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The Strongest El Niño Ever

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Re: The Strongest El Niño Ever

#241

Post by fragmede »

throw-the-towel wrote: post #225
omnimus wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In terms of greenhouse it also depends on type of meat. Very acidental but europeans eat much less beef and eat pork/chicken instead. Chicken protein for example is in many cases better than cheese emission wise. Also i don't think europeans don't use AC to save the planet. It's just expensive and it didn't use to be a problem.

I wonder if pork is better than beef for the environment.

Pork, by a bunch. Lower land use, lower greenhouse gas emissions, less water use.

Re: The Strongest El Niño Ever

#242

Post by dredmorbius »

silexia wrote: post #184
dredmorbius wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"El Niño, California Precipitation, and Landslides" https://www.conservation.ca.gov/cgs/landslides/el-nino > El Niño is the “warm phase” of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation and features warmer than average ocean surface temperatures off the coast of Ecuador and Peru in the equatorial eastern Pacific Ocean.... Historically, the presence of El Niño conditions tilts the odds in favor of wetter than normal precipitation…

The aquifers are all extremely depleted and the reservoirs nearly empty. Extra rain will be very good. If private interests are allowed to graze and log public land, fire risk can be mitigated.

The reservoirs are designed and calibrated for specific times and rates of fill, largely driven by snowmelt runoff rather than precipitation deluges.

Aquifer fill rates are slow, and are generally predicated on large-scale flooding. Prior to modern flood control (dams, river channelisation, levee construction), in which much, and occasionally effectively all of California's Central Valley (as well as large riparian valley systems in Oregon and Washington) would flood.

See the Great Flood of 1862: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Flood_of_1862>.

Reservoirs provide parlous slim protection against landslides of elevated slopes. Those are affected by upslope water saturation (the stuff that's on its way to fill your aquifers in coming months or years), not floodplain innundation. It's exacerbated by fire-cleared hillsides, particularly those which burn ferociously hot, killing plant roots and baking soil. Those fires are not historically typical, but have been the conditions experienced with greatly increased frequency since the 1990s.

Cattle don't graze chaparral, oak woodlands, or ponderosa or Douglas fir forests. Those have been what's been burning.

Your suggestions / assessments are at a far remove from reality.

Re: The Strongest El Niño Ever

#243

Post by dredmorbius »

windexh8er wrote: post #208
dredmorbius wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48055532 >

Unfounded comments that are nothing but a lie are OK. Yet, calling it out directly goes against the rules. In this case the response is warranted. Until people start to see what actually goes on in these data centers with respect to pollution (of many kinds) I don't have a problem being direct.

What the link I'd shared stated was "Please edit out swipes, as the site guidelines ask".

It also states "Your comment would be fine without that ... bit."

I frequently address poorly-founded comments myself. Just did immediately before this reply, see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49064763> (

I'm doing so both staying within the guidelines and specifically calling out the idiocy displayed, though without relying on that particular word.

Calling out Guidelines violations does not imply disagreement with what's been said otherwise. It is a call for more substantive participation, and probably strengthening your own arguments.

You've been here long enough that all of this should be quite familiar to you.

(I'm not a mod, which is why I'd initially linked a mod's own admonition.)

Re: The Strongest El Niño Ever

#244

Post by protocolture »

bcoughlan wrote: post #140
yostrovs wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be one thing if Europe immediately stopped using coal, drastically reduced airline usage, quit building gasoline cars, but if anything it is only marginally better than the US. Europe mostly shifted their dirty work to Asia and North America, while restricting themselves from using air conditioning as some kind of virtue signaling. That's the problem as I see it.

There's a lot to criticise of every country, but we're trying. The US is not trying (*) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Agreement#/media/File:Pa... * Not aimed at all the wonderful, sane and reasonable people of the USA.

>* Not aimed at all the wonderful, sane and reasonable people of the USA.

I am sure both of them appreciate the exception

Re: The Strongest El Niño Ever

#245

Post by _DeadFred_ »

tacomonstrous wrote: post #200
_DeadFred_ wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no such thing as a binding 'agreement' like this in the USA system of government. We have treaties. That have to be ratified by the Senate. The governments of the world understood this, and understood that the Paris climate agreement was an attempt by the US executive branch at the time to bluff to a hollow 'deal' (instead of creating a true binding treaty) hoping future politicians would be too embarrassed…

Hmm... If only there were a tangible reason why a treaty would have been impossible to get through the US Congress as currently constituted.

'we couldn't follow the law because the law's hard, instead we started the gateway for Trump by bending the rules, destroying norms, pretending the meaningless has meaning and creating pretext Conservatives could use for ignoring (first) these fake rules, but later under Trump huge amounts of the the real rules.'.

It was a bullshit agreement, and everyone knew it was, and were knowing in that what they were doing would weaken/damage politics in the USA and adherence to the rules. And they did it anyways. To no productive end but lots and lots and lots of damage.

Re: The Strongest El Niño Ever

#246

Post by protocolture »

xorcist wrote: post #70
gonzalohm wrote: post #16

What's interesting to me is that almost all models underestimated the ocean temperature. We are entering uncharted waters and I fear that at some point we will get an extreme extreme weather event and the worse thing is that we won't see it coming.

