Something to keep in mind in the comments when talking about climate change and CO2 levels is that it’s not the level so much as the rate. We’re on the path to doubling (or have doubled if you look at CO2 equivalents) global CO2 levels faster than likely any other time in earths entire history. We have the CO2 levels equivalent to a time period when the earths poles didn’t have ice caps and instead forests in the span of about 200 years.
Every organism and ecosystem you’ve ever encountered in your life is adapted to an Ice Age climate, but we’ve recreated the conditions of a Hot House earth. Species and ecosystems adapt on much slower time scales. They cannot adapt to changes this abrupt, which means they will necessarily collapse if we do nothing and allow emit CO2. Every other time in earths history that the CO2 levels have rapidly risen it’s lead to a mass extinction. Yes it’s been hotter before but that change happened gradually. It’s like the joke about poison vs medicine, it’s the dose that kills you.
So it’s pretty clear we need to adopt solar radiation management r&d asap. Because that is the only feasible way we will stabilize the heat balance in the next few decades.
The upping was most clearly down 1940-1950. When shipping and/or industry took a hit. Together with the sulfur emissions debacle, it's clear that most interventions (either radiative cooling or at-source capture) need to focus on shipping.
But then you hit the "laws of the high seas" problem. Maybe tariffs can have a role to play here! Via a Nobel Prize!
I have total fatigue about it. It is true, and also it is terrifying, and also it is completely debilitating to imagine doing anything effective about this.
The silver lining politically: its not like the impact goes away. So progress won't just grind to a halt from one bad administration or one country's government. And there is a lot of progress happening.
To my understanding, the only time CO2 emissions were down was during covid.
While there are a few localized success stories, I'm not aware we've actually meaningfully impacted our trajectory.
To be abundantly clear: it's true that eg. Trump's administration will have limited effect, mainly because it's a global thing ... But global emissions have been rising, too.
People have predicted peak CO2 multiple times, but it hasn't actually crystalized beyond the shutdown year to my knowledge.
I think we witnessed a profound paradigm shift last week - China is the new global driving force to avert climate catastrophy. The probably peaked CO2 output last year. Last yeear they reached their 2030 target for renewables as share of total energy production. Almost 60% of new cars sold there are electric. And China produced more PV cells in the first half of this year alone than have been installed in the US in sum, ever.
And now they stated a public CO2 reduction goal for the first time.
I suspect people in the US haven't really noticed this as much because the 100%+ tariffs on cars and PV isolate the country from the dramatic changes happening everywhere else. Here in Germany I can buy 2 kWp in panels plus an inverter for under 400€.
We can say the growth curve is not exponential, its now linear. At the most hopeful, we can say its plateauing and we will hit peak carbon emissions soon (some say we've already hit it).
But all that's modeling, there are too many variables to really know.
I think reality is a potentially a bit darker in that we really have impacted the trajectory, it is just grossly insufficient to have a meaningful change in the direction.
We now seem in the unfortunate place where we have kicked or are kicking off system dynamics that are going to cause a large scale reconfiguration of our life support system.
The US has turned to authoritarianism. It seems naive to think this is going to go away in an election.
Our government is owned by the ultra wealthy who pursue their own narrow interests at the expense of the common good. Some of these people are just cynical; others identify their narrow interests with the common good. In either case they’ll continue to steer our world toward self destruction.
The best thing to do isn’t to hide one’s head in the sand or place our faith in failed institutions. These are two kinds of denial. We should be building a base of popular power in labor unions. The ideology is solidarity and striking holds actual power over the ownership class. It’s really the only thing that has a chance of leading society out of the collapse we are witnessing around us.
No. Of course we shouldn't "place faith in our institutions" but there is a degree of "If Gorman is going to burn, let it burn all the more brightly". You can galvanize a lot of individual / collective action without the government when people see consequences enabled by authoritarian structures.
You might argue the ONLY progress -- in the US -- is not at all from the gov't but from private players genuinely caring about the issue. A lot of people wake up in the morning and decide they'd rather work on an important issue, like climate, than squeezing a tiny bit more profit for some soulless corporation.
