This is the most important part most people don't get:
> And what would 3 °C mean for Germany?
> FB: In summer, meteorological records could reach up to 50 °C. Three degrees of global warming does not mean hot days will just be 3 or 4 degrees hotter. It could mean up to 10 degrees hotter. We would also face much longer droughts.
3°C warming implies summer days can get 10°C hotter. This is nightmare scenario.
this also means thermal turbulence which means breakup of flow, and that means failure of distribution, leading to localized torrid spots, that translates to heat dome regions of more than 10°C hotter.
I'm sure you know that "up to" means the same as "no more than", and "could" means "might or might not". So there's no meaning in what you quoted, so why did you not only quote it but say that it's important and most people don't get it? It's not important, it's intentionally misleading.
Are you being intentionally obtuse? In normal language the quoted text means there is a meaningful chance of record temperatures 10 degrees hotter than current records.
This article sprinkles the word "risk" which people interpret as "bad things are coming" but actually means "there's some probability of the bad thing happening."
The probability is not quantified so it's impossible to react to. Over-protecting from a risk is as bad and under-protecting.
For example - something bad can happen to you any time you leave your house. However if you "protect" against that the risk by never leaving the house you are almost certainly worse off.
In case of climate the "thing to do" to protect from the risk is to minimize the economic activity that has improved life for everyone. Stopping that has an immediate "cost" which looks large compared to the unquantified risk it allegedly mitigates.
I wouldn't be too worried about it this century at least. if things look like they are going to get bad we will resort to geoengineering, and once we get a taste for it we will further optimize global temperatures to our liking.
perversely, global warming earlier than expected is a good thing [for us] as it will wipe away all meaningful opposition to geoengineering.
note how according to them having 50C days is a likely outcome. no one will tolerate this. sending the sulfur planes is assured at that point. you wouldn't even need to try and convince people with harvest yields.
What we already have is uncontrolled geoengineering. Having said that, geoengineering might lead to geopolitical conflict. The current situation is making the tropical/equatorial area less habitable while creating overall benefits for the high latitudes.
> geoengineering might lead to geopolitical conflict
I have heard of this but haven't heard a credible scenario describing it. if Europe or the US or China wanted to do it they could just be flying in circles in their own territory to deploy it safely (at the cost of some efficiency probably). only a nuclear power would likely dare to unilaterally do geoengineering.
it remains to be seen who will start the geoengineering effort, arguably Russia would benefit from global warming and so will Canada, so the US food supply should also remain secure.
I'm sure the day after Russia withdraws from Ukraine they're going to demand the pipeline from Russia be restored and everyone they suspect involved involved in the Nord Stream blasts extradited too.
North Stream was never about additional capacity. It was always about circumventing Ukraine's pipelines. Which in case of war turned it into a national security risk for Ukraine, which is why they blew it up. It forced Russia to either stop its exports or go through Ukraine. Which all turned out somewhat moot in the end.
On the path we're on I don't think we'll have to worry too much about future generations.
The EU has already seeing 10,000 excess deaths from climate changed caused heat waves and this is a minuscule taste of what's to come.
A very large percentage of mass extinction events have their roots in increased atmospheric CO2, but all of them on dramatically increased time scales. The closest thing in the history of the planet to what's happening to day was PETM [0] and that was only a lessor extinction event because the Earth was already quite warm (for example, there was already no polar ice at the time).
We _are_ doing something about this. We’re locating concentrated millions of years of trapped fossil energy and moving it into our atmosphere as fast as we possibly can. To a first approximation, that is the world economy.
Both Europe and US's emissions are significantly (18%-30%) below their peak (which was 20 years ago. The rest of the world is also moving towards renewables.
Co2 parts per million are a stock, like the level of water in a bathtub. Annual emissions are a flow, like how strongly the water is flowing in.
The tub is fuller than ever before AND filling at the fastest rate ever.
The problem is that carbon energy is useful. So unless something globally beats almost all use cases then somewhere marginally it will be worth burning vs not burning it.
