I have believed for years that Americans would have a completely different attitude to global warming if the Lower 48 had more glaciers. In the Alps, you can easily walk to places where there are 100m of ladders to reach a hut that used to be at the level of the ice. In Canada, you can drive to places that used to be the toe of a glacier, then drive another half-mile to the parking lot, built at the edge of the glacier 20 years ago, then walk even farther on loose rubble. 1.5℃ of warming feels abstract and trivial. A giant piece of ice disappearing feels much more real.
Whenever I try to read up on it, it seems like glaciers are receding at ~2x their without-climate-change rate. That's a huge increase, but it doesn't seem like there's something that a person can experience at a visceral level here that is based on fact and not just preconception.
It's definitely striking, I can't deny that. I crossed the last remnants of an almost-extinct glacier last year that my guide guessed would be gone in 1-3 years: at the beginning of his career it was a real glacer with non-trivial extents, crevasses, etc.
I live in one of the places in the lower 48 with relatively easy access to glaciers. The change in some of them is fairly noticeable for me over the last say 20 years. It tends to feel grim and helpless if think about it too much. But I hike so I have spent time closer to them than an average person.
I grew up in a small town in rural Alaska that would have been completely under glacier ice when Columbus landed in North America. In the time between Captain Cook exploring the area in the 18th century and the next western survey a hundred years later, the coastline had been transformed by glaciers receding and revealing inlets hadn't been there for Cook to map. The glacier that was directly in between my town and the highway to Anchorage when I was a child is all but gone now, and there is a road.
I mean it doesn't seem like Canadians have any different attitude (judging by carbon footprint) and they have glaciers. The truth is nobody really cares about global warming, just their own comfort at this moment :/ It's just the human condition.
Do they? Wildfires are some percent more likely and larger, but forests have always burned, and there are other factors like a century of fire suppression. Hurricanes are more violent and frequent, but there have always been hurricanes. Eggheads will tell you those things, but your day-to-day experiences of them are easy to dismiss. Watching a glacier die is visceral:
Most polls find that a substantial majority of Americans acknowledge climate change is real. However, whether it should be acted on with urgency polls differently by party affliation and by geographical region.
Many climate change deniers I know have moved from "it isn't real" to "so what?" Or, perhaps more charitably, to "addressing climate change is not in the national interest."
I don't think people who want to drill in national parks, privatize and raze old growth preserves, or exhaust fisheries without limits are going to be moved by seeing glaciers melt. They fundamentally have different values and place other interests over preservation and conservation.
That ice melting absorbs the energy that would otherwise be warming the atmosphere and causing cataclysmic storms and crop failures due to heat. And that is exactly what is going to happen once the glaciers melt.
The people worried about melting glaciers are not laminating the loss of pretty ice. They are worried about where this extra energy will go once there is no more ice to change phase and absorb it.
The planet's rising temperatures will be the least of some regions' concerns as the knock-on effects from the redistributed water will be much, much deeper than current awareness.
The mass of ice on the earth's poles has also led to the shape of the planet via tectonics over thousands of millennia. As that mass melts and redistributes from a solid to a liquid spreading around the globe our spheroid will begin to rebound. We have sensors everywhere, even in space, so the resulting effects will not be a surprise to some when the 'mass'ive shift begins. As those tectonic events increase in frequency so too will volcanic activity so I ask if anyone else has been checking on such data?
We do not know what we do not know however we act like we know everything yet learn new things about the planet daily. The things the survivors are going to learn about the changes that are setting in will be the last thing those that did not survive experienced from those cataclysmic moments.
China is building, domestically deploying, and exporting solar, wind, batteries, and EVs so fast that the world will have no choice but to rapidly move towards net zero simply due to economics. Existing excess atmospheric carbon emissions remain to be sequestered. China deployed 277GW of solar in 2024 and is accelerating, having deployed 212GW in the first half of 2025. 1GW of solar is being deployed globally every 15 hours. Clean energy and global electrification flywheel go brrrr.
I hope so, but to do that it isn't enough to make renewables economical.
You also have to make carbon uneconomical. China's CO2 emissions have continued to increase rapidly along with renewables.
Energy is really useful and we don't have enough to fulfil demand. Unless renewables + nuclear are cheaper than carbon and not supply constrained I'd expect both sources to increase in tandem.
> Energy is really useful and we don't have enough to fulfil demand.
Enough sunlight falls on Earth in ~30 min to power humanity for a year. There is currently a capture constraint, not a supply constraint, which is currently being solved for.
> Unless renewables + nuclear are cheaper than carbon and not supply constrained I'd expect both sources to increase in tandem.
Renewables are cheaper than carbon, even when accounting for storage, unsubsidized. Some will say "what about seasonal!?" Not solved for yet; fossil gas for the gaps until solar, wind, transmission, batteries, and demand response/orchestration keep closing that gap. Nuclear will never be cheap unfortunately.
I'd love for CO2 to be peaking, but the comments on that link suggest this is a single month's measurement and that month is not representative as there was a policy cutoff for end of the month that frontloaded solar investments.
It's for 2025 up to May, and not just for a single month. Fair point about front loaded investments that may have moved the numbers. Nevertheless it's a positive sign.
CO2 emissions haven't yet peaked but global coal use has, all countries have significantly dropped their coal usage with the exception of India and China.
Per annum total global coal use has peaked and is projected to fall from this year forward.
China's use is becoming "better" (closing many small dirty old coal power stations, opening fewer but larger and more efficient less polluting new ones) while having a set long term plan to phase out coal while using it now to power a transition to renewables (wind turbines and solar panels don't make themselves yet, nor do they yet power their own production).
