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World surpasses key warming threshold across an entire year

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Re: World surpasses key warming threshold across an entire year

#131

Post by sokoloff »

thelastgallon wrote: post #118
moffkalast wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A race of machines doesn't need to eat food, drink water, breathe clean air, and doesn't die from wet bulb temperatures. I bet it's a lot easier to build nuclear reactors when radiation poisoning doesn't matter. The perfect candidate for carrying our cultural torch forward.

> doesn't die from wet bulb temperatures AI, which is data-centers have been first-class citizens on this planet. All DCs have air conditioning, which most humans don't have. Without AC, these race of machines will fail often. Also, this race of machines is refreshed every 3 years.

> refreshed every 3 years.

That's not been my experience. I've got plenty of 7+ year old machines and DC infrastructure components that are even older than that. Power and compute density improvements are no longer fast enough to have full turnovers in 3 years.

Re: World surpasses key warming threshold across an entire year

#132

Post by wongarsu »

jowea wrote: post #128
wongarsu wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't you exactly describing Elon's proclaimed plans for a mars colony? Not a tiny lab like NASA would build, but an industrial base with thousands of inhabitants. Is his plan realistic? Hard to tell. It's far beyond anything we have ever done, and financing such a plan is going to be challenging to say the least. And technologically we are also decades out. So I guess he better hurry up. But that's a different goal…

Don't we need millions of people for a viable industrial Martian civilization? Honest question don't know. Also, we haven't even been to Mars, unless SpaceX has some single-state to orbit spaceplane plus some fancy interplanetary engines in the works I'm not that optimistic. And who is going to finance this? Honestly building a Fallout vault to wait the worst out seems easier.

The current idea of how to get there depends on launching Starships to earth orbit, refueling them completely using a bunch more Starships, and then going to Mars. In terms of energy required it should work out, but I have no clue how he is planning to pay for it beyond a small NASA colony.

On the other hand Mars hasn't been stripped of easily accessible resources in the same way Earth has been over the last couple thousand years. As an obvious example, Mars's surface is covered in so much iron ore that it dominates the color of the landscape. Iron isn't worth enough per pound to bring it back to earth, but if they find deposits of more valuable materials there might well be a mining opportunity that pays for the whole endeavour. Nothing brings in money, people and resources like a gold rush.

Re: World surpasses key warming threshold across an entire year

#133

Post by bloopernova »

jowea wrote: post #126
bloopernova wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If predictions of 8 to 10 degrees Celsius warming by the end of the century are true, then humanity is absolutely doomed.

Maybe I'm optimistic (for a certain value of optimistic) but I feel we would do mass geoengineering and/or start serious international emission control, enforced by war if necessary, before we get to that.

My very pessimistic view is that things will get very bad first. Which means that humanity will have to deal with mass refugee movements, wars, natural disasters from climate change, and trying to mitigate the effects.

One of those by itself would be difficult to deal with, but all at once would be impossible. In my opinion.

Re: World surpasses key warming threshold across an entire year

#134

Post by boxed »

_Algernon_ wrote: post #67
boxed wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just wrong on so many levels. First of all, creating light is irrelevant to the problem at hand. Secondly, LEDs have made your statement outright false as there's no one who lives in a house that packs their home with light enough to spend that energy budget AND KEEPS THEM ON AT NIGHT. Because they would GO BLIND. So that's just the light thing. 100% wrong. Saying technology can't solve the problem is speculat…

The point, which I can only assume that you intentionally missed, is the following: - Light is only a standin for any economic activity. The same argument holds for manufacturing, steel smelting, and basically any other economic activity you can think of. - We spend ~2000x less per unit of light but create much more than 2000x the amount of total artificial light now compared to the 1800s. Hence greater overall energ…

> Light is only a standin for any economic activity

And yet for exactly light the entire premise is falsified. It's a hilarious own goal.

Re: World surpasses key warming threshold across an entire year

#135

Post by boxed »

shafyy wrote: post #68
boxed wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't like the word "drastic" here. It's very much less drastic than what we are already doing. In fact, it's much less drastic. I like to say: There is no longer a choice of playing God or not, only a choice of playing a competent or incompetent God.

You know what would be less drastic? Fucking stop emitting as much carbon. Solutions are there: Less livestock farming, less cars, less flights, less production of unnecessary products. Now, can we convince enough people to change their behavior just by telling them to do it? No, of course not. But what works really well is controlling people's behavior via consumer prices. This means, make animal products more expen…

Stopping all CO2 emissions tomorrow magically won't bring back the 1+ degrees of warming we already caused though.