It's a leaking bathtub. Half life of excess CO2 in the atmosphere is 30-100 years. So you need the water flowing in to continue to increase in rate (not just to continue flowing in), otherwise you reach a new equilibrium and the CO2 levels in the atmosphere stop increasing.
Yes, this is the right question to ask. A lot of the decrease in emissions in Western nations is the equivalent of dumping your trash in a lot across town. Sure it's "gone", but only in a technical sense.
While yes the emissions are down from 2007 and majority of it has been driven by the shift away from coal in power generation.
However, every other sector has been rather flat in terms of emissions since the 90s. When you account for the fact that a large amount of industries have moved to China and other developing countries, the fact that emissions from industries have been flat, means that the overall consumption has gone up.
If you account for the emissions that we’ve offshored, we’d not be looking so good.
There has been a lot of debate over AC use. Everyone chiming in only discusses runtime energy use.
The biggest issue is mining and manufacturing, and the moving of all the materials, parts, and such.
Every AC has sheathed wires and circuit boards.
Every airplane, car, phone, network router, refrigerator... same expansive mess creation.
Gamers complaining about disc less games despite that problem pipeline and waste.
Complaining about RAM prices despite the problem pipeline.
No one is focused on the lag effects, externalities, of billions using up an endless supply of technologies and dumping airplane smog in the atmosphere. Etc, etc, etc
Thermodynamics makes it pretty clear that energy is not gone just hanging out in the atmosphere.
Thermodynamics means we may be fucked even if we slow down; that energy in the atmosphere can only go from atmosphere into oceans, glaciers, and permafrost. There's a lot of potential energy in the Earth to release as it absorbs the heat already in the atmosphere
I totally agree with you that our unhinged consumption behavior is the core problem. And with AI we stepped on the accelerator again.
But regarding your second statement. The actual problem is the greenhouse effect of CO2 and Methane in the atmosphere which traps the suns energy in our atmosphere heating up oceans, ice and landmass. The heat we produce is negligible compared to the energy the sun sends every day. The greenhouse gases are the problem. And you are right, pulling away that blanket so that more heat can dissipate into space will take a looong time (growing trees) or cost an insane amount of (clean) energy, reversing the chemical processes of burning oil, gas and coal.
> Gamers complaining about disc less games despite that problem pipeline and waste.
Tbf the issue is the user-hostile parameters of buying a diskless game. Most people would be happy to download their games if they could back them up to a thumb drive and never get locked out of them and sell the game when they’re done with it.
Seems deeply tangential, but it’s not. Blaming people for wanting a physical thing because the alternative is being further abused by a corporation - that’s a miss. Be mad at game platforms for not offering real ownership in whatever the most climate-friendly way possible. Be mad at governments for not forcing companies to cost in the negative externalities of their business.
If you want less of something, tax it. Support consumption based taxes like the FairTax in the US which would tax new goods at a high rate while used goods would be tax free. This encourages keeping items for longer, repairing rather than replacing, and purchasing used goods over new ones.
Oh well ok I will get right on raising taxes. So simple I should have done it sooner.
FairTax is regressive and does nothing to stop a trillionaire from launching dick rockets to nowhere. Each rocket and launch using more resources than a poor person will their entire life.
You may enjoy Ian McEwan's What We Can Know: "Civilization as we know it ends. A pair of scholars in 2120, risking death from roving predatory gangs, travel across what’s left of England in search of a long-lost, epoch-making poem titled 'A Corona for Vivien.' They are the last, it seems, historians alive" [1]. (It's less apocalyptic than this makes it seem, at least relative to the modern apocalyptic genre à la Mad Max.)
China (13 GT), the US (4.6 GT), and India (3 GT) alone represent 51% of global carbon emissions - and at least in India's case, it is growing at a rate of 5%.
Throw in other large polluters like Russia (2 GT), Indonesia (0.8 GT), Iran (0.8 GT), KSA (0.6 GT), Brazil (0.5 GT), and Vietnam (0.5 GT) whose rate of carbon emissions is growing in the 5-10% range and you see there is no path forward.