Ultimately cost is just one factor to prime driver like energy, energy security most overwhelming priority in energy trilemma (security, cost, sustainability)... Having dispatchahble power not tied to weather with abundance fuel source is always going to trump all other considerations for any serious grid. PRC got burn going ham on renewable a few years ago, few heat events that fucked over hydro production, increased AC demand and all of sudden you're dealing with opportunity cost of rationing factories that currently far exceeds $ differences in generation. Theoretically countries can size renewable rollout that minimum intermittent power + storage can reliabily power grid even with current tech, but that's like... multidecade megaproject.
> China is building, domestically deploying, and exporting solar, wind, batteries, and EVs so fast that the world will have no choice but to rapidly move towards net zero simply due to economics.
I can't help but read "we're going to produce and consume more than ever" and I really don't see how it ends in a good way...
Take transportation alone, 1.3 billion ICE vehicles to replace by EVs, there is nothing green about that. Not even talking about the absolutely massive mining operations we'll need to build solar and batteries. What about cement? Steel? Petrol derivate chemistry, medicine, fertilizers,...
And then what? We continue building and consuming more and more shit forever? Who believes this can be "net zero"?
Well, not forever. Global population will peak end of century (sometime between 2055-2084) and then begin to rapidly decline based on fertility rate curves. Solar PV panels can be recycled 100% today, trivially, as can lithium and sodium batteries (these materials are abundant in the Earth's crust, but only so much will be needed to establish a circular supply lifecycle loop). I suppose we can argue about the scale of mining operations. Certainly, low carbon powered mass transit whenever possible vs light vehicles and aircraft. This is Africa and India's opportunity to "do better" based on what China has accomplished (having had the chance to ride their high speed rail and ride in their autonomous vehicles) with regards to urban planning, civil engineering, and infrastructure investment, being the last parts of the world that will develop.
50%+ of the world population is low to low middle income, and they're all going to want to increase emission by 4x for parity high income life styles. Realistically 8x since developing = catching up on infra build out, i.e. extremely emissions intensive fuckton of steel and concrete. IIRC 50% more than current consumption by 2050, i.e. consuming much more is basically locked in and that's based on presumption that developing countries are fucking inept and slow rolling development because they don't have a system to do a PRC modernization push otherwise we'd be looking at 200/300/400% increases in steel and concrete. Net zero is pipe dream, it's not going to happen. We can try to make the transition greener, but it's not going to be green. Ultimately, enviroment pilled brains need to remember, development/poverty reduction is going to be a net good that benefits far more people than climate change will fuck over / displace.
Incorrect; energy dependence on a nuclear power with a general desire to displace existing hegemons isn't a wise or tenable policy.
If you care about America using carbon-light power you should throw your weight behind nuclear, geothermal, and some wind/solar/battery manufactured domestically, by allies, or within our sphere of influence.
The United States had a chance to lead, they tried to build domestically (Inflation Reduction Act), and it was sabotaged by governance choices. Someone else has demonstrated their ability to execute and deliver. Elections have consequences. Better luck next time.
Cool, I do, and I care more about her than about carbon because I and my people live here. So I will oppose any policy that cedes leadership or hegemony. See you at the ballot box, I guess.
So how's that going? Your unreliable leader is dissolving alliances left and right and tries to bully countries into submission. Faced with that, they'd rather deal with other assholes who are, although assholes, at least keep their promises. Leadership, hegemony, hah, how deluded do you want to get...
If you have a bucket list, start working on the things that are most vulnerable. Things you want to see may disappear within your lifetime, so go see it while you can.
Stand up, fight back now... gotta save democracy first sadly. What a thorn in my side it has been to trade one existential crises for humanity for a government that seems actively opposed to doing a god damn thing about it
Same. It pops into my head a few times per week that I haven't thought about global climate change recently, and it is because we are dealing with the more immediate thread of hypercapitalism-authoritarian-christofascism, and my neighbors in Chicago are being disappeared nightly.
Considering America is literally promoting fossil fuels over renewables and the US administration is publicly saying climate change is a scam, I think America deserves more flack than China here
Production rates are subject to change. China is showing it wants to move towards a future where it emits less CO2 and the US recently elected and appointed cronies to take us in the opposite direction.
> CO2 since 1750! This isn't serious. Who is currently today doing the thing?
> Does the climate care about per capita?
It does care about CO2 since 1750 though because that CO2 never went away. It's at least as important as, if not more than "Who is currently today doing the thing?"
No. The incremental CO2 is what is harming us. We're already experiencing the effects of 1750 to present. What happens from now on will incrementally deteriorate the climate.
Total historic emissions is the ONLY serious metric. Since it accounts for all capital buildouts, it takes centuries of emission heavy construction to get developed countries where they are. Countries are going to emit more when they're in steel and concrete phase of nation building.
Does climate care about emissions? Does climate care about changing? No. Climate doesn't care it cycles back to ice age.
Humans (hypothetically) care about climate change. It's a fundmentally a geo-political problem, which means the solution is geopolitically agreed on metric. Currently it rhetorically per capita, but arguably it should be historic per capita, because per capita itself is geopolitic concession metric that shifts responsibility away from historic carbon debt of developed nations towards developing nations.
Because it's not uniformly developed, there's still 100s of millions who are underdeveloped. If we're sensible we'll cap a limit on what first place should emit per capita and that will be the benchmark everyone targets / settles at. Right now that's high income per capita emissions. Realistically, it doesn't stop until some agreed/enforced per capital emission ceiling and if that agreed ceiling takes us to 4/5/6 degrees then that's where we're going to settle. Ultimately the fair requirement is suggest countries have X historic per captia emissions adjustment to unfuck themselves / prepare for climate change. If wealthy countries are generous they can subsidize the transition, but we know that's unlikely so really it's about how (or whether) to mitigate the free for all.
