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> each and every one of us contributes to its intensification or mitigation through our decisions.

I have to disagree here.

This idea of a consumer-level personal responsibility for the fossil energy industry's externalized costs is a lot like the plastic producers shifting blame for waste by saying that it's the consumers' fault for not recycling. It's transparent blame-shifting.

The fossil energy industry pulls the carbon out of the ground and distributes it globally. Then it buys and sells politicians and, through mass media, votes, to ensure they maintain the industry's hegemony.

You only have to look at the full-blown slide of the US into a despotic petrostate to understand the causes of the climate crisis.

The concern about climate is well placed. Ripple et al. lay out a serious case that we may be closer to tipping cascades than models predict, with the Greenland Ice Sheet potentially vulnerable to tipping below 2°C warming, well before 2050.

But "invest an equal share of the resources currently being pumped into AI into climate" misidentifies the bottleneck. Marine cloud brightening could produce meaningful planetary cooling for roughly $5 billion per year at scale (NAS estimate). That's like what? 1% of what was spent on AI infrastructure last year?

The money exists. What doesn't exist is the political coordination to spend it.

The goddamn Alameda city council shut down a University of Washington MCB field test in 2024 because nobody told them it was happening on their property. Go look it up.

This's the actual bottleneck: governance, coordination, and political will, not capital.

When someone says "we should invest resources in X instead of Y," it's worth asking who "we" is and what mechanism they're proposing. AI investment is private capital chasing returns. You can't redirect it to climate by wishing. The implicit model, that Society has a budget and we're choosing wrong, assumes a resource allocation authority that doesn't exist. If you want to argue for creating one, that's a real position, but it should be stated openly rather than hidden inside "it would be sensible."

Also ... "AI won't solve it; it only makes it worse" is doing a ton of work! The energy consumption concern has real merit. But materials science, grid optimization, and climate modeling are direct climate contributions happening now. Google has saved energy in its datacenters ... using AI!

Blanket dismissal of an entire domain of capability isn't seriousness, it's pattern matching. (Ironically, there's a phrase for systems that produce plausible-sounding output by matching patterns without engaging with underlying structure. We're told to be worried about them.)

Unfortunately, more people seems to care about getting AI to play SimCity than the environment.

Renewable energy technology is ready, right now today, to replace fossil fuels. All we have to do is start doing it, but the Oil lobby is just too strong apparently. There is no political will. I wish I was wrong, but I just don't see humanity pulling together to solve this one.

If you're looking to experience a "climate change" simulator, kind of, the game Oxygen Not Included is an interesting chemistry sandbox where you need to balance things like O2, heat, food, etc in a "terrarium" of sorts. The parallels to climate change are similar to real life--most of the game ending problems you encounter are from short sighted thinking earlier on/kicking the can down the road.

We contribute to it 1% by the actions we take as individuals, and 99% by the leaders we select.

> that each and every one of us contributes to its intensification or mitigation through our decisions

I‘ve travelled quite a bit and I find it hard to convince myself that I as a city dweller contribute any meaningful amount to pollution or waste. I‘ve seen rivers of trash flow directly into the ocean. The rich and wealthy pollute disproportionally in such a way that I don‘t think offloading the responsibility to the general public is fair.

> And, no, AI won't solve it; unfortunately, it only makes it worse.

A conclusive argument for this still seems out of reach. AI does solve some problems, and it's not exactly clear which problems AI "only makes worse". It's not clear how much energy all of our AI systems will use, and while it's tempting to outright believe they'll simply use more and more, even that's not yet clear based on arguments presented.

I agree to an extent that each of us contributes in a manner, but the manner that we contribute is not certain. A person who puts more effort into reducing their own personal climate impact could be doing worse than using the same effort to enact systemic change. It could be bailing water on a sinking ship instead of fixing the leak. The problem is you might not appear to be doing anything in isolation. Just spending that extra effort at work and sending the money earned to the ship patching people so they can get what they need would fix the problem better. If you choose bailing are you not just choosing something visible but ineffective over achieving the desired outcome but just being a boring taxpayer.

