A Hellish 'Hothouse Earth' Getting Closer, Scientists Say
19 339The world is closer than thought to a "point of no return" after which runaway global heating cannot be stopped, scientists have said. From a report: Continued global heating could trigger climate tipping points, leading to a cascade of further tipping points and feedback loops, they said. This would lock the world into a new and hellish "hothouse Earth" climate far worse than the 2-3C temperature rise the world is on track to reach.
The climate would also be very different to the benign conditions of the past 11,000 years, during which the whole of human civilisation developed. At just 1.3C of global heating in recent years, extreme weather is already taking lives and destroying livelihoods across the globe. At 3-4C, "the economy and society will cease to function as we know it," scientists said last week, but a hothouse Earth would be even more fiery. The public and politicians were largely unaware of the risk of passing the point of no return, the researchers said.
The group said they were issuing their warning because while rapid and immediate cuts to fossil fuel burning were challenging, reversing course was likely to be impossible once on the path to a hothouse Earth, even if emissions were eventually slashed. It was difficult to predict when climate tipping points would be triggered, making precaution vital, said Dr Christopher Wolf, a scientist at Terrestrial Ecosystems Research Associates in the US. Wolf is a member of a study team that includes Prof Johan Rockstrom at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and Prof Hans Joachim Schellnhuber at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria.
19 comments
Re:Well (Score: 5, Informative)
by TheMiddleRoad ( 1153113 ) on Wednesday February 11, 2026 @04:07PM (#65983128)
I'd rather have Musk just move away.
"Scientists thought they understood global warming. Then the past three years happened."
https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]
Yes, we are fucked in the ass. The worst case scenarios are likely if not optimistic.
Re:Well (Score: 5, Interesting)
by jacks smirking reven ( 909048 ) on Wednesday February 11, 2026 @05:38PM (#65983388)
Maybe? It's arguable that his support of this admin helped them win power and that has offset much of the good hos EVs have done at this point. Probably not true but it's also not zero, he's burned through a lot of his goodwill and the admin is setting the issue backwards by some amount.
Teslas cratering sales in Europe, the mediocrity of the Cybertruck, the paring down of their product lines, they continue to lose self driving ground to Waymo, Tesla isn't failing but it isn't doing great either and I think Musk himself eats a lot of that. My prediction is that Tesla is sticking around with within the next 5 years they will have squandered their enormous first mover advantage. Once the other car companies are able to produce affordable battery packs Tesla will have to compete on more than price and they will lose that fight
Re: Well (Score: 5, Funny)
by fluffernutter ( 1411889 ) on Thursday February 12, 2026 @05:10AM (#65984260)
We did get fucked. Millions of people died. What's your point?
Real question (Score: 5, Funny)
by TwistedGreen ( 80055 ) on Wednesday February 11, 2026 @04:06PM (#65983118)
Is this going to happen before, or after I retire?
Re:Real question (Score: 5, Insightful)
by jhoegl ( 638955 ) on Wednesday February 11, 2026 @04:29PM (#65983188)
And this is why we cant have older people dictating policy in our governments.
Re:Real question (Score: 5, Insightful)
by JoshWurzel ( 320371 ) on Wednesday February 11, 2026 @07:17PM (#65983598)
You would think so, and if you ask them they'll certainly claim they do, but this claim is not supported by the voting data.
Re:Real question (Score: 5, Insightful)
by Jeremi ( 14640 ) on Wednesday February 11, 2026 @08:32PM (#65983758)
Based on my own older family members who voted for Trump, I don't believe they did so because they didn't care, but because they were deceived.
The thing is, they wanted to be deceived -- that gave them an out. Now they can go to their graves with a clear conscience, because they "know" global warming is a myth and therefore they didn't really doom their grandchildren. That's all they wanted, is some comforting lies that would give them permission to not worry about it.
Re:Time to address the real problem (Score: 5, Insightful)
by kbrannen ( 581293 ) on Wednesday February 11, 2026 @04:33PM (#65983208)
You do realize they'll never "eat" those costs, right? They'll pass them on to you the consumer and maintain their profits and bonuses. I dislike being that cynical, but the tariffs have shown us extra costs are passed on.
Re: Time to address the real problem (Score: 5, Insightful)
by memory_register ( 6248354 ) on Wednesday February 11, 2026 @05:55PM (#65983436)
I do not understand why people see the concept of costs being passed on to consumers as controversial. If a corporation ceases to make a profit, it ceases to exist. If a corporation is taxed into oblivion and cannot meet the payroll, people stop working there and it stops creating goods and services. Their only existential option is to pass new costs onto consumers.Why is this difficult for people to understand?