In an even fairer world, huge renewable exporters would get credit / per capita adjustments for exporting net renewable and fossil exporers would get opposite. Oh and countries with high TFR or advanced economies with high immigration that multiplies an immigrant's emission (i.e. poor -> rich flow) would get penalized. But that's even less likely to happen because it's obvious whose interest these sensible proposals undermine, because climate change isn't a scientific of enviromental problem, it's a geopolitcal one.
What matters is how much CO2 was dumped in the atmosphere (and to stop doing it, China is transitioning, the US administration tells everyone it's a scam...)
I'm no expert, but if these data are correct, emissions in China are growing dramatically, and in the US they are trending downward at (honestly) an unexpectedly impressive rate.
China is currently emitting well over 2x what the US does, and extrapolation from the last 25 years suggests that China will exceed the US, on a per-capita basis, in a handful of years.
This is somewhat counter-narrative. But assuming it's correct, the questions become: How bad would it be if China was not taking the problem seriously, and how much better would the US be if they were taking the problem seriously?
It's obvious you don't believe a word of whatever you're saying all over this comment thread. Especially
> The climate doesn't care about improvement, only about total tons of CO2
Given how easily you pooh-poohed cumulative historical emissions in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45509432. The climate also cares about all carbon, past and present. Not just the carbon emitted by China specifically today on October 7, 2025, as you keep repeating. (Only current emissions matter, right? So even China's emissions yesterday and the day before are meaningless).
All of your arguments are extremely in bad faith.
I don't understand why you're doing this though. What do you gain? Is it just about "China bad"? Or about denying the developed world's responsibility for climate change? Or is it for the pleasure of trolling? Please help me understand what's going through your mind.
This thread is highlighting that climate change initiatives are about harming the West in favor of everyone else.
China is by far the biggest carbon emitter. People try to obscure that through "per capita" and "historical cumulative" figures and "percentage improvement".
The way people contort themselves to protect China, the mega-emitter is laughable. They improved 2.7%!! So they went from 31% to 30.92% of total manmade CO2?
You're not serious about the climate, you just want to punish the US/West.
> climate change initiatives are about harming the West
By introducing a cheaper, less-polluting source of energy? If harm is cheaper electricity and cleaner air, please harm me.
> in favor of everyone else.
"Everyone else" is also going solar. Very quickly. It's cheap.
> The way people contort themselves to protect China, the mega-emitter is laughable
Pretend it's 20 countries. Then it's no longer the #1 emitter. Unless you're suggesting some kind of rapid depopulation over there that's all they can do. Btw they also had a one child policy for so long, so they've already tried rapid depopulation themselves.
> They improved 2.7%!! So they went from 31% to 30.92% of total manmade CO2
To 30.163%, assuming your 31% was even true. In one year. Don't lie about simple arithmetic. It makes you less credible about everything else.
> You're not serious about the climate, you just want to punish the US/West
I want the US/west to adopt the cheapest and fastest growing source of energy ASAP. I don't want more bowing down to fossil fuel interests, and higher energy prices, like we've seen in the past 2 years. The latter is punishment.
You're definitely not serious about the climate. Your arguments add up to "China bad. Even if China improves, China still bad. Any number about China good can be interpreted as China bad based on arbitrary criteria that I alone decide are important. Oh and I don't wanna do anything about climate because and it'll hurt me (somehow for reasons that aren't important) and btw have you seen how bad China is?".
Unless you're getting paid by the fossil fuel industry, I don't see how arguing all this benefits you in any way.
> In 2024, the U.S. emissions were on the rise, whereas the European Union (EU) was decreasing its emissions. The U.S. contributes about 13.5% of global annual emissions, whereas the EU's share has fallen to approximately 6%.
I don't even understand what you're tyring to say, America is taking climate change seriously in your eyes?
China is leading the world in renewable energy production. Nuclear buildout, wind farms, solar farms. There's even some minor thermal (even though they're not geographically suited for that).
Sure, they are starting from a high number as the worlds manufacturer, but they're are clearly making strides that the other major industrial nations (the US) are not.
Can't have a discussion on climate change without the obligatory "But what about Chiiiiina!?"
It's time to own up to the fact that China is going out of their way to use renewables, and the U. S. is actively sabotaging renewable energy programs. Whining about China is starting to look pretty silly.
> If you are so emotionally attached to solid water [...]
That's an oddly personal remark to be making when global warming is a concern for humanity.
That final sentence is not a positive note, either: "we're still experiencing above average ice melt - but this year wasn't as bad and some other years!".
I found that the message I replied to was an oddly personal remark and I couldn’t help it. Anyway, this year was better seems a positive note (to end a negative melody if you will).
You have to weigh up the negatives with the positives and look at trends. AI can gave you a more exhaustive list of positive developments, but some I've noticed:
* "FERC: Solar + wind made up 91% of new US power generating capacity in H1 2025" [1] - The rollback of the IRA will reduce the speed of the US transition.
* "Solar and wind growth exceeded global demand growth in the first half of 2025" [2]
* Perovskite solar panels could lead to even lower solar costs [3]
There's also increased investment in nuclear, exicting geothermal advances (eg. Fervo Energy), increasing EV sales, a massive expansion of battery storage, zero emissions concrete (https://sublime-systems.com/). There are lots of positive developments, so I'd recommend learning more about them to offset your current fears and introduce some hope.
How does investing in new forms of energy help when old one is not decreasing? Demand for energy is still rising so those new forms are just covering (part of) new demand...
