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The Strongest El Niño Ever

theclimatebrink.com

101–110 of 370 posts

Re: The Strongest El Niño Ever

#101
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is, if you feed cold water into your normal heating pipes, all the piping and radiators will get wet from condensation. So you would have to have a regulator that measures air moisture and temperature in all your rooms and only feeds water with a temperature above the dew point. This is possible, but inefficient and (especially on hot+wet days) doesn't cool very well. The possible real fixes are either to…

Yeah, I wasn't planning to run the cold loops through the existing radiator piping. I just want the ability to cool at least 1 room by reusing the air-to-water system, even if that means the FPU requires its own piping from the outside. In that scenario, are FPUs a good option? Are there other drawbacks?

Most Francoils I know don’t have a way to get rid of any condensation that happens in the unit like internal air conditioning units do. So even if you run the piping outside of the house you have condensation in the unit and the floors, not to mention the walls.

Even then, there is a fair limit in cooling and efficiency you can get from them because of the lack of phase changes occurring.

If you have a balanced mechanical ventilation (both inlet and outlet) that would be one of the best options to condition the whole house without putting air conditioning units everywhere. Having said that, we turn on the air conditioning in the attic during hot days which removes the biggest heat and moisture from the house. Next up is installing more sun blinds to prevent the heat from entering in the first place.

Re: The Strongest El Niño Ever

#102
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So we've been stupid "solar oven" buildings for 50 years while climate scientists were warning against extreme weather events and, now that said extreme event arrives, the best we find is to rush to aircon. Seems pretty short-sighted to me.

Don't worry it will even out when the Gulf Stream chokes out /s

...or not ? As el Nino would say: Porque no los dos ?

Re: The Strongest El Niño Ever

#103
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're building more data centers for a technology that's ramping global warming even faster. Water consumption, heat generation and tons and tons of CO2 emitting concrete to house these things. So we're doing something , but those things are counterproductive to our planet's general well being. Apparently billionaires don't need an inhabitable Earth to live on.

DC water consumption is a red herring. That water is returned back to its source but warmer.

Yes, just like cow farts.

Re: The Strongest El Niño Ever

#104

The buried lede: What does all this mean for global temperatures? Because global temperature lags ENSO by around three to five months, most of this event’s warming will land in 2027, which is now shaping up to be a genuinely alarming year and the warmest on record by a sizable margin I’m certainly no climate scientist, but if I lived in Europe, I would absolutely be looking into how to get a solar energy system set u…

So we've been stupid "solar oven" buildings for 50 years while climate scientists were warning against extreme weather events and, now that said extreme event arrives, the best we find is to rush to aircon. Seems pretty short-sighted to me.

I live in SoCal and am continually shaking my head at the architecture. So my floor-to-ceiling glass buildings in a climate known for sunny weather. So much extra air-conditioning will be spent to cool those buildings compared to if they had been built more reflective.

Re: The Strongest El Niño Ever

#105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel every comment section related to weather and climate seems to have the same winging about buildings. Cold? Europe has amazing buildings, hot? Europe has been building ovens... it's interesting psychology. Edit: We cannot blame people for buildings things that worked when we had a stable climate but are no long suitable for all these extremes. We needed to fix the emissions issue 30-50 year ago to avoid this. W…

> you'd be out of business. Correct. And we'd be "out of business" too as a country if we decided alone to fix emissions. Other economies would have passed ours because burning oil is so damn useful. Thing is, I don't feel we are changing much in this respect. Now the best idea we come up with is burning more fuel for aircon...

> Now the best idea we come up with is burning more fuel for aircon...

I mean really what else is there? We can't undo the warming, we can't rebuild every building in Europe (even if we could, would it work? Winter will still happen too). We can install solar panels and air conditioners, though.

Re: The Strongest El Niño Ever

#106

Other than "numbers go up" it's unclear to me what the consequences are, as I'm not extremely familiar with El Niño events. Hurricanes, maybe?

US NOAA has a (still generally useful) list of links to various impacts:

https://www.pmel.noaa.gov/elnino/impacts-of-el-nino>

Those include: hydrology (floods, drought), sea-surface temperatures (hotter or cooler, both of which impact local ecologies and fisheries), storms (weaker hurricane season in the Atlantic, due to high-altitude wind shear, stronger in other areas), and others: economic, fisheries, military, human health, marine life, and specific regional impacts.

Re: The Strongest El Niño Ever

#107
We all know we’re way past the time where we need to cut the carbon emissions, like it was 30 years ago. Why aren’t the governments investing money on research on carbon capture technology? That’s the only way left to undo massive carbon emissions due to industrialisation

Re: The Strongest El Niño Ever

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mean to be divisive, but this meme-like stream of news articles and comments about Europeans being silly about air conditioning, from the drill-baby-drill nation that refused to even try to do anything about climate change, really grates on me.

I didn’t see anything meme-like in the comment you responded to. Or even anything related to environmentalism. To me, it just looked like good health advice.

In case you don't know, there is a meme in the US that Europe don't know/don't have A/C. We do, but in some coutries there are laws banning A/C below 25°C (77°F) in public places, so (US) tourist don't get the cold air hit when entering a building like a musseum, leaving with the impression we don't know A/C.

No general A/C might be the case in regions that never needed it before (mild summers, cold winters), but their presence is increasing.

Re: The Strongest El Niño Ever

#109
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, data-centers are definitely the worst thing happening to the planet. You got your priorities straight. AI data centers are what, half a percent of the world electricity consumption, if that, and an even smaller fraction of the total energy?

Growth trend matters more than absolute present value. Data centres generally had been seeing energy use growing at 12% annually, or with a doubling time of 5.8 years (about 5 years 10 months). AI is accelerating that trend. In the United States, power consumption by data centres is on course to account for almost half of the growth in electricity demand between now and 2030. Driven by AI use, the US economy is set t…

>or with a doubling time of 5.8 years

So that in ~6 years they will account for 1%, and still a fraction of the percent of the world total energy use?

Re: The Strongest El Niño Ever

#110
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And by a sizable margin they mean maybe 4 degrees Celsius. Remember that 1.5 degrees Celsius is a nearly end-of-the-world scenario and we're currently about 1.1 degrees. All that warming that we caused but didn't actually happen? Turns out the ocean saves it up.

> Remember that 1.5 degrees Celsius is a nearly end-of-the-world scenario No, it's not end of the world. 3C is where things start getting bad. 1.5C is the target for the 2015 Paris climate agreement to try and avoid hitting 2C. We are looking at more severe droughts, flash floods, and rising oceans where we are at, but not the worst of it like mass 40C wet bulb heat domes which wipe out all life underneath them.

This is an incorrect way to frame the impacts of temperature increases. 1.5, 2, 3C makes extreme events like the one you stated significantly more likely in a probabilistic sense. The ability of adapt is in part driven by frequency of extreme events as much as it is adaptability to specific thresholds. We are already experiencing deadly heat bulb events at current warming levels, the impacted areas and frequency of these events will strictly increase.
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