I never worried particularly much about climate change, but just to hedge my bets for my kids I moved to northern Europe. For the most part it's just equated to milder (= bearable) Winters and nicer summers up here.
I guess we also spend a fair bit on moving to renewables up here - Finland achieved energy self sufficiency last year thanks to a good combination of nuclear + solar + hydro. If I were an ideologue in either direction I'd probably say "that's the real reason I moved" or "can't believe they're waiting my tax money on this", but I'm not, I'm just a guy who likes hedging his bets. The nuclear is especially nice because cheap electricity is the true backbone of society, and we've seen the market prices go straight up _negative_ a few times due to overproduction.
Self recommending! Come to Finland and help us build a stronger democracy, whatever that means to you.
> Finland achieved energy self sufficiency last year thanks to a good combination of nuclear + solar + hydro.
Energy means, well, energy. Finland still drives combustion vehicles (a lot of them, last I was there they drove some of the oldest cars in the EU on average due to high taxes for buying new ones) and probably mostly heat with energy not originating from the trio you mentioned.
I think you meant electricity, which is a great milestone on the way but not yet the destination.
Electricity used to be about 10% of a rich country's energy consumption, of late I think it's closer to 20% as some early adopters and new buildings have made the switch, but that still leaves 80% of your energy generated from oil and natural gas
Let’s also not forget another human activity, also a kind of energy consumption, but in a more direct way, aka eating. Livestock produces around 15% of global greenhouse emissions according to my quick Google search. And I am sure some Finns like to eat meat.
Agriculture in general is less than 15% of the US and the US likes to eat meat. Agriculture including farming plants in total is 10-11%. https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...
If the plant farming was higher than animal farming, would you suggest they not farm?
And add to that the fact that cow flatulence is very rich in methane (much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2) because of poor diet in industrial agriculture.
Yeah, the AMOC collapse predictions are interesting.
I'd love to see a much colder Finland, personally, since I want to know what a developed country that has 6 months of winter feels and looks like from the inside. But I do agree that for most people here it would be unfortunate.
Nothing out of the ordinary here in Norrbotten, Sweden. Seems like things stop working properly under -35 degrees or so (trains, heat pumps), so some adjustments would be needed if such temperatures became more frequent.
While you may be technically true, it is obviously clear that some places are far safer than others, and moving to another place will have a very high impact on how global warming affects you, as some regions will be affected much more harshly than others. At the extreme, some places may be underwater or otherwise uninhabitable, but if you can afford to, moving away from them in a timely manner, you can escape being forced to do so at a time when doing so may be much harder.
Second order effects will be the killer. It won’t be the coastal flooding, it will be the dispossessed hordes. It won’t be the uninhabitable areas, it will be the rapid rise in price of food staples. No matter where you are, the chaos will come to your door, when it comes.
Takes surprisingly little to collapse a civilisation when you kick its knees out from under it.
I agree, but there is a meaningful difference between having dispossessed hordes on your doorstep and being among those dispossessed hordes having to find a place for yourself; and if the price of grain doubles, for a poor community that means starvation while a wealthy community would barely notice.
...until the dispossessed hordes burn it to the ground.
The belief that rich people will be able to ride this one out is a huge part of the problem. No matter how deep your bunker, no matter how many acres of land you own, extreme weather will make all of it worthless.
This scenario is not a zombie apocalypse where the hordes are literally at your doorsteps and it's individuals protecting themselves from other nearby individuals.
The climate change may easily cause large scale international conflict or fights over resources at national level, but the distance between places without capacity to handle the weather and the better-off areas generally are thousands of miles and an ocean, and the parties to any conflict would be neighboring communities of many millions of people each - I mean, this discussion is about "what will happen to the population of current Bangladesh, and what effect that will have on neighboring countries" not about what will happen for few rich people in USA against their literal neighbors from the same state and county.
I fully expect that the wealthy countries can handle some internal displacement due to e.g. sea level rise without mass violence and a general breakdown of internal order - people having to abandon coastal properties in Florida would cause economic woes and internal political pressure to Do Something (not necessarily constructive), not cause the displaced Florida men to form large uncontested gangs roaming the Midwest looking for bunkers to loot.