> How does investing in new forms of energy help when old one is not decreasing?
In relation to electricity this is not the case for H1 2025, as shown in the article "Solar and wind growth exceeded global demand growth in the first half of 2025" [1]
the pictures in the article show how patheticly out of touch the response to global warming is , pathetic and apathetic, people looking at melting grubby glacier with there coat over there shoulder, a town devestated by a glacial collapse sitting underwater, but with a little bright orange sediment barrier installed to meet regulations
meanwhile gretta is getting shit kicked by zionist goons for showing the connections between social and environmental collapse
The record loss was 2022. The ice never came back. It is devastating. Instead of ice coming back, 2025 came very close to same devastating loss.
Fortunately, when climate change causes devastating food shortages I'll have the competitive advantage over climate change deniers of being orders of magnitude smarter than they are.
Almost every scenario of hell has happened over the past 4.5b years to our planet. A bunch of those were extinction events. If we manage to speed run 10s of millions of years of nature in 200k years humanity, then we are indeed very special.
Glaciers provide a lot of fresh water, sustained over warm months, free of charge, to the places we can live in. We need them to support life in hotter, drier, or more temperate areas. Here in BC, Canada they provide cool, oxygenated water for countless species including several pacific salmon and other fish species, which constitutes (or constituted, now; I'm no longer sure of the status) one of the largest nutrient transfers on the planet.
Glaciers are a crucial component of many ecosystems and ways of life. We can't live on them, but they make it so we can live where we do live now.
The water doesn’t actually come from the glacier, though, right? It comes from the sky. The glacier hogs it for awhile. The glacier melting won’t cause the rain to stop falling.
The slow release mechanism does seem useful, but a human built reservoir can do the same thing. It doesn’t really seem like something to worry much about? In isolation, anyway. As a canary it might be worrying.
I do feel confused at how everyone is convinced the warming is man made. Like the climate is never static, so it’s either warming or cooling all the time. Our understanding of what happened in the past climate-wise is based on a bunch of methods that are impossible to actually test directly (since we can’t time travel). And the granularity of temperature data I’ve seen from the past is suspect - the short time period we are dealing with here could be an oscillation of a frequency that gets lost in the sampling granularity that actually happens. I’ve done a fair bit of reading looking for the definitive proof, but I just haven’t found it. I’m a bit spectrum-y though and social consensus or pressure doesn’t really work on me, which is kind of unfortunate, I don’t say that proudly. Were you convinced by data on this, or have you just been taught that the experts say this is what is happening? Can you help me?
I have believed for years that Americans would have a completely different attitude to global warming if the Lower 48 had more glaciers. In the Alps, you can easily walk to places where there are 100m of ladders to reach a hut that used to be at the level of the ice. In Canada, you can drive to places that used to be the toe of a glacier, then drive another half-mile to the parking lot, built at the edge of the glacier 20 years ago, then walk even farther on loose rubble. 1.5℃ of warming feels abstract and trivial. A giant piece of ice disappearing feels much more real.
Whenever I try to read up on it, it seems like glaciers are receding at ~2x their without-climate-change rate. That's a huge increase, but it doesn't seem like there's something that a person can experience at a visceral level here that is based on fact and not just preconception.
It's definitely striking, I can't deny that. I crossed the last remnants of an almost-extinct glacier last year that my guide guessed would be gone in 1-3 years: at the beginning of his career it was a real glacer with non-trivial extents, crevasses, etc.
I live in one of the places in the lower 48 with relatively easy access to glaciers. The change in some of them is fairly noticeable for me over the last say 20 years. It tends to feel grim and helpless if think about it too much. But I hike so I have spent time closer to them than an average person.
This researcher's account is interesting to see comparisons of EU glaciers over the last 100 years or so. https://bsky.app/profile/subfossilguy.bsky.social
And this blog: https://glacierchange.blog/
I grew up in a small town in rural Alaska that would have been completely under glacier ice when Columbus landed in North America. In the time between Captain Cook exploring the area in the 18th century and the next western survey a hundred years later, the coastline had been transformed by glaciers receding and revealing inlets hadn't been there for Cook to map. The glacier that was directly in between my town and the highway to Anchorage when I was a child is all but gone now, and there is a road.
>and revealing inlets hadn't been there for Cook to map.
That must have been maddening for the people who showed up and tried to make sense of it with only Cook's maps.
I think we're further hamstrung by 2℃ sounding smaller than the 3.6℉ it is equivalent to.
There are vast swaths of the us where people say things like "we used to get more snow" or "the snow used to stick around" or whatever.
It's not like people aren't exposed to the changes.
I mean it doesn't seem like Canadians have any different attitude (judging by carbon footprint) and they have glaciers. The truth is nobody really cares about global warming, just their own comfort at this moment :/ It's just the human condition.
Plenty of Americans can see and feel the effects of global warming, they just don't think addressing it is worth the effort.
Do they? Wildfires are some percent more likely and larger, but forests have always burned, and there are other factors like a century of fire suppression. Hurricanes are more violent and frequent, but there have always been hurricanes. Eggheads will tell you those things, but your day-to-day experiences of them are easy to dismiss. Watching a glacier die is visceral:
https://maevethornberry.ie/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Mer-de... https://drdirtbag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/athabasca36...
Most polls find that a substantial majority of Americans acknowledge climate change is real. However, whether it should be acted on with urgency polls differently by party affliation and by geographical region.
Many climate change deniers I know have moved from "it isn't real" to "so what?" Or, perhaps more charitably, to "addressing climate change is not in the national interest."
I don't think people who want to drill in national parks, privatize and raze old growth preserves, or exhaust fisheries without limits are going to be moved by seeing glaciers melt. They fundamentally have different values and place other interests over preservation and conservation.
