[gonzalohm]

What's interesting to me is that almost all models underestimated the ocean temperature.

We are entering uncharted waters and I fear that at some point we will get an extreme extreme weather event and the worse thing is that we won't see it coming.

[gmuslera]

That should be the scary part. We know how El Niño affects world's weather, but it is also a symptom of how much heat the ocean is absorbing.

That core problem won't end this year or the next one, and it will keep disrupting global climate. And with it, agriculture, settlements, economy and civilization as we know it.

And the scariest part is what we do about it. Keep doing activities that rise global temperature and power up positive feedback loops, weakening or abolishing climate policies, and when things start to feel urgent will try things by the fast way with unclear outcomes.

[markvdb]

- There is no "we", but it would take "we" to fix this.

- There is a global scale issue, but no consensus on this being a problem. Not at the global, continental, local or individual level. FFS, there are idiots proudly rolling coal.

- Leadership - in the rare places on earth where it is somewhat accountable - reflects this lack of consensus.

- Acknowledging the problem does not equal acting even on an individual level.

- There's lots of cognitive dissonance. Why am I even flying to the other side of the world next week?

We are cooked. Not so much us old farts, but the children.

[hammock]

It’s all so scary! I regret having a child.

[xyzsparetimexyz]

For your child's sake, make sure they never find out your regrets.

[protocolture]

>It’s all so scary! I regret having a child.

I dont get this. I would regret having a kid maybe if he turns out to not be resilient and up to the challenges posed by the changing climate and the shitty political situation. But those are things I can work with him on. Opsec can be taught. Political dissent can be taught. This thing can be turned around when the political class has been disposed of.

[AlecSchueler]

The point is it's too far gone. You can't teach much resilience for continent-wide crop failure.

[protocolture]

Its not too far gone to turn around.

[AlecSchueler]

What are you basing that on? Even the most optimistic predictions are saying the best we can hope for this century is to slow down the damage being done.

[gonzalohm]

It's scary because you see the world being destroyed and there is nothing we (normal citizens) can do about it

[grvdrm]

I don’t. But I will at least consider the thinking about my kids (8, 4) should look into alternative paths.

[gonzalohm]

For me, this was one of the reasons to not have kids

[xorcist]

Due to the widespread idea that climate prediction has been predicting doom and gloom all the time, and has always been wrong about it, I have been entertaining myself by revisiting old climate predictions from 20 years ago. I can highly recommend it.

I mean, predicting the climate must be one of the hardest numerical simulations you can run. Climate models are famously incomplete. But the results turned out to be way more accurate than I would have thought. That's some impressive modeling, and I would assume that models have only improved since then.

The most chilling thing (and not in a good way) about it is that popular science type repotrs for the general public usually indicate an interval between a good case and a bad case, with a nice line in between. In retrospect we have been pretty much perfectly tracking the bad case line ever since.

[amluto]

I don’t recall the more serious predictions predicting anything worse than what we’ve actually experiencing. There were plenty of predictions about nasty consequences if we experienced X degrees of warming by, say, 2050, and it’s not 2050 yet…

[protocolture]

>Due to the widespread idea that climate prediction has been predicting doom and gloom all the time, and has always been wrong about it, I have been entertaining myself by revisiting old climate predictions from 20 years ago. I can highly recommend it.

N=1 Mind, but I remember reading a spread in Australian Scientist that predicted Australia would become something of a rainless desert, storms bringing only lightning, by 2020 or so. Leaving only Melbourne, Adelaide and Tasmania somewhat habitable. Article went on to discuss how to calmly migrate the population south over the 13 or so years remaining, and what the government might do to dissuade climate refugees from pacific islands.

Since then I have a read a lot of people walking back the absolute death and destruction stuff, but "Extremier Extremes" seems to be the closest to a consensus position, one that the strongest El Nino ever supports completely.

[baxtr]

Interesting. Do you mind sharing some of the predictions you have been revisiting?

[dlx]

This sounds neat...I'd love to do it as well. Any past predictions vs current conditions tools or datasets that you're using?

[jakebol]

There have been a lot of published retrospective cohort climate model studies, ex https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2019GL08...

[jonwinstanley]

Well, we can see it coming, but we are doing very little about

[CGMthrowaway]

We are doing a lot. Almost 90% of electricity capacity added last year was renewables. Nearly 1 in 3 cars sold are now EVs. The world is spending over $2 trillion every year on low‑carbon energy investment. Solar and wind have already avoided more than 2 gigatons of C02 being added to the atmosphere. In the US, the IRA will drop emissions 40% to below 2005 levels.

What do you mean we are doing very little?

