Notice the red line, marking where the average temperature of the warmest month is below 10°C. Notice how low it is on the west side of the Atlantic, in Nunavut and Labrador. It’s between 50° and 60° north.
Now imagine that line at those latitudes in Europe. You’d have Labrador-like conditions in the UK, a drastic situation indeed. Reykjavik would suddenly resemble Iqaluit.
That’s an overly optimistic way to look at it. The geological record shows there were glaciers in parts of France and Germany the last time th current shut down. (When it shut down due to CO2 induced global warming.)
Also, the temperature change was rapid: Somewhere between 50-100 years. If we’re in the same cycle, we’re more than a decade in already.
One is a part of the other. What an unsympathetic comment. While its imprecise, AMOC and Gulf stream has been mixed up for decades in colloquial discussion about this issue. You're not adding anything here.
People tend to underestimate how cold it gets in the interior of countries generally seen as the "sunny Mediterranean" - from Croatia, Montenegro, Albania and even Greece.
And Spain. Bring these "sunny Spain lovers" to North/Inner Spain in Winter. Watch them running away as if it were some kind of weird disease.
Also, spotting the typical tourist climbing the Picos de Europa range in sandals is not weird. What's weird if he/she makes it alive... or without frozen fingers or toes.
There are glaciers on Kilimanjaro or South American mountains ie in Ecuador which are very close to equator, its just a question of altitude and given microclimate.
Do you know the difference between a prophesy and an empirical observation? If you can’t distinguish between those basic things, why do you feel comfortable snarking so confidently?
Would current collapse make more than just Northern Europe colder? Or maybe they would be warmer?
They seem to suggest only certain northern countries would be affected because warm water stops flowing from the south.
So the southern waters would stay hotter right? Or what about across the Atlantic where the currents do the opposite (and make the winters so cold). Would Boston and New York get more temperate?
North of the Alps temperature would drop considerably. South of the Alps, probably fine due to the thermal mass of the mediterranean sea. However, for the whole Europe you would see a massive drop in rainfall, since basically all the humidity comes from the Atlantic's warm air that carries a lot of it.
Additionally, Carribeans, Mexico and South of the US would also be fucked since the energy wouldn't disperse and all the heat and humidity would stay there. Hurricanes would be much more violent, with way more rain, and likely more frequent.
Labrador current might become weaker though, but it is not a given. Currently, the waters from the gulf stream cool down and sink to the bottom of the ocean, so they don't displace the artic waters and hence are not likely the cause of how cold north eastern US is.
None? It is not certain any country will benefit. Countries built their infrastructure and population centers according to the weather of the location. If the weather changes probably every country will have to adjust.
If you are asking which area will benefit from climate change I would say Siberia as it will become increasingly important due to the northern corridor remaining ice free and because a lot of people will be displaced by weather/sea level. And that place is empty. Additionally, it has nice farming soil which right now is not used since there are easier places to farm but in a warming world this could change
I'm glad they took this seriously and considered it important. Maybe the world will finally notice how we're destroying the planet and ourselves, and whether anyone thinks about their children and grandchildren who may live in a world destroyed by generations.
Convincing the world seem the hard part. 43% of the forcing greenhouse grasses are currently coming from non amicable regimes. 53% if you include USA, but there's a chance administration is going to change. Beyond declaring what are the small countries options?
climate change isn't an one/off effect but gradual
every bit of improvement is a higher chance to avoid some of the most catastrophic outcomes (where the unlikely but possible worst outcome being a mass extinction chain reaction which humanity will find very very hard to survive in a functioning manner/without losing their future)
so still worth fighting for any improvement even if we can't avoid a catastrophe anymore, as there is a huge margin between what we still can archive, and what we might end up with if we stop fighting and are quite unlucky
But it's also clear, it won't be enough. Emissions are not only still increasing, they likely won't stop increasing in my lifetime (in the next 50 years.)
We must adapt. The earth is going to get a lot warmer, and wetter in some parts, and drier in others, and sea levels will likely keep slowly rising for many centuries to come, if not millennia.
Even though we, collectively, are driving said train. As a believer in the great filter theory[1] it's a shame given how far we've apparently come, only to be brought low by our desires, our inability to believe we could screw ourselves this royally, and our collective lack of give-a-shit to fix it.
I believe in climate change but in terms of a great filter candidate it doesn't seem significant - even in a worst case scenario with a lot of warming there will be large parts of the planet that are perfectly habitable.
On the other hand: nuclear war, genetic engineering, or just plain bad luck (carrington event, asteroid impact) seem much more likely to actually wipe out modern society
I think it's most likely a symptom, not an end result of our stupidity. It's the short-sightedness that lets us keep doing this, that is the same idiocy that will lead us to nuclear or chemical warfare which reduces us back to a pre-industrialized society. Only this time we won't have readily available hydrocarbons we can use to dig ourselves out of it again. We'll be stuck burning wood to make coal.
Interestingly in the UK the industrial revolution actually started with water power, not steam engines. It just so happens that the UK, especially England is actually fairly bad for hydropower potential (too flat).
We'll never know the counterfactual, but I think if coal didn't exist what you would have seen is an increased focus on hydropower instead. That would have meant industrialisation would have been slower and distributed completely differently geographically, but would still have happened in my opinion
Aside from just plain bad luck, the things you list don't happen in isolation. Humans have fought bloody wars over land for as long as we've stood upright. Do you think we'll all neatly organize into the remaining habitable land?
I agree climate change could cause wars but I don't agree with the narrative that it will somehow cause 'worse' wars because... worse than what? We've managed to have terrible wars than wipe out whole peoples, and great power competition that almost destroyed civilisation in the 1960s without any climate change required. It's hard to see how things can really get much worse on that front
The great filter isn't about extinction necessarily, but about not being able to transcend to a space-faring species. I don't think our ignorance of climate change will extinct us, but I do think the way we handle climate change is a symptom of the short-sightedness and willful ignorance that ensures we won't make it past Type I on the Kardashev scale.
I see your point, but to qualify for the great filter it has to prevent not only us, but most civilizations from continuing as technological civilizations.
I don't see it. Maybe at worst it's a temporary setback, not a permanent one.
it's both true and misleading in what conclusions people might take from it
e.g. if you want the true climate damage done by a country you would have to look at all the damage done by producing all the goods consumed there. This isn't very practical doable. But if you e.g. mass import Chinese goods you can't only blame China for the climate damage done in context of producing those goods (but neither can you take away all the fault from them, they still decide how to produce the goods in the end and we (west) motivate them to do so badly).
This also applies to Oil producing countries etc.
And some non amicable countries are so because they see no way to handle their economical situation if they tried to change it. But if countries where to work better together they might find a way forward. And sometimes innovation can fix that by itself. E.g. solar cells have gotten absurdly good to a point where sometimes they just out compete non-renewables on purely economical benefits. That is, if your government doesn't do regulations to actively prevent this (weather it's by hindering solar or by hugely subventionieren oil/coal/gas).
So the situation is both better and worse then the statistics above make it look. Better as you could move production away from non amicable countries and boycott their products and "convince" some of them by giving them a economical feasible means to improve. Worse because we know this won't happen and it means its not just "their fault" but quite often indirectly partially our fault, too.
Also lets be realistic thanks to corruption, short term thinking(e.g. next election) and sometimes plain stupidity many countries which try to get away from oil/coal/gas have done such horrible bad decisions that they not only completely fucked avoiding climate change but also have put their economy in a thought spot. When then is taken out of context and used by people like Trump as an example why fighting climate change is supposedly a scam.
> finally notice how we're destroying the planet and ourselves,
this might sound very pessimistic
but the world has noticed _very long ago_
the first calculations about the greenhouse effect where in 1896!
in the 50th/60th it increasingly more clear that there might be a huge problem
in the 70th it became clear that there might not just be a huge problem but most likely is one, even if there wasn't yet scientific consensus on it
in the 80th scientific consensus was formed that there is human accelerated climate change and that it's a huge problem
since then outside of a very small fraction (depending on year, but in general <10% of scientist) the question wasn't if it is happening or if it is quite bad, but how "exactly" it will play out and how bad exactly it will get with options ranging from quite bad, over parts of earth becomes inhabitable for human where currently up to ~1000000000 people lives, to risk of human extinction in the long run (indirectly by causing a mass extinction event from a combination of climate change being to fast in combination with other environmental damages done by humans). Sure there have been other effect overlying climate change and people have tried to use them to explain climate change away, but consistently fail, sadly only from a scientific POV and not from a convincing people they don't have to worry POV.
And now in 2025 we have on of the most powerful nations of the world deciding that climate change is a scam, not based on data or analysis but based on it benefiting companies owned by some of their most influential citizens. And started systematically removing access to all public data they had previously gathered about climate change basically trying to rewrite history. And that at a time where large part of the US are currently being severely affected by long term environmental abuse. And yes abusing the environment isn't the same as climate change, but we could take a hint that if something has pretty bad effect on a local scale that then something similar done globally will probably have pretty bad effect globally.
It's also not like we don't know that currently _already_ whole nations (e.g. Philippines) are in the process of sinking. Or the amount and level of extrema weather conditions has constantly increased. Or that heat related death are constantly increasing. Or that there are gigantic dead areas in the oceans (through likely not caused by climate change, but this other kind of environmental catastrophes overlap with it putting even more strain on nature).