Tragically common. A tragedy of the commons if you will.
Most Americans can see the effect but are unable to correlate it. The don't understand science. Most of them believe in a magical fairy in the sky.
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Sure, and I'm happy a meteor wiped out the dinosaurs so we mammals could take over… but I'd be a bit saltier about a new one hitting tomorrow.
That ice melting absorbs the energy that would otherwise be warming the atmosphere and causing cataclysmic storms and crop failures due to heat. And that is exactly what is going to happen once the glaciers melt.
The people worried about melting glaciers are not laminating the loss of pretty ice. They are worried about where this extra energy will go once there is no more ice to change phase and absorb it.
The planet's rising temperatures will be the least of some regions' concerns as the knock-on effects from the redistributed water will be much, much deeper than current awareness.
The mass of ice on the earth's poles has also led to the shape of the planet via tectonics over thousands of millennia. As that mass melts and redistributes from a solid to a liquid spreading around the globe our spheroid will begin to rebound. We have sensors everywhere, even in space, so the resulting effects will not be a surprise to some when the 'mass'ive shift begins. As those tectonic events increase in frequency so too will volcanic activity so I ask if anyone else has been checking on such data?
We do not know what we do not know however we act like we know everything yet learn new things about the planet daily. The things the survivors are going to learn about the changes that are setting in will be the last thing those that did not survive experienced from those cataclysmic moments.
If you like to nerd out on data, the GLAMOS website publishes a catalog of all glaciers in Switzerland, with measurements for the larger ones:
https://www.glamos.ch/en/factsheet#/B36-26
Some years the glacier count goes down, because a glacier disappears. Some years the glacier count goes up, when a glacier shrinks and splits in two.
I’m having a hard time contributing anything intellectually interesting. This is emotionally terrifying to me.
What can be said?
China is building, domestically deploying, and exporting solar, wind, batteries, and EVs so fast that the world will have no choice but to rapidly move towards net zero simply due to economics. Existing excess atmospheric carbon emissions remain to be sequestered. China deployed 277GW of solar in 2024 and is accelerating, having deployed 212GW in the first half of 2025. 1GW of solar is being deployed globally every 15 hours. Clean energy and global electrification flywheel go brrrr.
https://ember-energy.org/data/china-cleantech-exports-data-e...
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/china-energy-transi...
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/china-is-quietly-saving-the-wo...
https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/08/21/china-clean-renewable-e...
I hope so, but to do that it isn't enough to make renewables economical.
You also have to make carbon uneconomical. China's CO2 emissions have continued to increase rapidly along with renewables.
Energy is really useful and we don't have enough to fulfil demand. Unless renewables + nuclear are cheaper than carbon and not supply constrained I'd expect both sources to increase in tandem.
> Energy is really useful and we don't have enough to fulfil demand.
Enough sunlight falls on Earth in ~30 min to power humanity for a year. There is currently a capture constraint, not a supply constraint, which is currently being solved for.
> Unless renewables + nuclear are cheaper than carbon and not supply constrained I'd expect both sources to increase in tandem.
Renewables are cheaper than carbon, even when accounting for storage, unsubsidized. Some will say "what about seasonal!?" Not solved for yet; fossil gas for the gaps until solar, wind, transmission, batteries, and demand response/orchestration keep closing that gap. Nuclear will never be cheap unfortunately.
https://ember-energy.org/latest-updates/24-hour-solar-now-ec...
https://www.surrey.ac.uk/news/solar-energy-now-worlds-cheape...
https://www.authorea.com/users/960972/articles/1329770-solar... | https://doi.org/10.22541/au.175647950.09188768/v1
(think in systems)
Proof is in the pudding. Has China halted all coal construction because coal is unambigously more expensive than solar?
We may at some point cross the cost curve and I hope we do but not obvious we are there yet.
>enough sunlight to power earth for a year
Is that based on the entire surface of the earth, or just dry land?
My understanding of the fact is entire surface. I can provide citations related to only usable solar and wind potential, if so desired.
> or just dry land?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_solar
https://www.rwe.com/en/research-and-development/solar-energy...
https://www.nrel.gov/news/detail/press/2025/floating-solar-p...
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/long-popular-in-asia-fl...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221462962...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136403212...
https://time.com/china-massive-floating-solar-field/
https://theelectricityhub.com/seychelles-launches-floating-s...
> China's CO2 emissions have continued to increase rapidly along with renewables
China's emissions fell 2.7% this year. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45108292 Not per-capita emissions, total emissions.
I'd love for CO2 to be peaking, but the comments on that link suggest this is a single month's measurement and that month is not representative as there was a policy cutoff for end of the month that frontloaded solar investments.
It's for 2025 up to May, and not just for a single month. Fair point about front loaded investments that may have moved the numbers. Nevertheless it's a positive sign.
CO2 emissions haven't yet peaked but global coal use has, all countries have significantly dropped their coal usage with the exception of India and China.
Per annum total global coal use has peaked and is projected to fall from this year forward.
China's use is becoming "better" (closing many small dirty old coal power stations, opening fewer but larger and more efficient less polluting new ones) while having a set long term plan to phase out coal while using it now to power a transition to renewables (wind turbines and solar panels don't make themselves yet, nor do they yet power their own production).
Ultimately cost is just one factor to prime driver like energy, energy security most overwhelming priority in energy trilemma (security, cost, sustainability)... Having dispatchahble power not tied to weather with abundance fuel source is always going to trump all other considerations for any serious grid. PRC got burn going ham on renewable a few years ago, few heat events that fucked over hydro production, increased AC demand and all of sudden you're dealing with opportunity cost of rationing factories that currently far exceeds $ differences in generation. Theoretically countries can size renewable rollout that minimum intermittent power + storage can reliabily power grid even with current tech, but that's like... multidecade megaproject.
