211–220 of 304 posts
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US voters didn't become climate change deniers by chance
How do US voters go about changing climate policy in China and India?
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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.
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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.
Solar is relatively inefficient, but it can't be used to build a dirty bomb or worse. With large patches of uninhabit{ed,able} desert, many African countries have more than enough space to build large solar farms if they can find a solution to the sand blowing onto the panels.
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Wow, that's Death Valley hot.
I haven't had the opportunity to look up the humidity in BC, but certainly it is far greater than what you would see in death valley. Death valley is a very dry area. The Pacific Northwest is wet and the humidity just adds to the misery of the heat. In my area we saw almost 110° at about 35% humidity. I have experienced 120° in 5% humidity and I have to say the 110 felt hotter! Definitely more miserable!
Portland's dewpoint I think peaked around 65F.
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…
The new nonprofit founded by Aubrey de Grey https://viento.ai/ works on this issues.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_thermal_energy_conversio...
I wonder if this heat dome effect contributed to Venus' eventual fate. My #1 fear is we're just going to get into some runaway cascade of warming and turn into something like Venus much faster than we realize.
It's kind of sad how we are fantasizing about terraforming Mars, while we've been seemingly very effective at venusforming Terra.
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.
An alternative to desalination is capturing humidity from the air, e.g. by isothermal membrane-based air dehumidification [2] or passively using condensation [3].
I’m involved in building a fund to invest in startups in this and other areas related to biosphere resilience, and would love to get in touch with people taking such technology to the market.
My guess is we will be needing adaptive measures sooner than most people expect.
[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iYodKQP72mg
[2] https://www.osti.gov/pages/biblio/1476418
[3] https://newatlas.com/science/passive-drinking-water-harveste...
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> Not saying that in any disrespectful way, I know some people get a bit butthurt… Incongruence detected.
If someone ACTUALLY is a savant with Asperger's or autism, is it disrespectful to point that fact out when you are gauging the importance of their predictions?
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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.
Last I checked Algeria has a bit of solar energy hitting it. :)
It reached 40 degrees on Monday with humidity around 60%. It was still 32 by sunset. I lived in Panama for ten years. I've never felt heat like this.