You seem to believe that the disposed hordes will inevitable be able to burn it to the ground despite primarily being dispossessed from places with near primitive military practices, alone supplies. While we’re writing fictional tales, there’s an alternative ending to this fiction that ends with the dispossessed hordes simply losing.
By losing you mean starving, I assume. If the rich northern countries can even come to some sort of agreement that the poor from the south should be kept out by killing them when they try to migrate north. This is all going to be horrifying no matter what.
There are also potential feedback effects from rising temperature. Northern Europe should survive the 2C warming we are headed towards, but higher temps could cause big problems.
Northern Europe should worry about the Gulf Stream or Atlantic Conveyor currents failing and changing the climate.
Another big one is melting permafrost. Warmer temps cause permafrost to melt and release CO2, which leads to more warming, and repeat.
Finally, there is danger of ice sheets melting which could rise sea levels by hundreds of feet.
I always tell my gun-hoarding, go-box toting, bug-out planning prepper friends the same thing. You don't have enough guns and ammo to stop the masses coming for your canned pork'n'beans.
Is that true? I mean, I figure worst case, small rural midwest communities that band together and shoot trespassers on site will be the best off.
I guess an army of thousands could take it over but my hope is that me and my gun toting farming community won't put up with invaders and invaders won't want to take their chances
On the other hand, on a country level, countries generally do have enough guns and ammo to greatly limit any chaos coming over their border; uncontrolled immigration happens not because countries can't control it but because they effectively choose not to.
I wonder how long that strategy will work. Eventually society will reach a new "equilibrium" but how many less defended societies will succumb to the starving hordes before that happens.
I quote "equilibrium" because social structures never stop changing. What I mean is a relatively stable situation where most of the world is not invading the rest of the world. Our present situation is that the larger portion of the population is not invading the rest, though the present trend seems to be in the wrong direction.
Why do you say that? Most of the Midwest USA seems like it will do fine for the inevitable future.
More co2 means corn and soy will be growing better and better, warming temps increase our growing season. We have more than enough water. What am I missing?
Or live to learn like a drifting dog on the street, that’s probably the most realistic training. Become homeless with no money and only the provisions you can carry. Oh and no electricity either. Learn to thrive like that and you may be prepared.
The earth has had some of the fastest warming ever in the last 15 thousand. During this time crop yields have increased dramatically. The trend is unmistakable, the warmer the planet, the more food we produce.
Hot Weather.—Many a man has mopped his brow during the summer months of 1884, declaring it was the hottest weather the world ever knew, which, of course, would not be true, for the extreme heat in the record of the past has not been approached during the late summer.
In 627, the heat was so great in France and Germany, says the London Standard, that all springs dried up; water became so scarce that many people died of thirst.
In 879, work in the field had to be given up; agricultural laborers persisting in their work were struck down in a few minutes, so powerful was the sun. In 993, the sun’s rays were so fierce that vegetation burned up as under the action of fire. In 1000, rivers ran dry under the protracted heat, the fish were left dry in heaps and putrefied in a few hours. Men and animals venturing in the sun in the summer of 1022 fell down dying.
In 1132, not only did the rivers dry up, but the ground cracked and became baked to the hardness of stone. The Rhine in Alsace nearly dried up. Italy was visited with terrific heat in 1189; vegetation and plants were burned up. During the battle of Bela, in 1200, there were more victims made by the sun than by weapons; men fell down sunstruck in regular rows. The sun of 1277 was also severe; there was an absolute dearth of forage.
In 1303 and 1304, the Rhine, Loire, and Seine ran dry. In 1615, the heat throughout Europe became excessive. Scotland suffered particularly in 1625; men and beasts died in scores. Meat could be cooked by merely exposing it to the sun. Not a soul dared to venture out between noon and 4 p.m. In 1718, many shops had to be closed; the theatres were never opened for several months. Not a drop of water fell during six months.