And still overall the trend of the last few years is to do less about it, not more. Because it is seen as luxury counties can't afford in a very strained world economy.
And people very commonly speak about it's anyway to late why bother, when we are speaking about a gradual effect not a binary yes/no switch.
I honestly don't have optimism about it anymore, there is no indication for me to believe thinks will get better until it's way way to late to prevent a catastrophe.
And don't get me wrong, humanity will (probably) survive, we are quite good at that. And there most likely will be a future where children can have a nice happy live. But before that for reasons not limited to climate change things probably will go to shit for a few decades, maybe even a century. But don't worry as long as people still try to make things better, things will get better again, it just might take some time.
But if I where living close by the coast or close to the equator, or in a area which already has common extrema weather, I would make sure my children grow up somewhere else.
bah that was such a downer to write, but it is my take on the topic anyway
This hyperbole isn’t helpful. The world won’t be destroyed. (If you promise annihilation and are visited simply by devastation, it reduces credibility in an unnecessary way.)
I'm curious why this conversation tat is more or less a George Carlin bit from decades ago plays out over and over on social media. I bet that you knew exactly what they meant when they talked about the world being destroyed.
It wasn't a scenario where the Earth is literally annihilated by a black hole, or a super nova, or a meteor or a GMB, it was a scenario where the world is functionally ruined for human life as we know it in a time-scale far shorter than we can muster up the resources to stop or even mitigate it.
So like, what's going on here? Is your response a subconscious coping strategy to change the topic to something more comfortable than one of impending doom for the human species and civilization as we know it?
> it was a scenario where the world is functionally ruined for human life as we know it
Sure. The AMOC collapsing doesn’t do that. It makes life shit for a lot of people. But it doesn’t make the Earth uninhabitable for humans or technological civilization.
“Destroy the earth” is hyperbole. Cause mass starvation, associated wars and refugee crises, and mass extinctions with renewed vigor are not.
It’s like being invited to a party in someone’s house. One person starts smoking in the house. Sure, one person is no big deal. Then another person lights up because someone else did, and hey, they don’t have to live there tomorrow. Before you know it, 5–10% of people are smoking and making it stink for everyone, but it’s fine. They’ll stop eventually, and it’s not like you have to live there.
Unless someone stands up and says "no smoking in the house" ... people are going to keep smoking.
> Unless someone stands up and says "no smoking in the house" ... people are going to keep smoking
Sure. But if if someone says the house will burn down when the first person lights up, and they’re ignored, and it doesn’t, that doesn’t help. Most importantly because it isn’t true.
We live in the atomic age. The idea that calamity could befall one part of the world and the others will be fine just isn't possible.
Here's a plausible scenario -- European countries decide that they will just power through the cold Frostpunk style by burning massive amounts of hydrocarbons and some other societies in regions suffering from the heat due to climate change decide that this course of action is unacceptable and war breaks out.
The theme of climate change is feedback loops and one way checkpoints. The increasing rates of change from these feedback loops and how societies respond may doom the plant and life as we know it.
As you said, we’ve had plausible scenarios for actually destroying industrial civilisation since the middle of the Cold War. We dealt with it by having the population ignore it while a few nuclear states manage the risks. That doesn’t work for climate change.
right everyone will be hah we were not all killed, only lots of people, but some survived! You lose! Glad we didn't listen to you, most of my family were killed except for me and my niece, but you said me and my niece would be killed too! You know absolutely nothing!!
This doesn't help the discussion, won't change anybody's mind (which you should desperately want in this topic) and just paint you as an outcast too annoying to listen to or debate with.
This seems more like informal and basically reasonable talk, rather than hyperbole.
The purpose of Earth, from the point of view of most humans, is to act as a comfortable host of humans. We are destroying the Earth by making it no longer fit for that purpose. I don’t think anybody reads “destroy Earth” and interprets it as something more like, “get rid of the iron ball as well.”
Unless you are one of those deep-sea vent dwelling creatures, we’re risking changes to the planet that will affect your life eventually.
> we’re risking changes to the planet that will affect your life
Most people should already be seeing changes to their life in a statistically significant way.
But the AMOC collapsing doesn’t mean plenty of the Earth isn’t comfortable for humans. Global temperatures peaking in their pessimistic state still leaves, for better or for worse, most of the industrialized world viable. Poorer. Less comfortable. But viable nonetheless.
This is important because committing to long-term projects requires avoiding nihilism and complacency. Pitching everything as disaster tips into the former.
> most of the industrialized world viable. Poorer. Less comfortable.
If we're trying to use precise language, the economic modelling [0] actually suggests they will be wealthier and more comfortable than they are now. Just probably not as wealthy and comfortable as they could be under other hypotheticals.
To further clarify, this is the research (from August 2025) which is cited in the CNN story which is the basis of the Dagens AI copypasta. "Shutdown of northern Atlantic overturning after 2100 following deep mixing collapse in CMIP6 projections".
The paper I cite is for sea level rise. IPCC models from 1990 and 2011 have made forecasts on sea level rise. When we compare those to what actually happened up to 2025, we see that we are slightly worse right now than their highest sea level prediction that was made.
We're worse than their worst case scenario, so their models were significantly too optimistic.
In the same paper, they also note that for temperature, the models have been accurate.
> When we compare those to what actually happened up to 2025, we see that we are slightly worse right now than their highest sea level prediction that was made.
No. The paper does not show that. Figure 3 shows that recent sea level rise, accounting for measurement uncertainty, is in line with projections of any of the models (around 2mm per year). In any case, they call out explicitly that the recent data is of insufficient duration to make the comparison you’re trying to make.
Temperature data in figure one is more or less exactly in the uncertainty window of the models (not shocking, considering that they’re calibrated to reproduce recent data).
I'm sorry, but I double checked and I do think you have it wrong. Figure 3 is for "sea level rise _rate_", and that one is indeed high but not significantly so.
Quoting "The satellite-based linear trend 1993–2011 is 3.2±
0.5 mm yr−1
, which is 60% faster than the best IPCC estimate
of 2.0 mm yr−1
for the same interval"
But, as the authors point out, the worst case forecasts that were within-data, are so for the wrong reasons. Quote "The model(s) defining the upper 95-percentile might
not get the right answer for the right reasons, but possibly by
overestimating past temperature rise."
My previous comment is regarding Figure 2, i.e. "Sea Level". I would invite you to read the whole paper. It is only 3 pages and written without jargon.
Sea level rise rate is what matters (we cannot measure “sea level” absolutely, and therefore must work in terms of relative rates of change). The authors explicitly tell you that the data is not sufficient to conclude what they’re alluding:
> this period is too short to determine meaningful changes in the rate of rise
Now, you note that the authors openly acknowledge that the rate of rise is measured in low-single-digit units of millimeters per year. So, why is the y-axis of Figure 2 measured in centimeters?
Hint: it’s because every point on that plot is a wild extrapolation.
This paper is not good, btw. The fact that it’s “only three pages” should be a blinking red sign telling you that it is not serious. Just read the more recent IPCC reports, because they deal with the question of updates from prior reports.
No you can't. That study is comparing past estimates of the past and present to the lived in past and present not past estimates of the future to current estimates of the future.
Okay, but why then do the IPCC reports of the past present vastly different historical data than the present ones? History cannot change, but people can "reinterpret" it for political purposes.
Humans didn't exist since the beginning of time, and we only started to properly record temperatures in the last few centuries. That means we have to determine historical data through the effects it had on our planet. The methods to find this historical data from the effects keep changing and evolving, so it makes complete sense to me that historical data has changed throughout the reports.
Unfortunately you didn't specify where one can find this "vastly different historical data", so I can't get more specific than this.
AFAIK the IPCC are generally quite conservative on these matters. Newer research shows possible collapse occurring much sooner (Sometime between 2025-2095).
They seem to be giving the word unlikely a range from 0-33%. I'm not sure how to reason about that 0% given that they also used the phrase "not impossible."
Ok, it's a national security risk. Now what? What are steps 2 and 3 in combating this existential risk? I see only 1 viable option: Start digging now and move the entire population underground.
> Unfortunately people are too short-sighted and selfish so it's unlikely taxes will be raised.
I'm curious how the long-sighted and altruistic are going to restore the weakening currents to their best strength. Could you start with how much voluntary tax you're going to contribute, what sort of tax scheme you'd recommend for the rest and how these contributions will affect the currents?
Preferably, a step by step explanation, like an llm-R model would produce.
> going to restore the weakening currents to their best strength
Wouldn’t the more likely scenario be working out how the country will weather (pun intended) the huge change rather than trying to reverse the inevitable?
Either way I imagine step one there is research. Which costs money. “Don’t spend a penny until an incredibly detailed step by step plan arrives from nowhere” doesn’t strike me as a plan for success.
> Either way I imagine step one there is research. Which costs money.
To quote myself, the important part here is "how much voluntary tax you're going to contribute" and "what sort of tax scheme you'd recommend for the rest"
On the flip side Quick, the sky is falling, tax everybody for "research" is going to fly like a lead balloon.
Don't fret at the messenger, it's politics 101...
> “Don’t spend a penny until an incredibly detailed step by step plan arrives from nowhere”
"Don’t spend a penny" and "don't propose a tax increase by an unspecified amount and undefined distribution of tax load" are two vastly different statements, I did not author the first one of these.
