We're getting cooked. I'm already paying 10-times more for water usage than I spend on gas, and 5-times more on electricity bills - AC's running non-stop. That's crazy, because I live in the area where you can't even walk to buy a piece of bread - we drive all the time. I fully expect for businesses very soon to operate at night. Costco, Walmart, groceries, even libraries will be working all night in places like Arizona, Texas and some parts of California.
Maybe this country focusing so much on keeping the gas cheap might have something to do with it.
> I'm already paying 10-times more for water usage than I spend on gas<p>Are you irrigating an enormous yard?
No, but I have a pool and it's been drying up below the skimmers, I need to keep the water level or the filtration dies.
Maybe they mean consumption is the same but price is up.
I assume they mean natural gas
Or driving a small, economical car?
I read the comment as an overview of their utility costs—natural gas, not gasoline.
Even if you’re driving a Prius and getting 50mpg, if you’re “driving all the time” you’re spending at least $100 a month in gas. There’s nowhere in the country where a water bill is $1000 a month unless you’re doing a lot of irrigation.
Maybe I am pessimistic but it seems no one cares about climate change these days. All of Los Angeles is sweltering now. Just pointing fingers and dropping individual names while the world continues to heat slowly. Any suggestions to get involved are welcome, I don’t want to be just a complainer.
Get politically involved, vote and and volunteer for local pro-climate candidates. Talk about and promote public transport, cycling, better zoning and infrastructure etc. People underestimate the power of local politics.<p>On a macro scale all you can really do is vote for national level candidates that care about these issues. Luckily it’s not hard to see which ones do and which ones don’t.
Individually you can't do anything. You can drive an EV, set your AC to 78, or whatever makes you feel good but only national governments can make the regulatory changes that will really have an impact.<p>I even roll my eyes at my city council spending even one second on climate change policy (and they have spent whole meetings on it). Our city of 80,000 people could disappear from the face of the planet and it would not make a bit of difference.
Working at the level of 80,000 people is a lot more effective than working at the level of an individual.<p>Working on your own carbon footprint is a $100M marketing trick played on you by oil companies like BP.<p>Leah Stokes' new book offers instead a "carbon wave" -- how to evaluate and maximize your impact at a local, state, national, and global level. Here's a LinkedIn post. She's got a new book coming out about this: <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:share:7496265286942359552/" rel="nofollow">https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:share:7496265286...</a>
You can vote
Yes you can but you'll have to vote against your immediate self interest and comfort. The sort of changes that will have an impact on the climate will mean giving up a lot of what makes modern life convenient and comfortable.
Changes can be phased in. For example that's why places phasing out ICE cars are generally doing it by phasing out new ICE sales over many years and letting any cars already on the road when new sales stop stay on the road, and are concurrently building public charging infrastructure.
Thermodynamics; your convenience and comfort (CnC) are merely externalized on others not eliminated; someone else makes your stuff, deals with the environmental toll in the future.<p>Happy to sacrifice some of your CnC to ease obligations on those you give no assurances to.
I think there are gradients to this<p>It would be hard for me to vote against indoor plumbing if that was needed to save the planet<p>I would vote against "Same Day Delivery" in a heartbeat though, if it helped
Best the corresponding parties can do is banning plastic straws (no impact but feels great) and massive bureaucratic hurdles for air conditioning in private homes (because it's an "unnecessary luxury" and if your apartment is unbearably hot during a heat wave where the temperature doesn't drop below 25 even at night, you're just not correctly using shades and windows).
Not to mention there are plenty of environmental improvements that are vast and near-term quality of life improvements. The only penalty on many of these things is <i>financial</i>, but even <i>that</i> is only in the near-term, and in the medium to long term become financial wins.
Entirely depends on your district. There are many districts where it doesn't matter, especially with gerrymandering.<p>Better to volunteer for a swing district. You can write letters or fundraise from home, anywhere in the country.
Both parties in the United States are pretty much turning a blind eye to climate change. What we need to do is start boycotting parties, telling them we won’t vote for them unless they have really strong climate platforms. We need to make them want our vote.