In 1753 the thermometer rose to one hundred and eighteen degrees. In 1779, the heat at Bologna was so great that a large number of people died. In July 1793, the heat became intolerable. Vegetables were burned up and fruit dried upon the trees. The furniture and woodwork in dwelling-houses cracked and split up; meat became bad in an hour.
In Paris in 1846, the thermometer marked one hundred and twenty-five degrees in the sun. The summers of 1859, 1860, 1869, 1870, 1874, etc., although excessively hot, were not attended by any disaster.”
Only in regards to the rivers drying out.
At that time those rivers weren’t canals like since the 19th century. They where much larger and had more „siderivers“ so water could get into the ground etc much more easily.
Mate, it's not, it's based on extraordinarily well understood theories around the how chemical bonds and the electromagnetic spectrum work. That is the theory behind the mechanism for anthropogenic climate change is based on exactly the same science that allows big chunks of the infrastructure of civilisation to work - that is, chemistry, quantum physics and arithmetic/accountancy.
You. Literally YOU. Can trivially measure the impact of different gases on temperature.
Telling the difference between natural and human produced is probably not doable by you personally, however, human burned pollution tends to have different atomic markers from naturally occurring. We have mandatory pollution reporting. We can do basic maths to find reasonably close numbers to how much of the pollution is natural and how much is from us.
With regard to “the prediction models are always wrong” fake news propaganda bullshit:
They are always wrong in a way that’s worse for us by underestimating the bad impacts. Every time we improve the models, the outcomes are worse even faster than the models predict, and we have to find why.
Yet you don't know nothing, you believe in catastrophic scenarios.
We can measure anecdotaly that temperature is slightly rising. The reason why is it happening and happend in history multiple times is topic for debate that we can explore.
However your tone is not open for debate and use exactly same words as those you fight against.
It is not “up for debate” that various gasses cause a rise in temperature.
You are pretending that our scientific knowledge is at 1600 levels to come to your insane conclusions.
You claim that I’m not open for debate, but it’s actually just that there is no debate here. You’re a just printing demonstrable lies on to the internet, for what?
posed in ignorance (perhaps genuine ignorance, perhaps feigned) above, we (humans) have been measuring gas properties in isolation for 200 years (and more) and have been specifically measuring (and storing as bottled samples) atmospheric gas composition since the start of the Cold War.. seventy odd years or so now.
Much of our high quality environmental data comes from cold war research - ocean tempretures were first mapped at large scale by Scripps in order to use thermoclines to pinpoint submarines and other sounds in water.
This and other global references informs us about the changing atmospheric makeup and other experiments inform us about the increase in trapped heat from incoming solar radiation.
Those data from measured ocean temperature needs to be readjusted:
Before about 1940, the most common method for measuring sea surface temperature was to throw a bucket attached to a rope overboard from a ship, haul it back up, and read the water temperature. The method was far from perfect. Depending on the air temperature, the water temperature could change as the bucket was pulled from the water. (1)
In the late 1970s ... tracking what was happening to Earth temperatures was at a relatively primitive state. Much of the relevant weather station data had not been digitized and what had been, was not widely available. Previous estimates of temperature changes ... had focused on the northern hemisphere, but that obviously missed half the planet. (2) interactive map: (3)
There is analysis showing differences in model temperature variation models and actual data from balloons and satellites since 1979. (4)
Those are few examples how our ability to measure things changes with our developing knowledge.
Rising temperatures is not new phenomena. Greenland ice core project (5) showing that there was about 25 dramatic climate changes in history. Its called Dansgaard–Oeschger event. (6), (7) and shows that for example during Younger Dryas (8) there was dramatic temperature decline and increase in few decades.
Making predictions on data since 70's are fragile and should be constantly reanalyzed.
You've provided links to things the vast bulk of people in earth sciences, particularly climatic related earth and atmospherics are already well aware of.
Yet they, in near majority, still stand behind the broad predictions of future climate change - even being aware of the work of Smale and Lorenz .. perhaps it's that 40+ year old understanding of stability, robustness, and the Dzhanibekov effect in which the broad arc of motion is entirely predictable despite wobbles on a minor axis or two.
