Live data from Hacker News

Oceans hit highest temperature on record

bbc.com

511–520 of 693 posts

Re: Oceans hit highest temperature on record

#511

With the growth in solar, it is easy to think that we can solve it, we just do more renewables, but the decline of fossil fuels is negligible: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:share:7438918221... Globally, fossil fuels supply 81.1% today (2023). Only marginally down from 81.4% in 2000. Fossil fuels are not on track to end by 2050. But rather in 4-10 centuries.

Solar + wind were 99% of new generation capacity last year. Fossil fuel usage dropped for one of the first times ever. Renewables generated more than coal. Solar installation is huge and the increase continues to accelerate. Every year has seen a record amount of installed solar. Solar started at zero two decades ago and is already curbing other sources.

The trouble is that we’re adding renewables to add capacity, not as a way to bring significant amounts of fossil fuel capacity offline.

Re: Oceans hit highest temperature on record

#512
post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you get to abdicate responsibilty of some avoidable negative externality of something you do just because some entirely separate function of it is the thing your customers want. If I were a plumber who fixed leaks by diverting the water into the customers' neighbors houses, my customers aren't the ones responsible for the damage it causes. I don't think it matters even if the externality isn't avoidable…

Re: emissions per capita - why should the Chinese be limited to a lower amount than the US citizens? They want a high standard of living too.

that might make sense in a world where the US has been chugging along emitting at a constant rate for many years, to maintain a certain standard of living.- but the reality is the US emissions has been going down for many years, while increasing their standard of living (arguable, but difficult to say that US standard of living is less than half of what it was in the 90s), while china is going up in emissions.

I also don't agree that just because someone else became rich through some negative process (crime, perhaps), that everyone has a right to the same. This sort of thinking is the way the world burns.

I don't get a free pass to behave like a mafia boss just because I really really want to have a bunch of money like one

Re: Oceans hit highest temperature on record

#513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you get to abdicate responsibilty of some avoidable negative externality of something you do just because some entirely separate function of it is the thing your customers want. If I were a plumber who fixed leaks by diverting the water into the customers' neighbors houses, my customers aren't the ones responsible for the damage it causes. I don't think it matters even if the externality isn't avoidable…

I don’t think looking at first derivative of emissions per capita is more important than absolute measure when thinking of the morality of polluting. If China’s per capita is lower than some other place, they’re doing better. The first derivative tells us that might become untrue, but countries with high historical emissions don’t get a pass because they’re lowering those high levels as compared to a lower emitting c…

china's historical total emissions will also surpass the US's pretty soon, on account of their nearly 3x as large population combined with their per capita emissions being nearly as high. and as mentioned, theirs is likely set to grow way faster. I agree extrapolating isn't always the best way to assign historical blame (for whatever that might mean), I do think it makes sense to use when thinking about what policies people ought to take now, to reduce damage as much as possible

I also don't agree that just because someone else became rich through some negative process (crime, perhaps), that everyone has a right to the same. This sort of thinking is the way the world burns

Re: Oceans hit highest temperature on record

#514
post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The self-flagellation has gotten too extreme. Photovoltaics were invented in the US, and the US helped subsidize it to the point where they were an economically viable source of energy.

Wikipedia says invented in France and developed by the Germans and Japanese. Do you have some references for US involvement?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cell#History

"1954 – The first practical photovoltaic cell was publicly demonstrated at Bell Laboratories.[27] The inventors were Calvin Souther Fuller, Daryl Chapin and Gerald Pearson.[28]"

The references are on Wikipedia. Maybe do the most basic thing in Wikipedia and click on some links to the related pages before asking for sources. One can still quibble that 'first practical' is indeed different from 'first' but the practical part is the part that actually matters in this argument anyway (i.e. solar rollout).

(also, of course it was Bell Labs.)

Re: Oceans hit highest temperature on record

#515
post #10

BBC did a pretty good deep dive a few days ago on what we're in for: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xZCh8eDZFc DW also, similar stuff, but the guest is quite good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dcl5Mn373Oc Anton Petrov covered it from a much more science lens a couple months back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRoU3whzX_Q

That BBC documentary shows or exposes very shallow thinking skills at this timestamp 6m42s: https://youtu.be/_xZCh8eDZFc?si=AHyDPgoDucsCRllS&t=402 They claim the panama canal is continuously fed by freshwater for the canal locks (which segment the canal into sections with different water levels, and which enable ships to be raised or lowered to the next water level during travel along the canal). It's 2026, why are h…

“It's 2026, why are humans dumping freshwater into the oceans?”

They’re called rivers and they do that naturally.