In other words, solving the problem does not start with calls for raising taxes, nor are people "selfish" for rejecting such calls.
I wish other countries would take it this seriously.
Somewhat ironically, Iceland might be the country best suited by nature to handle the cold that would descend upon the Nordics if the gulf stream collapsed. At least they have plenty of volcanic heat they can use. My home country Sweden is not so lucky. Sure it's located a fair bit further south, but it's not clear that'll be enough to escape the cold. Yet the Swedish government seems wholly oblivious. Even the opposition is silent on this issue.
Kudos to the Icelandic! I wish you well in this endeavour!
Feel like I should mention the other end of this problem too: if the gulf stream stops heating the Nordics, it also stops bringing cold water from the Arctic to the gulf of Mexico. The heat waves will be absolutely epic. The Caribbeans, Florida and Mexico ought to be more worried too. In my armchair opinion, this will go way beyond nice beach days.
See [amocscenarios.org](https://amocscenarios.org/) for various modeled scenarios on what the future could look like with a collapsed AMOC.
Sweden, Finland, Norway would not be hit too badly. Summers will still be warmer, but shorter. Winters longer but about as cold.
The worst effects will be for the UK and specifically Scotland. Their climate wil change to look more like Finlands or Swedens. I.e. proper winters with pretty deep cold spells. This will be a complete disaster as buildings and general infrastrucure will not be able to handle it. There'll be massive issues from frost heave, buildings that are not insulated enough, heating systems specced too small to properly heat houses and so forth.
An AMOC collapse will be very bad, but not quite the Day Afer Tomorrow as some think it would be.
The main factor reducing gulf stream is increase of fresh water runoff into Arctic ocean. So maybe we should invest into building Sibaral Canal diverting some of the water of northern rivers towards Aral sea, and by that saving both Nordic and Central Asian countries.
Beyond Florida, the entire east coast of the US will become not just drastically warmer if the AMOC collapses, but will experience dramatic local sea level rise (warm water is more voluminous than cold water). Think Boston with the climate of modern-day Alabama.
Both the recent Acapulco and Jamaica hurricanes had non-normal intensification as they hit the warn coastal waters. I wonder how devastating this is going to be to Florida and the Atlantic states. Every time there is a hurricane it hits the Cat 5 physical limit.
Fort Lauderdale and Miami are underwater several times a year as is. The seawall at Daytona is gone.
It is going to be destabilizing. As long as it doesn't affect the corn growing in Iowa.
Europe will be thrown into chaos if the AMOC actually fully collapses. Minimum temperatures in the north and west dropping twenty degrees celcius will wreak havoc on harvests, put pressure on trade relations, and will probably drain several large cities. No doubt one asshole biding their time will take the chance to start a war in Europe amidst the chaos.
From what I've read, a full collapse is unlikely, though. Plus, preventing this from happening requires a concentrated worldwide effort, which seems unlikely with the leader of the leading greenhouse gas emission source per capita having gone on record saying climate change is a Chinese conspiracy.
At this point, I think a lot of governments are just hoping the best case scenario is right, because there's hardly anything we can do if the AMOC does indeed start collapsing fully, other than southbound mass emigration.
We're also well set up where a majority of the population is in just one city, meaning it would be pretty easy to do some centralized building. Swedish population is far more spread out than Iceland is
It is nice to see a country take it seriously of course. But, at some level I don’t love this type phrasing that has become generally accepted—it is a big deal, so we declare it a national security risk.
Everything is a national security risk when we look generally enough. Climate, education, economics, cultural diversity: failing in any of these fields makes the country weaker in some abstract way and that will impact national security down the road. “This impacts the general welfare and quality of life of the people” should be the highest category of urgent problem that needs to be fixed. A healthy, happy, productive populace can solve national security as a side effect.
> A healthy, happy, productive populace can solve national security as a side effect.
I think many “healthy, happy, productive” societies that have been invaded by less happy and productive neighbors throughout all of recorded history would beg to disagree.
IMO it would take some real study to come to a conclusion there. My opinion is mostly borrowed from the ACOUP guy: societies that are relatively developed in comparison to their neighbors rack up a lot of W’s. This is just unsurprising and not narratively dramatic so the opposite gets over-emphasized.
Coincidentally at the moment the Canadian government has begun yet again pushing the idea of a new oil pipeline to serve asian markets with the justification being boosting the economy.
Remains depressing that somehow no one thinks for a second of the economic instability that will be induced by the climate change that that oil pipeline would contribute to...
I think in that article Gates does quite a disservice to the climate change dialogue because he does not even entertain the possibility that the most severe of the effects of climate change is going to be massive population migration due to extreme weather and agricultural failures. His comment that climate change is not going to lead to civilization collapse fails to elaborate for whom.
> ... most severe of the effects of climate change is going to be massive population migration due to extreme weather and agricultural failures
Perhaps it's not worth mentioning that because there are existing well-tested methods of stopping population migration that are available to be deployed once supported by public opinion. Specifically, fences, warships, and machine guns.
Given recent results of democratic elections across most western world, decency seems to be overrated. Maybe you were voting against such change, but look where we are. Its not just US or just parts of Europe.
I don't have a solution, but to change people one has to start where masses are and how they thing and especially how they feel. Facts seem to be overrated too.
My answer was in relation to the casualness of the dude affirming that murdering unarmed refugees at borders is anything but "the end of civilization", I was not trying to debate the likelihood of it happening.
My (paranoid) unpopular take: the AI boom we’re currently experiencing is a concerted effort by the billionaires to maintain operational agency (the ability to think and do at a massive scale) once society begins to collapse due to climate change.
~~ edit ~~
Thank you for the sane responses. I’m reconsidering how much I believe this.
This is also my reasoning for why I think AI alignment is not going to be a problem for humanity any time soon.
By the time AI will be capable of maintaining the whole supply chain required to keep itself running sufficient time will have passed so we can come up with something viable.
I think Billionaire alignment is a much larger problem than AI alignment. To use Bostrom's language, it's not full-on owl domestication, but sparrows with owl-like powers that we need to worry about.
Respectfully disagree. An AI with full access to robots could do everything on its own that it would need to "survive" and grow. I argue that humans are actually in the way of that.
The highlighted parts are a kind of TL;DR, but in the context here actually reading it - it is not much - is actually required to get anything out of it for the arguments used here.
Anything technological is orders of magnitude more complex.
Pointing to any single part really makes no sense, the point is the complexity and interconnectedness of everything.
Some AI doing everything is harder than the East Bloc countries attempting to use central planning for the whole economy. Their economy was much more simple than what such a mighty AI would require for itself and its robot minions. And that's just the organization.
I did like "Gaia" in Horizon Zero Dawn (game) because it made a great story though. This would be pretty much exactly the kind of AI fantasized about here.
Douglas Adams hints at hidden complexity towards the end of HHGTTG, talking about the collapse of Golgafrincham's society.
You overlook just one single tiny thing and it escalates to failure from there. Biological systems don't have that problem, they are self-assembling no matter how you slice and dice them. You may just end up with a very difference eco-system, but as long as the environment is not completely outside the useful range it will grow and reorganize. human-made engineered things on the other hand will just fail and that's it, they will not rise on their own from nothing. Human-made systems are much much more fragile than biological ones (even if you can't guarantee the kind of biological system you will get after rounds of growth and adaptations).
> Pointing to any single part really makes no sense, the point is the complexity and interconnectedness of everything
Doesn’t it though?
The bauxite mine owners in Pincarra could purchase hypothetical robotic mining & smelting equipment. The mill owners in Downey, the cocoa leaf processor in New Jersey, the syrup factory in Atlanta, and others could purchase similar equipment. Maybe they all just buy humanoid robots and surveil their works for awhile to train the robots and replace the workers.
If all of those events happen, Coca Cola supply chain has been automated. Also, since e.g. the aluminum mill probably handles more orders beyond just coke cans, other supply chains for other products will now be that much more automated. Thereby the same mechanism that built these deep supply chains will (I bet) also automate them.
> Biological systems don't have that problem, they are self-assembling no matter how you slice and dice them.
If the machines used to implement manufacturing processes are also built in an automated way, the system is effectively self-healing as you describe for biological systems.
> did like "Gaia" in Horizon Zero Dawn (game) because it made a great story though. This would be pretty much exactly the kind of AI fantasized about here.
Perhaps the centralized AI “Gaia” becomes an orchestrator in this scheme, rather than the sole intelligence in all of manufacturing? Not too familiar with this franchise to make a more direct comparison, but my larger point is that the complexity of the system doesn’t need to be focused on one single greenfield entity.
Man made stuff does not self-repair and self-replicate.
So, no. You are not thinking far enough, only the next step. But it is a complex vast network, and every single thing in it except the humans has that man-made item deficiency of decay without renewal.
You miss even repairs of the tiniest item - which in turn requires repairing he repairers, everything eventually stops.
Humans have to intervene fixing unforeseen problems all the time! It is humans that hold all those systems together.
Even if you had AGI, human brains are far from perfect too so that would not change anything in the end, we have biology to the rescue (of us in general, not necessarily the individual ofc) when we miss stuff.
Let us assume, at some point in the near future, it is possible to build a humanoid robot that is able to operate human-run machines and mimic human labor:
> Man made stuff does not self-repair and self-replicate.