This is some “both sides” absolute bullshit. The Biden administration passed the IRA, huge incentives for personal and commercial renewable energy production, EVs, all kinds of things.<p>Trump is paying people to burn more coal, blocking solar, canceling wind.<p>Could the dems have done more, sure. Are those programs perfect, absolutely not. But one party is moving in the right direction and the other is actively trying to accelerate climate change. Gtfo with that both sides crap.
> I even roll my eyes at my city council spending even one second on climate change policy<p>Every meeting minute spent on discussing climate change is another minute not spent on authorizing things like Flock or permitting data centers. That's nothing to roll your eyes about
well obviously YOU couldn't. you seem to lack the willpower to sacrifice a single convenience in favor of the rest of us, per your confession below.<p>that's the difference between you and the public servants that you roll your eyes at.
“Everyone wants the village, nobody wants to be the villager.” Maybe look into changing what you want.
You can do all of that, and then Elon Musk will use his hundreds of billions to install another pedofile in charge who won't give a shit about the environment.
Sf Bay Area didn’t have a single day above 100 this year. Not counting Livermore etc. it’s the first time in a long time I can remember the entire summer being so nice and relatively cool.
> All of Los Angeles is sweltering now.<p>I think that, if people who believe in climate change want to be convincing, it would be more effective to avoid blaming specific instances of weather on climate change without strong justification. Especially when the weather isn’t even abnormal.<p>Los Angeles, especially inland and in the valley, is hot in the summer. It was hot in the summer 30 years ago and it’s still hot in the summer. It’s the typical hot season right now, and the valley appears to be only slightly above season average temperatures today, and coastal LA seeks be slightly cooler than average. Apparently it will be unseasonably cool in a couple days.
You’re correct that LA is usually hot (95F+) this time of year, but the humidity is what’s abnormal. The dew point in Disneyland was higher than in Disney World yesterday due to a tropical storm that dissipated west of the LA basin.<p>More tropical storms are approaching LA and that’s increasing humidity is why it’s sweltering.
A separate LA Times article explained that the humidity is due to lingering effects of a recent hurricane/tropical storm.<p>"Forecasters attributed the punishing humidity to the remnants of Tropical Storm Iselle moving over the state, as well as unusually warm ocean temperatures due to a combination of a months-long marine heat wave, a powerful El Niño and climate change.<p>"Dew points in the Los Angeles Basin have been “really high,” hovering around 70 degrees in many places, with a few coastal areas like Redondo Beach and Torrance reaching a dew point of 73 to 75 on Friday, said Ryan Kittell, meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Oxnard. The metric measures the moisture content in the air."<p><a href="https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-08-28/forget-florida-la-humidity-is-off-charts-this-summer-whats-going-on" rel="nofollow">https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-08-28/forget-f...</a>
Exactly! What a strange about what’s going on in the LA basin right now is the extremely high humidity for this time of year. A 69° dewpoint is unheard of in this region. And this is what’s associated with the El Niño and associated with climate change.
Climate change is a fact. You can’t believe in a fact.
I haven't paid much attention to la lately.is this true? San Diego is having an unusually hot and humid summer. Water temperatures are nearly tropical right now too
The right thinks it's a hoax and the left thinks it's on corporations (not themselves) to fix it.<p>To put it plainly, everyone wants the problem to go away without having to change anything about their lifestyle.
“Both-sides”ing this is ridiculous. Certain leftists might sometimes disproportionally blame corporations for the issue rhetorically but they aren’t broadly opposed to the kinds of taxes and regulations - on corporations or individuals - that would be needed to bring carbon emissions down.<p>If you <i>insist</i> on finding a way to criticize leftists on the climate file, a much better tack would be pointing out how some environmentalists have opposed nuclear power or densification.
Come join our El Niño session on Wednesday with Stripe's climate scientist Zeke Hausfather: <a href="https://luma.com/tu0uvbx1" rel="nofollow">https://luma.com/tu0uvbx1</a><p>We'll talk climate science, impacts, and what we can do to avert the worst impacts of the worst El Niño in human history.
