- With 2024 and 2023 being 2nd and 1st resp. The last 11 years were the hottest 11 in recorded history. I don't know how more evidence we need. We are standing on the train tracks, the train is coming, and many of us say "Oh just look over there instead, we'll be fine."
Meanwhile - even if you do not care about climate - there is so much money to make with renewables (production, storage, mobility, etc). China and much of the rest of the world are charging ahead, while the US wants to be a petrol state.
- Whenever you hear a politician say "carbon neutral by 2050", interrupt them. The real goal is to avoid getting too far over 1.5 degrees warming. We need to avoid reaching tipping points that will cause non-recoverable damage to the earth system. The year 2050 is meaningless. Actual global average temperatures is what should be measured.
- Related: Earth is warming faster. Scientists are closing in on why (https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2024/12/16/...)
- Is there a real practical solution to this? It seems like all proposed solutions in last 40 years are a drop in the ocean, or just a money grab scams. Only thing that really worked for such global scale is the ozone layer repair. Global warming/climate change I guess we should just accept it and adapt?
- A change in attitudes is not enough. Structural change is needed to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. Currently, the population is unable to achieve results.
- Yeah, we definitely need to put more weather stations in urban areas and remove rural ones. That's how we can reach first place every year. Being number 3 is disappointing.
- The next one probably will be even hotter
- 30 years ago I attended a university lecture in an economics class and the professor spoke about the economic consequences of global warming - some places will be better off and plenty of places will be worse off. There will be water shortages in some places, while heavy rainfall in others. He presented it as a given fact that the global warming is coming - and pretty much the whole audience was shocked. Finally someone asked if he really thinks that it is unavoidable. And his answer was yes, that is human nature. As long as fossil fuels are there and cheap to explore someone will use them.
30 years later it looks like he was right.
Edit: the IPCC was founded in 1988 thus people started in the 70ies to understand that there will be a problem but there was a very long period of inactivity. Personally I am quite optimistic that fusion will become commercially available before 2040.
And dear downvoters, dont shoot the messenger.
- I can't think of a single time in history that humanity responded to a threat in a fully coordinated manner. Maybe this is the first time, but the incentive stack from the individual voter all the way up to geopolitical grand strategy argues against it.
Trying to tell poor nations to remain poor -- or telling rich nations to consume less -- is a losing game. There's evidence that as societies get richer, their populations demand cleaner air, water, etc. And, as another commenter mentioned, a realistic hope is that the whole green-tech stack matures to the point where it can compete on price.
We'll either make lower-carbon/lower-warming solutions work at near-market rates, in a way that allows personal and national economies to grow, or it'll just be talk for the next 50 years as well.
- Wow, a shocking amount of climate change denialism in this thread. Honestly what I expected from HN readership.
- Third hottest year on record, so far.
- I’d love to see the raw data.