If robots can repair a man-made object or build an entirely new one, the object is effectively self-repairing and self-replicating for the purposes of a larger goal to automate manufacturing.
> You miss even repairs of the tiniest item - which in turn requires repairing he repairers, everything eventually stops
So… don’t? Surely the robots can be tasked to perform proactive inspections and maintenance of their machines and “coworkers” too.
> But it is a complex vast network
…that already exists, and doesn’t even need to be reimagined in our scenario. If one day our hypothetical robots become available, each individual factory owner could independently decide the next day to purchase them. If all of the factories in the “supply chain graph” for a particular product do this, the complex decentralized system they represent doesn’t require human labor to run. It doesn’t even need to happen all at once. By this mechanism I propose the supply chain could rapidly organically automate itself.
Yeah? How many robots? What kind of robots? What would the AI need to survive? Are the robots able to produce more robots? How are the robots powered? Where will they get energy from?
Sure it's easy to just throw that out there in one sentence, but once you actually dig into it, it turns out to be a lot more complicated than you thought at first. It's not just a matter of "AI" + "Robots" = "self-sustaining". The details matter.
This makes no sense. It takes a complex industrial society to keep that tech going. The supply chain to make GPUs would not survive even a modest disruption in the world economy. It's probably the most fragile thing we currently manufacture.
If you're an AI company and you believe your own hype (like Musk seems to), you'll probably believe that you can automate everything from digging minerals out of the ground all of the way up to making the semiconductors in the robots that dig the minerals.
As you may infer from my use of the word "hype", I do not think we are close to such generality at a high enough quality level to actually do this.
Presumes that the surviving humans will not actively disrupt/destroy these automated industries. Which seems highly likely as they will want to scavenge them for anything of value or repurpose them for their own means.
There's lots of implicit assumptions or this would be a book, but remember that Musk has a rocket and wants to colonise Mars, and that Mars is so bad that it is currently 100% populated by robots.
For the billionaires without rockets, there's also a whole bunch of deserts conveniently filled with lots of silicon.
(Or as Mac(Format|World|User) put it sometime in the 90s when they were considering who might bail out Apple and suggested one of the middle east oil barrons, a "silly con").
His lifetime, I agree unlikely, but also I think that will be short: he's pissed off too many other powerful people and will get the western equivalent of Russian oligarchs "falling out of a window".
The economics he talks about are all nonsense. No bank will lend someone $200k for the ticket to go to Mars on the offchance they might be a successful pizza restaraunteur.
But like I said, if you're (e.g.) him and you buy your own hype…
(His grandkids' lifetimes are another question entirely. Things are changing too fast).
While I believe we’re in a slow takeoff, I believe we are in a takeoff. The important question to my mind is whether AGI comes before systemic societal collapse due to climate change. I think it does, and my tin foil hat grows a wider brim with each passing day. I hope I’m wrong!
This is also why I'm skeptical of claims that it would be impossible (or nearly so) for governments to meaningfully regulate AI R&D/deployment (regardless of whether or not they should). The "you can't regulate math" arguments. Yeah, you can't regulate math, but using the math depends on some of the most complex technologies humanity has produced, with key components handled by only one or a few companies in only a handful of countries (US, China, Taiwan, South Korea, Netherlands, maybe Japan?). US-China cooperation could probably achieve any level of regulation they want up to and including "shut it all down now." Likely? Of course not. But also not impossible if the US and China both felt sufficiently threatened by AI.
The only thing that IMO would be really hard to regulate would be the distribution of open-weight models existing at the time regulations come into effect, although I imagine even that would be substantially curtailed by severe enough penalties for doing so.
This is the best argument I’ve heard against it, so thanks.
My anxiety entirely orbits around the scale of AI compute we’ve reached and the sentiment that there is drastic room for improvement, the rapidly advancing state of the art in robotics, and the massive potential for disruption of middle/lower class stake in society. Not to mention the general sentiment that the economy is more important than people’s well being in 99.9% of scenarios.
Who's to say it has to keep moving forward? The companies are buying up massive amounts of GPUs in this AI race, a move that's widely questioned because next year's GPUs might render the current ones outdated[0], so there will probably be plenty of GPUs to go around if the CEO demands it (prior to collapse). Operating datacenters would probably be out of the question with a collapsed society as the power grid might be unreliable, global networks might be down and securing many datacenters would probably be difficult, but there's at least one public record of a billionaire building his own underground bunker with off-grid power generation and enough room to have his own little datacenter inside[1]. "Ordinary" people will acquire 32GB GPUs or Mac Studios for local open-source LLM inference, so it seems likely billionaires would just do the next step up for their bunker and use their company's proprietary weights on decommissioned compute clusters.
If there's an evil plot, it's goal must surely be to accelerate environmental degradation.
First we had the blockchain, now AI to consume enormous amounts of resources and distract us from what we should be investing in to make the environment healthier.
I guess it's whoever was in that Doug Rushkoff meeting with the whole idea we'll have security forces with those exploding dog collars to keep them in line and to keep revolutionary forces from killing us and taking our food supply!
it's very easy to achieve great things without coordination if you can just do what's best for yourself and help your peers achieve their collective goals.
but they do meet at davos every now and again, without the democratic shackles.
FWIW I do agree with the operational agency at scale bit
and I’m always fascinated by these conspiracy theories, was genuinely hoping to get one (but also happy to see you’re challenging your own position). the idea of people coordinating on these things is very funny to me
I think like all tech people will use it for good and bad. those in power have more power etc etc I think it tends to boil down to whether you believe people are, overall, good or bad. over time, that’s what you’ll get with use of tech
It’s worth looking at this polar map to get a visual sense of the ramifications of this happening:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_Circle#/media/File:Arct...
Notice the red line, marking where the average temperature of the warmest month is below 10°C. Notice how low it is on the west side of the Atlantic, in Nunavut and Labrador. It’s between 50° and 60° north.
Now imagine that line at those latitudes in Europe. You’d have Labrador-like conditions in the UK, a drastic situation indeed. Reykjavik would suddenly resemble Iqaluit.
That’s an overly optimistic way to look at it. The geological record shows there were glaciers in parts of France and Germany the last time th current shut down. (When it shut down due to CO2 induced global warming.)
Also, the temperature change was rapid: Somewhere between 50-100 years. If we’re in the same cycle, we’re more than a decade in already.
That was during an ice age, the global temperature was way lower in general. It wasn't caused by just the absence of the gulf stream
[flagged]
One is a part of the other. What an unsympathetic comment. While its imprecise, AMOC and Gulf stream has been mixed up for decades in colloquial discussion about this issue. You're not adding anything here.
[flagged]
This isn't saying much. There are glaciers in parts of France and Germany now.
There are glaciers as far south as Slovenia. Spitting distance to the mediterranean.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skuta_Glacier
Granted it’s not a very big glacier, but it’s there :D
Though not for long https://slovenia.si/this-is-slovenia/remnants-of-slovenias-g... :( (the other Slovenian glacier is almost gone as well)
> Spitting distance to the mediterranean.
People tend to underestimate how cold it gets in the interior of countries generally seen as the "sunny Mediterranean" - from Croatia, Montenegro, Albania and even Greece.
And Spain. Bring these "sunny Spain lovers" to North/Inner Spain in Winter. Watch them running away as if it were some kind of weird disease.
Also, spotting the typical tourist climbing the Picos de Europa range in sandals is not weird. What's weird if he/she makes it alive... or without frozen fingers or toes.
We even have a snowy mouintain outside Tehran.
There are glaciers on Kilimanjaro or South American mountains ie in Ecuador which are very close to equator, its just a question of altitude and given microclimate.
[flagged]
Shutdown of northern Atlantic overturning after 2100 following deep mixing collapse in CMIP6 projections - 28 August 2025 - https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/adfa3b
High-resolution ‘fingerprint’ images reveal a weakening Atlantic Ocean circulation (AMOC) - 12 Oct 2025 - https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2025/10/high-...
Physics-Based Indicators for the Onset of an AMOC Collapse Under Climate Change - 24 August 2025 -https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2025JC02...
[flagged]
Do you know the difference between a prophesy and an empirical observation? If you can’t distinguish between those basic things, why do you feel comfortable snarking so confidently?
[flagged]
Models based on observations that are adjusted as new observations come in. You know… science. Versus whatever you’re suggesting.
Link disambiguation: <https://edition.cnn.com/2025/11/15/climate/iceland-warming-c...>
(Cited source by dagens.com, which is / may be AI-generated to boot.)
All the news seems to be copy pasted and machine translated around. I think this is the original English language source: https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/cop/iceland-sees-secu...
Dang's since updated the story link, see: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46090018>.
Would current collapse make more than just Northern Europe colder? Or maybe they would be warmer?
They seem to suggest only certain northern countries would be affected because warm water stops flowing from the south.
So the southern waters would stay hotter right? Or what about across the Atlantic where the currents do the opposite (and make the winters so cold). Would Boston and New York get more temperate?
North of the Alps temperature would drop considerably. South of the Alps, probably fine due to the thermal mass of the mediterranean sea. However, for the whole Europe you would see a massive drop in rainfall, since basically all the humidity comes from the Atlantic's warm air that carries a lot of it.