Any amount of de-carbonization that China or the collective West does is automatically negated by the other countries I listed. At best global carbon emissions stagnate - which by default is going to lead to a 2-3 °C increase in temperatures.
You conveniently left the US out of that and the US's role in driving global emissions. China is also likely rapidly de-carbonizing right now just like they rapidly spun up. They are an issue, but the US and its policies have a massive impact on this problem. Same with Europe. Rapidly adopting renewables and not externalizing our emissions to other countries would go a long way.
I have seen the argument shift from 'That's a lie. Global warming doesn't exist. Stop pushing regulations for a non-existent problem.' To 'Maybe it does, or there is some human impact but this is all within normal variation and the climate can take some amount of pollution so stop trying to regulate it!' to, I guess the new argument of, 'It's too late so why try? We shouldn't change course because it won't matter so stop trying to regulate the problem away.' It isn't too late. Do something.
> China is also likely rapidly de-carbonizing right now
Huh. "China’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions fell by 1% in the final quarter of 2025, likely securing a decline of 0.3% for the full year as a whole" [1].
So "rapidly de-carbonising" is wrong. But decarbonising per se is correct.
Chin's emissions rose by 20% from 2017 to 2024 and then flat-lined in 2025 with emissions expected to decline in 2026. That is what decarbonization looks like, the rate of change has swung massively in the right direction. The .3 in 2025 will likely turn into -1.5 in 2026 and more after that. They have embraced alternative energy because it is now making them money and gaining them influence. That trend won't change and they will keep on decarbonizing because it is the easy, profitable, route.
Its only falling per Chinese gov data. The trend since 2019 is for them to downplay emission data and when the next international review comes around we'll have seen that it was actually increasing for the past 3 years and everything will be revised and they will say oh its decreasing starting from now and everyone will forget that the gov stats were lying and take their word that its decreasing.
NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory, 2 (OCO-2) provides the most complete dataset tracking the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂), the main driver of climate change. Every day, OCO-2 measures sunlight reflected from Earth’s surface to infer the dry-air column-averaged CO₂ mixing ratio and provides around 100,000 cloud-free observations.
China is not rapidly de-carbonizing. They've put off even starting to transition to clean energy by 15 years and they lag behind the other nations. They shouldnt be where the US is as the US has done an awful job. They should be where the EU is.
Both China and the US have similar carbon emission growth rates (0.3-0.5%).
And that does nothing to stop the collective 8 GT of carbon emissions coming from India and the other countries I listed with an average emissions increase rate of around 3-5%.
A lot if this industrialisation is actually factories making products that are outsourced manufacturing. So it doesn't really make sense to say its China, India's or Vietnam's fault, when most of the products are being shipped to the US and EU and are not necessarily local born companies.
1.1 GT combined but shrinking yearly by 1-3%, which isn't enough to make up for the combined increase in carbon emissions from India, ASEAN, MENA, LatAm, and Russia.
But the UK and EU (the only large polluters who have even considered carbon tariffs) have largely watered them down - for example, yesterday with the UK increasing it's duty free steel quota for India [0] as Tata Steel owns much of the UK's steel capacity and demand (JLR is a Tata company). Add to that the EU's largest steel maker is owned by India's Mittal family (AcrelorMittal) and European conglomerates like Renault [1] are expanding manufacturing in markets like India, which means using Indian steel.
And all of that ignores domestic growth in all those countries. Base GDP growth rates are expected to be in the 6.5-8% for India and ASEAN despite deglobalization because domestic markets are growing.
Developing countries like India, Indonesia, and Vietnam are continuing to expand their emissions as they industrialize. All are expected to have an GDP growth rate in the 6-8% range over the next decade, as will their peers across Asia, so the carbon footprint globally will only increase.
Even China's emissions rate aren't decreasing - they're stagnant, which is a good shift, but not enough to turn the tide given how large China's existing carbon footprint is.
Edit: can't reply
> but they're not going to expand by taking on coal and fossil fuels...
India [0], Vietnam [1], and other large industrializing nation in Asia have all doubled down on expanding coal usage over the last 6 months. And that's ignoring increased usage of NatGas and Oil.