As for AI, to characterise it as a "solution to problems we didn't really have" is placing your opinion over others. They may be right or wrong about it but many AI proponents firmly believe that AI can provide solutions to real world problems that we definitely have. You may disagree about their potential effectiveness, and that's ok, but at least tolerate that people might have different ideas about how to make the world better.

The difference is emblematic of the difficulty in getting attention for climate mitigation. AI succeeds because you can sell a service to an individual human which will give them advantages over other humans. Climate change mitigation fails because you are trying to sell a service to humanity which will result in a better end state over some other hypothetical imagined future. Humans make decisions, not humanity, and many of them are pretty bad with both hypotheticals and imagination. It's no wonder that a product designed to make them do better at what they do, right now is more successful than one designed to make everybody do better than what would otherwise have resulted, 50-100 years in the future when they'll likely be dead.

Any kind of workable solution to large, societal-level problems needs to deal with the principal agent issue. Society doesn't actually exist; humanity doesn't actually exist. These are abstractions we use to label the behavior of individual people. You need to operate on the level of individual people to get any sort of outcome.

(FWIW, this is a major reason why concepts like markets, capitalism, democracy, rule of law, and federalism have been successful. They work by aligning incentives so that when one person takes an action that is good for themselves, they more-or-less end up benefitting the people around them too.)

I think if the hope is that the whole world comes together to reduce emissions to a meaningful level, there is little to no chance of that. Even in the face of clear evidence, many leaders either do not believe it or do not think it will affect them in their lifetime. Capitalism and globalization march to a different drum.

The hope becomes that we can innovate our way out of the problem with technology, that is the race to the finish. AI will likely help us get there faster, but 2nd place will not be an option.

You could say industrialization was a solution to a problem we didn't have...but efficiency and profit is always the pursuit of business, and unfortunately that is a lot of the world we live in.

And I say this as someone who loves the idea of energy that doesn't come from burning things.

Maybe we could ask AI!

https://chatgpt.com/share/698ce97b-4d54-8000-aecb-542ceecb00...

Unfortunately it won't happen, as humanity rather nuke ourselves generating memes, while driving beverage from paper straws.

Imagine if we had laws that required all LLM compute to come from solar, or other sustainable power sources. We could have used the market's thirst for AI as a backchannel way to force creation of new sustainable energy.

In contrast to Elon/XAI's illegal methane fuled datacenter in memphis

As a human living on this planet, with roughly another 50 years left, I say we allow our actions to continue. We are unable to stop those in power and with high influence from doing anything; we deserve what is coming. Earth will be fine without us. Good luck everyone!

every year (month?) that passes people are saying the end of the world is right around the corner due to climate change. then 10 yrs passes, nothing happens, and they keep saying the same stuff.

the system warning you the world is in big trouble dont remind you 'their side' has been saying the sky is falling for ~40+ yrs.

I've started composting. I'm sure that'll outweigh the average Vegas visitor's emissions. /s

I'm being a bit facetious obviously, but it does feel a bit like tilting against windmills. We need policy and systemic changes, if we're relying on individuals to all collectively start doing the "right thing", we're sunk.

There simply is no solution to this problem. We would all need to stop driving, flying, and eating meat. Most families (in the US, anyway) would suffer unemployment and starvation if they couldnt drive to work.

Humans will continue to do whatever is needed to survive,, and that currently involves driving, flying, and eating meat. They will only stop when those behaviours are either not possible, or hinder survival.

Work on local things to make your own city better. Plenty of stuff that's not too difficult, even if it won't fix everything:

* Multifamily housing is much more energy efficient. Is it legal to build throughout your city, or does zoning prevent it?

* Is there good bicycle infrastructure so people don't have to drive for everything?