Additionally, Carribeans, Mexico and South of the US would also be fucked since the energy wouldn't disperse and all the heat and humidity would stay there. Hurricanes would be much more violent, with way more rain, and likely more frequent.
Labrador current might become weaker though, but it is not a given. Currently, the waters from the gulf stream cool down and sink to the bottom of the ocean, so they don't displace the artic waters and hence are not likely the cause of how cold north eastern US is.
So what countries will be the beneficiaries of this process?
None? It is not certain any country will benefit. Countries built their infrastructure and population centers according to the weather of the location. If the weather changes probably every country will have to adjust.
If you are asking which area will benefit from climate change I would say Siberia as it will become increasingly important due to the northern corridor remaining ice free and because a lot of people will be displaced by weather/sea level. And that place is empty. Additionally, it has nice farming soil which right now is not used since there are easier places to farm but in a warming world this could change
I'm glad they took this seriously and considered it important. Maybe the world will finally notice how we're destroying the planet and ourselves, and whether anyone thinks about their children and grandchildren who may live in a world destroyed by generations.
Convincing the world seem the hard part. 43% of the forcing greenhouse grasses are currently coming from non amicable regimes. 53% if you include USA, but there's a chance administration is going to change. Beyond declaring what are the small countries options?
Build economies around carbon removal, and investing in climate interventions like sunlight reflection to buy time.
The same as everyone else’s options.
Adapt.
There’s no stopping this train.
climate change isn't an one/off effect but gradual
every bit of improvement is a higher chance to avoid some of the most catastrophic outcomes (where the unlikely but possible worst outcome being a mass extinction chain reaction which humanity will find very very hard to survive in a functioning manner/without losing their future)
so still worth fighting for any improvement even if we can't avoid a catastrophe anymore, as there is a huge margin between what we still can archive, and what we might end up with if we stop fighting and are quite unlucky
I agree, it's worth doing everything we can.
But it's also clear, it won't be enough. Emissions are not only still increasing, they likely won't stop increasing in my lifetime (in the next 50 years.)
We must adapt. The earth is going to get a lot warmer, and wetter in some parts, and drier in others, and sea levels will likely keep slowly rising for many centuries to come, if not millennia.
Even though we, collectively, are driving said train. As a believer in the great filter theory[1] it's a shame given how far we've apparently come, only to be brought low by our desires, our inability to believe we could screw ourselves this royally, and our collective lack of give-a-shit to fix it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter
I believe in climate change but in terms of a great filter candidate it doesn't seem significant - even in a worst case scenario with a lot of warming there will be large parts of the planet that are perfectly habitable.
On the other hand: nuclear war, genetic engineering, or just plain bad luck (carrington event, asteroid impact) seem much more likely to actually wipe out modern society
I think it's most likely a symptom, not an end result of our stupidity. It's the short-sightedness that lets us keep doing this, that is the same idiocy that will lead us to nuclear or chemical warfare which reduces us back to a pre-industrialized society. Only this time we won't have readily available hydrocarbons we can use to dig ourselves out of it again. We'll be stuck burning wood to make coal.
Interestingly in the UK the industrial revolution actually started with water power, not steam engines. It just so happens that the UK, especially England is actually fairly bad for hydropower potential (too flat).
We'll never know the counterfactual, but I think if coal didn't exist what you would have seen is an increased focus on hydropower instead. That would have meant industrialisation would have been slower and distributed completely differently geographically, but would still have happened in my opinion
Aside from just plain bad luck, the things you list don't happen in isolation. Humans have fought bloody wars over land for as long as we've stood upright. Do you think we'll all neatly organize into the remaining habitable land?
I agree climate change could cause wars but I don't agree with the narrative that it will somehow cause 'worse' wars because... worse than what? We've managed to have terrible wars than wipe out whole peoples, and great power competition that almost destroyed civilisation in the 1960s without any climate change required. It's hard to see how things can really get much worse on that front
You were downvoted for some reason I can't fathom, but I agree with you.
It's not an extinction level event (not for humans anyway, it may well be for many other species.) It's not a candidate for the great filter.
There will be migration, but over centuries, not a sudden exodus. There may be wars, but what's new.
The great filter isn't about extinction necessarily, but about not being able to transcend to a space-faring species. I don't think our ignorance of climate change will extinct us, but I do think the way we handle climate change is a symptom of the short-sightedness and willful ignorance that ensures we won't make it past Type I on the Kardashev scale.
I see your point, but to qualify for the great filter it has to prevent not only us, but most civilizations from continuing as technological civilizations.
I don't see it. Maybe at worst it's a temporary setback, not a permanent one.
it's both true and misleading in what conclusions people might take from it
e.g. if you want the true climate damage done by a country you would have to look at all the damage done by producing all the goods consumed there. This isn't very practical doable. But if you e.g. mass import Chinese goods you can't only blame China for the climate damage done in context of producing those goods (but neither can you take away all the fault from them, they still decide how to produce the goods in the end and we (west) motivate them to do so badly).
This also applies to Oil producing countries etc.
And some non amicable countries are so because they see no way to handle their economical situation if they tried to change it. But if countries where to work better together they might find a way forward. And sometimes innovation can fix that by itself. E.g. solar cells have gotten absurdly good to a point where sometimes they just out compete non-renewables on purely economical benefits. That is, if your government doesn't do regulations to actively prevent this (weather it's by hindering solar or by hugely subventionieren oil/coal/gas).
So the situation is both better and worse then the statistics above make it look. Better as you could move production away from non amicable countries and boycott their products and "convince" some of them by giving them a economical feasible means to improve. Worse because we know this won't happen and it means its not just "their fault" but quite often indirectly partially our fault, too.
Also lets be realistic thanks to corruption, short term thinking(e.g. next election) and sometimes plain stupidity many countries which try to get away from oil/coal/gas have done such horrible bad decisions that they not only completely fucked avoiding climate change but also have put their economy in a thought spot. When then is taken out of context and used by people like Trump as an example why fighting climate change is supposedly a scam.
[dead]
> took this seriously
That assumes Iceland consider "National Security Risk" as politically charged as it is in other major countries.
> finally notice how we're destroying the planet and ourselves,
this might sound very pessimistic
but the world has noticed _very long ago_
the first calculations about the greenhouse effect where in 1896!
in the 50th/60th it increasingly more clear that there might be a huge problem
in the 70th it became clear that there might not just be a huge problem but most likely is one, even if there wasn't yet scientific consensus on it
in the 80th scientific consensus was formed that there is human accelerated climate change and that it's a huge problem
since then outside of a very small fraction (depending on year, but in general <10% of scientist) the question wasn't if it is happening or if it is quite bad, but how "exactly" it will play out and how bad exactly it will get with options ranging from quite bad, over parts of earth becomes inhabitable for human where currently up to ~1000000000 people lives, to risk of human extinction in the long run (indirectly by causing a mass extinction event from a combination of climate change being to fast in combination with other environmental damages done by humans). Sure there have been other effect overlying climate change and people have tried to use them to explain climate change away, but consistently fail, sadly only from a scientific POV and not from a convincing people they don't have to worry POV.
And now in 2025 we have on of the most powerful nations of the world deciding that climate change is a scam, not based on data or analysis but based on it benefiting companies owned by some of their most influential citizens. And started systematically removing access to all public data they had previously gathered about climate change basically trying to rewrite history. And that at a time where large part of the US are currently being severely affected by long term environmental abuse. And yes abusing the environment isn't the same as climate change, but we could take a hint that if something has pretty bad effect on a local scale that then something similar done globally will probably have pretty bad effect globally.
It's also not like we don't know that currently _already_ whole nations (e.g. Philippines) are in the process of sinking. Or the amount and level of extrema weather conditions has constantly increased. Or that heat related death are constantly increasing. Or that there are gigantic dead areas in the oceans (through likely not caused by climate change, but this other kind of environmental catastrophes overlap with it putting even more strain on nature).
And still overall the trend of the last few years is to do less about it, not more. Because it is seen as luxury counties can't afford in a very strained world economy.
And people very commonly speak about it's anyway to late why bother, when we are speaking about a gradual effect not a binary yes/no switch.
I honestly don't have optimism about it anymore, there is no indication for me to believe thinks will get better until it's way way to late to prevent a catastrophe.
And don't get me wrong, humanity will (probably) survive, we are quite good at that. And there most likely will be a future where children can have a nice happy live. But before that for reasons not limited to climate change things probably will go to shit for a few decades, maybe even a century. But don't worry as long as people still try to make things better, things will get better again, it just might take some time.
But if I where living close by the coast or close to the equator, or in a area which already has common extrema weather, I would make sure my children grow up somewhere else.
bah that was such a downer to write, but it is my take on the topic anyway
> the first calculations about the greenhouse effect where in 1896!
Even 1824 by Fourier
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect#History_of_d...
> a world destroyed by generations
This hyperbole isn’t helpful. The world won’t be destroyed. (If you promise annihilation and are visited simply by devastation, it reduces credibility in an unnecessary way.)
I'm curious why this conversation tat is more or less a George Carlin bit from decades ago plays out over and over on social media. I bet that you knew exactly what they meant when they talked about the world being destroyed.
It wasn't a scenario where the Earth is literally annihilated by a black hole, or a super nova, or a meteor or a GMB, it was a scenario where the world is functionally ruined for human life as we know it in a time-scale far shorter than we can muster up the resources to stop or even mitigate it.
