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

noaa.gov

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

#331

Post by orf »

gruez wrote: post #288
orf wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok then, people spending thousands of dollars to make their cars less fuel efficient and pollute more. It’s the same point. That doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world. It’s ridiculous. But the fact it exists in the country with the largest per-person capita of CO2 emissions points to a huge underlying social problem that is unlikely to be fixed in the near future.

>But the fact it exists in the country with the largest per-person capita of CO2 emissions I have a feeling that you're not talking about all the people rolling coal in Palau. US isn't even in the top 10 when it comes to carbon emissions per capita. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...

Or the Falkland Islands, population 3,000. They are the real problem!

The combined populations of the small states above you don’t even reach 1/3rd of the USA’s population.

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

#332

Post by NikolaNovak »

pessimizer wrote: post #200
SigmundA wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the deniers I know have shifted from it doesn't exist to either its not man made and just a natural cycle or it may actually be a good thing because plants like CO2 and warmth...

There is a severely underestimated group of religious people who think that only God controls the weather, His reasons for what he does with it are not for you to evaluate, and that saying that humans can change the weather is blasphemy. It's easy to make fun of, but the most direct experience that people have of a God who controls the universe would be the weather. These people need to be approached theologically; s…

>>I'm always amused on HN when people in a thread realize that the reference to demonic possession or witchcraft by another commenter was completely in earnest.

I have been in a serious relationship with a wonderful, intelligent, university-educated, well-read, eloquent person who absolutely believed that Magic:The Gathering led to sorcery, which was in turn also an absolutely real thing (to her).

Similarly, the father of another relationship of mine was one of the most well-educated people I met, well-regarded principal of premier private school in Toronto, host of book clubs to which mayor participated in, but definitely prevaricated between "climate change doesn't exist", "it's not man-made", and "it's god's will/plan". His book club included a published physics researcher and university professor who similarly was the head of local skeptics society until his absolute inability & blind spot to apply skepticism/rationality to his strong religious views, including those impacting cosmology let alone earth weather, became too much of a conflict/contradiction.

My best friend is a Microbiology / Pharmacology PhD from prestigious Canadian university, who then went through medical school later in life; roughly half of her student colleagues in either program were similarly highly religious - with religiously-guided views on cosmology, climate, and of course what they can and cannot do as doctors :-/

The bubble is real, and for all its diversity Hacker News is a bubble of its own.

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

#333

Post by CyanBird »

syops wrote: post #274
kmlx wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is a myth from the 1970s. it has been debunked countless times (even by history itself), but people still fall back to this.

What is a myth? If there were far fewer people less carbon would be used/extracted. Less trees and natural space would be destroyed. Less plastic would be around. Etc. There are not enough resources for everyone to live like we Americans. As the world gets richer we’ll collectively destroy more of the environment. This is not disputable.

> If there were far fewer people less carbon would be used/extracted.

1 American releases the same amount of co2 as ten people in Benin, let alone the amount of trash and general consumption

This is not about the "amount of people" , it is about percapita numbers and consumption

If everyone consumed like Americans do, we'd need like 4, 5 earth's just to maintain that

Again, it is a matter of co2/per capita

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

#334

Post by [deleted] »

anyfoo wrote: post #216
lmilcin wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would risk suggesting that he is being downvoted because of cynical point of view. It is us , right now, who are exploiting the world. It is our kids and their kids that are going to pay for this. And here somebody complains "the cost is too high". It is as if the robber, after robbing your house, complained the bus fare was too high to get to work, so it somehow excuses the theft.

I still want to understand that side. And know how it can be counteracted, e.g. by subvention (to encourage the more expensive but better alternatives), and regulation (to outlaw the cheap but terrible ones). For that, I'd like to know what exactly the "anything green related" is that's (being perceived as) expensive.

[deleted]

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

#335

Post by chrononaut »

k33n wrote: post #244
underscore_ku wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

same rednecks vote for trump...