What is the temporal resolution of the ice cores or whatever else is being used to measure when the last “hot house” periods were? Because today we are measuring CO2 with minute-level resolution. But I feel like an ice core might be a year at best, probably much worse. Which if I’m right would mean we really don’t know how fast or slow we entered into the last hot period (the rate)
The Amazon forest is unique in many ways but most importantly because unlike other forests, it CANNOT grow back. The reason for this is that it is a leftover from when the planet was covered in rainforests because it was a lot warmer and wetter in the Eocene epoch. The forest is sustained by the rain it creates from itself. Once the trees are gone, the water will be gone. [1] We also have reasons to think this self-sustaining climate is going to collapse soon [2]
So far the best way to protect it I have found is through the Rainforest Trust [3] which is a foundation that's trying to purchase and protect parts of the rainforests that companies would otherwise cut or burn down for agricultural use.
> The reason for this is that it is a leftover from when the planet was covered in rainforests because it was a lot warmer and wetter in the Eocene epoch.
Won't it get much warmer and wetter once global warming hits, allowing the rainforest to grow back?
Not necessarily, (or even according to climate models I’ve seen). The feedback the OP mentioned is because trees near the coasts catch rain that they then respirate back up and create an atmospheric river that moves inland and falls as rain thus continuing the cycle inward. This cycle is disrupted by deforestation and can stop during a state change where it turns into Savannah. Savannah's are much drier and don’t cycle through water like the rain forest would. We’ll also see abrupt changes in global climate which will lead to completely different global rainfall patterns than we know today. For example the Sahara desert will likely turn into grassland/forest (which has happened in the past). The rainforest being a holdover from the Eocene is news to me, but my understanding was that the climate of the Holocene that we are leaving had weather patterns that facilitated a positive feedback with the Amazon rainforest expansion. From my understanding a thriving Amazon also necessarily depended on a desert Sahara as they drive weather/nutrient patterns that helps the Amazon
Global warming will not reforest the planet with a substantially different biosphere to set the conditions for the Amazon to regrow and then persist.
I mean I suppose it could but contingent on that would be things like "thousands of years" and "likely substantial extinction of human population centers".
My understanding is very challenging for a few reasons.
1. A forest is not just a bunch of trees. It’s most healthy and robust with mature trees and right animal life that supports and propagates them
2. The short term economic incentives towards rehabilitating the forest aren’t there and are actively counter productive for soy and beef farming
3. It might already be past a tipping point as some parts of the forest are dying out and setting on fire through natural causes. The Amazon rainforest is NOT an ecosystem that is used to burning and it cannot recover from it since it destroys the ground cover and soils rainforest plants depend on to grow. Plants that like wet conditions need wet conditions to prosper, dusty charred clay ain’t that
And even if it's somehow possible, it takes a lot longer too. Unless you're just moving the trees from somewhere else (which kinda defeats the whole point), you need to grow new ones, and trees take a pretty long time to get as large as the ones we're talking about.
In 2023 there was also massive fires in Canada covering a similar area, 2021 Siberia, in 2019/2020 in Australia, 2015 in Indonesia (peat fires, less area but similar emissions)... there is a long list of extended fires with weighty emissions all in the last decade that nullifies and add a big share to every trial of forestation as natural carbon capture method. And things will get worse as that is in part a positive feedback loop.
Australia has long had fires. Fires are an integral part of Australia’s historic natural environment.
So much so, that Eucalyptus trees evolved to become a fire dependent species that benefits from regular burning. This is why they are so dangerous when planted in places like Los Angeles.
The 2019–2020 fires were so hot that eucalyptus trees actually struggled to reproduce. Trees with pyrophilic seeds that normally like a good scorching were instead totally consumed by the fires, and the soil got so hot that seeds already dropped and buried were burned to death. Trees that store energy in their wood (either underground or shielded by bark) got so hot that their normally safe wood burned.
Obviously not every tree died due to the fires, but the death and destruction left in the wake of this fire was on a scale far surpassing past fires. Not to mention the deaths of animals.
Recommended reading: The End of Eden by Adam Welz, which basically covers how global weirding and extreme weather events have pushed species already teetering on the edge of survival over the brink.
I’m not meaning that ocasional/limited forest fires can or not be healthy for forest. Just that the mentioned ones were all record breaking, and had a significant contribution to long lasting CO2 in the atmosphere, all of them were in similar orders than the 2024 fires.