* Does your city still have expensive parking mandates that lock in car dependency? Get rid of those. They also get in the way of places becoming more walkable.

* This one hurts, but: eat less beef.

* Advocate for good transit as another way for people to get around without driving a personal vehicle.

* What can be done in your city/region to electrify heating for homes and businesses?

* What can your region do to build more renewable energy capacity?

Those are all things where even a few voices can sometimes make a difference.

> I feel like especially the West is regressing on climate change with the rise of the far right

Is it the "far right"? Or is it that technology and fertility have actually lowered the risks substantially?

Solar plus batteries, right now, seems to be the cheapest form of new energy. Given that, you would expect most of new energy to be "green". (And if you look at the stats, that seems to be coming true.)

Electrification of transportation is happening quickly. China is cranking out cheap electric cars that are generally better than ICE cars of yesterday. And the world seems to be transitioning.

And fertility rates are dropping everywhere. So the amount of people we will need to support in the future continues to decline.

I've mostly stopped worrying about climate change. Not because I don't think it is real. But because I think we are clearly on the path to mitigating the worse scenarios.

There are actions you can cheer on, like China's quick adoption of renewable energy. You can't make it happen yourself but you can bring peoples' attention to good things, encourage those within your circle of influence, and vote for representation that shares your views.

As for what "we" collectively can do... let's assume you are speaking of areas of research. We may need to focus on researching adaptation techniques for the areas that are going to be the hardest hit, or that have the fewest resources to cope. It's a sad topic but it may be needed. Assume the worst, hope for the best, and plan for what you can.

Significant emissions are from ground transportation. Advocate for walkable neighbourhoods, bike infrastructure and public transit.

this is like a tiktok rage bait way of thinking. western nations have largely peaked on carbon emissions. china is slowing down and will peak soon. there are a lot of countries that still are growing in emissions, sure, but you are not looking at this scientifically.

The answer to that question is always the same. Join a party and become politically active. Or, if you really can't find any party that represents your views, join an NGO and become active in it. If you're too lazy for that, consider paying an NGO that does spectacular actions that have a public impact. And never vote for any parties that don't do anything for better climate control, of course.

If you are a US citizen, voting Trump out might be unironically the most significant decision your country could make for the next 100 years of mankind.

Not because the alternative is so great, but because Trump is so horrible that it's not even a question. We really don't need someone who doesn't even acknowledge climate change in charge of the world's biggest economy.

> I don't know what to do.

As a 52 year old who never believed we would take climate change seriously (and who is more convinced than ever I was correct as society actually regresses on this issue) I did what I had to do -- I purposefully didn't have children.

Good luck to those of you who did.

This ain't my problem. I'll be dead (or close enough) when the shit fully hits the fan and won't have doomed any offspring to the upcoming migration/resources wars

You work in software, right? Then you can donate some money to enviro orgs.

Die a horrible death while watching a group of hateful people scream that it’s all the immigrants fault and that they ate all the cats and dogs, I guess …

Fear and egoism is probably causing the rise of the far-right, fear of not having enough, and egoism of "Why do I have to share?" (and being dumb enough to believe "make it great again" lies). And then the idiotic "center" who doesn't want to lose voters start moving to the right. With the decaying planet less capable of producing food, there'll be less, and there'll be more of that scarcity mindset (although do we even have scarcity, maybe it's just the uneven distribution, with billionaires eating cows that's been fed grass that's grown with the purest glacier water flown by helicopter from the Swiss alps...).

In one aspect, the autocratic rule of Xi Jinping has a positive: "We're going to cover the whole mountain with solar panels, and force electrification of cars." and there's no busybodies protesting and threatening to vote his party out of office.

I think there's someone that wrote about what is to be done, but I can't remember who. /s

the west is regressing on climate because, quite frankly, almost anything we do is pointless. we're not the ones who need to do anything to have an impact on the world. the entities that must do something don't want to

> might need many years to become stable again

People really fail to grasp the significance of this part.