Yeah, but they're not going to expand by taking on coal and fossil fuels. The third world is taking on green energy alternatives at a great rate. Not least because it's cheaper and more convenient. These countries can grow without the damage that marked the Western world through the industrial revolution onwards
I have already accepted that there is nothing plebs can do about climate change. I can try hard by using public transport, using less plastic, and using less air conditioning, but all of those efforts are rendered useless by rich people going on vacation in yachts or private planes. And if you talk about reducing meat consumption, Americans will go mad, lol.
Ordinary plebs trying to prevent climate change is like subtracting $100 from a billion dollars - it does not make any meaningful difference.
Are you saying no pleb wants to consume? Are you saying no pleb demands more product? Are you saying no pleb wants their polluting employer to continue so they have a job? Are you saying no pleb chooses to lower cost but more polluting options at every turn?
EU has done its part, but all efforts are just drop in the ocean. Also, can these studies be trusted? EU basically throws money anything "green" (except buying forests and making them protected), so naturally these studies benefit from it.
Protecting forests is good and all, but it will not reverse climate change. We'll have to stop all fossil fuel burning and, additionally, sequester around 600 billion tonnes of CO2 (in addition to all the natural carbon sinks) to get back to +1.5C by 2100.
UK official body of actuaries basically says we are on trajectory of "Extreme" rating:
> 3°C or more by 2050.
Multiple climate tipping
points triggered,
tipping cascade.
> over 4 billion
deaths
If so, big shifts would already be imminently felt within next 5-10 years.
Remember that there would basically be no place to hide from these direct or knock-on effects.
Not for any self sufficient "prepper with a Mac Studio" nor for any billionaire with their "Galapagos" private island data center come habitat or any other short-sighted fantasy escape scenarios.
Edit: "on trajectory" to "Extreme" was too strong; it’s the report’s worst case band and not a forecast. What they’re basically saying is that "the chance of this happening is way too high".
Edit edit: TIL that HN has a "delay" setting; worth considering for high-stakes arguments like for when discussing heated topics like climate change..
> In my profile, what is delay?
It gives you time to edit your comments before they appear to others. Set it to the number of minutes you'd like. The maximum is 10.
> there will basically no place to hide from these direct or any knock-on effects
This is nonsense. (And your own source doesn't support the claim that the consequences of global warming will be unmitigable for anyone.)
Many parts of the world will become milder for human occupation as a result of climate change. And nothing realistically forecast is unavoidable with wealth–rich countries will A/C and seawall their ways around the consequences.
The effects would definitely be felt by everyone if the global population were on its way to be halved. Also knock-on effects like mass emigration putting additional pressure on an already difficult political landscape. Potential for many more wars; more unknown unknowns etc.
Edit: the report’s "Extreme" severity band is indeed not a forecast but they’re basically saying "the chance of this happening is way too high".
Is the major issue here that 3 degrees Celsius is like an average so all the hot tropics places just become uninhabitable whereas temperature rises are more moderated in higher latitudes?
Also how much faster and higher will that number go with all the data centers? Can't imagine it not just getting worse.
One major issue is the extreme difficulty of being precise about tipping points.
Eg: Have you seen a train derail? A couple of degrees of tilt - nothing .. and then .. whoops.
The global climate has been 'stable' about mean values for the bulk of human written history and development of urban civilisations. The planet now hosts 7 billion+ people, largely urban, and feed by a century of stable agriculture patterns write large.
The disruption of that will have a major impact across the human population of the planet.
The tipping points, when they come, are related to the significant loss of polar ice, and the beginning of positive feedback of atmospheric insulation factors other than CO2.
Melting ice, the transformation from near zero degree ice to near zero degree water, takes up a large amount of the energy from the sun trapped by increasing insulation. The energy used to melt X tonnes of ice, if no ice can be melted, will instead raise the temperature of X tonnes of water by some 66 degrees C (or there abouts - worth looking it up exactly).
Increased land and sea surface temperatures releases methane from peat bogs and tundras, and increases the water vapour content of the lower atmosphere.
