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Reduction of sulfur emissions from ships may be causing rising sea temperatures

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Re: Reduction of sulfur emissions from ships may be causing rising sea temperatures

#461

Post by amrocha »

californical wrote: post #320
concordDance wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Public transportation still requires you to go to the bus stop in the rain. I'm also unsure what the proposed solution to Bob being 10 miles away is. Should I only make friends with people who work at the same place?

The solution is that Bob isn’t 10 miles away because the town is more dense. And carrying an umbrella to the tram or train stop 3 blocks away is easy

This isn't right. 10 miles is a fine distance. I met up with friends 13 miles away today. As long as there's good public transport it's not a big deal.

Re: Reduction of sulfur emissions from ships may be causing rising sea temperatures

#462

Post by smolder »

kaba0 wrote: post #351
fasterik wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>That is why discussions around such technological silver bullets are always toxic: people want to believe. On the flip side, some people reject technological solutions on principle because for them, it's not about solving problems, it's about atoning for the sins of humanity. What does the alternative future look like where we solve the climate crisis by changing the way we live and organize society? Personally, I w…

We have enough resources to provide heating and running water for every living person on Earth, it is just not allocated fairly and smartly (e.g. in my country we flush the toilet with very good grade water meant for drinking, because historically we don’t have separate piping for less potable water and we are rich in waters). But do we really need to be able to order some bullshit plastic shit from China for 2 dolla…

Meanwhile, I encountered an adult the other day who only drinks from plastic disposable cups so that they don't have to wash dishes.

Re: Reduction of sulfur emissions from ships may be causing rising sea temperatures

#463

Post by amrocha »

vel0city wrote: post #439
CalRobert wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trams or buses to your friend Bob's flat or rowhouse would be helpful here.

Statistically speaking in the US Bob doesn't live in a flat or rowhouse.

Yeah, we should fix that

Re: Reduction of sulfur emissions from ships may be causing rising sea temperatures

#464

Post by febra_ »

fasterik wrote: post #305
atoav wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is very uncomplicated in fact: Most people here on HN are rationally capable of understanding the challenges humanity faces right now. What many aren't capable of is accepting the conclusion that we all have to change the way we live and quite possibly even the way we organize society in order to mitigate the irreperable problems our way of living has already caused. Deep down they might suspect this is necessary,…

>That is why discussions around such technological silver bullets are always toxic: people want to believe. On the flip side, some people reject technological solutions on principle because for them, it's not about solving problems, it's about atoning for the sins of humanity. What does the alternative future look like where we solve the climate crisis by changing the way we live and organize society? Personally, I w…

> while putting a substantial portion of GDP into building nuclear reactors and removing carbon from the atmosphere.

So, the first one taking decades and the second one being a meme """solution""" for the science illiterate?

Re: Reduction of sulfur emissions from ships may be causing rising sea temperatures

#465

Post by akira2501 »

zith wrote: post #214

Climate models take this into account [0], contrary to what some people here seem to imply. It is also very likely that this is part of, but not the major factor of recent warming. [1] I would like to point out that this is not something we're just figuring out "this week" as Hank Green seems to want to frame it. There's no need to sensationalize. There is no conspiracy here. This is well known. It's good to educate…

The same climate models that predict a "missing" volcanic eruption?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1808_mystery_eruption

Re: Reduction of sulfur emissions from ships may be causing rising sea temperatures

#466

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #455
zith wrote: post #214

Climate models take this into account [0], contrary to what some people here seem to imply. It is also very likely that this is part of, but not the major factor of recent warming. [1] I would like to point out that this is not something we're just figuring out "this week" as Hank Green seems to want to frame it. There's no need to sensationalize. There is no conspiracy here. This is well known. It's good to educate…

It’s reasonable to be skeptical since past climate models (eg from 20 years ago) didn’t do great over the subsequent period. It could be that current ones are much better (but we won’t know for a while).

What has changed in 20 years? Realistically.

When we’re the ClimateGate emails? Do you think the industry got itself together after that?

Re: Reduction of sulfur emissions from ships may be causing rising sea temperatures

#467

Post by clolege »

BurningFrog wrote: post #416
Turskarama wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have absolutely no idea if the "solutions" we try won't lead to even worse outcomes. Up until the point climate change is becoming an existential threat, which it isn't yet, we shouldn't go doing anything too drastic. There is plenty of evidence that we can still avert the worst of it without resorting to geoengineering.

> You have absolutely no idea if the "solutions" we try won't lead to even worse outcomes. This is absolutely untrue. The mechanisms of how SO2 in the stratosphere cools the planet are well understood and empirically observed. This includes the fact that it breaks down in ~2 years, making it self repairing, should something unforeseen happen.

what is this now, a quadruple negative?

It is untrue that they have no idea if the "solutions" we try won't lead to worse outcomes

It is true that they have some idea that the "solutions" we try won't lead to worse outcomes

It is true that they have some idea that the "solutions" we try will lead to better outcomes.

I think the nuance needed here is: what do we mean by "better outcomes?" It's reasonable to believe that it will help lower temperatures. But is that an "outcome" in and of itself?

If we consider the "outcome" to also include the second and third order effects, I'd like to understand how anyone could be certain that it will be better.

Re: Reduction of sulfur emissions from ships may be causing rising sea temperatures

#468

Post by adrianN »

askvictor wrote: post #160
adrianN wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are lots of nuclear reactors being built world wide currently. The problem is that it takes forever to build nuclear reactors and we would need twenty times as much nuclear as we have right now just to replace coal. An additional twenty times as much as we have now to replace oil. And an additional fifteen times as much as we have right now to replace gas. Nuclear is not particularly cheap either.

Where do you get those numbers from? In terms of total energy use, perhaps. But oil accounts for about 3% for electricity generation, compared to coal's 36% [ https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-balances-overview/w... ]. Most oil is used for transport, so dropping that would increase electricity demand, though a lot of that doesn't need to be dispatchable, and there might be efficiencies gained moving to electri…

I google for world primary energy use. You’re right that electrification reduces primary energy use. That’s of course true for coal and gas as well.

Re: Reduction of sulfur emissions from ships may be causing rising sea temperatures

#469

Post by adrianN »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #460
virgildotcodes wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone came to you with a problem on a project, and you had a hard deadline of the end of the week, and you had two ways to go about it - 1) this is gonna be a pain in the ass to implement, you'll all be pulling 12 hour days but it's straightforward and crystal clear in how this directly addresses the problem, and 2) some completely unproven solution, that even when fully implemented the math/logic doesn't really…

It’s a very bad analogy because we have no know working solution. We simply have never achieved zero carbon emissions given a modern world of 8 billion people.

We have in fact several known working solutions. You don’t have to implement a solution to know that it works. The problem is that they cost money to implement and nobody wants to pay.

Re: Reduction of sulfur emissions from ships may be causing rising sea temperatures

#470

Post by adrianN »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #440
gjulianm wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> while putting a substantial portion of GDP into building nuclear reactors and removing carbon from the atmosphere. The first thing takes years and we still don’t have feasible technology for the second. Not to mention that we would still have a lot of emissions from transport, manufacture, and meat consumption. A technological silver bullet would be cool but the reality is that we don’t have one and there’s nothing…

Growing up biomass is a good way to eliminate carbon from the atmosphere. You can build or make product from the biomass, or even just throw it into a deep ocean trench.

The problem with this is scale and cost. We essentially need to unburn all the coal and oil were burnt in the last hundred years or so. That gigantic amounts of mass.
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