| ▲ | lbriner 3 hours ago |
| When I was younger, I remember thinking, "a few degrees, what difference does that make?" Then when I grew older I realised that in Climate science a few degrees is the difference between survival and annihilation. A few degrees warmer in the ocean and El Niño becomes an incredible problem for half the world. I am glad that I live far away from the effects but it is sad to think of people losing all kinds of things for the lack of respect of Mother Earth! |
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| ▲ | larsfaye 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| >I am glad that I live far away from the effects Are you not on planet earth? Unless you're on Mars, you're not far away from any effects. |
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| ▲ | ceejayoz 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | There are regions on the planet that will likely fare better than others, though. | | |
| ▲ | consumer451 an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Maybe you will require less insulation reconfiguration than some other regions, but it will be hard to escape the effects of billions of people suffering. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polycrisis edit: To be clear, I still think there is time to react, and stop the worst impacts. We just need to get way off the rails of the route that we are currently on. If we put half of the heroic engineering + global capital that we put into fossil fuel extraction into better things, we could get most of the way to the goal. Fossil fuel extraction is like many simultaneous Manhattan Projects. It's nuts what we put into that. Would be super cool if some of the breakout sessions titled "surviving WWIII," were replaced by "avoiding WWIII." | |
| ▲ | mullingitover 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | And we can tell ourselves that those regions which fare better will be left entirely alone. No one is going to, say, kill all the inhabitants and take the land from them. | |
| ▲ | bix6 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Not for long. |
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| ▲ | wcfrobert an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It's like interest rates. I used to think it's weird why people are so obsessed with a couple percentage points. But it's turns out those couple of percent could mean hundreds of thousands of dollars difference for a 30 year mortgage |
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| ▲ | giarc 39 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I fell in the same trap "So it'll be 25C in summer instead of 23C!". Sometimes it's small things that make you realize how small changes make big impacts. For example, I was watching a documentary about caribou in Northern Canada. A whole herd starved and died because of a slight warming during winter. Normally they dig through the snow to find food in the winter. But a slight warming meant the snow fell as freezing rain and left a thick layer of ice on top of the snow. The caribou couldn't dig through it and therefore couldn't eat and they died. A tiny change in temperature wiped out a huge colony. |
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| ▲ | yodsanklai an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > A few degrees warmer in the ocean and El Niño becomes an incredible problem for half the world. Ice age was only 6 degrees less than now, half of Europe was under ice |
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| ▲ | Windchaser an hour ago | parent [-] | | And when the Earth was 3C cooler, NYC was nearly under an ice sheet. The current estimate is that we're heading for +3C warmer, which is gonna have some big impacts. |
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| ▲ | cameldrv 41 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Honestly I think American scientists not speaking in Fahrenheit units to an American audience is an incredibly simple and stupid, but very significant cause of the problem. If I tell you the Earth is going to get 2 degrees C warmer, Americans are going to think, "2 degrees, not that much, barely noticeable." If you tell them it's 4 degrees F, they'll think, that's not a ton, but it's definitely noticeable. |
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| ▲ | cmrdporcupine 30 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > I am glad that I live far away from the effects but it is sad to think of people losing all kinds of things for the lack of respect of Mother Earth! I thought this too, feeling a bit more smug living in southern Ontario, safer than my family in BC and Alberta next to raging forest fires and potential drought. But seems we now get a few weeks of forest fire smoke every year even down here in lush green great lakes land. And the number of tornadoes and ice storms seem to increase every year. Plus watching the Children of Men style xenophobia and callous disregard for climate refugees set in all over the world. Blech. I love my kids but I think my perspective would be much different and positive if I'd just remained childless. |
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| ▲ | triska 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > "a few degrees, what difference does that make?" Maybe this helps: Think about when we have a fever of "a few degrees", say, instead of 37 degree Celsius, we have 40. It shows that also a few degrees can make a huge difference. |
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| ▲ | Isaackoz 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Think even bigger. 1 degrees inside your house? Not noticeable at all. But on a planet-wide scale? A 1 degree difference requires a LOT of energy. It's like boiling a cup of water vs an Olympic sized swimming pool. The latter is going to take a lot more energy than the former. | |
| ▲ | charcircuit 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The temperature of a fever is not measuring the temperature outside. | | |
| ▲ | an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | groby_b an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | This may be hard to understand, but that was an illustrative example on why sometimes a few degree difference have bigger absolute impact than you'd expect from the purely numerical value. Nobody (well, almost nobody, I guess) considered it an explanation or model of climate change. |