Both of these things increase the insulation factor of the atmosphere to a greater degree than CO2.
I think the problem is much worse than people imagine as well. Of those around 5.5 to 6 billion people live in "developed world" conditions (sanitation, water & electricity to the home). Over the next 20 years that's expected to grow to by another 1.5 billion (the previous 20 years was around the same). That alone is going to be a huge demand in energy, for construction and ongoing day to day energy usage.
On the other hand global energy demand has a very close correlation with the number of people living in developed world conditions - so after this point the growth in energy demand should start to level off.
Let's hope China continues to push renewables, and their investment in developing countries favours that instead of fossil fuels.
Yet Europeans will continue to hamstring their economic activity to lower their footprint which is really not doing anything in the grand scheme of things vs. China/India and what Africa will produce if/when they modernize.
But there have been way higher atmospheric carbon dioxide levels historically, and those have largely coincided with plant and animal life climaxing. See the Jurassic.
"History" is generally used to mean when humans were around writing stuff down. And no, CO2 levels have never been this high during the entire history of human civilization, and likely the entire existence of Homo sapiens
> But there have been way higher atmospheric carbon dioxide levels historically
Historically? In written human history?
If we're talking the state of the planet throughout the past 4 billion odd years of existence, it once had no breathable atmosphere and had a stretch with a largely molten surface, and got smacked up hard when the moon was spun off.
None of these things are relevant to the planets near future as a direct result of human induced changes of the past century and a half.
I believe those followed global extinction events thanks to large scale volcanic activity over long enough time frames to change the climate. Life did adapt, the life that survived. I'm not sure we want to run that experiment on human civilization.
The first is that 3C represents a lot more energy in the atmosphere. That translates to more water evaporating from the oceans creating bigger more violent storms (think more frequent flash floods).
It changes the ocean currents which can be really bad. Right now Europe is warm for it's latitude because of a weakening current from the equator to the UK brings a lot of heat. If that completely collapses, Europe can enter an ICE age.
The rising temperature also ends up weakening the vortex of the north pole which mostly keeps the arctic temperatures sealed up north. As that vortex weakens, spills of crazy blizzards can hit unusual places pretty hard. The winter storm in 2021 is an example of that happening.
Then of course there's the potential melting of the ice caps which will release a lot of methane into the atmosphere (speeding up warming). That will ultimately cause sea levels to rise which won't be great for the state of Florida.
Mass migration, crop instability, more frequent and more extreme weather. It's just a combo of bad things that all come together at once.
As I understand it just means there's a lot more energy in the atmosphere. Like imagine the amount of energy it takes to increase water temperature in a pot by 3° and scale it up to the planet. All that energy makes everything bigger, badder, and less predictable. Longer, dryer droughts; bigger, longer winter storms, etc.
It’s sort of all over the place but it’s mostly the other way round. The poles might see like +5-8c. It’s also the overall temperature. Today’s high temperature where I am is 33 and the low is 25. 33 isn’t super unusual, maybe a dozen days a year. 25 as a low though is crazy high even on days historically above 30. It all averages out to +whatever.
> more evaporation over oceans, which makes the air denser
More humid air is less dense than less humid air at the same temperature and otherwise same composition. H2O has a molar mass of 18, vs ~29 for dry air.
The most extreme warming happens at the poles, doesn't it? Plus increases in volatility on top of a rising baseline, so more extreme heat wave peaks even in temperate climates that don't change as much on average.
If we coat and paint the entire human occupied land surface in white nano-diversely-sized barium sulfate paint, it will reflect the excess heat into space. Most people don't understand that this works or how it works, but science does. We will still have to lower our CO2 and emissions but we will get a break from warming.
Oil refineries, tankers burn in the open. Nuclear stations may get blown by drones / ballistic rockets any moment. Dead dolphins are all over Black sea. And yet ... let's put a price on carbon!
> And what would 3 °C mean for Germany?
> FB: In summer, meteorological records could reach up to 50 °C. Three degrees of global warming does not mean hot days will just be 3 or 4 degrees hotter. It could mean up to 10 degrees hotter. We would also face much longer droughts.