Re: Oceans hit highest temperature on record

#516
post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Western democracies at this point can't do anything at that even hints at minimally inconveniencing 5% of the population. Any 5% at that. We are stuck in local maximum even if it slowly and surely slides into the shitter

Pretty much everything the EU does, is inconveniencing most of its population, often in the name of "climate change" (while not actually making any impact). Positives: no mobile roaming charges Negatives: - less efficient home appliances (dishwasher, washing machine, drier) - cookie law - car annoyances (e.g. "beep if over the speed limit") - paper straws - attached bottle caps - LED lights - expensive electricity (a…

Not in the EU but have similar regulations

> less efficient home appliances (dishwasher, washing machine, drier)

How exactly are they less efficient?

> cookie law

The fault being those trying to steal my data

> car annoyances (e.g. "beep if over the speed limit")

I haven't seen that

> paper straws

I'll give you that one, however in my country its businesses that stopped it just to customer pressure, not a law, indeed it's perfectly legal to serve plastic straws to people, its just people don't ask for them

> attached bottle caps

These are great

> LED lights

These are also great

> expensive electricity

In my country that's due to the price of gas

Re: Oceans hit highest temperature on record

#517

With less ice around than there used to be, the same incident energy can do a lot more ocean heating. It takes 80 calories to convert 1 gram of ice at 0C to 1 gram of water at 0C. Once the ice is melted, a further 80 calories can raise the temperature of the gram of water at 0C to 80C

Yep, once you learn about Latent temperature fusion, ones view on these things change drastically. It also explains why boiling water doesn't spontaneously just explode into vapor once it hits that temperature

The concept of heat of fusion blew my mind when I learned about it in high school chemistry. Feels extremely counterintuitive at first.

Re: Oceans hit highest temperature on record

#518
post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re: emissions per capita - why should the Chinese be limited to a lower amount than the US citizens? They want a high standard of living too.

that might make sense in a world where the US has been chugging along emitting at a constant rate for many years, to maintain a certain standard of living.- but the reality is the US emissions has been going down for many years, while increasing their standard of living (arguable, but difficult to say that US standard of living is less than half of what it was in the 90s), while china is going up in emissions. I also…

There's a phrase for that "do as I say, not as I do" (see also: "pulling the ladder up"). This is rightly viewed as hypocritical by those on the receiving end.

Re: Oceans hit highest temperature on record

#519
post #331

Thank God we have a new technology that is aggressively using water, power, and making the world increasingly hotter.

It is not aggressively using water. That figure was a lie produced by a likely CCP spy, and later retracted ("oops!"). [1] [1] https://x.com/tbpn/status/1990950527128252856

Irrelevant.

https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-co...

Re: Oceans hit highest temperature on record

#520
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I'm not saying that and I don't think 1.5% is particularly large. Moreover many of these projects are built out with on site 0 carbon generation so they're in some ways a net benefit.

This is wildly out of touch with reality. Have you never seen a construction site? A 0 carbon generation site doesn't exist.

This is so lame man. A few construction vehicles aren't why the world is burning. It's burning because we pump and dig up billions of tons of fossil fuels to burn in large scale power plants, cargo ships etc. And a bunch of other reasons of course, but the main point is we could easily run data centers and everything else includibg most if not all construction vehicles etc on renewables and nuclear if we wanted to.

The problem is not that we are building more things that use electricity, the problem is that we are generating electricity using fossil fuels. We should have phased out fossil fuels decades ago yet here we are ramping it up while everyone's bickering about inconsequential bullshit like datacenters.

Datacenters are not the problem. Construction is not the problem (except concrete which generates huge emissions but we can't really do much about that). Some things are infinitely easier to fix than others. Power generation is such a thing. We have the solution, we've had it for like a century (nuclear) and we're getting even more solutions.

We could run all power production with hardly any fossil fuels if we really wanted, nearly all land transport could be electric. These two changes alone would eliminate the vast majority of emissions. And we can do that, it's realistically possible.

We could also probably run global shipping and aviation on non-fossil fuels if we really wanted to, though I don't really know anything about that. There are large scale mining excavators, dozers and trucks running on electricity, and hybrid solutions.

Stop bickering about the small stuff. The only thing we should be focused on is transitioning all electricity production to green as fast as possible. That takes care of almost half of all emissions by itself and opens up lots of opportunities for solving other problems without emissions. For example we could use green energy to produce hydrogen from water, or biogas, ethanol etc, and then we'd have emission-free fuels we could use where combustion engines are still necessary.

But no let's just bicker about data centers and other inconsequential shit while the world ends.

Post reply on HN