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This month is the planet’s hottest on record by far – and hottest in 120k years

cnn.com

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Re: This month is the planet’s hottest on record by far – and hottest in 120k years

#191

Post by piva00 »

briantakita wrote: post #36
ajkjk wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You must be aware that dismissing very-overtly-obvious climate claims out of hand makes you sound very dubious, right? Super "merchants-of-doubt"y. The only way to deliver this opinion in a non-suspect way would be something like: "I'm aware that all metrics show it's the hottest month on record, and everyone is experiencing that everywhere, but ". Like, it is obvious in the last fifty years. Your argument is "well m…

The climate always changes. Always has & always will. No political movement, economic paradigm, or technology will make the climate static. The geomagnetic field fluctuations, Sun, the solar system's current cosmological coordinates, cosmological effects are too big of a driver of the climate. Geologically speaking, we have just left a mini-ice age. Our efforts are better invested in adjusting to these inevitable cha…

> Our efforts are better invested in adjusting to these inevitable changes.

Of course. If those changes would happen in a timeframe spanning hundreds of centuries we could dedicate some effort to progressively adapt to them, when it looms to violently happen upon us in the next 50-100 years and it's known it could've been partially avoided I don't think we can just magically wave it away to "it will eventually be solved technologically". It might as well not be, that's the scary part.

Re: This month is the planet’s hottest on record by far – and hottest in 120k years

#192

Post by valval »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #142
NelsonMinar wrote: post #78

It's also likely to be the coolest July for the next twenty to hundred+ years. Enjoy it while you can!

Clearly you're not factoring in the nuclear winters that the third and fourth world wars will provide for us within that timespan if climate change destabilises world politics to the predictable degree.

Predictable by whom? I’ll tag you in 30 years when nothing of significance has happened.

Re: This month is the planet’s hottest on record by far – and hottest in 120k years

#193

Post by EgregiousCube »

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #130
EgregiousCube wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Greek wildfires may be a poor example here, as arson is suspected: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/corfu-wildfi... . It's too early to ascribe a cause.

That's a very bad take, as it covers only fires in Corfu specifically (and that see other replies regarding that), but not the extreme heat in general over Greece, Italy ( https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/25/italy-wildfire... ) and most of the rest of Europe, and the other fires in other parts of Greece, e.g. Rhodes https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-66297476 , Evia https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/24/…

I don't intend to reduce Europe's summer to Greek wildfires, in fact quite the opposite, I want to point out that they are a bad example because their causes are still being investigated.

Rhodes's firefighters also suspect arson ( https://greekreporter.com/2023/07/26/wildfires-arson-greece/ ) and arrests have been made on Kefalonia ( https://greekcitytimes.com/2023/07/25/kefalonia-two-arrests-... ).

Re: This month is the planet’s hottest on record by far – and hottest in 120k years

#194

Post by ZeroGravitas »

shdh wrote: post #190
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IEA figures shows that it expects global electricity generation to rise by 2,493TWh between 2022 and 2025. > The IEA expects the growth in renewable generation to cover the vast majority of this total, growing by 2,450TWh. This is equivalent to 98% of the overall increase in global demand.

Share some figures that are per dollar. Fusion has the potential to beat all of that.

I don't understand what you mean?

Any future fusion that requires a steam turbine to generate electricity will not be cost competitive with wind/solar/batteries by the time it arrives as the steam turbine will cost more to build and maintain than the alternatives even if you assume the fusion part is free.

Some fusion approaches convert more directly to electricity and might make a difference, but probably not for decades.

Re: This month is the planet’s hottest on record by far – and hottest in 120k years

#195

Post by [deleted] »

briantakita wrote: post #74
esalman wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scientists use tree rings, coral reefs and deep sea sediment cores to measure historical temperature from a long time ago. These methods are based on the principle that the growth and chemistry of these natural archives reflect the environmental conditions that they experienced. Tree rings show the annual variations in temperature and precipitation on land. Coral reefs show the sea surface temperature and salinity in…

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Mathematical models with curated inputs & ever changing factors are not extraordinary evidence.

[deleted]

Re: This month is the planet’s hottest on record by far – and hottest in 120k years

#196

Post by bryanlarsen »

shdh wrote: post #162
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only real solution is to make energy ubiquitous and plentiful. Renewables have been the boring, consensus answer to this for about a decade. There's some obscure academic discussions about the exact makeup of the last 15% of energy needs, but most of those options revolve around how to best reuse the massive amounts of nearly free electricity that a sensible overbuild of renewables will create at other times. I…

Wind, solar, and geo haven't really made up a significant enough portion of overall energy generation. Also they don't seem to be scaling up quickly enough. We're still seeing many coal plants operating and new ones coming online in the West.

> they don't seem to be scaling up quickly enough.

They're scaling up at a rate of 5% of total electricity production per year. And that rate is increasing by about 1/3 per year.

That's insanely quick.

https://electricenergyonline.com/article/energy/category/cli...