Due to the widespread idea that climate prediction has been predicting doom and gloom all the time, and has always been wrong about it, I have been entertaining myself by revisiting old climate predictions from 20 years ago. I can highly recommend it. I mean, predicting the climate must be one of the hardest numerical simulations you can run. Climate models are famously incomplete. But the results turned out to be wa…

>Due to the widespread idea that climate prediction has been predicting doom and gloom all the time, and has always been wrong about it, I have been entertaining myself by revisiting old climate predictions from 20 years ago. I can highly recommend it.

N=1 Mind, but I remember reading a spread in Australian Scientist that predicted Australia would become something of a rainless desert, storms bringing only lightning, by 2020 or so. Leaving only Melbourne, Adelaide and Tasmania somewhat habitable. Article went on to discuss how to calmly migrate the population south over the 13 or so years remaining, and what the government might do to dissuade climate refugees from pacific islands.

Since then I have a read a lot of people walking back the absolute death and destruction stuff, but "Extremier Extremes" seems to be the closest to a consensus position, one that the strongest El Nino ever supports completely.

Re: The Strongest El Niño Ever

#247

Post by gib444 »

sdeframond wrote: post #170
OptionOfT wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. Built a house in 2016 in Belgium. Perfectly insulated. You didn't have to run heating in winter. Kept it all inside. Also, it overheated instantly.

Insulation is actually helpul against heat too! But since modern buildings usually have huge windows, we're letting in about 1kw of heat from sunlight per square meter of window. That's 6kw for a 3x2m bay window, or about the equivalent of 6 electric heaters at full power. Block that heat ouside of your house with all kind of shade you can get: trees, blinds, adjustable shades, rolling shutters... Also, close every o…

(UK here)

This is all the usual advice, which works for a few days, but during a period of over a week of high temperatures, there's nothing you can do.

The sun will eventually heat up every part of the house and turn it into a radiator.

Even when night time temperatures drop to 17c, I have my have windows open at 10pm with a decent cross-wind, my bedroom temperature may drop from 26c to 24c after 2-3 hours, but if I close the windows, it jumps to 25c in ~30 minutes...

The streets probably don't help either - no trees, just asphalt, front yards with paving slabs etc

Re: The Strongest El Niño Ever

#248

Post by protocolture »

dredmorbius wrote: post #74
asats wrote: 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…

>Growth trend matters more than absolute present value.

Only if the current absolute present value is enough that the resulting trend matters.

It was only 2 weeks ago when someone posted an article claiming data centers worldwide use 24x less water than golf courses worldwide.

And I mean, you need somewhere to collate all that climate data? You need telecoms to let scientists communicate?

>Driven by AI use, the US economy is set to consume more electricity in 2030 for processing data than for manufacturing all energy-intensive goods combined, including aluminium, steel, cement and chemicals. In advanced economies more broadly, data centres are projected to drive more than 20% of the growth in electricity demand between now and 2030, putting the power sector in those economies back on a growth footing after years of stagnating or declining demand in many of them.

If horse use trends continue at their current pace, London will be covered in 20 meters of horse manure by the end of the decade.

> In advanced economies more broadly, data centre's are projected to drive more than 20% of the growth in electricity demand between now and 2030

20% of the growth isn't much overall either is it? That's likely assuming that the million and 1 spruiked projects actually get off the ground.

Re: The Strongest El Niño Ever

#249

Post by 1d22a »

sajithdilshan wrote: post #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

Carbon capture is physically unable to be as effective as we need it to be. To an approximation, growing a tree is able to capture as much carbon as burning the wood from that tree. If most of our released carbon came from burning wood, we would just need to re-grow that amount of wood (unfortunately it's not even that simple, as the soil stores carbon long term in a way that just growing the tree doesn't capture, and is also released over time when old growth forests are cut down). Instead, the carbon we're burning comes from processes which efficiently concentrated the carbon from plants and microorganisms over millions of years to create coal, oil, and gas.

Carbon capture technology would have to artificially replicate these millions-of-years-long processes, and do it on a scale of years to decades. The scale of carbon capture we need is entirely unfathomable, requiring processes that don't exist, because they have to work against entropy itself.

Carbon capture at the point of burning fossil fuels to abate further emissions might be economical. Capturing already released carbon dioxide from the atmosphere (concentration of ~0.04%) is a fiction pushed by fossil fuel companies to muddy the debate and distract from the urgency of immediately stopping the burning of fossil fuels.

Re: The Strongest El Niño Ever

#250

Post by scarecrowbob »

OptionOfT wrote: post #183
sdeframond wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Insulation is actually helpul against heat too! But since modern buildings usually have huge windows, we're letting in about 1kw of heat from sunlight per square meter of window. That's 6kw for a 3x2m bay window, or about the equivalent of 6 electric heaters at full power. Block that heat ouside of your house with all kind of shade you can get: trees, blinds, adjustable shades, rolling shutters... Also, close every o…

> Insulation is actually helpul against heat too! Yes, until you reach that tipping point where once warmed up, you can't cool down anymore.

I don't know your situation but surely you've tried ventilating at night and then closing up the house at a specific time in the day?

I only ask because when I moved from the US south to the high desert in NM (about 2KM) I had to learn how to time that transition.

Very few folks here run A/Cs, we generally have homes designed to stay warm and during the summer usually fans go on about bed time and off in the morning, and that's enough to keep things cool because of insulation.

It was not obvious to me how that worked and I spent one very sweaty summer before I got the timing correct.

Of course, if the nights are hot (which sometimes happens) then that doesn't work so well.

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