Live data from Hacker News

The Strongest El Niño Ever

theclimatebrink.com

331–340 of 370 posts

Re: The Strongest El Niño Ever

#331
post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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…

Scotland here - have heard people from London talking about moving here for the weather.. which isn't something I ever expected to hear! Was 10C this morning when I went out to walk my dog, in a t-shirt and shorts!

> Was 10C this morning when I went out to walk my dog

I hope you didn't get heatstroke ! XD

Re: The Strongest El Niño Ever

#332
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?

It would be great for you to experience living close to one of these data centers [0]. Maybe you'd have a consideration outside of your own myopic view then. [0] https://www.selc.org/news/xai-built-an-illegal-power-plant-t...

Yeah, as opposed to the very pleasant living by the side of a steel mill and an oil refinery.

What is myopic is chasing social media "evil of the month" trends, instead of looking at the actual data.

Re: The Strongest El Niño Ever

#333
post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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…

Scotland here - have heard people from London talking about moving here for the weather.. which isn't something I ever expected to hear! Was 10C this morning when I went out to walk my dog, in a t-shirt and shorts!

I'm surprised you need to put clothes on your dog

Re: The Strongest El Niño Ever

#334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, it sounded a bit "euro-A/C-ignorant" meme, but maybe I am on the receiving end and thus slightly oversensitive, because El Niño is not scientifically linked to any climate effect in Europe. It is known to cause effects in North America from Canada to Mexico, whole South America, Australia, South and East Asia, and South of Africa. Why it might sound as an attack to an european? Europe is "first world" and has…

It's an extreme taboo topic to discuss but I suspect it's going to be a slow fix if at all: society kind of stops functioning at its best when people live until 90 or 100, and spend decades on pension, disrupting inheritance chains when people "need" them: most Europeans inherit apartments but what good does it do if you inherit in your late 60s? The reality is for most of European history, people inherited in their…

> The reality is for most of European history, people inherited in their 40s and got their "big, family apartment" that way.

Do you have a source for this? It seems mathematically unlikely due to family sizes.

Re: The Strongest El Niño Ever

#335
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s all so scary! I regret having a child.

>It’s all so scary! I regret having a child. I dont get this. I would regret having a kid maybe if he turns out to not be resilient and up to the challenges posed by the changing climate and the shitty political situation. But those are things I can work with him on. Opsec can be taught. Political dissent can be taught. This thing can be turned around when the political class has been disposed of.

The point is it's too far gone. You can't teach much resilience for continent-wide crop failure.

Re: The Strongest El Niño Ever

#336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are doing a lot. Almost 90% of electricity capacity added last year was renewables. Nearly 1 in 3 cars sold are now EVs. The world is spending over $2 trillion every year on low‑carbon energy investment. Solar and wind have already avoided more than 2 gigatons of C02 being added to the atmosphere. In the US, the IRA will drop emissions 40% to below 2005 levels. What do you mean we are doing very little?

I’ve had the same discussion with many people, and when I tell them how much work is done on cleaning up carbon emissions, the reply is always “well… it’s not enough”. And of course, they don’t have a sense of what is “enough”. They don’t really understand it in a factual, measurable way, but just are interesting in what the overall story is, and what it says about humanity failing.

Are we measurably slowing down the warming effect?

Re: The Strongest El Niño Ever

#337
post #63

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.

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?

It feels like you're being sarcastic but "AI data centers are what, half a percent of the world electricity consumption" -- 0.5% of the global total is huge!

Re: The Strongest El Niño Ever

#338

Remember that you don't need AC to beat the heat - we've had other options for centuries. One of my favorites is fans. I've lived in a hot subtropical climate most of my life. The best modes of cooling are, in order of comfort: shade, clothing, breeze, fans, A/C. Our rather large home didn't have A/C when we bought it. But it did have a huge attic fan that kept the air moving throughout the entire house on hot days.…

You just need a well-isolated house, which are rare in the US, but common in Europe. A well-isolated house doesn't warm up as much on a hot day, unless you open windows wide. Temperature outside can be 35 Celsius, inside Personally, I much prefer this solution than ACs, because ACs sometimes affect my throat and make me feel tired.

Re: The Strongest El Niño Ever

#339
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because Europeans are more of nonconformists and could deal with some 7 to 10 super hot days in a year. It's now weeks in a row.

Europe could never "handle" it. Even in 1990-2001, Europe averaged about 3 heat-related deaths per 100,000: https://www.statista.com/chart/36367/average-annual-heat-rel... , compared to about 1 per 100,000 in the Americas at the time. 3 per 100,000 is a lot. That's higher than the homicide rates in New England and the upper midwest of the U.S.

Are these numbers actually based on the same way of counting heat-related deaths? As far as I have seen Europe looks at excess mortality, while the US only counts deaths explicitly attributed to heat-related issues. If there are different methods in use, I wouldn't be surprised if this accounted for a lot of the difference.

Re: The Strongest El Niño Ever

#340
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No, in ~6y they will count for 1% of present day consumption. The rest of the quote compares it to where we expect steel manufacturing projections. It all reads like something that seeks to influence rather than inform.
Post reply on HN