Re: This month is the planet’s hottest on record by far – and hottest in 120k years

#197

Post by myshpa »

zosima wrote: post #168
myshpa wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not blaming it on the climate change. I'm blaming overshoot. Mainly our agriculture (deforestation, biodiversity loss, pollution), misuse of fossil fuels and the structures of our societal and financial systems.

But deforestation and the following biodiversity loss is a completely different problem than reducing CO2. And in general, very few things that will reduce CO2 is going to help against deforestation (and contrary to popular opinion, even large scale reforestation will probably not affect CO2 very much either).

> very few things that will reduce CO2 is going to help against deforestation

Reform of agriculture might be it. Agriculture is also the leading driver of deforestation (50% of pastures were forested in the past).

> large scale reforestation will probably not affect CO2 very much either

But it could, it's probably the best tool in our arsenal. And it would not only affect CO2, but many of our other problems too (droughts, biodiversity, warming ...).

https://journals.plos.org/climate/article?id=10.1371/journal...

Rapid global phaseout of animal agriculture has the potential to stabilize greenhouse gas levels for 30 years and offset 68 percent of CO2 emissions this century

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-00603-4

Agricultural land use, particularly for animal feed, poses the biggest obstacle to ecosystem restoration and carbon sequestration, hindering climate efforts. The potential for carbon sequestration is vast, with enough capacity to meet the entire 1.5°C carbon budget.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/04/improvin...

Improving soil could keep world within 1.5C heating target, research suggests. Better farming techniques across the world could lead to storage of 31 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide a year, data shows

https://phys.org/news/2023-04-climate-crisis-biodiversity-ap...

The climate crisis and biodiversity crisis can't be approached separately, says study

https://news.mongabay.com/2023/06/to-meet-u-n-climate-biodiv...

To meet U.N. climate, biodiversity goals, 79% of plant cover must be saved, study

https://ourworldindata.org/drivers-of-deforestation

Every year the world loses around 5 million hectares of forest. 95% of this occurs in the tropics. At least three-quarters of this is driven by agriculture – clearing forests to grow crops (upto 80% for animal feed), and raise livestock

https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets

If the world adopted a plant-based diet we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares (and free up an area the size of Africa).

Re: This month is the planet’s hottest on record by far – and hottest in 120k years

#198

Post by valval »

wombat-man wrote: post #180
slily wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strawmen notwithstanding, the main controversy today is about governments as well as non-elected organizations (like the WEF) calling for increased central control over ordinary citizens and adopting tyrannical measures to reduce the standard of living and increase the cost of energy, food, travel and so on, using "climate crisis" as a vague excuse to invoke some sense of urgency in the hopes that people are stupid e…

I'll just say that I agree that most people are not ready/willing to pay the price of real climate action in dollars today. We'll probably just have to pay down the line. I guess we'll see how bad it gets.

I’m surprised that so many highly analytical minds (such as HN posters I’d assume are) mistakenly believe that whatever crisis may or may not be at hand would be solved by individual action as instructed by some vague institutions or organisations. It’s like asking people to drive slowly without introducing and enforcing speed limits, or more tangibly whatever the farce with recycling has been for the past decades.

Come on, as an engineer you know these problems are solved by removing the human error from the equation, not by desperately trying to adjust the weight of the human error.

Re: This month is the planet’s hottest on record by far – and hottest in 120k years

#199

Post by glimshe »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #154
shdh wrote: post #145

Deceleration isn't really an option. Many developing nations are going to continue to have increasing energy needs. To ask these countries to reduce their energy requirements is to ask their citizens to live a lower standard of life. Hypocritical of those in the West to make that request. The only real solution is to make energy ubiquitous and plentiful. Governments should be investing 100's billions of dollars into…

> The only real solution is to make energy ubiquitous and plentiful. Renewables have been the boring, consensus answer to this for about a decade. There's some obscure academic discussions about the exact makeup of the last 15% of energy needs, but most of those options revolve around how to best reuse the massive amounts of nearly free electricity that a sensible overbuild of renewables will create at other times. I…

The radical insistence on renewables as the ONLY energy source, and the equally radical opposition to Nuclear is part of why we aren't improving fission and researching fusion more, which would get us out of the woods.

No compromise is being pursued from the renewables side, while the nuclear side completely agree that renewables will be a major part of our grid.

Re: This month is the planet’s hottest on record by far – and hottest in 120k years

#200

Post by ZeroGravitas »

valval wrote: post #192
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clearly you're not factoring in the nuclear winters that the third and fourth world wars will provide for us within that timespan if climate change destabilises world politics to the predictable degree.

Predictable by whom? I’ll tag you in 30 years when nothing of significance has happened.

Hopefully! I'm guardedly optimistic, because I think renewable tech will save us, but we're going to have some real stormy political times to get there.

Donald Trump, the conspiracy theorist gameshow host was elected president of the USA! And might be again! So there's no room for complacency.

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