July was the hottest month ever recorded, according to Nasa • Hacker News Board

Re: July was the hottest month ever recorded, according to Nasa

#131

Post by usea » Tue, Aug 23, 2016, 12:53 PM UTC

runeb wrote: post #91

oliv__ wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before AC, did people not live without it?

In my part of the world (northern Europe) basically nobody has AC, but that is probably because of the cooler temperatures here. I'm curious, at what temperatures do people who live with AC start using it? Or is it going all year round?

I live in Louisiana, southern US. I generally leave the thermostat set to ~23°C, so the AC comes on periodically to try and maintain that temperature indoors. During the warmer months, that's a significant portion of every day. During the winter, the central heating comes on instead to do the same job. There are some times of the year where neither come on, but they are brief and it will likely be on at night. It would get far too humid indoors without something running, I wager.

Re: July was the hottest month ever recorded, according to Nasa

#132

Post by colejohnson66 » Tue, Aug 23, 2016, 12:54 PM UTC

SixSigma wrote: post #103

guptaneil wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but it wasn't as hot... It's a vicious self-fueling cycle. By using AC, we're making the world warmer, which makes us use more AC.

People in our Florida office have fan heaters running under the desk because the AC keeps it too cold. The insanity boggles my mind. I had to go out and buy a sweater and thick trousers to sit in the office while it is 32C/90F outside.

The problem there is: what are you supposed to do? Many thermostats are placebos anyways.

Re: July was the hottest month ever recorded, according to Nasa

#133

Post by pjc50 » Tue, Aug 23, 2016, 12:54 PM UTC

Roritharr wrote: post #58

harryh wrote: post #44

Personally I think that the idea that these trends can ever be revered by some sort of world wide agreement to lower consumption is a pipe dream. People want to eat meat and drive cars and fly on airplanes. As long as they're rich enough to do so you'll never stop them. The only solution to this problem is technology. Some combination of green energy sources plus probably very large scale terraforming.

I see this actually as a nice plot someone could turn into a book. 1. Build a machine that pulls significant amounts of CO² out of the atmosphere. 2. Go to the UN an straight up tell them "we can make this problem go away, give us 1tn$ and 20 square kilometers of land in these countries, over this schedule with these milestones". 3. Profit.

I think the technology for that is already there, or nearly so; the financial will really isn't. There's no way you can get $1trn for anything other than a war.

Re: July was the hottest month ever recorded, according to Nasa

#134

Post by tombert » Tue, Aug 23, 2016, 12:54 PM UTC

jbail wrote: post #106

tombert wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, considering that I get my power from a combination of Nuclear and wind power, I doubt that I give a particularly high carbon footprint. But you're not wrong, I almost certainly have a higher footprint than most of the third world. I guess what I was getting at is that I think the levels New York has are substantially more sustainable than the rest of the US. Sorry for the confusion.

Do you have any data to back up your claim that New York is "substantially more sustainable than the rest of the US"? I'd be genuinely curious to look at that data

It's not terribly hard to find data on NYC's carbon footprint per capita: http://www.eia.gov/environment/emissions/state/analysis/

From the article: "New York, with a population of 19.6 million people, had the lowest per capita CO2 emissions – 8 mt per capita. A large portion of the population is located in the New York City metropolitan area where mass transit is readily available and most residences are multi-family units that provide efficiencies of scale in terms of energy for heating and cooling."

Re: July was the hottest month ever recorded, according to Nasa

#135

Post by Pitarou » Tue, Aug 23, 2016, 12:54 PM UTC

misja111 wrote: post #8

So 14 of the 15 hottest years ever have taken place since 2000. I'm wondering, if this is the result of global heating due to emissions, why do we see so many new record highs only now? The industrial revolution has been going on already for over 150 years. Why were there so few records broken in, say, 1980 - 1996, and so many in 2000 - 2016?

The problem is the accumulation of these emissions over decades. CO2 lingers in the atmosphere for roughly a century. Also, the recent industrialisation of countries like China means we are emitting more today than ever before.

Re: July was the hottest month ever recorded, according to Nasa

#136

Post by acomjean » Tue, Aug 23, 2016, 12:55 PM UTC

kleiba wrote: post #120

bjourne wrote: post #110

Anyone else who feel that the climate-related news are getting very scary? If for every month for the last year, there was a new sprinter breaking the last months world Record in 100 meters you'd know something was fishy. Like some kind of incredibly potent anabolic steroid runners were ingesting. With new and improved versions of that steroid being released every few months...