So like, what's going on here? Is your response a subconscious coping strategy to change the topic to something more comfortable than one of impending doom for the human species and civilization as we know it?
> it was a scenario where the world is functionally ruined for human life as we know it
Sure. The AMOC collapsing doesn’t do that. It makes life shit for a lot of people. But it doesn’t make the Earth uninhabitable for humans or technological civilization.
“Destroy the earth” is hyperbole. Cause mass starvation, associated wars and refugee crises, and mass extinctions with renewed vigor are not.
It’s like being invited to a party in someone’s house. One person starts smoking in the house. Sure, one person is no big deal. Then another person lights up because someone else did, and hey, they don’t have to live there tomorrow. Before you know it, 5–10% of people are smoking and making it stink for everyone, but it’s fine. They’ll stop eventually, and it’s not like you have to live there.
Unless someone stands up and says "no smoking in the house" ... people are going to keep smoking.
> Unless someone stands up and says "no smoking in the house" ... people are going to keep smoking
Sure. But if if someone says the house will burn down when the first person lights up, and they’re ignored, and it doesn’t, that doesn’t help. Most importantly because it isn’t true.
Houses burn down all the time from people smoking in a house…
We live in the atomic age. The idea that calamity could befall one part of the world and the others will be fine just isn't possible.
Here's a plausible scenario -- European countries decide that they will just power through the cold Frostpunk style by burning massive amounts of hydrocarbons and some other societies in regions suffering from the heat due to climate change decide that this course of action is unacceptable and war breaks out.
The theme of climate change is feedback loops and one way checkpoints. The increasing rates of change from these feedback loops and how societies respond may doom the plant and life as we know it.
This isn't hyperbole.
> Here's a plausible scenario
As you said, we’ve had plausible scenarios for actually destroying industrial civilisation since the middle of the Cold War. We dealt with it by having the population ignore it while a few nuclear states manage the risks. That doesn’t work for climate change.
War breaks out involving nuclear capable countries and nuclear bombs haven’t been used so far.
If Russia hasn’t used one on Ukraine, it doesn’t seem likely that a country mad about its climate would just destroy the world.
right everyone will be hah we were not all killed, only lots of people, but some survived! You lose! Glad we didn't listen to you, most of my family were killed except for me and my niece, but you said me and my niece would be killed too! You know absolutely nothing!!
This doesn't help the discussion, won't change anybody's mind (which you should desperately want in this topic) and just paint you as an outcast too annoying to listen to or debate with.
I am pretty sure you can do better than that.
Is the credibility in question among anyone who would notice the difference in phrasing?
We should always try to speak with precision, but not for the sake of people who will dismiss it no matter what you say.
This seems more like informal and basically reasonable talk, rather than hyperbole.
The purpose of Earth, from the point of view of most humans, is to act as a comfortable host of humans. We are destroying the Earth by making it no longer fit for that purpose. I don’t think anybody reads “destroy Earth” and interprets it as something more like, “get rid of the iron ball as well.”
Unless you are one of those deep-sea vent dwelling creatures, we’re risking changes to the planet that will affect your life eventually.
> we’re risking changes to the planet that will affect your life
Most people should already be seeing changes to their life in a statistically significant way.
But the AMOC collapsing doesn’t mean plenty of the Earth isn’t comfortable for humans. Global temperatures peaking in their pessimistic state still leaves, for better or for worse, most of the industrialized world viable. Poorer. Less comfortable. But viable nonetheless.
This is important because committing to long-term projects requires avoiding nihilism and complacency. Pitching everything as disaster tips into the former.
> most of the industrialized world viable. Poorer. Less comfortable.
If we're trying to use precise language, the economic modelling [0] actually suggests they will be wealthier and more comfortable than they are now. Just probably not as wealthy and comfortable as they could be under other hypotheticals.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_analysis_of_climate_c...
The IPCC rates a collapse before 2100 as “unlikely but not impossible.”
The IPCC has historically also underestimated the effect of climate change on the sea.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/7/4/044...
To further clarify, this is the research (from August 2025) which is cited in the CNN story which is the basis of the Dagens AI copypasta. "Shutdown of northern Atlantic overturning after 2100 following deep mixing collapse in CMIP6 projections".
Is that true for all the metrics? Didn’t they overestimate sea level rise? I recall reading that actually levels are lower than the forecasts.
The paper I cite is for sea level rise. IPCC models from 1990 and 2011 have made forecasts on sea level rise. When we compare those to what actually happened up to 2025, we see that we are slightly worse right now than their highest sea level prediction that was made.
We're worse than their worst case scenario, so their models were significantly too optimistic.
In the same paper, they also note that for temperature, the models have been accurate.
> When we compare those to what actually happened up to 2025, we see that we are slightly worse right now than their highest sea level prediction that was made.
No. The paper does not show that. Figure 3 shows that recent sea level rise, accounting for measurement uncertainty, is in line with projections of any of the models (around 2mm per year). In any case, they call out explicitly that the recent data is of insufficient duration to make the comparison you’re trying to make.
Temperature data in figure one is more or less exactly in the uncertainty window of the models (not shocking, considering that they’re calibrated to reproduce recent data).
I'm sorry, but I double checked and I do think you have it wrong. Figure 3 is for "sea level rise _rate_", and that one is indeed high but not significantly so.
Quoting "The satellite-based linear trend 1993–2011 is 3.2± 0.5 mm yr−1 , which is 60% faster than the best IPCC estimate of 2.0 mm yr−1 for the same interval"
But, as the authors point out, the worst case forecasts that were within-data, are so for the wrong reasons. Quote "The model(s) defining the upper 95-percentile might not get the right answer for the right reasons, but possibly by overestimating past temperature rise."
My previous comment is regarding Figure 2, i.e. "Sea Level". I would invite you to read the whole paper. It is only 3 pages and written without jargon.
Sea level rise rate is what matters (we cannot measure “sea level” absolutely, and therefore must work in terms of relative rates of change). The authors explicitly tell you that the data is not sufficient to conclude what they’re alluding:
> this period is too short to determine meaningful changes in the rate of rise
Now, you note that the authors openly acknowledge that the rate of rise is measured in low-single-digit units of millimeters per year. So, why is the y-axis of Figure 2 measured in centimeters?
Hint: it’s because every point on that plot is a wild extrapolation.
This paper is not good, btw. The fact that it’s “only three pages” should be a blinking red sign telling you that it is not serious. Just read the more recent IPCC reports, because they deal with the question of updates from prior reports.
> Hint: it’s because every point on that plot is a wild extrapolation.
I don't understand, or do not spot the issue you are seeing. Could you expand a bit?
You could say it that way, or you could say that they're currently overestimating the effects.
No you can't. That study is comparing past estimates of the past and present to the lived in past and present not past estimates of the future to current estimates of the future.
Okay, but why then do the IPCC reports of the past present vastly different historical data than the present ones? History cannot change, but people can "reinterpret" it for political purposes.
Humans didn't exist since the beginning of time, and we only started to properly record temperatures in the last few centuries. That means we have to determine historical data through the effects it had on our planet. The methods to find this historical data from the effects keep changing and evolving, so it makes complete sense to me that historical data has changed throughout the reports.
Unfortunately you didn't specify where one can find this "vastly different historical data", so I can't get more specific than this.
When was it updated? The newer research seems up the probability.
Eg https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/aug/28/collapse...
It's presumably worth it for Iceland to take seriously even if the probability is low.
AFAIK the IPCC are generally quite conservative on these matters. Newer research shows possible collapse occurring much sooner (Sometime between 2025-2095).
I was curious about whether or not the IPCC associates numerical values to words like "unlikely" so I looked it up:
https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2017/08/AR5_Uncertai...
They seem to be giving the word unlikely a range from 0-33%. I'm not sure how to reason about that 0% given that they also used the phrase "not impossible."
[flagged]
Ok, it's a national security risk. Now what? What are steps 2 and 3 in combating this existential risk? I see only 1 viable option: Start digging now and move the entire population underground.
Step 2, higher taxes for you.
One would hope so.
Unfortunately people are too short-sighted and selfish so it's unlikely taxes will be raised.
> Unfortunately people are too short-sighted and selfish so it's unlikely taxes will be raised.
I'm curious how the long-sighted and altruistic are going to restore the weakening currents to their best strength. Could you start with how much voluntary tax you're going to contribute, what sort of tax scheme you'd recommend for the rest and how these contributions will affect the currents?
Preferably, a step by step explanation, like an llm-R model would produce.
> going to restore the weakening currents to their best strength
Wouldn’t the more likely scenario be working out how the country will weather (pun intended) the huge change rather than trying to reverse the inevitable?
Either way I imagine step one there is research. Which costs money. “Don’t spend a penny until an incredibly detailed step by step plan arrives from nowhere” doesn’t strike me as a plan for success.
> Either way I imagine step one there is research. Which costs money.
To quote myself, the important part here is "how much voluntary tax you're going to contribute" and "what sort of tax scheme you'd recommend for the rest"
On the flip side Quick, the sky is falling, tax everybody for "research" is going to fly like a lead balloon.
Don't fret at the messenger, it's politics 101...