And that carbon capture through planting trees may be something fragile and short lived.
> The Amazon contributing 741 ± 61 teragram of carbon-its highest level since 2000 and more than half of the global fire emission anomaly. This surge, driven by exceptional heat and drought, offset two decades of declining deforestation emissions.
That's rough, whatever gains we thought we made, puff gone. The next sentence paints us a picture of what the future holds. Many of us are going to be here for pretty drastic events I could imagine.
We've banned this account for repeatedly posting inflammatory rhetoric and ignoring our requests to stop.
You're a longtime user who has made positive contributions to HN and we don't want to ban you, but we can't continue to tolerate this. If you don't want to be banned, you can contact us at hn@ycombinator.com to discuss it further.
As soon as we decarbonise we will see an imediate reduction in atmospheric CO² and global temperatures will follow quickly.
Given how bad and likely some of the failure modes of climate change are, decarbonisation is our only reasonable way forward that guarantees our continued technological progress as a species, vs a dark age.
We need to halt the AI rollout and focus on using engineering talent to help make sure afforestation works and forests conditions are monitored carefully. We need to make sure that the forests we have can be sustained and the carbon we have emitted can be successfully sequestered back into the forest.
Most importantly we need to drastically change our consumption patterns to prevent emissions from continuing to rise.
It got coverage back then because at the same time as the Amazon was experiencing record fires the administration also allowed record cuts. You can probably see why that doesn’t go well together.
The current administration has reduced deforestation rates in Brazil by around half.
Bolsonaro's policy choices regarding the Amazon likely meaningfully contributed to this issue by allowing "ideal conditions" to accumulate in the years that preceded. If anything, this helps confirm it rather than absolve him.
Naturally other issues like El Niño and factors outside of Brazil also play a role, but it stands to reason this would not have been as tragic had he not been elected president.
Nah. Time to stop blaming him. It's been three years, plenty of time for Lula to do something if he actually gave a shit. He's too busy to actually run the country though. He's got far more important things to do such as finding innovative new ways to tax us and persecuting Bolsonaro until his death.
In many other countries other than the USA the gap between left and right in regards to climate change is much smaller and majority on the right are at least concerned about it and it is definitely NOT part of their identity. How does pointing out this misconception is "burying my head in sand" as your reply implies? At no point I imply that climate change shouldn't be carefully studied and mitigated.
This forums' USA centrism (although unsurprising) is really starting to get on my nerves.
> Today, 29 percent of the natural gas extracted in North Dakota is just burned away. This wasted amount represents enough gas to heat half a million homes
Combining the data in the article that was posted (741 ± 61 teragram of carbon annually) with a single Google search about the Bakken fields (4 tons of carbon daily), yields a result that this contribution from the Amazon is 507,534 times larger than the contribution from the Bakken fields.
The misconception here is that the carbon in the Bakken is locked up geologically and essentially removed the biosphere’s carbon cycle but the Amazon is not. Even if the entire Amazon rainforest were to burn it wouldn’t change that. The problem with fossil fuels is that we are added sequestered to our biosphere at rates it cannot adapt to.
So while absolute terms are less it isn’t the same and we should be worried about what OP is discussing
I knew someone would inevitably try to find a way to refocus the blame on America. Thanks for illustrating just how ridiculously wrong it was in this instance.
That last sentence should give you an immediate idea of the scale, and that it’s not going to be near the top. Half a million homes is tiny when we’re talking about the entire globe. Thats like one medium-sized city, and just the heating, not any other energy use. It would be nice to capture that energy instead of wasting it, but there are far bigger fish to fry.
"Tree trunks in the Amazon are getting 3.3% thicker every decade as the plants absorb extra carbon dioxide, suggesting they are more resilient to global warming than previously thought."
It should be no surprise that at the margin virtually every plant gets a small boost from higher CO2.
Plants don’t get the optimal amount of any component, because they balance the components they take from the environment against the energy costs of acquiring them and other constraints.
If any component gets a little easier to aquire, the plant will do a little better. If it’s a long term change, the plant will evolve a new balance that will improve it slightly more.
But rising CO2 (in addition to making animal life dumber*) is contributing to a slow but radical rearrangement of local conditions through the globe.