One of our most common apocalyptic fantasies lays this out quite well: nuclear annihilation. The common narrative is about the post-apocalyptic world and rebuilding. But this presumes a new normal has been established.

With climate change we will continue to experience more extreme changes at a faster rate over time with no chance of a "new normal" in our lives.

It took hundreds of thousands of years for humans to develop agriculture. It's no coincidence that this development happened during one of the most stable periods of climate the planet has ever seen. People love to wax poetic on human adaptability, but we were effectively playing on "easy" mode.

While the other side of climate change might be a more hostile earth, the transition period will be worse because you can't adapt. In our lifetimes we may live to see a period of record heat waves in Europe, followed by a transition of Europe to that is dramatically colder (and who knows, maybe back again).

The other major problem is as stability decreases so does our ability to predict the future. It's hard to even know what we might be facing in the coming years, but high variance is usually not great for complex life.

It's not that policymakers are unaware. It's that some of them are allergic to true things that they find inconvenient, and have made false premises a pillar of their platform. Calling that "unaware" is giving them too much credit and understanding.

They are most definitely aware. They are willfully ignoring this but they are not ignorant.

I think most people bet that they'd be dead until that transition happens, so the problem won't be theirs to address.

The _state_ isn't alarming, it's the rate of change. The transition is happening on a scale of human lifetimes instead of geological time.

> Earth has been in a greenhouse state for about 85% of its history.

And during those periods there were no human beings. And no agriculture, or unstable globalised economiies, or dense urban societies vulnerable to disruption.

It is, of course, interesting that our planet has this long, varied existence that pre-dates us. But it is of little use in understanding how to get us out of the hole we're in. And it is arguably dangerous, because it misleads people into thinking that we have the capacity to adapt to such conditions, when we manifestly don't.

Thank you for saying this. If you want to know the answer to what causes climate problems, you need to go back to the era of dinosaurs, where CO2 levels were multiple times higher than today. Trees could thrive because they could breathe in a lot of CO2. Dinosaurs got so big because there were plenty of food. How could dinosaurs happily live with such high CO2 levels? The key is that there were plenty of forests. Peter Wohlleben's book "The Power of Trees: How Ancient Forests Can Save Us if We Let Them" explains how forests naturally circulate water.

Water vapor (clouds) also reflects sunlight. So it's complicated. We know the planet has had higher CO2 and higher temperatures in the past, and it did not "run away"

True runaway (i.e. oceans boiling / Venus) cannot happen on Earth unless you significantly increase incoming radiation stream (or alternatively halve the planet's albedo).

The runaway effect is scary b/c at certain temperature (~400K) atmosphere consisting predominantly of water vapor looses its ability to radiate out more heat up until 1600K.

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/ngeo1892 (see fig. 2b) (edit: the figure: https://imgur.com/a/ytoEXzd)

edit #2: I've measured some pixels and the starting runaway temp is closer to 315K / 42C, damn

And that's just one of the many positive feedback loops.

Yes, and the scary thing is that soon the atmospheric carbon PPM will be high enough to start affecting how we think, act, and feel on a day to day basis.

The problem can now only be solved on the supply side. Cut the production of oil and gas below the planet's natural carbon sequestration.

Go ask Google about China and the 3rd world contribution to global pollution. The West is bending over backwards to 'fight climate change' and a huge chunk of the world is just doing whatever they want, completely negating all of the west efforts.

Economically viable fusion power uses the fusion reactor in the sky beaming energy to us for free that we can collect with relatively cheap, simple, decentralized, solid state, and extremely long lasting (decades) power transmission recievers.

How about economically viable fission power, right now.

What about the possibility that the models so far have always been wrong and if they wrong in the wrong direction you would never hear about them?

The latter. I suggest reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleoclimatology#Reconstructin...

The later, "−6°C and +2°C relative to" is relative to the mean of 14.

