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What can a technologist do about climate change?

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Re: What can a technologist do about climate change?

#191

Post by pjc50 »

cies wrote: post #111

Great piece. I was thinking: "what programmers can do?" And came up with the "use compiled languages" answer. I compare Ruby and Haskell, as that's what I have experience with; but I expect it to hold true for any Ruby/Python/Java/etc vs C/C++/Haskell/Go/Rust/etc shootout. Just some typical numbers: Disk space to house one app deployment: 800MB Ruby/Rails vs 80MB Haskell/Yesod. Memory consumption of one instance: 350…

800MB Ruby/Rails

What, really? How much of that is the app source? As a byte-shaving embedded developer I have zero experience with Rails.

On the other hand, unless you're scaling really big, the CO2 cost of the computers is probably dwarfed by the cost of the developers commuting to work.

Re: What can a technologist do about climate change?

#192

Post by pjc50 »

haxel wrote: post #102
deoptimo wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So if we focused on developing a tool whose sole purpose was to give us quantified feedback on the consequences of our actions - much like how we use utility bills ... Utility bills and a carbon tax are the only feedback you need. All the rest is politics.

Does a carbon tax stop the slash-and-burn in Indonesia (for palm oil) and Brazil (for cattle)? I agree that the full cost of what we buy needs to be included in its price or else we'll keep seeing the same problem, having only kicked it down the road a bit. But there are also many more large problems besides climate change that involve more than carbon dioxide emissions.

Speaking of which, this came across my twitter feed just now: https://theconversation.com/feeding-godzilla-as-indonesia-bu...

Indonesia is keeping up the burning despite being under Chinese levels of smog.

Re: What can a technologist do about climate change?

#193

Post by rwallace »

protomyth wrote: post #82

The simple answer to the question is to create source of power and distribution that are cheaper, easier, and as reliable as gas, oil, and coal. Add to that a cheap solution to remove carbon from the air and oceans and you solve the problem. Anything that requires sacrifice of the first world or impedes the third world's progress is not going to be adopted. Swing for the fences since we need the homerun.

We already have energy sources that are much cheaper than coal when you take all the costs into account. If you start demanding that renewable energy must be cheaper than coal when coal gets huge effective subsidies and renewable energy gets none, that's an artificial constraint that makes the problem unsolvable.

Re: What can a technologist do about climate change?

#194

Post by vox_mollis »

ilaksh wrote: post #53

I actually believe 'climate change' is a type of cover for geopolitical issues related to the petrodollar. I believe that humans affect the climate, but the real scientific basis for that being the primary driver of climate change isn't there. But they are using 'da earf is melting' as a substitute for another truth that is just as scary. That truth is that the United States and its closest allies use about twice as…

Despite the downvotes, this is actually a decent hypothesis, even if tinfoil-hatty.

Re: What can a technologist do about climate change?

#195

Post by rwallace »

ilaksh wrote: post #53

I actually believe 'climate change' is a type of cover for geopolitical issues related to the petrodollar. I believe that humans affect the climate, but the real scientific basis for that being the primary driver of climate change isn't there. But they are using 'da earf is melting' as a substitute for another truth that is just as scary. That truth is that the United States and its closest allies use about twice as…

I'm surprised the above was downvoted.

Seems to me it can be paraphrased as 'whatever is going on with the climate, a big current issue is that our current level of oil consumption is geopolitically destructive and unsustainable; thus, the conclusion remains that we do need to reduce oil consumption, and the best way to do that is to cut down on the wasteful and destructive overuse of automobiles'.

Regardless of one's opinion regarding the relative importance of climate versus geopolitics, I think it's a reasonable argument and the prescribed action is a good idea either way.

Re: What can a technologist do about climate change?

#196

Post by api »

jbrande wrote: post #109
oberstein wrote: post #86

Buy iron, dump in ocean. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_fertilization ) Donate to geoengineering efforts and lobbying against insane moratoriums against geoengineering efforts.

Environmental 'solutions' have the unfortunate habit of being severely under researched and causing further, if not greater, damage. Besides, that is a solution for the symptom, not the disease.

It is indeed under-researched, so it should be researched. The fact that nobody is working on it at all is insane.

Re: What can a technologist do about climate change?

