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It’s official: July was Earth’s hottest month on record

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321–330 of 578 posts

Re: It’s official: July was Earth’s hottest month on record

#321
post #8

Who still believes global warming does not exist? I am currently listening to audiobook of Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six (1998). It has a paragraph on global warming and trying to convince POTUS it is real. And POTUS not wanting to act on it because it would be too large economic drag on US. This book is almost quarter of century old.

I chuckled at your picking up that part out of this whole (really great) book. The general story line about the terrorists trying to "deal" with the global warming is ahead of its time. Don't want to spoil it for anyone, but it's funny how the President wasn't the (most) ridiculous one there.

I chose this because that's exactly where I am in the book.

I am literally listening to it right now!

Re: It’s official: July was Earth’s hottest month on record

#322
post #83

Ok global warming is happening we know it for a long time. But is there a place somewhere that explain how could the world works without emitting too much co2, or any gaz which are problematic. How do we replace cars ? trucks ? how many people on earth is possible ? Can we have plane ? Boat ? How do we produce clothes, how do we have electricity at night ... I'm not asking to have a plan for everything, because this…

Right now?

Invest on lowering the price of solar and increasing panel production;

Invest on lowering the price of batteries (I'm not sure ramping-up production is wise right now);

Invest on nuclear power on the (very few) places it can be ramped-up quickly, and stop taking offline the reactors that have no extraneous safety problems;

Invest on electrifying transportation (that's mostly by replacing trucks, buses and cars, but if it's viable to replace things by trains, that's a double gain, I would ignore planes for the time being);

Invest on lowering the costs of carbon capture (I would focus on atmospheric capture for chemical usage, but any kind could be great);

If you live in a place without them, press for carbon taxes, the government can use the money to pay for the things above or distribute it to the poor. It's easier to get if you make it mildly protectionist, but that has the side effect of impoverishing your local economy (politics is weird).

You personally can not do much, unless you have a lot of money. But any reasonably rich government can do a lot of change (it doesn't even to be at the national level).

Re: It’s official: July was Earth’s hottest month on record

#324
post #102
post #50

The current administration has approved more than 2,000 new fracking permits. I'm so glad the US has rejoined the Paris Agreement. "Meet the new boss Same as the old boss"

And is asking for OPEC to produce more oil[0]. EDIT: updated the linked article. I originally linked to an opinion piece rather than a news piece. [0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/white-house-urges-opec-to-boost... old link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/joe-biden-wants-opec-to-drill-o...

After land-locking the supply to the most ethical producing nation to the north.

Re: It’s official: July was Earth’s hottest month on record

#325

Imagine an asteroid would be on trajectory to collide with earth in (say) 2025. Possible order of hypothetical events: 1. Scientist discover the asteroid. Calculate risk of collision. 2. Asteroid comes closer, probability of impact is calculated as high. 3. People will start saying that we cannot let our economy be controlled by the specter of an asteroid. 4. The asteroid becomes visible. You can see it with your bar…

I believe this is the premise of an upcoming Netflix movie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_Look_Up_(2021_film)

Re: It’s official: July was Earth’s hottest month on record

#326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think part of the problem is that we started talking about global warming (“nice! More sunshine!!”) to climate change (“cool! We get too much snow here anyway!!”). Maybe instead of talking about climate change, which is a symptom and not the problem, we should talk about “destabilising the atmosphere”. I feel like people will find it harder to use nonsense arguments if they’re confronted with the problem rather tha…

Semantics aren't going to change anything. You have to provide very specific and likely negative outcomes to specific regions.

It's all right here: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/billions-could-face-tempe...

Nobody wants to do anything about something that's only going to affect people decades in the future.

Re: It’s official: July was Earth’s hottest month on record

#327
post #206

We are far beyond being able to fix this by just reducing our emissions. We need to focus on innovations focused on extracting CO2 directly from our atmospheres at scale. An interesting read on the topic: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-05/bill-gate...

Carbon Engineering [1] seems to be making good progress toward this goal. They even published a paper about their process and its economics in Cell [2]. "We describe a process for capturing CO2 from the atmosphere in an industrial plant. The design captures ∼1 Mt-CO2/year in a continuous process using an aqueous KOH sorbent coupled to a calcium caustic recovery loop. We describe the design rationale, summarize perfor…

> They even published a paper about their process and its economics in Cell [2].

The journal is Joule.

https://www.cell.com/joule/aims

Re: It’s official: July was Earth’s hottest month on record

#328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About this, what was very puzzling to me was the opinions of the late Michael Chrichton. He was constantly expressing the opinion that the global warming was a frame up, both in his books but also to various talks. He had even written a book on which the bad guys were Greenpeace agents! Now, considering how highly educated (not only he was a great author but he also had studied MD) and smart (this should be obvious t…

Maybe I've spent too much time among lawyers, but I have noticed that there are some very smart people that seem to relish having certain unconventional beliefs. A critical, independent mind is a great thing, but the danger is when the view is held because it is unpopular and not because of any critical investigation of the evidence. Call it "anti-confirmation bias" if you want. Or to put it another way, some people…

Yes, that's an explantation that could support his behaviour.

However I don't think that he was doing it just to present himself as smarter than the other people. He firmly believed that opinions, at least that's what I was getting out of his talks and some of his books.

Re: It’s official: July was Earth’s hottest month on record

#329

Imagine an asteroid would be on trajectory to collide with earth in (say) 2025. Possible order of hypothetical events: 1. Scientist discover the asteroid. Calculate risk of collision. 2. Asteroid comes closer, probability of impact is calculated as high. 3. People will start saying that we cannot let our economy be controlled by the specter of an asteroid. 4. The asteroid becomes visible. You can see it with your bar…

you can start writing your book

Re: It’s official: July was Earth’s hottest month on record

#330
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately the difficulty increasing that percentage isn't linear. It'll probably look like the vaccine rollout where there's a pretty hard dropoff in increases past a little over 50%.

10 points in 4 years is pretty good! And this is from April; I wonder if it'd be different now after this brutal summer. But yeah the real problem is the gains in concern came pretty much entirely from Democrats and Independents.

Well, if science advances one funeral at a time, an increasingly hostile and less inhabitable planet may give us opportunity for advancement ...
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