If you're an engineer and you want to help enable sustainable deployment of solar power infrastructure, my company Genability is hiring for all kinds of roles right now. http://genability.com/careers/work_with_us.html
What can a technologist do about climate change?
31–40 of 293 posts
Re: What can a technologist do about climate change?
#32Weather resistant building design, for example, concrete dome construction.
Re: What can a technologist do about climate change?
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow, that slide presentation is a masterpiece in how to deceive engineers. He's not looking at it "as an engineer," he's looking at everything with preconceived notions and trying to cherry pick his way to his conclusion.
That's fairly ad hominem. Can you give some examples?
It's pretty obvious that there is a clear bias from the beginning, and the tone is revealing as well.
Re: What can a technologist do about climate change?
#34I still like Burt Rutan's take on the AGW question ( http://rps3.com/Files/AGW/EngrCritique.AGW-Science.v4.3.pdf ). He looks at it as an engineer, using generally-accepted data. His conclusion is that the alarmists are wrong.
What terrible arguments:
The temperature trend is so slight that, were the global average temperature change which has taken place during the 20th and 21st centuries were to occur in an ordinary room, most of the people in the room would be unaware of it.
Well, yes, people are bad at noticing gradually increasing temperatures. A room full of people can heat up from 23°C to 26°C without most people noticing.
That has nothing to do with whether a global temperature increase of 3 degrees would be healthy for the planet.
Re: What can a technologist do about climate change?
#35Interacting with that graph of world carbon emissions and gradually realizing what it is showing me. Stuff of nightmares (and fantastic interaction design).
If you liked those interactions, I'd check out the iPad app Al Gore / Bret worked on - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-edAGLokak
Re: What can a technologist do about climate change?
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm struggling to figure out why nuclear is lumped in with fossil fuels.
Nuclear is low-carbon, but it's not renewable. Earth has a set amount of uranium that is destroyed when creating energy. Currently we have about 200 years of uranium available for economical extraction. But if we tried to replace all coal with nuclear, we would be out within a few decades. Then we'd need to move to other non-renewable materials (thorium?) or start mining astroids. http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar…
Is that a problem (the non-renewability)? Even if we deplete our available uranium while transitioning to fully renewable energy, we've still quit dumping carbon into the atmosphere. At that point, economic pressures are adequate to force us to renewable energy, I think.
Re: What can a technologist do about climate change?
#37I look at the human-caused part of climate change as a billion or so smaller and easier-to-solve (but still hard) problems. Each one of these billions of problems is a person like you and me who acts without truly knowing what they are doing. Not in the sense of faking our way through life, but that we have only a superficial awareness of the consequences of our habitual or culturally-driven actions. This makes climate change an information problem, and technologists do information splendidly.
It's an information problem because we base much of our behavior on feedback loops. When we get a big electricity bill, we take a closer look and perhaps rely less on our heaters or air-conditioner. When we see the odometer on our car hitting big numbers too soon (and repair bills looming), perhaps we look into a job closer to home. There's thousands of examples, many of which have an impact our our environment.
So if we focused on developing a tool whose sole purpose was to give us quantified feedback on the consequences of our actions - much like how we use utility bills - we might be able to make a real dent in the big problem of climate change and others like it. We already have the pieces for a tool like this (Internet, computers everywhere, software libraries) along with the skills of technologists, so what's needed is the vision and the demand.
I recently wrote these ideas in long form: (https://medium.com/@SteveHazel/we-re-drowning-in-low-quality...)
Re: What can a technologist do about climate change?
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm struggling to figure out why nuclear is lumped in with fossil fuels.
Nuclear is low-carbon, but it's not renewable. Earth has a set amount of uranium that is destroyed when creating energy. Currently we have about 200 years of uranium available for economical extraction. But if we tried to replace all coal with nuclear, we would be out within a few decades. Then we'd need to move to other non-renewable materials (thorium?) or start mining astroids. http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar…
Nuclear is not really low carbon when you take into account the amount of concrete you need to build a modern reactor.
Unless we have a major breakthrough in mining uranium or we actually manage to make breeder reactors safe and cost effective then nuclear is not really a viable option.
Edit. I should have been more precise in my language. By low carbon I am meaning minimal carbon, not just lower carbon. Natural gas is lower carbon, but it is not low carbon.
It really doesn't matter too much because there just isn't enough uranium to make it a viable alternative at the scale we need to have a significant impact on carbon emissions.
Re: What can a technologist do about climate change?
#39I look at the human-caused part of climate change as a billion or so smaller and easier-to-solve (but still hard) problems. Each one of these billions of problems is a person like you and me who acts without truly knowing what they are doing. Not in the sense of faking our way through life, but that we have only a superficial awareness of the consequences of our habitual or culturally-driven actions. This makes clima…
Somewhat towards this end, the University of Michigan has built this: http://lab11.eecs.umich.edu/projects/powerblade/
Re: What can a technologist do about climate change?
#40Technologist can do approximately the same thing about the climate change, that our Sun can do about the average temperature in the Milky Way. Keep calm and carry on! Humanity is not a geological force on this planet. UPD: Lovely stockpile of relevant information though. But I have a better one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfeytbHBPFM . Snows always melt. Look at glaciology data, dudes!
You're absolutely wrong. Here are two examples of human activity having global, negative effects: 1. Our use of CFCs caused global ozone depletion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_depletion#Antarctic_ozon... 2. Our use of leaded gas caused global lead poisoning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraethyllead#History_of_cont...
1. Never heard of mass extinction of penguins caused by the Great Antarctic Ozone Depletion. Antarctic plankton (very _basic_ thing in that ecosystem) is also not depleted. So? What 's so global about that?
2. That one is grossly exaggerated to force people buy some gasoline products. There are local impacts on local human populations, but this is not a global problem and can never be. Total area of all cities and motorways is just 0,5% of land. Everything humanity built on this planet is negligibly small if properly scaled.
Here is what can do a real climate change, for example (and it did). Cyanobacteria long time ago consumed most of "greenhouse" gases from our precious atmosphere and produced oxygen is such quantities that massively extinct themselves, leaving some nice fossils still visible in Australia. Humanity is not even close to that scale of activity.