67 comments. One mention of “climate crisis” (appropriate), 3 of “climate credits”.
No one here is really discussing “climate change”.
Is it denial, or just that we’ve accepted the obvious?
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What is there to discuss? Outlier weather events are growing more common and the hot summer obviously played a role here.
Even climate change denial has moved from denying the fact to denying that we can fix anything, for either economic or technical reasons.
> What is there to discuss?
The governance crisis: how can we follow science on so many things, how can countries completely change on short order, but not for this...
The French president notoriously said a few weeks ago in June during the third (!!!) heat wave of this summer “who could have predicted [it]”… that’s the level, at the highest layer which decides on policy.
Governments have been working on this for more then 20 years now. 40 maybe. As long as I've been alive at least. It's just that all of the actions to try and deal with this have been continuously undermined by fossil fuel industries and right-wing politics.
James Hansons Senate hearing was in 1988, so at least 38 years since it was brought front and center.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senate_Hearing_of_James_E._Han...
Hansen is still going and has been ringing the alarm that we have deeply under estimated the relative carbon loading and heating potential on emissions. There is a real fear that we have locked in a lot more warming potential than the models have been predicting via several factors. Namely carbon warms slightly more than anticipated, more methane releases, great water vapor levels as a result of the previous two and reduced reflective materials decreasing our relative albedo.
There is a national election in Sweden this year. Which parties or blocks are against construction of thermal power plants, and which are against it? Thermal power plants are primarily fueled by oil or natural gas. Party platforms are public and posted on their websites.
A few years ago EU voted to define two technologies as green. One was natural gas, and the other was nuclear. Which parties voted for natural gas, and which parties voted for nuclear?
There is a EU decision to phase out ICE in cars. A good continuation would be to issue a similar decision to phase out ICE in the energy grid. It would be nice if both sides could just join together on such decision.
For me, it has degraded to the point where I simply presume that no significant promises are going to be kept after the election anyway. The respective parties will promise what they think they need to get the votes, and will then target whatever is relevant for the ever-evolving social-media driven zeitgeist.
"A completely fossil-free energy system" ("Ett helt fossilfritt energisystem" (1)) yesteryear and now lower fuel prices than 20 years ago (adjusted for inflation, yes).
(1) https://moderaterna.se/app/uploads/2022/03/220326FemVallöfte...
Fuel prices is one of those things where people will complain about Iran war driving prices up, and then in the next sentence complain that low fuel taxes will encourage consumption. The reduction in taxes has basically removed half of the price on gasoline, but with the increase in global market price this has only resulted in a minor price reduction in total. For diesel the price is still above that of last year.
It will be interesting to see if researchers will find any significant behavioral change from having half the fuel prices compared to nearby countries. Personally I doubt it will be a significant statistical difference, but it is a perfect time to get some real data if people treat fuel as a necessity and pay what the market demands, or if its a luxury product where consumption goes up and down based on price.
Right-wing politics being opposed to environmental action is so weird when back in the day right-wing politicians didn't have such an issue with it (for example this speech by Margaret Thatcher: <https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/107346>).
This is downvoted, but exactly right. Moreover, government is not a singular entity. Blaming the whole government just serves to take the blame from actually guilty and attributing it to those whonwere doing the right thing.
No, its that all the action consistently denies the fact that human societies can not keep i together if degrown. The policies produce regression aka facism.
We can fix it nonetheless, we have the resources and the need. We broke it and we will fix it
I think there is some nuance to this. It isn't likely that we will go back to the way it was before industrialization, we are too far past that. But we will head to a new normal that could be manageable.
Problems have solutions, predicaments have responses. We are in a predicament, and the quicker and more direct we can respond the better chance we have to adverting the more nasty paths of the future.
Climate change is real and contributes to this but there have been massive fires in this region for over a century - primarily from the artificially planted Maritime Pine forests. The 1940s were particularly bad. Look up the Great Fire of 1949.
Never on that scale. This is unprecedented. France asked other EU members for help as the firefighters are overwhelmed and the fire uncontrollable. There hasn’t been an evacuation this large since WW2 (300k people displaced so far, 0.5% of the country’s population)
This isn’t a “it’s summer, and fires burn” type of a deal. Even though most fires are set by idiots on purpose, it spreads so well because everywhere is dry. Most parcs and fields look like savannas instead of the usual green.
The sources I can readily find place the total extent of forest fires in France this year at 40,000 hectares, still less than https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1949_Landes_forest_fire .