3°C warming implies summer days can get 10°C hotter. This is nightmare scenario.
I wouldn't say "people don't get" it when it's not well-communicated. When the headline always says 2-3 degrees, of course people are going to shrug.
The probability is not quantified so it's impossible to react to. Over-protecting from a risk is as bad and under-protecting.
For example - something bad can happen to you any time you leave your house. However if you "protect" against that the risk by never leaving the house you are almost certainly worse off.
In case of climate the "thing to do" to protect from the risk is to minimize the economic activity that has improved life for everyone. Stopping that has an immediate "cost" which looks large compared to the unquantified risk it allegedly mitigates.
perversely, global warming earlier than expected is a good thing [for us] as it will wipe away all meaningful opposition to geoengineering.
note how according to them having 50C days is a likely outcome. no one will tolerate this. sending the sulfur planes is assured at that point. you wouldn't even need to try and convince people with harvest yields.
it remains to be seen who will start the geoengineering effort, arguably Russia would benefit from global warming and so will Canada, so the US food supply should also remain secure.
They need to look inward before pointing outward.
The EU has already seeing 10,000 excess deaths from climate changed caused heat waves and this is a minuscule taste of what's to come.
A very large percentage of mass extinction events have their roots in increased atmospheric CO2, but all of them on dramatically increased time scales. The closest thing in the history of the planet to what's happening to day was PETM [0] and that was only a lessor extinction event because the Earth was already quite warm (for example, there was already no polar ice at the time).
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene%E2%80%93Eocene_therm...
Or did you mean to do something differently?
Co2 parts per million are a stock, like the level of water in a bathtub. Annual emissions are a flow, like how strongly the water is flowing in.
The tub is fuller than ever before AND filling at the fastest rate ever.
The problem is that carbon energy is useful. So unless something globally beats almost all use cases then somewhere marginally it will be worth burning vs not burning it.
https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions
They do increase in rate as you said (for now).
However, every other sector has been rather flat in terms of emissions since the 90s. When you account for the fact that a large amount of industries have moved to China and other developing countries, the fact that emissions from industries have been flat, means that the overall consumption has gone up.
If you account for the emissions that we’ve offshored, we’d not be looking so good.
There has been a lot of debate over AC use. Everyone chiming in only discusses runtime energy use.
The biggest issue is mining and manufacturing, and the moving of all the materials, parts, and such.
Every AC has sheathed wires and circuit boards.
Every airplane, car, phone, network router, refrigerator... same expansive mess creation.
Gamers complaining about disc less games despite that problem pipeline and waste.
Complaining about RAM prices despite the problem pipeline.
No one is focused on the lag effects, externalities, of billions using up an endless supply of technologies and dumping airplane smog in the atmosphere. Etc, etc, etc
Thermodynamics makes it pretty clear that energy is not gone just hanging out in the atmosphere.
Thermodynamics means we may be fucked even if we slow down; that energy in the atmosphere can only go from atmosphere into oceans, glaciers, and permafrost. There's a lot of potential energy in the Earth to release as it absorbs the heat already in the atmosphere
But regarding your second statement. The actual problem is the greenhouse effect of CO2 and Methane in the atmosphere which traps the suns energy in our atmosphere heating up oceans, ice and landmass. The heat we produce is negligible compared to the energy the sun sends every day. The greenhouse gases are the problem. And you are right, pulling away that blanket so that more heat can dissipate into space will take a looong time (growing trees) or cost an insane amount of (clean) energy, reversing the chemical processes of burning oil, gas and coal.
Tbf the issue is the user-hostile parameters of buying a diskless game. Most people would be happy to download their games if they could back them up to a thumb drive and never get locked out of them and sell the game when they’re done with it.
Seems deeply tangential, but it’s not. Blaming people for wanting a physical thing because the alternative is being further abused by a corporation - that’s a miss. Be mad at game platforms for not offering real ownership in whatever the most climate-friendly way possible. Be mad at governments for not forcing companies to cost in the negative externalities of their business.