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| ▲ | toomuchtodo 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| “Climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you're the one filming it.” You cannot outrun agriculture and crop failures, infrastructure failures, insurance costs accelerating to properly price the risk, wild fires, etc. US cattle herds are at record lows from climate related input costs. Romanian, Hungarian, and Bulgarian nuclear reactors no longer have enough water to operate. The Colorado River Basin will only continue to dry out. And so on. Some will be impacted more than others, but everyone will feel some impact, and it potentially will only worsen over time. If you believe in climate change, do your best to mitigate the impact for the remainder of your lifetime. If you don't believe, oh well, good luck. https://x.com/ZackBornstein/status/1877055187241594986 Londoners Find ‘Horrendous’ Cracks in Their Homes After Successive Heat Waves - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-23/londoners... | https://archive.today/koMaT - August 23rd, 2026 > “The impact that climate change is having is undeniable.” -- Laura Hughes, Head of general insurance at the Association of British Insurers. > 20%-25%: The average property devaluation as a result of subsidence, according to the Federation of Master Builders The Age of Unstoppable Wildfires Has Reached Europe - https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2026-europe-summer-wildfi... | https://archive.today/OjDZH - July 30th, 2026 Climate Change Is Already Showing Up in the Cost of Living - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-24/climate-c... | https://archive.today/EYTqo - April 24th, 2026 Heat Strains US Power Grids That Need Off-Season Repairs - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-19/rising-he... | https://archive.today/K9VF0 - May 19th, 2026 US Spending on Climate Damage Nears $1 Trillion Per Year - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-17/us-spendi... | https://archive.today/9IJWo - June 17th, 2025 (Texas night time temps are staying high enough [~78F] that the utility equipment does not get time to cool off and cycle, leading to more faults, for example, and the manufacturing supply chain for transformers has a backlog measured in years) |
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| ▲ | abdullahkhalids 35 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Almost no one has the capability to intuitively understand cascading failure modes in complex systems. Especially, those with non-linear or flip-flop behaviour. It takes a lot of education to understand very particular types of complex systems, and then more effort to generalize those lessons to other types of systems. For example, a science model might predict only a 5% drop in global food production. That is easy to ignore because we waste so much food. But that 5% might be enough to trigger countries to impose food export bans, and some dominoes falling later, there are localized famines in particular places with 50% loss of food supply. That then triggers wars. It's impossible to predict if and when such types of event chains will happen. The only way out is to be very conservative, and aggressively defend against failure. | |
| ▲ | Forgeties79 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Even the US military treats climate change as not only real but as a destabilizing threat. What other endorsement could one possibly need? | | |
| ▲ | lbriner 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | "Yeah but they would say that, they are part of the system" Sadly, there is no way to counter a conspiracy theorist because if you question or counter then you are just part of the conspiracy too. Governments know that they need to do stuff but they also know that ignorant voters who read trash tabloid newspapers will vote them out next time because they might have to pay a little more for their electricity or cars. | | | |
| ▲ | 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | jimt1234 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| This is exactly what I hear from my MAGA relatives: Why should I care if the ocean rises a few inches? I don't own beachfront property in Florida. |
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| ▲ | shoobiedoo 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Well, at least they are honest about their stupidity. I live in Japan and am constantly shocked how many raised SUVs with the oversized max-grip tires in cities. Japan used to be a "doing it right" country in terms of not going overboard with waste. If you asked them why, they would probably say "it's cool!". Turns out humans will always choose status symbols and vanity over facts. Oh well | | |
| ▲ | horacemorace an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Humans simply choose whatever is comfortable and conforming. If their tribal mantra is solar panels, they’ll do that just like they’ll do anything else. | |
| ▲ | HeyLaughingBoy an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | I'm sorry, but why is this a surprise? | | |
| ▲ | shoobiedoo an hour ago | parent [-] | | Besides my saying that it used to be contrary to Japanese cultural expectations (もったいない)? | | |
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| ▲ | kenhwang 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | From what we've seen, so far the (not projected to be underwater) coastal areas might be the areas spared in this scenario too, because being by the water still moderates temperature swings. It's everywhere else that'll be getting record breaking heat/drought and snow, which have been far more damaging. The disaster radius of hurricanes reaches far more inland than just the coast. | |
| ▲ | twothreeone 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I mean they're right, rising oceans will be a drop in the bucket for the majority of us. Unless we act together, human civilization will end through the combination of breakdown of global trade, mass migration due to heat and resource wars, and collapse of our food chain. Ocean levels are just one of the side effects that goes along with rising global temperatures. Beef production in the US is already down from 30 years ago. At some point you won't be able to raise cows anywhere, less alone feed them. Corn and wheat have seen tremendous fluctuations in the past and will likely continue to fall. Imagine corn yields dropping by more than 80% in the US [1]. Of course MAGA people will probably only notice once the shelves aren't being restocked. [1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.0906865106 | | |
| ▲ | jimt1234 an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | > Of course MAGA people will probably only notice once the shelves aren't being restocked. And then they'll blame Obama. | |
| ▲ | jibcage 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | US beef production is actually slightly higher than 30 years ago. What has fallen is the cattle headcount (now the smallest since 1951) but heavier animals have kept total output up. The recent herd shrinkage owes more to drought economics and the normal boom and bust cycle of ranching than to cattle becoming unraisable. | | |
| ▲ | twothreeone 22 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Right, exactly that was what I meant. Thanks for clarifying. I remember being surprised by this when I heard it on NPR a few weeks ago. |
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| ▲ | ElProlactin 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Your relatives clearly aren't MAGA if they're not concerned about what rising sea levels will do to Mar-a-Lago. | | |
| ▲ | Terr_ 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Careful, that's a pitfall there if we assume MAGA words reflect an internal belief system. Too often the words are whatever they have to say in order to secure continued membership in the group: The Emperor's New Clothes are a glorious blue today. P.S: Also, we have always been [about to start|recently victorious] in the [illegal war|undeclared "excursion"] against Irania, and the tariff-free chocolate ration has been raised to twenty grammes per week. |
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