Top all-time · #3105
Andrew Dessler
Personal blog · theclimatebrink.comscienceeconomics
Andrew Dessler writes The Climate Brink, a personal blog at theclimatebrink.com about science and economics. Since 2023, 25 different Hacker News readers have linked it 32 times, most often “The Scariest Climate Plot in the World (2023)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-26, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (15) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Andrew Dessler's climate blog for commentary on climate science, heat records, sea level, and responses to government climate reports and critiques of warming studies and energy debates.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 15 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
The Choice is Ours: Climate Disaster or a Sustainable Future.
Most-linked posts?
- The Scariest Climate Plot in the World (2023)2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2026-02-11
- On The Death of RCP8.52 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-05-26
What Hacker News says?
Former CEO of AXA, a major French insurer, famously announced that a world at +4°C would be "uninsurrable" [1]. That was 10 years ago. It's true that most predictions about climate are wrong - most of the time, they're optimistic. (Not always, fortunately [2]) [1] https://www.leparisien.fr/economie/business/special-cop21-un... [2] https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/emissions-are-no-longer-fo...
Comment linking /p/emissions-are-no-longer-following
on “Is the world becoming uninsurable?”Submitted How renewables are saving Texans billions as a story · 131 points
HN discussionAnother take from a climate researcher on how the DOE report misrepresents (their) science: https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/how-the-doe-and-epa-used-a... A coordinated response is being prepared by climate researchers debunking the whole thing, but the news story has already passed so I don’t know whether it will matter.
Comment linking /p/how-the-doe-and-epa-used-and-misused
on “US to rewrite its past national climate reports”Submitted The Strongest El Niño Ever as a story · 43 points
HN discussion> A primary hypothesized reason for the literally-off-the-charts heat of the past 15 months or so is that regulations that cleaned up the amount of sunlight-reflecting aerosols in container ship fuel was having the effect of letting more sunlight reach Earth; the idea is that the aerosols had previously been limiting the amount of global warming that would have shown up earlier. I see this repeated a lot on HN, but…
Comment linking /p/2023s-unexpected-and-unexplained
on “Clouds vanish during a solar eclipse”Submitted Most of the world has recently set all-time heat records as a story · 16 points
HN discussionI wish it was hyperbole. Describing our crazy world makes you sound crazy now. You seem to take me somewhat seriously so I'll develop a bit, but it's an HN comment so I can only go so far. The paper I linked or the author of Ghost in the Machine take hours to explain this way better than me. People behind GenAI are fascists: for some it's obvious by now I hope (trump, elon musk). They are otherwise techbros who seek…
Comment linking /p/off-grid-data-centers-have-60-80
on “Microsoft offers voluntary buyouts to a quarter of its workforce”Submitted How climate change is raising your electricity bill as a story · 5 points
HN discussion"Unfortunately, while their radiative forcing estimate is well within the range of others in the literature, their calculation of the resulting warming relies on an overly simplified model that results in a substantial overstating of current warming impacts." , https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/a-problematic-estimate-of-... The conclusions of this paper are being disputed. Read more about that at the page linked abo…
Comment linking /p/a-problematic-estimate-of-warming
on “2023 planetary heat uptake from termination shock of inadvertent geoengineering?”Submitted Canada's boreal wildfires aren't bad forest management as a story · 3 points
HN discussionWhen I want to motivate myself I look at this https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/the-scariest-climate-plot-...
Comment linking /p/the-scariest-climate-plot-in-the
on “The risk of a hothouse Earth trajectory”Submitted A problematic estimate of warming from low-sulfur marine fuels as a story · 3 points
HN discussion> USHCN This was the network that had heat island issues because it was volunteer stations highly biased towards urban areas. It was superseded by USCRN (which you linked to) in 2005. USCRN is 114 stations intentionally situated away away from development. USCRN shows MORE warming than global networks, around .3* C per decade, and it recorded 2024 as the warmest year on record. The article you are indirectly citing…
Comment linking /p/the-most-accurate-record-of-us-temperatures
on “How Climate Resilient Are the Largest Cities?”Submitted Visualizing a summer of extremes in 7 charts as a story · 3 points
HN discussion> have always been considered by many in the climate science community to be underestimating climate change. This is exactly wrong as it relates to RCP 8.5. A number of research papers came out basically showing how 8.5 was completely implausible, and it was only after these papers were widely cited and reached consensus did the IPCC retire 8.5. This article by some of the original authors of one of those papers exp…
Comment linking /p/on-the-death-of-rcp85
on “Magnifica Humanitas (Encyclical Letter)”Submitted What if the world hadn't built wind and solar? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionIt was negligible. https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/the-climate-impact-of-the-...
Comment linking /p/the-climate-impact-of-the-hunga-tonga
on “July 2023 was the hottest month on record”Submitted The Scariest Climate Plot in the World (2023) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionhttps://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/the-scariest-climate-plot-...
Comment linking /p/the-scariest-climate-plot-in-the
on “Sea level much higher than assumed in most coastal hazard assessments”Submitted Exploring the drivers of modern global warming as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> You also mention the time spent waiting for nuclear to come online but fail to consider that PV has consistently failed to reduce fossil fuel usage (in absolute or percentage numbers) even as the market share of it has skyrocketed. You should look at flows rather than stocks. > However, stocks are a lagging indicator. Stocks follow flows; the car fleet follows car sales. Flows are the leading indicator. In the ear…
Comment linking /cp/138702709
on “Microsoft is going nuclear to power its AI ambitions”Submitted The energy use of agentic AI as a story · 1 points
HN discussionAlso at the same time complaining up 'mismanagement' of Canadian wildfires: * https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/canadas-boreal-wildfires-a... * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48977607
Comment linking /p/canadas-boreal-wildfires-arent-just
on “Federal cuts threaten wildfire research as Western fire risk rises”Submitted Raw Data, Wrong Answers as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThe "It is impossible until is beyond reasonable doubt proven possible" thinking is backwards and quite uninteresting. One thing is certain, nuclear power is not proven to work economically at scale yet, despite 70 years of subsidies. This, quite biased, article has an interesting take on the question. Look to flows rather than stocks. > Rarely mentioned is the fact that renewables have been taking an increasing sha…
Comment linking /cp/138702709
on “Sellafield: 'bottomless pit of hell, money and despair'”Submitted A primer on cloud seeding (2024) as a story · 1 points
HN discussion> Yes, pine is flammable. So what? Should we replace it with wood that doesn't burn? Different trees react differently to fire. The forest fires of (e.g.) the American west are different than the forest fires in Canada: > The forest-mismanagement argument was, in fairness, based on real evidence from some regions. In the frequent-fire dry forests of the western US that are dominated by ponderosa pine and mixed conif…
Comment linking /p/canadas-boreal-wildfires-arent-just
on “French firefighters face 'pyrocumulonimbus' for first time”Submitted On The Death of RCP8.5 as a story · 1 points
HN discussionRepresenting that as a "climate spiral" would make it unnecessary to adjust for the seasons, and the original data could be used instead of a statistical view. It makes it easy for anyone to see the trend. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_spiral - https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/visualizing-daily-global-t... - https://www.climate-lab-book.ac.uk/spirals/
Comment linking /p/visualizing-daily-global-temperature
on “The Graph That Should Be Front-Page News”Submitted The AI-Augmented Scientist as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