> China is building, domestically deploying, and exporting solar, wind, batteries, and EVs so fast that the world will have no choice but to rapidly move towards net zero simply due to economics.
I can't help but read "we're going to produce and consume more than ever" and I really don't see how it ends in a good way...
Take transportation alone, 1.3 billion ICE vehicles to replace by EVs, there is nothing green about that. Not even talking about the absolutely massive mining operations we'll need to build solar and batteries. What about cement? Steel? Petrol derivate chemistry, medicine, fertilizers,...
And then what? We continue building and consuming more and more shit forever? Who believes this can be "net zero"?
Well, not forever. Global population will peak end of century (sometime between 2055-2084) and then begin to rapidly decline based on fertility rate curves. Solar PV panels can be recycled 100% today, trivially, as can lithium and sodium batteries (these materials are abundant in the Earth's crust, but only so much will be needed to establish a circular supply lifecycle loop). I suppose we can argue about the scale of mining operations. Certainly, low carbon powered mass transit whenever possible vs light vehicles and aircraft. This is Africa and India's opportunity to "do better" based on what China has accomplished (having had the chance to ride their high speed rail and ride in their autonomous vehicles) with regards to urban planning, civil engineering, and infrastructure investment, being the last parts of the world that will develop.
https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Slides_London.pdf
> Population will peak end of century and then begin to rapidly decline based on fertility rate curves.
If that's truly how it'll go we don't even need EVs and renewable to attain equilibrium. But something tells me we'll manage to fuck it up somehow
we absolutely need to stop pushing CO2 into the atmosphere ASAP.
> Not even talking about the absolutely massive mining operations we'll need to build solar and batteries
Less than we need for fossil fuels though.
It's good that ICE cars are replaced by EV over time. Even better if we have less cars overall and more mass transit.
50%+ of the world population is low to low middle income, and they're all going to want to increase emission by 4x for parity high income life styles. Realistically 8x since developing = catching up on infra build out, i.e. extremely emissions intensive fuckton of steel and concrete. IIRC 50% more than current consumption by 2050, i.e. consuming much more is basically locked in and that's based on presumption that developing countries are fucking inept and slow rolling development because they don't have a system to do a PRC modernization push otherwise we'd be looking at 200/300/400% increases in steel and concrete. Net zero is pipe dream, it's not going to happen. We can try to make the transition greener, but it's not going to be green. Ultimately, enviroment pilled brains need to remember, development/poverty reduction is going to be a net good that benefits far more people than climate change will fuck over / displace.
Incorrect; energy dependence on a nuclear power with a general desire to displace existing hegemons isn't a wise or tenable policy.
If you care about America using carbon-light power you should throw your weight behind nuclear, geothermal, and some wind/solar/battery manufactured domestically, by allies, or within our sphere of influence.
The United States had a chance to lead, they tried to build domestically (Inflation Reduction Act), and it was sabotaged by governance choices. Someone else has demonstrated their ability to execute and deliver. Elections have consequences. Better luck next time.
Cool, I do, and I care more about her than about carbon because I and my people live here. So I will oppose any policy that cedes leadership or hegemony. See you at the ballot box, I guess.
You should probably vote for someone who doesn't dismantle every attempt to preserve a future for your children and their children.
So how's that going? Your unreliable leader is dissolving alliances left and right and tries to bully countries into submission. Faced with that, they'd rather deal with other assholes who are, although assholes, at least keep their promises. Leadership, hegemony, hah, how deluded do you want to get...
If Americans cared about the world, they would abolish their military and voluntarily lower their emissions.
If you have a bucket list, start working on the things that are most vulnerable. Things you want to see may disappear within your lifetime, so go see it while you can.
I guess we can hope America starts taking climate change seriously again instead of chasing short term stock market returns
Stand up, fight back now... gotta save democracy first sadly. What a thorn in my side it has been to trade one existential crises for humanity for a government that seems actively opposed to doing a god damn thing about it
Same. It pops into my head a few times per week that I haven't thought about global climate change recently, and it is because we are dealing with the more immediate thread of hypercapitalism-authoritarian-christofascism, and my neighbors in Chicago are being disappeared nightly.
And China too with its ~30-31% of world CO2.
Considering America is literally promoting fossil fuels over renewables and the US administration is publicly saying climate change is a scam, I think America deserves more flack than China here
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Production rates are subject to change. China is showing it wants to move towards a future where it emits less CO2 and the US recently elected and appointed cronies to take us in the opposite direction.
CO2 emissions by country: China vs US. Number only.
https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/which-countries-hav... I would be surprised if China ends up dumping more CO2 than the US (and then if we look at per capita, even more so).
CO2 since 1750! This isn't serious. Who is currently today doing the thing? china
Does the climate care about per capita? no
> CO2 since 1750! This isn't serious. Who is currently today doing the thing?
> Does the climate care about per capita?
It does care about CO2 since 1750 though because that CO2 never went away. It's at least as important as, if not more than "Who is currently today doing the thing?"
No. The incremental CO2 is what is harming us. We're already experiencing the effects of 1750 to present. What happens from now on will incrementally deteriorate the climate.
Total historic emissions is the ONLY serious metric. Since it accounts for all capital buildouts, it takes centuries of emission heavy construction to get developed countries where they are. Countries are going to emit more when they're in steel and concrete phase of nation building.
Does climate care about emissions? Does climate care about changing? No. Climate doesn't care it cycles back to ice age.