Temperature changes, precipitation levels, wind and storm prevalence, sea encroachment and season lengths being the biggest. And both have tremendous impact on plants.
The faster the change. The worse the damage. When changes compound, they can happen very fast.
* CO2 levels have gone from 240ppm to 420ppm. At 1,000 ppm there are clear measurable impacts on human cognition. Given cognition is such a critical capability, it begs the question: what is the actual curve of CO2ppm to cognitive effects. Same goes for metabolic efficiency related to our need to expel CO2.
Because even small consistent subtle effects over time are likely to have practical effects. And also because raising the floor of CO2 outside, also raises the bar inside where CO2 notoriously collects, and decreases the rate that enclosed spaces can renormalize levels when given a chance. Both of which raise the indoor CO2 expected and ceiling values.
Perfect. It should be no surprise but sometimes it is: some people get really surprised when they discover that higher temperatures, extra light and more CO2 make plants bigger. Or when they find out that pre-historical times had less oxygen and more CO2.
CO2 is so demonized that people forget that it's essential to life (at least, to some forms of life).
I don’t think any credible person is saying CO2 is dangerous to life.
The changes to the climate can disrupt things like ocean currents to disastrous effect. Atmospheric gas won’t kill anyone, we’ll kill each other over access to resources like food and water.
CO2 isn’t demonized. People focus on the harms because the beneficial aspects are well known, not argued, and not particularly relevant when making pretty much any real-world decision.
It’s not that more CO2 is bad it’s that the rate of change is faster than any time in the geologic history of earth. And every mass extinction including the dinosaurs involved abrupt changes to CO2 levels. Every living thing is made out of carbon that came from CO2. Every scientist studying climate change knows this. But every organism on this planet evolved for ice age like conditions and in the span of 200 years we turned the earth’s thermostat from Ice Age to Hot House
Fires are part of a natural short-term Carbon cycle at around 5 years on average. These events have little impact on global climate change, and highlights the absurdity of planting trees for carbon credits.
Long-term carbon cycles last about 30000 years, and the majority of climate change is driven from burning old carbon sources deep in the earths crust.
Fossil oil is incredibly useful stuff, and it is wasteful burning it as fuel. Something to consider between the floods, fires, droughts, and contrarians. lol =3
The Amazon rainforest is not an ecosystem that burns. It’s not adapted to it and it effectively destroys it permanently on a human time scale. It requires wet conditions that are fostered by trees and heavy organic forest litter like leaves. Even if a fire in the Amazon only burns the ground litter it will kill the that part of the forest because the trees have adapted to those leaves being there.
The Amazon rainforest is close to a tipping point at which point it will almost entirely die off and convert to Savanah. And if you think fossil fuels are incredibly useful wait till you learn how useful a stable climate has been
The Amazon rain forest creates its own local wet climate, and when that cycle is broken the place will be far drier than many would expect.
Mismanagement is ultimately a self-correcting problem, as local extinction events are also natural. If I recall the rain-forest floor organic layer is rather thin when compared to other ecosystems.
However, China economic interests in South America agriculture and resources is a complex issue. All world donations sent to help preserve the forest was negligible by comparison. =3
Something to keep in mind in the comments when talking about climate change and CO2 levels is that it’s not the level so much as the rate. We’re on the path to doubling (or have doubled if you look at CO2 equivalents) global CO2 levels faster than likely any other time in earths entire history. We have the CO2 levels equivalent to a time period when the earths poles didn’t have ice caps and instead forests in the span of about 200 years.
Every organism and ecosystem you’ve ever encountered in your life is adapted to an Ice Age climate, but we’ve recreated the conditions of a Hot House earth. Species and ecosystems adapt on much slower time scales. They cannot adapt to changes this abrupt, which means they will necessarily collapse if we do nothing and allow emit CO2. Every other time in earths history that the CO2 levels have rapidly risen it’s lead to a mass extinction. Yes it’s been hotter before but that change happened gradually. It’s like the joke about poison vs medicine, it’s the dose that kills you.
So it’s pretty clear we need to adopt solar radiation management r&d asap. Because that is the only feasible way we will stabilize the heat balance in the next few decades.
We had just that. But we accidentally banned it by banning sulfur in cargo ship fuel.
