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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?

#231

Post by grenzbegriff »

likeapub wrote: post #228
grenzbegriff wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I expect to have $500k by 27. No, I don't have a house, I split an apartment with a roommate close to work so I have a very short commute.

500k is enough for retirement? are you going to live in a cheap city?

It's enough for me to live the way I live right now, indefinitely. I currently live in silicon valley paying very high rent ($1100/mo). If I didn't want to work I could live somewhere a lot cheaper.

"Retirement" means different things to different people. I was talking about financial independence, which means I can choose to retire, but more likely it will mean I find work I enjoy more, without considering the pay as much.

There are some risks, nothing is guaranteed: - I could have health problems that cost me too much even with health insurance - The market could crash and never recover

But if the market crashes and doesn't recover, maybe I'd have to go back to work for a while. Health problems are a risk for everyone, and no amount of money is going to guarantee good health. However, I bet that leaving the office job early will reduce the risk of health problems overall anyway.

Re: What can a technologist do about climate change?

#233

Post by IanDrake »

personomas wrote: post #225
Jemaclus wrote: post #57

I've asked this question a few times but haven't really gotten a satisfactory answer. There are a lot of what I might call "epic problems" out there. Malaria, homelessness, HIV, refugees, war, climate change, income inequality, gender inequality, hate crimes. I don't know anything about creating vaccines or cures for malaria or HIV. I don't have a degree in social work or behavior science. I don't have any experience…

Listen to God, and he'll tell you what to do! Anyways, many "epic" problems are caused by our own sin: hate crimes, war, homelessness, gender inequality, etc, etc. Our sin is the cause of these problems. Not only sin found else where in the world, but our sin. So here's a starting point: love thy neighbor as thy self, read the bible with your heart, and rejoice for Jesus died for our sins! Finally, love God! And all…

I'm not sure why you're getting down voted. You're viewpoint is just as sane as the guy a few comments above (grenzbegriff) who thinks a lot about what he can do, but is too busy making sure he never again needs to work a day in his life. Heart warming stuff.

As an atheist who is in the middle of listening to 90 hours of the King James bible, I think you should listen to the bible with your ears, not your heart.

If you do, you will find all sorts of bigotry, slavery, bigamy, intolerance, and stonings for women to didn't yell loud enough while they were being raped. To be clear, this is the stuff God is cool with.

In the bible God is a fickle asshole who can't make up his mind most of the time. One minute he's pissed because men want a king to reign over them, the next minute he's picking the king. One minute he's infallible, the next he's taking advice from humans. The one thing God is really, really sure about is our penis. He wants it circumcised.

Re: What can a technologist do about climate change?

#234

Post by MichaelDickens »

jacobolus wrote: post #215
jerf wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is absolutely, positively nothing wrong with making "lots" of money in a conventional manner, and donating it to an effective charity taking on the target task. In fact, in the spirit of the Kantian imperative, if everybody actually dropped their "merely productive" jobs and then tried to "directly solve poverty", we'd have just made the poverty problem much, much worse! You may want to Google the term "effecti…

Funny enough, there’s a link at the top of Bret’s essay here to an article describing how the community/movement excited about “effective altruism” has gone off the deep end worrying about the singularity and strong AI (not to mention proselytizing / self promotion) while ignoring more obvious concerns like poverty or climate change. http://www.vox.com/2015/8/10/9124145/effective-altruism-glob... > Effective altruism…

According to the 2014 effective altruism survey [1], about 80% of effective altruists surveyed donate to global poverty and only about 5% donate to organizations working on AI risk.

[1] http://eahub.org/sites/effectivealtruismhub.com/files/survey...

Re: What can a technologist do about climate change?

#235

Post by saalweachter »

Jemaclus wrote: post #57

I've asked this question a few times but haven't really gotten a satisfactory answer. There are a lot of what I might call "epic problems" out there. Malaria, homelessness, HIV, refugees, war, climate change, income inequality, gender inequality, hate crimes. I don't know anything about creating vaccines or cures for malaria or HIV. I don't have a degree in social work or behavior science. I don't have any experience…

Get involved in local government.

As someone else pointed out, most epic problems are social problems. Building a moon base was a technical challenge in like the fifties, and now it's an organizational problem of getting a hundred million people to agree to do it.

Government is our primary mechanism for solving organizational problems; you can invent other ones, but why bother?

