Heat dome causing record breaking heat wave • Hacker News Board

Re: Heat dome causing record breaking heat wave

#231

Post by cal5k » Wed, Jun 30, 2021, 11:53 PM UTC

andrei_says_ wrote: post #4

Maybe it’s time to signal political leaders that climate collapse is an urgent issue.

Eh, here's the thing: politicians will use whatever crisis is available to them to cynically further their own agendas.

I'm sure plenty of them are tweeting away about how this heatwave is a clear sign of climate change (because that's what their constituents want to hear), and yet any meteorologist worth their salt would be hesitant to make that connection - weather is not climate. Climate is a meta-phenomenon.

When they use climate as cover for whatever policy agenda they intended to pursue anyway, it cheapens the discourse - political opposition that agrees on the facts likely disagrees about the solution set, particularly if it is ideologically-driven, and lumping people into childish categories like "climate deniers" only serves to harden positions.

And yet - a lot of these so-called "climate deniers" will happily buy an electric F-150 because Ford has made an attractive product that makes good choices easier. No need for a rancher in rural Montana to downgrade to a Prius to signal that he cares about the climate.

In the end, politicians are not even the right vehicles for this type of change - there's no good evidence that nation-states can achieve a game-theoretically stable set of climate policies given the harsh economic consequences of taxing the crap out of your country's industrial output. Far better results can be obtained through good old-fashioned free market capitalism.

When good choices are easy to make, those choices will be made. The market will abide.

Re: Heat dome causing record breaking heat wave

#232

Post by eloff » Wed, Jun 30, 2021, 11:54 PM UTC

justshowpost wrote: post #227

I'm concerned how this article speaks about setting records. Setting new records aren't always a good thing. Setting a new record in climate change destroys uncountable organisms affecting the nature system, and eventually humans. By staying ignorant of our impact on the nature system, we dig our own grave.

Nobody, including in this article, thinks breaking these records is a good thing.

Re: Heat dome causing record breaking heat wave

#233

Post by Johnny555 » Wed, Jun 30, 2021, 11:55 PM UTC

state_less wrote: post #175

_ph_ wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't solar be much better for powering desalination than nuclear power? It is way cheaper per energy produced than nuclear, especially in those countries, which need desalination most. Also, it doesn't take a decade to set up. Not even mentioning proliferation issues.

Yes, solar is dirt cheap energy and you wouldn’t need much of a battery (or any?) in this case, since you can store the excess product water in a tank. I power my water maker with about 1400 watts and can make 35 gallons an hour. The panels, electronics and water maker were ~ $5000. I did the work myself at a slow pace, so not sure what the labor costs would be. I set my system up in about 2 weeks. The requirements a…

That seems like a lot of cost and complexity for a rural installation in a 3rd world country. How does the water output compare with, say, spending $1000 a simple evaporation design? The size of the evaporation pool would be larger than 1400W worth of solar, but it's much simpler and easy to repair.

Re: Heat dome causing record breaking heat wave

#234

Post by brendoelfrendo » Wed, Jun 30, 2021, 11:59 PM UTC

NDizzle wrote: post #105

TremendousJudge wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US voters didn't become climate change deniers by chance

How do US voters go about changing climate policy in China and India?

How about we do something about what we can control rather than drag each other down like crabs in a bucket?

Re: Heat dome causing record breaking heat wave

#235

Post by frozenlettuce » Thu, Jul 01, 2021, 12:02 AM UTC

NDizzle wrote: post #105

TremendousJudge wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US voters didn't become climate change deniers by chance

How do US voters go about changing climate policy in China and India?

They generate co2 in mostly to produce goods that are consumed in western countries... pollution was just outsourced

Re: Heat dome causing record breaking heat wave

#236

Post by newbie789 » Thu, Jul 01, 2021, 12:02 AM UTC

This heat is ridiculous.

My friend’s mousepad fused to his desk and he had to scrape it off with a butter knife.