My best advice is not to approach people with numbers and figures and all the danger, start with saying you’re concerned about the future. It’s kind of an open ended conversation starter.<p>The big problem is this is all driven by consumption and it’s hard for people to cut back on consumption. I don’t know how to explain to people how a simple life is much easier than the complicated life of the rich and famous they see every day on the Internet.<p>I don’t think there is an answer for this, I think there’s way too much propaganda on the other side of the equation. My only hope from this El Niño is that it creates such damage and disaster that it starts waking people up. I think if it affects the ranchers and farmers that will be a big plus because they are usually on the side of not believing in climate change.<p>What I do right now is just keep talking to people and preparing, but I’m lucky since I live in a minivan full-time. I mean, I can drive anywhere. The weather suits me.
I'll go against the grain but our capitalist way of life is totally incompatible with solving climate change. Likewise one country can't solve this problem alone. You need the whole world on board. I truly think the only real solution is a one world government truly working toward for the betterment of the planet and it's occupants. We all know that ain't ever gonna happen though so we're hosed.
Hey I grew up super environmental and I have plenty of hippie cred, but this statement gave me shudders "the only real solution is a one world government". Yeesh, yeah a single government, surely nothing could go wrong.
It seems we are no more capable of organizing than bacteria in a petri dish could avoid replicating until the resources are exhausted.
I've had this thought too. And when I think about it in the big picture way, I don't think it doesn't need to be all that hard to solve. It's not like we're talking about like, you know, some huge slice of GDP or something. Yes, the price of fossil fuels effectively doubles. But we can create lots of jobs to make solar and nuclear and all these other solutions in the meantime.<p>An economy that seizes climate solutions can zoom ahead in terms of innovation, manufacturing, and enforcement. The changing climate is one of the biggest economic opportunities we've ever seen in human history, but somehow we've convinced ourselves that it's not only the worst non-opportunity ever but somehow would break capitalism. The richest man on the planet makes electric cars.
Let me guess, you think it’s somehow impossible that people like Trump and Musk would end up running this One World Government like Trey have done in the US because…reasons.
Renewable energy is expanding faster than ever. And it's hard for people to look at that and think we're moving too slowly. But we still are. That's the basic cultural disconnect.<p>When nuclear power became a thing in the seventies, there was massive planning around a presumed nuclear-powered future. The largest energy storage facilities in the US were all built around that time. This turned out to be a mirage as the cost of nuclear went up with the safety expectations of the electorate, while petrochemical prices dropped. But this time it's not prices we're predicting, it's temperature, which is much more reliable.
Nuclear has a lot of environmental impact too. You need to mine a lot of earth to get a little uranium, and a lot of that activity is very polluting and a lot of that activity is not climate neutral. Then you have the waste problem that's not figured out, proliferation etc.<p>We can't go cherrypicking environmental problems. That way we roll from one crisis into the next. There's so many issues we're causing, like entire ecosystems going extinct. Sooner or later that will lead to crises too. We have to stop externalising.<p>And yes the electorate wants to be safe and for good reason. Even Fukushima polluted a lot. It's not just about death tolls.
The time for prevention has passed. The course has been set. Now Darwin rules the day - we'll see which species survive. We chose this.
Sometimes I wonder if the anti-immigrant rhetoric that has been growing more popular is a tactical tool used by individuals who don't actually believe in it but instead have accepted that they would rather be wealthy and destroy the planet and are pricing in the consequences of that decision.
There's also a prisoner's dilemma situation. Suppose you're some wealthy media magnate promoting culture war distractions from your portfolio of asset strippers and polluters, thinking of defecting to team decency.<p>That hypothetical you can look around at the rest of the global political class and see that the rest of the establishment will destroy the livability of the biosphere whether that hypothetical you starts putting all of your money into unions, green technology and BECCs or not and conclude that the only available choice is whether to be poor in a collapsing world or rich in a collapsing world.
Why would investing in green tech make you poor? That's what's wrong with that argument.<p>Moving away from fossil fuels is cheaper. Green energy is very cheap, it just misses a base load component right now. It's just that the people benefiting are different ones. And those people are going to lose sooner or later anyway, because in addition to climate change, fossil fuels are also finite.<p>The only reason trump is on the oil bandwagon is because many of his buddies are benefiting from it. And probably because he's still pissed at the Scotland windmill thing.<p>But doing the right thing doesn't have to make you poor. It will benefit everyone including the investors.