> “Don’t spend a penny until an incredibly detailed step by step plan arrives from nowhere”
"Don’t spend a penny" and "don't propose a tax increase by an unspecified amount and undefined distribution of tax load" are two vastly different statements, I did not author the first one of these.
In other words, solving the problem does not start with calls for raising taxes, nor are people "selfish" for rejecting such calls.
If you're broke just get a better job bro.
I wish other countries would take it this seriously.
Somewhat ironically, Iceland might be the country best suited by nature to handle the cold that would descend upon the Nordics if the gulf stream collapsed. At least they have plenty of volcanic heat they can use. My home country Sweden is not so lucky. Sure it's located a fair bit further south, but it's not clear that'll be enough to escape the cold. Yet the Swedish government seems wholly oblivious. Even the opposition is silent on this issue.
Kudos to the Icelandic! I wish you well in this endeavour!
Feel like I should mention the other end of this problem too: if the gulf stream stops heating the Nordics, it also stops bringing cold water from the Arctic to the gulf of Mexico. The heat waves will be absolutely epic. The Caribbeans, Florida and Mexico ought to be more worried too. In my armchair opinion, this will go way beyond nice beach days.
See [amocscenarios.org](https://amocscenarios.org/) for various modeled scenarios on what the future could look like with a collapsed AMOC.
Sweden, Finland, Norway would not be hit too badly. Summers will still be warmer, but shorter. Winters longer but about as cold.
The worst effects will be for the UK and specifically Scotland. Their climate wil change to look more like Finlands or Swedens. I.e. proper winters with pretty deep cold spells. This will be a complete disaster as buildings and general infrastrucure will not be able to handle it. There'll be massive issues from frost heave, buildings that are not insulated enough, heating systems specced too small to properly heat houses and so forth.
An AMOC collapse will be very bad, but not quite the Day Afer Tomorrow as some think it would be.
> The worst effects will be for the UK and specifically Scotland
On the cooling side. The worst general effects will hit the Caribbean, Africa, India and Southeast Asia.
(Also the northern Rockies will get slightly better ski seasons?)
Has that site been /slashdotted by HN? It's really buggy for me.
The main factor reducing gulf stream is increase of fresh water runoff into Arctic ocean. So maybe we should invest into building Sibaral Canal diverting some of the water of northern rivers towards Aral sea, and by that saving both Nordic and Central Asian countries.
Beyond Florida, the entire east coast of the US will become not just drastically warmer if the AMOC collapses, but will experience dramatic local sea level rise (warm water is more voluminous than cold water). Think Boston with the climate of modern-day Alabama.
Both the recent Acapulco and Jamaica hurricanes had non-normal intensification as they hit the warn coastal waters. I wonder how devastating this is going to be to Florida and the Atlantic states. Every time there is a hurricane it hits the Cat 5 physical limit.
Fort Lauderdale and Miami are underwater several times a year as is. The seawall at Daytona is gone.
It is going to be destabilizing. As long as it doesn't affect the corn growing in Iowa.
Europe will be thrown into chaos if the AMOC actually fully collapses. Minimum temperatures in the north and west dropping twenty degrees celcius will wreak havoc on harvests, put pressure on trade relations, and will probably drain several large cities. No doubt one asshole biding their time will take the chance to start a war in Europe amidst the chaos.
From what I've read, a full collapse is unlikely, though. Plus, preventing this from happening requires a concentrated worldwide effort, which seems unlikely with the leader of the leading greenhouse gas emission source per capita having gone on record saying climate change is a Chinese conspiracy.
At this point, I think a lot of governments are just hoping the best case scenario is right, because there's hardly anything we can do if the AMOC does indeed start collapsing fully, other than southbound mass emigration.
We just need to drop all the emission policies so the temps go up /s
We're also well set up where a majority of the population is in just one city, meaning it would be pretty easy to do some centralized building. Swedish population is far more spread out than Iceland is
Iceland has the 5th highest GDP per capita in the world. We’re about to witness what rich countries do when confronted by a changing climate.
This is clearly getting more reporting on than on any domestic news outlets. This is the first I am hearing about this.
Is it the first time you hear about the risks of AMOC collapsing?
To clarify, no the AMOC collapse I have grown up with as a discussion point over the last 40 years.
I am talking about the decision by our national security council. I had not seen any reporting on that domestically.
It is nice to see a country take it seriously of course. But, at some level I don’t love this type phrasing that has become generally accepted—it is a big deal, so we declare it a national security risk.
Everything is a national security risk when we look generally enough. Climate, education, economics, cultural diversity: failing in any of these fields makes the country weaker in some abstract way and that will impact national security down the road. “This impacts the general welfare and quality of life of the people” should be the highest category of urgent problem that needs to be fixed. A healthy, happy, productive populace can solve national security as a side effect.
> A healthy, happy, productive populace can solve national security as a side effect.
I think many “healthy, happy, productive” societies that have been invaded by less happy and productive neighbors throughout all of recorded history would beg to disagree.
IMO it would take some real study to come to a conclusion there. My opinion is mostly borrowed from the ACOUP guy: societies that are relatively developed in comparison to their neighbors rack up a lot of W’s. This is just unsurprising and not narratively dramatic so the opposite gets over-emphasized.
https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-...
Coincidentally at the moment the Canadian government has begun yet again pushing the idea of a new oil pipeline to serve asian markets with the justification being boosting the economy.
Remains depressing that somehow no one thinks for a second of the economic instability that will be induced by the climate change that that oil pipeline would contribute to...
All it took was one irrational clown seizing power to erase twenty-five years of woefully inadequate progress.
Even the Green party is supporting this government.
If it wasn't clear before, it certainly is now; there is no political solution to the climate crisis.
When all that is left is direct action, the results aren't pretty.
Few politicians seem to want to think about what happens after their time in office. Quick, short term wins only.
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45906226
Nomen est omen...
Referring to Iceland
Url changed from https://www.dagens.com/news/iceland-declares-ocean-current-i..., which points to this.
[flagged]
[flagged]
[dead]
[flagged]
See Bill Gates recent article on climate change alarmism.
I think in that article Gates does quite a disservice to the climate change dialogue because he does not even entertain the possibility that the most severe of the effects of climate change is going to be massive population migration due to extreme weather and agricultural failures. His comment that climate change is not going to lead to civilization collapse fails to elaborate for whom.
> ... most severe of the effects of climate change is going to be massive population migration due to extreme weather and agricultural failures
Perhaps it's not worth mentioning that because there are existing well-tested methods of stopping population migration that are available to be deployed once supported by public opinion. Specifically, fences, warships, and machine guns.
Maybe such callousness doesn't spoil your, or Gates' lunch, but it does most decent peoples'.
Given recent results of democratic elections across most western world, decency seems to be overrated. Maybe you were voting against such change, but look where we are. Its not just US or just parts of Europe.
I don't have a solution, but to change people one has to start where masses are and how they thing and especially how they feel. Facts seem to be overrated too.
My answer was in relation to the casualness of the dude affirming that murdering unarmed refugees at borders is anything but "the end of civilization", I was not trying to debate the likelihood of it happening.
Maybe he’s hoping for sea level rise these days. Enough to submerge a particular island.
Bill Gates changed quickly when he realized the damage to the environment that AI will cause I guess.
Not how I understood it. It was about climate “vs” health not whether the climate is breaking down.
I think there's an "and" in that that article, not an exclusive "or".
My (paranoid) unpopular take: the AI boom we’re currently experiencing is a concerted effort by the billionaires to maintain operational agency (the ability to think and do at a massive scale) once society begins to collapse due to climate change.
~~ edit ~~
Thank you for the sane responses. I’m reconsidering how much I believe this.
How would that work? AI cannot run if society collapses.
Maintaining all that infrastructure and supplying spare parts is not going to work.
Also AI cannot do anything on its own. Barely anything with support from humans.
This is also my reasoning for why I think AI alignment is not going to be a problem for humanity any time soon.
By the time AI will be capable of maintaining the whole supply chain required to keep itself running sufficient time will have passed so we can come up with something viable.
I think Billionaire alignment is a much larger problem than AI alignment. To use Bostrom's language, it's not full-on owl domestication, but sparrows with owl-like powers that we need to worry about.
https://lukemuehlhauser.com/bostroms-unfinished-fable-of-the...
Long before 2100, critical AI system will no longer be operating from this soil. They are in Earths orit, and on its moon.
And the industrial base that maintains it? Chips have a limited lifespan.
It will collapse, surely but 10-20-50 years after human civilization collapsed on earth. Trope explored already in sci-fi long time ago.
> AI cannot run if society collapses.
That doesn’t mean some idiot billionaires huffing each others’ farts can’t think it can.
Respectfully disagree. An AI with full access to robots could do everything on its own that it would need to "survive" and grow. I argue that humans are actually in the way of that.
"robots" is a very hand wavy answer. There's so much that goes into the supply chain of improving and running AI that I, a human, feel quite safe.
Is there any particular element of the supply chain that you feel make “robots” hand-wavy?
In support of the other reply, here is a look at the supply chain of a very simple product - a can of Coke.
https://medium.com/@kevin_ashton/what-coke-contains-221d4499...
(https://archive.md/PPYez)
The highlighted parts are a kind of TL;DR, but in the context here actually reading it - it is not much - is actually required to get anything out of it for the arguments used here.
Anything technological is orders of magnitude more complex.