I’ve had to build makeshift doors to isolate a tiny cooled room in my house. I haven’t worn pants in days. My partner and I went through a 1.5L spray bottle misting ourselves in the couple hours leading up to midnight (!)

Now we’ve just gotta hope that nobody lights a match in this giant, extremely windy basket of bone-dry fuel. The fact that there is a fireworks stand open on the main road in my town right now is, to put it mildly, very unsettling.

Re: Heat dome causing record breaking heat wave

#237

Post by DFHippie » Thu, Jul 01, 2021, 12:02 AM UTC

misiti3780 wrote: post #132

paxys wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easy to blame political leaders, but they are (mostly) elected by the general population. Here in the US ~50% of the people vote for climate change deniers, so they are the ones you need to convince.

I hate to rain on your parade, but any solution that doesnt lean heavily on nuclear is not a solution. 50% of the population may be climate deniers (need a reference though), but there is a large group of progressives that loved the green new deal also, which did not include nuclear energy, so there is blame on both sides.

Yes, we should pour money into nuclear power, not so much because it's efficient or necessary, but because unless we give the denialists this sop they won't play ball. It's the price of cooperation.

I'm serious. If wasting money on nuclear is the price we have to pay, we should pay that price. The key word there is "if". In reality if the people treating the issue seriously get behind nuclear the goalposts will move again. Al Gore's shoe size or entrees or thermostat will prove it's all a liberal hoax and we'll roll on just as before but considerably warmer and with a few energy companies a bit richer.

Re: Heat dome causing record breaking heat wave

#238

Post by gucciboi22 » Thu, Jul 01, 2021, 12:03 AM UTC

Lammy wrote: post #11

Maybe it's time to start talking about ways humanity can geo-engineer our way out of this instead of just sitting here waiting to suffer. The US Air Force has been interested in this topic for decades, but there's no way to know how viable any of that research actually is. Some of the speculative documents I've read propose using carbon black dust as a way to artificially reflect heat, like https://web.archive.org/we…

The technology I'm most excited about is advances in radiative cooling. Basically with materials science we can create perfectly reflective surfaces which emit Infrared energy out to space through the atmospheric window. It's both a local mitigation in that it could keep us cool as shit gets out of hand, while also getting the excess energy out of Earth's system. I feel like with industrial scale it could be feasible and get us off of energy-heavy AC and replace some of the lost albedo from the ice caps. 10C below ambient is super impressive IMO.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243511...

Re: Heat dome causing record breaking heat wave

#239

Post by sbierwagen » Thu, Jul 01, 2021, 12:04 AM UTC

nradov wrote: post #47

Taek wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not celebrating people dying of thirst, but I also think that's the only thing that will get the world properly focused on the issue. We need to make big structural changes to the global economy to fight climate change, and those changes are going to have an outsized negative impact on today's wealthiest and most powerful people. They aren't going to let change happen without a fight. People dying is what it's go…

What will force the issue isn't people dying, but rather masses of climate refugees fleeing countries that are no longer habitable and moving toward the poles.

Nothing says the response has to be positive. One possible response is "papers please"-style national IDs and autoturrets at the border. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/10/trump-th...

Re: Heat dome causing record breaking heat wave

#240

Post by lovemenot » Thu, Jul 01, 2021, 12:05 AM UTC

Izikiel43 wrote: post #81

Arrath wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most desalination methods are unfortunately quite energy intensive, and produce a concentrated brine that has environmental/disposal concerns such that it can't just be pumped back into the ocean, really. It presents a difficult problem for entrepreneurs to tackle. Definitely the potential to change people's lives for the better, though.

Is brine useful for something?

Lithium, magnesium and other minerals can be extracted from sea-water / brine. Currently it's not economic, but this is a technology to watch.

For instance, according to a recent research paper[0] from Saudi Arabia, sea-water yields hydrogen, chlorine and lithium all from a single multi-stage process. These are all useful materials for industry. I imagine the process is both energy and capital intensive, but SA would be a good place to begin something like that.

[0] https://phys.org/news/2021-06-electrochemical-cell-harvests-...