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Heat dome causing record breaking heat wave

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Re: Heat dome causing record breaking heat wave

#181

Post by edoceo »

Taek wrote: post #18
kiloreux wrote: post #6

The affects of this on third world country are even worse. Here in Algeria we are having the worst drought in over 20 years. What I fear, is that if this continues to happen, people could literally start dying from thirst again. I wonder how good is desalination of sea water technology and if we could see some startups that explore this field, certainly a lot of people's lives to be changed.

I'm not celebrating people dying of thirst, but I also think that's the only thing that will get the world properly focused on the issue. We need to make big structural changes to the global economy to fight climate change, and those changes are going to have an outsized negative impact on today's wealthiest and most powerful people. They aren't going to let change happen without a fight. People dying is what it's go…

What is the number? Hella people already dying and we (USA) ain't doing shit.

The haute bourgeoisie will not, have not done anything to help.

Mike Muir was right. Give it revolution!!

Re: Heat dome causing record breaking heat wave

#182

Post by mbostleman »

retrac wrote: post #125
mbostleman wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do we know this is the result of climate change? It's meant as an honest question. Though it is largely ignored in the mainstream discussion, I've heard for years to be careful about making a distinction between weather and climate. Are you thinking this is not weather, but climate? How does one tell the difference? If there's a record winter of cold temps, would it be evidence that the climate is cooling?

I don't mean to be dismissive, but simple statistics. A record winter by itself is just a freak incident. As is a record hot summer. But what are the probabilities? One record cold day broken after 80 years? Improbable but not downright implausible. Year after year after year of record highs? Just coincidence?

Makes sense. I don’t have a good grasp on what the actual data is over time. My primary awareness is the extreme events that make the news.

Re: Heat dome causing record breaking heat wave

#183

Post by jhayward »

ArkanExplorer wrote: post #154

There are 241 coal power plants in the USA. Get 50 people chained up in front of the gates, and stop workers and coal coming in. Maintain this human blockade until the last coal power plant is shut down. Ignore arrests and ignore the police. Screw the impact on the 'investment'. The grid will handle the loss of electricity anyway. That's about 12,000 people across the USA who could actively shape the future of humani…

> The grid will handle the loss of electricity anyway.

No, it won't. And if you do it in the midst of a hot summer, or a cold winter, people will die because you killed them.

There are responsible ways to close those plants without killing people.

Re: Heat dome causing record breaking heat wave

#184

Post by mbostleman »

jbotz wrote: post #131
mbostleman wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do we know this is the result of climate change? It's meant as an honest question. Though it is largely ignored in the mainstream discussion, I've heard for years to be careful about making a distinction between weather and climate. Are you thinking this is not weather, but climate? How does one tell the difference? If there's a record winter of cold temps, would it be evidence that the climate is cooling?

There are actually scientific methods for attributing specific events to global warming or not, probabilistically. I.e. although you can never say with perfect certainty "this heatwave was caused by global warming", you can say: with global warming this heatwave has a probability 0.1 (once in ten years), but without global warming it would have a probability of 0.001 (once in a thousand years). We seem to be having s…

Gotcha.

Re: Heat dome causing record breaking heat wave

#185

Post by eulers_secret »

bob1029 wrote: post #13

I wish I knew more about meteorology. It must be incredible (and maybe a little harrowing) to be in that profession these days. Does anyone have any idea how this heat wave will conclude? Does all that energy just fade out into a nice polite rainstorm, or should we expect something more dramatic to cap it off considering the unprecedented circumstances?

For future reference, check out weather.gov and read the forecast discussion - it's written by your local meteorologist and is THICK with jargon and interesting stuff to google. It's sort of the 'root' for weather information and you pay for it anyways through taxes. It's great.

Portland, OR example: https://forecast.weather.gov/product.php?site=PQR&issuedby=P...

EDIT: Look through the history to get their perspective on what happened - just click "previous version" to go back in time!

Re: Heat dome causing record breaking heat wave

#186

Post by nickpp »

paxys wrote: post #67
andrei_says_ wrote: post #4

Maybe it’s time to signal political leaders that climate collapse is an urgent issue.

It's easy to blame political leaders, but they are (mostly) elected by the general population. Here in the US ~50% of the people vote for climate change deniers, so they are the ones you need to convince.

Yeah, when they had only two choices it could’ve been any number of issues influencing their vote, not only climate change.

Two-party system sucks.

Re: Heat dome causing record breaking heat wave

#187

Post by 908B64B197 »

NDizzle wrote: post #105
TremendousJudge wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US voters didn't become climate change deniers by chance

How do US voters go about changing climate policy in China and India?

Import tariffs and immigration quota reduction for countries not doing their part.

Re: Heat dome causing record breaking heat wave

#188

Post by stavros »

bin_bash wrote: post #163
_ph_ wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't solar be much better for powering desalination than nuclear power? It is way cheaper per energy produced than nuclear, especially in those countries, which need desalination most. Also, it doesn't take a decade to set up. Not even mentioning proliferation issues.

Solar doesn’t provide nearly as much energy and for desalination you need a surprising amount. Nuclear is a great use-case since the problem with nuclear is it needs a constant water source. If you’re desalinating you’ve got that problem covered.

Does nuclear need fresh water? I'd imagine salt water would wreck all the equipment, and you probably don't want to use up all the fresh water you generate...

Re: Heat dome causing record breaking heat wave

#189

Post by mbgerring »

Lammy wrote: post #11

Maybe it's time to start talking about ways humanity can geo-engineer our way out of this instead of just sitting here waiting to suffer. The US Air Force has been interested in this topic for decades, but there's no way to know how viable any of that research actually is. Some of the speculative documents I've read propose using carbon black dust as a way to artificially reflect heat, like https://web.archive.org/we…

There's a growing number of companies and VC firms working on geoengineering, and now is a good time to get in if you want to make a difference.

https://climatebase.org/ https://lowercarboncapital.com/ https://climatetechvc.org/a-running-list-of-climate-tech-vcs...

Re: Heat dome causing record breaking heat wave

#190

Post by Klonoar »

grishka wrote: post #100

In the US, at least, air conditioning is somewhat common from what I know. It was as hot as +35 in northwest part of Russia last week, for several days, with sun barely coming down at night, and that felt like a torture at times. Some historical records were broken.

I mean, specifically for areas in the PNW it has not be historically common. It's part of why the region struggles to deal with the heat.

It's also arguable that AC is part of the problem, e.g Singapore.

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