What can a technologist do about climate change? • Hacker News Board

Re: What can a technologist do about climate change?

#181

Post by adenylyl » Tue, Nov 24, 2015, 9:57 PM UTC

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…

"Anticipated Clearance Level: Q (Position will be cleared to this level)."

... why would someone working on climate modeling software need a clearance for nuclear weapon design information?

Re: What can a technologist do about climate change?

#182

Post by emcq » Tue, Nov 24, 2015, 9:57 PM UTC

nabla9 wrote: post #15

>Here’s an opinion you might not hear much — I feel that one effective approach to addressing climate change is contributing to the development of Julia. Julia is a modern technical language, intended to replace Matlab, ... Well that was awkward transition.

Completely agree. I like Bret's stuff and love Julia but that section seemed very weird and almost preachy. He seems a little out of his element because a lot of physicists doing earth modeling use compiled languages like Fortran and C/C++ for the big simulations and python for the smaller stuff. Julia is cool though and a great substitute for the python stuff. It won't implicitly solve distributed computing and the computational problems people have to create large models. Unfortunately being closer to the metal can give big wins in terms of communication (mpi), avoiding memory copies, using simd compiler intrinsics and gpus, etc. and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

Re: What can a technologist do about climate change?

#183

Post by merpnderp » Tue, Nov 24, 2015, 9:57 PM UTC

superuser2 wrote: post #146

merpnderp wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Peak uranium is about as believable as peak oil. And given that uranium is a tiny fraction on the operating cost of a nuclear plant, it is viable at much higher prices. Which means much lower yield ores can be used for fuel. | And then there is thorium, which we have more of than we know what to do with. Then there's mining Uranium from the Ocean which puts a ceiling on the price of Uranium at 15x the current price.…

Why is peak oil not believable? There might be more of than we thought, but we're pretty sure there's not infinitely much. It has to happen eventually.

When I say peak oil isn't believable, I mean in the sense that over the last 15 years, especially before shale oil, the west was bombarded by "experts" saying peak oil had already occurred, and oil would be unafforadable in just a few years as prices skyrocketed. Any argument that involved technological progress in reducing the cost of mining hard to get oil was mocked and lambasted as hopelessly naive.

I of course don't believe that there's an infinite supply of oil. Only that we haven't exhausted the millions of years of dead trees, which before the the emergence of white fungus with the ability to eat them, covered the Earth a hundred meters deep in some places.

Re: What can a technologist do about climate change?

#184

Post by vonmoltke » Tue, Nov 24, 2015, 10:00 PM UTC

danieltillett wrote: post #143

XorNot wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the time honoured tradition of shooting ourselves in the foot by making better the enemy of best? Neither concrete, nor uranium mining have to burn fossil fuels (and CO2 sequesting concrete is a real thing). They are decoupled from their fuel source, but the lack of incentives to improve that situation at present (due to the near entirety of electrical generation being fossil fuels) is the bigger problem.

Making cement by its nature releases a large amount of CO2 and accounts for 5% of total emissions [1]. I do agree that we are not really creating the right incentives to improve things. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_conc...

In addition to what XorNot7 said, the amount of concrete needed to build a nuclear power plant is trivial compared to the total amount consumed annually by the construction industry.

Re: What can a technologist do about climate change?

#185

Post by DennisP » Tue, Nov 24, 2015, 10:03 PM UTC

danieltillett wrote: post #155

DennisP wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

Nuclear plants cost a lot up front but they produce a lot of power for a long time. Per MWh they're not that expensive compared to renewables. Taking the government's estimates for capital cost, we have onshore wind at $58/MWh, nuclear at $70/MWh, hydro $71, advanced coal $77, solar PV $109, offshore wind $168, solar thermal $192.

But I don't think anyone would claim that the construction of a modern coal plant has significant emissions compared to actually burning the coal.

https://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/electricity_generation.cfm

Re: What can a technologist do about climate change?

#186

Post by chaosphere2112 » Tue, Nov 24, 2015, 10:05 PM UTC

adenylyl wrote: post #181

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…

"Anticipated Clearance Level: Q (Position will be cleared to this level)." ... why would someone working on climate modeling software need a clearance for nuclear weapon design information?