The optimal strategy for short term oligarchic revenue maximisation is a mixed strategy of mostly fossil fuels with some green tech.<p>The optimal strategy for long term biosphere habitability is a mixed strategy of mostly green tech with a tiny amount of fossil fuels exclusively for those metal smelting roles where arc furnaces and biofuels are unsuitable.<p>Investment portfolios dominated by technology that lifts everybody up are less profitable than greedy choices of risky investment, per some of the finer details of the mutual fund separation theorem.
> it just misses a base load component right now.<p>I’m sympathetic to the intent of your argument, but man, that’s a hallava gotcha there. Other than nuclear there isn’t a compelling story for a base load source of green energy. And all the new-gen nuclear tech is a long shot for safe, cost efficient, rapid scaling right now.
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Bot
On the off chance they weren't a bot and were merely somebody sucked in to the culture war to the point of losing a lot of sanity, the answer is that the optimal amount of green tech for maximising oligarchic wealth extraction is somewhere both far above zero while also being at least one order of magnitude smaller than the necessary amount to mitigate emissions numbers.
Thanks for reporting my comment instead of engaging. Great contribution!
And I think the artificially created right wing shift was to enable Israel to do a lot of killing without the rest world being united to tell them to stop with this.
This seems political and unrelated to the article.
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I thought the narrative was that it was the blue cities that were the chaotic hellholes, specifically because of all the minorities that live there? Can you try to keep your stories straight?
That's the narrative about Europe as well. That we're somehow overrun by immigrants.<p>Yet I can walk here in the city at night without getting robbed at gunpoint. Or any point really. Pickpockets are a pest here but that's about it.
Sorry, I have no idea what you are referencing or what person you are talking about. Please stay on topic. Did you respond to a different post by accident? What is your contribution?
Texas was bussing the Venezuelan migrants out of state to blue cities and pocketing a lot of the money that was to be used for integrating the migrants.<p>That's how places like Denver ended up with 40k Venezuelan migrants <i>and</i> little federal assistance for them.<p>And you know what we did? Tighten our belts a bit and help these people get integrated into our city rather than just pawning them off onto someone else.
It is unfathomably weird of you to post like a raving lunatic and then get pissy when we downvote you.
i've lived in rural texas close to the border, and nothing was happening there except an immigration detention facility.
LA and NY are both border cities that accept millions more immigrants than the red cities that do all the complaining.
> The global average sea-surface temperature hit a record 70 degrees on Aug. 22, according to Europe’s Earth observation agency Copernicus, which has been tracking the metric daily since 1979. The previous single-day record was measured in March 2024.<p>70°F is 21°C<p>Fish don't have AC.
<i>since 1979</i><p>And what about the years before that?
Other agencies tracked ocean thermoclines.<p>Eg: Totally not tracking submarines, we're looking at dolphins and whales!<p>With notable funky bespoke hardware: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RP_FLIP" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RP_FLIP</a><p>Scripps itself has been running since 1903.
Hint: the world had much hotter periods before humans and capitalism
That's like saying coastal sea level rise is nothing to worry about in places like Florida because that whole area was at the bottom of an ocean 100 million years ago.
Did you mean “humans <i>or</i> capitalism”?<p>In any event, who cares what the climate was like before humans walked the planet? We do care about what it is like while we’re around because it puts significant constraints on our lives.
Hint: <a href="https://xkcd.com/1732/" rel="nofollow">https://xkcd.com/1732/</a>
Earth has, human civilization as we know it has not.
How deep is the surface measurement though? It’s a record nonetheless, but a few meters deeper - where fish actually live is likely cooler.
Deep ocean temperatures have also been rising over the decades: <a href="https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2024GL111229" rel="nofollow">https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/202...</a>
Yes, but it’s not uniform at all. The paper shows cooling in some parts of the north, and heating in the southern latitudes, along with significant variations by depth.<p>There’s a lot of nuance in this stuff - far more than global average surface temperature (which is primarily good for scary headlines) and “fish don’t have AC”.
