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What can a technologist do about climate change?

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Re: What can a technologist do about climate change?

#151

Post by grenzbegriff »

clock_tower wrote: post #139
grenzbegriff wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think about the same things and ask the same question. My current plan is to save most of my money so I can reach financial independence very early. I'm 25 now, I'll be financially independent by 27, meaning I'll have enough money invested to live indefinitely on interest/dividends. My total expenses/spending is $25k/year and I'm sure I can keep them there if I want to. Most people who start making a silicon valley…

Congratulations! I spent my 20s having spotty, unpredictable employment and chasing large personal projects that never paid off, so I'm looking at financial independence around 43 instead. ($55,000/year of dividend income, ignoring capital gains; this will be after the 15% tax on dividends.) I wish I'd taken this possibility seriously at an earlier point in my life; I commend you for doing that, and I hope you find g…

Thanks :)

43 still gives you about 20 more years than most people to do something other than earning money to spend! Imagine what you'll get to do with that kind of time.

I love hearing from other people who have a similar plan.

And of course I'll suggest you could be independent sooner if you reduce some spending. ;) But that's your tradeoff to consider.

Re: What can a technologist do about climate change?

#152

Post by uberdog »

chaosphere2112 wrote: post #133

I work on climate software at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory[1]. My team works with big data and visualization. We support ACME[2] (the Department of Energy's climate modeling program), PCMDI[3] (a team that's been evaluating climate models since 1989), and a number of other projects and groups. If you are interested in what you can do for the climate, we need all the help we can get. Our code may not be the…

"NOTE: This is a Career Indefinite position."

Sold!

Re: What can a technologist do about climate change?

#153

Post by chaosphere2112 »

uberdog wrote: post #152
chaosphere2112 wrote: post #133

I work on climate software at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory[1]. My team works with big data and visualization. We support ACME[2] (the Department of Energy's climate modeling program), PCMDI[3] (a team that's been evaluating climate models since 1989), and a number of other projects and groups. If you are interested in what you can do for the climate, we need all the help we can get. Our code may not be the…

"NOTE: This is a Career Indefinite position." Sold!

Career Indefinite means that if the project you're on ends, the lab will keep you floating for a (short) period of time till you find another source of funding.

Re: What can a technologist do about climate change?

#154

Post by grenzbegriff »

jkaunisv1 wrote: post #148
grenzbegriff wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think about the same things and ask the same question. My current plan is to save most of my money so I can reach financial independence very early. I'm 25 now, I'll be financially independent by 27, meaning I'll have enough money invested to live indefinitely on interest/dividends. My total expenses/spending is $25k/year and I'm sure I can keep them there if I want to. Most people who start making a silicon valley…

By my quick math you'd need at least $500k to live off the interest. Are you investing in a plain way (ie. index fund or similar) and just have a really good salary? It sounds like you're banking upwards of $75k/year.

Yes just index funds, making about $200k/year pretax if I count salary+stock+bonus+401k match.

I'll admit, not everyone makes $200k this early. But most people could be financially independent much sooner than they think if they realized that spending doesn't make them happier and started saving instead -- so I suggest this when I get the chance. :)

Lots of people have no idea where their money is going because they don't track spending.

Re: What can a technologist do about climate change?

#155

Post by danieltillett »

DennisP wrote: post #142
danieltillett wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not just the the total mass of concrete needed, it is the technical requirements and the difficulty of building the nuclear structures that uses massive amounts of carbon derived energy.

I'd like to see specific numbers on how that difficulty translates into carbon emissions. Estimates I've seen that showed large CO2 emissions from nuclear were wildly overblown. In one case, they assumed that nuclear power would lead to full-scale nuclear war and included the carbon impact of the war. In any case, if the NRC would let companies start building molten salt reactors, we could have much simpler construct…

>I'd like to see specific numbers on how that difficulty translates into carbon emissions.

So would I. Getting good data in this area is near impossible.

For something complex you can use the rough rule of thumb that the dollar cost is proportional to the emissions - as complexity increases the actual emissions converge towards the economy wide average. On this basis the emissions from building a current generation nuclear power plant is very high.