Re:Time to address the real problem (Score: 5, Insightful)
by Jeremi ( 14640 ) on Wednesday February 11, 2026 @08:28PM (#65983748)
You do realize they'll never "eat" those costs, right? They'll pass them on to you the consumer and maintain their profits and bonuses. I dislike being that cynical, but the tariffs have shown us extra costs are passed on.
You are indeed being overly cynical. You're right that they don't want to eat those costs, but you're missing that they also don't want to lose market share (and therefore sales) to a competitor who is able to charge less because the competitor doesn't incur those costs.
Which is to say, if there is an alternative way to provide the same (or similar) product cheaper by reducing/avoiding expensive CO2 emissions, they'll switch to that, as a way to remain competitive. Which is the desired outcome.
Re:Got bad news for y'all (Score: 5, Insightful)
by Jeremi ( 14640 ) on Wednesday February 11, 2026 @08:40PM (#65983764)
Will it be this utter hell some are predicting? Probably not. But it will be toasty. An odd thing is some places will get colder.
If you consider only the climate itself, then it probably won't be utter hell -- large portions of the Earth will still be perfectly livable.
But at the same time -- large, currently highly populated portions of the Earth will no longer be livable, and all of those dispossessed people are going to have to go somewhere else, and compete for the remaining resources of the places that remain livable... which means refugee flows, and famine, and xenophobia, and violence, and war. That's where the utter hell is going to come from. Too many mouths chasing not enough grain.
devil is in the details (Score: 5, Interesting)
by OrangeTide ( 124937 ) on Wednesday February 11, 2026 @04:35PM (#65983210)
2012 was the record minimum for Artic sea ice. So someone's model seemed to be onto something.
Now the journalist that wrote the science piece dumbed down so that you could understand it likely did a poor job of explaining it.
But there are so many models and theories that offer up different specifics but similar generalities that it can be frustrating for laypeople to make sense of it all.
Re:Again (Score: 5, Informative)
by Truth_Quark ( 219407 ) on Wednesday February 11, 2026 @07:10PM (#65983578)
So, the ice caps will again disappear like they were supposed to in 2012?
That was one prediction by Dr Wieslaw Maslowski of the Naval Postgraduate School in California. And not for either ice cap. Nor for 2012. It was for the northern summer sea ice, and was based on the 28% drop in minimum extent between summer 2006 and summer 2007 being a tipping point rather than, as it turned out, a bad year.
And the prediction was "inside five to seven years" which was about 2013-2014 not 2012.
And while the denialiosphere will use one paper and claim that it discredits the entire fields of thermodynamics, optics and earth science, it doesn't.
But even then they don't usually claim that it was a prediction of total ice loss of Greenland (Which would raise sea levels about 7 metres), much less Antarctica (Which would raise sea levels a further 58 metres).
Congratulations. You've managed to hit a whole new level of wrong.
When are people going to stop falling for this
Oh, the irony.
They have been CATASTROPHICALLY wrong every single time.
Wrong again.
The models have been improving, but even Hansen's 1981 model is pretty close, if a little conservate. Since the late 80s, they've been pretty much bang on the nose. [realclimate.org]
Re:Again (Score: 5, Informative)
by cunniff ( 264218 ) on Wednesday February 11, 2026 @04:29PM (#65983184)
No they didn't. Sea ice area may be somewhat increased. But overall volume has gone done dramatically - https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3115... [nasa.gov]
Re:Again (Score: 5, Insightful)
by Powercntrl ( 458442 ) on Wednesday February 11, 2026 @04:48PM (#65983252)
Mars is already a completely unlivable hellscape of a planet. Economically and technologically speaking, it's far easier to just not screw up Earth any worse than it already is than terraform Mars.
Re:Again (Score: 5, Informative)
by Truth_Quark ( 219407 ) on Wednesday February 11, 2026 @07:42PM (#65983658)
Name one climate prediction over the last 40 years that came close to truth.
Here's an analysis of how the major models have preformed [realclimate.org], with respect to global mean surface temperature predictions.
The one from the early 80s was a bit conservative, but they've all been pretty close since then.
Perhaps you can link to a few of these papers you think got it wrong?
In 2006, former vice-president Al Gore projected that unless drastic measures were implemented, the planet would hit an irreversible “point of no return” by 2016. Game over.