[bluefirebrand]

> We are doing a lot. Almost 90% of electricity capacity added last year was renewables

New capacity being electric is fine but we need to be actively removing fossil fuels from existing capacity, which isn't actually happening. We're just building new capacity on top of old existing fossil fuels. So sure, it's nice that a majority of new capacity is green, but we're still burning more fossil fuels year over year

[logtempo]

It should be at the level od the economy of war but worldwide. The majority reacted too late to have the possibility to act slowly.

[akamaka]

I’ve had the same discussion with many people, and when I tell them how much work is done on cleaning up carbon emissions, the reply is always “well… it’s not enough”. And of course, they don’t have a sense of what is “enough”.

They don’t really understand it in a factual, measurable way, but just are interesting in what the overall story is, and what it says about humanity failing.

[AlecSchueler]

Are we measurably slowing down the warming effect?

[myaccountonhn]

Both can be true: we are doing a lot, and it's not enough.

[inigyou]

We've been seeing our own certain destruction from climate change coming since the 70s. The 1870s. We had two entire lifetimes to do something about it, we didn't.

Except those guys throwing soup at the fossil fuel HQs. They did a little.

[windexh8er]

We're building more data centers for a technology that's ramping global warming even faster. Water consumption, heat generation and tons and tons of CO2 emitting concrete to house these things.

So we're doing something, but those things are counterproductive to our planet's general well being. Apparently billionaires don't need an inhabitable Earth to live on.

[asats]

Yeah, data-centers are definitely the worst thing happening to the planet. You got your priorities straight.

AI data centers are what, half a percent of the world electricity consumption, if that, and an even smaller fraction of the total energy?

[dredmorbius]

Growth trend matters more than absolute present value.

Data centres generally had been seeing energy use growing at 12% annually, or with a doubling time of 5.8 years (about 5 years 10 months). AI is accelerating that trend.

In the United States, power consumption by data centres is on course to account for almost half of the growth in electricity demand between now and 2030. Driven by AI use, the US economy is set to consume more electricity in 2030 for processing data than for manufacturing all energy-intensive goods combined, including aluminium, steel, cement and chemicals. In advanced economies more broadly, data centres are projected to drive more than 20% of the growth in electricity demand between now and 2030, putting the power sector in those economies back on a growth footing after years of stagnating or declining demand in many of them.

<https://www.iea.org/news/ai-is-set-to-drive-surging-electric...>

[protocolture]

>Growth trend matters more than absolute present value.

Only if the current absolute present value is enough that the resulting trend matters.

It was only 2 weeks ago when someone posted an article claiming data centers worldwide use 24x less water than golf courses worldwide.

And I mean, you need somewhere to collate all that climate data? You need telecoms to let scientists communicate?

>Driven by AI use, the US economy is set to consume more electricity in 2030 for processing data than for manufacturing all energy-intensive goods combined, including aluminium, steel, cement and chemicals. In advanced economies more broadly, data centres are projected to drive more than 20% of the growth in electricity demand between now and 2030, putting the power sector in those economies back on a growth footing after years of stagnating or declining demand in many of them.

If horse use trends continue at their current pace, London will be covered in 20 meters of horse manure by the end of the decade.

> In advanced economies more broadly, data centre's are projected to drive more than 20% of the growth in electricity demand between now and 2030

20% of the growth isn't much overall either is it? That's likely assuming that the million and 1 spruiked projects actually get off the ground.

[dredmorbius]

Only if...

No.

If the trend continues.

Exponential growth, a/k/a constant periodic percentage growth (per day, month, year, etc.), increases rapidly. Differences (or errors) in magnitude measurement disappear rapidly: a factor of two in a single generation, a factor of ten in about three generations, a factor of 100 in less than 7, a factor of one thousand in fewer than 10.

What matters is that the growth rate continue.

Which of course, it usually doesn't. Most growth trends follow a sigmoid rather than exponential curve (initially), or more complex longer-term dynamics.

The point of your infamous horse quote was less to show that the Earth would be covered in horses (or their effluvia), than that the observed current trend could not reasonably continue. And as some of us are aware, it didn't, due to the adoption of ... the petroleum-fueled automobile ... which has some bearing on this particular HN post itself.

Had the automobile not come along, or petroleum reserves proved much more limited as was widely believed at the time[1], large horse-congested cities such as London, New York, and Chicago would likely have seen sharply slowed or even reversed growth under negative hygiene pressures. It was the multiple factors of growth in fossil fuel use (displacing horses, and their effluvia), development of sewerage systems, solid waste disposal, food safety and purity, refrigeration, and public health which turned cities from death zones to attractive living places, rather than merely drawing desperate immigrants through high wages amidst rampant rural and foreign poverty.

But the point remains that the sustained growth rate matters far more than the starting point.

2030 is three and a half years away. That's soon.