The upping was most clearly down 1940-1950. When shipping and/or industry took a hit. Together with the sulfur emissions debacle, it's clear that most interventions (either radiative cooling or at-source capture) need to focus on shipping.
But then you hit the "laws of the high seas" problem. Maybe tariffs can have a role to play here! Via a Nobel Prize!
https://skepticalscience.com/The-CO2-Temperature-correlation...
I have total fatigue about it. It is true, and also it is terrifying, and also it is completely debilitating to imagine doing anything effective about this.
The silver lining politically: its not like the impact goes away. So progress won't just grind to a halt from one bad administration or one country's government. And there is a lot of progress happening.
It is?
To my understanding, the only time CO2 emissions were down was during covid.
While there are a few localized success stories, I'm not aware we've actually meaningfully impacted our trajectory.
To be abundantly clear: it's true that eg. Trump's administration will have limited effect, mainly because it's a global thing ... But global emissions have been rising, too.
People have predicted peak CO2 multiple times, but it hasn't actually crystalized beyond the shutdown year to my knowledge.
I think we witnessed a profound paradigm shift last week - China is the new global driving force to avert climate catastrophy. The probably peaked CO2 output last year. Last yeear they reached their 2030 target for renewables as share of total energy production. Almost 60% of new cars sold there are electric. And China produced more PV cells in the first half of this year alone than have been installed in the US in sum, ever.
And now they stated a public CO2 reduction goal for the first time.
I suspect people in the US haven't really noticed this as much because the 100%+ tariffs on cars and PV isolate the country from the dramatic changes happening everywhere else. Here in Germany I can buy 2 kWp in panels plus an inverter for under 400€.
We can say the growth curve is not exponential, its now linear. At the most hopeful, we can say its plateauing and we will hit peak carbon emissions soon (some say we've already hit it).
But all that's modeling, there are too many variables to really know.
I think reality is a potentially a bit darker in that we really have impacted the trajectory, it is just grossly insufficient to have a meaningful change in the direction.
We now seem in the unfortunate place where we have kicked or are kicking off system dynamics that are going to cause a large scale reconfiguration of our life support system.
The US has turned to authoritarianism. It seems naive to think this is going to go away in an election.
Our government is owned by the ultra wealthy who pursue their own narrow interests at the expense of the common good. Some of these people are just cynical; others identify their narrow interests with the common good. In either case they’ll continue to steer our world toward self destruction.
The best thing to do isn’t to hide one’s head in the sand or place our faith in failed institutions. These are two kinds of denial. We should be building a base of popular power in labor unions. The ideology is solidarity and striking holds actual power over the ownership class. It’s really the only thing that has a chance of leading society out of the collapse we are witnessing around us.
No. Of course we shouldn't "place faith in our institutions" but there is a degree of "If Gorman is going to burn, let it burn all the more brightly". You can galvanize a lot of individual / collective action without the government when people see consequences enabled by authoritarian structures.
You might argue the ONLY progress -- in the US -- is not at all from the gov't but from private players genuinely caring about the issue. A lot of people wake up in the morning and decide they'd rather work on an important issue, like climate, than squeezing a tiny bit more profit for some soulless corporation.
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What is the temporal resolution of the ice cores or whatever else is being used to measure when the last “hot house” periods were? Because today we are measuring CO2 with minute-level resolution. But I feel like an ice core might be a year at best, probably much worse. Which if I’m right would mean we really don’t know how fast or slow we entered into the last hot period (the rate)
The Amazon forest is unique in many ways but most importantly because unlike other forests, it CANNOT grow back. The reason for this is that it is a leftover from when the planet was covered in rainforests because it was a lot warmer and wetter in the Eocene epoch. The forest is sustained by the rain it creates from itself. Once the trees are gone, the water will be gone. [1] We also have reasons to think this self-sustaining climate is going to collapse soon [2]
So far the best way to protect it I have found is through the Rainforest Trust [3] which is a foundation that's trying to purchase and protect parts of the rainforests that companies would otherwise cut or burn down for agricultural use.
[1]https://youtu.be/hb3b-A6QAc8
[2]https://www.nasa.gov/earth-and-climate/human-activities-are-...
[3]https://www.rainforesttrust.org
> The reason for this is that it is a leftover from when the planet was covered in rainforests because it was a lot warmer and wetter in the Eocene epoch.