Normalisation and may other adjustments to data sets are stock in trade operations across all the observational sciences- geophysical mineral exploration, radiometric surveying, radio astronomy, distributed signal aquisition, etc. etc. etc. You'll note for example that NASA et al are out in front about doing such things.
Predictions of trains headed for derailment based on speed, mass, and topography are not refuted by an inability to predict where the centrepiece vase in the dining car comes to rest.
That's because it's more just a nice secondary factor. ;)
Mostly I moved because it amused me. I have a long history of going to places I can't actually locate on a map, eg I thought Northwestern University would be in Portland, not Chicago - imagine my shock when I stepped off the plane. Similarly with Finland. I knew so little about the place that when the opportunity to move arose I couldn't not take it, it would be like turning down getting teleported into the inside of a black hole.
how were you able to permanently move from the states to Finland - were you already a citizen there? (I assume you mean Boston Mass, unless you are talking about another Boston already in the EU)
Real nasty bunch. Used to burn whole parts of england only a few centuries ago. They'd probably still do it if it weren't for the might of the British Navy.
Thank you. I must stop scoffing at others on HN when they don't get what I consider to be obvious jokes, as it seems I too am capable of missing obvious humor.
Certainly 'self-sufficient' is inaccurate, given the reliance on external inputs.
If other nation states are also not self-sufficient for fissionable materials, and/or other fuel types, then I would also not call them self-sufficient on power generation.
Sure, there are degrees of reliance on providers of fuel types, but no need to muddy the waters about self-sufficiency. (f.e. Australia could be self-sufficient on solar, wind, coal, fission, I suspect - at least in terms of raw materials.)
If shit hits the fan everywhere else but North Europe remains safe - will it be business as usual there? Won't hundreds of millions of people (or more) from India, China and Africa flee to to wherever is safe?
That’s very interesting, can you point me to any sources showing that 99.5% of all asylum seekers and refugees are deported every single year? Or do they instead just transition into the illegal immigrant category and we just kinda collectively shrug our shoulders and go “well what can ya do.”
Because I see that we have a lot of people coming in from Mexico claiming asylum for uh, whatever war is going on there, getting released into the country, and just never showing up for their court hearings: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/nearly-600000-m...
> If shit hits the fan everywhere else but North Europe remains safe - will it be business as usual there?
No, it will still suck, but it'll be the kind of suck you can survive without fleeing.
Unless the thermohaline circulation changes significantly, in which case the northern Mediterranean coast starts to look like Toronto, Paris starts to look like Vancouver, and Scandinavia starts to look like Anchorage.
> Won't hundreds of millions of people (or more) from India, China and Africa flee to to wherever is safe?
Yes, although in the case of China they'll probably flee to elsewhere in China, because it's huge.
> No, it will still suck, but it'll be the kind of suck you can survive without fleeing
Still. Moving now to North Europe because maybe 30 years from now you'll have to move? Why not wait it out and see if you have to move? The whole thing is one huge speculation. There's no telling if Finland will be secure since its quite weak militarily. And we we don't really know what's gonna happen - we have models with very differing scenarios.
> Still. Moving now to North Europe because maybe 30 years from now you'll have to move? Why not wait it out and see if you have to move?
The older you are when you move, the harder it is. New language, new culture, new laws, disconnection from your old friends who took a different path. And less time to contribute to a state pension — a skilled 30-year-old can be a welcome addition to a workforce, a 60-year-old might get their state pension before citizenship — which may make them less inclined to accept you. Especially if you're moving because there's a huge global disaster and they need more workers rather than pensioners.
That said, the economics may radically change over the next 30 years; while I think the current humanoid robot workers are a bit gimmicky at best, and that they'll only be ready for autonomous use about 5-10 years after no-steering-wheel-included self-driving cars[0], the general trend of automation they represent is significant and began long before they were able to walk on legs.
> The whole thing is one huge speculation. There's no telling if Finland will be secure since its quite weak militarily. And we we don't really know what's gonna happen - we have models with very differing scenarios.