Humans (hypothetically) care about climate change. It's a fundmentally a geo-political problem, which means the solution is geopolitically agreed on metric. Currently it rhetorically per capita, but arguably it should be historic per capita, because per capita itself is geopolitic concession metric that shifts responsibility away from historic carbon debt of developed nations towards developing nations.
Why does China have the right to "develop" when they are already one of the most advanced countries on the planet?
Do they get to advance until they're in first place? And then what? It stops there or does India get a shot at being first place? Then Nigeria?
Meanwhile what does the climate look like if every single country executes the China 1945-2025 playbook?
Because it's not uniformly developed, there's still 100s of millions who are underdeveloped. If we're sensible we'll cap a limit on what first place should emit per capita and that will be the benchmark everyone targets / settles at. Right now that's high income per capita emissions. Realistically, it doesn't stop until some agreed/enforced per capital emission ceiling and if that agreed ceiling takes us to 4/5/6 degrees then that's where we're going to settle. Ultimately the fair requirement is suggest countries have X historic per captia emissions adjustment to unfuck themselves / prepare for climate change. If wealthy countries are generous they can subsidize the transition, but we know that's unlikely so really it's about how (or whether) to mitigate the free for all.
In an even fairer world, huge renewable exporters would get credit / per capita adjustments for exporting net renewable and fossil exporers would get opposite. Oh and countries with high TFR or advanced economies with high immigration that multiplies an immigrant's emission (i.e. poor -> rich flow) would get penalized. But that's even less likely to happen because it's obvious whose interest these sensible proposals undermine, because climate change isn't a scientific of enviromental problem, it's a geopolitcal one.
What matters is how much CO2 was dumped in the atmosphere (and to stop doing it, China is transitioning, the US administration tells everyone it's a scam...)
It doesn't matter because it's done. There is nothing we can do about it, only about the present. China is presently the worst CO2 emitter.
> China vs US. Number only.
China: down 2.7% this year
US: up 4.2%.
That's total, not per-capita. Try some other excuses to do nothing about climate change.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45108292
https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china?country=CHN~USA
I'm no expert, but if these data are correct, emissions in China are growing dramatically, and in the US they are trending downward at (honestly) an unexpectedly impressive rate.
China is currently emitting well over 2x what the US does, and extrapolation from the last 25 years suggests that China will exceed the US, on a per-capita basis, in a handful of years.
This is somewhat counter-narrative. But assuming it's correct, the questions become: How bad would it be if China was not taking the problem seriously, and how much better would the US be if they were taking the problem seriously?
That chart only goes up to 2023. The reduction is from this year.
> how much better would the US be if they were taking the problem seriously?
I wish we lived in that world too.
-2.7% to what total amount? +4.2% to what total amount?
This obscures the numbers. The climate doesn't care about improvement, only about total tons of CO2.
It's obvious you don't believe a word of whatever you're saying all over this comment thread. Especially
> The climate doesn't care about improvement, only about total tons of CO2
Given how easily you pooh-poohed cumulative historical emissions in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45509432. The climate also cares about all carbon, past and present. Not just the carbon emitted by China specifically today on October 7, 2025, as you keep repeating. (Only current emissions matter, right? So even China's emissions yesterday and the day before are meaningless).
All of your arguments are extremely in bad faith.
I don't understand why you're doing this though. What do you gain? Is it just about "China bad"? Or about denying the developed world's responsibility for climate change? Or is it for the pleasure of trolling? Please help me understand what's going through your mind.
This thread is highlighting that climate change initiatives are about harming the West in favor of everyone else.
China is by far the biggest carbon emitter. People try to obscure that through "per capita" and "historical cumulative" figures and "percentage improvement".
The way people contort themselves to protect China, the mega-emitter is laughable. They improved 2.7%!! So they went from 31% to 30.92% of total manmade CO2?
You're not serious about the climate, you just want to punish the US/West.
> climate change initiatives are about harming the West
By introducing a cheaper, less-polluting source of energy? If harm is cheaper electricity and cleaner air, please harm me.
> in favor of everyone else.
"Everyone else" is also going solar. Very quickly. It's cheap.
> The way people contort themselves to protect China, the mega-emitter is laughable
Pretend it's 20 countries. Then it's no longer the #1 emitter. Unless you're suggesting some kind of rapid depopulation over there that's all they can do. Btw they also had a one child policy for so long, so they've already tried rapid depopulation themselves.
> They improved 2.7%!! So they went from 31% to 30.92% of total manmade CO2
To 30.163%, assuming your 31% was even true. In one year. Don't lie about simple arithmetic. It makes you less credible about everything else.
> You're not serious about the climate, you just want to punish the US/West
I want the US/west to adopt the cheapest and fastest growing source of energy ASAP. I don't want more bowing down to fossil fuel interests, and higher energy prices, like we've seen in the past 2 years. The latter is punishment.
You're definitely not serious about the climate. Your arguments add up to "China bad. Even if China improves, China still bad. Any number about China good can be interpreted as China bad based on arbitrary criteria that I alone decide are important. Oh and I don't wanna do anything about climate because and it'll hurt me (somehow for reasons that aren't important) and btw have you seen how bad China is?".
Unless you're getting paid by the fossil fuel industry, I don't see how arguing all this benefits you in any way.
No idea, if you read my comment you'd understand that's not what I think matters.
That is not a serious position, that is a political position.
Ok lol
> In 2024, the U.S. emissions were on the rise, whereas the European Union (EU) was decreasing its emissions. The U.S. contributes about 13.5% of global annual emissions, whereas the EU's share has fallen to approximately 6%.