#197

Post by magicalist »

jerf wrote: post #67
Jemaclus wrote: post #57

I've asked this question a few times but haven't really gotten a satisfactory answer. There are a lot of what I might call "epic problems" out there. Malaria, homelessness, HIV, refugees, war, climate change, income inequality, gender inequality, hate crimes. I don't know anything about creating vaccines or cures for malaria or HIV. I don't have a degree in social work or behavior science. I don't have any experience…

There is absolutely, positively nothing wrong with making "lots" of money in a conventional manner, and donating it to an effective charity taking on the target task. In fact, in the spirit of the Kantian imperative, if everybody actually dropped their "merely productive" jobs and then tried to "directly solve poverty", we'd have just made the poverty problem much, much worse! You may want to Google the term "effecti…

Ha, I feel like you are responding to a completely different poster than the GP. Your quotes must be responding to some strawman, because nowhere do I see the post above suggest leaving a job, directly solving poverty, or the problems with making lots of money.

Meanwhile from someone with the GP's background, the marginal utility of a few hours a week helping with an Open Data or Open Government project would be vastly higher than staying at work longer hoping to get that promotion, not to mention it would also scratch that itch most of us have to be developing new things, it will help prevent burnout at work, and get you involved with a new community which is good for possible future social and business contacts. You won't directly solve poverty, but I'll bet the farm that you also won't eventually have billions (or even millions) to donate to charity just because you decided donating money is a cool way to help people.

To Jemaclus, if you don't have any contacts at your local level of people that could really use some tech help (and most of us don't), Code for America might be a great starting place to look: http://www.codeforamerica.org/brigade/

Re: What can a technologist do about climate change?

#198

Post by noname123 »

Jemaclus wrote: post #57

I've asked this question a few times but haven't really gotten a satisfactory answer. There are a lot of what I might call "epic problems" out there. Malaria, homelessness, HIV, refugees, war, climate change, income inequality, gender inequality, hate crimes. I don't know anything about creating vaccines or cures for malaria or HIV. I don't have a degree in social work or behavior science. I don't have any experience…

> Re: Malaria, homelessness, HIV, refugees, war, climate change, income inequality, gender inequality, hate crimes.

There are tons of informatics needs for modeling malaria genome evolution specially against emergence of front-line drug resistance that is spreading from SE Asia to Africa. Tools need to be built to inform public health officials where the genome's gene flow is headed next to modify the front-line treatment to contain the spread (e.g., Real-time genomic surveillance of Artesminin resistance of Plasmodium).

There is an entire open-source community of people uploading and sharing time-stamped genomic samples of malaria and host information if you are interested (http://www.malariagen.net/).

Similarly for HIV, there are lots of public health research groups doing modeling of HIV transmission, applied to specific local communities to contain an epidemic. Web front-end needs to be made and data pipelines that crunch incoming input data is needed. Most of this work is done in academic labs where information is only broadcasted on papers but could use a nicer front-end open to public and automated back-end for production data crunching. (e.g., http://web2.research.partners.org/cepac/model.html).

Re: What can a technologist do about climate change?

#199

Post by protomyth »

rwallace wrote: post #193
protomyth wrote: post #82

The simple answer to the question is to create source of power and distribution that are cheaper, easier, and as reliable as gas, oil, and coal. Add to that a cheap solution to remove carbon from the air and oceans and you solve the problem. Anything that requires sacrifice of the first world or impedes the third world's progress is not going to be adopted. Swing for the fences since we need the homerun.

We already have energy sources that are much cheaper than coal when you take all the costs into account. If you start demanding that renewable energy must be cheaper than coal when coal gets huge effective subsidies and renewable energy gets none, that's an artificial constraint that makes the problem unsolvable.

Why does China use coal? If you truly want India and China to switch sources then you need to check all the boxes. No one is going to sacrifice when they are bootstrapping.

Re: What can a technologist do about climate change?

#200

Post by magicalist »

noname123 wrote: post #198
Jemaclus wrote: post #57

I've asked this question a few times but haven't really gotten a satisfactory answer. There are a lot of what I might call "epic problems" out there. Malaria, homelessness, HIV, refugees, war, climate change, income inequality, gender inequality, hate crimes. I don't know anything about creating vaccines or cures for malaria or HIV. I don't have a degree in social work or behavior science. I don't have any experience…

> Re: Malaria, homelessness, HIV, refugees, war, climate change, income inequality, gender inequality, hate crimes. There are tons of informatics needs for modeling malaria genome evolution specially against emergence of front-line drug resistance that is spreading from SE Asia to Africa. Tools need to be built to inform public health officials where the genome's gene flow is headed next to modify the front-line trea…

that's just stating that there is a need, not where to start :) I wouldn't have any idea on where to go to help out with those either
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