Our government -- assuming you're in the US or a similar country -- is a citizen government. While there are a lot of bureaucrats involved in carrying out policy and a some of our higher elected offices become full-time jobs, the vast majority of the policy makers are ordinary people taking time out of their ordinary lives to decide which problems we want to tackle and how.

If you have reached a point of stability in your life and are looking for a way give back, start hanging around your local town, city, or county meetings. You'll find a lot of opportunities to just jump in and start helping -- events and ongoing activities you can lend a hand with, volunteer advisory boards you can lend your knowledge to. And if you find an area where no one seems interested in doing something, well, that's an opportunity for you to run for local office and try to start something new.

Re: What can a technologist do about climate change?

#236

Post by DennisP »

danieltillett wrote: post #229
DennisP wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that report is interesting. It says, "Nuclear and renewable generation generally have a low carbon footprint." In the charts, nuclear has a significantly lower carbon footprint than solar PV, geothermal, and small/medium wind, and only a slightly higher footprint than large wind.

Getting accurate information on the carbon footprint of nuclear energy is hard. The best paper I have seen on this is Life Cycle Greenhouse Gas Emissions of Nuclear Electricity Generation [1]. Their range is from 9 to 110 g CO2-eq/kWh by 2050. 1. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1530-9290.2012....

Ok let's go with that. By comparison, coal is around 900, and gas around 500, according to the U.K. document and the EIA [1].

Once we have molten salt reactors, nuclear's impact should drop further, both because they need much less concrete, and because they need much less uranium. Even Terrestrial Energy's basic version is 6 times more fuel-efficient than conventional light-water reactors. Transatomic's is 75 times better than LWRs, and can be fueled by our existing nuclear waste stockpiles, which could power all of civilization for decades, no mining required.

But maybe you want to stay with currently deployed technology. In that case, you have to take into account that we mostly back up renewables with natural gas, which is five to fifty times worse than nuclear.

1. https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=74&t=11

Re: What can a technologist do about climate change?

#237

Post by criddell »

snowwrestler wrote: post #128
criddell wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That has nothing to do with whether a global temperature increase of 3 degrees would be healthy for the planet. Don't leave us hanging here!

It helps to think about temperature as what it really measures: the amount of energy stored in the system. A small room that increases by a few degrees is storing only slightly more energy. Humans won't really notice it. A global biosphere is a much larger volume, so a few degrees stores much more energy, compared to the human scale. And that energy is what powers our weather. Can you think of a weather system you wo…

So, if we had the technology to do it, how many degrees should we cool the planet? Could we eliminate hurricanes and other catastrophic weather?

Re: What can a technologist do about climate change?

#238

Post by nether »

Jemaclus wrote: post #57

I've asked this question a few times but haven't really gotten a satisfactory answer. There are a lot of what I might call "epic problems" out there. Malaria, homelessness, HIV, refugees, war, climate change, income inequality, gender inequality, hate crimes. I don't know anything about creating vaccines or cures for malaria or HIV. I don't have a degree in social work or behavior science. I don't have any experience…

I'm curious as to what motivates your question. Is there an expectation that a software developer could contribute to climatology more than a climatologist could to software problems?

Re: What can a technologist do about climate change?

#239

Post by tvanantwerp »

saalweachter wrote: post #235
Jemaclus wrote: post #57

I've asked this question a few times but haven't really gotten a satisfactory answer. There are a lot of what I might call "epic problems" out there. Malaria, homelessness, HIV, refugees, war, climate change, income inequality, gender inequality, hate crimes. I don't know anything about creating vaccines or cures for malaria or HIV. I don't have a degree in social work or behavior science. I don't have any experience…

Get involved in local government. As someone else pointed out, most epic problems are social problems. Building a moon base was a technical challenge in like the fifties, and now it's an organizational problem of getting a hundred million people to agree to do it. Government is our primary mechanism for solving organizational problems; you can invent other ones, but why bother? Our government -- assuming you're in th…

Getting involved with local government may help to solve your local problems, but won't help with the epic ones. And from my own experience living and working in DC, getting involved with the federal government gives you only a very small chance of making a dent in whatever your pet issue is. I've worked with people who've lived here for 30+ years fighting for a single issue who've failed to make any meaningful progress.

Re: What can a technologist do about climate change?

#240

Post by musesum »

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…

I used to refer to LLNL sankey diagrams all the time: https://flowcharts.llnl.gov -- really good work.

There is also the global model from the IEA: http://www.iea.org/etp/explore/

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