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

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

#171

Post by mseebach » Tue, Aug 23, 2016, 1:14 PM UTC

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.

It's not just the practical problem of getting rich people in the west to lower their consumption, it's the deeply moral problem of denying the lifestyle we've enjoyed for the past ~century to the couple of billion people currently joining the middle class.

So yes, technology is the only solution. Incremental improvements in efficiency should not be shunned, but they're not going to be 'solutions'.

I'm not even sure we will need to go to very dramatic steps to get there. Solar competitive with coal at market-prices seems to be right around the corner, that'll be a massive water-shed moment. I have high hopes for algae fuel (perhaps naive), because this can plug directly in to the existing downstream oil infrastructure (and burning hydrocarbons is going to be part of life for the foreseeable future).

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

#172

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Aug 23, 2016, 1:14 PM UTC

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.

[deleted]

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

#173

Post by dredmorbius » Tue, Aug 23, 2016, 1:16 PM UTC

chukye wrote: post #96

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

Embrace limits.

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

#174

Post by nl » Tue, Aug 23, 2016, 1:17 PM UTC

snarfy wrote: post #78

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.

There is another solution: less people.

I don't understand why people say this like it is some kind of self evident comment.

High levels of industrial production without counting the cost of carbon emissions is the problem.

Counties with high birth rates (mostly in Africa) aren't the ones causing that.

It's really the 2 person family in the West, with 3 cars, a MacManshion and 4 overseas holidays a year.

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

#175

Post by michael_h » Tue, Aug 23, 2016, 1:17 PM UTC

snarfy wrote: post #115

konschubert wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you trying to say?

That the problem is there are too many people in a world of finite resources. A solution is less people. I'm not suggesting how this is done, but we probably shouldn't e.g. subsidize growth anymore. You shouldn't get a tax break for having kids. It should go the other way.

You're probably correct on this point in general, but the tax break I get from having kids offsets the cost of almost two weeks of preschool. No one is having kids to save money.

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

#176

Post by konschubert » Tue, Aug 23, 2016, 1:18 PM UTC

Klathmon wrote: post #154

ThomPete wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What on earth does language have to do with it? Other countries write about climate change too :)

Because to a non-native speaker the 2 words can be confused as synonyms. Hell I didn't even know there was a distinct difference between the 2 words until just now (and i've been speaking english my whole life), and I had just assumed that these kinds of discussions were talking about the "long term" data.

Well, in German

climate = Klima

weather = Wetter

So, I really don't think that the confusion can be excused by language in this case :)

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

#177

Post by dash2 » Tue, Aug 23, 2016, 1:19 PM UTC

nilved wrote: post #160

pjc50 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and no. You can change the carbon efficiency of people's consumption quite a bit with appropriate nudging and consumption taxes. You can also have global agreements paying countries not to exploit their "unburnable" fossil fuel resources. Little things like the EU mandate for ending incandescent lightbulbs can definitely add up. You need technology and policy and economics. The market for power plants is never go…

> Yes and no. You can change the carbon efficiency of people's consumption quite a bit with appropriate nudging and consumption taxes. You can also have global agreements paying countries not to exploit their "unburnable" fossil fuel resources. No, you really can't, or we wouldn't have year-after-year record breaking temperatures. Regulation has never fixed anything. And especially when it comes to science, we need t…

> Regulation has never fixed anything.

That's just silly. Regulation guarantees the safety of the food you eat, the buildings you live in and the car you drive.

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

#178

Post by return0 » Tue, Aug 23, 2016, 1:19 PM UTC

As someone who does not tolerate heat well, i can confirm. And it isn't over yet.

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

#179

Post by scatters » Tue, Aug 23, 2016, 1:20 PM UTC

Flockster wrote: post #121

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.

Yes, your upfront cost are expensive, because of course the plants have to be build. But that was the case with fossil plants as well, the only difference is, they are already built. But in the long run, it's cheaper due to the lack of needed fuel.

So there's three things here: upfront cost, running costs, and decommissioning costs. The running costs of renewable generation are nonzero even if the fuel is free, as there's considerable maintenance cost. The long run cost - and so the decision whether to build fossil or renewable - has to take all three into account.

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

#180

Post by collyw » Tue, Aug 23, 2016, 1:20 PM UTC

blahi wrote: post #53

socialist_coder wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, there will always be people who are less than noble in their pursuits. In academia, in NGOs, in environmental groups, in government, in private industry, everywhere. Ask yourself though, even if all this climate change and global warming is FUD, what happens if we respond to it like it is real? Result: we have a cleaner planet (cleaner air, cleaner water, oceans that still support life) and we have a susta…

I don't dispute there is climate change. It is pretty self-evident at this point that the climate is changing. What is not clear at all is whether humans are responsible for it.

The scientific consensus is that it is probably man made.