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

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

#221

Post by dasboth » Tue, Aug 23, 2016, 1:40 PM UTC

scatters wrote: post #170

dasboth wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's definitely true, it's rare to see a fully civilised discussion where those concerns are addressed without the accompanying rhetoric. Having said that, surely it's a fact that we'll run out of fossil fuels at some point and will need an alternate source of energy, and that will be expensive no matter when we do it, so why not start early?

Opportunity cost. Those resources could conceivably be better spent building roads, railways, factories, protecting wetlands, rewilding forests, educating children... There are plenty of current, pressing problems to solve; why solve a problem that won't exist for decades if not centuries?

OK, I can understand that. Does that however not come with the assumption that we can solve that problem quickly when it does come about (assuming we can calculate roughly when we run out of fossil fuels)? I don't know how much evidence there is out there that that's the case.

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

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Post by realityking » Tue, Aug 23, 2016, 1:41 PM UTC

mseebach wrote: post #193

nilved wrote: post #160

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. 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…

A simple carbon tax at $X/ton and a little patience would go along way by simply making carbon-lighter solutions more competitive. The problem with pretty much any regulation actually implemented is that politicians have been way too eager picking winners (massively subsidising specific approaches instead of letting a thousand flowers bloom) and protecting losers (assigning emissions trading credits to existing big p…

This. Taxes (and some kinds of regulation like Germany's "fell a tree, plant a tree" rules) are immensely helpful to price externalities into the market.

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

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Post by sguav » Tue, Aug 23, 2016, 1:42 PM UTC

runeb wrote: post #91

oliv__ wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before AC, did people not live without it?

In my part of the world (northern Europe) basically nobody has AC, but that is probably because of the cooler temperatures here. I'm curious, at what temperatures do people who live with AC start using it? Or is it going all year round?

Northern Italy (just below Austria). The hottest is around 37° Celsius, but I don't use AC until I go over 30 inside the house (which has happened just once or twice this summer). Workplaces usually keep AC on as long as temp is above 23°, but that's just my experience.

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

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Post by pjc50 » Tue, Aug 23, 2016, 1:44 PM UTC

VLM wrote: post #164

pjc50 wrote: post #137

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Do we have the luxury of giving up multiple hundreds of square kilometers for the exclusion zones if there is a failure, though? And the technology doesn't scale well. Few big plants that take ages to build, compared to panels on every roof and turbines put up one by one.

Isn't that extremely small area compared to submerged coastline and harbors and coastal cities? Some industrial processes and some datacenter services require baseload power. "most" power demand doesn't truly require baseload. Conveniently they require approx no people. Go build the plants and the data centers and the aluminum refineries in the desert next to the a-bomb test sites and no one will notice or care. As a…

The US might have plenty of desert, but you need rather a lot of cool water to run a nuclear plant, which is why they're often built on coasts.

And what of other places? France has a decent set of nuclear reactors, but there aren't really uninhabited areas in Europe to put more in. Only relatively less populated areas. The UK is currently struggling to get one off the ground and the economics of it look terrible.

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

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Post by Angostura » Tue, Aug 23, 2016, 1:45 PM UTC

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

> I'm not going to get into a debate over it,

Would that be because you know you've just made an unsustainable statement. Regulation has prevented plenty of ills.

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

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Post by barkbro » Tue, Aug 23, 2016, 1:46 PM UTC

_ph_ wrote: post #144

s_q_b wrote: post #108

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Nuclear, nuclear, nuclear. I've said this before, and the same climate scientists who first discovered anthropogenic global warming agree, that nuclear fission plants are the only technology that can bridge the gap between fossil fuels and fusion.

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.

The problem is that wind and solar are only a supplementary to nuclear power at the moment. It won't be able to replace nuclear until we find a better way to store energy.

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

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Post by bennettfeely » Tue, Aug 23, 2016, 1:46 PM UTC

Roritharr wrote: post #58

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.

I see this actually as a nice plot someone could turn into a book. 1. Build a machine that pulls significant amounts of CO² out of the atmosphere. 2. Go to the UN an straight up tell them "we can make this problem go away, give us 1tn$ and 20 square kilometers of land in these countries, over this schedule with these milestones". 3. Profit.

> Build a machine that pulls significant amounts of CO² out of the atmosphere

Or you could plant a tree.

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

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Post by blahi » Tue, Aug 23, 2016, 1:48 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #214

blahi wrote: post #208

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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…

The claims that climate change is likely mostly man made are based on a combination of well-established physics and chemistry as well as observations of how climate change correlates with the various conditions which are theorized to drive it, which gives a pretty clear idea of the direct contributions, and we have very good ideas of the root causes of those direct contributions, at least to the extent of which ones…

Yeah, those physics and chemistry models are made by scientists who are really, really smart and are 100% correct, 100% of the time. They have lab coats and all.

It's definitely possible to model the whole climate system. Amazon is making recommendations with machine learning AI and shit.

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

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Post by neom » Tue, Aug 23, 2016, 1:48 PM UTC

blowski wrote: post #157

neom wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The economics aren't that hard, just long term and not as good as other returns. think arability. Particularly useful in areas you might terraform. (have thought about this for like 2 years now, heh. I hope it's my next startup.)

For me, terraforming is the equivalent of developers saying "we need to rebuild from scratch".

Kinda, yeah!

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

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Post by beachstartup » Tue, Aug 23, 2016, 1:49 PM UTC

SixSigma wrote: post #103

guptaneil wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but it wasn't as hot... It's a vicious self-fueling cycle. By using AC, we're making the world warmer, which makes us use more AC.

People in our Florida office have fan heaters running under the desk because the AC keeps it too cold. The insanity boggles my mind. I had to go out and buy a sweater and thick trousers to sit in the office while it is 32C/90F outside.

in cities like chicago and new york they crank the heat in the winter so that it's 80F inside. you get sick just from the temperature differentials of walking inside and outside.

you also have to strip down to a single layer as soon as you walk in the door, and put all the damn clothes back on if you want to go outside, or you start pouring sweat. what's wrong with keeping everything on but your winter coat?

being from southern california you see this stuff for what it is -- people going insane from shitty weather. it should be 73F everywhere, inside and out, all the time.

unfortunately, it's getting hotter and hotter here, too. eventually we'll be insane also.