But yea, I agree, we really really need to cut CO2 emissions. BADLY. Even if we can compensate for the warming we still need to fix the ocean acidification.

Re: World surpasses key warming threshold across an entire year

#136

Post by thelastgallon »

sokoloff wrote: post #131
thelastgallon wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> doesn't die from wet bulb temperatures AI, which is data-centers have been first-class citizens on this planet. All DCs have air conditioning, which most humans don't have. Without AC, these race of machines will fail often. Also, this race of machines is refreshed every 3 years.

> refreshed every 3 years. That's not been my experience. I've got plenty of 7+ year old machines and DC infrastructure components that are even older than that. Power and compute density improvements are no longer fast enough to have full turnovers in 3 years.

Big companies refresh based on their depreciation and not if they are still usable, these are usually fully depreciated in 3 - 5 companies, depending on their accountants. Also, there is going to be massive growth in DCs with AI, companies aren't going to compete on 7+ year old hardware just because it runs ok.

Re: World surpasses key warming threshold across an entire year

#137

Post by blueflow »

adamwong246 wrote: post #105
blueflow wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans live anywhere in the world with a average temperature range from -20 to 30 degrees. This is a range of 50 degrees. 10 degrees increase wont kill us.

Surely you understand that the danger that climate change poses is not "heat exhaustion"?

We had it 14 degrees warmer 50 million years ago and earth is still hospitable.

Burning all the fossil fuels is (at worst) just going to put us back into a Cambrian/Devonian greenhouse earth configuration.

Re: World surpasses key warming threshold across an entire year

#138

Post by boxed »

lm28469 wrote: post #108
boxed wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just wrong on so many levels. First of all, creating light is irrelevant to the problem at hand. Secondly, LEDs have made your statement outright false as there's no one who lives in a house that packs their home with light enough to spend that energy budget AND KEEPS THEM ON AT NIGHT. Because they would GO BLIND. So that's just the light thing. 100% wrong. Saying technology can't solve the problem is speculat…

You might want to read about the rebound effect. If your toaster is 10% more efficient but you have twice as many toasters in the world you're still fucked, this is what we're doing right now. This new faith in technology as the great redeemer is closer to religion than science. At best it's wishful thinking at worst it's delusional

Yea, except if the toasters get a million times more efficient people won't in fact run ten toasters per person around the clock to make the rebound effect possible. This is the type of gains LEDs have made.

I've seen left leaning people make claims like LEDs just mean people have their lights on more so the total consumption goes up. But that's absolutely not true, because LEDs are so much more important that if everyone kept all their lights on in their house 24/7 and also bought 5 times more light bulbs they STILL would use less electricity.

That's why the specific example given was such an own goal. If the tech is good enough it can't be overcome by the rebound effect.

Re: World surpasses key warming threshold across an entire year

#139

Post by _Algernon_ »

boxed wrote: post #134
_Algernon_ wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point, which I can only assume that you intentionally missed, is the following: - Light is only a standin for any economic activity. The same argument holds for manufacturing, steel smelting, and basically any other economic activity you can think of. - We spend ~2000x less per unit of light but create much more than 2000x the amount of total artificial light now compared to the 1800s. Hence greater overall energ…

> Light is only a standin for any economic activity And yet for exactly light the entire premise is falsified. It's a hilarious own goal.

It's not which I just explained to you.

If you are going to keep pretending to be the human embodiment of a brick wall, I won't engage any further.

Have a nice day!

Re: World surpasses key warming threshold across an entire year

#140

Post by ted_bunny »

gasparto wrote: post #20
atleastoptimal wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AGI will make the economy far more efficient, increase the rate of scientific innovation, etc. For example, some ancestor of alphafold could spark a revolution in genetic engineering, creating crops which are far more efficient and resilient, etc.

Technology won't save us. Hoping that someday soon^tm someone will come up with something that makes all the current mess go away is a dangerous path. In germany they call it 'Technologieoffen' - and even some political parties have written it on their flags. 'No need to implement changes now - someday God will decent and absolve us from all of our sins - until then party hard! #yolo' I'm all for accelerating researc…

We're more likely to get Deus Ex than a Deus Ex Machina
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