I would take it with a grain of salt. In Germany, we had warm summers in recent years, but this year's July has generally been cold and very rainy.

climate is long term, weather is short term[1]. Its a subtle difference and often confused, especially if english isn't your first language.

[1]http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/noaa-n/climate/climate_wea...

Re: July was the hottest month ever recorded, according to Nasa

#137

Post by pjc50 » Tue, Aug 23, 2016, 12:57 PM UTC

Pitarou wrote: post #122

throwanem wrote: post #95

It never ceases to bewilder me that nuclear power isn't taken seriously as a replacement for fossil-burning baseload generation.

Agreed. We no longer have the luxury of being prissy about ionising radiation.

Do we have the luxury of giving up multiple hundreds of square kilometers for the exclusion zones if there is a failure, though?

And the technology doesn't scale well. Few big plants that take ages to build, compared to panels on every roof and turbines put up one by one.

Re: July was the hottest month ever recorded, according to Nasa

#138

Post by js8 » Tue, Aug 23, 2016, 12:57 PM UTC

misja111 wrote: post #39

pjc50 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're misunderstanding the arithmetic. Take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_temperature_recor... The Nth "hottest years" are relative to the present day. So in the graph, it looks like 1981 would have been a record hot year - but now it's only the 30th (or whatever) hottest year. If the graph were a completely smooth upward-sloping line, then you'd expect that 15 of the 15 hottest years…

Thanks for the chart. To me it still seems like we are missing something. If you look at the period of 1940 - 1980, then there was not really an upward or downward trend. But in the 36 years after 1980, the global temperature has been going up like crazy. Should all of that be attributed to statistical noise? To me it looks like some new factor has started to influence the climate in the recent years, whatever that f…

The standard explanation is that aerosol emissions (soot and SO2) masked the warming during 1940-1980. Once environmental protections in the West kicked in, the warming due to CO2 has taken up.

Re: July was the hottest month ever recorded, according to Nasa

#139

Post by eludwig » Tue, Aug 23, 2016, 12:58 PM UTC

dasboth wrote: post #49

harryh wrote: post #44

Personally I think that the idea that these trends can ever be revered by some sort of world wide agreement to lower consumption is a pipe dream. People want to eat meat and drive cars and fly on airplanes. As long as they're rich enough to do so you'll never stop them. The only solution to this problem is technology. Some combination of green energy sources plus probably very large scale terraforming.

> some sort of world wide agreement to lower consumption is a pipe dream This has been my conclusion recently too. Sure, we can all do our own bit individually, but I can't realistically see a global shift in conscientiousness taking place.

It's good to remember that "globally" we are a huge collection of individuals. Perfect individual == perfect globe (ideally, of course).

Re: July was the hottest month ever recorded, according to Nasa

#140

Post by VLM » Tue, Aug 23, 2016, 12:59 PM UTC

sevenless wrote: post #36

throwanem wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That assumes power consumption is constant for a given ∆T regardless of the method used to produce it, which seems optimistic.

Yeah. I don't think thermodynamics works like that.

Shockingly that is pretty much how heat pumps work to a first degree (oh the pun), they don't much care which side is the evaporator and which side is the condenser. There are minor details in size of fan and design of coil vs tolerable noise level vs quality of insulation on connecting pipes. Also the pressure vs temp graphs are a little non-linear which does show up at the extremes (and the extremes are a small fraction of total operational time)

In the west most cooling is done with a heat pump permanently wired into refrigeration mode aka a conventional air conditioner. There's a widely held belief that the entire system coefficient of performance is exactly 1 with somewhat less popular urban legends claiming a small fraction of 1 or only analyzing 100% efficient theoretical gas table cycles of 30 or whatever. However real world deployed average systems including air handler (aka fan) power and a realistic depreciation or embedded energy of manufacture etc results in about 3. So in the real world the total cost to the environment is about a kilowatt/hr to move about 3 kilowatt/hr of heat out of a building. It scales better than linear with size, something to do with moving air being expensive and larger AC being connected to larger buildings having a better surface area to volume ratio.

Anyway for better or worse a kilowatt into an electric heater costs 3 KW of burned coal or uranium down at the plant and generates about 1 KW of heating in a typical building, whereas a kilowatt into an AC or heat pump costs 3 KW of burned coal or uranium down at the plant and moves about 3 KW of heat out of the building.

In practice it takes less energy to cool than to heat although in theory a heat pump has difficulty telling the difference between 90F outdoor and 50F outdoor temps.