And the context is that at the time, they had no way to fight those fires. So yes, it burned 50,000 ha. That was the starting point of devising ways to efficiently fight forest fires.
Today we have plenty of specialized trucks, trained firemen, planes, helicopters, who have been fighting for 5 days, and already 42,000 ha are gone. 32,000 ha 4 years ago. After a very wet winter.
Climate is changing drastically, exactly as predicted.
What does the means to fight the fire have to do with the starting cause of a fire?
Read their post again. They say you cannot compare sizes because nowadays we are much better at extinguishing forest fires that we were 80 years ago.
Once in a hundred year (or more) event that was beaten in lethality twice in the past two decades. Hmmmm. Can’t possibly be a pattern there. Not like we have models predicting what happens and that reality is progressing far worse than the scientists are allowed to officially report.
0.5% you mean? France population is over 60 million people.
France has more than 6 million people. I think you meant 0.5%
Yes
The Landes region has a long history of devastating wildfires, and the 1949 fire is a tragic example, that's correct.
But that's not really the point being debated. Nobody is claiming climate change invented wildfires. But it is making the conditions for extreme fires more common. The IPCC concludes with high confidence that fire hazard conditions, including heatwaves and fire weather, have increased across Europe since 1980, particularly in southern and western Europe, even though ignition sources and land management still matter.
Climate change is increasing the odds that fires become larger and harder to control.
Western Europe has also experienced increasingly frequent and severe droughts in recent years. Those prolonged dry conditions leave forests and vegetation far more combustible, making fires spread faster and burn more intensely once they start.
I truly think it’s because we are in the “Find out” phase and most people have very little hope (justifiably) in anything meaningful actually occurring that can prevent or mitigate climate change even a little bit.
It is also fairly disheartening to see a lot of proposed responses just quietly get shelved because it was economically not idea on the short term. A lot of them were fairly weak to begin with and even they couldn't hold.
I don't think it will be grim forever, this isn't "DOOOOMED, WE ARE ALL DOOMED!" but I am not holding out for the Frutiger Aero future of only a few decades back.
Hello from one of the accounts who mentioned "climate credits." Do you know why I mentioned it? Because I believe climate change is a real issue and the people selling a fake solution to make people feel better about their jet set lifestyle is doing a disservice to our ability to actually fix the issue. Thank you for your attention to this matter.
acceptance; the problems identified. efforts now should focus on innovative solutions that dont rely on nation state investment.
Why? The vast majority of fossil fuel production globally is through state-owned companies.
in the 1800's, were the vast majority of horses produced through state owned companies? that process was upended by human ingenuity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Benz
begging governments to solve the problem has obviously failed; focusing our efforts on fostering ideas and inventions is our best hope at getting our of this mess.
We have all the technological tools available to largely decarbonize energy. We don’t have to wait for, nor have the time, to wait around for a deus-ex-machina.
Given the dominance of state level actors in fossil fuel extraction (a role they did not have in horse based transport), to deny states have a role in decarbonizing energy seems naive. I don’t see what’s unreasonable to suggest that the current massive resources states put into supporting fossil fuel consumption and spending on wars to protect its production and distribution be redirected towards accelerating the adoption of modern clean energy production and use.
Well, considering that the issue was created by the same "human ingenuity" aka turbo-capitalism, I'm not sure that the solution could be found there.
I mean, we had one of such capitalists that looked like he was 100% into "fixing it" and now probably thinks it's just a woke invention. You cannot rely on single people changing the future, because they can change their mind far too easily.
The most downvoted comment I've ever made on Hacker News was related to climate change. There's a profoundly ignorant collection of people here who want to stick their head in the sand and pretend everything is fine while the world burns around them.
Alas, a lot of people are reactive and not proactive. There is also the factor that most people see themselves as the virtuous ones, and they do not appreciate a Cassandra pointing out the awful truths that undermine this narrative.
Thank you for this
Must…
Build…
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Datacenters…
But seriously, hacker news routinely denies the obvious when it comes to climate crisis.
That's because there is the chance that it will benefit them short term over others. F U I got mine! Or just ignorance.
Where are you seeing such denial?
From what I read in another comment this was caused by Napoleon.
Napoleon did his geo-engineering 150 years ago, in a completely different world. He's not the one to blame here.
Well he didn't help, but this is a good example of why so many military's call climate change a 'Risk Multiplier'.
There was already an issue but it has just been amplified.
He planted highly flammable trees is a hot part of the country. Even in his times it got 35 degrees over there.