Do you think the general statement “ocean temperatures are rising” is misleading?
> Yes, but it’s not uniform at all.<p>Translation: "<i>I expect all areas to be affected the same, despite axial tilt, fluid dynamics, etc.</i>"
That's not the issue, though I recognise the poster above was remarking about fish. High surface temps means more cyclones / typhoons / hurricanes, more coral bleaching, lower fish breeding and feeding because reefs die, impacts out food chains and destroys our homes.<p>Im Australian, so it also means droughts, water restrictions, and significant increases in bushfire number and severity after a few years of drought. Drought followed by cyclone, or bulk rain events causes catastrophic flooding. Its a shit show.
El Niño events are more than 36% stronger today than they were 40 years ago due to climate change.[1]<p>[1]J. E. Cole et al., Recent strengthening of eastern Pacific ENSO in the last millennium paleorecord.
Science DOI:10.1126/science.ady2660
they took the sulfur out of the shipping fuel and everything accelerated very quickly. nobody's even talking about it anymore
Stripe's climate researcher Zeke Hausfather is coming to AirMiners this Wednesday to share about El Niño climate science, the impacts, and then we're going to work on what we can do to avert the worst impacts of this storm.<p>Come join! <a href="https://luma.com/tu0uvbx1" rel="nofollow">https://luma.com/tu0uvbx1</a>
I can’t overstate how it is. And you will need to be prepared. Be prepared for floods and just weird weather. While we humans are adaptable to these weather changes, plants and animals are not. This is going to affect feed crops for both humans and animals. So I would expect some inflation because of this.<p>I also want to state for those of you living in Southern California to be prepared for a possible earthquake. It’s a salton sea fills up with a lot of water quickly It could most likely trigger an earthquake.<p>But those are the impacts just in the United States. We might be looking at food price shocks in combination with the ongoing war in Iran.<p>By the way for those of you complaining about the heat in Los Angeles, it’s not really the heat. It’s the humidity. The LA basin has had record high dewpoint temperatures. That’s why it’s so uncomfortable.<p>How do we fix this? The only thing I can think of is a spiritual awakening where owning and doing less is more attractive than flying around in jets and building AI data centers.
I scuba dive in Monterey, CA every other weekend, and just came back from a liveaboard in Galapagos in May. The water is much warmer this year, and it is very noticeable because usually in Galapagos, divers are expected to wear 8mm wetsuit or dry suit to be comfortable in the water, but this year even a 5mm made me feel too warm. In Monterey, water temp used to be around 11-13°C but this year it’s easily above 16°C, divers also reported more sightings of spiny lobsters which were rare in Monterey because water was too cold for them.
Discussions:<p><i>Oceans hit highest temperature on record</i><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49424606">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49424606</a><p><i>Super El Niño Keeps Growing as New Forecasts Reach Record Territory Ahead Winter</i><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49313428">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49313428</a><p><i>Climate change is strengthening El Niño, coral records suggest</i><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49475404">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49475404</a><p><i>The Strongest El Niño Ever Forecast and the Hunger It Will Leave Behind</i><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49281960">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49281960</a>
You can’t get a more direct example of failure of collective action.<p>I’m not sure the human species has the capacity to actually coordinate behavior at the scale needed, irrespective of any future warning etc…, to be able to combat this
We all reduced CFC use and stopped ozone depletion.<p>The problem with climate change is that there is a huge incentive to not fix it, and the culprit is not just rich oil corporations. Many countries subsist solely on oil profits and have no other natural resources to sustain themselves, i.e. Saudi Arabia. Those countries have influence over others like the US.<p>There are alternative options already available to replace fossil fuels for most things. In first-world countries, the only thing stopping a transition is the loss of corporate profits.
People can't even think big enough to zipper merge properly. We are absolutely cooked.
The planet started out a ball of molten stardust, completely inhospitable to life as we know it. But then there was not only life, but life detached from the ground too. Then K-T event wiped out almost all of it. But the planet kept going! It can be argued it got better and more diverse.<p>Are people in trouble? Perhaps. If we stop technological achievement in the name of a few degrees centigrade, then definitely.