Re: What can a technologist do about climate change?

#157

Post by epistasis »

hueving wrote: post #120
epistasis wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, you find my comment to be fairly ad hominem but you don't the slide deck you shared? Basically all the "data" and arguments that he's presenting are cherry picked to be on the edge of plausibility, but as soon as you poke at them at all they fall part. It's really just a standard piece of denialist schlock. For example on slide 4 look at his plot and compare to the wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.or…

>Something balanced like the IPCC will be far more solid information, with proper citations, that can be backed up. How could an organization dedicated to a topic filled with people who dedicated their life to said topic be trusted to have a balanced view of whether or not that topic has an impact? Just purely from a conflict of interest perspective, it seems similar to asking for a balanced view of religion from the…

That seems like an argument for getting programming best practices advice from an auto mechanic.

Climate scientists are not dedicated to advancing the idea of anthropogenic climate change, they are dedicated to studying the climate, where ever that leads them. If this were not true, then some of the contrarian scientists in the field would have much stronger criticisms of the work. As it is, their criticisms are relegated to rather minor details, without any good rebuttals of the primary thrust.

If you want to make the claim that the IPCC is not balanced on this, then there should be much stronger criticisms of the science in the IPCC, rather than the easily knocked down trivialities that appear in denialist memes.

Re: What can a technologist do about climate change?

#158

Post by spot »

The model-driven section (ability to write models, publish models, and for them to become the standard for public decision making) is important to me and I am working on solving it through the Beaker Notebook, an environment for data modeling, visualization, communication, and publication.

Check out http://BeakerNotebook.com and especially https://pub.beakernotebook.com/#/publications

The final step of making authoring and execution work in the cloud is still under development...

Re: What can a technologist do about climate change?

#159

Post by codeshaman »

Fantastic article with so much information.. I feel humbled when I see how much work people put into these things and how great the result looks like !

Haven't read it all yet and forgive me if I'm repeating what's already mentioned there, but I would also add the following..

I think that climate change is the consequence of people doing too much X. One way to curb it would be for people to do less X or do (more) Y instead. No governments, no grants, you and me - the people, aka users.

But that involves changing the people's behaviour, which is very hard. Or is it ? Well, advertising works quite well and we've become very good at manipulating and determining people to do (buy) all kinds of things.

What if we used all that ad tech and all that exposure that tech corporations have and implement a global 'climate change' propaganda ?

This can be done starting tomorrow.

Microsoft Windows popping up an alert "Do you really need all your lights on in your house ?"

Facebook wall containing ads encouraging people to be less wasteful, respect nature and think about the future (we can do incredibly cool ads nowadays!).

iPhones displaying "plant a tree !" on the home screen with the button to actually schedule it in the calendar.

Google search returning a 'sponsored' link to climate-healing projects ...

There's so much, we, the tech people working at the big corps can do today .. We don't need startups for that, we already have most of the eyeballs of the planet in our operating systems, social networks or search engines.

It's a matter of delivering the right information and people will follow. We all want to do this, regardless of country or race or religion.

So, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple , etc - why not allocate 1% of your UIs to fixing the climate ?

You can reach everyone on the planet and we are ready to do it, just give us some pointers, remind us to do the good stuff and we will, because that's how advertising works !

I'd happily discuss this more, so let me know if anyone's interested ;).

Re: What can a technologist do about climate change?

#160

Post by sloppycee »

ilaksh wrote: post #53

I actually believe 'climate change' is a type of cover for geopolitical issues related to the petrodollar. I believe that humans affect the climate, but the real scientific basis for that being the primary driver of climate change isn't there. But they are using 'da earf is melting' as a substitute for another truth that is just as scary. That truth is that the United States and its closest allies use about twice as…

Shockingly, passenger vehicles make up 43% of US greenhouse gas emissions. [1]

Your comment made me look into it since my intuition was that you were wrong (that personal transportation does not contribute _that_ much).

1. http://www3.epa.gov/otaq/climate/documents/420f13033a.pdf (page 2)

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