Indeed; very little is predictable even 10 years out in geopolitics. The UK was never going to leave the EU in 2012, but gone it was a decade later. The USSR was indomitable in 1984 and gone in 1994. 30 years? That's the gap between the height of the British Empire and the WW2 home guard starting with arm bands instead of uniforms, and being armed with a mix of privately owned guns and various improvised weapons.
For the environment, what happens depends on how people react to the models that exist. We may well completely eliminate CO2 emissions on that time scale — the technology is already known and in deployment for how to do this for electricity and land transport, it's being demonstrated for iron and other metal oxide refinement, but there are plenty of things to work on before we say we can manage this without also removing CO2 from the air.
But on the other hand, we may squander the remaining time, just like we squandered the last 30 years.
[0] More specifically, when the energy cost of the computing power needed for sufficient quality real-time vision reduces to ~10W; the computers Tesla currently use are supposedly 100W, but as Tesla's autopilot is not yet rated as a full-replacement for human drivers I must assume that a sufficient AI would also be more power-hungry. As 100W is very little power, Tesla (and others) might brute force this problem by having a bigger computer that uses e.g. 1kW rather than keeping the power use to 100W and waiting for a better computer. 1kW is my guess for the maximum that anyone would be willing to use in a car-based AI.
How dead Moore's Law is or isn't depends on what you're asking, I think it's still working for Joules-per-operation which is what matters here, and every factor of 10 improvement needed is about 5 years at Moore's Law rates.
> That said, the economics may radically change over the next 30 years;
I think you're optimistic, I think we'll see mass layoffs 5-10 years from now for white collar work, and 5-10 years after that for expensive manual labor (like doctors etc). I think the gap between "solving" white collar work (e.g something similar to AGI) and solving humanoid autonomous work will be narrow, but that's just my hunch.
Also, even without AI, sufficiently cheap telepresence robots can do to for manual labour what Mechanical Turk and remote work (and possibly GenAI) is doing for desk jobs — "good enough" can be surprisingly poor quality if it comes with a small enough invoice.
However, my main point is that things are hard to predict.
Thermohaline circulation might not be the cause of warmer Europe although many people believe it is.
Its probably mostly because of the planetary effect which lets the wind flow in a typical pattern. Europe is a sea climate. Eastern US is continental. Western US and Canada has the same warming as Europe. Because the wind does something similar.
If your energy infrastructure has a significant amount of nuclear, and your solar power is over-producing during the day, it is cheaper to have negative energy prices than to shut down the nuclear plant.
Minulla lemppari urheilulaji :D se kehittyy hitaasti mutta varmasti.
I actually maintain several online Finnish learning resources now, including a flashcard deck of the most common 10,000 words from the YLE study way back [1], a command line lemmatizer [2], and a website whose permissions I need to refresh ASAP which archives Selkouutiset with YYYY/MM/DD URLs [3].
Indeed building these tools were what got me back into software development as a profession, after a long absence.
Oh cool, I'll check these out! I've been doing some coding myself to learn Finnish. I'll post a video of my tool in a little bit. I generate a daily set of exercises, and then track my progress over time.
The tasks: scrape all the selko articles and then generate fi-> en translation tasks in the form of phrases (using an LLM). Same thing except en->fi. Free form task generation where I tend to use HS for articles (so like, adult Finnish). And then one I'm working on now, Finnish transcription from auto-generated speech, from selko again.
A lot of my evaluation is based on embedding + cosine distance. LLM's are truly bringing a golden age for language learning.
I was planning on doing a similar thing but my wife didn't seem terribly enthused by the current SOTA with Finnish text generation. Sometimes I do ask GPT-4 to "kerro minulle jotain kiinostavaa [aiheesta]" and throw the generated longform text into a single Anki card to read later on. The style definitely feels different, and it hallucinates a lot, but hey, it's still net beneficial on the margin.
Let's keep in touch, it's always good to meet fellow Finnward folk. My email is in my bio if you ever need anything.