________________________________

Notes:

1. It wasn't until the 1930s with the discovery of the East Texas Oil Field in the US and of vast fields in Saudi Arabia that it seemed likely that oil was more than a short-term resource. In marked contrast to, say, the short-lived Indian natural gas boom of the late 19th and early 20th centuries: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_gas_boom>. Daniel Yergin's The Prize is an excellent history of the industry's growth, though I disagree strongly with the author's strong allegiance to it.

[asats]

>or with a doubling time of 5.8 years

So that in ~6 years they will account for 1%, and still a fraction of the percent of the world total energy use?

[andreyf]

No, in ~6y they will count for 1% of present day consumption. The rest of the quote compares it to where we expect steel manufacturing projections. It all reads like something that seeks to influence rather than inform.

[dredmorbius]

Modulo, as noted, AI is accelerating that trend.

[myaccountonhn]

1% is a lot.

[netsharc]

Because GPUs grow on trees...

> TSMC’s manufacturing success comes at an ecological cost. The company accounts for around 150,000 tonnes of water per day and 6.4% of the national electricity consumption.

https://taiwaninsight.org/2025/11/05/water-nexus-can-semicon...

[windexh8er]

It would be great for you to experience living close to one of these data centers [0]. Maybe you'd have a consideration outside of your own myopic view then.

[0] https://www.selc.org/news/xai-built-an-illegal-power-plant-t...

[asats]

Yeah, as opposed to the very pleasant living by the side of a steel mill and an oil refinery.

What is myopic is chasing social media "evil of the month" trends, instead of looking at the actual data.

[windexh8er]

Yeah, except those aren't being built in areas where people already live. You do realize that a refinery lasts 50+ years and the OECD already has surplus capacity? So why would there be significant spend here? Meanwhile DC starts totaled $25B+ in January of this year [0].

Maybe you should try providing some data given your comment, I'd be interested in hearing about all of these refineries and steel mills being produced!

[0] https://news.constructconnect.com/march-2026-data-center-rep...

[AlecSchueler]

It feels like you're being sarcastic but "AI data centers are what, half a percent of the world electricity consumption" -- 0.5% of the global total is huge!

[inigyou]

DC water consumption is a red herring. That water is returned back to its source but warmer.

[windexh8er]

If you think that every data center is now a closed loop system enjoy your propaganda.

Colossus 1 and 2 still use open loop systems. And with the case of blow down water that's "returned" it's not usable due to the use of concentrated salts (1,200 to 6,000 mg/L).

In your mind this is a closed loop system of clean water. It is not. And as DCs have less and less discharge there is more and more solid waste produced.

Your assertion that "water consumption is a red herring" is utter bull shit. I'd suggest enlightening yourself [0][1][2][3].

[0] https://genesiswatertech.com/blog-post/advanced-blowdown-tre... [1] https://fieldreport.caes.uga.edu/publications/TP121/how-data... [2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.21760 [3] https://www.yahoo.com/news/science/articles/epa-writing-perm...

[jay_kyburz]

Yes, but they _could_ be a closed loop system if governments demanded it. And they should.

The could, and should generate their own electricity as well. And perhaps even provide free power to the surrounding neighborhood to make up for the noise and inconvenience of having one nearby.

[inigyou]

The xAI one does that, with the result of giving everyone in a several mile radius permanent asthma.

[simmerup]

Have you seen that some of these things are so loud they’re damaging to health? But they’re loud at frequencies we can’t hear so it’s not easy to tell without specialised equipment

[dredmorbius]

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48055532>

[windexh8er]

Unfounded comments that are nothing but a lie are OK. Yet, calling it out directly goes against the rules.

In this case the response is warranted. Until people start to see what actually goes on in these data centers with respect to pollution (of many kinds) I don't have a problem being direct.

[inigyou]

What happens to the water leaving Colossus 1 and 2?

[froggy]

Very interesting how your enlightening comments about dirty AI data centers are being downvoted. Pro-Musk, pro-AI bots and shills trying to keep the smoke screen going?

[inigyou]

We don't have to make up false reasons why these things are bad. There are enough true reasons.

[CGMthrowaway]

Yes, just like cow farts.

[inigyou]

Cow burps are a significant contributor to global warming, like 10%. There are just so many damn cows and their digestive systems produce methane.

[bamboozled]

Once I listened to a podcast about the holodomor, a famine caused by Stalin and affected Ukrainians mostly. In the end they were forced to eat their children as they were so desperate for food. The suffering was untold, but real, it happened, and that kind of thing can and will happen again if we're not extra extra careful.

We're pushing ourselves into absolutely untold suffering the longer do nothing. I truly fear a famine like that and the more we go down this road, the closer we're getting.

Obviously its too late to avoid the worst, the only hope we have is to collectively cooperate to help each other get through it. Not sure that will happen but I believe that's the only way through.