for lunch.<p>I’m the first to recycle, so you’re preaching to the choir. What I’m saying if we could do better than self-flagellating. Or rather, there is nothing our self-flagellation will achieve in the end.<p>We keep focusing on things that are easy to measure like how much meat does one person eat, rather than the real numbers that are effectively immeasurable. Am I a worse person for eating beef, yet not using LLMs nor driving a car, than a vegan would might do all those things? Only for my conscience to know. In the end, it all amounts to hypocrisy, and squabbling among the plebes, while the rich keep polluting the planet.
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.
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.
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.
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
How many people living in doghouses does it take to offset emissions from large industry?
This is not what I'm saying. Telling people to eat less meat or live in smaller houses is not only inefficient, but a counterproductive way to protect environment. This is environmental protection theatre, if not circus. It makes environmental protection measures look laughable and ridiculous. Unless something is done against the biggest pollutors, eating less meat (now think about how dangerous this advice looks without taking into account who it's addressed at - stupid parents can stop feeding their children meat and cause them lifelong health problems) won't prevent environmental problems. Sorry, I'm interested in participating or endorsing environmenal protection circus.
If the factory is in China but the product is consumed in the US who should the CO2 emissions be attributed to?
Individual action is not the solution
> eat less meat<p>Eat less and different meat with a smaller footprint. Mostly poultry, eggs, also more organ meats, etc. Also combat fertiliser runoff, etc.<p>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.<p>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...<p>Well we'll solve a lot of related problems by drastically reducing the world's population with a gigantic famine.
“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.
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.
> How they will affect weather patterns or whatever?<p>> 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.<p>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.