Won't it get much warmer and wetter once global warming hits, allowing the rainforest to grow back?
Not necessarily, (or even according to climate models I’ve seen). The feedback the OP mentioned is because trees near the coasts catch rain that they then respirate back up and create an atmospheric river that moves inland and falls as rain thus continuing the cycle inward. This cycle is disrupted by deforestation and can stop during a state change where it turns into Savannah. Savannah's are much drier and don’t cycle through water like the rain forest would. We’ll also see abrupt changes in global climate which will lead to completely different global rainfall patterns than we know today. For example the Sahara desert will likely turn into grassland/forest (which has happened in the past). The rainforest being a holdover from the Eocene is news to me, but my understanding was that the climate of the Holocene that we are leaving had weather patterns that facilitated a positive feedback with the Amazon rainforest expansion. From my understanding a thriving Amazon also necessarily depended on a desert Sahara as they drive weather/nutrient patterns that helps the Amazon
Without the trees, more rain may erode the soil, the Amazon river might flood more easily causing more erosion.
Eocene temperatures: 6-15 kelvin above current. Would take another century or two of coal-burning to reach.
We are already at Eocene levels of CO2 it’s just that our climate hasn’t caught up yet
I think that's wrong, Eocene ended when levels had fallen to roughly 600-700 ppm? And we are at 480 ppm now.
Global warming will not reforest the planet with a substantially different biosphere to set the conditions for the Amazon to regrow and then persist.
I mean I suppose it could but contingent on that would be things like "thousands of years" and "likely substantial extinction of human population centers".
How hard is it to plant it back?
My understanding is very challenging for a few reasons. 1. A forest is not just a bunch of trees. It’s most healthy and robust with mature trees and right animal life that supports and propagates them 2. The short term economic incentives towards rehabilitating the forest aren’t there and are actively counter productive for soy and beef farming 3. It might already be past a tipping point as some parts of the forest are dying out and setting on fire through natural causes. The Amazon rainforest is NOT an ecosystem that is used to burning and it cannot recover from it since it destroys the ground cover and soils rainforest plants depend on to grow. Plants that like wet conditions need wet conditions to prosper, dusty charred clay ain’t that
A lot harder than just not burning it down in the first place.
And even if it's somehow possible, it takes a lot longer too. Unless you're just moving the trees from somewhere else (which kinda defeats the whole point), you need to grow new ones, and trees take a pretty long time to get as large as the ones we're talking about.
hard, and expensive, but doable as long as carbon credits are a thing: https://re.green/en/?force_locale=1
there are a few others in Brazil, like Biomas and Mombak
In 2023 there was also massive fires in Canada covering a similar area, 2021 Siberia, in 2019/2020 in Australia, 2015 in Indonesia (peat fires, less area but similar emissions)... there is a long list of extended fires with weighty emissions all in the last decade that nullifies and add a big share to every trial of forestation as natural carbon capture method. And things will get worse as that is in part a positive feedback loop.
Australia has long had fires. Fires are an integral part of Australia’s historic natural environment.
So much so, that Eucalyptus trees evolved to become a fire dependent species that benefits from regular burning. This is why they are so dangerous when planted in places like Los Angeles.
The 2019–2020 fires were so hot that eucalyptus trees actually struggled to reproduce. Trees with pyrophilic seeds that normally like a good scorching were instead totally consumed by the fires, and the soil got so hot that seeds already dropped and buried were burned to death. Trees that store energy in their wood (either underground or shielded by bark) got so hot that their normally safe wood burned.
Obviously not every tree died due to the fires, but the death and destruction left in the wake of this fire was on a scale far surpassing past fires. Not to mention the deaths of animals.
Recommended reading: The End of Eden by Adam Welz, which basically covers how global weirding and extreme weather events have pushed species already teetering on the edge of survival over the brink.
I’m not meaning that ocasional/limited forest fires can or not be healthy for forest. Just that the mentioned ones were all record breaking, and had a significant contribution to long lasting CO2 in the atmosphere, all of them were in similar orders than the 2024 fires.
And that carbon capture through planting trees may be something fragile and short lived.
> The Amazon contributing 741 ± 61 teragram of carbon-its highest level since 2000 and more than half of the global fire emission anomaly. This surge, driven by exceptional heat and drought, offset two decades of declining deforestation emissions.