I don't even understand what you're tyring to say, America is taking climate change seriously in your eyes?
China is leading the world in renewable energy production. Nuclear buildout, wind farms, solar farms. There's even some minor thermal (even though they're not geographically suited for that).
Sure, they are starting from a high number as the worlds manufacturer, but they're are clearly making strides that the other major industrial nations (the US) are not.
Can't have a discussion on climate change without the obligatory "But what about Chiiiiina!?"
It's time to own up to the fact that China is going out of their way to use renewables, and the U. S. is actively sabotaging renewable energy programs. Whining about China is starting to look pretty silly.
Look at cumulative co2 emissions though, the US created 50% of the global cumulated co2 emissions alone
Let's forget how they make almost everything we and you own.
Until not long ago, they very likely even processed your own trash.
Stop reading things that upset you.
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> If you are so emotionally attached to solid water [...]
That's an oddly personal remark to be making when global warming is a concern for humanity.
That final sentence is not a positive note, either: "we're still experiencing above average ice melt - but this year wasn't as bad and some other years!".
I found that the message I replied to was an oddly personal remark and I couldn’t help it. Anyway, this year was better seems a positive note (to end a negative melody if you will).
It varies a lot by each year, but the trend is clear. Article also say that swiss glaciers lost 40% of ice volume in 25 years.
> The overall summer melt this year was therefore only 15 percent above the 2010-2020 average -- its lowest level in the past four years.
That is not really comforting. Is your comment satire?
You have to weigh up the negatives with the positives and look at trends. AI can gave you a more exhaustive list of positive developments, but some I've noticed:
* "FERC: Solar + wind made up 91% of new US power generating capacity in H1 2025" [1] - The rollback of the IRA will reduce the speed of the US transition.
* "Solar and wind growth exceeded global demand growth in the first half of 2025" [2]
* Perovskite solar panels could lead to even lower solar costs [3]
There's also increased investment in nuclear, exicting geothermal advances (eg. Fervo Energy), increasing EV sales, a massive expansion of battery storage, zero emissions concrete (https://sublime-systems.com/). There are lots of positive developments, so I'd recommend learning more about them to offset your current fears and introduce some hope.
1. https://electrek.co/2025/09/03/ferc-solar-wind-91-percent-ne...
2. https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/global-electricity-...
3. https://www.ft.com/content/a5095373-1762-41cd-a078-af533e264...
How does investing in new forms of energy help when old one is not decreasing? Demand for energy is still rising so those new forms are just covering (part of) new demand...
> AI can gave you a more exhaustive list
...so maybe it should not?
> How does investing in new forms of energy help when old one is not decreasing?
In relation to electricity this is not the case for H1 2025, as shown in the article "Solar and wind growth exceeded global demand growth in the first half of 2025" [1]
> ...so maybe it should not?
Fair point.
1. https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/global-electricity-...
the pictures in the article show how patheticly out of touch the response to global warming is , pathetic and apathetic, people looking at melting grubby glacier with there coat over there shoulder, a town devestated by a glacial collapse sitting underwater, but with a little bright orange sediment barrier installed to meet regulations meanwhile gretta is getting shit kicked by zionist goons for showing the connections between social and environmental collapse
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The record loss was 2022. The ice never came back. It is devastating. Instead of ice coming back, 2025 came very close to same devastating loss.
Fortunately, when climate change causes devastating food shortages I'll have the competitive advantage over climate change deniers of being orders of magnitude smarter than they are.
Almost every scenario of hell has happened over the past 4.5b years to our planet. A bunch of those were extinction events. If we manage to speed run 10s of millions of years of nature in 200k years humanity, then we are indeed very special.
Yeah, the earth has been entirely without ice before aswell but that earth was not habitable for us
Just because its happened before doesnt mean its fine
Perhaps what you're missing here is that it's ice loss, not ice levels. The rate of change is at near record levels.
> Swiss glaciers have shrunk by a quarter since 2015, study says
And what about this ice loss trend?
40% loss in volume in 25 years and it's accelerating. Don't look up I guess.
Are you aure that in those other times when it happenes it didn't end in catastrophe?
Sounds like free real estate! Humans have a pretty hard time living on glaciers AFAIK.
Glaciers provide a lot of fresh water, sustained over warm months, free of charge, to the places we can live in. We need them to support life in hotter, drier, or more temperate areas. Here in BC, Canada they provide cool, oxygenated water for countless species including several pacific salmon and other fish species, which constitutes (or constituted, now; I'm no longer sure of the status) one of the largest nutrient transfers on the planet.
Glaciers are a crucial component of many ecosystems and ways of life. We can't live on them, but they make it so we can live where we do live now.
The water doesn’t actually come from the glacier, though, right? It comes from the sky. The glacier hogs it for awhile. The glacier melting won’t cause the rain to stop falling.
The slow release mechanism does seem useful, but a human built reservoir can do the same thing. It doesn’t really seem like something to worry much about? In isolation, anyway. As a canary it might be worrying.
I do feel confused at how everyone is convinced the warming is man made. Like the climate is never static, so it’s either warming or cooling all the time. Our understanding of what happened in the past climate-wise is based on a bunch of methods that are impossible to actually test directly (since we can’t time travel). And the granularity of temperature data I’ve seen from the past is suspect - the short time period we are dealing with here could be an oscillation of a frequency that gets lost in the sampling granularity that actually happens. I’ve done a fair bit of reading looking for the definitive proof, but I just haven’t found it. I’m a bit spectrum-y though and social consensus or pressure doesn’t really work on me, which is kind of unfortunate, I don’t say that proudly. Were you convinced by data on this, or have you just been taught that the experts say this is what is happening? Can you help me?