Pointing to any single part really makes no sense, the point is the complexity and interconnectedness of everything.
Some AI doing everything is harder than the East Bloc countries attempting to use central planning for the whole economy. Their economy was much more simple than what such a mighty AI would require for itself and its robot minions. And that's just the organization.
I did like "Gaia" in Horizon Zero Dawn (game) because it made a great story though. This would be pretty much exactly the kind of AI fantasized about here.
Douglas Adams hints at hidden complexity towards the end of HHGTTG, talking about the collapse of Golgafrincham's society.
You overlook just one single tiny thing and it escalates to failure from there. Biological systems don't have that problem, they are self-assembling no matter how you slice and dice them. You may just end up with a very difference eco-system, but as long as the environment is not completely outside the useful range it will grow and reorganize. human-made engineered things on the other hand will just fail and that's it, they will not rise on their own from nothing. Human-made systems are much much more fragile than biological ones (even if you can't guarantee the kind of biological system you will get after rounds of growth and adaptations).
Thanks for providing the archive link!
> Pointing to any single part really makes no sense, the point is the complexity and interconnectedness of everything
Doesn’t it though?
The bauxite mine owners in Pincarra could purchase hypothetical robotic mining & smelting equipment. The mill owners in Downey, the cocoa leaf processor in New Jersey, the syrup factory in Atlanta, and others could purchase similar equipment. Maybe they all just buy humanoid robots and surveil their works for awhile to train the robots and replace the workers.
If all of those events happen, Coca Cola supply chain has been automated. Also, since e.g. the aluminum mill probably handles more orders beyond just coke cans, other supply chains for other products will now be that much more automated. Thereby the same mechanism that built these deep supply chains will (I bet) also automate them.
> Biological systems don't have that problem, they are self-assembling no matter how you slice and dice them.
If the machines used to implement manufacturing processes are also built in an automated way, the system is effectively self-healing as you describe for biological systems.
> did like "Gaia" in Horizon Zero Dawn (game) because it made a great story though. This would be pretty much exactly the kind of AI fantasized about here.
Perhaps the centralized AI “Gaia” becomes an orchestrator in this scheme, rather than the sole intelligence in all of manufacturing? Not too familiar with this franchise to make a more direct comparison, but my larger point is that the complexity of the system doesn’t need to be focused on one single greenfield entity.
Man made stuff does not self-repair and self-replicate.
So, no. You are not thinking far enough, only the next step. But it is a complex vast network, and every single thing in it except the humans has that man-made item deficiency of decay without renewal.
You miss even repairs of the tiniest item - which in turn requires repairing he repairers, everything eventually stops.
Humans have to intervene fixing unforeseen problems all the time! It is humans that hold all those systems together.
Even if you had AGI, human brains are far from perfect too so that would not change anything in the end, we have biology to the rescue (of us in general, not necessarily the individual ofc) when we miss stuff.
Let us assume, at some point in the near future, it is possible to build a humanoid robot that is able to operate human-run machines and mimic human labor:
> Man made stuff does not self-repair and self-replicate.
If robots can repair a man-made object or build an entirely new one, the object is effectively self-repairing and self-replicating for the purposes of a larger goal to automate manufacturing.
> You miss even repairs of the tiniest item - which in turn requires repairing he repairers, everything eventually stops
So… don’t? Surely the robots can be tasked to perform proactive inspections and maintenance of their machines and “coworkers” too.
> But it is a complex vast network
…that already exists, and doesn’t even need to be reimagined in our scenario. If one day our hypothetical robots become available, each individual factory owner could independently decide the next day to purchase them. If all of the factories in the “supply chain graph” for a particular product do this, the complex decentralized system they represent doesn’t require human labor to run. It doesn’t even need to happen all at once. By this mechanism I propose the supply chain could rapidly organically automate itself.
The length and breadth of it mostly.
I think this is a very common opinion here. I'd say at least 15% people believe that.
Yeah? How many robots? What kind of robots? What would the AI need to survive? Are the robots able to produce more robots? How are the robots powered? Where will they get energy from?
Sure it's easy to just throw that out there in one sentence, but once you actually dig into it, it turns out to be a lot more complicated than you thought at first. It's not just a matter of "AI" + "Robots" = "self-sustaining". The details matter.
This makes no sense. It takes a complex industrial society to keep that tech going. The supply chain to make GPUs would not survive even a modest disruption in the world economy. It's probably the most fragile thing we currently manufacture.
If you're an AI company and you believe your own hype (like Musk seems to), you'll probably believe that you can automate everything from digging minerals out of the ground all of the way up to making the semiconductors in the robots that dig the minerals.
As you may infer from my use of the word "hype", I do not think we are close to such generality at a high enough quality level to actually do this.
Presumes that the surviving humans will not actively disrupt/destroy these automated industries. Which seems highly likely as they will want to scavenge them for anything of value or repurpose them for their own means.
There's lots of implicit assumptions or this would be a book, but remember that Musk has a rocket and wants to colonise Mars, and that Mars is so bad that it is currently 100% populated by robots.
For the billionaires without rockets, there's also a whole bunch of deserts conveniently filled with lots of silicon.
(Or as Mac(Format|World|User) put it sometime in the 90s when they were considering who might bail out Apple and suggested one of the middle east oil barrons, a "silly con").
Musk smokes a lot of weed. We won't have a colony on Mars in his grandshildren's lifetime.
His lifetime, I agree unlikely, but also I think that will be short: he's pissed off too many other powerful people and will get the western equivalent of Russian oligarchs "falling out of a window".
The economics he talks about are all nonsense. No bank will lend someone $200k for the ticket to go to Mars on the offchance they might be a successful pizza restaraunteur.
But like I said, if you're (e.g.) him and you buy your own hype…
(His grandkids' lifetimes are another question entirely. Things are changing too fast).
While I believe we’re in a slow takeoff, I believe we are in a takeoff. The important question to my mind is whether AGI comes before systemic societal collapse due to climate change. I think it does, and my tin foil hat grows a wider brim with each passing day. I hope I’m wrong!
This is also why I'm skeptical of claims that it would be impossible (or nearly so) for governments to meaningfully regulate AI R&D/deployment (regardless of whether or not they should). The "you can't regulate math" arguments. Yeah, you can't regulate math, but using the math depends on some of the most complex technologies humanity has produced, with key components handled by only one or a few companies in only a handful of countries (US, China, Taiwan, South Korea, Netherlands, maybe Japan?). US-China cooperation could probably achieve any level of regulation they want up to and including "shut it all down now." Likely? Of course not. But also not impossible if the US and China both felt sufficiently threatened by AI.
The only thing that IMO would be really hard to regulate would be the distribution of open-weight models existing at the time regulations come into effect, although I imagine even that would be substantially curtailed by severe enough penalties for doing so.
This is the best argument I’ve heard against it, so thanks.
My anxiety entirely orbits around the scale of AI compute we’ve reached and the sentiment that there is drastic room for improvement, the rapidly advancing state of the art in robotics, and the massive potential for disruption of middle/lower class stake in society. Not to mention the general sentiment that the economy is more important than people’s well being in 99.9% of scenarios.
Who's to say it has to keep moving forward? The companies are buying up massive amounts of GPUs in this AI race, a move that's widely questioned because next year's GPUs might render the current ones outdated[0], so there will probably be plenty of GPUs to go around if the CEO demands it (prior to collapse). Operating datacenters would probably be out of the question with a collapsed society as the power grid might be unreliable, global networks might be down and securing many datacenters would probably be difficult, but there's at least one public record of a billionaire building his own underground bunker with off-grid power generation and enough room to have his own little datacenter inside[1]. "Ordinary" people will acquire 32GB GPUs or Mac Studios for local open-source LLM inference, so it seems likely billionaires would just do the next step up for their bunker and use their company's proprietary weights on decommissioned compute clusters.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/14/ai-gpu-depreciation-coreweav... [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-hawaii-under...
If there's an evil plot, it's goal must surely be to accelerate environmental degradation.
First we had the blockchain, now AI to consume enormous amounts of resources and distract us from what we should be investing in to make the environment healthier.
Concerted effort among the greediest people in the world all competing with each other? I find that very hard to imagine.
do you think it’s one person or a group of them that meets? design by committee? how are they getting it all done? let’s hear it!
I guess it's whoever was in that Doug Rushkoff meeting with the whole idea we'll have security forces with those exploding dog collars to keep them in line and to keep revolutionary forces from killing us and taking our food supply!
https://english.elpais.com/technology/2023-09-20/writer-doug...
it's very easy to achieve great things without coordination if you can just do what's best for yourself and help your peers achieve their collective goals.
but they do meet at davos every now and again, without the democratic shackles.
I don’t know if I believe it’s an active conspiracy. Instead I think it’s more of a very concerning, very plausible eventuality.
FWIW I do agree with the operational agency at scale bit
and I’m always fascinated by these conspiracy theories, was genuinely hoping to get one (but also happy to see you’re challenging your own position). the idea of people coordinating on these things is very funny to me
I think like all tech people will use it for good and bad. those in power have more power etc etc I think it tends to boil down to whether you believe people are, overall, good or bad. over time, that’s what you’ll get with use of tech
You should go see "Bugonia" by Yorgos Lanthimos, if you haven't yet, then! That movie might be straight up your alley.
So, if this happens, Iceland actually becomes Iceland...