That's rough, whatever gains we thought we made, puff gone. The next sentence paints us a picture of what the future holds. Many of us are going to be here for pretty drastic events I could imagine.
The climate change self reinforcing loop
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We've banned this account for repeatedly posting inflammatory rhetoric and ignoring our requests to stop.
You're a longtime user who has made positive contributions to HN and we don't want to ban you, but we can't continue to tolerate this. If you don't want to be banned, you can contact us at hn@ycombinator.com to discuss it further.
More than a few dozen people stand between where we are and a carbon-neutral future/alt-history.
But there were some important tipping points that have pushed us into our current do-nothing trajectory. The stolen 2000 election was a notable one.
We've already hit 1.5C, by the way. Hold on to your butts.
https://berkeleyearth.org/global-temperature-report-for-2024...
As soon as we decarbonise we will see an imediate reduction in atmospheric CO² and global temperatures will follow quickly. Given how bad and likely some of the failure modes of climate change are, decarbonisation is our only reasonable way forward that guarantees our continued technological progress as a species, vs a dark age.
> As soon as we decarbonise
And there it is, because when is this going to happen?
My dad used to have a term for this.. “Saint Never’s Day”
We need to halt the AI rollout and focus on using engineering talent to help make sure afforestation works and forests conditions are monitored carefully. We need to make sure that the forests we have can be sustained and the carbon we have emitted can be successfully sequestered back into the forest.
Most importantly we need to drastically change our consumption patterns to prevent emissions from continuing to rise.
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It got coverage back then because at the same time as the Amazon was experiencing record fires the administration also allowed record cuts. You can probably see why that doesn’t go well together.
The current administration has reduced deforestation rates in Brazil by around half.
Bolsonaro's policy choices regarding the Amazon likely meaningfully contributed to this issue by allowing "ideal conditions" to accumulate in the years that preceded. If anything, this helps confirm it rather than absolve him.
Naturally other issues like El Niño and factors outside of Brazil also play a role, but it stands to reason this would not have been as tragic had he not been elected president.
Nah. Time to stop blaming him. It's been three years, plenty of time for Lula to do something if he actually gave a shit. He's too busy to actually run the country though. He's got far more important things to do such as finding innovative new ways to tax us and persecuting Bolsonaro until his death.
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The oppression I would put up with if the right pivoted against global warming…
There is no such single entity as the global right, the world is far too diverse and complicated for that. This seems to be mostly an USA tendency.
How’s the air down there in the sand
In many other countries other than the USA the gap between left and right in regards to climate change is much smaller and majority on the right are at least concerned about it and it is definitely NOT part of their identity. How does pointing out this misconception is "burying my head in sand" as your reply implies? At no point I imply that climate change shouldn't be carefully studied and mitigated.
This forums' USA centrism (although unsurprising) is really starting to get on my nerves.
Well yes. given that the current president isn’t pouring fuel on the fire.
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the northern hemisphere burning coal for data centers, electric cars... but, yes, the problem is definitely the deindustrialized southern hemisphere
I find it hard to believe anything can top the non-stop burning of natural gas the past two decades from the Bakken fracking fields in North Dakota
Think about how much fuel they waste, tons of CO2 and heating the atmosphere just to get to the oil
https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2013/01/16/169511949/a...
> Today, 29 percent of the natural gas extracted in North Dakota is just burned away. This wasted amount represents enough gas to heat half a million homes
Combining the data in the article that was posted (741 ± 61 teragram of carbon annually) with a single Google search about the Bakken fields (4 tons of carbon daily), yields a result that this contribution from the Amazon is 507,534 times larger than the contribution from the Bakken fields.
The misconception here is that the carbon in the Bakken is locked up geologically and essentially removed the biosphere’s carbon cycle but the Amazon is not. Even if the entire Amazon rainforest were to burn it wouldn’t change that. The problem with fossil fuels is that we are added sequestered to our biosphere at rates it cannot adapt to.
So while absolute terms are less it isn’t the same and we should be worried about what OP is discussing
I knew someone would inevitably try to find a way to refocus the blame on America. Thanks for illustrating just how ridiculously wrong it was in this instance.