The lab clears basically all salaried employees at L or Q; if there's any chance that you might look at classified data some day (IE: if you want to interview at another group internally, or have some useful expertise that can be leveraged somewhere else), it saves everyone time and energy if you're already a Q. There's some financial reasons not to do it, but I think the math works out in favor of not running multiple levels of background check on every new hire (if they were to give you an L and then a Q).

Re: What can a technologist do about climate change?

#187

Post by oberstein » Tue, Nov 24, 2015, 10:08 PM UTC

jbrande wrote: post #138

oberstein wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you have treated all symptoms and stopped them from arising again, the disease is effectively cured even if you still carry it. The final solution will be complete mastery over our planetary weather, it's better we do that sooner than later. Tsunami and earthquake deaths total far above terrorism deaths, we only need funding to fight terrorism to the extent that they get in the way of building to that final solu…

You are vastly, VASTLY, overestimating our understanding of the biology, chemistry, geology, & incredibly complex web of interdependencies and relationships that make up the environment we live in. Much simpler to solve at the source (whatever actions are directly causing the damage) than the falacy of thinking we understand and have accounted for every possible permutation of events that will cascade after dumping m…

No, I recognize it's a hard problem, that's why we should be devoting significant resources to doing things now.

I get the point about unintended consequences with cascading problems (and cascading solutions to the new problems) (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2743879) but the odds of screwing up here are much less than screwing up on AGI, whose work has already significantly started and may be completed first anyway making this whole discussion moot. Geoengineering is risky, but it's not as risky as other things, including inaction, which as the status quo guarantees loss of thousands of lives. Even if the climate change alarmists' greatest fears come true we still easily have 50 years to try things on smaller scales before time is up. Anyway I think it's a lot more feasible for a strong nation to lead a technological solution than to convince all strong nations to curb their development. Call it a plan B if you must, but at some point I expect climate change alarmists are going to say something like "China and Russia and India aren't playing ball hard enough, their emissions are still causing global warming that will end humanity in x years unless they immediately reduce to the levels of the USA and the EU whose combined efforts bought us y years but it's still not enough, so it's time for war to make them."

Re: What can a technologist do about climate change?

#188

Post by xigency » Tue, Nov 24, 2015, 10:10 PM UTC

xigency wrote: post #70

Honestly, reading even a little bit of this article leads to the conclusion that the only solution is to switch to nuclear energy as our primary source of energy. I'm sorry, but wind kites or wind blimps aren't going to substantially affect carbon emissions.

  > Nuclear power
  > I didn’t mention nuclear because I don’t know much about it. 
  > See Stewart Brand’s book Whole Earth Discipline for an optimistic 
  > take from a recent convert. (Ironically published five months 
  > before Fukushima, but his points still stand.)

I haven't read the book (Whole Earth Discipline), but it seems to have been published at least a year and a half before the Tōhoku earthquake. In any case, advocating nuclear power before an earthquake or tsunami would only be ironic if the author were advocating building new reactors near coastlines or fault lines and allowing them to lapse on safety mechanisms.

The alternative would be to argue for the whole city of Tokyo to drastically alter its energy profile so that an entire nuclear reactor weren't needed, in addition to other plants, to power the city.

Re: What can a technologist do about climate change?

#189

Post by mouly » Tue, Nov 24, 2015, 10:10 PM UTC

Bret Victor has provided a first principles approach to solving climate change. I work at SolarCity we take a similar systems thinking approach and tackle the problems at their fundamental level. We have been vertically integrating the business from manufacturing highest efficiency solar panels, mounting systems that enable fast installation, electrical systems that can work with the grid, financing for homeowners that don't require any downpayment.

Our Software engineering team specifically works on improving efficiency of our sales workflow, geo spatial systems that support our installation crew, grid systems that monitor and work with the grid, and providing the best experience for our customers.

I'm happy to talk to anyone who is interested in joining us. Shoot me an email at mkumaraswamy@solarcity.com

Our career's page: http://solar.solarcity.com/careers/software-engineering/

Re: What can a technologist do about climate change?

#190

Post by suyash » Tue, Nov 24, 2015, 10:12 PM UTC

Do you find that navigation in the middle annoying, specially since user has to scroll to find it again. Content is great but design didn't quite do justice to the research.