We have had the technology to decarbonise the grid since the 1950s and we have known about the problem since the 1970s. Politics however has driven the use of CO2 instead of nuclear energy and required the drastic development of high end wind and solar. Even that wasn't enough, it also had to get considerably cheaper than CO2 producing energy sources and the entire time the entire worlds population has been subjected to massive amounts of propaganda to keep burning oil, gas and coal. This transition was possible 55 years ago when the problem was first surfaced, the political will just wasn't there so it didn't happen.

Its not an education issue, it has always been governments getting in the way and refusing to change the power source. its why I think Solar will win out, it can be deployed on an individual house level unlike everything else and that changes things enormously.

20 years ago was when Al Gore’s influential documentary An Inconvenient Truth first appeared. Almost everyone I knew discussed it, including primary school pupils. Guess what, we do have better tools today than 20 years ago to fight climate change, such as practical and useful electric vehicles to replace CO2-emitting conventional vehicles.

Putting sulfur into the right layers of the atmosphere seems to be the currently best viable options. It's not overly expensive, either. It acts fast and is reversible.

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

So far all of the carbon capture techniques (apart from growing forests and keeping them protected) have been pretty unsuccessful, and/or don't scale well.

That leaves us in the realm of solutions that may be very likely to disrupt our ecosystem themselves, like genetically-engineering algae/phytoplankton to improve ocean carbon sequestration

I don't think carbon capture / sequestration is going to do enough, but if we continue slipping into this trajectory I think there will be more support for changing reflectivity (spraying sea water, or putting particles in the stratosphere).

There are currently no power efficient and scalable ways to remove carbon dioxide from air or water.

Renewables are considered woke technology which mock old and masculine fossil fuel tech, which feel threatened by all these white spinny things, hence renewable energy projects are being actively discouraged or canceled altogether.

You know, we'd be all woke and weird if our cars don't have 8 cylinders and make wroom sounds. Same for our chimneys and power architecture. Woke electrons should be banned. We need masculine, fossil based electrons, which are more powerful per electron than wind/solar based fluffy/hippie ones.

Needed to happen 30 years ago.

Now it’s drill baby drill time.

> If such a thing existed, we could be sure that environmentalists and leftists would have openly embraced it, rather than nip it at the bud 50 years ago. Because they are Good People™. And we should definitely listen to them now because they Follow The Science™.

The issue with current politics wrt environment is environmentalists and leftists? This feels like a smoker blaming their smoking habit on anti-drug associations not being good enough rather than big tobacco.

CO2 seems very threatening but loss of biodiversity is also a problem, and it has nothing to do with energy...

We're in deep s*t

People may be downvoting you because they think you're not speaking in good faith. But I think this touches on an important issue which is the credibility of politicians when it comes to bringing the science hammer down (in the form of policy). Stuff like the junk science behind those old CA plastic straw policies, the seesawing on Covid prevention and lab-leak denialism, the energy efficient dryers that don't work (this last one is more hearsay to me, and issue of CBA rather than scientific fact perhaps.) I think if politicians can get their shit straight on communicating mature science thoroughly and accurately it could go a long way to getting people to work together.

But that source of power is a high-modernist invention that is unnatural and especially dangerous because of a few high-profile accidents. We have to shut it all down!

Surely nothing has ever done wrong with this limitless source of clean energy to give people pause? There's no uninhabitable areas of the Earth due to this?

Not the same silicon. Wafer fabs make pure crystals. Photovoltaics use polysilicon.

Obviously you mean purified silicon, but, remember silicon is what the Earth has in abundance (yeah I know it’s energy intensive, and there exist such profession as sand prospector.)

> It's unfortunate because a rapid civilizational collapse could give humanity as a species a better chance of survival.

How's that?

> Meanwhile all these other AI threads everybody’s worried about losing their jobs

don't worry

AI will cause both losing your job AND climate change