I love languages, but I've been scared off of Finnish because I have heard that it has impossibly complicated grammar. Is this true? Or is there a logic to it that can be easily understood?
There is indeed a logic to it, and I'm currently working on an edutainment game meant to focus on drilling this part in particular.
Finnish has 15 noun cases, but it's probably better thought of as 4+6+5 cases. The first 4 are pretty straightforward, except for the partitive, which is kind of a catch-all case. The middle 6 correspond to certain spatial relationships. Very roughly you can imagine these as {inside, outside} × {unmoving, moving closer, moving further}. Huone = room, huoneessa = in room, huoneen = into (=moving closer to the inside of) room. That kind of stuff. The last 5 have niche, special uses. That's how I mentally imagine them at least, there are a lot of details you only pick up by reading a lot.
The trade-off is that Finnish has virtually no prepositions, which English has a lot of, and which are similarly very confusing for beginners and even intermediate English speakers. There are a few post-positions, but even these are mostly things you can pick up by ear.
Verbs have a similar story. If you've ever learned Latin, Russian or Spanish you'll feel right at home with Finnish verbs, which pack a lot of info into the conjugation, but with the benefit of requiring fewer actual words per sentence.
Similar, though leaving the US had a lot to do with hedging our bets against a crumbling democracy as well.
How is Finland? It was on our list but we wanted to have good train connections to the continent so ended up in the Netherlands (but above sea level). Oulu has impressive winter cycling though.
I lived in Oulu for a time, and yes it does indeed live up to its winter cycling reputation. Actually most of my wife's family lives around that region, so we'll probably return up there in a few years.
Finland is terrific! Learning the language is tough, and recommended, but ultimately optional for white collar migrants. The lower salaries here are unfortunate - I make a third of what I could make as a software lead in the US (~50k vs ~150k). Doubly so as there really is a lot of top notch engineering talent here, probably because it's so hard to hire people that FTEs end up having to learn a lot about everything lol. I haven't yet carved a path to make US level money while living in Finland - but you'd better believe it's on my list of things to beeline towards once I hit my thirties.
Meh, you can come up with twenty different methodologies and they all point to coming out way way behind in Finland. SF -> Finland immigrant, took approximately 70% pay cut, and enjoying the 80% marginal tax rate.
The health of democracy is way better than the US at least.
Consumer prices are not lower in Finland, although VAT is responsible for a lot of the difference, to be fair. Yeah, sales tax in Finland is 24%. I've been in both places in the last year, cried when I bought my used Toyota here.
Rent indeed is 70% lower, but you lose by having 70% lower rent and 70% lower salary. Besides, median salaries in Finland are 15% of what they are in SF (staff swe at 500k vs 90k). And the tax burden is way lower, even in CA. Finland has a lot going for it, but there's just no point in debating the money part.
Whatever bothered you about US politics is also happening in Europe. There's no Trump, he's one of a kind, but there's polarization, distrust in institutions and populism just fine.
It's the same disease really.
Also - I can't imagine North Europe will remain prosperous if America somehow fails, the West is very much dependent on the U.S (now also for energy).
But I do hope you enjoy your time, I lived in Leiden for almost 4 years and it was like living in a postcard. Shit weather though.
On Thursday, the Expert Group for Studies in Public Economics (ESO) will present a report on the employment level of refugees between 1983 and 2015. Among other things, the study shows that the integration of refugees gradually deteriorated during the period, and that an average refugee represents a cost of SEK 74 000 per year for public finances.
I guess we also spend a fair bit on moving to renewables up here - Finland achieved energy self sufficiency last year thanks to a good combination of nuclear + solar + hydro. If I were an ideologue in either direction I'd probably say "that's the real reason I moved" or "can't believe they're waiting my tax money on this", but I'm not, I'm just a guy who likes hedging his bets. The nuclear is especially nice because cheap electricity is the true backbone of society, and we've seen the market prices go straight up _negative_ a few times due to overproduction.
Self recommending! Come to Finland and help us build a stronger democracy, whatever that means to you.