We've past 350 ppm of CO2, which is the level that will come with the high-cost high casualty impacts of greater than 1.5C of warming. Currently we're at 427 ppm.
So Gore hasn't been shown to be wrong. Perhaps the problems is that you don't understand that it takes decades for half the warming from an increase in CO2 to have occurred. Ice-albedo feedback in particular takes centuries.
Nor Pachuri.
James Hansen, drew a line in the sand testifying before Congress in June 2008, on the dangers of greenhouse gases: “We’re toast if we don’t get on a very different path. This is the last chance.”
Do you have any evidence that he was wrong? Or are you hoping, without basing that hope on any facts that you can point to?
Re:Again (Score: 5, Informative)
by Truth_Quark ( 219407 ) on Wednesday February 11, 2026 @09:50PM (#65983868)
We are 10 years past Al Gores, "Point of no return". So, are you saying that you think that there is no longer any action we can take that would avoid a complete disaster?
Every kilogram of CO2 makes it worse. But the opportunity to keep the earth below 1.5 degrees of warming, passed about the time Gore was speaking of. 8 degrees of warming is worse than 7.5 degrees of warming.
Ice sheets are growing.
It blows me away that you can post in a thread with multiple links to how much the ice sheets are shedding mass, and claim that the Ice sheets are growing.
[B]etween 2002 and 2025, Antarctica shed approximately 135 gigatons of ice per year [nasa.gov].
[B]etween 2002 and 2025, Greenland shed approximately 264 gigatons of ice per year [nasa.gov].
As for Nor, you named him but typed nothing.
Nor Pachuri, as in neither Pachuri. As in "you haven't provided evidence that he was wrong either".
Because probably he was the head of the UN climate panel, supposedly an EXPERT, and he stated that the point of no return was 4 years earlier than Gore.
That's not from his work. His background is engineering and economics. The IPCC is half a dozen people. The EXPERTS are the thousands of scientists who volunteer their time to the working groups.
But he's wasn't wrong either.
X year passes, same statements made, only change is now it is Y year!
Can you please link me to a couple or few instances of where the same statements have been published by a scientific body, but the year backdated?
Because a lot of the other stuff you've said here has been opposite to the facts, so I worry that you're mistaken about this too.
Look at what they implement if you want to know why they yell. Massive, dirty lithium mines, and other heavy metal mining operations stripping the earth for electric car batteries.
Oh, good to see you're concerned about the environment. Is it only the impact of lithium mines that concerns you, and those heavy metals that are used for batteries? Because Humanity uses many resources for many things.
A single 3 Megawatt (MW) wind turbine requires 335 tons of steel, 4.7 tons of copper, 3 tons of aluminum, 2 tons of rare earths and 1,200 tons of concrete.
Infrastructure takes resources. Roads. Coal Plants. Bridges. Wind Turbines. Wind turbines produce the cheapest electricity there is with no fuel costs, no fuel logistics, and without greenhouse emissions during operation. You're welcome to be a luddite, but if you're concerned about concrete, shouldn't you start complaining about roads?
They cost more in energy, created mostly by fossil fuels to create than they will ever offset.
Nope.
The embodied energy in a wind turbine, that is, the energy used in its manufacture, transport, erection and operation is generally paid back within 6-12 months of operation. [todayshomeowner.com]
Those massive composite blades last 20 -25 years and to this date they have no idea how to recycle any of the blade.
Carbon fibre and fibreglass aren't easy to recycle, but:
1) Not impossible: Carbon Rivers Makes Wind Turbine Blade Recycling and Upcycling a Reality With Support From DOE [energy.gov]
2) Represent nearly no part of the mass of the turbine 90% or so of which can be recycled
We are regulating heavily, subsidizing and diverting energy to, "Green Technologies" that kill the environment.
No mate. That's fossil fuels
Re: This is so incredibly much bullshit (Score: 5, Insightful)
by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) on <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Wednesday February 11, 2026 @05:30PM (#65983364)
Nobody gives a fuck whether the climate before we existed would have supported us. What matters is now and this is an unprecedented situation with previously unseen rates of change.
Re:Benign? (Score: 5, Insightful)
by Weirsbaski ( 585954 ) on Wednesday February 11, 2026 @05:32PM (#65983376)
Rate of change matters. Just because I can use the brakes in my car to reduce speed slowly doesn't mean stopping by hitting a brick wall at full speed is at all safe.
Ecosystems need time to adjust to new temperatures, so they don't collapse.