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July was the hottest month ever recorded, according to Nasa

nytimes.com

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

#161

Post by Pitarou »

bnolsen wrote: post #57

if almost half you input data is made up" and not raw observations then you can falsely come to this conclusion. The real data shows spiking in the mid 1930s far above current levels.

This claim has been thoroughly discredited. Even the climate change denier Andrew Watts agrees that it is false. And in any case, it makes no sense -- to believe this claim is to believe that all climate scientists are part of some conspiracy.

Politifact do a nice job of debunking it. http://politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2014/jun/25/stev...

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

#162

Post by blahi »

dasboth wrote: post #104
blahi wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very fucking expensive. And those articles frequently on the front page of HN are biased and are not telling the whole story. That's the problem. NGOs are framing the public discourse in a very one-sided way. If you raise concerns, you are a "denier" and downvoted into oblivion because people just want to believe the beautiful story of clean energy vs. greedy capitalist pigs.

That's definitely true, it's rare to see a fully civilised discussion where those concerns are addressed without the accompanying rhetoric. Having said that, surely it's a fact that we'll run out of fossil fuels at some point and will need an alternate source of energy, and that will be expensive no matter when we do it, so why not start early?

You don't seem to grasp what I am saying at all. I am not against upgrading our energy capabilities. This whole comment chain started because of the claim that only lizard people have incentive to lie. This couldn't be further from the truth. There are snake people who lie, scream and spread FUD who just want to take the lizards' place.

Their screaming leads to a lot of tension and escalation. THIS IS A PROBLEM. SOLVE IT RIGHT NOW. This is what FUD is after all. This leads to rash decisions. We don't know where and when to invest. Should we invest in more nuclear and supplement with distributed photovoltaics? Should we build giant panels? Should we focus on batteries and what kinds of batteries?

Or should we focus on hydro power instead? Or maybe beam energy from space (it's a thing)? What about clean chemical reactions?

And most importantly - when should we start and when should we double down on it? What are the checkpoints of R&D and production grade equipment? What should we wait on?

Opportunists did what they do best - they found an opportunity to get attention and are exploiting it for their gain. This goes against the general public's gain. That's what I am against. Repeating completely unproductive rhetoric to get the tension high.

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

#163

Post by gambiting »

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'm from Poland, last week we actually had 38C outside and I don't know anyone who has AC. Yes it's hot during the day and nights can be uncomfortable, but every conversation I had with friends about this always ends with "yeah it would be nice to have but it's not worth the expense for the few weeks of summer".

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

#164

Post by VLM »

pjc50 wrote: post #137
Pitarou wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Isn't that extremely small area compared to submerged coastline and harbors and coastal cities?

Some industrial processes and some datacenter services require baseload power. "most" power demand doesn't truly require baseload. Conveniently they require approx no people. Go build the plants and the data centers and the aluminum refineries in the desert next to the a-bomb test sites and no one will notice or care.

As an example my cheap old refrigerator "needs" 24x7 power but with better insulation and higher thermal mass it could trivially run once a day, or even less, at peak solar production.

Another example is culturally we "need" to have retail and service businesses open during the lowest solar generation times of the day, but that cultural demand has no technological basis. There are cultural and economic reasons walmart can't replace all its gigawatts of light bulbs with skylights but no technological reasons.

Another cultural example is there's no reason we "have to" have millions of people living in deserts, and no matter how much environmental damage it causes we're not going to depopulate the West USA down to a sustainable level for purely political and cultural reasons. Ditto the far south. We as a culture have decided no level of environmental damage is too large to stop providing water and air conditioning for millions to live in historically unlivable climates, even if there's plenty of land in livable climates. In that way, ionizing radiation doesn't matter any more than the destruction of the Colorado River matters, for example.

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

#165

Post by [deleted] »

adrenalinelol wrote: post #145
lallysingh wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Populations past a certain level of prosperity for a generation or two do seem to drop reproductive rates. Perhaps the answer here is higher educational costs to discourage people from having many kids, and lots of alternative activities instead (Pokemon)?

Increase college tuition (even more?) with the hopes of stemming population growth? You know the majority of the planet doesn't actually attend college as is already?

[deleted]

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

#166

Post by pjmorris »

pjc50 wrote: post #123
pjmorris wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about Lunaforming? If there's enough water, there's certainly enough sunlight to split it for H and O, making habitation and manufacturing possible. Migrating heavy industry off-planet, the old L5 society [0] idea, might be an option. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L5_Society

The trouble with heavy industry is that it's heavy. You can't ship e.g. bauxite to orbit and aluminium back down using conventional rockets and have the economics make any sense. The timeframe is unlikely to work either. We're a decade away at least from the first industrial building on the moon, but we need to change CO2 production now . Edit: the only sci-fi space solution that might make sense is the solar shade,…

I was thinking, but didn't write, that mining on the moon is the place to start. It'd be silly to ship raw materials to space. It's not nearly as hard to ship finished products back.

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

#168

Post by _ph_ »

chukye wrote: post #96

OK, but... any ideas how can we solve that?

Move to renewable energies as fast as possible. Wind and solar is now cost-competetive, especially if you look at solar in the south of the US. If anyone operates an AC unit at home, why is it not powered by solar? Especially as you really need it when the sun shines. Tesla have shown: electrical cars are a thing. The quicker the automotive sector moves to electrical, the better.

We can't solve the problem over night, but thats the reason we should start now. There is a lot we can do. Last year, Germany produced 30% of its energy with renewables, up from 25% the previous year. As I write this, German solar produces 22 GW of solar electricity alone.

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

#169

Post by dredmorbius »

sevenless wrote: post #4

These maps are based on emission trends continuing, assuming no political action will be taken. But wouldn't a hotter world tend to exacerbate emission trends, with human needs for AC and desalination rising, plus forest fires? Moreover, there might be some tipping point for large scale methane release. The 'tail risk' to global warming has appreciable density a long way out.

We've known the basic climate math since the 1960s. The first political attempts to reach global agreements on emissions controls were in the early 1970s.

45 years on, we've yet to achieve an actual reductions agreement, let alone enact it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Conference_on...

I'm not particularly sanguine.

There are many books and authors on this topic. For the energy angle, I strongly recommend Vaclav Smil. For the political dynamics, William Ophuls is among the best I've read. His 1977 Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity is a brief, but commanding overview of the problems and dynamics. It's long ago enough that many of its predictions are testable. While pessimistic on population and food, much the rest has held up, and Ophuls' predictions specifically on China and the former Soviet Union are uncannily accurate.

He's written more since, with what he says is his final book being published in 2012.

http://www.worldcat.org/title/ecology-and-the-politics-of-sc...

http://www.worldcat.org/title/platos-revenge-politics-in-the...

http://www.worldcat.org/title/sane-polity-a-pattern-language...

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

#170

Post by scatters »

dasboth wrote: post #104
blahi wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very fucking expensive. And those articles frequently on the front page of HN are biased and are not telling the whole story. That's the problem. NGOs are framing the public discourse in a very one-sided way. If you raise concerns, you are a "denier" and downvoted into oblivion because people just want to believe the beautiful story of clean energy vs. greedy capitalist pigs.

That's definitely true, it's rare to see a fully civilised discussion where those concerns are addressed without the accompanying rhetoric. Having said that, surely it's a fact that we'll run out of fossil fuels at some point and will need an alternate source of energy, and that will be expensive no matter when we do it, so why not start early?

Opportunity cost. Those resources could conceivably be better spent building roads, railways, factories, protecting wetlands, rewilding forests, educating children...

There are plenty of current, pressing problems to solve; why solve a problem that won't exist for decades if not centuries?

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