Proudly! His policy positions resulted in us being energy independent, reformed our prisons, and ended the forever-wars. Then there's the vaccine that Democrat leadership advised their constituents not to take. The Trump haters believe that an election should be a popularity contest, and not a contest of policy and ideas.

> The Trump haters believe that an election should be a popularity contest

Ironically I'd argue that Trump himself was probably the biggest believer that an election is a popularity contest, given his obsession around inauguration turnout, the mission to find millions of votes after he was elected in 2016 (even though it didn't matter), etc

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

#336

Post by titzer »

ttul wrote: post #206
Crash0v3rid3 wrote: post #89

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…

Whoa, gasoline produces 20 pounds of CO2 per gallon burned. So 100 gallons per ton of CO2. At $2/gallon, that's $200/t to produce. And then we have to spend potentially more than that to clean up the pollution. Planetarily, we iz a stupid.

But for the record, I absolutely don't believe it's that cheap to take CO2 out of the air at scale. So this whole thing is a pipedream.

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

#337

Post by skytreader »

titzer wrote: post #213
lordnacho wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just ordinary stupid people. I've known people with advanced degrees who ostensibly make a living making predictions who don't believe it. Sometimes their arguments get very very intricate. There's just so many layers to the onion it's impossible to do in a conversation, rather than say an essay. Other friends have CS degrees and don't believe it either. It's particularly hard because there's a lot of little…

> Other friends have CS degrees and don't believe it either. I have three CS degrees. Our field has a real problem with hubris and reinterpreting everything through a CS lens, particularly assuming everything is discrete, falls into neat categories, and is not subject to noise. I had a decade long debate with a friend from Chemical Engineering about whether the Universe was continuous or discrete, and also about whet…

Out of curiosity, how can one have three CS degrees? Do you mean you went through the (1) undergrad, (2) masters, (3) PhD cycle?

> Our field has a real problem with hubris and reinterpreting everything through a CS lens

Man, I agree if only because I, too, am guilty of at least having a phase like this. But I think I also observe it in the dev and academic CS community in general. I just don't know if this is a generic intellectual hubris or a type of superiority complex specific to "hackers". Of course my opinion is very biased and maybe even cynical but I'm tending towards the latter. I wonder how that came to be; I can only speak for myself, unfortunately.

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

#338

Post by [deleted] »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #319
linuxhansl wrote: post #303

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…

Given the experience of the last couple of years, I think this would be a very plausible scenario. And we'd deserve to go extinct like the dinosaurs did.

[deleted]

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

#339

Post by yongjik »

starik36 wrote: post #143
cryptoz wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am very left, and despise Biden's refusal to address climate change where it counts, like fraking. But honestly, the new boss is not the same as the old boss, even with climate change. The new boss does in fact acknowledge it exists, rather than insisting that all climate change is a hoax and it is invented by China to hurt the US. Biden is not making the progress I'd like to see, but he is in no way as bad as the…

This is nonsense. Whether someone virtue signals or not, actions are what's important, not words. The CO2 emissions output has been coming down since the high in 2006. With the old boss and the new boss. https://www.statista.com/statistics/183943/us-carbon-dioxide... If anything, fracking helped the environment, since it offset resources being mined by the traditional, more wasteful methods.

> This is nonsense. Whether someone virtue signals or not, actions are what's important, not words.

That's not fair. When you're the chief of a fire station, saying "Yep that's a blazing fire right there, let's do something" is not virtual signaling, it's called not being a fucking idiot.

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

#340

Post by ptkd »

alanbernstein wrote: post #283
ptkd wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not either or, we need both. It will never be more efficient to pull CO2 from the atmosphere then it is to just prevent it from getting there in the first place, so cutting emissions is still the bottleneck

Might be more "politically efficient" to extract it though.

I think this is basically a play by big oil to try to keep their business alive. We actually are pretty much at the point where the only thing standing between us and MASSIVE emissions reductions are special interest groups. Solar/wind are now the cheapest energy in the US, and the move is starting already
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