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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

#201

Post by paulajohnson »

nilved wrote: post #183
dash2 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Plenty of people are dying from unsafe food, unsafe buildings and unsafe driving. Nobody can fix these problems because lobbyists are increasing the barrier to entry under the guise of safety. After all, check out this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12340694

In 1900 it was literally impossible to buy flour that did not contain significant amounts of chalk dust and other adulterants. In Hong Kong there are entire streets given over to baby formula shops because the Chinese from the mainland don't trust the stuff in their shops, with very good reason. Don't assume that just because things are not perfect that regulation hasn't made a huge positive difference.

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

#202

Post by Jaruzel »

nl wrote: post #159
_ph_ wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wind and Solar are now cost-competetive with nuclear, without its nasty side effects. And the cost of storage for nuclear waste has not really been calculated yet.

Whoever downvoted this should take a look again. While being pro-nuclear was all counter-conventional wisdom cool 5 years ago, the math is changing very, very quickly. PV power is so much cheaper in terms of startup costs, and it scales both up and (more importantly) down.

Was reading about this the other day. As far back as three years ago they predicted that Solar would undercut Nuclear. there's many articles out there, this is one of them:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-04-16/new-wind-s...

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

#203

Post by Lagged2Death »

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.

Young, inexperienced but passionate fish sometimes have been known to deny the existence of water. Later they're embarrassed.

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

#204

Post by goodmachine »

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.

Regarding terraforming, I suggest a quick win may be to trigger a volcanic super-eruption. The cooling effect is known to reduce global temperatures to refreshing and/or bracing levels:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_winter

I was leaning towards using nuclear weapons to kick things off, but the potential side effects of such an event will probably be tricky enough, without the giant dust clouds soon to enshroud the Earth also being radioactive.

There may of course be other unforeseen consequences, but given the alternatives (which we see all too clearly) I ask: who's in?

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

#205

Post by arethuza »

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…

"We can't afford to stifle the inventor who will get us out of this mess."

As long as that inventor doesn't turn out to be a new Thomas Midgley Jr.:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.

NB Inventor of both leaded petrol and CFCs.

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

#207

Post by s_q_b »

nl wrote: post #159
_ph_ wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wind and Solar are now cost-competetive with nuclear, without its nasty side effects. And the cost of storage for nuclear waste has not really been calculated yet.

Whoever downvoted this should take a look again. While being pro-nuclear was all counter-conventional wisdom cool 5 years ago, the math is changing very, very quickly. PV power is so much cheaper in terms of startup costs, and it scales both up and (more importantly) down.

Nuclear power isn't some counter-cultural fad. It's the top recommendation and consensus among climate scientists. This messianic fantasy that solar and wind will save us, to which every anti-nuclear technologist clings, is not only wrong, but dangerous.

Global warming is no longer a theoretical issue. It is here. Now. Within 20 years people will begin abandoning the Persian Gulf, sending a wave of refugees across Europe that will make current migration look like a trickle.

We are facing an existential threat to global civilization. There's no longer time to bet on a solar moonshot. We're discussing geoengineering for god's sake. We need proven technology, and we need it now.

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

#208

Post by blahi »

collyw wrote: post #180
blahi wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The scientific community could not possibly hope to have a definite answer to that.

Hard liners on "man-made" climate change are sponsored through various channels just like hard-liners on no climate change at all.

I am no ecologist, but I know my statistics, math and logic. From what I've read on the subject, claims that it is man-made are based on assumptions which don't hold and huge jumps in logic and conclusions.

What we can safely deduce is that there is some shift in the climate with temperatures increasing. Humans probably are a contributing factor without any way of knowing how much we contributed overall.

Every paper which claimed something differing from the above made HUGE jumps in their logic.

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

#209

Post by bad_user »

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.

The problem is that costs are subsidized by basically letting businesses destroy the environment. The solution should be simple: add lots of taxes, let the off-the-shelf cost of meat and gasoline reflect the real cost to our environment, make deforestation a crime, tax the shit out of all polluting industries and if a country is not participating add taxes on imports from said country, or ban those imports altogether.

As long as the burning of fossil fuels keeps being dirt cheap, there's no incentive for innovation.

You mentioned meat - if governments would tax the current CAFO practices in accordance to the destruction of the environment and of our health, the consumption of meat would go down because of the price, but that meat would end up being raised with sustainable farming practices, on organic grass, locally grown, as that would prove to be the cheaper way to raise meat and so it would have a higher quality.

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

#210

Post by lintiness »

konschubert wrote: post #176
Klathmon wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

strange, it never rained once when i was there, and i was there for at least 3 days.
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