FairTax is regressive and does nothing to stop a trillionaire from launching dick rockets to nowhere. Each rocket and launch using more resources than a poor person will their entire life.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/22/books/review/ian-mcewan-w...
We can't. We're too late.
China (13 GT), the US (4.6 GT), and India (3 GT) alone represent 51% of global carbon emissions - and at least in India's case, it is growing at a rate of 5%.
Throw in other large polluters like Russia (2 GT), Indonesia (0.8 GT), Iran (0.8 GT), KSA (0.6 GT), Brazil (0.5 GT), and Vietnam (0.5 GT) whose rate of carbon emissions is growing in the 5-10% range and you see there is no path forward.
Any amount of de-carbonization that China or the collective West does is automatically negated by the other countries I listed. At best global carbon emissions stagnate - which by default is going to lead to a 2-3 °C increase in temperatures.
I have seen the argument shift from 'That's a lie. Global warming doesn't exist. Stop pushing regulations for a non-existent problem.' To 'Maybe it does, or there is some human impact but this is all within normal variation and the climate can take some amount of pollution so stop trying to regulate it!' to, I guess the new argument of, 'It's too late so why try? We shouldn't change course because it won't matter so stop trying to regulate the problem away.' It isn't too late. Do something.
Huh. "China’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions fell by 1% in the final quarter of 2025, likely securing a decline of 0.3% for the full year as a whole" [1].
So "rapidly de-carbonising" is wrong. But decarbonising per se is correct.
[1] https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-ha...
And that does nothing to stop the collective 8 GT of carbon emissions coming from India and the other countries I listed with an average emissions increase rate of around 3-5%.
But the UK and EU (the only large polluters who have even considered carbon tariffs) have largely watered them down - for example, yesterday with the UK increasing it's duty free steel quota for India [0] as Tata Steel owns much of the UK's steel capacity and demand (JLR is a Tata company). Add to that the EU's largest steel maker is owned by India's Mittal family (AcrelorMittal) and European conglomerates like Renault [1] are expanding manufacturing in markets like India, which means using Indian steel.
And all of that ignores domestic growth in all those countries. Base GDP growth rates are expected to be in the 6.5-8% for India and ASEAN despite deglobalization because domestic markets are growing.
[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-14/india-win...
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/world/india/renault-plans-boost-indi...
That's why nothing will happen.
Developing countries like India, Indonesia, and Vietnam are continuing to expand their emissions as they industrialize. All are expected to have an GDP growth rate in the 6-8% range over the next decade, as will their peers across Asia, so the carbon footprint globally will only increase.
Even China's emissions rate aren't decreasing - they're stagnant, which is a good shift, but not enough to turn the tide given how large China's existing carbon footprint is.
Edit: can't reply
> but they're not going to expand by taking on coal and fossil fuels...
India [0], Vietnam [1], and other large industrializing nation in Asia have all doubled down on expanding coal usage over the last 6 months. And that's ignoring increased usage of NatGas and Oil.
[0] - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/india-will-use-more-...
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/vietnam-looks-more-c...
Ordinary plebs trying to prevent climate change is like subtracting $100 from a billion dollars - it does not make any meaningful difference.
Ultimately consumption is 2/3s of all emissions, and the majority of it is not billionaires.
And, if some do, do they not maximise that profit by seeking to maximise the consumption of others?
Including paying to have wood pellets shipped across the Atlantic using bunker fuel and then calling it "bioenergy"
The EU is 'clean' largely out of it's own limited access to fossil fuels and other energy resources rather than because they are "doing their part".
https://ourworldindata.org/contributed-most-global-co2
> 3°C or more by 2050. Multiple climate tipping points triggered, tipping cascade.
> over 4 billion deaths
If so, big shifts would already be imminently felt within next 5-10 years.
Remember that there would basically be no place to hide from these direct or knock-on effects.
Not for any self sufficient "prepper with a Mac Studio" nor for any billionaire with their "Galapagos" private island data center come habitat or any other short-sighted fantasy escape scenarios.
https://actuaries.org.uk/media/ni4erlna/planetary-solvency.p...