That last sentence should give you an immediate idea of the scale, and that it’s not going to be near the top. Half a million homes is tiny when we’re talking about the entire globe. Thats like one medium-sized city, and just the heating, not any other energy use. It would be nice to capture that energy instead of wasting it, but there are far bigger fish to fry.
"Tree trunks in the Amazon are getting 3.3% thicker every decade as the plants absorb extra carbon dioxide, suggesting they are more resilient to global warming than previously thought."
https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/climate-change/amaz...
It should be no surprise that at the margin virtually every plant gets a small boost from higher CO2.
Plants don’t get the optimal amount of any component, because they balance the components they take from the environment against the energy costs of acquiring them and other constraints.
If any component gets a little easier to aquire, the plant will do a little better. If it’s a long term change, the plant will evolve a new balance that will improve it slightly more.
But rising CO2 (in addition to making animal life dumber*) is contributing to a slow but radical rearrangement of local conditions through the globe.
Temperature changes, precipitation levels, wind and storm prevalence, sea encroachment and season lengths being the biggest. And both have tremendous impact on plants.
The faster the change. The worse the damage. When changes compound, they can happen very fast.
* CO2 levels have gone from 240ppm to 420ppm. At 1,000 ppm there are clear measurable impacts on human cognition. Given cognition is such a critical capability, it begs the question: what is the actual curve of CO2ppm to cognitive effects. Same goes for metabolic efficiency related to our need to expel CO2.
Because even small consistent subtle effects over time are likely to have practical effects. And also because raising the floor of CO2 outside, also raises the bar inside where CO2 notoriously collects, and decreases the rate that enclosed spaces can renormalize levels when given a chance. Both of which raise the indoor CO2 expected and ceiling values.
Recent collective decisions around the world suggest an impairment may occur at concentrations already exceeded.
Perfect. It should be no surprise but sometimes it is: some people get really surprised when they discover that higher temperatures, extra light and more CO2 make plants bigger. Or when they find out that pre-historical times had less oxygen and more CO2.
CO2 is so demonized that people forget that it's essential to life (at least, to some forms of life).
I don’t think any credible person is saying CO2 is dangerous to life.
The changes to the climate can disrupt things like ocean currents to disastrous effect. Atmospheric gas won’t kill anyone, we’ll kill each other over access to resources like food and water.
CO2 isn’t demonized. People focus on the harms because the beneficial aspects are well known, not argued, and not particularly relevant when making pretty much any real-world decision.
It’s not that more CO2 is bad it’s that the rate of change is faster than any time in the geologic history of earth. And every mass extinction including the dinosaurs involved abrupt changes to CO2 levels. Every living thing is made out of carbon that came from CO2. Every scientist studying climate change knows this. But every organism on this planet evolved for ice age like conditions and in the span of 200 years we turned the earth’s thermostat from Ice Age to Hot House
This hasn’t seemed to help with
https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/
Or if it is helping it’s certainly not enough and the limits of the biosphere to accept more CO2 are being exceeded.
Fires are part of a natural short-term Carbon cycle at around 5 years on average. These events have little impact on global climate change, and highlights the absurdity of planting trees for carbon credits.
Long-term carbon cycles last about 30000 years, and the majority of climate change is driven from burning old carbon sources deep in the earths crust.
Fossil oil is incredibly useful stuff, and it is wasteful burning it as fuel. Something to consider between the floods, fires, droughts, and contrarians. lol =3
The Amazon rainforest is not an ecosystem that burns. It’s not adapted to it and it effectively destroys it permanently on a human time scale. It requires wet conditions that are fostered by trees and heavy organic forest litter like leaves. Even if a fire in the Amazon only burns the ground litter it will kill the that part of the forest because the trees have adapted to those leaves being there.
The Amazon rainforest is close to a tipping point at which point it will almost entirely die off and convert to Savanah. And if you think fossil fuels are incredibly useful wait till you learn how useful a stable climate has been
The Amazon rain forest creates its own local wet climate, and when that cycle is broken the place will be far drier than many would expect.
Mismanagement is ultimately a self-correcting problem, as local extinction events are also natural. If I recall the rain-forest floor organic layer is rather thin when compared to other ecosystems.
However, China economic interests in South America agriculture and resources is a complex issue. All world donations sent to help preserve the forest was negligible by comparison. =3