Edit: "on trajectory" to "Extreme" was too strong; it’s the report’s worst case band and not a forecast. What they’re basically saying is that "the chance of this happening is way too high".
Edit edit: TIL that HN has a "delay" setting; worth considering for high-stakes arguments like for when discussing heated topics like climate change..
> In my profile, what is delay? It gives you time to edit your comments before they appear to others. Set it to the number of minutes you'd like. The maximum is 10.
This is nonsense. (And your own source doesn't support the claim that the consequences of global warming will be unmitigable for anyone.)
Many parts of the world will become milder for human occupation as a result of climate change. And nothing realistically forecast is unavoidable with wealth–rich countries will A/C and seawall their ways around the consequences.
Edit: the report’s "Extreme" severity band is indeed not a forecast but they’re basically saying "the chance of this happening is way too high".
Also how much faster and higher will that number go with all the data centers? Can't imagine it not just getting worse.
Eg: Have you seen a train derail? A couple of degrees of tilt - nothing .. and then .. whoops.
The global climate has been 'stable' about mean values for the bulk of human written history and development of urban civilisations. The planet now hosts 7 billion+ people, largely urban, and feed by a century of stable agriculture patterns write large.
The disruption of that will have a major impact across the human population of the planet.
The tipping points, when they come, are related to the significant loss of polar ice, and the beginning of positive feedback of atmospheric insulation factors other than CO2.
Melting ice, the transformation from near zero degree ice to near zero degree water, takes up a large amount of the energy from the sun trapped by increasing insulation. The energy used to melt X tonnes of ice, if no ice can be melted, will instead raise the temperature of X tonnes of water by some 66 degrees C (or there abouts - worth looking it up exactly).
Increased land and sea surface temperatures releases methane from peat bogs and tundras, and increases the water vapour content of the lower atmosphere.
Both of these things increase the insulation factor of the atmosphere to a greater degree than CO2.
I think the problem is much worse than people imagine as well. Of those around 5.5 to 6 billion people live in "developed world" conditions (sanitation, water & electricity to the home). Over the next 20 years that's expected to grow to by another 1.5 billion (the previous 20 years was around the same). That alone is going to be a huge demand in energy, for construction and ongoing day to day energy usage.
On the other hand global energy demand has a very close correlation with the number of people living in developed world conditions - so after this point the growth in energy demand should start to level off.
Let's hope China continues to push renewables, and their investment in developing countries favours that instead of fossil fuels.
Historically? In written human history?
If we're talking the state of the planet throughout the past 4 billion odd years of existence, it once had no breathable atmosphere and had a stretch with a largely molten surface, and got smacked up hard when the moon was spun off.
None of these things are relevant to the planets near future as a direct result of human induced changes of the past century and a half.
The first is that 3C represents a lot more energy in the atmosphere. That translates to more water evaporating from the oceans creating bigger more violent storms (think more frequent flash floods).
It changes the ocean currents which can be really bad. Right now Europe is warm for it's latitude because of a weakening current from the equator to the UK brings a lot of heat. If that completely collapses, Europe can enter an ICE age.
The rising temperature also ends up weakening the vortex of the north pole which mostly keeps the arctic temperatures sealed up north. As that vortex weakens, spills of crazy blizzards can hit unusual places pretty hard. The winter storm in 2021 is an example of that happening.
Then of course there's the potential melting of the ice caps which will release a lot of methane into the atmosphere (speeding up warming). That will ultimately cause sea levels to rise which won't be great for the state of Florida.
Mass migration, crop instability, more frequent and more extreme weather. It's just a combo of bad things that all come together at once.
For temps by latitude/region this source seems ok on a quick search https://scied.ucar.edu/interactive/compare-climates-regional...
Poland continues to experience significant cold related deaths and any warning might be welcomed.
Denser air carries more momentum, which means more frequent (and more severe) hurricanes.
More humid air is less dense than less humid air at the same temperature and otherwise same composition. H2O has a molar mass of 18, vs ~29 for dry air.
And here we are.